SRI AUROBINDO

The Future Poetry

and Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art

Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art

Section Ten. Poets – Mystics – Intellectuals

The Poet, the Yogi and the Rishi

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It is quite natural for the poets to vaunt their métier as the highest reach of human capacity and themselves as the top of creation, it is also natural for the intellectuals to run down the Yogi or the Rishi who claims to reach a higher consciousness than that which they conceive to be the summit of human achievement. The poet lives still in the mind and is not yet a spiritual seer, but he represents to the human intellect the highest point of mental seership where the imagination tries to figure and embody in words its intuition of things, though that stands far below the vision of things that can be grasped only by spiritual experience. It is for that that the poet is exalted as the real seer and prophet. There is too, helping the idea, the error of the modern or European mentality which so easily confuses the mentalised vital or life being with the soul and the idealising mind with spirituality. The poet imaging mental or physical beauty is for the outer mind something more spiritual than the seer or the God-lover experiencing the eternal peace or the ineffable ecstasy. Yet the Rishi or Yogi can drink of a deeper draught of Beauty and Delight than the imagination of the poet at its highest can conceive. The Divine is Delight and it is not only the unseen Beauty that he can see but the visible and the tangible also has for him a face of the All-beautiful which the mind cannot discover.

10.11.1934

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Poetic intuition and illumination is not the same thing as Rishi’s intuition and illumination.

11.2.1936

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A Rishi is one who sees or discovers an inner truth and puts it into self-effective language — the mantra. Either new truth or old truth made new by expression and realisation.

He [R.M.] has expressed certain eternal truths by process of Yoga — I don’t think it is by Rishi-like intuition or illumination nor has he the mantra.

A Rishi may be a Yogi, but also he may not; a Yogi too may be a Rishi, but also he may not. Just as a philosopher may or may not be a poet, and a poet may or may not be a philosopher.

11.2.1936

The Poet and the Prophet

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Evidently the poet’s value lies in his poetic and not in his prophetic power. If he is a prophet also, the intrinsic worth of his prophecy lies in its own value, his poetic merit does not add to that, only it gives to its expression a power that perhaps it would not have otherwise.

Genius and Yoga

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I never heard of anyone getting genius by effort. One can increase one’s talent by training and labour, but genius is a gift of Nature. By Sadhana it is different, one can do it; but that is not the fruit of effort, but either of an inflow or by an opening or liberation of some impersonal power or manifestation of unmanifested power. No rule can be made of such things; it depends on persons and circumstances how far the manifestation of genius by Yoga will go or what shape it will take or to what degree or height it will rise.

28.7.1938

Poetic Genius and Yoga

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For poetry one must have a special inspiration or genius. With literary capacity one can write good verse only.

Genius usually means an inborn power which develops of itself. Talent and capacity are not genius, they can be acquired. But that is the ordinary rule, by Yoga one can manifest what is concealed in the being.

22.9.1934

   247   

No poet feels his poetry as a “normal phenomenon” — he feels it as an inspiration — of course anybody could “make” poetry by learning the rules of prosody and a little practice. In fact many people write verse, but the poets are few. Who are the ordinary poets? There is no such thing as an ordinary poet.

30.5.1937

   248   

A born poet is usually a genius, poetry with any power or beauty in it implies genius.

Richness of image is not the whole of poetry. There are many born poets who avoid too much richness of image. There are certain fields of consciousness which express themselves naturally through image most — there are others that do it more through idea and feeling.

13.2.1936

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Poetic genius — without which there cannot be any originality — is born, but it takes time to come out; the first work even of great poets is often not original. That is in ordinary life. In Yoga poetic originality can come by an opening from within, even if it was not there before in such a way as to be available in this life.

22.3.1934

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You must remember that you are not a “born” poet — you are trying to bring out something from the Unmanifest inside you. You can’t demand that that should be an easy job. It may come out suddenly and without apparent reason like the Ananda — but you can’t demand it.

8.6.1934

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What you say about the spontaneous development of the capacity in the metre after a silent and inactive incubation of over two years is quite true. But it is not amazing; it often happens and is perfectly natural to those who know the laws of the being by observation and experience. In the same way one suddenly finds oneself knowing more of a language or a subject after returning to it subsequent to a short interim without study, problems which had been abandoned as unsolvable solving themselves spontaneously and easily after sleep or when they are taken up again; knowledge or ideas coming up from within without reading or learning or hearing from others. Sudden efflorescences of capacity, intuitions, wellings up of all sorts of things point to the same inner power or inner working. It is what we mean when we speak of the word, knowledge or activity coming out of the silence, of a working behind the veil of which the outer mind is unconscious but which one day bears its results, of the inner manifesting itself in the outer. It makes at once true and practical what sounds only a theory to the uninitiated,— the strong distinction made by us between the inner being and the outer consciousness. It is how also unexpected Yogic capacity reveals itself, sometimes no doubt as a result of long and apparently fruitless effort, sometimes as a spontaneous out-flowering of what was concealed there all the time or else as a response to a call which had been made but at the time and for long seemed to be without an answer.

22.2.1935

Classification of the World’s Greatest Poets

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I suppose all the names you mention can be included among the world’s supreme singers; or if you like you can put them all in three rows — e.g.:

First row — Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki.

Second row — Dante, Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Virgil, Milton.

Third row — Goethe.

And there you are! To speak less flippantly, the first three have at once supreme imaginative originality, supreme poetic gift, widest scope and supreme creative genius. Each is a sort of poetic demiurge who has created a world of his own. Dante’s triple world beyond is more constructed by the poetic seeing mind than by this kind of elemental demiurgic power — otherwise he would rank by their side; the same with Kalidasa. Aeschylus is a seer and creator but on a much smaller scale. Virgil and Milton have a less spontaneous breath of creative genius; one or two typal figures excepted, they live rather by what they have said than by what they have made.

31.3.1932

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I am not prepared to classify all the poets in the universe — it was the front bench or benches you asked for. By “others” I meant poets like Lucretius, Euripides, Calderon, Corneille, Hugo. Euripides (Medea, Bacchae and other plays) is a greater poet than Racine whom you want to put in the first rank. If you want only the very greatest, none of these can enter — only Vyasa and Sophocles. Vyasa could very well claim a place beside Valmiki, Sophocles beside Aeschylus. The rest, if you like, you can send to the third row, but it is something of a promotion about which one can feel some qualms. Spenser too, if you like; it is difficult to draw a line.

Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth have not been brought into consideration although their best work is as fine poetry as any written, but they have written nothing on a larger scale which would place them among the greatest creators. If Keats had finished Hyperion (without spoiling it), if Shelley had lived, or if Wordsworth had not petered out like a motor car with insufficient petrol, it might be different, but we have to take things as they are. As it is, all began magnificently, but none of them finished, and what work they did, except a few lyrics, sonnets, short pieces and narratives, is often flawed and unequal. If they had to be admitted, what about at least fifty others in Europe and Asia?

The critical opinions you quote¹ are, many of them, flagrantly prejudiced and personal. The only thing that results from Aldous Huxley’s opinion, shared by many but with less courage, is that Spenser’s melodiousness cloyed upon Aldous Huxley and that perhaps points to a serious defect somewhere in Spenser’s art or in his genius but this does not cancel the poetic value of Spenser. Swinburne and Arnold are equally unbalanced on either side of their see-saw about Hugo. He might be described as a great but imperfect genius, who just missed the very first rank because his word sometimes exceeded his weight, because his height was at the best considerable, even magnificent, but his depth insufficient and especially because he was often too oratorical to be quite sincere. The remarks of Voltaire and Mark Pattison go into the same basket.

