Nirodbaran’s Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo. Volume 2

Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1936

Letter ID: 1802

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

December 16, 1936

Guru, please read pages 19-21 of this book¹. There Kastner seems to say about Mallarmé just what I have said, though he speaks of him as being an acknowledged master, and of his great influence on contemporary poetry.

He can’t deny such an obvious fact, I suppose – but he would like to.

He says, “A purely intellectual artist, convinced that sentiment was an inferior element of art, Mallarmé never evokes emotion, but only thought about thought; and the thoughts called fort h in his mind by the symbol are generally so subtle and elliptical that they find no echo in the mind of the ordinary mortal.”² Do you agree with all that he says about Mallarmé?

Certainly not – this man is a mere pedant; his remarks are unintelligent, commonplace, often perfectly imbecile.

He continues: “Obscurity was part of his doctrine and he wrote for the select few only and exclusively...”³

Rubbish! His doctrine is perfectly tenable and intelligible. It is true that the finest things in art and poetry are appreciated only by the few and he chose therefore not to sacrifice the truth of his mystic (impressionist, symbolist) expression in order to be easily understood by the multitude, including this professor.

“Another cause of his obscurity is that he chose his words and phrases for their evocative value alone, and here again the verbal sonorities suggested by the tortuous trend of his mind make no appeal except to the initiated.”⁴ (I suppose here he means what you meant about the limitedness of the French language?)

Not only that – his will to arrive at a true and deep, instead of a superficial and intellectual language. I gave two reasons for Mallarmé’s unusual style and not this one of the limitedness of the French language only.

“His life-long endeavour to achieve an impossible ideal accounts for his sterility (he has left some sixty poems only, most of them quite short) and the darkness of his later work, though he did write, before he had fallen a victim to his own theories, a few poems of great beauty and perfectly intelligible.”⁵

60 poems, if they have beauty, are as good as 600. It is not the mass of the poet’s work that determines his greatness. Gray and Catullus wrote little; we have only 7 plays of Sophocles and seven of Aeschylus (though they wrote more), but these seven put them still in the front rank of poets.

He says that “Mallarmé’s verse is acquired and intricate” i.e. a thing not of spontaneity, but of intellectualisation. Saying that Verlaine is an inspired poet, he seems to mean the contrary about Mallarmé.

If these two magnificent sonnets (the last two)⁶ are not inspired, then there is no such thing as inspiration. It is rubbish to say of a man who refused to limit himself by intellectual expression, that he was an intellectual artist. Symbolism, impressionism go beyond intellect to pure sight – and Mallarmé was the creator of symbolism.

I don’t say that this author is an authority, but I found this reference interesting and send it to you for your opinion...

I don’t find it interesting – it is abysmally stupid.

... X also seems to have the same view as the writer’s.

I hope not.

In fact it was X who said about Mallarmé’s set determination to make his works unintelligible [14.12.36]. He writes in an article: Hopkins, in seeking for the secret of sound which is the soul of poetry, has done such rigorous Hathayogic sadhana with rhythm that it strikes us as an astonishing feat. (For instance he has turned the expression “through the other” into “throughter” [“throughther”?].)

That is a question of language – how far one can do violence to the form of a language. It is a different question altogether.

He says that Mallarmé adopted the path of arduous tapasyā with language because the French language is too simple, clear and transparent etc., etc. And then he remarks that just as in spirituality simple (sahaj) sadhana leads to truth, so also in poetry simplicity leads to beauty.

Would it mean then, that due to Mallarmé’s acrobatics with words, his poems are not beautiful and won’t lead you to beauty – if written in that way?

Only X can say what he meant, but to refuse beauty to Mallarmé’s poetry would be itself an acrobacy of the intellect. For what then is beauty? Simplicity and beauty are not convertible terms. There can be a difficult beauty. What about Aeschylus then? or Blake?

I tried to break that nut of his (no. 199)⁷ – an exposition of it is also attached. But, pardi! It was a hard nut, Guru. Really what a tortuous trend and how he has turned the images!

[“... Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d’aile ivre

Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre

Le transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas fui!”]

“The transparent glacier of flights haunting the hard lake under the frost”! The frost or snow has become the glacier (icefield) and the icefield composes the lake – that’s what I imaged.

How does hoar-frost or rime become the glacier? “Givre” is not the same as “glace” – it is not ice, but a covering of hoar-frost such as you see on the trees etc., the congealed moisture of the air – that is the “blanche agonie” which has come down from the insulted Space on the swan and on the lake. He can shake off that but the glacier holds him; he can no more rise to the skies, caught in the frozen cold mass of the failures of the soul that refused to fly upward and escape.

I tried hard to understand the construction, can’t say I have it!

You haven’t.

What do you think of this sonnet [Le cygne]?

One of the finest sonnets I have ever read.

Magnificent line, by the way, “le transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas fui!” This idea of the denied flights (imprisoned powers) of the soul that have frozen into a glacier seems to me as powerful as it is violent. Of course in French such expressions were quite new – in some other languages they were already possible. You will find lots of kindred things in the most modern poetry which specialises in violent revelatory (or at least would-be revelatory) images. You disapprove? Well, one may do so,– classical taste does; but I find myself obliged here to admire.

What’s this “evocative value” of words and phrases? Suggestiveness? Taking away imagination beyond the expressions or words? “According to Mallarmé’s own definition, the poet’s mission is either ‘to evoke gradually an object in order to suggest a mood, or, inversely, to choose an object as a symbol and disengage from it a mood by a series of decipherments’.”⁸

It is a very good description of the impressionist method in literature. Verlaine and others do the same, even if they do not hold the theory.

I don’t understand what he means, but it seems to be something different from what Housemann means.

[Sri Aurobindo put a question mark above “Housemann”.]

What’s this spelling? He is not a German.

Housman is not a symbolist or impressionist in theory – V⁹

He [Housman] says a poet’s mission is to “transfuse emotion” which Mallarmé had not!

Indeed? because the professor says so? How easily you are impressed by anybody’s opinion and take it as final!

Some reply please – I have left a whole page blank.

I do not know what you mean by emotion. If you mean the surface vital joy and grief of outer life, these poems of Mallarmé do not contain it. But if emotion can include also the deeper spiritual or inner feeling which does not weep or shout, then they are here in these two sonnets¹⁰. The Swan is to my understanding not merely the poet who has not sung in the higher spaces of the consciousness, which is already a fine idea, but the soul that has not risen there and found its higher expression, the said poet being, if Mallarmé thought of that specially, only a signal instance of this spiritual frustration. There can be no more powerful, moving and formidable expression of this spiritual frustration, this chilled and sterile greatness than the image of the frozen lake and the imprisoned Swan as developed by Mallarmé.

I do not say that the spiritual or occult cannot be given an easier expression or that if one can arrive at that without minimising the inner significance, it is not perhaps the greatest achievement. (That is, I suppose, X’s contention.) But there is room for more than one kind of spiritual or mystic poetry. One has to avoid mere mistiness or vagueness, one has to be true, vivid, profound in one’s images; but, that given, I am free to write either as in Nirvana or Transformation, giving a clear mental indication along with the image or I can suppress the mental indication and give the image only with the content suggested in the language – but not expressed so that even those can superficially understand who are unable to read behind the mental idea – that is what I have done in the “Bird of Fire”. It seems to me that both methods are legitimate.