Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/74

 told; but they are enough to show how fine a medium he attained. The scenes of Indian country life which they contain—sketched by him when he was acting as steward of the family estates on the Ganges—grow as intimate and real in his telling as those familiar in our everyday English fiction.

It is remarkable too how often the story is directed to showing the devotion and the heroism of the Hindu wife or woman. In one which he calls "The Ghât" he makes the river-stair itself turn narrator; and its reminiscences culminate in the fate of the girl Kusum. The opening discovers the instinctive sense of place and the affectionate regard for his neighbourhood that inspire the narrator. No western writer, not even Turgenief in his, or George Sand in , is better able to call up the illusion and the aroma of a scene in the printed page. But perhaps if a comparison be needed, we may turn first, as Dr. Seal suggests, to Flaubert and his account of Félicité in "The Simple Heart" (, 1879). Of the two, Flaubert is more sure and artistically exact; Tagore more imaginative, more suggestive of the moods and hidden