{"id":462,"date":"2013-07-13T01:28:09","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=462"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:28:09","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:28:09","slug":"54-the-men-that-pass-vol-17-the-hour-of-god-volume-17","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/17-the-hour-of-god-volume-17\/54-the-men-that-pass-vol-17-the-hour-of-god-volume-17","title":{"rendered":"-54_The Men That Pass.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n
\n

\nThe
\nMen That Pass<\/b><\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/font><\/span>R<\/font><\/b><\/span>omesh<\/span><\/span> Chandra Dutt<\/span> is dead. After a long life of
\nthe most manifold and untiring energy, famous, honoured<\/span>,
\nadvanced in years, with a name known in England as well as in India, the man
\nalways successful, always favoured of Fortune, always striving to deserve her by
\nskill and diligence, type of a race that passes, of a generation that to younger
\nminds is fast losing the appearance of reality and possibility, has passed away
\nat the height and summit of his career before his great capacities could justify
\nthemselves to the full in his new station, but also before the defects of his
\ntype could be thoroughly subjected to the severe ordeal of the times that have
\ncome upon us. The landmarks of the past fall one by one and none rise in their
\nplace. The few great survivors here and there become more and more dignified
\nmonuments of the last century and less and less creators of the living present.
\nNew ideals, new problems, new men, almost a new race wholly different in mind,
\ncharacter, temperament<\/span>, feeling,
\nrise swiftly and wait till they can open the gates of the future and occupy the
\nfield of action.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The official, the liberal
\nCongress politician, the well-read litterateur, the Oriental scholar, the
\njournalist proficient in English and fluent of Western ideas, the professional
\nman successful and sleek, these were the foremost men of the old generation,
\nthose who were in the eyes of all srestha<\/span>, the best,
\nin whose footsteps, therefore, all strove to follow and on whose
\npattern all formed themselves. An active, self-confident, voiceful<\/span>
\ngeneration making up by these qualities for the lack of height, depth and
\nbreadth in their culture and atoning for the unoriginal imitativeness to which
\nthey were doomed by the fidelity in detail and framework of the imitation! In
\nall but one of these lines of activity Romesh<\/span> Dutt<\/span> had achieved a high distinction among the men of his
\nown generation, and we doubt whether another man could be pointed out among
\nthem so many-sided, so full of strength and hope and energy, so confident, so
\nuniformly success-<\/span> \n<\/p>\n

\nPage – 367<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n


\nful<\/span><\/span>. Nature was
\nliberal to him of her gifts, Fortune of her favours<\/span>.
\nA splendid physique, robust and massive, equipped him to bear the strain of an
\nunceasing activity: a nature buoyant, sanguine, strong, as healthy as his
\nframe, armed him against the shocks of life and commanded success by insisting
\nupon it; an egoism natural to such a robust vitality seized on all things as
\nits provender and enabled its possessor thoroughly to enjoy the good things of
\nlife which it successfully demanded; a great tact and savoir fa<\/span>ire steered him clear of unnecessary friction and
\navoidable difficulties; an unrivalled quickness of grasp, absorption<\/span> and assimilation, more facile than subtle or
\ndeep, helped him to make his own all that he heard or read; a rapid though not
\ningenious brain showed him how to use his material with the best effect and
\nmost practical utility; and a facile pen and speech which never paused for a
\nthought or a word, could always be trusted to clothe what he wished to convey
\nin a form respectable and effective and so well put as to conceal the absence
\nof native literary faculty and intellectual distinction. These were Nature’s
\npresents to him at his birth. Fortune placed him in a wealthy, well-read and
\nwell-known family, gave him the best advantages of education the times could
\nafford, sent him to England and opened the doors of the Civil Service, the
\npinnacle of the young Jndian’s<\/span> aspiration in his
\ndays, and crowned him with the highest prizes that that highest of careers
\ncould yield to a man of his hue and blood. It is characteristic of his career
\nthat he should have died as Prime Minister of the Indian State which has been
\nmost successful in reproducing and improving upon the Anglo-Indian model of
\nadministration.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>There were limits,
\nas we have hinted, to the liberality of Nature. Of all the great Bengalis of
\nhis time Romesh<\/span> Dutt<\/span> was
\nperhaps the least original. His administrative faculties were of the second
\norder, not of the first; though he stood for a time foremost among the most
\nactive of Congress politicians and controversialists, he was neither a Ranade<\/span> nor a Surendranath<\/span>, had
\nneither the gift of the organiser<\/span> and political
\nthinker nor the gift of the orator; he had literary talent of an imitative kind
\nbut no literary genius; he wrote well on scholastic subjects and translated
\npleasantly and effectively, but was no great Sanskrit<\/span> \n<\/p>\n

