Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/113

, on that idea of the deliverance from the circle of imperfections and the lower sense, which is behind the whole doctrine of Brahma. It is one of the elements in Rabindranath's poetry, whether dramatic or lyric in form, which help to make his pages more humanly interesting—that he expresses there so freely the ideal history of his own spiritual pilgrimage. He is the tenderest of lovers, the fondest idolater of a small child, the happiest dreamer, that ever walked under the moon: yet he is a stoic who knows very well what the terrors of Siva mean, and what exceeding darkness that is in the sun, on which its bright light rests. But when a man writes the drama of himself, he always tends to be lyrical; and both in and  the play does seem to be looking at every turn for its lyric moment and for a solution which transcends the common office of the stage.

The dramatic critics have complained over this tendency in Indian playwrights, as if in great drama, in Æschylus, in Sophocles, in Shakespeare, in Goethe's, there was not any attempt to find lyrical alleviation on the road to the dramatic climax. Moreover, the