SECTION
TEN
Poets – Mystics – Intellectuals
THE POET, THE YOGI
AND THE RISHI
1
It is quite natural for the poets to vaunt their métier as the
highest reach of human capacity and themselves as the top of creation, it is
also natural for the intellectuals to run down the Yogi or the Rishi who claims
to reach a higher consciousness than that which they conceive to be the summit
of human achievement. The poet lives still in the mind and is not yet a
spiritual seer, but he represents to the human intellect the highest point of
mental seership where the imagination tries to figure and embody in words its
intuition of things, though that stands far below the vision of things that
can be grasped only by spiritual experience. It is for that that the poet is
exalted as the real seer and prophet. There is too, helping the idea, the error
of the modern or European mentality which so easily confuses the mentalised
vital or life being with the soul and the idealising mind with spirituality.
The poet imaging mental or physical beauty is for the outer mind something more
spiritual than the seer or the God-lover experiencing the eternal peace or the
ineffable ecstasy. Yet the Rishi or Yogi can drink of a deeper draught of
Beauty and Delight than the imagination of the poet at its highest can
conceive. The Divine is Delight and it is not only the unseen Beauty that he
can see but the visible and the tangible also has for him a face of the
All-beautiful which the mind cannot discover.
10.11.1934
2
Poetic
intuition and illumination is not the same thing as Rishi’s intuition and
illumination.
11.2.1936
3
A Rishi is one
who sees or discovers an inner truth and puts it into self-effective
language — the mantra. Either new truth or old truth made new by
expression and realisation
Page – 517.
He [R.M.] has expressed certain
eternal truths by process of Yoga — I don’t think it is by Rishi-like intuition
or illumination nor has he the mantra.
A Rishi may be a Yogi, but also he may not; a Yogi too may be a Rishi,
but also he may not. Just as a philosopher may or may not be a poet, and a poet
may or may not be a philosopher.
11.2.1936
THE POET AND THE
PROPHET
Evidently the poet’s value lies in his poetic and not in his prophetic
power. If he is a prophet also, the intrinsic worth of his prophecy lies in its
own value, his poetic merit does not add to that, only it gives to its
expression a power that perhaps it would not have otherwise.
GENIUS
AND
YOGA
I never heard of anyone getting genius by effort. One can increase one’s
talent by training and labour, but genius is a gift of Nature. By Sadhana it is
different, one can do it; but that is not the fruit of effort, but either of an
inflow or by an opening or liberation of some impersonal power or manifestation
of unmanifested power. No rule can be made of such things; it depends on persons
and circumstances how far the manifestation of genius by Yoga will go or what shape
it will take or to what degree or height it will rise.
28.7.1938
POETIC GENIUS AND YOGA
1
For poetry one
must have a special inspiration or genius. With literary capacity one can write
good verse only.
Genius usually means an inborn power which develops of
itself. Talent and capacity are not genius, they can be acquired.
Page – 518
But
that is the ordinary rule, by Yoga one can manifest what is concealed in the
being.
22.9.1934
2
No poet feels his poetry as a "normal phenomenon" — he feels it
as an inspiration — of course anybody could "make" poetry by learning
the rules of prosody and a little practice. In fact many people write verse,
but the poets are few. Who are the ordinary poets? There is no such thing as an
ordinary poet.
30.5.1937
3
A
born poet is usually a genius, poetry with any power or beauty in it implies
genius.
Richness
of image is not the whole of poetry. There are many born poets who avoid too
much richness of image. There are certain fields of consciousness which express
themselves naturally through image most — there are others that do it more through
idea and feeling.
13.2.1936
4
Poetic genius — without which there cannot be any originality —is born,
but it takes time to come out; the first work even of great poets is often not
original. That is in ordinary life. In Yoga poetic originality can come by an
opening from within, even if it was not there before in such a way as to be
available in this life.
22.3.1934
5
You must
remember that you are not a "born" poet — you are trying to bring out
something from the Unmanifest inside you. You can’t demand that that should be
an easy job. It may come
Page – 519
out suddenly and without
apparent reason like the Ananda— but you can’t demand it.
8.6.1934
6
What you say about the spontaneous development of the capacity in the
metre after a silent and inactive incubation of over two years is quite true.
But it is not amazing; it often happens and is perfectly natural to those who
know the laws of the being by observation and experience. In the same way one
suddenly finds oneself knowing more of a language or a subject after returning
to it subsequent to a short interim without study, problems which had been
abandoned as unsolvable solving themselves spontaneously and easily after sleep
or when they are taken up again; knowledge or ideas coming up from within
without reading or learning or hearing from others. Sudden efflorescences of
capacity, intuitions, wellings up of all sorts of things point to the same
inner power or inner working. It is what we mean when we speak of the word,
knowledge or activity coming out of the silence, of a working behind the veil
of which the outer mind is unconscious but which one day bears its results, of
the inner manifesting itself in the outer. It makes at once true and practical
what sounds only a theory to the uninitiated, — the strong distinction made by
us between the inner being and the outer consciousness. It is how also
unexpected Yogic capacity reveals itself, sometimes no doubt as a result of long
and apparently fruitless effort, sometimes as a spontaneous out-flowering of
what was concealed there all the time or else as a response to a call which had
been made but at the time and for long seemed to be without an answer.
22.2.1935
CLASSIFICATION
OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST POETS
1
I suppose all
the names you mention can be included among the
Page – 520
world’s supreme singers; or if you
like you can put them all in three rows — e.g :
First row—Homer; Shakespeare, Valmiki
Second row —Dante, Kalidasa, Aeschylus,
Virgil, Milton.
Third row — Goethe.
And there you
are! To speak less flippantly, the first three have at once supreme imaginative
originality, supreme poetic gift, widest scope and supreme creative genius.
Each is a sort of poetic demiurge who has created a world of his own. Dante’s
triple world beyond is more constructed by the poetic seeing mind than by this
kind of elemental demiurgic power — otherwise he would rank by their side; the
same with Kalidasa. Aeschylus is a seer and creator but on a much smaller
scale. Virgil and Milton have a less spontaneous breath of creative genius; one
or two typal figures excepted, they live rather by what they have said than by
what they have made.
31.3.1932
2
I am not prepared to classify all the poets in the universe — it was the
front bench or benches you asked for. By "others" I meant poets like
Lucretius, Euripides, Calderon, Corneille, Hugo. Euripides (Medea, Bacchae
and other plays) is a greater poet than Racine whom you want to put in the
first rank. If you want only the very greatest, none of these can enter — only
Vyasa and Sophocles. Vyasa could very well claim a place beside Valmiki,
Sophocles beside Aeschylus. The rest, if you like, you can send to the third
row, but it is something of a promotion about which one can feel some qualms, Spenser
too, if you like; it is difficult to draw a line.
Shelley,
Keats and Wordsworth have not been brought into consideration although their
best work is as fine poetry as any written, but they have written nothing on a
larger scale which would place them among the greatest creators. If Keats had
finished Hyperion (without spoiling it), if Shelley had lived, or if
Wordsworth had not petered out like a motor car with insufficient petrol, it
might be different, but we have to take
Page – 521
things as they are. As it is,
all began magnificently, but none of them finished, and what work they did,
except a few lyrics, sonnets, short pieces and narratives, is often flawed and
unequal. If they had to be admitted, what about at least fifty others in Europe
and Asia?
The
critical opinions you quote1 are, many of them, flagrantly
prejudiced and personal. The only thing that results from Aldous Huxley’s
opinion, shared by many but with less courage, is that Spenser’s melodiousness
cloyed upon Aldous Huxley and that perhaps points to a serious defect somewhere
in Spenser’s art or in his genius but this does not cancel the poetic value of
Spenser. Swinburne and Arnold are equally unbalanced on either side of their
see-saw about Hugo. He might be described as a great but imperfect genius, who
just missed the very first rank because his word sometimes exceeded his weight,
because his height was at the best considerable, even magnificent, but his
depth insufficient and especially because he was often too oratorical to be
quite sincere. The remarks of Voltaire and Mark Pattison go into the same
basket.
2.4.1932
GOETHE
AND SHAKESPEARE; HOMER, VYASA AND VALMIKI
Yes, Goethe goes much deeper than Shakespeare; he had an incomparably
greater intellect than the English poet and sounded problems of life and
thought Shakespeare had no means of approaching even. But he was certainly not
a greater poet; I do not
1 A had asked: "Saintsbury as good
as declares that poetry is Shelley and Shelley poetry — Spenser alone, to his
mind, can contest the right to that equation. (Shakespeare, of course, is
admittedly hors concours.) Aldous Huxley abominates Spenser; the fellow
has got nothing to say and says it with a consummately cloying melodiousness!
Swinburne, as is well known, could never think of Victor Hugo without bursting
into half a dozen alliterative superlatives, while Matthew Arnold it was, I
believe, who pitied Hugo for imagining that poetry consisted in using ‘divinité,
‘éternité’, ‘infinité’, as lavishly as possible. And then there is Keats, whose
Hyperion compelled even the sneering Byron to forget his usual
condescending attitude towards ‘Johnny’ and confess that nothing grander had
been seen since Aeschylus.
Racine, too, cannot be left out — can he?