2.4.1932

Goethe and Shakespeare; Homer, Vyasa and Valmiki

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Yes, Goethe goes much deeper than Shakespeare; he had an incomparably greater intellect than the English poet and sounded problems of life and thought Shakespeare had no means of approaching even. But he was certainly not a greater poet; I do not find myself very ready to admit either that he was Shakespeare’s equal. He wrote out of a high poetic intelligence, but his style and movement nowhere came near the poetic power, the magic, the sovereign expression and profound or subtle rhythms of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a supreme poet and one might almost say, nothing else; Goethe was by far the greater man and the greater brain, but he was a poet by choice, his mind’s choice among its many high and effulgent possibilities, rather than by the very necessity of his being. He wrote his poetry as he did everything else with a great skill and an inspired subtlety of language, and effective genius but it was only part of his genius and not the whole. There is too a touch mostly wanting — the touch of an absolute, an intensely inspired or revealing inevitability; few quite supreme poets have that in abundance, in others it comes by occasional jets or flashes.

When I said there were no greater poets than Homer and Shakespeare, I was thinking of their essential force and beauty — not of the scope of their work as a whole; for there are poets greater in their range. The Mahabharata is from that point of view a far greater creation than the Iliad, the Ramayana than the Odyssey, and spread, either and both of them, their strength and their achievement over a larger field than the whole dramatic world of Shakespeare; both are built on an almost cosmic vastness of plan and take all human life (the Mahabharata all human thought as well) in their scope and touch too on things which the Greek and Elizabethan poets could not even glimpse. But as poets — as masters of rhythm and language and the expression of poetic beauty — Vyasa and Valmiki though not inferior, are not greater than either the English or the Greek poet. We leave aside for the moment the question whether the Mahabharata was not the creation of the mind of a people rather than of a single poet, for that doubt has been raised also with regard to Homer.

Virgil’s Poetry

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I don’t at all agree that Virgil’s verse fills one with the sense of the Unknown Country — he is not in the least a mystic poet, he was too Latin and Roman for that. Majestic sadness, word-magic and vision need not have anything to do with the psychic; the first can come from the Higher Mind and the noble parts of the Vital, the others from almost anywhere. I do not mean to say there was no psychic touch at all anywhere in Virgil. And what is this Unknown Country? There are plenty of Unknown Countries (other than the psychic world) to which many poets give us some kind of access or sense of their existence behind, much more than Virgil. But if when you say verse you mean his rhythm, his surge of word-music, that does no doubt come from somewhere else, much more than the thoughts or the words that are carried on the surge.

31.3.1932

Dante and Milton

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I don’t think either can be called a mystic poet — Milton not at all. A religious fervour or a metaphysical background belongs to the mind and vital, not to a mystic consciousness. Dante writes from the poetic intelligence with a strong intuitive drive behind it.

18.10.1936

Importance of the Power of Poetic Expression

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All depends on the power of expression of the poet. A poet like Shakespeare or Shelley or Wordsworth though without spiritual experience may in an inspired moment become the medium of an expression of spiritual Truth which is beyond him and the expression, as it is not that of his own mind, may be very powerful and living, not merely aesthetically agreeable. On the other hand a poet with spiritual experience may be hampered by his medium or by his transcribing brain or by an insufficient mastery of language and rhythm and give an expression which may mean much to him but not convey the power and breath of it to others. The English poets of the 17th century often used a too intellectual mode of expression for their poetry to be a means of living communication to others, except in rare moments of an unusual vision and inspiration; it is these that give their work its value.

8.7.1935

Wordsworth’s Realisation

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I am rather astonished at your finding Wordsworth’s realisation, however mental and incomplete, to be abstract and vague or dictated by emotional effervescence. Wordsworth’s was hardly an emotional or effervescent character. As for an abstract realisation, it sounds like a round square; I have never had one myself and find it difficult to believe in it. But certainly a realisation in its beginning can be vague and nebulous or it can be less or more vivid. Still, Wordsworth did not make that impression on me and to him it certainly seemed as something positive, wonderfully luminous, direct, powerful and determinative. He stayed there and went no farther, did not get to the source, because more was hardly possible in his time and surroundings, at least to a man of his moral and intellectual temper. In a more deep and spiritual sense a concrete realisation is that which makes the thing realised more real, dynamic, intimately present to the consciousness than any physical thing can be. Such a concrete spiritual realisation whether of the personal Divine or of the impersonal Brahman or of the Self does not, except in rare cases, come at or anywhere near the beginning of a Sadhana, in the first years or for many years: one has to go deep to get it and deeper to keep it. But a vivid and very personal sense of a spirit or infinite in Nature can very well come in a flash and remain strongly behind a man’s outlook on the universe.

Wordsworth and Keats

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One can’t make rigid rules like that. Wordsworth is as simple and direct as possible, (not always though), Keats aims at word magic. One can’t say Wordsworth is a greater poet than Keats. Whatever style is poetically successful, is advisable.

21.12.1935

Shelley’s “Skylark” — Imperfections of Great Poets — Essential Significance of Shelley’s Poetry

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I objected to your criticisms and cutting up of Shelley’s Skylark, because the whole of it seems to me to proceed from a wrong starting-point altogether. You seem to start with the assumption that the poem ought to be an intellectual whole with coherent parts, a logical structure. Your contention is that the main idea, consistent in other stanzas, is of a spiritual something, an incorporeal joy, and the stanzas you condemn as not consistent with the idea and tone of the rest come from an inferior less spiritual inspiration and lower the level of the poem. Accordingly, you propose to cut out these excrescences and insert some manipulations which would make the amended whole the perfect poem the Skylark should be.

I do not deny that from that standpoint your deductions are logical. The poem arranged as you want it, without these too earthly verses, would be a single ethereal impalpable shining tissue. It would be more subtly ethereal (not more spiritual), far from the earth, winging between the rainbow and the lightnings and ignorant of anything less brilliant and unearthly. Only it would be Shelley with something of himself left out, the Skylark incomplete with part of its fullness of tone vanished and a big hole in the middle — a beautiful poem, but no longer so worthy of its place among the few supreme English lyrics. That at least is what I feel. One thing more — even if these stanzas are an imperfection, I do not think it wise to meddle with them either by elimination or re-doing. To interfere with the imperfections of the great poets of the past is a hazardous business — their imperfections as well as their perfections are part of themselves. Imagine a drama of Shakespeare with all the blots scratched out and all the scoriae done over and smoothed to a perfect polish! It would be Shakespeare no longer. And this is Shelley whose strange and sweet and luminous magic of lyrical rhythm and language, when he is at his best and here he is at his best, in the impugned stanzas as well as in the others, is his own secret and no other shall ever recover it. To meddle here is substantially to mar. Things as great or greater in another kind may be done, but not with this unique and inevitable note. To omit, to change words or lines, to modify rhythms seems to me inadmissible².

I do not altogether appreciate your references to Mrs. Shelley and the firefly and your cynical and sarcastic picture of the “high-born maiden” as she appears to you — all that has nothing to do with Shelley’s poetic conception which is alone relevant to the matter. I could draw a realistic picture of the poet “singing hymns unbidden” and unwanted and asking occasionally as he wrote whether dinner was ready — with hopes, but also with fears that he might not get it, his butcher’s bill being unpaid for a long time. Or I might cavil scientifically about the nature of sunset and sunrise and rainbow drops and ask what was the use of all this romantic flummery when there are real things to write about. Or I might quote the critic — I don’t remember who he was — who said that Shelley certainly did not believe that the skylark was a spirit and not a bird and so the whole conception of the poem is false, insincere, ethereal humbug and therefore not true poetry because poetry must be sincere. Such points of view are irrelevant. Shelley is not concerned with the real life of the high-born maiden or the poet any more than with the ornithology of the skylark or with other material things. His glow-worm is something more than a material glow-worm. He is concerned with the soul love-laden, with the dreams of the poet, with the soul of beauty behind the glow-worm’s light and the colour and fragrance of the rose. It is that he is feeling and it is linked in his vision with the essential something he has felt behind the song of the skylark. And because he so felt it he was not only entitled but bound to make place for it in his inspired lyrical theme.

