REFLECTIONS ON GANDHI
minded that Gandhi started out with the normal ambitions of a young
Indian student and only adopted his extremist opinions by degrees and,
in some cases, rather unwillingly. There was a time, it is interesting to
learn, when he wore a top hat, took dancing lessons, studied French and
Latin, went up the Eiffel Tower and even tried to learn the violin-all
this with the idea of assimilating European civilization as thoroughly as
possible. He was not one of those saints who are marked out by their
phenomenal piety from childhood onwards, nor one of the other kind
who forsake the world after sensational debaucheries. He makes full
confession of the misdeeds of his youth, but in fact there is not much to
confess.
As
a frontispiece to the book there is a photograph of Gandhi's
possessions at the time of his death. The whole outfit could be pur–
chased for about £5, and Gandhi's sins, at least his fleshly sins, would
make the same sort of appearance if placed all in one heap. A few
cigarettes, a few mouthfuls of meat, a few annas pilfered in childhood
from the maidservant, two visits to a brothel (on each occasion he got
away without "doing anything"), one narrowly escaped lapse with his
landlady in Plymouth, one outburst of temper-that is about the whole
collection. Almost from childhood onwards he had a deep earnestness,
an attitude ethical rather than religious, but, until he was about thirty, no
very definite sense of direction. His first entry into anything describable
as public life was made by way of vegetarianism. Underneath his less or–
dinary qualities one feels all the time the solid middle-class business men
who were his ancestors. One feels that even after he had abandoned per–
sonal ambition he must have been a resourceful, energetic lawyer and a
hardheaded political organizer, careful in keeping down expenses, an
adroit handler of committees and an indefatigable chaser of subscrip–
tions. His character was an extraordinarily mixed one, but there was
almost nothing in it that you can put your finger on and call bad, and
I believe that even Gandhi's worst enemies would admit that he was an
interesting and unusual man who enriched the world simply by being
alive. Whether he was also a lovable man, and whether his teachings
can have much value for those who do not accept the religious beliefs on
which they are founded, I have never felt fully certain.
Of late years it has been the fashion to talk about Gandhi as though
he were not only sympathetic to the Western leftwing movement, but
were even integrally part of it. Anarchists and pacifists, in particular,
have claimed him for their own, noticing only that he was opposed to
centralism and State violence and ignoring the otherworldly, anti–
humanist tendency of his doctrines. But one should, I think, realize that
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