Voltaire adored him, Voltaire who called Shakespeare a drunken barbarian. Finally,
what of Wordsworth, whose Immortality Ode was hailed by Mark Pattison as the ne
plus ultra English poetry since the days of Lycidas?
"Kindly
shed the light of infallible viveka on this chaos of jostling
opinions.”
Page – 522
find
myself very ready to admit either that he was Shakespeare’s equal. He wrote out
of a high poetic intelligence, but his style and movement nowhere came near the
poetic power, the magic, the sovereign expression and profound or subtle
rhythms of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a supreme poet and one might almost
say, nothing else; Goethe was by far the greater man and the greater brain, but
he was a poet by choice, his mind’s choice among its many high and effulgent
possibilities, rather than by the very necessity of his being. He wrote his
poetry as he did everything else with a great skill and an inspired subtlety of
language, and effective genius but it was only part of his genius and not the
whole. There is too a touch mostly wanting — the touch of an absolute, an
intensely inspired or revealing inevitability; few quite supreme poets have
that in abundance, in others it comes by occasional jets or flashes.
When I said there were no greater poets than Homer and Shakespeare, I was
thinking of their essential force and beauty — not of the scope of their work
as a whole; for there are poets greater in their range. The Mahabharata is from
that point of view a far greater creation than the Iliad the Ramayana than the
Odyssey, and spread, either and both of them, their strength and their
achievement over a larger field than the whole dramatic world of Shakespeare;
both are built on an almost cosmic vast-ness of plan and take all human life
(the Mahabharata all human thought as well) in their scope and touch too on
things which the (Greek and Elizabethan poets could not even glimpse. But as
poets — as masters of rhythm and language and the expression of poetic beauty —
Vyasa and Vatmiki though not inferior, are not greater than either the English
or the Greek poet. We leave aside for the moment the question whether the
Mahabharata was not the creation of the mind of a people rather than of a
single poet, for that doubt has been raised also with regard to Homer.
VIRGIL’S POETRY
I don’t at all
agree that Virgil’s verse fills one with the sense of the Unknown Country — he
is not in the least a mystic poet, he was
Page
– 523
too Latin and Roman for that. Majestic sadness, word-magic and vision
need not have anything to do with the psychic; the first can come from the
Higher Mind and the noble parts of the Vital, the others from almost anywhere.
I do not mean to say there was no psychic touch at all anywhere in Virgil. And
what is this Unknown Country ? There are plenty of Unknown Countries (other
than the psychic world) to which many poets give us some kind of access or
sense of their existence behind, much more than Virgil. But if when you say
verse you mean his rhythm, his surge of word-music, that does no doubt come
from somewhere else, much more than the thoughts or the words that are carried
on the surge,
31.3.1932
DANTE
AND MILTON
I don’t think either can be called a mystic poet —Milton
not at all. A religious fervour or a metaphysical background belongs to the
mind and vital, not to a mystic consciousness. Dante writes from the poetic
intelligence with a strong intuitive drive behind it.
18.10.1936
IMPORTANCE OF THE POWER OF POETIC EXPRESSION
All depends on the power of expression of the poet. A poet like Shakespeare
or Shelley or Wordsworth though without spiritual experience may in an inspired
moment become the medium of an expression of spiritual Truth which is beyond
him and the expression, as it is not that of his own mind, may be very
powerful and living, not merely aesthetically agreeable. On the other hand a
poet with spiritual experience may be hampered by his medium or by his
transcribing brain or by an insufficient mastery of language and rhythm and
give an expression which may mean much to him but not convey the power and
breath of it to others. The English poets of the 17th century often used a too
intellectual mode of expression for their poetry to be a means of living
communication to others, except in rare moments of an unusual
Page
- 524
vision and inspiration; it is
these that give their work its value.
8.7.1935
WORDSWORTH’S REALISATION
I am rather astonished at your finding Wordsworth’s realisation, however
mental and incomplete, to be abstract and vague or dictated by emotional
effervescence. Wordsworth’s was hardly an emotional or effervescent character.
As for an abstract realisation, it sounds like a round square; I have never
had one myself and find it difficult to believe in it. But certainly a
realisation in its beginning can be vague and nebulous or it can be less or
more vivid. Still, Wordsworth did not make that impression on me and to him it
certainly seemed as something positive, wonder-f
fully luminous, direct, powerful and determinative. He stayed there and went no
farther, did not get to the source, because more was hardly possible in his
time and surroundings, at least to a man of his moral and intellectual temper.
In a more deep and spiritual sense a concrete realisation is that which makes
the thing realised more real, dynamic, intimately present to the consciousness
than any physical thing can be. Such a concrete spiritual realisation whether
of the personal Divine or of the impersonal Brahman or of the Self does not,
except in rare cases, come at or anywhere near the beginning of a Sadhana, in
the first years or for many years: one has to go deep to get it and deeper to
keep it. But a vivid and very personal sense of a spirit or infinite in Nature
can very well come in a flash and remain strongly behind a man’s outlook on the
universe.
WORDSWORTH AND KEATS
One can’t make rigid rules like that. Wordsworth is as simple and direct
as possible, (not always though), Keats aims at word magic. One can’t say
Wordsworth is a greater poet than Keats. Whatever style is poetically
successful, is advisable.
21.12.1935
Page
- 525
SHELLEY’S
"SKYLARK" — IMPERFECTIONS OF GREAT POETS — ESSENTIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF
SHELLEY’S POETRY
I objected to your criticisms and cutting up of Shelley’s Skylark,
because the whole of it seems to me to proceed from a wrong starting-point
altogether. You seem to start with the assumption that the poem ought to be an
intellectual whole with coherent parts, a logical structure. Your contention is
that the main idea, consistent in other stanzas, is of a Spiritual something,
an incorporeal joy, and the stanzas you condemn as not consistent with the
idea and tone of the rest come from an inferior less spiritual inspiration and
lower the level of the poem. Accordingly, you propose to cut out these
excrescences and insert some manipulations which would make the amended whole
the perfect poem the Skylark should be.
I
do not deny that from that standpoint your deductions are logical. The poem
arranged as you want it, without, these too earthly verses, would be a single
ethereal impalpable shining tissue. It would be more subtly ethereal (not more
spiritual), far from the earth, winging between the rainbow and the lightnings
and ignorant of anything less brilliant and unearthly. Only it would be Shelley
with something of himself left out, the Skylark incomplete with part of
its fullness of tone vanished and a big hole in the middle — a beautiful poem,
but no longer so worthy of its place among the few supreme .English lyrics.
That at least is what I feel. One thing more — even if these stanzas are an
imperfection, I do not think it wise to meddle with them either by elimination
or re-doing. To interfere with the imperfections of the great poets of the
past is a hazardous business — their imperfections as well as their perfections
are part of themselves. Imagine a drama of Shakespeare with all the blots
scratched out and all the scoriae done over and smoothed to a perfect polish!
It would be Shakespeare no longer. And this is Shelley whose strange and sweet
and luminous magic of lyrical rhythm and language, when he is at his best and
here he is at his best, in the impugned stanzas as well as in the others, is
his own secret and no other shall ever recover it. To meddle here is substantially
to mar. Things as great or greater in another kind may
Page – 526
be done, but not with this
unique and inevitable note. To omit, to change words or lines, to modify
rhythms seems to me inadmissible.1
I
do not altogether appreciate your references to Mrs. Shelley and the firefly
and your cynical and sarcastic picture of the "high-born maiden” as she
appears to you — all that has nothing to do with Shelley’s poetic conception
which is alone relevant to the matter. I could draw a realistic picture of the
poet "singing hymns unbidden" and unwanted and asking occasionally
as he wrote whether dinner was ready — with hopes, but also with fears that he
might not get it, his butcher’s bill being unpaid for a long time. Or I might
cavil scientifically about the nature of sunset and sunrise and rainbow drops
and ask what was the use of all this romantic flummery when there are real
things to write about. Or I might quote the critic — I don’t remember who he
was — who said that Shelley certainly did not believe that the skylark was a
spirit and not a bird and so the whole conception of the poem is false,
insincere, ethereal humbug and therefore not true poetry because poetry must be
sincere. Such points of view are irrelevant. Shelley is not concerned with the
real life of the high-born maiden or the poet any more than with the
ornithology of the skylark or with other material things. His glow-worm is
something more than a material glow-worm. He is concerned with the soul
love-laden, with the dreams of the poet, with the soul of beauty behind the
glow-worm’s light and the colour and fragrance of the rose. It is that he is
feeling and it is linked in his vision with the essential something he has felt
behind the song of the skylark. And because he so felt it he was not only
entitled but bound to make place for it in his inspired lyrical theme.
I
may observe in passing that the ethereal and impalpable are not more spiritual
than the tangible and the concrete — they may seem more easily subtle and ideal
to the idealising and abstracting mind, but that is a different affair. One
can feel the spiritual through the embodied and concrete as well as through
its opposite. But Shelley was not a spiritual poet and the Skylark
1 The result is bound to be like
Landor’s rewriting of
Milton — very good Landor but very bad Milton.
