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SECTION ONE The Process, Form and Substance of Poetry
POETIC NOBILITY AND GRANDEUR: EPIC AND BALLAD MOVEMENTS I I am unable to agree that Chapman’s poetry is noble or equal, even at its best, to Homer and it seems to me that you have not seized the subtler quality of what Arnold means by noble. "Muscular vigour, strong nervous rhythm" are forceful, not noble. Everywhere in your remarks you seem to confuse nobility and forcefulness but there is between the two a gulf of difference. Chapman is certainly forceful, next to Marlowe, I suppose, the most forceful poet among the Elizabethans. Among the lines you quote from him to prove your thesis, there is only one that approaches nobility: Much have I suffered for thy love, much laboured, wishèd much — and even then it is spoilt for me by the last two words which are almost feeble. The second quotation: When the unmeasured firmament bursts to disclose her light Page – 314 has a rhythm which does not mate with the idea and the diction; these are exceedingly fine and powerful — but not noble. There is no nobility at all in the third: And such a stormy day shall come, in mind and soul I know, When sacred Troy shall shedher towersfor tears of’overthrow. The first line of the couplet is rhetorical and padded, the second is a violent, indeed extravagant conceit which does not convey any true and high emotion but is intended to strike and startle the intellectual imagination. One has only to compare Homer’s magnificent lines absolute in their nobility of testrained yet strong emotion, in which the words and rhythm give the very soul of the emotion, but in its depth, not with any outward vehemence. In the fourth quotation: Heard Thetis’ foul petition and wished in any wise The splendour of the burning ships might satiate his eyes — the first line has the ordinary ballad movement and diction and cannot rank, the second is very fine poetry, vivid, powerful, impressive; with a beginning of grandeur — but the nobility of Homer, Virgil or Mifton is not there. The line strikes at the mind with a great vehemence in order to impress it – nobility in poetry enters in and takes possession with an assured gait by its own right. It would seem to me that one has only to put the work of these greater poets side by side with Chapman’s best to feel the difference. Chapman no doubt lifts rocks and makes mountains suddenly to rise — in that sense he has elevation or rather elevations; but in doing it he gesticulates, wrestles, succeeds finally with a shout of triumph; that does not give a noble effect or a noble movement. See in contrast with what a self-possessed grandeur, dignity or godlike ease Milton, Virgil, Homer make their ascensions or keep their high levels. Then I come to Arnold’s example of which you’question the nobility on the strength of my description of one essential of the poetically noble. Mark that the calm, self-mastery, beautiful control which I have spoken of as essential to nobility is a poetic, Page – 315 not an ethical or Yogic calm and control. It does not exclude the poignant expression of grief or passion, but it expresses it with a certain high restraint so that even when the mood is personal it yet borders on the widely impersonal. Cleopatra’s words¹ are an example of what I mean; the disdainful compassion for the fury of the chosen instrument of self-destruction which vainly thinks it can truly hurt her, the call to death to act swiftly and yet the sense of being high above what death can do, which these few simple words convey has the true essence of nobility. "Impatience" only! You have not caught the significance of the words "poor venomous fool", the tone of the "Be angry, and despatch", the tense and noble grandeur of the suicide scene with the high light it sheds on Cleopatra’s character. For she. was a remarkable woman, a great queen, a skilful ruler and politician, not merely the erotic intriguer people make of her. Shakespeare is not good at describing greatness, he poetised the homme moyen but he has caught something here. The whole passage stands on a par with the words of Antony "I am dying, Egypt, dying" (down to "A Roman by a Roman valiantly vanquished") which stand among the noblest expressions of high, deep, yet collected and contained emotion in literature — though that is a masculine and this a feminine nobility. There is in the ballad of Sir Patrick Spense the same poignancy and restraint — something that gives a sense of universality and almost impersonality in the midst of the pathetic expression of sorrow. There is a quiver but a high compassionate quiver, there is no wail or stutter or vehemence. As for the rhythm, it may be the ballad "alive", but it is not "kicking" — and it has the overtones and undertones which ballad rhythm has not at its native level. Then for the other example you have given — lines didactic in intention can be ¹ If thou and nature can so gently part, The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch, Which hurts and is desir’d.… ……….Come, thou mortal wretch, With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate Of life at once untie; poor venomous fool, Be angry, and despatch. - Shakespeare Page – 316 noble, as for instance, the example quoted by Arnold from Virgil, Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem, Fortunam ex aliis, or the line quoted from Apollo’s speech about the dead body of Hector and Achilles’ long-nourished and too self-indulgent rage against it. Johnson’s two lines,
