Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Third Series

Fragment ID: 21111

I find in Shavianism a delightful note and am thankful to Shaw for being so refreshingly different from other men that to read even an ordinary interview with him in a newspaper is an intellectual pleasure. As for his being one of the most original personalities of the age, there can be no doubt of that. All that I deny to him is a great creative mind – but his critical force, especially in certain fields, and his discrimination of values in life are very great and in those fields he can in a sense be called creative and have remarkable scope and envergure. He has certainly created a singularly effective and living form for his criticism of life. It is not strictly drama, but it is something original and strong and altogether of its own kind – so, up to that limit, I qualify my statement that Shaw was not pre-eminent as a creator.

The tide may turn against him after being so strongly for him under compulsion from his own power and will, but nothing can alter the fact that he was one of the keenest and most powerful minds of the age with an originality in his way of looking at things which no one else in his time could equal. He is too penetrating and sincere a mind to be a stiff partisan or tied to some intellectual dogma or other. When he sees something which qualifies the “ism” – even that on whose side he is standing, he says so; that need not weaken the ideal behind,– on the contrary it is likely to make it more plastic and practicable.