Page – 527
is not a spiritual lyric. Shelley
looked, it is true, always towards
the light,
towards a beauty, a truth behind the appearance of things, but he never got
through the idealising mind to the spiritual experience. What he did get was
something of the purest emotional or aesthetic feeling or purest subtle
mind-touch of an essence behind the appearance, an essence of ideal light,
truth or beauty. It is that he expresses with a strange aerial magic or a
curious supersensuously sensuous intensity in his finest lyrics. It is that we
must seek in the Skylark and, if we
find it, we have no right to claim anything else. It is there all through and
in abundance — it is its perfection that creates the sustained perfection of
the poem. There is not and there ought not to be an intellectual sequence, a
linked argument, a logical structure. It is a sequence of feeling and of ideal
perceptions with an occult logic of their own that sustains the lyric and makes
it a faultless whole. In this sequence the verses you condemn have an indefeasible
right of place. Shelley was not only a poet of other worlds, of Epipsychidion
and of The Witch of Atlas; he was
passionately interested in bringing the light, beauty and truth of the ideal
super-world from which he came into the earth life — he tried to find it there
wherever he could, he tried to infuse it wherever he missed it. The mental, the
vital, the physical cannot be left out of the whole he saw in order to yield
place only to the ethereal and impalpable. As he heard the skylark and felt the
subtle essence of light and beauty in its song, he felt too the call of the
same essence of light and beauty elsewhere and it is the things behind which he
felt it that he compares to the hymn of the skylark — the essence of ideal
light and beauty behind things mental, the poet and his hymns, behind things
vital, the soul of romantic love, behind things physical, the light of the
glow-worm, the passionate intensity of the perfume of the rose. I cannot see an
ordinary glow-worm in the lines of Shelley’s stanza — it is a light from beyond
finding expression in that glimmer and illumining the dell of dew and the
secrecy of flowers and grass that is there. This illumination of the earthly
mind, vital, physical with his super-world light is a main part of Shelley;
excise that and the whole of Shelley is not there, there is only the
ineffectual angel beating his wings in the void; excise it from the Skylark
Page
- 528
and the true whole of the Skylark is no longer there.
8.11.1934
DRAMATIC GENIUS OF ROMANTIC POETS
I don’t believe Keats had any dramatic genius in him. None of these
[romantic] poets had. Shelley’s Cenci is a remarkable feat of dramatic
construction and poetic imagination but it has no organic life like the work of
the Elizabethans, or the Greeks or like such dramas as the Cid or
Racine’s
tragedies.
7.2.1935
BLAKE
1
Blake stands out
among the mystic poets of Europe. His occasional
obscurity, — he is more often in his best poems lucid and crystal clear, — is
due to his writing of things that are not familiar to the physical mind and
writing them with fidelity instead of accommodating them to the latter…. In
reading such writing the inner being has to feel first, then only the mind can
catch what is behind.
2
I did not mean that he never altered — I don’t know about that. I meant
he did not let his mind disfigure what came by trying to make it intellectual.
He transcribed what he saw and heard.
BLAKE AND MALLARME
Blake is Europe’s greatest mystic poet and Mallarmé
turned the whole current of French poetry (one might almost say, of all
modernist poetry) into a channel of which his poems were an opening.
Page
- 529
MALLARME
1
The French language was too
clear and limited to express mystic truth, so he had to wrestle with it and
turn it this way and that to arrive at a mystic speech. Also he refused to be
satisfied with anything that was a merely intellectual or even at all
intellectual rendering of his vision. That is why the surface understanding
finds it difficult to follow him. But he is so great that it has laboured to
follow him all the same.
2
[Re unintelligibility of Mallarmé's. works:] Then why did they have so
much influence on the finest French writers and why is modernist poetry trying
to burrow into the subliminal in order to catch something even one quarter as
fine as his language, images and mystic suggestions?
3
His doctrines are perfectly tenable and intelligible. It is true that the
finest things in art and poetry are appreciated only by the few and he chose
therefore not to sacrifice the truth of his mystic (impressionist, symbolist)
expression in order to be easily understood by the multitude…. Not only
that—his will to arrive at a true and deep, instead of a superficial and
intellectual language. I gave two reasons for Mallarme’s unusual style and not
this one of the limitedness of the French language only…. 60 poems, if they
have beauty, are as good as 600. It is not the mass of the poet’s work that
determines his greatness. Gray and Catullus wrote little; we have only seven plays
of Sophocles and seven of Aeschylus (though they wrote more), but these seven
put them still in the front rank of poets.
4
It1 is one of the finest sonnets I have
ever read. Magnificent line,
1
Le Cygne by Mallarmé.
Page – 530
by the way, "Le
transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas fui!" This idea of the
denied flights (imprisoned powers) of the soul that have frozen into a glacier
seems to me as powerful as it is violent. Of course in French such expressions were quite new — in some
other languages they were already possible. You will find lots of kindred
things in the most modern poetry which specialises in violent revelatory (or
at least would-be revelatory) j images. You disapprove?
Well one may do so,—classical taste does; but I find myself obliged here to
admire.
I
do know what you mean by emotion. If you mean the surface vital joy and grief
of outer life, these poems of Mallarmé do not contain it. But if emotion can
include also the deeper spiritual or inner feeling which does not weep or
shout, then they are here in these two sonnets.1 The swan is to my
understanding not merely the poet who has not sung in the higher spaces of the
consciousness, which is already a fine idea, but the soul that has not risen
there and found its higher expression, the poet, if Mallarmé thought of that
specially, being only a signal instance of this spiritual frustration. There
can be no more powerful, moving and formidable expression of this spiritual
frustration, this chilled and sterile greatness than the image of the frozen
lake and the imprisoned swan as developed by Mallarmé.
I
do not say that the spiritual or occult cannot be given an ‘ easier expression
or that if one can arrive at that without minimising the inner significance,
it is not perhaps the greatest achievement. But there is room for more than one
kind of spiritual or mystic poetry. One has to avoid mere mistiness or vagueness,
one has to be true, vivid, profound in one’s images; but, that given, I am free
to write either as in Nirvana* or Transformation,* giving a clear
mental indication or I can suppress the mental indication and give the image
only with the content suggested in the language — but not expressed so that
even those can superficially understand who are unable to read behind the
mental idea — that is what I have done in The Bird of Fire* It seems to
me that both methods are legitimate.
¹ Le Cygne and Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poë by Mallarmé.
·
"Poems
by Sri Aurobindo. See Collected Poems (Centenary Edition, 1972),
Page
- 531
If these two1
magnificent sonnets… are not inspired then there is no such thing as
inspiration. It is rubbish to say of a man who refused to limit himself by
intellectual expression, that he was an intellectual artist. Symbolism,
impressionism go beyond intellect to the pure sight and Mallarmé was the
creator of symbolism.
YEATS AND
A.E.
Yes, simplicity is always a
sound basis for poetic style. Even if one has to be complex, subtle or ornate
by necessity of the inspiration, the basic habit of simplicity gives a greater
note of genuineness and power to it.
I
do not think I have been unduly enthusiastic over Yeats, but one must recognise
his great artistry in language and verse in which he is far superior to A.E.
—just as A.E. as a man and a seer was far superior to Yeats. Yeats never got
beyond a beautiful mid-world of the vital antariksa, he has not
penetrated beyond to spiritual-mental heights as A.E. did. But all the same,
when one speaks of poetry, it is the poetical element to which one must give
the most importance. What Yeats expressed, he expressed with great poetical
beauty, perfection and power and he has, besides, a creative imagination. A.E.
had an unequal profundity of vision and power and range in the spiritual and
psychic field. A.E.’s thought and way of seeing and saying things is much more
sympathetic to me than Yeats’ who only touches a brilliant floating skirt-edge
of the truth of things — but I cannot allow that to influence me when I have to
judge of the poetic side of their respective achievements…. The depths of
A.E. are greater than those of Yeats, assuredly. His suggestiveness must therefore
be profounder. In this poem2 which you have translated very
beautifully, his power of expression, always penetrating, simple and direct, is
at its best and his best can be miraculously perfect.
1 Le
Cygne and Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poë by Mallarmé.
² Sybyl by A.E.
Page – 532
Of course when you are writing poems or composing you are in
contact with your inner being, that is why you feel so different then. The
whole art of Yoga is to get that contact and to get from it into the inner
being itself, for so one can enter directly into and remain in all that is
great and luminous and beautiful. Then one can try to establish them in this
troublesome and defective outer shell of oneself and in the outer world also.
August, 1934
YEATS AND THE OCCULT
1
It is certainly a very beautiful passage1 and has obviously a
mystic significance; but I don’t know whether we can put into it such
1
Dectora:
No. Take this
sword
2
And cut the rope,
for I go on with Forgael….
The sword is in the rope —
The rope’s in two — it falls into the sea,
It whirls into the foam. 0 ancient worm,
Dragon that loved the world and held us to it,
You are broken, you are broken. The world drifts away,
And I am left alone with my beloved,
Who cannot put me from his sight for ever.
We are alone for ever, and I laugh,
Forgael, because you cannot put me from you.
The mist has covered the heavens, and you and I
Shall be alone for ever. We two — this crown —
I half remember. It has been in my dreams.
Bend lower, 0 king, that I may crown you with it.
0 flower of the branch, 0 bird among the leaves,
0 silver fish that my two hands have taken
Out of the running stream, 0 morning star,
Trembling in the blue heavens like a white fawn
Upon the misty border of the wood,
Bend lower, that I may cover you with my hair,
For we will gaze upon this world no longer.
