Correspondence 1934, August (I)

August 1934

Merci. Je comprends le sens maintenant parfaitement. Voyons! [Thank you. I now understand the meaning perfectly. Let’s see!] I suppose now there is no hitch and it runs with a real Wordsworthian rhythm with the authentic Wordsworthian significance packed therein. The scene of my novel is in Grasmere where I went to see the poet’s cottage — lovely Grasmere. So there are some other citations too from the poet. These I will send you by and by. All in good time — in proper sequence. There is a deal of such poetic passages in my novel. C’est pourquoi [That is why].

Harin has given me some exquisite poems! What a poet — really mon maître — il у a quelque chose même dans la poésie pure à proprement parler [there is something in pure poetry strictly speaking]. What a poem on A.E., the poet I loved best in the West. With all your enthusiasm for Yeats Guru, Yeats has meant very little indeed to me, I have never been able to warm up to him, but A.E. — yes. I have often been more deeply moved by A.E. than I could account for — his note rang to me so [true?]. That was why I have been so deeply stirred by Harin’s on A.E. Do write a sonnet at least on him Guru — don’t you think he deserves it — in these days when people pooh-pooh mystic poetry (as Thomson wrote to me) when A.E. still stood to his guns on his lonely heights. Why you really set so much store by Yeats I can’t gather — he is often so impossibly obscure. But A.E. is never so. His has been a note of calm grandeur to me. And it is significant that a poet of Harin’s genius regards him as the greatest poet of this age — barring you. I agree with him. But it seems to me there has always been some diffidence in you. Will you let me know why? Amal also mentions him passingly in his Notes on Poetry for which I groaned to him, for he is in ecstasies over Yeats. Please write on back — also a sonnet if you have time. If not some éclaircissement [clarification] at least. A letter from you has been long overdue to me in reward of my hermit-like dove-like purity anyway if not for my romantic speed in romance-writing.

I do not think I was ever enthusiastic over Yeats, but I 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 antarikṣa [mid-world] — 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 while A.E. had only a certain though considerable interpretative power. 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. I hope that will be éclaircissement enough for you — for I have no time for more — certainly none for writing sonnets — my energy is too occupied in very urgent and pressing things (quite apart from “correspondence”) to “dally with the rhythmic line”.

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August 1, 1934

Don’t indulge in gloomy forebodings. What one fears does not always happen, though it is true that fears and forebodings are mental formations and that such mental formations can give a fillip to the [imps?] of mischief. For my part I propose to make the opposite formation that nothing will happen of importance, even while trying to guard against possibilities. If anything does happen, you will tell me at once and I will try to set it right. This seems to me the thing to be done. I don’t see the necessity of a circuit to the Himalayas.

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August 4, 1934

Very glad that the reconciliation has proceeded all right and I am glad too that your tendency is so readily towards “harmony” and away from “disharmonies” that have been too rife. As for Moni he is very stiff in a quarrel and to make him ease his backbone when he has once straightened it for a fight is not easy.

Your strictures on Moni’s present tendencies in poetry are largely correct, but although he always had a flow of language and flow of verse — and when he has the right subject and substance he can do something very fine — I have never put so high a value on his poetry — it is his prose which at its best seemed to me remarkable. Nishikanta’s poem is very good indeed. But the parallel or rather contrast between them from the Ashram residence point of view is not very much to the point. Moni comes in from a mental and vital past; with Nishikanta the question is whether he has stuff enough, not poetic or artistic—for he is a good poet and clever painter — but Yogic to stand the spiritual future.

I have read your preface and have some idea of reading your mammoth suffix in some [aeonian?] future — I will try to read also the pages you point out at the same time. But what strange ideas you have about the relative intensities of the vital joys and the psychic joy or the spiritual peace!

Glad to hear about the appreciation of O.C. Ganguli[1] — and OK about the singing.

P.S. I was forgetting about Harmony. After a forced halt of several days it has started again and is proceeding with a grim tortoise-like determination to its goal.