I may observe in passing that the ethereal and impalpable are not more spiritual than the tangible and the concrete — they may seem more easily subtle and ideal to the idealising and abstracting mind, but that is a different affair. One can feel the spiritual through the embodied and concrete as well as through its opposite. But Shelley was not a spiritual poet and the Skylark is not a spiritual lyric. Shelley looked, it is true, always towards the light, towards a beauty, a truth behind the appearance of things, but he never got through the idealising mind to the spiritual experience. What he did get was something of the purest emotional or aesthetic feeling or purest subtle mind-touch of an essence behind the appearance, an essence of ideal light, truth or beauty. It is that he expresses with a strange aerial magic or a curious supersensuously sensuous intensity in his finest lyrics. It is that we must seek in the Skylark and, if we find it, we have no right to claim anything else. It is there all through and in abundance — it is its perfection that creates the sustained perfection of the poem. There is not and there ought not to be an intellectual sequence, a linked argument, a logical structure. It is a sequence of feeling and of ideal perceptions with an occult logic of their own that sustains the lyric and makes it a faultless whole. In this sequence the verses you condemn have an indefeasible right of place. Shelley was not only a poet of other worlds, of Epipsychidion and of The Witch of Atlas; he was passionately interested in bringing the light, beauty and truth of the ideal super-world from which he came into the earth life — he tried to find it there wherever he could, he tried to infuse it wherever he missed it. The mental, the vital, the physical cannot be left out of the whole he saw in order to yield place only to the ethereal and impalpable. As he heard the skylark and felt the subtle essence of light and beauty in its song, he felt too the call of the same essence of light and beauty elsewhere and it is the things behind which he felt it that he compares to the hymn of the skylark — the essence of ideal light and beauty behind things mental, the poet and his hymns, behind things vital, the soul of romantic love, behind things physical, the light of the glow-worm, the passionate intensity of the perfume of the rose. I cannot see an ordinary glow-worm in the lines of Shelley’s stanza — it is a light from beyond finding expression in that glimmer and illumining the dell of dew and the secrecy of flowers and grass that is there. This illumination of the earthly mind, vital, physical with his super-world light is a main part of Shelley; excise that and the whole of Shelley is not there, there is only the ineffectual angel beating his wings in the void; excise it from the Skylark and the true whole of the Skylark is no longer there.

8.11.1934

Dramatic Genius of Romantic Poets

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I don’t believe Keats had any dramatic genius in him. None of these [romantic] poets had. Shelley’s Cenci is a remarkable feat of dramatic construction and poetic imagination but it has no organic life like the work of the Elizabethans or the Greeks or like such dramas as the Cid or Racine’s tragedies.

7.2.1935

Blake

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Blake stands out among the mystic poets of Europe. His occasional obscurity,— he is more often in his best poems lucid and crystal clear,— is due to his writing of things that are not familiar to the physical mind and writing them with fidelity instead of accommodating them to the latter.... In reading such writing the inner being has to feel first, then only the mind can catch what is behind.

   263   

I did not mean that he never altered — I don’t know about that. I meant he did not let his mind disfigure what came by trying to make it intellectual. He transcribed what he saw and heard.

Blake and Mallarme

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Blake is Europe’s greatest mystic poet and Mallarmé turned the whole current of French poetry (one might almost say, of all modernist poetry) into a channel of which his poems were an opening.

Mallarme

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The French language was too clear and limited to express mystic truth, so he had to wrestle with it and turn it this way and that to arrive at a mystic speech. Also he refused to be satisfied with anything that was a merely intellectual or even at all intellectual rendering of his vision. That is why the surface understanding finds it difficult to follow him. But he is so great that it has laboured to follow him all the same.

   266   

[Re unintelligibility of Mallarmé’s works:] Then why did they have so much influence on the finest French writers and why is modernist poetry trying to burrow into the subliminal in order to catch something even one quarter as fine as his language, images and mystic suggestions?

   267   

His doctrines are 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.... Not only that — his will to arrive at a true and deep, instead of a superficial and intellectual language. I gave two reasons for Mallarme’s unusual style and not this one of the limitedness of the French language only.... 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 seven plays of Sophocles and seven of Aeschylus (though they wrote more), but these seven put them still in the front rank of poets.

   268   

It³ is 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.

I do 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 sonnets⁴. 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 poet, if Mallarmé thought of that specially, being 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. 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 Nirvana⁵ or Transformation⁶, giving a clear mental indication 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 Fire⁷. It seems to me that both methods are legitimate.

   269   

If these two⁸ magnificent sonnets... 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 the pure sight and Mallarmé was the creator of symbolism.

Yeats and A.E.

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Yes, simplicity is always a sound basis for poetic style. Even if one has to be complex, subtle or ornate by necessity of the inspiration, the basic habit of simplicity gives a greater note of genuineness and power to it.

I do not think I have been unduly enthusiastic over Yeats, but one must recognise his great artistry in language and verse in which he is far superior to A.E. — just as A.E. as a man and a seer was far superior to Yeats. Yeats never got beyond a beautiful mid-world of the vital antarikṣa, he has not penetrated beyond to spiritual-mental heights as A.E. did. But all the same, when one speaks of poetry, it is the poetical element to which one must give the most importance. What Yeats expressed, he expressed with great poetical beauty, perfection and power and he has, besides, a creative imagination. A.E. had an unequal profundity of vision and power and range in the spiritual and psychic field. A.E.’s thought and way of seeing and saying things is much more sympathetic to me than Yeats’ who only touches a brilliant floating skirt-edge of the truth of things — but I cannot allow that to influence me when I have to judge of the poetic side of their respective achievements.... The depths of A.E. are greater than those of Yeats, assuredly. His suggestiveness must therefore be profounder. In this poem⁹ which you have translated very beautifully, his power of expression, always penetrating, simple and direct, is at its best and his best can be miraculously perfect.

Of course when you are writing poems or composing you are in contact with your inner being, that is why you feel so different then. The whole art of Yoga is to get that contact and to get from it into the inner being itself, for so one can enter directly into and remain in all that is great and luminous and beautiful. Then one can try to establish them in this troublesome and defective outer shell of oneself and in the outer world also. August, 1934

Yeats and the Occult

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It is certainly a very beautiful passage¹⁰ and has obviously a mystic significance; but I don’t know whether we can put into it such precise meaning as you suggest. Yeats’ contact, unlike A. E.’s, is not so much with the sheer spiritual Truth as with the hidden intermediate regions, from the faery worlds to certain worlds of larger mind and life. What he has seen there, he is able to clothe rather than embody in strangely beautiful and suggestive forms, dreams and symbols. I have read some of his poems which touch these behind-worlds with as much actuality as an ordinary poet would achieve in dealing with physical life,— this is not surprising in a Celtic poet, for the race has the key to the occult worlds or some of them at least,— but this strange force of suggestive mystic life is not accompanied by a mental precision which would enable us to say, it is this or that his figures symbolise. If we could say it, it might take away something of that glowing air in which his symbols stand out with such a strange unphysical reality. The perception, feeling, sight of Yeats in this kind of poetry are remarkable, but his mental conception often veils itself in a shimmering light — it has then shining vistas but no strong contours.