Still raise for good the supplicating voice, But leave to Heaven the measure and the choice,
are less fine and harmonious in their structure; there is something of a rhetorical turn and therefore it reaches a lower height of nobility, but nobility there is, especially in the second line of the couplet. I do not find it cold; there is surely a strong touch of poetic emotion there. I may say, however,’that grandeur and nobility are kindred but not interchangeable terms. One can be noble without reaching grandeur – one can be grand without the subtle quality of nobility. Zeus Qlympius is grand and noble; Ravana or Briareus with the thousand arms is grand without being noble. Lear going mad in the storm is grand, but too vehement and disordered to be noble. I think the essential difference between the epic movement and ballad rhythm and language lies in this distinction between nobility and force — in the true ballad usually a bare, direct and rude force. The ballad metre has been taken by modern poets and lifted out of its normal form and movement, tfiVen subtle turns and cadences and made the vehicle of lyric beauty and fervour or of strong or beautiful narrative; but this is not the true original ballad movement and ballad motive. Scott’s movement is narrative, not epic — there is also a lyrical narrative movement and that is the quality reached by Coleridge, perhaps the finest use yet made of the ballad movement. It is doubtful whether the ballad form can bear the epic lift for more than a line or two, a stanza or two — under the epic stress the original jerkiness remains while the lyric flow smooths it out. When it tries to lift to the epic height, it does so with a Page – 317 jerk, an explosive leap or a quick canter; one feels the rise, but there is still something of the old trot underneath the movement. It is, at least what I feel throughout in Chesterton — there is a sense of effort, of disguise with the crudity of the original form still showing through the brilliantly coloured drapery that has been put upon it. If there is no claim to epic movement I do not mind and can take it for what it can give, but comparisons with Homer and Virgil and the classic hexameter are perilous and reveal the yawning gulf between the two movements. As to the line of fourteen syllables. Chapman often overcomes its difficulties but the jog-trot constantly comes out. It may be that all that can be surmounted but Chapman and Chesterton do not surmount it – whatever their heights of diction or imagination, the metre interferes with their maintenance, even, I think, with their attaining their full eminence. Possibly a greater genius might wipe out the defect – but would a greater genius have cared to make the endeavour? I have left myself no space or time for Chesterton as a poet and it is better so because I have not read The Ballad of the White Horse and know him only by extracts. ‘Your passages establish him as a poet, a fine>and vivid poet by intervals, but not as a great or an epic poet — that is my impression. Sometimes I find your praise of particular passages extravagant, as when you seem to put Marlowe’s mighty line See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament and Chesterton’s facetious turn about the stretched necks and burned beards on a par. Humour can be poetic and even epic, like Kaikeyi’s praise of Manthara’s hump in the Ramayana; but this joke of Chesterton’s does not merit such an apotheosis. That is ballad style, not mighty or epic. Again all that passage about Colan and Earl Harold is poor ballad stuff — except the first three lines and the last two — poor in diction, poor in movement. I am unable to enthuse over It smote Earl Harold over the eye And blood began to run. Page – 318 The lines marrying the soft sentimentalism of the "small white daisies" with the crude brutality of the "blood out of the brain" made me at first smile with the sense of the incongruous, it seemed almost like. an attempt at humour — at least at the grotesque. I prefer Scott’s Tunstall; in spite of its want of imagination and breadth it is as good a thing as any Scott has written; on the contrary, these lines show Chesterton far below his best. The passage about the cholera and wheat is less flat; it is even impressive in a way, but impressive by an exaggerated bigness and forced attempt at epic greatness on one side and a forced and exaggerated childish sentimentalism on the other. The two do not fuse and the contrast is grotesque. This cholera image might be fine out of its context, it is at least forceful and vivid, but applied to a man (not a god or a demigod) it sounds too inflated — while the image of the massacrer muttering sentimentally about bread while he slew is so unnatural as to tread on or over the borders of the grotesque — it raises even a smile like the poor small white daisies red with blood out of Earl Harold’s brain. I could criticise further, but I refrain. On the other hand, Chesterton is certainly very fine by flashes. His images and similes and metaphors are rather explosive, sometimes they are mere conceits like the "cottage in the clouds", but all the same they have very often a high poetic quality of revealing vividness. At times also he has fine ideas finely expressed and occasionally he achieves a great lyrical beauty and feeling. He is terribly unequal and unreliable, violent, rocketlike, ostentatious, but at least in parts of this poem he does enter into the realms of poetry. Only, I refuse to regard the poem as an epic — a sometimes low-falling, sometimes high-swinging lyrical narrative is the only claim I can concede to it. 2
