3 MAY 1924, Page 17

A BOOK OF THE MOMENT.

MAHATMA GANDHI.

IN the epilogue to his Jean-Christophe, that vast epic of a disappearing age, M. Romain-Rolland makes Saint Chris- topher, after struggling through the river with the Infant on his shoulder, ask its name. The Infant replies : " Je suis le jour qui va naitre." In this remarkable essay the motif is the same. M. Rolland exalts Mr. Gandhi as the apostle of a new and better humanity, whom a weary, blundering British Government has carried through the floods of absolutism and set on the shore of a liberated India, to draw all men unto him. The theme is developed with rhythmic eloquence. Mr. Gandhi offers healing to a dis- illusioned and broken world. " Centuries of brutal national pride, spread by the empty mockery of democracies and crowned by a century of inhuman industrialism, rapacious plutocracy and a materialistic system of economics where the soul perishes, were bound to culminate in those dark struggles where the treasures of the West succumbed." Our civilization has gone down in the tempest of war and revolution. Europe stands naked, exhausted, before all mankind, her prestige gone, her hypocrisy unveiled. To " the surging spirit of Asia " alone can we look for a fresh ideal of life and of death for humanity. We find it in Gandhi's message, the message of soul-force and self-sacrifice, which alone will conquer freedom for mankind. Christianity has failed ; here is the new evangel.

Given this setting, there is no fault to fmd with M. Rolland's picture of Gandhi and his work. We see the simple little man, fragile in body, indomitable in spirit, blameless in private life, ascetic, tenacious, with a charm and sincerity which captivate all who know him. For twenty years he toiled in South Africa, organizing passive resistance in every form to the anti-Asiatic measures which were prominent in a policy of a " White Dominion." Thrice during that period he laid aside his advocacy to help the British ; first, with a Red Cross unit of Indians which he led in the Boer War ; next, with a plague hospital which he got together at Johannesburg ; and again, when he raised a corps of stretcher-bearers in the native rising of 1908 in Natal. In his political work much obloquy, frequent personal violence and more than one term of imprisonment were his rewards. Yet, when he left Africa in 1914, he had accomplished what had long seemed the impossible, in the measure of civic rights conceded at last to Indians in the Union. Returning to his own country, a master of the art of passive resistance, he deter- mined to devote his gifts to the service of Home Rule for India. With characteristic chivalry he held his hand till the War was over, but early in 1919 his opportunity came. An Act of a strictly emergency nature, directed against anarchical crime with which the ordinary law had been unequal to cope, was seized upon by the Nationalist Party as insulting to India and a potential engine of oppression. The signal was given for an agitation which had long been simmering, and Gandhi immediately leaped into command. Then came the Punjab outrages and their suppression ; and for three years Gandhi rode on from strength to strength, until at Christmas, 1921, the National Congress appointed him dictator of the movement for the liberation of India from British rule. He had espoused the Moslem cause, with its clamorous demand for a revision of the Treaty of Sevres ; he had launched " non-co-operation " ; he had proclaimed " civil disobedience." Twice had he called back his forces, aghast at the murderous consequences of his own teaching ; but in February, 1922, he finally threw down the gauntlet,* and was promptly put on his trial for sedition. To the unspeakable chagrin of his followers, who commanded most of the forensic talent of the country, he insisted on pleading guilty ; and he was sent to six years' imprisonment. To no man, whispered rumour, was the sentence more welcome than to Gandhi himself ; it secured him rest and release from a position which had become impossible. Before two

• In the article beginning with the phrase The British lion continues to shake his gory claws in our faces."

years of the term were over, the Governor of Bombay released him unconditionally on grounds of health ; and he is now recuperating in silence after an operation for appendicitis.

M. Rolland's study of his hero's career is careful and documented by copious quotations from his speeches and manifestoes ; but it is a study in mato. M. Rolland is, before all things, a musician. To his ear the voice of Gandhi is a trumpet-call in a listening world ; to most of us it is only a thin reed in a huge and discordant human orchestra. Of the material to which Gandhi appealed, of his failure to control it, of the conflagrations he kindled and left others to quench, of the race hatred his doctrines generated, of the terrible dangers in which he involved his own land—of all this the book tells little or nothing. And when it leaves the realm of Gandhi's own speculations, it is often gravely misleading. A few examples of this defect may be given.

1. In April, 1918, says M. Rolland, the Prime Minister appealed to India for help in the War, and " hinted that the hour of India's independence was near." But by the end of the year, when danger was over, India's services were for- gotten and the Government, " instead of granting the promised liberties, suspended whatever freedom already existed." Ultimately the Caliphate movement drove England to " belated concessions," and the Reform Act was passed. The facts are, of course, entirely different. The only promise held out to India was the Cabinet's declaration in August, 1917, of the policy of training India for responsible govern- ment ; and the interval until December, 1919, when the new Constitution was granted, was continuously occupied in devising the measures necessary to put that policy into effect. The suspension of freedom is as imaginary as the influence of the Caliphate agitation.

2. In April, 1919, says M. Rolland, the news of Gandhi's " arrest caused riots in the Punjab ; at Amritsar some houses were looted, and a few people were killed." Then " martial law was proclaimed, and a reign of terror spread over the Punjab." However opinions may differ as to the treatment of the outbreak, no one could accept this grossly inadequate picture of the Punjab rising—described by Lord Hunter's commission as " open rebellion "—and the military dispositions for quelling it. There is not a word of the burning of public buildings, the attacks on railways, the wholesale destruction of communications, or the savage murders of officials and unprotected Europeans.

3. In December, 1919, the King " urged the Viceroy to pardon political offences and recommended a general amnesty. . . . The Viceroy did not heed the King's appeal for clemency, and instead of setting prisoners free, the doors of the jails opened only for executions." Travesty could hardly go further ; the amnesty was generous to a degree and, among others, hundreds of the Punjab rioters were released.

These instances by no means exhaust the serious misstate- ments in the book. It is no pleasure to pillory a great literary artist, to whom presumably truth is sacred ; and it can only be surmised, as indeed would appear from the bibliography with which M. Rolland's essay concludes, that his knowledge of the last few years in India is derived mainly from the works of Mr. Gandhi himself and his admirers.

Mr. Gandhi has many human failings, as he would be the last to deny. He has four times given a precise date for the millennium of India's freedom, and on none of them has it arrived. He measures out little penances for himself, in ludicrous disproportion to the calamities with which he relates them. But the tragedy of his work is his power to sway the multitude by enunciating a lofty ideal, and his complete inability to hold the multitude when, in its own crude fashion, it proceeds to translate the ideal into practice. For he seems incapable of realizing that he plays directly into the hands of those sinister spirits whose object is to extinguish the light which British rule has been carrying into the dark places of Indian life. Thus, while he has been preaching non-violence and love, violence and hate have been the in- evitable sequels. No catastrophe has taught him caution in tampering with human passions ; and in weighing out his own sufferings and sacrifices he forms no estimate of the sufferings of the three hundred millions of his people if they were thrown back into the chaos to which his idealism would condemn them. M. Rolland's apotheosis of the Mahatma is a contribution to the wave of emotion which is sweeping over India to-day ; it is for Englishmen to keep their feet and not allow it to engulf the work of a hundred and fifty years, as well as the happiness of an innocent