Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
SABCL 26
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Tagore 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 putting of the steps are minor matters. 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 departure 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, specially 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 Tagore? But these injustices of the moment do not endure – in the end a wise and fair estimmate is formed and survives the changes of time.
Tagore
, 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 or may not 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 idealism4 has been smashed to pieces by the immense adverse event and everybody is busy exposing its weaknesses
– 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 some firm foundation there
, will not carry us very far. And what else is there? Until new spiritual values are discovered, no great enduring
creation is possible.
24-3-1934
Current publication:
Sri Aurobindo. On Himself // SABCL.- Volume 26. (≈ 35 vol. of CWSA)
Other publications:
Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Yoga // SABCL.- Volume 22. (≈ 28 vol. of CWSA).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1971.- 502 p.
[A letter: ] Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo to Dilip / edited by Sujata Nahar, Shankar Bandyopadhyay.- 1st ed.- In 4 Volumes.- Volume 2. 1934 – 1935.- Pune: Heri Krishna Mandir Trust; Mysore: Mira Aditi, 2003.- 405 p.
Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Poetry and Art // CWSA.- Volume 27.- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2004.- 769 p.
Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Yoga. I // CWSA.- Volume 28. (≈ 22 vol. of SABCL).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2012.- 590 p.
Sri Aurobindo. Letters of Sri Aurobindo: In 4 Series.- Second Series [On Yoga].- Bombay: Sri Aurobindo Sircle, 1949.- 599 p.
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo and Mother to Prithwi Singh: Correspondence (1933-1967).- Mysore: Mira Aditi, 1998.- 183 p.