"Noble" has a special meaning, also "elevation" is used in a certain sense by Arnold. In that sense these words do not seem to me to be applicable either to Chapman or to the ballad metre. Strong, forceful, energetic, impressive they may be — but nobility is a rarer, calmer, more self-mastered, highly harmonious
Page – 319 thing than these are. Also, nobility and grandeur are not quite the same thing. 2.2.1935 3
I have not much taste for the English ballad form; it is generally either too flat or too loud and artificial and its basic stuff is a strenuous popular obviousness that needs a very rare genius to transform it. 20.11.1932
PHILOSOPHY IN POETRY 1
What does your correspondent mean by "philosophy" in a poem? Of course if one sets out to write a metaphysical argument in verse like the Greek Empedocles or the Roman Lucretius, it is a risky business and is likely to land you into prosaic poetry which is a less pardonable mixture than poetic prose. Even when philosophising in a less perilous way, one has to be careful not to be flat or heavy. It is obviously easier to be poetic when singing about a skylark than when one tries to weave a robe of verse to clothe the attributes of the Brahman. But that does not mean that there is to be no thought or no spiritual thought or no expression of truth in poetry; there is no great poet who has not tried to philosophise. Shelley wrote about the skylark, but he also wrote about the Brahman. Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
is as good poetry as Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! There are flights of unsurpassable poetry in the Gita and the Page – 320 Upanishads. These rigid dicta are always excessive and there is no reason why a poet should allow the expression of his personality or the spirit within him or his whole poetic mind to be clipped, cabined or stifled by any theories or "thou shalt not"-s of this character. 7.12.193.1 P.S. And if one were to take stock of your correspondent’s theories (that no poems should ever have any philosophy, etc.), then half the world’s poetry would have to disappear. Truth and Thought and Light cast into forms of beauty cannot be banished in that cavalier way. Music and art and poetry have striven from the beginning to express the vision of the deepest and greatest things and not the things of the surface only, and it will be so as long as there are poetry and art and music. 2
If H had indicated that the God spoken of was not the sole Divinity he would have spoiled the poem. For the purpose of the poem he has to be spoken of as the sole Divinity. Why must we take the poem as an exercise in philosophy? A poem is a poem, not a doctrine. It expresses something in the poet’s mind or his feeling. If it agrees with the total truth or the highest truth of the universe, so much the better, but we cannot demand that of every poet and every poem. My appreciation was given from the purely aesthetic standpoint. Even if a poet were to extol a false doctrine such as a malevolent God creating a painful universe, still if it were a fine poem I would enjoy and praise it — although it would be there too an appearance of the universe but not spoiled by putting it forward as a doctrine. 1.2.1935
SAMENESS AND VARIETY IN POETRY 1 Ordinary poems (and novels) always write about love and similar Page – 321 things. Is it one point against ordinary (non-spiritual) poetry? If there is sameness of expression in spiritual poems, it is due either to the poet’s binding himself by the tradition of a fixed set of symbols (e.g. Vaishnava poets, Vedic poets) or to his having only a limited field of expression or imagination or to his deliberately limiting himself to certain experiences or customs that are dear to him. To readers who feel these things it does not appear monotonous. Those who listen to Mirabai’s songs, don’t get tired of them, nor do I get tired of reading the Upanishads. The Greeks did not tire of reading Anacreon’s poems enough he always wrote of wine and beautiful boys (an example of sameness in unspiritual poetry). The Vedic and Vaishnava poets remain immortal in spite of then" sameness which is in another way like that of the poetry of the troubadours in mediaeval Europe, deliberately chosen. Variety, vaicitra, is all very well, but it is the power of the poetry that really matters. After all every poet writes always in the same style, repeats the same vision of things in "different garbs". 25. 5.1938 2
