Plato threatened to banish all poets from his Republic. Was it in pity or in anger, I wonder? Will our Indian Swaraj, when it comes to exist, pass a deportation order against all those feckless creatures, who are pursuers of phantoms and fashioners of dreams, who neither dig nor sow, bake nor boil, spin nor darn, neither move nor support resolutions?
I have often tried to imagine the banished hordes of poets establishing their own Republic in the near neighbourhood of that of Plato. Naturally, as an act of reprisal, His Excellency the poet President is sure to banish from the Rhymers’ Republic all philosophers and politicians. Just think of the endless possibilities arising from feuds and truces of these rival Republics—peace conferences, deputations of representatives, institutions with busy secretaries and permanent funds having for their object the bridging of the gulf between the two adversaries. Then think of a trivial accident, through which a hapless young man and a melancholy maiden, coming from the opposite territories, meet at the frontier, and owing to the influence of the conjunction of their respective planets fall in love with each other.
There is no harm in supposing that the young man is the son of the President of the Philosophers’ Republic while the maiden is the daughter of that of the Poets. The immediate consequence is the secret smuggling of forbidden love-lyrics by the desperate youth into the very heart of the commentaries and controversies of the two contradictory schools of Philosophy—the one professed by the yellow turbanned sages proclaiming that one is true and two is nought, and the other, which is the doctrine of the green-turbanned sages, asserting that two is truth and one is an illusion.
Then came the day of the great meeting, presided over by the Philosopher President, when the pandits of opposite factions met to fight their dialectic duels finally to decide the truth. The din of debates grew into a tumultuous hubbub; the supporters of both parties threatened violence and the throne of truth was usurped by shouts. When these shouts were about to be transmuted into blows, there appeared in the arena the pair of lovers, who, on the full moon light of April were secretly wedded, though such intermarriage was against the law. When they stood in the open partition between the two parties, a sudden hush fell upon the assembly.
How this unexpected and yet ever to be expected event, mixed with texts liberally quoted from the proscribed love-lyrics, ultimately helped to reconcile the hopeless contradiction in logic, is a long story. It is well-known to those who have had the privilege to pursue the subsequent verdict of the judges, that both doctrines are held to be undoubtedly true; that, one is in two and therefore two must find itself in one. The acknowledgment of this principle helped to make the intermarriage valid, and since then the two Republics have successfully carried out their disarmament, having discovered for the first time, that the gulf between them was imaginary.
Such a simple and happy ending of this drama has caused widespread unemployment and consequent feeling of disgust among the vast number of secretaries and missionaries belonging to the institutions maintained, with the help of permanent funds, for the preaching of Union—those organisations which were so enormously perfect in their machinery that they could well afford to ignore the insignificant fact of their barrenness of result. A large number of these individuals gifted with an ineradicable passion for doing good are joining the opposite organisations, which have their permanent funds, in order to help them to prove and to preach that two is two and ever the twain shall meet.
That the above story is a true one will, I am sure, be borne out by the testimony of even the august shade of Plato himself. This episode of the game of hide and seek of one in two should be sung by some poet; and therefore I request you to give it, with my blessings, to Satyendranath Datta that he may set it in those inimitable verse forms of which he is a master—and make it ring with the music of happy laughter. *