SOME FAMOUS WRITERS

from

Glimpses of World History

by

Jawaharlal Nehru

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As I was writing to you yesterday about the rise of Germany, it struck me that I had not told you anything about the greatest German of the early nineteenth century. This man was Goethe, a famous writer, the centenary of whose death was celebrated all over Germany a few months ago. And then I thought that I might tell you something about the famous writers of this period in Europe. But this was a dangerous subject for me, dangerous because I would only show my own ignorance. Just to give a list of well-known names would be rather silly, and to say something more would be difficult. I know little enough about English literature, and of the other European literatures my knowledge is confined to a few translations. What, then, was I to do?

The idea to say something on the subject had taken possession of my mind, and I could not rid myself of it. I felt that I should at least point out this direction to you, even though I cannot accompany you far, along the way to this enchanted land. For, art and literature often give greater insight in to a nation’s soul than the superficial activities of the multitude. They take us to a region of calm and serene thought which is not affected by the passions and prejudices of the moment. But today the poet and the artist are seldom looked upon as the prophets of tomorrow and they meet with little honour. If some honour comes to then at all, it usually comes after they are dead.

So I shall mention just a few names to you, some of which must be already familiar to you, and I shall only touch upon the early part of the century. This is just to whet your appetite. Remember that the nineteenth century has rich stores of fine writing in many of the European countries.

Goethe really belonged to the eighteenth century, for he was born in 1749, but he lived to the ripe old age of eighty-three, and thus saw a good third of the next century. He lived through one of the stormiest periods of European history, and saw his own country overrun by Napoleon’s armies. In his own life he experienced much sorrow, but gradually he gained an inner command over life’s difficulties and attained a detachment and calm which brought peace to him.

Napoleon first saw him when he was over sixty. As he stood in the doorway, there was something in his face and figure, an untroubled look and a bearing so full of dignity, that Napoleon exclaimed: “Voila un homme!” He dabbled in many things, And whatever he did, he did with distinction. He was a philosopher, a poet, a dramatist, and a scientist interested in many different sciences; and, besides all this, his practical job was that of a minister in the Court of a petty German prince! He is best known to us as a writer, and his most famous book is Faust. His fame spread far, during his long life, and in his own sphere of literature, he came to be regarded by his countrymen almost as a demi-god.

Goethe had a contemporary, somewhat younger than he was, named Schiller, who was also a great poet. Much younger was Heinrich Heine, yet another great and delightful poet in German, who has written very beautiful lyrics. All these three-Goethe, Schiller, and Heine- were steeped in the classical culture of ancient Greece.

Germany has long been known as the land of philosophers, and I might as well mention one or two names to you, although perhaps they will not interest you greatly. Only those people who have a passion for the subject need try to read their books, for they are very abstruse and difficult. Nonetheless these and other philosophers are interesting and instructive, for they kept alight the torch of thought, and through them one can fellow the development of ideas. Immanuel Kant was the great German philosopher of the eighteenth century, and he lived on to the turn of the century, when he was eighty. Hegel is another great name in philosophy. He followed Kant, and is supposed to have greatly influenced Karl Marx, the father of communism. So much for the philosophers.

The early years of the nineteenth century produced quite a number of eminent poets, especially in England. Russia’s best-known national poet, Pushkin, also lived then. He died young as the result of a duel. There were several poets in France also, but I shall mention only two French names. One is that of Victor Hugo, who born in 1802 and lived, like Goethe, to the age of eighty-three and, also like Goethe, became a kind of demi-god of literature in his own country. He had a varied career both as a writer and as a politician. He started life as an aggressive royalist and almost a believer in autocracy. Gradually he changed step by step till he became president of the short-lived Second Republic.

In 1871 Victor Hugo favored the commune of Paris. From the extreme right of conservatism he had moved gradually but surely to the extreme left of socialism. Most people grow conservative and reactionary as they become older. Hugo did the exact opposite. But we are concerned here with him as a writer. He was a great poet, novelist and dramatist.

The second French name I shall mention to you is that of Honore de Balzac. He was a contemporary of Victor Hugo’s, but was very different from him. He was a novelist of tremendous energy, and wrote a huge number of novels during a fairly short life. His stories are connected with one another; the same characters often appear in them. His object was to mirror the whole of the French life of his day in his novels, and he called the whole series La Comedie Humaine. It was a very ambitious idea, and although he worked hard and long, he could not complete the enormous task he had set himself.

In England three brilliant young poets stand out in the early years of the nineteenth century. They were contemporaries, and they all died young within three years of each other. These three were Keats, Shelley and Byron. Keats had a hard tussle with poverty and discouragement, and when he died in Rome in 1821 at the age of twenty-six he was little known. And yet he had written some very beautiful poetry. Keats belonged to the middle classes, and it is interesting to note that if lack of money was an obstruction in his way, how much more difficult must it be for the poor to become poets and writers. Indeed, the present Cambridge Professor of English Literature has some pertinent remarks to make about this: “It is”, he says,

“certain that, by some fault in our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in these days, nor has for two hundred years, a dog’s chance. Believe me- and I have spent a great part of ten years in watching some three hundred and twenty elementary schools, -we may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born”.