Well, and if a poet is a spiritual seeker what does Tagore¹ want him to write about? Dancing girls? A has done that. Wine and women? Hafiz has done that. But he can only use them as symbols as a rule. Must he write about politics ? Why should he describe the outer aspects of world nature, viśva-prakrti, for their own sake, when his vision is of something else within or even apart from her? Merely for the sake of variety? He then becomes a mere litterateur. Of course if a man simply writes to get poetic fame and a lot of readers, if he is only a poet, Tagore’s advice may be good for him. 25.5.1938 3 Obviously, it is desirable not to repeat oneself or, if one has to,
¹ These remarks are apropos of Tagore’s view that only spiritual inspiration dealing with Page – 322 it is desirable to repeat in another language and in a new light. Still, even that cannot be overdone. The difficulty with most writers of spiritual poetry is that they have either a limited field of experience or are tacked on to a limited inspiration though an intense one. How to get out of it ? The only recipe I know is to widen oneself (or one’s receptivity) always. Or else perhaps wait in the eternal quietude for a new "white word" to "break" it — if it does not come, telephone. 30.8.1937 POETIC INTUITION AND CRITICAL INTELLECT
What you have written as the general theory of the matter seems to be correct and it does not differ substantially from what I wrote. But your phrase about unpurposive repetition might carry a suggestion which I would not be able to accept; it might seem to indicate that the poet must have a "purpose" in whatever he writes and must be able to give a logical account of it to the critical intellect. That is surely not the way in which the poet or at least the mystic poet has to do his work. He does not himself deliberately choose or arrange word and rhythm but only sees it as it comes in the very act of inspiration. If there is any purpose of any kind, it also comes by and in the process of inspiration. He can criticise himself and the work; he can see whether it was a wrong or an inferior movement, he does not set about correcting it by any intellectual method but waits for the true thing to come in its place. He cannot always account to the logical intellect for what he has done; he feels or intuits, and the reader or critic has to do the same. 26.4.1946 POETIC IMAGINATION AND EXPERIENCE
But is it necessary to say which is which? It is not possible to deny that it was an experience, even if one cannot affirm it — not being in the consciousness of the writer. But even if it is an Page – 323 imagination, it is a powerful poetic imagination which expresses what would be the exact feeling in the real experience. It seems to me that that is quite enough. There are so many things in Wordsworth and Shelley which people say were only mental feelings and imaginations and yet they express the deeper seeings or feelings of the seer. For poetry it seems to me the point is irrevelant. 27.5.1936 POETIC EXPRESSION AND PERSONAL FEELING OF THE POET
1 What you say is quite true. Poets are mediums for a force of vision and expression that is not theirs, so they need not feel except by reflection the emotions they utter. But of course that is not always the case — sometimes they express what they feel or at any rate what a part of their being feels. 25.9.1934 2 What the poets feel when writing (those who are truly inspired) is the great Ananda of creation, possession by a great Power superior to their ordinary minds which puts some emotion or vision of things into a form of beauty. They feel the emotion of the thing they express, but not always as a personal feeling, but as Something which seizes hold of them for self-expression. But the personal feeling also may form a basis for the creation. 26.9.1934 POETIC EXPRESSION AND PERSONAL ATTITUDE OF THE POET
These designations, a magnified ego, an exalted outlook of the vital mind apply in Sadhana, but hardly to poetic expression which lifts or ought to lift to a field of pure personal-impersonal Page – 324 bhāva. An utterance of this kind can express a state of consciousness or an experience which is not necessarily the writer’s personal position or ego attitude but that of an inner spirit. So long as it is so the question of ego does not arise. It arises only if one turns away from the poem to the writer and asks in what mood he wrote it and that is a question of psychological fact alien to the purpose of poetry. 29.6.1935 THE TWO PARTS OF THE POETIC CREATOR
Your poem is forcible enough, but the quality is rather rhetorical than poetic. Yet at the end there are two lines which are very fine poetry: Gay singing birds caught in a ring of fire and A silent scorn that sears Eternity. If you could not write the whole in that strain which would have made it epic almost in pitch, it is, I think, because your indignation was largely mental and moral, the emotion though very strong being too much intellectualised in expression to give the poetic intensity of speech and movement. Indignation, the saeva indignatio of Juvenal, can produce poetry, but it must be either vividly a vital revolt which stirs the whole feeling into a white heat of self-expression — as in Milton’s famous sonnet¹ — or a high spiritual or deep psychic rejection of the undivine. Besides, it is well known that the emotion of the external being, in the raw as it were, does not make good material for poetry; it has to be transmuted into something deeper, less externally personal, more permanent before it can be turned into good poetry. There are always two parts of oneself which collaborate in poetry — the instrumental which lives and feels what is written, makes a sort of projective identification with it, and the Seer-Creator within