Forgael
(gathering Dectora’s hair about him):
Beloved, having dragged the net about us,
And knitted mesh to mesh, we grow
immortal;
And that old harp awakens of itself
To cry aloud to the grey birds, and dreams,
That have had dreams for father, live in us.
—
Yeats,
The Shadowy Waters.
Page
- 533
precise meaning as you suggest,
Yeats’ contact, unlike A. E.’s, is not so much with the sheer spiritual Truth
as with the hidden intermediate regions, from the faery worlds to certain
worlds of larger mind and life. What he has seen there, he is able to clothe
rather than embody in strangely beautiful and suggestive forms, dreams and
symbols. I have read some of his poems which touch these behind-worlds with as
much actuality as an ordinary poet would achieve in dealing with physical life,
— this is not surprising in a Celtic poet, for the race has the key to the
occult worlds or some of them at least, — but this strange force of suggestive
mystic life is not accompanied by a mental precision which would enable us to
say, it is this or that his figures symbolise. If we could say it, it might
take away something of that glowing air in which his symbols stand out with
such a strange unphysical reality. The perception, feeling, sight of Yeats in
this kind of poetry are remarkable, but his mental conception often veils
itself in a shimmering light — it has then shining vistas but no strong
contours.
1.9.1932
2
The perfection here of Yeats’ poetic expression of things occult is due
to this that at no point has the mere intellectual or thinking mind interfered
— it is a piece of pure vision, a direct sense, almost sensation of the
occult, a light not of earth flowing through without anything to stop it or to
change it into a product of the terrestrial mind. When one writes from pure
occult vision there is this perfection and direct sense though it may be of
different kinds, for the occult world of one is not that of another. But when
there is the intervention of the intellectual mind in a poem this intervention
may produce good lines of another power, but will not coincide in tone with
what is before them or after — there is an alternation of the subtler occult
and the heavier intellectual notes and the purity of vision becomes blurred by
the intrusion of the earth-mind into a seeing which is beyond our earth-nature.
But
these observations are valid only if the object is, as in Yeats’ lines, to
bring out a veridical and flawless transcript of
Page – 534
the vision and atmosphere of
faeryland. If the object is rather to create symbol-links between the seen and
the unseen and convey the significance of the mediating figures, there is no
obligation to avoid the aid of the intellectualising note. Only, a harmony
and fusion has to be effected between the two elements, the light and beauty of
the beyond and the less remote power and interpretative force of the
intellectual thought-links. Yeats does that too, very often, but he does it by
bathing his thought also in the faery light; in the lines quoted1
however, he does not do that, but leaves the images of the other world
shimmering in their own native hue of mystery. There is not the same beauty and
intense atmosphere when a poem is made up of alternating notes. The finest
lines of these poems are those in which the other-light breaks out most fully —
but there are others also which are very fine too in their quality and
execution.
D. H.
LAWRENCE
1
I have not read anything of
Lawrence,
but I have recently seen indications about him from many quarters; the
impression given was that of a man of gifts who failed for want of vital
balance like so many others. The prose you have turned into verse — very well,
as usual — has certainly quality, though there is not enough to form a definite
judgment. A seeker who missed the issue, I should imagine — misled by the
vitalistic stress to which the mind of today is a very harassed captive.
2
Lawrence had the psychic push
inside towards the Unknown and Beyond at the same time as a push towards the
vital life which came in its way. He was trying to find his way between the two and mixed them up
together till at the end he got his mental
liberation from the tangle though not yet any clear
1
From The Stolen Child and The
Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland.
Page – 535
knowledge of the way — for that,
I suppose, he will have to be born nearer the East or in any case in
surroundings which will enable him to get at the Light.
9.7.1936
D. H. LAWRENCE
AND MODERN POETRY
1
I suppose Lawrence
was a Yogi who had missed his way and come into a European, body to work out
his difficulties. "To lapse back into darkness and unknowing" sounds
like the, Christian mystic’s passage into the "night of God", but I
think Lawrence thought of a new efflorescence from the subconscient while the
mystic’s "night of God" was a stage between ordinary consciousness
and the Superconscient Light.
The passage you
have quoted certainly shows that Lawrence
had an idea of the new spiritual birth. that he has written there could be a
very accurate indication of the process of the change, the putting away of the
old mind, vital, physical consciousness and the emergence of a new
consciousness from the now invisible Within, not an illusory periphery like the
present mental, vital, physical ignorance but a truth-becoming from the true
being within us. He speaks of the transition as a darkness created by the
rejection of the outer mental light, a darkness intervening before the true
light from the Invisible can come. Certain Christian mystics have said the same
thing and the Upanishad also speaks of the luminous Being beyond the darkness.
But in India the rejection of the mental light, the vital stir, the physical
hard narrow concreteness leads more often not to a darkness but to a wide
emptiness and silence which begins afterwards to fill with the light of a
deeper, greater, truer consciousness, a consciousness full of peace, harmony,
joy and freedom. I think Lawrence
was held back from realising because he was seeking for the new birth in
the subconscient vital and taking that for the Invisible Within — he
mistook Life for Spirit, whereas Life can only be an expression of the Spirit.
That too perhaps was the
Page – 536
reason for his preoccupation
with a vain and baffled sexuality.
His appreciation of the Ajanta paintings must have
been due to the same drive that made him seek for a new poetry as well as a new
truth from within. He wanted to get rid of the outward forms that for him hide
the Invisible and arrive at something that would express with bare simplicity
and directness some reality within. It is what made people begin to prefer the
primitives to the developed art of the Renaissance. That is why he depreciates Botticelli
as not giving the real thing, but only an outward grace and beauty which he
considers vulgar in comparison with the less formal art of old that was
satisfied with bringing out the pure emotion from within and nothing else. It
is the same thing which makes him want a stark bare rocky directness for modern
poetry.
To
continue about Lawrence’s poetry
from where I stopped. The idea is to get rid of all over-expression, of
language for the sake of language, or form for the sake of form, even of
indulgence of poetic emotion for the sake of the emotion, because all that
veils the thing in itself, dresses it up, prevents it from coming out in the
seizing nudity of its truth, the power of its intrinsic appeal. There is a sort
of mysticism here that wants to express the inexpressible, the concealed, the
invisible. Reduce expression to its barest bareness and you get nearer the
inexpressible; suppress as much of the form as may be and you get nearer that
behind, which is invisible. It is the same impulse that pervaded recent
endeavours in Art. Form hides, not expresses the reality; let us suppress the
concealing form and express the reality by its appropriate geometrical
figures—and you have cubism. Or since that is too much, suppress exactitude of
form and replace it by more significant forms that indicate rather than conceal
the truth — so you have "abstract" paintings. Or, what is within
reveals itself in dreams, not in waking phenomena, let us have in poetry or
painting the figures, visions, sequences, designs of Dream — and you have
surrealist art and poetry. The idea of Lawrence
is akin: let us get rid of rhyme, metre, artifices which please us for their
own sake and draw us away from the thing in itself, the real behind the form.
So suppressing these things let us have something bare, rocky, primally
expressive. There is
Page – 537
nothing to find fault with in
the theory provided it does lead to a new creation which expresses the inner
truth in things better and more vividly and directly than with its rhyme and
metre the old poetry, now condemned as artificial and rhetorical, succeeded in
expressing it. But the results do not come up to expectation. Take the four
lines of Lawrence1:
in what do they differ from the old poetry except in having a less sure rhythmical
movement, a less seizing perfection of language? It is a fine image and Keats
or Thompson would have made out of it something unforgettable. But after
reading these lines one has a difficulty in recalling any clear outline of
image, any seizing expression, any rhythmic cadence that goes on reverberating
within and preserves the vision forever. What the modernist metreless verse
does is to catch up the movements of prose and try to fit them into varying
lengths and variously arranged lengths of verse. Sometimes something which has
its own beauty or power is done — though nothing better or even equal to the
best that was done before, but for the most there is either an easy or a
strained ineffectiveness. No footsteps hitting the earth? Footsteps on earth
can be a walk, can be prose; the beats of poetry can, on the contrary, be a
beat of wings. As for the bird image, well, there is more lapsing than flying
in this movement. But where is the bareness, the rocky directness — where is
the something more real than any play of outer form can give? The attempt at
colour, image, expression is just the same as in the old poetry — whatever is
new and deep comes from Lawrence’s
peculiar vision, but could have been more powerfully expressed in a closer-knit
language and metre.
Of course, it does not
follow that new and free forms are not to be attempted or that they cannot
succeed at all. But if they succeed it will be by bringing the fundamental
quality, power, movement of the old poetry — which is the eternal quality of
all poetry — into new metrical or rhythmical discoveries and new secrets of
poetic expression. It cannot be done by reducing these
1 Just a few of the roses gathered by the Isar
Are fallen, and
their blood-red petals on the cloth
Float like boats
on a river, waiting
For a fairy
wind to wake them from their sloth,
Page – 538
to skeletonic
bareness or suppressing them by subdual and dilution in a vain attempt to
unite the free looseness of prose with the gathered and intent paces of poetry.