1.9.1932

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The perfection here of Yeats’ poetic expression of things occult is due to this that at no point has the mere intellectual or thinking mind interfered — it is a piece of pure vision, a direct sense, almost sensation of the occult, a light not of earth flowing through without anything to stop it or to change it into a product of the terrestrial mind. When one writes from pure occult vision there is this perfection and direct sense though it may be of different kinds, for the occult world of one is not that of another. But when there is the intervention of the intellectual mind in a poem this intervention may produce good lines of another power, but will not coincide in tone with what is before them or after — there is an alternation of the subtler occult and the heavier intellectual notes and the purity of vision becomes blurred by the intrusion of the earth-mind into a seeing which is beyond our earth-nature.

But these observations are valid only if the object is, as in Yeats’ lines, to bring out a veridical and flawless transcript of the vision and atmosphere of faeryland. If the object is rather to create symbol-links between the seen and the unseen and convey the significance of the mediating figures, there is no obligation to avoid the aid of the intellectualising note. Only, a harmony and fusion has to be effected between the two elements, the light and beauty of the beyond and the less remote power and interpretative force of the intellectual thought-links. Yeats does that too, very often, but he does it by bathing his thought also in the faery light; in the lines quoted¹¹ however, he does not do that, but leaves the images of the other world shimmering in their own native hue of mystery. There is not the same beauty and intense atmosphere when a poem is made up of alternating notes. The finest lines of these poems are those in which the other-light breaks out most fully — but there are others also which are very fine too in their quality and execution.

D. H. Lawrence

   273   

I have not read anything of Lawrence, but I have recently seen indications about him from many quarters; the impression given was that of a man of gifts who failed for want of vital balance like so many others. The prose you have turned into verse — very well, as usual — has certainly quality, though there is not enough to form a definite judgment. A seeker who missed the issue, I should imagine — misled by the vitalistic stress to which the mind of today is a very harassed captive.

   274   

Lawrence had the psychic push inside towards the Unknown and Beyond at the same time as a push towards the vital life which came in its way. He was trying to find his way between the two and mixed them up together till at the end he got his mental liberation from the tangle though not yet any clear knowledge of the way — for that, I suppose, he will have to be born nearer the East or in any case in surroundings which will enable him to get at the Light.

9.7.1936

D. H. Lawrence and Modern Poetry

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I suppose Lawrence was a Yogi who had missed his way and come into a European body to work out his difficulties. “To lapse back into darkness and unknowing” sounds like the Christian mystic’s passage into the “night of God”, but I think Lawrence thought of a new efflorescence from the subconscient while the mystic’s “night of God” was a stage between ordinary consciousness and the Superconscient Light.

The passage you have quoted certainly shows that Lawrence had an idea of the new spiritual birth. What he has written there could be a very accurate indication of the process of the change, the putting away of the old mind, vital, physical consciousness and the emergence of a new consciousness from the now invisible Within, not an illusory periphery like the present mental, vital, physical ignorance but a truth-becoming from the true being within us. He speaks of the transition as a darkness created by the rejection of the outer mental light, a darkness intervening before the true light from the Invisible can come. Certain Christian mystics have said the same thing and the Upanishad also speaks of the luminous Being beyond the darkness. But in India the rejection of the mental light, the vital stir, the physical hard narrow concreteness leads more often not to a darkness but to a wide emptiness and silence which begins afterwards to fill with the light of a deeper, greater, truer consciousness, a consciousness full of peace, harmony, joy and freedom. I think Lawrence was held back from realising because he was seeking for the new birth in the subconscient vital and taking that for the Invisible Within — he mistook Life for Spirit, whereas Life can only be an expression of the Spirit. That too perhaps was the reason for his preoccupation with a vain and baffled sexuality.

His appreciation of the Ajanta paintings must have been due to the same drive that made him seek for a new poetry as well as a new truth from within. He wanted to get rid of the outward forms that for him hide the Invisible and arrive at something that would express with bare simplicity and directness some reality within. It is what made people begin to prefer the primitives to the developed art of the Renaissance. That is why he depreciates Botticelli as not giving the real thing, but only an outward grace and beauty which he considers vulgar in comparison with the less formal art of old that was satisfied with bringing out the pure emotion from within and nothing else. It is the same thing which makes him want a stark bare rocky directness for modern poetry.

To continue about Lawrence’s poetry from where I stopped. The idea is to get rid of all over-expression, of language for the sake of language, or form for the sake of form, even of indulgence of poetic emotion for the sake of the emotion, because all that veils the thing in itself, dresses it up, prevents it from coming out in the seizing nudity of its truth, the power of its intrinsic appeal. There is a sort of mysticism here that wants to express the inexpressible, the concealed, the invisible. Reduce expression to its barest bareness and you get nearer the inexpressible; suppress as much of the form as may be and you get nearer that behind, which is invisible. It is the same impulse that pervaded recent endeavours in Art. Form hides, not expresses the reality; let us suppress the concealing form and express the reality by its appropriate geometrical figures — and you have cubism. Or since that is too much, suppress exactitude of form and replace it by more significant forms that indicate rather than conceal the truth — so you have “abstract” paintings. Or, what is within reveals itself in dreams, not in waking phenomena, let us have in poetry or painting the figures, visions, sequences, designs of Dream — and you have surrealist art and poetry. The idea of Lawrence is akin: let us get rid of rhyme, metre, artifices which please us for their own sake and draw us away from the thing in itself, the real behind the form. So suppressing these things let us have something bare, rocky, primally expressive. There is nothing to find fault with in the theory provided it does lead to a new creation which expresses the inner truth in things better and more vividly and directly than with its rhyme and metre the old poetry, now condemned as artificial and rhetorical, succeeded in expressing it. But the results do not come up to expectation. Take the four lines of Lawrence¹²: in what do they differ from the old poetry except in having a less sure rhythmical movement, a less seizing perfection of language? It is a fine image and Keats or Thompson would have made out of it something unforgettable. But after reading these lines one has a difficulty in recalling any clear outline of image, any seizing expression, any rhythmic cadence that goes on reverberating within and preserves the vision forever. What the modernist metreless verse does is to catch up the movements of prose and try to fit them into varying lengths and variously arranged lengths of verse. Sometimes something which has its own beauty or power is done — though nothing better or even equal to the best that was done before, but for the most there is either an easy or a strained ineffectiveness. No footsteps hitting the earth? Footsteps on earth can be a walk, can be prose; the beats of poetry can, on the contrary, be a beat of wings. As for the bird image, well, there is more lapsing than flying in this movement. But where is the bareness, the rocky directness — where is the something more real than any play of outer form can give? The attempt at colour, image, expression is just the same as in the old poetry — whatever is new and deep comes from Lawrence’s peculiar vision, but could have been more powerfully expressed in a closer-knit language and metre.

Of course, it does not follow that new and free forms are not to be attempted or that they cannot succeed at all. But if they succeed it will be by bringing the fundamental quality, power, movement of the old poetry — which is the eternal quality of all poetry — into new metrical or rhythmical discoveries and new secrets of poetic expression. It cannot be done by reducing these to skeletonic bareness or suppressing them by subdual and dilution in a vain attempt to unite the free looseness of prose with the gathered and intent paces of poetry.

29.6.1936

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What I have written about modern poetry is too slight and passing and general a comment, such as one can hazard in a private letter; but for a criticism that has to see the light of day something more ample and sufficient would be necessary. Lawrence’s poetry, whatever one may think of his theory or technique, has too much importance and significance to be lightly handled and the modernism of contemporary poetry is a fait accompli. One can refuse to recognise or legitimatise the fait accompli, whether in Abyssinia or in the realms of literature, but it is too solid to be met with a mere condemnation in principle.

Apropos, the other day I opened Lawrence’s Pansies once more at random and found this:

I can’t stand Willy Wet-leg

Can’t stand him at any price.

He’s resigned and when you hit him

He lets you hit him twice.