¹ On the late Massacre in Piedmont Page – 325 who is not involved, but sees the inner significance of it and listens for the word that shall entirely express this significance. It is in some meeting-place of these two that what is felt or lived is transmuted into true stuff of poetry. Probably you are not sufficiently detached from this particular life-experience and the reactions it created to go back deeper into yourself and transmute it in this way. And yet you have done it in the two magnificent lines I have noted, which have the virtue of seizing the inner significance behind the thing experienced in the poetic or interpretative and not in the outward mental way. The first of these two lines conveys the pathos and tragedy of the thing and also the stupidity of the waste much more effectively than pages of denunciation or comment and the other stresses with an extraordinary power in a few words the problem as flung by the revolting human mind and life against the Cosmic Impersonal. The detachment of which you speak, comes by attaining the poise of the Spirit, the equality, of which the Gita speaks always, but also by sight, by knowledge. For instance, looking at what happened in 1914 — or for that matter at all that is and has been happening in human history — the eye of the Yogin sees not only the outward events and persons and causes, but the enormous forces which precipitate them into action. If the men who fought were instruments in the hands of rulers and financiers, these in turn were mere puppets in the clutch of those forces. When one is habituated to see the things behind, one is no longer prone to be touched by the outward aspects — or to expect any remedy from political, institutional or social changes; the only way out is through the descent of a consciousness which is not the puppet of these forces but is greater than they are and can compel them either to change or disappear. 17.7.1931
NEED OF LIFE-EXPERIENCE FOR LITERARY CREATION 1 Emotion alone is not enough for producing anything that can Page – 326 be called creation, at best it can give form to something lyrical and passionate or to something charming or appealing. For any considerable creation there must be a background of life, a vital rich and stored or a mind and an imagination that has seen much and observed much or a soul that has striven and been conscious of its strivings. These are needed, or one or other of them, but the purdah is not likely to produce them, though there may be a lucky accident in the worst circumstances, but one can’t count on accidents. A George Eliot, a George Sand, a Virginia Woolf, a Sappho, or even a Comtesse de Noailles grew up in other circumstances. 30.4.1933 2
The great novelists like the great dramatists have been usually men who lived widely or intensely and brought a world out of the combination of their inner and their outer observation, vision, experience. Of course if you have a world in yourself, that is another matter. RELATION BETWEEN THE PERSONAL CHARACTER AND LIFE EXPERIENCE AND THE WORK OF AN ARTIST The point that a man’s poetry or art need not express anything that has happened in his personal life is rather too obvious to be made so much of. The point is how far it can be supposed to be a transcript of his mind or mental life. It is obvious that his vital cast, his character may have very little to do with his writing, it might be its very opposite; his physical mind also need not determine the character of his writings; the physical mind of a romantic poet or artist may have been that of a commonplace respectable bourgeois; one who in his fiction is a benevolent philanthropist reformer full of cheery optimistic sunshine may have been in actual life selfish, hard, even cruel. All that is now well known and illustrated by numerous examples in the lives of great poets and artists. It is evidently in the inner mental personality Page – 327 of a man that the key to his creation must be discovered, not in his outward mind or life. Here again a poem or work of art need not be (though it may be) an exact transcription of a mental or spiritual experience; nor, if the creating mind takes up an incident of the life, a vital impression, emotion or reaction that had actually taken place, need it be more than a starting-point for the poetic creation. The "I" of a poem is more often than not a dramatic or representative I, nothing less and nothing more. But it does not help to fall back on the imagination and say that all is only the imagination working with whatever material it may happen to choose. The question is how the imagination of a poet came to be cast in this peculiar mould which differentiates him as a creator not only from the millions who do not create but from all