\nPage – 368<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nscholar:
\nhe cannot rank with Ranade<\/span> or even with Gokhale<\/span> as an economist, and yet his are the most
\npolitically effective contri<\/span>– butions<\/span>
\nto economic literature in India that recent years have produced. It must be
\nadmitted that his activity and dexterity of work were far in excess of his
\nliterary ability or scholastic conscientiousness. It is doubtful, therefore,
\nwhether any of his voluminous works in many kinds will be remembered, with the
\npossible though not very certain exception of his Bengali historical novels in
\nwhich he touched his creative highwater<\/span> mark. His
\ntranslation of the Rig-veda<\/span> by its ease and crispness
\nblinds the uninitiated reader to the fact that it may be a very pretty
\ntranslation but it is not the Veda. His history of ancient Indian civilisation<\/span> is a masterly compilation, void of original
\nresearch, which is rapidly growing antiquated. In fact, the one art he possessed
\nin the highest degree and in which alone it can be said that he did not only
\nwell but best, was the art of the journalist<\/span> and pamphleteer. Originality and deep thought are
\nnot required of a journalist, nor delicacy, nor subtlety; his success would be
\nlimited rather than assisted by such qualities. To seize victoriously on the
\navailable materials, catch in them what will be interesting and effective and
\nput it brightly and clearly, this is the dharma of the journalist, and, if we
\nadd the power of making the most of a case and enforcing a given view with
\nirresistible energy, dexterity and apparent unanswerableness<\/span>,
\nwe shall have added all that is necessary to turn the journalist into the
\npamphleteer. No man of our time has had these gifts to the same extent as Romesh<\/span> Dutt<\/span>. The best things he
\never did were, in our view, his letters to Lord Curzon<\/span>
\nand his Economic History. The former fixed public opinion in India
\nirretrievably and nobody cared even to consider Lord Curzon’s<\/span>
\nanswer. "That settles it" was the general feeling every ordinary reader
\ncontracted for good after reading this brilliant and telling indictment. Without
\nthe Economic History and its damning story of England’s commercial and fiscal
\ndealings with India we doubt whether the public mind would have been ready for
\nthe Boycott. In this one instance it may be. said of him that he not only wrote
\nhistory but created it. But all his works, with the exception of the historical
\nnovels, were rather pieces of successful <\/span> \n<\/p>\n

\nPage – 369<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

journalism
\nthan literature. Still, even where it was most defective, his work was always
\nuseful to the world. For instance, his Ramayana and Mahabharata, though they
\nare poor and commonplace poetry and do unpardonable violence to the spirit of
\nthe original, yet familiarised<\/span> the average reader in
\nEngland with the stories of the epics and thus made the way easy for future
\ninterpreters of the East to the West. In brief, this may be said in unstinted
\npraise of Romesh<\/span> Dutt<\/span>, that
\nhe was a gigantic worker and did an immense amount of pioneer spadework by
\nwhich the future will benefit.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>We have dwelt on
\nthis interesting and vigorous personality as one of the most typical of the men
\nthat pass, much more typi<\/span>cal than greater or more
\noriginal contemporaries. The work they did is over and the qualities with which
\nthey were equipped for that work will no longer sufficiently serve our purpose.
\nAn education at once more subtle and more massive, a greater originality, force
\nand range of intellectual activity, an insatiable thirst for knowledge, the
\nglut of a giant for work and action, mighty qualities of soul, a superhuman
\ncourage, self-abnegation and power to embrace and practise almost impossible
\nideals, these are the virtues and gifts India demands from the greatest among
\nher sons in the future so that they may be sufficient to her work and her
\ndestinies. But such gifts as Romesh<\/span> Dutt<\/span> possessed are not to be despised. Especially did his
\nuntiring capacity for work and his joyous vitality and indestructible buoyancy
\nmake him a towering reproach to the indolent, listless, sneering and anaemic<\/span> generation that intervened between him and the
\nrecent renascence.<\/span> \n<\/p>\n

\nPage – 370<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Men That Pass   \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Romesh Chandra Dutt is dead. After a long life of the most manifold and untiring energy, famous, honoured, advanced…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-17-the-hour-of-god-volume-17","wpcat-9-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}