Sri Aurobindo to Dilip. Volume 2

Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1934 — 1935

Letter ID: 438

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

March 24, 1934

I am not sure that it is very discreet to send these obiter dicta [incidental remarks] outside; I think it would be better to keep these up your sleeve as an indiscretion would very easily set them rolling till they got a semi-public character. While such obiter dicta are all right with regard to poems and problems and happenings, they can only be passed under seal of privacy on persons, most of all persons in public view. So, let the seal be there. Obiter dicta of this kind are after all only side-flashes – not a judgment balanced and entire.

I don’t think we should hastily conclude that Tagore is passing over to the opposite camp. He is sensitive and perhaps a little affected by the positive robustious, slogan-fed practicality of the day – he has passed through Italy and Persia and was feted there. But I don’t see how he can turn his back on all the ideas of a life-time. After all he has been a wayfarer towards the same goal as ours in his own way – that is the main thing, the exact stage of advance and the putting of the steps are minor matters. So let there be no clash, if possible. Besides he has had a long and brilliant day – I should like him to have as peaceful and undisturbed a sunset as may be. His exact position as a poet or a prophet or anything else will be assigned by posterity and we need not be in haste to anticipate the final verdict. The immediate verdict after his death or soon after it may very well be a rough one – for this is a generation that seems to take a delight in trampling with an almost Nazi rudeness on the bodies of the Ancestors, especially the immediate ancestors. I have read with an interested surprise that Napoleon was only a bustling and self-important nincompoop all whose great achievements were done by others, that Shakespeare was “no great things” and that most other great men were by no means so great as the stupid respect and reverence of past ignorant ages made them out to be! What chance has then Tagore⁸?

As for your question, Tagore⁹ of course belonged to an age which had faith in its ideas and whose very denials were creative affirmations. That makes an immense difference. Your strictures on his later development may be correct, but this mixture even was the note of the day and it expressed a tangible hope of fusion into something new and true – therefore it could create. Now all that has been smashed to pieces and its weaknesses exposed – but nobody knows what to put in its place. A mixture of scepticism and slogans, “Heil-Hitler” and the Fascist salute and Five-Year Plan and the beating of everybody into one amorphous shape, a disabused denial of all ideals on one side and on the other a blind “shut-my-eyes and shut-everybody’s-eyes” plunge into the bog in the hope of finding something there, will not carry us very far. And what else is there? Until new spiritual values are discovered, no big creation is possible.

¹ Sri Aurobindo and Mother to Prithwi Singh: But I don’t think Tagore’s passing into the opposite camp is a certitude.