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The Future Poetry
Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry
Chapter I
The Mantra
IT IS not often that we see published in India literary criticism which is of the first order, at once discerning and suggestive, criticism which forces us both to see and think. A book which recently I have read and more than once reperused with a yet unexhausted pleasure and fruitfulness, Mr. James Cousins’ New Ways in English Literature, is eminently of this kind. It raises thought which goes beyond the strict limits of the author’s subject and suggests the whole question of the future of poetry in the age which is coming upon us, the higher functions open to it — as yet very imperfectly fulfilled, — and the part which English literature on the one side and the Indian mind and temperament on the other are likely to take in determining the new trend. The author is himself a poet, a writer of considerable force in the Irish movement which has given contemporary English literature its two greatest poets, and the book on every page attracts and satisfies by its living force of style, its almost perfect measure, its delicacy of touch, its fineness and depth of observation and insight, its just sympathy and appreciation.
For the purpose for which these essays have been, not indeed written, but put together, the criticism, fine and helpful as it is, suffers from one great fault,
— there is too little of it.
Mr. Cousins is satisfied with giving us the essential, just what is necessary for a trained mind to seize intimately the spirit and
manner and poetic quality of the writers whose work he brings before us. This is done sometimes in such a masterly manner that
even one touch more might well have been a touch in excess. The essay on Emerson is a masterpiece in this kind; it gives
perfectly in a few pages all that should be said about Emerson’s poetry and nothing that need not be said. But some of the essays,
admirable in themselves, are too slight for our need. The book is not indeed intended to be exhaustive in its range. Mr. Cousins
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wisely takes for the most part, — there is one notable exception, — writers with whom he is in close poetical sympathy or for
whom he has a strong appreciation; certain names which have come over to our ears with some flourish of the trumpets of
renown, Thompson, Masefield, Hardy, do not occur at all or only in a passing allusion. But still the book deals among contemporary poets with Tagore, A. E. and Yeats, among recent poets with Stephen Phillips, Meredith, Carpenter, great names
all of them, not to speak of lesser writers. This little book with its 135 short pages is almost too small a pedestal for the figures
it has to support, not, be it understood, for the purposes of the English reader interested in poetry, but for ours in India who
have on this subject a great ignorance and, most of us, a very poorly trained critical intelligence. We need something a little
more ample to enchain our attention and fix in us a permanent interest; a fingerpost by the way is not enough for the Indian
reader, you will have to carry him some miles on the road if you would have him follow it.
But Mr. Cousins has done a great service to the Indian mind by giving it at all a chance to follow this direction with such a
guide to point out the way. The English language and literature is practically the only window the Indian mind, with the narrow
and meagre and yet burdensome education given to it, possesses into the world of European thought and culture; but at least
as possessed at present, it is a painfully small and insufficient opening. English poetry for all but a few of us stops short with
Tennyson and Browning, when it does not stop with Byron and Shelley. A few have heard of some of the recent, fewer of some
of the contemporary poets; their readers are hardly enough to make a number. In this matter of culture this huge peninsula,
once one of the greatest centres of civilisation, has been for long the most provincial of provinces; it has been a patch of tilled
fields round a lawyer’s office and a Government cutcherry, a cross between a little district town and the most rural of villages,
at its largest a dried-up bank far away from the great stream of the world’s living thought and action, visited with no great force
by occasional and belated waves, but for the rest a bare field for
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sluggish activities, the falsest possible education,
a knowledge always twenty-five or fifty years behind the time. The
awakening brought by the opening years of the twentieth century has
chiefly taken the form of a revival of cultural patriotism, highly
necessary for a nation which has a distinctive contribution to make
to the human spirit in its future development, some new and great
thing which it must evolve out of a magnificent past for the opening
splendours of the future; but in order that this may evolve rapidly
and surely, it needs a wide and sound information, a richer stuff to
work upon, a more vital touch with the life and master tendencies of
the world around it. Such books as this will be of invaluable help
in creating what is now deficient.