29.6.1936
2
What I have written about modern poetry is too slight and passing and
general a comment, such as one can hazard in a private letter; but for a
criticism that has to see the light of day something more ample and sufficient
would be necessary. Lawrence’s poetry, whatever one may think of his theory or
technique, has too much importance and significance to be lightly handled and
the modernism of contemporary poetry is a fait accompli One can refuse to recognise or
legitimatise the fait accompli, whether in Abyssinia or in the realms of
literature, but it is too solid to be met with a mere condemnation in
principle,
Apropos, the other day I opened Lawrence’s
Pansies once more at random and found this:
I can’t
stand Willy Wet-leg
Can’t stand
him at any price.
He’s
resigned and when you hit him
He lets you hit him twice.
Well, well, this is the bare, rocky, direct poetry? God help us! This is
the sort of thing to which theories lead even a man of genius.
Page
- 539
D. H, LAWRENCE—HUMAN EGO-CENTRICITY — ATTITUDE TOWARDS HUMAN
DEFECTS
I must read Huxley’s preface1 and glance at some letters before venturing on
any comments — like the reviewers who frisk about, a page here and a page
there, and then write an ample or
¹To the book, The Letters of D. H.
Lawrence, edited by Aldous Huxley.
Page
- 539
devastating review. Anyhow it
seems to me Lawrence must have been
a difficult man to live with, even for him it must have been difficult to live
with himself. His photograph confirms that view. But a man at war with himself
can write excellent poetry -..if he is a poet; often better poetry than
another, just as Shakespeare wrote his best tragedies when he was in a state of
chaotic upheaval; at least so his interpreters say. But one needs a higher and
more calm and poised inspiration to write poems of harmony and divine balance
than any Lawrence ever had. I stick
to my idea of the evil influence of theories on a man of genius. If he had been
contented to write things of beauty instead of bare rookies and dry deserts, he
might have done splendidly and ranked among the great poets.
All
great personalities have a strong ego of one kind or another — for that matter
it does not need to be a big personality to be ego-centred; ego-centricity is
the very nature of life in the Ignorance, — even the sattwic man, the
philanthropist, the altruist live for and round their ego. Society imposes an
effort to restrain and when one cannot restrain at least to disguise it; morality
enjoins on us to control, enlarge, refine or sublimate it so that it shall be
able to exceed itself or use itself in the service of things bigger than its
own primary egoism. But none of these things enables one to escape from it. It
is only by finding something deep within or above ourselves and making laya
(dissolution) of the ego in that that it is possible. It is what Lawrence
saw and it was his effort to do it that made him "other" than those
who associated with him — but he could not find out the way. It was a strange
mistake to seek it in sexuality; it was also a great mistake to seek it at the
wrong end of the nature.
What
you say about the discovery of the defects of human nature is no doubt true.
Human nature is full of defects and cannot be otherwise, but there are other
elements and possibilities in it which, although never quite unmixed, have to
be seen to get a whole view. But the discovery of the truth about human beings
need not lead to cynicism; it may lead to a calm aloofness and irony which has
nothing disappointed or bitter in it; or it may lead to a large psychic charity
which recognises the truth but makes all allowances and is ready to love and to
help in spite of
Page – 540
all. In the spiritual
consciousness one is blind to nothing, but sees also that which is within
behind these coverings, the divine element not yet released, and is neither
deceived nor repelled and discouraged. That inner greater thing that was in
Lawrence
and which he sought for is in everybody: he may not have found it and his defects
may have prevented its release, but it is there.
I do not know about the lovableness; what you say is partly true, but
lovableness may exist in spite of ego and all kinds of defects and people may
feel it.
4.7.1936
COLERIDGE’S "ANCIENT MARINER"
May
I say a word about the four lines of Coleridge which you criticise? —
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us
He made and loveth all.
The sentimentalism of the "dear God" is obviously extra childlike
and may sound childish even. If it had been written by Coleridge as his own
contribution to thought or his personal feeling described in its native
language it would have ranked him very low. But Coleridge was a great
metaphysician or at any rate an acute and wide-winged thinker, not a
sentimental prattling poet of the third order. Mark that the idea in the lines
is not essentially poor; otherwise expressed it could rank among great thoughts
and stand as the basis of a philosophy and ethics founded on bhakti.
There are one or two lines of the Gita which are based on a similar thought,
though from the Vedantic, not the dualist point of view. But throughout the Ancient
Mariner Coleridge is looking at things from the point of view and the state
of mind of the most simple and childlike personality possible, the Ancient
Mariner who feels and thinks only with the barest ideas and the most elementary
and primitive emotions.
Page
- 541
The lines he writes here record
the feeling which such a mind and heart would draw from what he had gone
through. Are they not then perfectly in place and just in the right tone for
such a purpose? You may say that it lowers the tone of the poem. I don’t know
— the tone of the poem is deliberately intended to be that of an
unsophisticated ballad simplicity and ballad mentality — it is not the ideas
but the extraordinary beauty of rhythm and vividness of vision and fidelity to
a certain mystic childlike key that makes it such a wonderful and perfect poem.
This is of course only a point of view; but it came to me several times as an
answer that could be made to your criticism, so I put it on paper.
BROWNING
My opinion of Browning has been expressed, I think, in The Future
Poetry. I had a fervent passion for him when I was" from seventeen to
eighteen, after a previous penchant
for Tennyson; but like most calf-love both these fancies were of short
duration. While I had it, I must have gone through most of his writings (Fifine
at the Fair and some others excepted) some half a dozen times at least.
There is much stuff of thought in him, seldom of great depth but sometimes
unexpected and subtle, a vast range not so much of character as of dramatic
human moods, and a considerable power and vigour of rough verse and rugged language.
But there is very little of the pure light of poetry in him or of sheer poetic
beauty or charm and magic; he gets the highest or finest inspiration only in a
line or two here and there. His expression is often not only rough and hasty
but inadequate;
in his later
work he becomes tiresome. He
is not one of the greatest poets, but he is a great creator.
5.12.1931
BAUDELAIRE
Baudelaire was never vulgar — he was too refined and perfect
Page
- 542
an artist to be that. He chose
the evil of life as his frequent subject and tried to extract poetic beauty
out of it, as a painter may deal with a subject that to the ordinary eye may be
ugly or repellent and extract artistic beauty from it. But that is not the
only stuff of his poetry.
22.7.1936
GEORGE SANTAYANA
¹It
has a considerable beauty of thought and language in it. It is a great pity
that it is so derivative in form as to sound like an echo. With so much mastery
of language and ease of rhythm it should have been possible to find a form of
his own and an original style. The poetic power and vision are there and he
has done as much with it as could be done with a borrowed technique. If he had
found his own, he might have ranked high as a poet.
MICHAEL MADHUSUDAN
I had once the regret that the line of possibility opened out by Michael
Madhusudan was not carried any further in Bengali poetry; but after all it may
turn out that nothing has been lost by the apparent interruption. Magnificent
as are the power and –a
1
These remarks are apropos of the following poem by George
Santayana:
There we live o’er, amid angelic powers,
Our lives without remorse, as if not ours,
And others’ lives with love, as if our own;
For we behold, from these eternal towers,
The deathless beauty of all winged hours.
And have our being in their truth alone
….and I knew
The
wings of sacred Eros as he flew
And left me to the love of things not seen.
Tis
a sad love, like an eternal prayer,
And knows no keen delight, no faint surcease.
Yet from the seasons hath the earth increase,
And heaven shines as if the gods were there.
Had Dian passed there could no deeper peace
Embalm the purple
stretches of the air.
Page – 543
swing of his
language and rhythm, there was a default of richness and thought-matter, and a
development in which subtlety, fineness and richness of thought and feeling
could learn to find a consummate expression was very much needed. More mastery
of colour, form and design was a necessity as well as more depth and wealth in
the thought-substance — and this has now been achieved and, if added to the ojas,
can fulfil what Madhusudan left only half done.
GREAT PROSE-WRITERS
I stand rather aghast at your summons to stand and deliver the names of
the ten or twelve best prose styles in the world’s literature. I had no names
in mind and I used the incautious phrase only to indicate the high place I
thought Bankim held among the great masters of language. To rank the poets on
different grades of the Hill of poetry is a pastime which may be a little
frivolous and unnecessary, but possible, if not altogether permissible. I would
not venture to try the same game with the prose-writers who are multitudinous
and do not present the same marked and unmistakable differences of level and
power. The prose field is a field, it is not a mountain. It has eminences, but
its high tops are not so high, the drops not so low as in poetical literature.
Then
again there are great writers in prose and great prose-writers and the two are
by no means the same thing. Dickens and Balzac are great novelists, but their
style or their frequent absence of style had better not be described; Scott
attempts a style, but it is neither blameless nor is it his distinguishing
merit. Other novelists have an adequate style and a good one but their prose is
not quoted as a model and they are remembered not for that but as creators. You
speak of Meredith, and if Meredith had always written with as pure a mastery as
he did in Richard Feverel he might have figured as a pre-eminent master
of language, but the creator and the thinker played many tricks on the stylist
in the bulk of his work. I was writing of prose styles and what was in my mind
was those achievements in which language reached its acme of perfection in one
manner or another so that
Page
- 544
whatever the writer touched
became a thing of beauty — no matter what its substance — or a perfect form and
memorable. Bankim seemed to me to have achieved that in hi^ own way as Plato in
his or Cicero or Tacitus in theirs or in French literature,
Voltaire, Flaubert or Anatole" France.
