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Chapter VI
The National Evolution of Poetry
THE WORK of the poet depends not only on himself and his age, but on the mentality of the nation to which he belongs and the spiritual, intellectual, aesthetic tradition and environment which it creates for him. It is not that he is or need be entirely limited or conditioned by his environment or that he must regard himself as only a voice of the national mind or bound by some past national tradition and debarred from striking out a novel and original road of his own. In nations which are returning under difficulties to a strong self-consciousness, like the Irish or the Indians at the present moment, this kind of conscious nationalism in literature may be for some time a living idea and a powerful motive. In others which have had a vivid collective life that has exercised a common and intimate influence on all its individuals or in those which have cherished an acute sense of a great national culture and tradition, the more stable elements of that tradition may exert a very conscious influence on the mind of the poets. At once sustaining and limiting the weaker spirits, they give to genius an exceptional power for sustained beauty of form and a satisfying perfection. But this is no essential condition for the birth of great poetry. The poet, we must always remember, creates out of himself and has the indefeasible right to follow freely the breath of the spirit within him, provided he satisfies in his work the law of poetic beauty. The external forms of his age and his nation only give him his starting-point and some of his materials and determine to some extent, by education, by a subconscious and automatic environmental pressure, the room he finds for the free play of his poetic spirit. Nor is it necessary to subscribe to the theory of the man and his milieu or the dogma of the historical school of criticism which asks of us to study all the precedents, circumstances, influences, Page – 41 surroundings, all that “created” the man and his work, — as if there were not something in him apart from these which made all the difference, something that made him a man apart and not like others. It is supposed that out of this elaborate scientific study the right estimate of his poetry will arise. But even the right historical or psychological understanding of him need not inevitably arise out of this method; for we may very easily read into him and his work things which may perhaps have been there in front of him or around him, but never really got inside him. And the right estimate of his work we certainly shall not form if we bring in so much that is accidental and unessential to cloud our free and direct impression. Rather the very opposite is the true method of appreciation; we have to go straight to the poet and his poem for all we need essentially to know about them, — we shall get there all that we really want for any true aesthetic or poetic purpose. Afterwards we can go elsewhere, if we like, for any minor elucidations or rummage about laboriously to satisfy our scientific and historical curiosity. In this more natural order things accidental are much more likely to fall into their right place and the freshness and authenticity of our poetic appreciation have some chance of remaining unobscured and still vibrant. But quite apart from its external and therefore unreal method, there is a truth in the historical theory of criticism which is of real help towards grasping something that is important and even essential, if not for our poetic appreciation, yet for our intellectual judgment of a poet and his work. In poetry, as in everything else that aims at perfection, there are always two elements, the eternal true substance and the limitations and accidents brought in by the time element. The first alone really and always matters, and it is that which must determine our definitive appreciation, our absolute verdict, or rather our essential response to poetry. A soul expressing the eternal spirit of Truth and Beauty through some of the infinite variations of beauty, with the word for its instrument, that is, after all, what the poet is, and it is to a similar soul in us seeking the same spirit and responding to it that he makes his appeal. It is when we can get this response at its purest and in its most Page – 42 direct and heightened awakening that our faculty of poetic appreciation becomes at once surest and most intense. It is, we may say, the impersonal enjoyer of creative beauty in us responding to the impersonal creator and interpreter of beauty in the poet. For it is the impersonal spirit of Truth and Beauty that is seeking to express itself through his personality; and it is that and not his personal intelligence which finds its own word and seems itself to create through him in his highest moments of inspiration. And this Impersonal is concerned only with the creative idea and the motive of beauty which is seeking expression; its sole purpose is to find the perfect expression, the inevitable word and the rhythm that reveals. All else is subordinate, accidental, the crude material and the conditioning medium of this essential endeavour. Still there is also the personality of the poet and the personality of the hearer; the one gives the pitch and the form of the success arrived at, the other determines the characteristic intellectual and aesthetic judgment to which its appeal arrives. The correspondence or the dissonance between the two decides the relation between the poet and his reader, and out of that arises whatever is personal in our appreciation and judgment of his poetry. In this personal or time element there is always much that is merely accidental and this rather limits and deflects our judgment than helps usefully to form it. How much it interferes can be seen when we try to value contemporary poetry.1 It is a matter of continual experience that even critics of considerable insight and sureness of taste are yet capable of the most extraordinarily wrong judgments, whether on the side of appreciation or of depreciation, when they have to pass a verdict on their contemporaries. And this is because a crowd of accidental influences belonging to the effect of the time and the mental environment upon our mentality exercise an exaggerated domination and distort or colour the view of our mental eye