Well, well, this is the bare, rocky, direct poetry? God help us! This is the sort of thing to which theories lead even a man of genius.

D. H. Lawrence — Human Ego-centricity — Attitude towards Human Defects

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I must read Huxley’s preface¹³ and glance at some letters before venturing on any comments — like the reviewers who frisk about, a page here and a page there, and then write an ample or devastating review. Anyhow it seems to me Lawrence must have been a difficult man to live with, even for him it must have been difficult to live with himself. His photograph confirms that view. But a man at war with himself can write excellent poetry — if he is a poet; often better poetry than another, just as Shakespeare wrote his best tragedies when he was in a state of chaotic upheaval; at least so his interpreters say. But one needs a higher and more calm and poised inspiration to write poems of harmony and divine balance than any Lawrence ever had. I stick to my idea of the evil influence of theories on a man of genius. If he had been contented to write things of beauty instead of bare rockies and dry deserts, he might have done splendidly and ranked among the great poets.

All great personalities have a strong ego of one kind or another — for that matter it does not need to be a big personality to be ego-centred; ego-centricity is the very nature of life in the Ignorance,— even the sattwic man, the philanthropist, the altruist live for and round their ego. Society imposes an effort to restrain and when one cannot restrain at least to disguise it; morality enjoins on us to control, enlarge, refine or sublimate it so that it shall be able to exceed itself or use itself in the service of things bigger than its own primary egoism. But none of these things enables one to escape from it. It is only by finding something deep within or above ourselves and making laya (dissolution) of the ego in that that it is possible. It is what Lawrence saw and it was his effort to do it that made him “other” than those who associated with him — but he could not find out the way. It was a strange mistake to seek it in sexuality; it was also a great mistake to seek it at the wrong end of the nature.

What you say about the discovery of the defects of human nature is no doubt true. Human nature is full of defects and cannot be otherwise, but there are other elements and possibilities in it which, although never quite unmixed, have to be seen to get a whole view. But the discovery of the truth about human beings need not lead to cynicism; it may lead to a calm aloofness and irony which has nothing disappointed or bitter in it; or it may lead to a large psychic charity which recognises the truth but makes all allowances and is ready to love and to help in spite of all. In the spiritual consciousness one is blind to nothing, but sees also that which is within behind these coverings, the divine element not yet released, and is neither deceived nor repelled and discouraged. That inner greater thing that was in Lawrence and which he sought for is in everybody: he may not have found it and his defects may have prevented its release, but it is there.

I do not know about the lovableness; what you say is partly true, but lovableness may exist in spite of ego and all kinds of defects and people may feel it.

4.7.1936

Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner”

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May I say a word about the four lines of Coleridge which you criticise? —

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.

The sentimentalism of the “dear God” is obviously extra childlike and may sound childish even. If it had been written by Coleridge as his own contribution to thought or his personal feeling described in its native language it would have ranked him very low. But Coleridge was a great metaphysician or at any rate an acute and wide-winged thinker, not a sentimental prattling poet of the third order. Mark that the idea in the lines is not essentially poor; otherwise expressed it could rank among great thoughts and stand as the basis of a philosophy and ethics founded on bhakti. There are one or two lines of the Gita which are based on a similar thought, though from the Vedantic, not the dualist point of view. But throughout the Ancient Mariner Coleridge is looking at things from the point of view and the state of mind of the most simple and childlike personality possible, the Ancient Mariner who feels and thinks only with the barest ideas and the most elementary and primitive emotions. The lines he writes here record the feeling which such a mind and heart would draw from what he had gone through. Are they not then perfectly in place and just in the right tone for such a purpose? You may say that it lowers the tone of the poem. I don’t know — the tone of the poem is deliberately intended to be that of an unsophisticated ballad simplicity and ballad mentality — it is not the ideas but the extraordinary beauty of rhythm and vividness of vision and fidelity to a certain mystic childlike key that makes it such a wonderful and perfect poem. This is of course only a point of view; but it came to me several times as an answer that could be made to your criticism, so I put it on paper.

Browning

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My opinion of Browning has been expressed, I think, in The Future Poetry. I had a fervent passion for him when I was from seventeen to eighteen, after a previous penchant for Tennyson; but like most calf-love both these fancies were of short duration. While I had it, I must have gone through most of his writings (Fifine at the Fair and some others excepted) some half a dozen times at least. There is much stuff of thought in him, seldom of great depth but sometimes unexpected and subtle, a vast range not so much of character as of dramatic human moods, and a considerable power and vigour of rough verse and rugged language. But there is very little of the pure light of poetry in him or of sheer poetic beauty or charm and magic; he gets the highest or finest inspiration only in a line or two here and there. His expression is often not only rough and hasty but inadequate; in his later work he becomes tiresome. He is not one of the greatest poets, but he is a great creator.

5.12.1931

Baudelaire

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Baudelaire was never vulgar — he was too refined and perfect an artist to be that. He chose the evil of life as his frequent subject and tried to extract poetic beauty out of it, as a painter may deal with a subject that to the ordinary eye may be ugly or repellent and extract artistic beauty from it. But that is not the only stuff of his poetry.

22.7.1936

George Santayana

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It¹⁴ has a considerable beauty of thought and language in it. It is a great pity that it is so derivative in form as to sound like an echo. With so much mastery of language and ease of rhythm it should have been possible to find a form of his own and an original style. The poetic power and vision are there and he has done as much with it as could be done with a borrowed technique. If he had found his own, he might have ranked high as a poet.

Michael Madhusudan

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I had once the regret that the line of possibility opened out by Michael Madhusudan was not carried any further in Bengali poetry; but after all it may turn out that nothing has been lost by the apparent interruption. Magnificent as are the power and swing of his language and rhythm, there was a default of richness and thought-matter, and a development in which subtlety, fineness and richness of thought and feeling could learn to find a consummate expression was very much needed. More mastery of colour, form and design was a necessity as well as more depth and wealth in the thought-substance — and this has now been achieved and, if added to the ojas, can fulfil what Madhusudan left only half done.

Great Prose-Writers

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I stand rather aghast at your summons to stand and deliver the names of the ten or twelve best prose styles in the world’s literature. I had no names in mind and I used the incautious phrase only to indicate the high place I thought Bankim held among the great masters of language. To rank the poets on different grades of the Hill of poetry is a pastime which may be a little frivolous and unnecessary, but possible, if not altogether permissible. I would not venture to try the same game with the prose-writers who are multitudinous and do not present the same marked and unmistakable differences of level and power. The prose field is a field, it is not a mountain. It has eminences, but its high tops are not so high, the drops not so low as in poetical literature.

Then again there are great writers in prose and great prose-writers and the two are by no means the same thing. Dickens and Balzac are great novelists, but their style or their frequent absence of style had better not be described; Scott attempts a style, but it is neither blameless nor is it his distinguishing merit. Other novelists have an adequate style and a good one but their prose is not quoted as a model and they are remembered not for that but as creators. You speak of Meredith, and if Meredith had always written with as pure a mastery as he did in Richard Feverel he might have figured as a pre-eminent master of language, but the creator and the thinker played many tricks on the stylist in the bulk of his work. I was writing of prose styles and what was in my mind was those achievements in which language reached its acme of perfection in one manner or another so that whatever the writer touched became a thing of beauty — no matter what its substance — or a perfect form and memorable. Bankim seemed to me to have achieved that in his own way as Plato in his or Cicero or Tacitus in theirs or in French literature, Voltaire, Flaubert or Anatole France. I could name many more, especially in French which is the greatest store-house of fine prose among the world’s languages — there is no other to match it. Matthew Arnold once wrote a line that runs something like this:

France great in all great arts, in none supreme,

to which someone very aptly replied, “And what then of the art of prose-writing? Is it not a great art and what other country can approach France there? All prose of other languages seems beside its perfection, lucidity, measure almost clumsy.”