I could name many more, especially in French which is the greatest store-house
of fine prose among the world’s languages — there is no other to match it.
Matthew Arnold once wrote a line that runs something like this:
France great in all great arts, in none supreme,
to which someone very aptly replied, "And what then of the art of
prose-writing? Is it not a great art and what other country can approach France
there ? All prose of other languages seems beside its perfection, lucidity,
measure almost clumsy."
There
are many remarkable prose-writers in English, but that essential or fundamental
perfection which is almost like a second nature to the French writers is not so
common. The great prose-writers in English seem to seize you by the personality
they express in their styles rather than by its perfection as an instrument —
it is true at least of the earliest and I think too of the later writers. Lamb
whom you mention is a signal example of a writer who erected his personality
into a style and lives by that achievement—Pater and Wilde are other examples.
As for Bengali, we have had Bankim and have still
Tagore and Sarat Chatterji. That is sufficient achievement for a single
century.
I have not answered your question — but I have
explained my phrase and I think that is all you can expect from me.
SARAT CHANDRA CHATTERJI
Novels deal with the vital life of men, so necessarily they bring that
atmosphere. Sarat Chandra is highly emotional writer with a great power of
presenting the feelings and movements of the human vital.
13.3.1936
Page
- 545
PLATO
Even in a good translation1 the poetry ought to come out to some extent. Plato was a
great writer as well as a philosopher — no more perfect prose has been written
by any man — in some of his books his prose carries in it the qualities of
poetry and his thought has poetic vision. That is what I meant when I said it
was poetry.
3.1.1937
PLOTINUS
Yes, Plotinus was not a mere philosopher — his philosophy was founded on
Yogic experience and realisation.
11.10.1933
AUGUSTUS CAESAR AND LEONARDO DA VINCI
Augustus Caesar
organised the life of the Roman Empire and it was this
that made the framework of the first transmission of the Graeco-Roman
civilisation to Europe — he came for that work and the
writings of Virgil and Horace and others helped greatly towards the success of
his mission. After the interlude of Middle Ages, this civilisation was reborn
in a new mould in what is called the .Renaissance, not in its life-aspects but
in its intellectual aspects. It was therefore a supreme intellectual, Leonardo da
Vinci, who took up again the work and summarised in himself the seeds of modern
Europe.
29.7.1937
INTELLECTUAL CAPACITY OF MYSTICS2
There have been any
number of spiritual men and mystics who
1 Of Plato’s
Banquet.
2 These remarks are apropos of a
statement of a famous scientist that mystics and spiritual men the world over
have in general been always men of very average intelligence, a handful of rare
instances excepted.
Page
- 546
have had a great and fine intellectual capacity or were endowed with a
great administrative and organising ability implying a keen knowledge of men
and much expenditure of brain-power. With a little looking up of the records of
the past I think one could collect some hundreds of names which would not
include of course the still greater number not recorded in history or the
transmitted memory of the past.
THE MYSTIC AND THE INTELLECTUAL—BERNARD SHAW
1
A mystic is currently supposed to be one who has mystic experience, and
a mystic philosopher is one who has such experience and has formed a view of
life in harmony with his experience. Merely to have metaphysical notions about
the Infinite and Godhead and underlying or overshadowing forces does not make
a man a mystic. One would never think of applying such a term to Spinoza, Kant or
Hegel, even Plato does not fit into the term, though Pythagoras has a good
claim to it. Hegel and other transcendental or idealistic philosophers were
great intellects, not mystics. Shaw is a keen and forceful intellect (I cannot
call him a great thinker1) but his ideas about the Life-Force
certainly do not make him a mystic. And do you really call that a constructive
vision of life —a vague notion about a Life-Force pushing towards an
evolutionary manifestation and a brilliant jeu
d’esprit about long life and people born out of eggs and certain extraordinary
operations of mind and body in these semi-immortals who seem to have been very
much at a loss what to do with their immortality ? I do not deny that there are
keen and brilliant ideas and views everywhere (that is Shaw’s wealthy
stock-in-trade), even an occasional profound perception; but that does not make
1 An admirable many-sided intelligence and an acute
critic discussing penetratingly or discoursing acutely or constructively on
many problems or presenting with force or point many aspects of life, he is not
a creator or disseminator of the great illuminating ideas that leave their mark
on the centuries.
Page
- 547
a man either a mystic or a
philosopher or a great thought-creator. Shaw has a sufficiently high place in
his own kind — why try to make him out more than he is? Shakespeare is a great
poet and dramatist, but to try to make him out a great philosopher also would
not increase but rather imperil his high repute.
2
I do not admit
that Shaw has a reasoned theory about basic realities; the only realities he or
his characters have argued about are the things of the surface; even his
Life-Force is only a thing of the surface or, at the most, just under the
surface.
I am not thrilled by the speech ;1 it is a
creation of the intellect, eloquent and on the surface.
16.5.1932
ESTIMATE OF BERNARD
SHAW
I do not think Harris’ attack on Shaw as you describe it can be taken
very seriously any more than can Wells’ jest about his pronunciation of English
being the sole astonishing thing about him. Wells, Chesterton, Shaw and others joust
at each other like the kabiwālās of old Calcutta,
though with more refined weapons, and "you cannot take their humorous
sparrings as considered appreciations; if you do, you turn exquisite jests into
solemn nonsense. Mark that their method in these sparrings, the turn of phrase,
the style of their wit is borrowed from Shaw himself with personal
modifications; for this kind of humour, light as air and sharp as a
razor-blade, epigrammatic, paradoxical, often flavoured with burlesque
seriousness and urbane hyperbole, good-humoured and cutting at once, is not
English in origin; it was brought in by two Irishmen, Shaw and Wilde. Harris’
stroke about the Rodin bust and Wells’ sally are entirely in the Shavian turn
and manner, they are showing their cleverness by spiking their Guru in swordsmanship
with his own rapier. Harris’ attack on Shaw’s literary reputation may have been
1
Caesar’s
speech about the Sphinx in Shaw’s play,
Caesar and Cleopatra.
Page – 548
serious,
there was a sombre and violent brutality about him which made it possible; but
his main motive was to prolong his own notoriety by a clever and vigorous
assault on the mammoth of the hour. Shaw himself supplied materials for his
critic, knowing well what he would write, and edited1 this damaging
assault on his own fame, a typical Irish act at once of chivalry, shrewd
calculation of effect and whimsical humour. I should not think Harris had much
understanding of Shaw the man as apart from the writer; the Anglo-Saxon is not
usually capable of understanding either Irish character or Irish humour, it is
so different from his own, And Shaw is Irish through and through; there is
nothing English about him except the language he writes and even that he has
changed into the Irish ease, flow, edge and clarity — though not bringing into it,
as Wilde did, Irish poetry and colour.
Shaw’s
seriousness and his humour, real seriousness and mock seriousness, run into
each other in a baffling inextricable mélange, thoroughly Irish in its
character, — for it is the native Irish turn to speak lightly when in dead
earnest and to utter the most extravagant jests with a profound air of
seriousness, — and it so puzzled the British public that they could not for a
long time make up their mind how to take him. At first they took him for a Jester
dancing with cap and bells, then for a new kind of mocking Hebrew Prophet or
Puritan reformer! Needless to say, both judgments were entirely out of focus.
The Irishman is, on one side of him, the vital side, a passioné, imaginative
and romantic, intensely emotional, violently impulsive, easily inspired to
poetry or rhetoric, moved by indignation and suffering to a mixture of
aggressive militancy, wistful dreaming and sardonic extravagant humour; on the
other side, he is keen in intellect, positive, downright, hating all loose
foggy sentimentalism and solemn pretence and prone, in order to avoid the
appearance of them in himself, to cover himself with a jest at every step; it
is at once his mask and his defence. At bottom he has the possibility in him of
a modern Curtius leaping into the yawning pit for a cause, a Utopist or a Don
Quixote,— according to occasions,
1 F. Harris’ biography of Shaw, edited
and published by Shaw himself after Harris’ death.
Page – 549
a fighter for dreams, an
idealistic pugilist, a knight-errant, a pugnacious rebel or a brilliant
sharp-minded realist or a reckless but often shrewd and successful adventurer.
Shaw has all that in him, but with it a cool intellectual clearness, also Irish,
which dominates it all and tones it down, subdues it into measure and balance,
gives an even harmonising colour. There is as a result a brilliant tempered
edge of flame, lambent, lighting up what it attacks and destroys, and
destroying it by the light it throws upon it, not fiercely but trenchantly — though
with a trenchant playfulness — aggressive and corrosive. An ostentation of humour
and parade covers up the attack and puts the opponent off his defence. That is
why the English mind never understood Shaw and yet allowed itself to be
captured by him, and its old established ideas, "moral" positions,
impenetrable armour of commercialised Puritanism and self-righteous Victorian
assurance to be ravaged and burned out of existence by Shaw and his allies.
Anyone who knew Victorian England and sees the difference now cannot but be
struck by it, and Shaw’s part in it, at least in preparing and making it
possible, is undeniable. That is why I call him devastating, not in any
ostentatiously catastrophic sense, for there is a quietly trenchant type of
devastatingness, because he has helped to lay low all these things with his
scythe of sarcastic mockery and lightly, humorously penetrating seriousness —
effective, as you call it, but too deadly in its effects to be called merely
effective.