The helpfulness of this
suggestive work comes more home to me personally because I have
shared to the full the state of mere blank which is the ordinary
condition of the Indian mind with regard to its subject. Such touch
as in the intellectual remoteness of India I have been able to keep
up with the times, had been with contemporary continental rather
than contemporary English literature. With the latter all vital connection came to a dead stop with my departure from England a quarter of a century ago; it
had for its last events the discovery of Meredith as a poet, in his Modern Love, and the perusal of
Christ in Hades, — some years
before its publication, — the latter an unforgettable date. I had long heard, standing aloof in giant ignorance, the great name of
Yeats, but with no more than a fragmentary and mostly indirect acquaintance with some of his work; A. E. only lives for me in
Mr. Cousins’ pages; other poets of the day are still represented in my mind by scattered citations. In the things of culture such
a state of ignorance is certainly an unholy state of sin; but in this immoral and imperfect world even sin has sometimes its
rewards, and I get that now in the joy and light of a new world opening to me all in one view while I stand, Cortez-like, on the
peak of the large impression created for me by Mr. Cousins’ book. For the light we get from a vital and illuminative criticism
from within by another mind can sometimes almost take the place of a direct knowledge.
There disengages itself from these essays not so much a
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special point of view as a distinctive
critical and literary temperament, which may be perhaps not so much the whole mind of
the critic as the response to his subject in a mind naturally in sympathy with it. Mr. Cousins is a little nervous about this in his
preface; he is apprehensive of being labelled as an idealist. The cut and dried distinction between idealism and realism in literature has always seemed to me to be a little arbitrary and unreal, and whatever its value in drama and fiction, it has no legitimate
place in poetry. What we find here is a self-identification with what is best and most characteristic of a new spirit in the age, a
new developing aesthetic temper and outlook, — or should we rather say, inlook? Its mark is a greater (not exclusive) tendency
to the spiritual rather than the merely earthly, to the inward and subjective than the outward and objective, to the life within and
behind than to the life in front, and in its purest, which seems to be its Irish form, a preference of the lyrical to the dramatic and
of the inwardly suggestive to the concrete method of poetical presentation. Every distinctive temperament has naturally the
defect of an insufficient sympathy, often a pronounced and intolerant antipathy towards all that departs from its own motives.
Moreover contemporary criticism is beset with many dangers; there is the charm of new thought and feeling and expression of
tendency which blinds us to the defects and misplaces or misproportions to our view the real merits of the expression itself;
there are powerful cross-currents of immediate attraction and repulsion which carry us from the true track; especially, there is
the inevitable want of perspective which prevents us from getting a right vision of things too near us in time. And if in addition one
is oneself part of a creative movement with powerful tendencies and a pronounced ideal, it becomes difficult to get away from
the standpoint it creates to a larger critical outlook. From these reefs and shallows Mr. Cousins’ sense of measure and justice
of appreciation largely, generally indeed, preserve him, though not, I think, quite invariably. But still it is not a passionless, quite
disinterested criticism which we get or want from this book, but a much more helpful thing, an interpretation of work which
embodies the creative tendencies of the time by one who has
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himself lived in them and helped both to direct and to form.
Mr. Cousins’ positive criticism is almost always fine, just
and inspired by a warm glow of sympathy and understanding tempered by discernment, restraint and measure; whatever the
future critic, using his scales and balance, may have to take away from it, will be, one would imagine, only by way of a slight
alteration of stress here and there. His depreciations, though generally sound enough, are not, I think, invariably as just as his
appreciations. Thus his essay on the work of J. M. Synge, “The Realist on the Stage”, is, in sharp distinction from the rest of
the book, an almost entirely negative and destructive criticism, strong and interesting, but written from the point of view of the
ideals and aims of the Irish literary movement against a principle of work which seemed entirely to depart from them; yet we are
allowed to get some glimpse of a positive side of dramatic power which the critic does not show us, but leaves us rather to guess
at. Mr. Cousins seems to me to take the dramatist’s theory of his own art more seriously than it should be taken; for the creator
can seldom be accepted — there may of course be exceptions, rare instances of clairvoyant self-sight
— as a sound exponent
of his own creative impulse. He is in his central inspiration the instrument of a light and power not his own, and his account
of it is usually vitiated, out of focus, an attempt to explain the workings of this impersonal power by motives which were the
contribution of his own personal effort, but which are often quite subordinate or even accidental side-lights of the lower
brain-mind, not the central moving force.
Mr. Cousins has pointed out clearly enough that art can
never be a copy of life. But it is also true, I think, that that is not the secret object of most realism, whatever it may say
about itself; realism is in fact a sort of nether idealism, or, perhaps more correctly, sometimes an inverse, sometimes a perverse
romanticism which tries to get a revelation of creative truth by an effective force of presentation, by an intensity, often an
exaggeration at the opposite side of the complex phenomenon of life. All art starts from the sensuous and sensible, or takes it
as a continual point of reference or, at the lowest, uses it as a
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symbol and a fount of images; even when it soars into invisible worlds, it is from the earth that it soars; but equally all art worth
the name must go beyond the visible, must reveal, must show us something that is hidden, and in its total effect not reproduce
but create. We may say that the artist creates an ideal world of his own, not necessarily in the sense of ideal perfection, but
a world that exists in the idea, the imagination and vision of the creator. More truly, he throws into significant form a truth
he has seen, which may be truth of hell or truth of heaven or an immediate truth behind things terrestrial or any other, but is
never merely the external truth of earth. By that ideative truth and the power,
the perfection and the beauty of his presentation and utterance of
it his work must be judged.