There are many remarkable prose-writers in English, but that essential or fundamental perfection which is almost like a second nature to the French writers is not so common. The great prose-writers in English seem to seize you by the personality they express in their styles rather than by its perfection as an instrument — it is true at least of the earliest and I think too of the later writers. Lamb whom you mention is a signal example of a writer who erected his personality into a style and lives by that achievement — Pater and Wilde are other examples.

As for Bengali, we have had Bankim and have still Tagore and Sarat Chatterji. That is sufficient achievement for a single century.

I have not answered your question — but I have explained my phrase and I think that is all you can expect from me.

Sarat Chandra Chatterji

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Novels deal with the vital life of men, so necessarily they bring that atmosphere. Sarat Chandra is a highly emotional writer with a great power of presenting the feelings and movements of the human vital.

13.3.1936

Plato

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Even in a good translation¹⁵ the poetry ought to come out to some extent. Plato was a great writer as well as a philosopher — no more perfect prose has been written by any man — in some of his books his prose carries in it the qualities of poetry and his thought has poetic vision. That is what I meant when I said it was poetry.

3.1.1937

Plotinus

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Yes, Plotinus was not a mere philosopher — his philosophy was founded on Yogic experience and realisation.

11.10.1933

Augustus Caesar and Leonardo Da Vinci

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Augustus Caesar organised the life of the Roman Empire and it was this that made the framework of the first transmission of the Graeco-Roman civilisation to Europe — he came for that work and the writings of Virgil and Horace and others helped greatly towards the success of his mission. After the interlude of the Middle Ages, this civilisation was reborn in a new mould in what is called the Renaissance, not in its life-aspects but in its intellectual aspects. It was therefore a supreme intellectual, Leonardo da Vinci, who took up again the work and summarised in himself the seeds of modern Europe.

29.7.1937

Intellectual Capacity of Mystics

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There¹⁶ have been any number of spiritual men and mystics who have had a great and fine intellectual capacity or were endowed with a great administrative and organising ability implying a keen knowledge of men and much expenditure of brain-power. With a little looking up of the records of the past I think one could collect some hundreds of names which would not include of course the still greater number not recorded in history or the transmitted memory of the past.

The Mystic and the Intellectual — Bernard Shaw

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A mystic is currently supposed to be one who has mystic experience, and a mystic philosopher is one who has such experience and has formed a view of life in harmony with his experience. Merely to have metaphysical notions about the Infinite and Godhead and underlying or overshadowing forces does not make a man a mystic. One would never think of applying such a term to Spinoza, Kant or Hegel: even Plato does not fit into the term, though Pythagoras has a good claim to it. Hegel and other transcendental or idealistic philosophers were great intellects, not mystics. Shaw is a keen and forceful intellect (I cannot call him a great thinker¹⁷) but his ideas about the Life-Force certainly do not make him a mystic. And do you really call that a constructive vision of life — a vague notion about a Life-Force pushing towards an evolutionary manifestation and a brilliant jeu d’esprit about long life and people born out of eggs and certain extraordinary operations of mind and body in these semi-immortals who seem to have been very much at a loss what to do with their immortality? I do not deny that there are keen and brilliant ideas and views everywhere (that is Shaw’s wealthy stock-in-trade), even an occasional profound perception; but that does not make a man either a mystic or a philosopher or a great thought-creator. Shaw has a sufficiently high place in his own kind — why try to make him out more than he is? Shakespeare is a great poet and dramatist, but to try to make him out a great philosopher also would not increase but rather imperil his high repute.

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I do not admit that Shaw has a reasoned theory about basic realities; the only realities he or his characters have argued about are the things of the surface; even his Life-Force is only a thing of the surface or, at the most, just under the surface.

I am not thrilled by the speech¹⁸; it is a creation of the intellect, eloquent and on the surface.

16.5.1932

Estimate of Bernard Shaw

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I do not think Harris’ attack on Shaw as you describe it can be taken very seriously any more than can Wells’ jest about his pronunciation of English being the sole astonishing thing about him. Wells, Chesterton, Shaw and others joust at each other like the kabiwālās of old Calcutta, though with more refined weapons, and you cannot take their humorous sparrings as considered appreciations; if you do, you turn exquisite jests into solemn nonsense. Mark that their method in these sparrings, the turn of phrase, the style of their wit is borrowed from Shaw himself with personal modifications; for this kind of humour, light as air and sharp as a razor-blade, epigrammatic, paradoxical, often flavoured with burlesque seriousness and urbane hyperbole, good-humoured and cutting at once, is not English in origin; it was brought in by two Irishmen, Shaw and Wilde. Harris’ stroke about the Rodin bust and Wells’ sally are entirely in the Shavian turn and manner, they are showing their cleverness by spiking their Guru in swordsmanship with his own rapier. Harris’ attack on Shaw’s literary reputation may have been serious, there was a sombre and violent brutality about him which made it possible; but his main motive was to prolong his own notoriety by a clever and vigorous assault on the mammoth of the hour. Shaw himself supplied materials for his critic, knowing well what he would write, and edited¹⁹ this damaging assault on his own fame, a typical Irish act at once of chivalry, shrewd calculation of effect and whimsical humour. I should not think Harris had much understanding of Shaw the man as apart from the writer; the Anglo-Saxon is not usually capable of understanding either Irish character or Irish humour, it is so different from his own. And Shaw is Irish through and through; there is nothing English about him except the language he writes and even that he has changed into the Irish ease, flow, edge and clarity — though not bringing into it, as Wilde did, Irish poetry and colour.

Shaw’s seriousness and his humour, real seriousness and mock seriousness, run into each other in a baffling inextricable mélange, thoroughly Irish in its character,— for it is the native Irish turn to speak lightly when in dead earnest and to utter the most extravagant jests with a profound air of seriousness,— and it so puzzled the British public that they could not for a long time make up their mind how to take him. At first they took him for a Jester dancing with cap and bells, then for a new kind of mocking Hebrew Prophet or Puritan reformer! Needless to say, both judgments were entirely out of focus. The Irishman is, on one side of him, the vital side, a passioné, imaginative and romantic, intensely emotional, violently impulsive, easily inspired to poetry or rhetoric, moved by indignation and suffering to a mixture of aggressive militancy, wistful dreaming and sardonic extravagant humour; on the other side, he is keen in intellect, positive, downright, hating all loose foggy sentimentalism and solemn pretence and prone, in order to avoid the appearance of them in himself, to cover himself with a jest at every step; it is at once his mask and his defence. At bottom he has the possibility in him of a modern Curtius leaping into the yawning pit for a cause, a Utopist or a Don Quixote,— according to occasions, a fighter for dreams, an idealistic pugilist, a knight-errant, a pugnacious rebel or a brilliant sharp-minded realist or a reckless but often shrewd and successful adventurer. Shaw has all that in him, but with it a cool intellectual clearness, also Irish, which dominates it all and tones it down, subdues it into measure and balance, gives an even harmonising colour. There is as a result a brilliant tempered edge of flame, lambent, lighting up what it attacks and destroys, and destroying it by the light it throws upon it, not fiercely but trenchantly — though with a trenchant playfulness — aggressive and corrosive. An ostentation of humour and parade covers up the attack and puts the opponent off his defence. That is why the English mind never understood Shaw and yet allowed itself to be captured by him, and its old established ideas, “moral” positions, impenetrable armour of commercialised Puritanism and self-righteous Victorian assurance to be ravaged and burned out of existence by Shaw and his allies. Anyone who knew Victorian England and sees the difference now cannot but be struck by it, and Shaw’s part in it, at least in preparing and making it possible, is undeniable. That is why I call him devastating, not in any ostentatiously catastrophic sense, for there is a quietly trenchant type of devastatingness, because he has helped to lay low all these things with his scythe of sarcastic mockery and lightly, humorously penetrating seriousness — effective, as you call it, but too deadly in its effects to be called merely effective.