That
is Shaw as I have seen him and I don’t believe there is anything seriously
wrong in my estimate. I don’t think we can complain of his seriousness about
Pacifism, Socialism and the rest of it; it was simply the form in which he put
his dream, the dream he needed to fight for, needed by his Irish nature. Shaw’s
bugbear was unreason and disorder, his dream was a humanity delivered from
vital illusions and deceptions, organising the life-force in obedience to
reason, casting out waste and folly as much as possible. It is not likely to
happen in the way he hoped; reason has its own illusions and, though he strove
against imprisonment in his own rationalistic ideals, trying to escape from
them by the issue of his mocking critical humour, he could not help being their
prisoner. As for his pose of self-praise,
Page – 550
no doubt he valued himself, —
the public fighter like the man of action needs to do so in order to act or to
fight. Most, though not all, try to veil it under an affectation of modesty;
Shaw, on the contrary, took the course of raising it to a humorous pitch of
burlesque and extravagance. It was at once part of his strategy in commanding
attention and a means of mocking at himself — I was not speaking of analytical
self-mockery, but of the whimsical Irish kind — so as to keep himself straight
and at the same time mocking his audience. It is a peculiarly Irish kind of humour
to say extravagant things with a calm convinced tone as if announcing a
perfectly serious proposition — the Irish exaggeration of the humour called by
the French pince-sans-rire; his hyperboles of self-praise actually reek
with this humorous savour. If his extravagant comparison of himself with
Shakespeare had to be taken in dull earnest without any smile in it, he would
be either a witless ass or a giant of humourless arrogance, — and Bernard, Shaw
could be neither.
As
to his position in literature, I have given my opinion; but more precisely, I
imagine he will take some place but not a very large place, once the drums have
ceased beating and the fighting is over. He has given too much to the battles
of the hour perhaps to claim a large share of the future. I suppose some of his
plays will survive for their wit and humour and cleverness more than for any
higher dramatic quality, like those of three other Irishmen: Goldsmith,
Sheridan, Wilde. His prefaces may be
saved by their style and force, but it is not sure. At any rate, as a
personality he is not likely to be forgotten, even if his writings fade. To
compare him with Anatole France
is futile — they were minds too different and moving in too different domains
for comparison to be possible.
WELLS
— CHESTERTON — SHAW
I refuse to accept the men you name, with the exception of Russell, as
serious thinkers. Wells is a super-journalist, super-pamphleteer and
story-teller. I imagine that within a generation of his death his speculations
will cease to be read or remembered;
Page
- 551
his stories may endure longer.
Chesterton is a brilliant essayist who has written verse too of an appreciable
brilliance and managed some good stories. Unlike Wells he has some gift of
style and he has caught the trick of wit and constant paradox which gives a
fictitious semblance of enhanced value to his ideas. These are men of a high
and wide contemporary fame but we are not sure how long their work will last,
though we may venture to predict some durability for a good part of
Chesterton’s poetry and Wells’ short stories. Shaw has a better chance of
lasting, but there is no certain certitude, because he has no pre-eminent
height or greatness in his constructive powers. He has constructed nothing
supreme, but he has criticised most things. In page after page he shows the
dissolvent critical mind and it is a dissolvent of great power; beyond that he
has popularised the ideas of Fabian socialism and other constructive viewpoints
caught up by him from the surrounding atmosphere, but with temperamental
qualifications and variations, for the inordinately critical character of his
mind prevents him from entirely agreeing with anybody. Criticism is also a
great power and there are some mainly critical minds that have become
immortals, Voltaire for instance; Shaw on his own level may survive — only, his
thinking is more of a personal type and not classic and typical of a fundamental
current of the human intellect like Voltaire’s. His personality may help him
as Johnson was helped by his personality to live.
Shaw
is not really a dramatist; I don’t think he ever wrote anything in the manner
of the true drama; Candida is perhaps the nearest he came to one. He is
a first-class play-writer, — a brilliant conversationalist in stage dialogue
and a manufacturer of speaking intellectualised puppets made to develop and
represent by their talk and carefully wire-pulled movements his ideas about
men, life and things. He gives his characters minds of various quality and they
are expressing their minds all the time; sometimes he paints on them some
striking vital colour, but with a few exceptions they are not living beings
like those of the great or even of the lesser dramatists. There are, however,
exceptions, such as the three characters in Candida, and as a supremely
clever playwright with a strong intellectual force and some genius he
Page – 552
may very well survive. He has a very striking and cogent and
incisive style admirably fitted for its work, and he sometimes tries his hand
at eloquence, but "heights of passionate eloquence" is a very unreal
phrase. I never found that in Shaw anywhere; whatever mental ardours he may
have, his mind as a whole is too cool, balanced, incisive to let itself go in
that manner.
SHAW AS A CREATIVE MIND
I find in Shavianism
a delightful note and am thankful to Shaw for being so refreshingly different
from other men that to read even an ordinary interview with him in a newspaper
is an intellectual pleasure. As for his being one of the most original personalities
of the age, there can be no doubt of that. All that I deny to him is a great
creative mind — but his critical force, especially in certain fields, and his
discrimination of values in life are very great and in those fields he can in a
sense be called creative and have remarkable scope and envergure He has
certainly created a singularly effective and living form for his criticism of
life. It is not strictly drama, but it is something original and strong and
altogether of its own kind — so, up to that limit, I qualify my statement that
Shaw was not pre-eminent as a creator.
The
tide may turn against him after being so strongly for him under compulsion from
his own power and will, but nothing can alter the fact that he was one of the
keenest and most powerful minds of the age with an originality in his way of
looking at things which no one else in his time could equal. He is too
penetrating and sincere a mind to be a stiff partisan or tied to some
intellectual dogma or other. When he sees something which qualifies the
"ism" — even that on whose side he is standing, he says so; that need
not weaken the ideal behind, — on the contrary it is likely to make it more
plastic and practicable.
BERTRAND
RUSSELL
1
About Russell — I have never disputed
his abilities or his character;
Page – 553
I am concerned
only with his opinions and there too only with those opinions which touch upon
my own province — that of spiritual Truth. In all religions, the most narrow
and stupid even, and in all non-religions also there are great minds, great
men, fine characters. I know little about Russell, but I never dreamed of
disputing the greatness of Lenin, for instance, merely because he was an
atheist — nobody would, unless he were an imbecile. But the greatness of Lenin
does not debar me from refusing assent to the credal dogmas of Bolshevism, and
the beauty of character of an atheist does not prove that spirituality is a lie
of the imagination and that there is no Divine. I might add that if you can
find the utterances of famous Yogis childish when they talk about marriage or
on other mental matters, I cannot be blamed for finding the ideas of Russell
about spiritual experience, of which he knows nothing, very much wanting in
light and substance. You have not named the Yogis in question, and till you do,
I am afraid I shall cherish a suspicion about either the height or the breadth
of their spiritual experience.
2
I have already said that I have no objection to anybody admiring Russell
or Dickinson or any other atheist for that matter. Genius or fine qualities are
always admirable in whomsoever they are found; all that has nothing to do with
the turn of a man’s opinions or the truth or untruth of atheism or^ of
spiritual experience. As for Russell’s booklet Why I am not a Christian, which
you sent me, I seized a few moments to run through it. It is just as I had
expected it to be. I have no doubt that Russell is a competent philosophic
thinker, but this might have been written by an ordinary propagandist
tract-writer. The arguments of the ordinary Christian apologists to prove the
existence of God are futile drivel and Russell answering them has descended to
their level. He was appealing to the mass-mind I suppose, but that is enough to
deprive the book of any real thought-value. And yet the questions raised are
interesting enough if treated with true philosophic insight or from the
standpoint of true spiritual experience. It is queer that the European mind,
capable enough
Page
- 554
in other directions, should sink
to such utter puerility when it begins to deal with religion or spiritual
experience.
COMMENT ON A STATEMENT OF B. RUSSELL1
I have not forgotten Russell but I have neglected him, first, for want of
time; second, because for the moment I have mislaid your letter; third, because
of lack of understanding on my part. What is the meaning of "taking
interest in external things for their own sakes”? And what is an introvert? Both
these problems baffle me.
The word "introvert" has come into existence only recently and
sounds like a companion of "pervert". Literally, it means one who is
turned inwards. The Upanishad speaks of the doors of the senses that are turned
outwards absorbing man in external things ("for their own sakes", I
suppose?) and of the rare man among a million who turns his vision inwards and
sees the self. Is that man an introvert? And is Russell’s ideal man
"interested in externals for their own sakes" — a Ramaswami the chef
or Joseph the chauffeur, for instance —homo externalis Russellius, an extrovert?
Or is an introvert one who has an inner life stronger than his external one, —
the poet, the musician, the artist? Was Beethoven in his deafness bringing out
music from within him an introvert? Or does it mean one who measures external
things by an inner standard and is interested in them not "for their own
sakes" but for their value to the soul’s self-development, its psychic,
religious, ethical or other self-expression? Are Tolstoy and Gandhi examples of
introverts? Or in another
field —.Goethe? Or does it mean one who cares for external things only as they
touch his own mind or else concern his own ego ? But that I suppose would
include 999,999 men out of every million.