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August 4, 1934

I have read your letter of explanation of the “strange” ideas but cannot answer it now because I am busy with the harmony affair and don’t want to discontinue. I still maintain that your views on the lack of all intensity in the psychic things or in the spiritual or their inferiority to vital pleasure are strange, because they contradict all psychic and spiritual experience except that of the mere vairāgis [renunciates] and make the choice of the spiritual life itself (Nirvana seekers excepted) quite inexplicable. Your arguments are not convincing. What have Ramakrishna’s cancer or the fluctuations of Vivekananda’s vital receptivity between exaltation and depression or Chaitanya’s viraha[2] to do with the question in issue? These are difficulties of the body and the vital. The question was of the intensity of psychic and pure spiritual experience — psychic devotion and love, peace, Ananda. You cannot base a general denial on your own particular experience; because you have only the initial experiences of calm, etc. and have not got to the intensities as I have done and others before me have done. It is only when one lives centrally in the psychic with the mental, vital and physical experiences held under its rule that one knows what psychic intensity is. It is only when the higher consciousness comes down in its floods that one can know what can be the intensities or ecstasies of spiritual peace, light, love, bliss. You can say “I have not yet had these intensities,” but you cannot say in a sweeping way, “They do not exist and I shall never have them,” or “They are only tepid quiet little things soothing and more capable of lasting, but not intense and glorious like the vital joys and pleasures.” Don’t cling to these notions born of the first limitations, but keep yourself open and plastic to greater possibilities in the future.

My own experience is not limited to a radiant peace; I know very well what ecstasy and ananda are from the Brahmānanda[3] down to the śarīra ānanda,[4] and can experience them at any time. But of these things I prefer to speak only when my work is done — for it is in a transformed consciousness here and not only above where the Ananda always exists that I seek their base of permanence.

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August 1934

I had forgotten one thing about the Fenêtres[5] room. When Sada went there, we made it a rule that there should not be too much “receiving” of friends, etc. (Sada has an array of them); but I think this will not incommode Nishikanta, as he is of the quiet type, I understand, and will besides be seeing much of his friends over there. If he prefers that room, he can have it as soon as it is repaired and everything ready.

I was relieved to get a more cheerful letter from Maya.[6] It appears that to stop her hunger strike Sh. has promised positively (?) to let her come here in February. I only hope the fellow won’t find another trick to prevent her then!

I am rather perplexed by your strictures on Rama. Cowardice is the last thing that can be charged against Valmiki’s Rama; he has always been considered as a warrior and it is the “martial races” of India who have made him their god. Valmiki everywhere paints him as a great warrior.

D.L. Roy with Dilip and Maya

His employment of ruse against an infrahuman enemy does not prove the opposite — for that is always how the human (even great warriors and hunters) has dealt with the infrahuman. I think it is Madhusudan who has darkened Valmiki’s hero in Bengali eyes and turned him into a poor puppet, but that is not the authentic Rama who, say what one will, was a great epic figure — Avatar or no Avatar. As for conventional morality, all morality is a convention — man cannot live without conventions, mental and moral, otherwise he feels himself lost in the rolling sea of the anarchic forces of the vital Nature. Even the Russells and Bernard Shaws can only end by setting up another set of conventions in the place of those they have skittled over. Only by rising above mind can one really get beyond conventions — Krishna was able to do it because he was not a mental human being but an overmental godhead acting freely out of a greater consciousness than man’s. Rama was not that, he was the Avatar of the sattwic mind — mental, emotional, moral — and he followed the Dharma of the age and race. That may make him temperamentally congenial to Gandhi and the reverse to you; but just as Gandhi’s temperamental recoil from Krishna does not prove Krishna to be no Avatar, so your temperamental recoil from Rama does not establish that he was not an Avatar. However, my main point will be that Avatarhood does not depend upon these questions at all, but has another basis, meaning and purpose.

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[1] Ordhendra Kumar Gangopadhyay (1.8.1881-9.2.1974), himself a good artist and musician, he is better known as an art-critic. Although he was a practising lawyer, art was his first love. As the general secretary of the Indian Society of Oriental Art, the Rupam magazine stands testimony to his brilliance. In countries like China and Burma (Myanmar), he gave lectures on Indian Art. Among the many books he wrote on art, are: Vedic Painting, South Indian Bronze, Masterpiece of Rajput Paintings, and his research work on music, Ragas and Raginis.

[2] viraha: separation, absence of the divine Lover.

[3] Brahmananda: bliss of absorption into Brahman.

[4] śarīra ananda: ananda in the body.

[5] Fenêtres: name of a house.

[6] Maya was Dilip’s only sister. She was married to Sri Bhava Shankar Banerjee, the only son of Sir Surendranath Banerjee, the great nationalist leader. They mostly lived in Barrackpur, near Kolkata.