That is Shaw as I have seen him and I don’t believe there is anything seriously wrong in my estimate. I don’t think we can complain of his seriousness about Pacifism, Socialism and the rest of it; it was simply the form in which he put his dream, the dream he needed to fight for, needed by his Irish nature. Shaw’s bugbear was unreason and disorder, his dream was a humanity delivered from vital illusions and deceptions, organising the life-force in obedience to reason, casting out waste and folly as much as possible. It is not likely to happen in the way he hoped; reason has its own illusions and, though he strove against imprisonment in his own rationalistic ideals, trying to escape from them by the issue of his mocking critical humour, he could not help being their prisoner. As for his pose of self-praise, no doubt he valued himself,— the public fighter like the man of action needs to do so in order to act or to fight. Most, though not all, try to veil it under an affectation of modesty; Shaw, on the contrary, took the course of raising it to a humorous pitch of burlesque and extravagance. It was at once part of his strategy in commanding attention and a means of mocking at himself — I was not speaking of analytical self-mockery, but of the whimsical Irish kind — so as to keep himself straight and at the same time mocking his audience. It is a peculiarly Irish kind of humour to say extravagant things with a calm convinced tone as if announcing a perfectly serious proposition — the Irish exaggeration of the humour called by the French pince-sans-rire; his hyperboles of self-praise actually reek with this humorous savour. If his extravagant comparison of himself with Shakespeare had to be taken in dull earnest without any smile in it, he would be either a witless ass or a giant of humourless arrogance,— and Bernard Shaw could be neither.

As to his position in literature, I have given my opinion; but more precisely, I imagine he will take some place but not a very large place, once the drums have ceased beating and the fighting is over. He has given too much to the battles of the hour perhaps to claim a large share of the future. I suppose some of his plays will survive for their wit and humour and cleverness more than for any higher dramatic quality, like those of three other Irishmen: Goldsmith, Sheridan, Wilde. His prefaces may be saved by their style and force, but it is not sure. At any rate, as a personality he is not likely to be forgotten, even if his writings fade. To compare him with Anatole France is futile — they were minds too different and moving in too different domains for comparison to be possible.

Wells — Chesterton — Shaw

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I refuse to accept the men you name, with the exception of Russell, as serious thinkers. Wells is a super-journalist, super-pamphleteer and story-teller. I imagine that within a generation of his death his speculations will cease to be read or remembered; his stories may endure longer. Chesterton is a brilliant essayist who has written verse too of an appreciable brilliance and managed some good stories. Unlike Wells he has some gift of style and he has caught the trick of wit and constant paradox which gives a fictitious semblance of enhanced value to his ideas. These are men of a high and wide contemporary fame but we are not sure how long their work will last, though we may venture to predict some durability for a good part of Chesterton’s poetry and Wells’ short stories. Shaw has a better chance of lasting, but there is no certain certitude, because he has no pre-eminent height or greatness in his constructive powers. He has constructed nothing supreme, but he has criticised most things. In page after page he shows the dissolvent critical mind and it is a dissolvent of great power; beyond that he has popularised the ideas of Fabian socialism and other constructive viewpoints caught up by him from the surrounding atmosphere, but with temperamental qualifications and variations, for the inordinately critical character of his mind prevents him from entirely agreeing with anybody. Criticism is also a great power and there are some mainly critical minds that have become immortals, Voltaire for instance; Shaw on his own level may survive — only, his thinking is more of a personal type and not classic and typical of a fundamental current of the human intellect like Voltaire’s. His personality may help him as Johnson was helped by his personality to live.

Shaw is not really a dramatist; I don’t think he ever wrote anything in the manner of the true drama; Candida is perhaps the nearest he came to one. He is a first-class play-writer,— a brilliant conversationalist in stage dialogue and a manufacturer of speaking intellectualised puppets made to develop and represent by their talk and carefully wire-pulled movements his ideas about men, life and things. He gives his characters minds of various quality and they are expressing their minds all the time; sometimes he paints on them some striking vital colour, but with a few exceptions they are not living beings like those of the great or even of the lesser dramatists. There are, however, exceptions, such as the three characters in Candida, and as a supremely clever playwright with a strong intellectual force and some genius he may very well survive. He has a very striking and cogent and incisive style admirably fitted for its work, and he sometimes tries his hand at eloquence, but “heights of passionate eloquence” is a very unreal phrase. I never found that in Shaw anywhere; whatever mental ardours he may have, his mind as a whole is too cool, balanced, incisive to let itself go in that manner.

Shaw as a Creative Mind

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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.

Bertrand Russell

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About Russell — I have never disputed his abilities or his character; I am concerned only with his opinions and there too only with those opinions which touch upon my own province — that of spiritual Truth. In all religions, the most narrow and stupid even, and in all non-religions also there are great minds, great men, fine characters. I know little about Russell, but I never dreamed of disputing the greatness of Lenin, for instance, merely because he was an atheist — nobody would, unless he were an imbecile. But the greatness of Lenin does not debar me from refusing assent to the credal dogmas of Bolshevism, and the beauty of character of an atheist does not prove that spirituality is a lie of the imagination and that there is no Divine. I might add that if you can find the utterances of famous Yogis childish when they talk about marriage or on other mental matters, I cannot be blamed for finding the ideas of Russell about spiritual experience, of which he knows nothing, very much wanting in light and substance. You have not named the Yogis in question, and till you do, I am afraid I shall cherish a suspicion about either the height or the breadth of their spiritual experience.

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I have already said that I have no objection to anybody admiring Russell or Dickinson or any other atheist for that matter. Genius or fine qualities are always admirable in whomsoever they are found; all that has nothing to do with the turn of a man’s opinions or the truth or untruth of atheism or of spiritual experience. As for Russell’s booklet Why I am not a Christian, which you sent me, I seized a few moments to run through it. It is just as I had expected it to be. I have no doubt that Russell is a competent philosophic thinker, but this might have been written by an ordinary propagandist tract-writer. The arguments of the ordinary Christian apologists to prove the existence of God are futile drivel and Russell answering them has descended to their level. He was appealing to the mass-mind I suppose, but that is enough to deprive the book of any real thought-value. And yet the questions raised are interesting enough if treated with true philosophic insight or from the standpoint of true spiritual experience. It is queer that the European mind, capable enough in other directions, should sink to such utter puerility when it begins to deal with religion or spiritual experience.

Comment on a Statement of B. Russell

   296   

I have²⁰ not forgotten Russell but I have neglected him, first, for want of time; second, because for the moment I have mislaid your letter; third, because of lack of understanding on my part. What is the meaning of “taking interest in external things for their own sakes”? And what is an introvert? Both these problems baffle me.

The word “introvert” has come into existence only recently and sounds like a companion of “pervert”. Literally, it means one who is turned inwards. The Upanishad speaks of the doors of the senses that are turned outwards absorbing man in external things (“for their own sakes”, I suppose?) and of the rare man among a million who turns his vision inwards and sees the self. Is that man an introvert? And is Russell’s ideal man “interested in externals for their own sakes” — a Ramaswami the chef or Joseph the chauffeur, for instance — homo externalis Russellius, an extrovert? Or is an introvert one who has an inner life stronger than his external one,— the poet, the musician, the artist? Was Beethoven in his deafness bringing out music from within him an introvert? Or does it mean one who measures external things by an inner standard and is interested in them not “for their own sakes” but for their value to the soul’s self-development, its psychic, religious, ethical or other self-expression? Are Tolstoy and Gandhi examples of introverts? Or in another field — Goethe? Or does it mean one who cares for external things only as they touch his own mind or else concern his own ego? But that I suppose would include 999,999 men out of every million.

