"Therefore he has sung lyrics to the end, and all the world except the critics has heard him gladly. India was a little surprised when her poet received the Nobel prize (1913); the Bengal reviewers had seen only his faults, and the Calcutta professors had used his poems as examples of bad Bengali.30 The young Nationalists disliked him because his condemnation of the abuses in India’s moral life was stronger than his cry for political freedom; and when he was knighted it seemed to them a betrayal of India. He did not hold the honor long; for when, by a tragic misunderstanding, British soldiers fired into a religious gathering at Amritsar (1919), Tagore returned his decorations to the Viceroy with a stinging letter of renunciation. Today he is a solitary figure, perhaps the most impressive of all men now on the earth: a reformer who has had the courage to denounce the most basic of India’s institutions—the caste system—and the dearest of her beliefs—transmigration; a Nationalist who longs for India’s liberty, but has dared to protest against the chauvinism and self-seeking that play a part in the Nationalist movement; an educator who has tired of oratory and politics, and has retreated to his ashram and hermitage at Shantiniketan, to teach some of the new generation his gospel of moral self-liberation; a poet broken-hearted by the premature death of his wife, and by the humiliation of his country; a philosopher steeped in the Vedanta, a mystic hesitating, like Chandi Das, between woman and God, and yet shorn of the ancestral faith by the extent of his learning; a lover of Nature facing her messengers of death with no other consolation than his unaging gift of song."