other poetic creators. There are two possible answers. A poet or artist may be merely a medium for a creative Force which uses him as a channel and is concerned only with expression in art and not with the man’s personality or his inner or outer life. Or, man being a multiple personality, a crowd of personalities which are tangled up on the surface but separate within, the poet or artist in him may be only one of these many personalities and concerned only with its inner and creative function ; its work done, it may retire and leave the man to the others. It may or may not use the experiences of the others as material for its work; it may also meddle with the activity of the others and try to square their make-up and action to its own images and ideals. In fact it is a mixture of the two things that creates the poet. He is a medium for the creative Force which acts through him; it uses or picks up anything stored up in his mind from his inner life or his memories or impressions of outer life and things, anything it can or cares to make use of and this it moulds and turns to its purpose. But still it is through the poet personality in him that it works and this poet personality may be either a mere reed through which the Spirit blows but laid aside after the tune is over, or it may be an active power having some say even in the surface mental composition and vital and physical activities of the total composite creature. In that general possibility there is room for a hundred degrees and variations and no rule can be laid down that covers all cases. Page – 328
LITERARY STYLE AND HEREDITARY INFLUENCES
It seems to me that this statement¹ is quite untrue. A man’s style expresses himself, not the sum and outcome of his ancestors. 24.1.1937 THE ILLUSION OF REALISM 1 I am afraid your correspondent is under the grip of what I may call the illusion of realism. What all artists do is to take something from life — even if it be only a partial hint — and transfer it by the magic of their imagination and make a world of their own; the realists, e.g., Zola, Tolstoi, do it as much as anybody else. Each artist is a creator of his own world — why then insist on this legal fiction that the artist’s world must appear as an exact imitation of the actual world around us ? Even if it does so seem, that is only a skilful make-up, an appearance. It may be constructed to look like that — but why must it be ? The characters and creations of even the most strongly objective fiction, much more the characters and creations of poetry live by the law of their own life, which is something in the inner mind of their creator — they cannot be constructed as copies of things outside. 30.1.1933 2 Why should a creative artist write only about problems? What a stupidly rigid principle! Can X really write nothing except what he has seen or experienced? What an unimaginative man he must be and how limited! I wonder whether Victor Hugo had to live in a convict’s
¹ "For style in the full sense is more than the deliberate and designed creation, more even than the unconscious and involuntary creation, of the individual man, who therein expresses himself. The self that he thus expresses is a bundle of inherited tendencies that come, the man himself can never know whence." Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, Constable & Co., London, 1923, p. 175.
Page – 329 prison before he created Jean Valjean. Certainly one has to look at life, but there is no obligation to copy faithfully from life. The man of imagination carries a world in himself and a mere hint or suggestion from life is enough to start it going. It is recognised now that Balzac and Dickens created out of themselves their greatest characters which were not at all faithful to the life around them. Balzac’s descriptions of society are hopelessly wrong, he knew nothing about it, but his world is much more striking and real than the actual world around him which he misrepresented – even, life has imitated the figures he made, rather than the other way round, Besides, who is living in entire seclusion in Pondicherry? There are living men and women around you and human nature is in full play here as much as in the biggest city — only one has to have an eye to see what is within them and the imagination that takes a few bricks and can make out of them a great edifice. One must be able to see that human nature is one everywhere and pick out of it the essential things that can be turned into great art. 26.5.1934 ART FOR ART’S SAKE
