We are in a most beautiful part of France. But of what avail is the beauty of Nature when you have lost your trunks which contained your dresses and underwear. I could have been in perfect sympathy with the trees surrounding me, if, like them, I were not dependent upon tailors for maintaining self-respect. However, the most important event for me in this world at present is not what is happening in Poland, or Ireland, or Mesopotamia, but that all the trunks belonging to our party have disappeared from the goods van in their transit from Paris to this place. And therefore, though the sea is singing its hymns to the rising and the setting sun and to the star-lit silence of the night, and though the forest round me is standing a tip-toe on the rock like an ancient Druid, raising its arms to the sky, chanting its incantation of primeval life, we have to hasten back to Paris to be restored to the respectability ministered to by tailors and washermen. This is what our first parents have brought upon us. Our clothes are acting like screens dividing us from the rest of the world; and for this we have to pay—pay the bills! Do you not think that it is outrageously undignified for my humanity, that, standing face to face with the magnificent spirit of this naked Nature, I can think and speak of nothing but wretched clothes, which in three years’ time will be tattered into shreds, while these pine trees will remain standing ever fresh and clean majestically unaffected by the soiling touch of the hours?
I suppose I told you in my last letter that I met Sylvain Levy in Paris. He is a great scholar, as you know, but his philology has not been able to wither his soul. His mind has the translucent simplicity of greatness and his heart is overflowing with trustful generosity which never acknowledges disillusionment. His students come to love the subject he teaches them, because they love him. I realise clearly when I meet these great teachers that only through the medium of personality can truth be communicated to men. This fundamental principle of education we must realise in Santiniketan. We must know that only he can teach who can love. The greatest teachers of men have been lovers of men. The real teaching is a gift; it is a sacrifice; it is not a manufactured article of routine work; and because it is a living thing, it is the fulfilment of knowledge for the teacher himself. Let us not insult our mission by allowing ourselves to become mere school-masters—the dead feeding-bottles of lessons for children who need the human touch lovingly associated with their mental food.
I have just received your letter, and, for some time, I have felt myself held tight in the bosom of our Ashram. I cannot tell you how I feel about the prolonged separation from it, which is before me, but at the same time I know that unless my relationship with the wide world of humanity grows in truth and love, my relationship with the Ashram will not be perfect. Through my life, my Ashram will send its roots into the heart of this great world to find its sap of immortality. We who belong to Santiniketan cannot afford to be narrow in our outlook and petty in our life’s mission and scope. We have seen, in Tiretta Bazar, thirty or more birds packed in one single cage, where they neither can sing nor soar in the sky, but make noise and peck at each other. Such a cage we build ourselves for our souls with our petty thoughts and selfish ambition and then spend our life quarrelling with each other clamouring and scrambling for a small advantage. But let us bring freedom of soul into Santiniketan.