Some occasional utterances in this book
seem to spring from very pronounced idiosyncrasies of its
distinctive literary temperament or standpoint and cannot always be accepted without
reservation. I do not myself share its rather disparaging attitude towards the dramatic form and motive or its comparative coldness towards the architectural faculty and impulse in poetry. When Mr. Cousins tells us that “its poetry and not its drama,
will prove to be the thing of life” in Shakespeare’s work, I feel that the distinction is not sound all through, that there is a truth
behind it, but it is overstated. Or when still more vivaciously he dismisses Shakespeare the dramatist to “a dusty and reverent
immortality in the libraries” or speaks of the “monstrous net of his life’s work” which but for certain buoys of line and speech
“might sink in the ocean of forgetfulness,” I cannot help feeling that this can only be at most the mood of the hour born of
the effort to get rid of the burden of its past and move more freely towards its future, and not the definitive verdict of the
poetic and aesthetic mind on what has been so long the object of its sincere admiration and a powerful presence and influence.
Perhaps I am wrong, I may be too much influenced by my own settled idiosyncrasies of an aesthetic temperament and being
impregnated with an early cult for the work of the great builders in Sanskrit and Greek, Italian and English poetry. At any rate,
this is true that whatever relation we may keep with the great
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masters of the past, our present business is to go beyond and
not to repeat them, and it must always be the lyrical motive and spirit which find a new secret and begin a new creation; for the
lyrical is the primary poetical motive and spirit and the dramatic and epic must wait for it to open for them their new heaven and
new earth.
I have referred to these points which are only side issues
or occasional touches in Mr. Cousins’ book, because they are germane to the question which it most strongly raises, the future
of English poetry and of the world’s poetry. It is still uncertain how that future will deal with the old quarrel between idealism
and realism, for the two tendencies these names roughly represent are still present in the tendencies of recent work. More
generally, poetry always sways between two opposite trends, towards predominance of subjective vision and towards an emphasis on objective presentation, and it can rise too beyond these to a spiritual plane where the distinction is exceeded,
the divergence reconciled. Again, it is not likely that the poetic imagination will ever give up the narrative and dramatic
form of its creative impulse; a new spirit in poetry, even though primarily lyrical, is moved always to seize upon and do what it
can with them, — as we see in the impulsion which has driven Maeterlinck, Yeats, Rabindranath to take hold of the dramatic
form for self-expression as well as the lyrical in spite of their dominant subjectivity. We may perhaps think that this was not
the proper form for their spirit, that they cannot get there a full or a flawless success; but who shall lay down rules for
creative genius or say what it shall or shall not attempt? It follows its own course and makes its own shaping experiments.
And it is interesting to speculate whether the new spirit in poetry will take and use with modifications the old dramatic and
narrative forms, as did Rabindranath in his earlier dramatic attempts, or quite transform them to its own ends, as he has
attempted in his later work. But after all these are subordinate issues.
It will be more fruitful to take the main substance of the matter for which the body of Mr. Cousins’ criticism gives a
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good material. Taking the impression it creates for a startingpoint and the trend of English poetry for our main text, but
casting our view farther back into the past, we may try to sound what the future has to give us through the medium of the poetic
mind and its power for creation and interpretation. The issues of recent activity are still doubtful and it would be rash to make any
confident prediction; but there is one possibility which this book strongly suggests and which it is at least interesting and may be
fruitful to search and consider. That possibility is the discovery of a closer approximation to what we might call the
mantra in
poetry, that rhythmic speech which, as the Veda puts it, rises at once from the heart of the seer and from the distant home of
the Truth, — the discovery of the word, the divine movement, the form of thought proper to the reality which, as Mr. Cousins
excellently says, “lies in the apprehension of a something stable behind the instability of word and deed, something that is a
reflection of the fundamental passion of humanity for something beyond itself, something that is a dim shadowing of the divine
urge which is prompting all creation to unfold itself and to rise out of its limitations towards its Godlike possibilities.” Poetry
in the past has done that in moments of supreme elevation; in the future there seems to be some chance of its making it a more
conscious aim and steadfast endeavour.
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