Art for Art’s sake ? But what, after all, is meant by this slogan and what is the real issue behind it ? Is it meant, as I think it was when the slogan first came into use, that the technique, the artistry is all in all ? The contention would then be that it does not matter what you write or paint or sculpt or what music you make or about what you make it so long as it is beautiful writing, competent painting, good sculpture, fine music. It is very evidently true in a certain sense, — in this sense that whatever is perfectly expressed or represented or interpreted under the conditions of a given art proves itself by that very fact to be legitimate material for the artist’s labour. But that free admission cannot be confined only to all objects, however common or deemed to be vulgar, — an apple, a kitchen pail, a donkey, a dish of carrots, — it can give a right of citizenship in the domain of art to a moral Page – 330 theme or thesis, a philosophic conclusion, a social experiment; even the Five Years’ Plan or the proceedings of a District Board or the success of a drainage scheme, an electric factory or a big hotel can be brought, after the most modern or the still more robustious Bolshevik mode, into the artist’s province. For, technique being all, the sole question would be whether he as poet, novelist, dramatist, painter or sculptor has been able to triumph over the difficulties and bring out creatively the possibilities of his subject. There is no logical basis here for accepting an apple and rejecting the Apple-Cart. But still you may say that at least the object of the artist must be art only, — even if he treats ethical, social or political questions, he must not make it his main object to wing with the enthusiasm of aesthetic creation a moral, social or political aim. But if in doing it he satisfies the conditions of his art, shows a perfect technique and in it beauty, power, perfection, why not ? The moralist, preacher, philosopher, social or political enthusiast is often doubled with an artist — as shining proofs and examples there are Plato and Shelley, to go no farther. Only, you can say of him on the basis of this theory that as a work of art his creation should be judged by its success of craftsmanship and not by its contents; it is not made greater by the value of his ethical ideas, his enthusiasms or his metaphysical seekings. But then, the theory itself is true only up to a certain point. For technique is a means of expression; one does not write merely to use beautiful words or paint for the sole sake of line and colour; there is something that one is trying through these means to express or to discover. What is that something? The first answer would be — it is the creation, it is the discovery of Beauty. Art is for that alone and can be judged only by its revelation or discovery of Beauty. Whatever is capable of being manifested as Beauty is the material of the artist. But there is not only physical beauty in the world — there is moral, intellectual, spiritual beauty also. Still, one might say that "Art for Art’s sake" means that only what is aesthetically beautiful must be expressed and all that contradicts the aesthetic sense of beauty must be avoided. Art has nothing to do with Life in itself, things in themselves. Good, Truth or the Divine for their own sake, but Page – 331 only in so far as they appeal to some aesthetic sense of beauty, — and that would seem to be a sound basis for excluding the Five Years’ Plan, a moral sermon or a philosophical treatise. But here, again, what after all is Beauty? How much is it in the thing itself and how much in the consciousness that perceives it? Is not the eye of the artist constantly catching some element of aesthetic value in the plain, the ugly, the sordid, the repellent and triumphantly conveying it through his material, — through the word, through line and colour, through the sculptured shape? There is a certain state of Yogic consciousness in which all things become beautiful to the eye of the seer, simply because they spiritually are — because they are a rendering in line and form of the quality and force of existence, of the consciousness, of the Ananda that rules the worlds, — of the hidden Divine. What a thing is to the exterior sense may not be, often is not beautiful for the ordinary aesthetic vision, but the Yogin sees in it the something More which the external eye does not see, he sees the soul behind, the self and spirit, he sees too lines, hues, harmonies and expressive dispositions which are not to the first surface sight visible or seizable. It may be said that he brings into the object something that is in himself, transmutes it by adding out of his own being to it — as the artist too does something of the same kind but in another way. It is not quite that, however; what the Yogin sees, what the artist sees, is there, his is a transmuting vision because it is a revealing vision; he discovers behind what the object appears to be, the something More that it is. And so from this point of view of a realised supreme harmony all is or can be subject-matter for the artist, because in all he can discover and reveal the Beauty that is everywhere. Again, we land ourselves in a devastating catholicity; for here too one cannot pull up short at any given line. It may be a hard saying that one must or may discover and reveal beauty in a pig or its poke or in a parish pump or an advertisement of somebody’s pills, and yet something like that seems to be what modern Art and Literature are trying with vigour and conscientious labour to do. By extension one ought to be able to extract beauty equally well out of morality or social reform or a political caucus or allow at least that all these things can, if he wills, become legitimate subjects for
