The Face of Silence
by New York: E. P. Dutton and Co. 1926. 12mo. x+255 pp. $3,00.
BIOGBAPHY can seldom hope to be achieved so easily and naturally as in this portrait of a great religious personality of India and certain of his disciples. Rama Krishna was believed by many of his race to be an incarnation of God. He is therefore surrounded by circumstances of the oocult and the mystical which will bring doubts and questions to the reader’s mind, and perhaps a feeling that some of the beliefs recorded in the book are not free from childishness. It is due to the author’s skill, to the sweetness of his temperament, as well as to the fortunate relation in which he stands to his material, that the racially and psychologically alien story of Rama Krishna and his influence can be entered into with no more difficulty and with so much sympathy.
Mr. Mukerji’s own life is engaged in the stream of influence which he records, and he can mingle with its living representatives on terms of understanding. Yet his years in the Western world have enabled him to regard it from without and above as well as from within, to see it through the refracting glass which the experience of a different race provides. This has had happy results, both for his tolerance and his sense of what may be universal in the significance of Rama Krishna’s life. It has also made possible the writing of a biography almost as if it were a personal adventure, in which the reader accompanies Mr. Mukerji to India and learns from the disciples of the seer themselves the story of their master. To visit monks in ochre-colored robes, to hear discourses from holy men in Benares in such company, is an adventure not to be despised. Its pleasure is increased by the beautifully chaste and lyrical English of which Mr. Mukerji has command. It is a classic language that he writes, but, with all its perfection, never far removed from the informality of speech. It invests many passages with a loveliness and eloquence which have a quality shared with few other books.
The final impression of the volume must be one of qualified respect for its material and lasting enjoyment of its beauty. Many questions which it precipitates are confirmed rather than dismissed at the end. And almost at once the Western reader will be disturbed by the remarks of a holy man to the author on the relative values of fact and legend in the life which he is about to undertake: ‘Rama Krishna legends . . . contain more of the truth about him than all the authentic facts. . . . Facts are so veracious and so dull that nobody is uplifted by believing in them.’ It may well be that ‘legend is the chalice of truth,’ and certainly the saying is a graceful one. But many readers will ask for a clear line of demarcation between what is told them for history and what for legend. When the case is rested on these enigmatic sentences, they will feel themselves licensed to regard as legend much in the book which a disciple might uphold as some form of truth. And a pretty irony might be written on the aphorism, ‘As raw material for legend there is nothing finer than history ’!
Two doctrines which have value apart from the occult practices dealt with on many pages of the book deserve to be mentioned. The first is that the life of the spirit is an experience, not a creed. This is perhaps broadening the thought more than it will bear, for to Rama Krishna the experience was ’Oneness with the Absolute’ or ‘seeing God.’ Yet even divested of the beliefs which underlie such expressions, the spirit has its life and its authority; and all who would enrich and strengthen the life of the spirit will find bonds of union in The Face of Silence. The second doctrine is a corollary of the first, which says that since the life of the spirit is an inward experience it should be put before all else, even before the doing of good deeds. If the spirit has its due, good will be done; but if deeds must be done at all costs, the spirit will never have its due. This is a hard lesson for philanthropic America, and harder for unphilanthropic America, for the energy of power and acquisitiveness which fill the world with turmoil. But surely it is a lesson with its point. There come times when we should be glad to borrow the words reported in this book of a disciple on his deathbed: ‘This madness of matter is a terrible veil — remove it from mine eyes, O Rama Krishna! ’
THEODORE MORRISON