1 Or even the poetry that has just preceded us, e.g. the nineteenth century’s contemptuous estimate of the eighteenth or the twentieth century’s equally contemptuous dismissal of the fallen Victorian demigods. Page – 43 upon its object. But apart from this disabling intrusion there is always something essential to our present personality which is of more value and has a right to be heard. For we are all of us souls developing our unfinished nature in a constant endeavour to get into unity with the spirit in life through its many forms of manifestation and on many different lines. And as there is in Indian Yoga a principle of varying capacity, adhikāra, something in the immediate power of a man’s nature that determines by its characteristics his right to this or that way of Yoga, of union with the Divine, which, whatever its merits or its limitations, is his right way because it is most helpful to him personally, so in all our activities of life and mind there is this principle of adhikāra. That which we can appreciate in poetry and still more the way in which we appreciate it, is that in it and us which is most helpful to us and therefore, for the time being at least, right for us in our attempt to get into union either with universal or transcendent Beauty through the revealing ideas and motives and suggestive forms of poetic creation. This is the individual aspect of the personal or time element. But there is also a larger movement to which we belong, ourselves and the poet and his poetry; or rather it is the same movement of the general soul of mankind in the same endeavour as the individual’s and towards the same objective. In poetry this shows itself in a sort of evolution from the objective to the inward and from the inward to the inmost, the spiritual, — an evolution which has many curves and turns and cycles, many returns upon past motives and imperfect anticipations of future motives, but is on the whole and up to a certain point a growth and progress, a constant labour of self-enlargement and self-finding. It is a clear idea of this evolution which may most helpfully inform the historical element in our judgment and appreciation of poetry; it is a judgment of it from the viewpoint of the evolution of the human spirit and the subtler consciousness and larger experience which that progress brings. We can see this general movement working itself out in different forms and on different lines through the souls of the nations and peoples, not so many after all, who have arrived at a strong self-expression Page – 44 through the things of the mind, through art and thought and poetry. These things of the mind do not indeed form or express the whole of the movement, even as they do not make up the whole of the life of the people; they represent its highest points, — or in the two or three peoples that have powerfully developed the spiritual force within, the highest with the exception of the spiritual summit. In these few we can best see the inner character and aim of any one line of the movement, — whether it be the line of poetry, the line of art or the line of religious and spiritual endeavour. This general evolution has its own natural periods or ages; but as with the stone, bronze and other ages discovered by the archaeologists, their time periods do not always correspond, are not the same for all the peoples which have evolved them. Moreover, they do not always follow each other in quite the same rigorous order; there are occasional reversals, extraordinary anticipations, violent returns; for in things psychological the Spirit in the world varies its movements more freely than in physical things. There, besides, the spirit of the race can anticipate the motives of a higher stratum of psychological development while yet it lives outwardly the general life of a lower stratum. So too when it has got well on to a higher level of development, it may go strongly back to a past and inferior motive and see how that works out when altered and uplifted or enlarged or even only subtilised by the motives and powers of the superior medium. There is here, besides, a greater complexity of unseen or half-seen subconscient and superconscient tendencies and influences at work upon the comparatively small part of us which is conscious of what it is doing. And very often a nation in its labour of self-expression is both helped and limited by what has been left behind from the evolution of a past self which, being dead, yet lives. Thus, the Indian spirit could seize powerfully the spiritual motive in an age in which the mass of the people lived a strenuous external life and was strongly outward-going and objective in its normal mentality. It succeeded in expressing the supreme spiritual experiences, so difficult to put at all into speech, in forms Page –45 and images proper to the simplest physical life and the most external customary mentality converting them into physical symbols of the supraphysical and then, by a rapid liberation, in its own proper voice, so producing the sacred poetry of the Veda and Upanishads. An Italy with the Graeco-Roman past in its blood could seize intellectually on the motives of catholic Christianity and give them a precise and supremely poetic expression in Dante, while all Germanised Europe was still stammering its primitive thoughts in the faltering infantile accents of romance verse or shadowing them out in Gothic stone, successful only in the most material form of the spiritual. In another direction, when it seized upon the romantic life-motive, the meeting-place of the Teuton and the Celt, we see it losing entirely the mystically sentimental Celtic element, Italianising it into the sensuousness of Tasso, and Italianising the rest into an intellectualised, a half imaginative, half satiric play with the superficial motives of romance, — the inevitable turn of the Italianised Roman spirit. On the other hand the English spirit, having got rid of the Latin culture and holding the Celtic mind for a long time at bay, exiled into the Welsh mountains or parked beyond the pale in Ireland, followed with remarkable fidelity the natural curve and stages of the psychological evolution of poetry, taking several centuries to arrive at the intellectual motive and more to get at something like a spiritual turn still too intellectualised to find any absolute intensity of the spirit, only the first shimmerings of an outbreak of vision. Generally, every nation or people has or develops a spirit in its being, a special soul-form of the human all-soul and a law of its nature which determines the lines and turns of its evolution. All that it takes from its environment it naturally attempts to assimilate to this spirit, transmute into stuff of this soul-form, make apt to and governable by this law of its nature. All its self-expression is in conformity with them. And its poetry, art and thought are the expression of this self and of the greater possibilities of its self to which it moves. The individual poet and his poetry are part of its movement. Not that they are limited by the present temperament and outward forms of the national Page – 46 mind; they may exceed them. The soul of the poet may be like a star and dwell apart; even, his work may seem not merely a variation from but a revolt against the limitations of the national mind. But still the roots of his personality are there in its spirit and even his variation and revolt are an attempt to bring out something that is latent and suppressed or at least something which is trying to surge up from the secret all-soul into the soul-form of the nation. Therefore to appreciate this national evolution of poetry and the relations of the poet and his work with it cannot but be fruitful, if we observe them from the point of view not so much of things external to poetry, but of its own spirit and characteristic forms and motives. Page –47 |