What
are external things? Russell is a mathematician. Are mathematical formulae
external things even though they exist here only in the World-mind and the mind
of Man? If not, is Russell, as mathematician, an introvert? Again, Yajnavalkya
1 "We
are all prone to the malady of the introvert, who, with the manifold spectacle
of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes upon the emptiness
within." B. Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (Alien & Unwin,
London, 1930), p. 160.
Page
- 555
says that one loves the wife not
for the sake of the wife, but for the self’s sake, and so with other objects of
interest or desire — whether the self be the inner self or, the ego. In Yoga it
is the valuing of external things in the terms of the desire of the ego that is
discouraged — their only value is their value in the manifestation of the
Divine. Who desires external things "for their own sakes" and not for
some value to the conscious being? Even Cheloo, the day-labourer, is not
interested in a two-anna piece for its- own sake, but for some vital
satisfaction it can bring him; even with the hoarding miser it is the same — it
is his vital being’s passion for possession that he satisfies and that is
something not external but internal, part of his inner make-up, the unseen
personality that moves inside behind the veil of the
body.
What
then is meant by Russell’s "for their own sakes”? If you enlighten me on
these points, I may still make an effort to comment on his mahāvākya.
More
important is his wonderful phrase about the "emptiness within"; on
that at least I hope to make a comment one day or another.
LOWES DICKINSON
The pre-war and
the post-war Dickinson are indeed a
contrast. This appreciation of human life is not without the force of a
half-truth, but it is just the other half that he misses when he sweeps
idealism out of the field. Man’s Utopias may be the projection of his hopes and
desires, but he has to go on building them on pain of death, decline or collapse.
As for the gospel of pleasure, it has been tried before and always failed —
Life and Nature after a time weary of it and reject it, as if after a surfeit
of cheap sweets. Man has to rush from his pursuit of pleasure, with all its
accompaniment of petrifying shallowness, cynicism, hardness, frayed nerves, ennui,
dissatisfaction and fatigue, to a new idealism or else sink towards a dull or
catastrophic decadence. Even if the Absolute Good were a high spiritual or
ideal chimera, the pursuit of it is rooted in the very make of humanity and it
is one of the
Page – 556
main sources of
the perennial life of the race. And that it is so would seem to indicate that
it is not a chimera — something still beyond man, no doubt, but into which or
towards which he is called by Nature to grow.
ROMAIN ROLLAND
I
have not read Jean Christophe, but Rolland is an idealist who takes
interest in spiritual mysticism — not himself a man of spiritual experience. It
is quite natural that such a man’s writing should produce an effect on an
intellectual man more easily than a religious or spiritual work. p0 was not
religious-minded, so a religious work would not move him because it would be
too far from his own way of thinking and turn of seeing. A spiritual book would
not reach him, for he would not understand or feel the spiritual experience or
knowledge contained in it, they being quite foreign to his then consciousness.
On the other hand, a book by an intellectual idealist with an intellectual turn
towards spirituality would suit his own temperament and could hook and draw his
thoughts that way.
26.10.1935
ANATOLE FRANCE1
Anatole France
is always amusing whether he is ironising about God and Christianity, or about
that rational animal man or Humanity (with a big H) and the follies of his
reason and his conduct. But I presume you never heard of God’s explanation of
his non-interference to Anatole France
when they met in some
¹ This is apropos of a quotation from Anatole
France which D had
sent to Sri Aurobindo saying, "Brotteaux, one of the unabashed scoffers in
Anatole France‘s Les Dieux ont soif, throws this hearty fling
at God in the face of Father Languemare, the pious Priest….
‘Either God would prevent evil if he could, but could
not, or he could but would not, or he neither could nor would, or he both
would and could. If he would but could not, he is ‘ impotent, if he could
but would not, he is perverse, if he neither could nor would he is at
once " impotent and perverse; if he both could and would why on
earth doesn’t he do it, Father?’
"I send this to you as I
immensely enjoyed the joke and am sure you would too, hoping you would have
something to fend it off with."
Page – 557
Heaven of Irony, I suppose, — it
can’t have been in the heaven of Karl Marx, in spite of France’s
conversion before his death. God is reported to have strolled up to him and
said: "I say, Anatole, you know that was a good joke of yours; but there
was a good cause too for my non-interference. Reason came along and told me:
‘Look here, why do you pretend to exist? You know you don’t exist and never
existed or, if you do, you have made such a mess of your creation that we can’t
tolerate you any longer. Once we have got you out of the way all will be right
upon earth, tip-top, A-l: my daughter
Science and I have arranged that between us. Man will raise his noble
brow, the head of creation, dignified, free, equal, fraternal, democratic, depending
upon nothing but himself, with nothing greater than himself anywhere in
existence. There will be no God, no gods, no churches, no priestcraft, no
religion, no kings, no oppression, no poverty, no war or discord anywhere.
Industry will fill the earth with abundance, commerce will spread her golden reconciling
wings everywhere. Universal education will stamp out ignorance and leave no
room for folly or unreason in any human brain; man will become cultured,
disciplined, rational, scientific, well-informed, arriving always at the right
conclusion upon full and sufficient data. The voice of the scientist and the expert
will be loud in the land and guide mankind to the earthly paradise. A
perfected society; health universalised by a developed medical science and a
sound hygiene; everything rationalised; science evolved, infallible,
omnipotent, omniscient; the riddle of existence solved; the Parliament of Man,
the Federation of the world; evolution, of which man, magnificent man, is the
last term, completed in the noble white race, a humanitarian kindness and
uplifting for our backward brown, yellow and black brothers; peace, peace,
peace, reason, order, unity everywhere.’ There was a lot more like that,
Anatole, and I was so much impressed by the beauty of the picture and its
convenience, for I would have nothing to do or to supervise, that I at once
retired from business, — for, you know that I was always of a retiring
disposition and inclined to keep myself behind the veil or in the background at
the best of times. But what is this I hear? — it does not seem to me from
reports that Reason even with the help of
Page – 558
Science has kept her promise.
And if not, why not? Is it because she would not or because she could not? or
is it because she both would not and could not, or because she would and could,
but somehow did not? And I say, Anatole these children of theirs, the State,
Industrialism, Capitalism, Communism and the rest have a queer look — they seem
very much like Titanic monsters. Armed, too, with all the powers of Intellect
and all the weapons and organisation of Science! And it does look as if mankind
were no freer under them than under the Kings and the Churches. What has
happened —or is it possible that Reason is not supreme and infallible,
even that she has made a greater mess of it than I could have done
myself?" Here the report of the conversation ends; I give it for what it
is worth, for I am not acquainted with this God and have to take him on trust
from Anatole France.
1.8.1932
VICTOR HUGO
1
People have different tastes —
some regard Hugo as a childish writer, a rhetorician without depth — others
regard him as a great poet and novelist. One has to give one’s own judgment and
leave others to hold theirs.
26.4.1937
2
It
[Les Misérable] is not one of the
masterpieces of "art", but I regard it as the work of a powerful
genius and certainly one of the great novels. It is certainly not
philosophically or psychologically deep, but it is exceedingly vivid and
powerful.
25.4.1937
3
That is again a matter of opinion. There is the position that plot
Page
- 559
and character-presentation are
sufficient and for the rest a large or great theme — one of the well-recognised
human situations or a picture of life largely dealt with — and no more is
necessary. Most famous English novels of the past are like that. There is
another position that subtle psychology, deep and true presentation (not
merely imaginative or idealistic) of the profounder problems or secrets of
life and nature are needed. Hugo’s characters and situations are thought by
many to be melodramatic or superficial and untrue. His novels, like his dramas,
are "romantic" and the present trend is against the romantic
treatment of life as superficial, childishly over-coloured and false. The
disparagement of what was formerly considered great is common on that ground.
"Faugh!" expresses the feeling.
27.4.1937
ALEXANDER
DUMAS’ HISTORY
Dumas’ "history" is
all slap and dash adventure — amusing rather than solidly interesting. But it
is all the history known to many people in France
— just as many in England
gather their history from Shakespeare’s plays.
2.12.1934
WILLIAM JAMES’
"PSYCHOLOGY"
James’ book1 is certainly a very
interesting one. I read it a long time ago and do not remember it very well
except that it was very interesting and not at all an ordinary book in its
kind, but full of valuable suggestions.
1.7.1933
CONTEMPORARY
DETECTIVE STORIES
The detective
stories of today are much better than those of the
¹ Psychology by William James.
Page – 560
Sherlock Holmes
time. This kind of writing has been taken up by men with imagination and
literary talent who would not have touched it before.
1.10.1935
BEETHOVEN’S
MUSIC
There can be no doubt that
Beethoven’s music was often from another world; so it is quite possible for it
to give the key to an inwardly sensitive hearer or to one who is seeking or
ready for the connection to be made. But I think it is very few who get beyond
being aesthetically moved by a sense of greater things; to lay the hand on the
key and use it is rare.
BHATKHANDE
Yes, I have read
your article on Bhatkhande. Very interesting: the charact4er came home to me as
a sublimation of a type I was very familiar with when in Baroda.
Very amusing his encounters with the Pundits — especially the Socratic way of
self-depreciation heightened almost to the Japanese pitch. His photograph you
sent me shows a keen and powerful face full of genius and character.
February,
1937
Page – 561
THE
END