I have given this quotation because we are apt to forget that poetry and fine writing, and culture generally, are monopolies of the well-to-do classes. Poetry and culture have little place in a poor man’s hut; they are not meant for empty stomachs. So our present-day culture becomes a reflection of the well-to-do bourgeois mind. It may change greatly when the worker takes charge of it in a different social system where he has the opportunities and leisure to indulge in culture. Some such change is being watched with interest in Soviet Russia today.

This also makes it clear to us that a great deal of our cultural poverty in India during the last few generations is due to our people’s excessive poverty. It is an insult to talk of culture to people who have nothing to eat. This blight of poverty affects even those few who happen to be relatively well-to-do, and so unhappily even these classes in India are today singularly uncultured. What a host of evils foreign rule and social backwardness have to answer for. But even in this general poverty and drabness, India can still produce splendid men and magnificent exemplars of culture like Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore.

I have drifted away from my subject.

Shelley was a most lovable creature; full of fire from his early youth and the champion of freedom in everything. He was expelled from his college at Oxford for writing an essay on The Necessity of Atheism. He (and Keats also) went through his brief life as a poet is supposed to do, living in his imagination and in the air and regardless of worldly difficulties. He was drowned near the Italian coast a year after the death of Keats. I need not tell you of his famous poems as you can easily find them out for yourself. But I shall give you one of his shorter poems. It is by no means among his best, but it brings out the awful fate of the poor worker in our present civilization. He is in almost as bad a condition as the old slaves were. It is more than hundred years since the poem was written, and yet it applies to present-day conditions. It is called The Mask of Anarchy.

“What is Freedom? –ye can tell

That which slavery is, too well-

For its very name has grown

To an echo of your own.

‘Tis to work and have such pay

As just keeps life from day to day

In your limbs, as in a cell

For the tyrant’s use to dwell.

So that ye for them are made

Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade,

With or without your own will bent

To their defence and nourishment.

‘Tis to see your children weak

With their mothers pine and peak,

When the winter winds are bleak-

They are dying, whilst I speak.

‘Tis to hunger for such diet

As the rich man in his riot

Casts to the fat dogs that lie

Surfeiting beneath his eye.

‘Tis to be a slave in soul

And to hold no strong control

Over your own wills, but be

All that others make of ye.

And at length, when ye complain

With a murmur weak and vain,

‘Tis to see the tyrant’s crew

Ride over your wives and you-

Blood is on the grass like dew.”

----SHELLEY

Byron has also written fine poetry in praise of freedom, but it is national freedom, and not economic freedom, as in Shelley’s poem. He died, as I have told you, in the Greek national war of liberation against Turkey, two years after Shelly. I am rather prejudiced against Byron as a man, and yet I have a fellow-feeling for him, for did he not go to Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge- my school and college? Unlike Keats and Shelley, fame came to him in his youth, and he was lionized by London society, only to be dropped later.

There were two other well-known poets about this time, both much longer-lived than this youthful trio. Wordsworth, who lived for eighty years from 1770 to 1850, is considered one of the great English poets. He was very fond of Nature, and much of his poetry is Nature-poetry.

The other was Coleridge; a few of his poems are very good.

The early nineteenth century also saw three famous novelists. Walter Scott was the eldest of these, and his Waverley novels were very popular. I suppose you have read some of them. I remember liking them when I was a boy, but tastes change as one grows up, and I am sure they would bore me now if I read them. Thackeray and Dickens were the two other novelists. Both, I think, are far superior to Scott. I hope they are both friends of yours. Thackeray was born in Calcutta in 1811, and spent five or six years there. Some of his books have got realistic descriptions of the Indian nabobs- that is, the English people in India who, having collected a huge fortune and become fat and peppery, returned to England to enjoy themselves.

This is as much as I propose to write about the writers of the early nineteenth century. It is ridiculously little about a big subject. A person who knows the subject could write charmingly about it; he would also, no doubt, tell you a lot about the music and art of the period. All this requires telling and knowing, but they are beyond me, and I shall wisely keep to solid ground.

I shall finish up this letter by giving you a poem from Goethe’s Faust. This is, of course, a translation from the German:

Alas, alas!

Thou hast smitten the world,

Thou hast laid it low,

Shattered, o’er thrown,

Into nothingness hurled

Crushed by a demi-god’s blow

We bear them away,

The shards of the world,

We sing well-a-day

Over the loveliness gone,

Over the beauty slain.

Build it again,

Great child of Earth,

Build it again

With a finer worth,

In thine own bosom build it on high!

Take up thy life once more:

Run the race again!

High and clear

Let a lovelier strain

Ring out than ever before!

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