Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 3

Letter ID: 862

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

November 12, 1936

(The first part of this letter is missing, it starts on page 3.)

(...) “Dilipkumar’s music is so eminently appealing as D. is not circumscribed by his art pure and simple.” I am a little dubious as to his precise meaning. Have you seen the passage? I wonder, because I don’t think his thesis is quite true. I don’t know that Beethoven had an all-sided culture. Tagore has a wide culture – grant. But are his novels more satisfying than Sarat Chandra’s whose culture is not so wide? Qu’en dites-vous? Is not culture a somewhat extraneous adjunct to a personality – a thing learnt with ado – whereas art with all its limitations at least spring from within?

I have not seen the remarks in question. I don’t suppose allround general culture has much to do with excelling in music. Music is a gift independent of any such thing and it can hardly be said that given a musical gift in two people the one with an all-round culture would go farther than the other in musical excellence. That would not be true in any of the arts. But something else was meant perhaps that there is a certain turn or element in the excellence that an all round culture makes possible? It is only in that sense that it could be true. Shakespeare’s poetry for instance is that of a man with a vivid and many-sided response to life; it gives the impression of a multifarious knowledge of things, but it was a knowledge picked up from life as he went; Milton gets a certain culture from his studies and learning; but in neither case is the genius or excellence of the poetry due to culture, but there is a certain turn or colouring in Milton which would have not been there otherwise and which is not there in Shakespeare. It does not give any superiority in poetic excellence to one over the other.