Page – 332 the artist. Here, too, one cannot say that it is on condition he thinks of beauty only and does not make moralising or social reform or a political idea his main object. For if with that idea foremost in his mind he still produces a great work of art, discovering Beauty as he moves to his aim, proving himself in spite of his unaesthetic preoccupations a great artist, it is all we can justly ask from him, whatever his starting-point, to be a creator of Beauty. Art is discovery and revelation of Beauty, and we can say nothing more by way of prohibitive or limiting rule. But there is one thing more that can be said, and that makes a big difference. In the Yogin’s vision of universal beauty, all becomes beautiful, but all is not reduced to a single level. There are gradations, there is a hierarchy in this All-Beauty and we see that it depends on the ascending power (Vibhuti) of Consciousness and Ananda that expresses itself in the object. All is the Divine, but some things are more divine than others. In the artist’s vision too there are or can be gradations, a hierarchy of values. Shakespeare can get dramatic and therefore aesthetic values out of Dogberry and Malvolio and he is as thorough a creative artist in his treatment of them as in his handling of Macbeth or Lear. But if we had only Dogberry or Malvolio to testify to Shakespeare’s genius, no Macbeth, no Lear, would he be so great a dramatic artist and creator as he now is? It is in the varying possibilities of one subject or another that there lies an immense difference. Apelles’ grapes deceived the birds that came to peck at them, but there was more aesthetic content in the Zeus of Pheidias, a greater content of Consciousness and therefore of Ananda to express and with it to fill in and intensify the essential principle of Beauty, even though the essence of beauty may be realised perhaps with equal aesthetic perfection by either artist and in either theme. And that is because just as technique is not all, so even Beauty is not all in Art. Art is not only technique or form of Beauty, not only the discovery or the expression of Beauty — it is a self-expression of Consciousness under the conditions of aesthetic vision and a perfect execution. Or, to put it otherwise, there are not only aesthetic values, but life-values, mind-values, soul-values that enter into Art. The artist puts out into form not
Page – 333 only the powers of his own consciousness, but the powers of the Consciousness that has made the worlds and, their objects. And if that Consciousness according to the Vedantic view is fundamentally equal everywhere, it is still in manifestation not an equal power in all things. There is more of the Divine expression in the Vibhuti than in the common man, prākrto janah; in some forms of life there are less potentialities for the self-expression of the Spirit than in others. And there are also gradations of consciousness which make a difference, if not in the aesthetic value or greatness of a work of art, yet in its contents-value. Homer makes beauty out of man’s outward life and action and stops there. Shakespeare rises one step further and reveals to us a life-soul and life-forces and life-values to which Homer had no access. In Valmiki and Vyas there is the constant presence of great Idea-Forces and Ideals supporting life and its movements which were beyond the scope of Homer and Shakespeare. And beyond the Ideals and Idea-Forces even there are other presences, more inner or inmost realities, a soul behind things and beings, the spirit and its powers, which could be the subject-matter of an art still more rich and deep and abundant in its interest than any of these could be. A poet finding these and giving them a voice with a genius equal to that of the poets of the past might not be greater than they in a purely aesthetic valuation, but his art’s contents-value, its consciousness-values could be deeper and higher and much fuller than in any achievement before him. There is something here that goes beyond any consideration of Art for Art’s sake or Art for Beauty’s sake; for while these stress usefully sometimes the indispensable first elements of artistic creation, they would limit too much the creation itself if they stood for the exclusion of the something More that compels Art to change always in its constant seeking for more and more that must be expressed of the concealed or the revealed Divine, of the individual and the universal or the transcendent Spirit. If we take these three elements as making the whole of Art, perfection of expressive form, discovery of beauty, revelation of the soul and essence of things and the powers of creative consciousness and Ananda of which they are the vehicles, then we
Page – 334 shall get perhaps a solution which includes the two sides of the controversy and reconciles their difference. Art for Art’s sake certainly; Art as a perfect form and discovery of Beauty; but also Art for the soul’s sake, the spirit’s sake and the expression of all that the soul, the spirit wants to seize through the medium of beauty. In that self-expression there are grades and hierarchies, widenings and steps that lead to the summits. And not only to enlarge Art towards the widest wideness but to ascend with it to the heights that climb towards the Highest is and must be part both of our aesthetic and our spiritual endeavour. 17.4.1933 Page – 335 |