Page:Holmes - World Significance of Mahatma Gandhi.djvu/7

 at least for the beginning of our discussion, in the personal character of the man. We can best get at this aspect of the problem by asking how it is that Gandhi has managed to acquire such a marvelous influence over the Indian people. Of the nature of this influence, there can be no question; it is one of the most extraordinary personal phenomena in the world today. As Gandhi moves from place to place, great multitudes of men and women follow him, as similar multitudes followed Jesus in Palestine. When he appears to speak in some town or city, crowds running all the way from twenty-five to seventy-five thousand people gather to hear his words. That he is a wonder-worker is implicitly believed by the ignorant and superstitious, and stories of his miracles are now the legend of the countryside. Everywhere he is called Mahatma, the “saint” or “blessed one,” for already the people reverence him as one who is divine. To find anything to match this influence of Gandhi over his people, we would have to return to ancient times and remote places, and even then the parallel would be incomplete. It is the testimony of a competent and unbiased observer that Gandhi’s personal following is greater in numbers, and more devoted and disciplined in spirit, than any man history has ever known.

If we seek for the explanation of this fact, we cannot find it, I believe, in any of the ordinary aspects of personality. It does not reside, for example, in Gandhi’s physical presence, which has been described as “pitifully insignificant.” Thus he weighs less than one hundred pounds. He shows all the weakness and emaciation of one who has disciplined his body to an asceticism of an extreme type for over thirty years. On occasion he is so feeble that he is unable to stand, and has to address his audiences while seated in a chair. His only impressive physical feature is his eyes, which glow with the flaming passion of a spirit which burns as though it would consume the flesh.—So, also, I cannot find that his personal influence has its origin in any extraordinary degree of intellectuality. Gandhi does not impress me as having exceptional mental powers. Certainly he is not to be compared with such an intellectual giant as Leo Tolstoy. To me, at least, it is inconceivable that the Indian could write such books as “War and Peace,” “Anna Karenina,” or even “My Religion.” Great as he is, Gandhi does not seem to move on this plane of achievement at all!—I feel the same way, also, about his gifts as an orator. I speak with some hesitancy here, for the standards of oratory, as of music, may be very different in the East from what they are in