What are external things? Russell is a mathematician. Are mathematical formulae external things even though they exist here only in the World-mind and the mind of Man? If not, is Russell, as mathematician, an introvert? Again, Yajnavalkya says that one loves the wife not for the sake of the wife, but for the self’s sake, and so with other objects of interest or desire — whether the self be the inner self or the ego. In Yoga it is the valuing of external things in the terms of the desire of the ego that is discouraged — their only value is their value in the manifestation of the Divine. Who desires external things “for their own sakes” and not for some value to the conscious being? Even Cheloo, the day-labourer, is not interested in a two-anna piece for its own sake, but for some vital satisfaction it can bring him; even with the hoarding miser it is the same — it is his vital being’s passion for possession that he satisfies and that is something not external but internal, part of his inner make-up, the unseen personality that moves inside behind the veil of the body.

What then is meant by Russell’s “for their own sakes”? If you enlighten me on these points, I may still make an effort to comment on his mahāvākya.

More important is his wonderful phrase about the “emptiness within”; on that at least I hope to make a comment one day or another.

Lowes Dickinson

   297   

The pre-war and the post-war Dickinson are indeed a contrast. This appreciation of human life is not without the force of a half-truth, but it is just the other half that he misses when he sweeps idealism out of the field. Man’s utopias may be the projection of his hopes and desires, but he has to go on building them on pain of death, decline or collapse. As for the gospel of pleasure, it has been tried before and always failed — Life and Nature after a time weary of it and reject it, as if after a surfeit of cheap sweets. Man has to rush from his pursuit of pleasure, with all its accompaniment of petrifying shallowness, cynicism, hardness, frayed nerves, ennui, dissatisfaction and fatigue, to a new idealism or else sink towards a dull or catastrophic decadence. Even if the Absolute Good were a high spiritual or ideal chimera, the pursuit of it is rooted in the very make of humanity and it is one of the main sources of the perennial life of the race. And that it is so would seem to indicate that it is not a chimera — something still beyond man, no doubt, but into which or towards which he is called by Nature to grow.

Romain Rolland

   298   

I have not read Jean Christophe, but Rolland is an idealist who takes interest in spiritual mysticism — not himself a man of spiritual experience. It is quite natural that such a man’s writing should produce an effect on an intellectual man more easily than a religious or spiritual work. X was not religious-minded, so a religious work would not move him because it would be too far from his own way of thinking and turn of seeing. A spiritual book would not reach him, for he would not understand or feel the spiritual experience or knowledge contained in it, they being quite foreign to his then consciousness. On the other hand, a book by an intellectual idealist with an intellectual turn towards spirituality would suit his own temperament and could hook and draw his thoughts that way.

26.10.1935

Anatole France

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Anatole France²¹ is always amusing whether he is ironising about God and Christianity or about that rational animal man or Humanity (with a big H) and the follies of his reason and his conduct. But I presume you never heard of God’s explanation of his non-interference to Anatole France when they met in some Heaven of Irony, I suppose,— it can’t have been in the heaven of Karl Marx, in spite of France’s conversion before his death. God is reported to have strolled up to him and said: “I say, Anatole, you know that was a good joke of yours; but there was a good cause too for my non-interference. Reason came along and told me: ‘Look here, why do you pretend to exist? You know you don’t exist and never existed or, if you do, you have made such a mess of your creation that we can’t tolerate you any longer. Once we have got you out of the way all will be right upon earth, tip-top, A-1: my daughter Science and I have arranged that between us. Man will raise his noble brow, the head of creation, dignified, free, equal, fraternal, democratic, depending upon nothing but himself, with nothing greater than himself anywhere in existence. There will be no God, no gods, no churches, no priestcraft, no religion, no kings, no oppression, no poverty, no war or discord anywhere. Industry will fill the earth with abundance, commerce will spread her golden reconciling wings everywhere. Universal education will stamp out ignorance and leave no room for folly or unreason in any human brain; man will become cultured, disciplined, rational, scientific, well-informed, arriving always at the right conclusion upon full and sufficient data. The voice of the scientist and the expert will be loud in the land and guide mankind to the earthly paradise. A perfected society; health universalised by a developed medical science and a sound hygiene; everything rationalised; science evolved, infallible, omnipotent, omniscient; the riddle of existence solved; the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the world; evolution, of which man, magnificent man, is the last term, completed in the noble white race, a humanitarian kindness and uplifting for our backward brown, yellow and black brothers; peace, peace, peace, reason, order, unity everywhere.’ There was a lot more like that, Anatole, and I was so much impressed by the beauty of the picture and its convenience, for I would have nothing to do or to supervise, that I at once retired from business,— for, you know that I was always of a retiring disposition and inclined to keep myself behind the veil or in the background at the best of times. But what is this I hear? — it does not seem to me from reports that Reason even with the help of Science has kept her promise. And if not, why not? Is it because she would not or because she could not? or is it because she both would not and could not, or because she would and could, but somehow did not? And I say, Anatole, these children of theirs, the State, Industrialism, Capitalism, Communism and the rest have a queer look — they seem very much like Titanic monsters. Armed, too, with all the powers of Intellect and all the weapons and organisation of Science! And it does look as if mankind were no freer under them than under the Kings and the Churches. What has happened — or is it possible that Reason is not supreme and infallible, even that she has made a greater mess of it than I could have done myself?” Here the report of the conversation ends; I give it for what it is worth, for I am not acquainted with this God and have to take him on trust from Anatole France.

1.8.1932

Victor Hugo

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People have different tastes — some regard Hugo as a childish writer, a rhetorician without depth — others regard him as a great poet and novelist. One has to give one’s own judgment and leave others to hold theirs.

26.4.1937

   301   

It [Les Misérables] is not one of the masterpieces of “art”, but I regard it as the work of a powerful genius and certainly one of the great novels. It is certainly not philosophically or psychologically deep, but it is exceedingly vivid and powerful.

25.4.1937

   302   

That is again a matter of opinion. There is the position that plot and character-presentation are sufficient and for the rest a large or great theme — one of the well-recognised human situations or a picture of life largely dealt with — and no more is necessary. Most famous English novels of the past are like that. There is another position that subtle psychology, deep and true presentation (not merely imaginative or idealistic) of the profounder problems or secrets of life and nature are needed. Hugo’s characters and situations are thought by many to be melodramatic or superficial and untrue. His novels, like his dramas, are “romantic” and the present trend is against the romantic treatment of life as superficial, childishly over-coloured and false. The disparagement of what was formerly considered great is common on that ground. “Faugh!” expresses the feeling.

27.4.1937

Alexander Dumas’ History

   303   

Dumas’ “history” is all slap and dash adventure — amusing rather than solidly interesting. But it is all the history known to many people in France — just as many in England gather their history from Shakespeare’s plays.

2.12.1934

William James’ “Psychology”

   304   

James’ book²² is certainly a very interesting one. I read it a long time ago and do not remember it very well except that it was very interesting and not at all an ordinary book in its kind, but full of valuable suggestions.

1.7.1933

Contemporary Detective Stories

   305   

The detective stories of today are much better than those of the Sherlock Holmes time. This kind of writing has been taken up by men with imagination and literary talent who would not have touched it before.

1.10.1935

Beethoven’s Music

   306   

There can be no doubt that Beethoven’s music was often from another world; so it is quite possible for it to give the key to an inwardly sensitive hearer or to one who is seeking or ready for the connection to be made. But I think it is very few who get beyond being aesthetically moved by a sense of greater things; to lay the hand on the key and use it is rare.

Bhatkhande

   307   

Yes, I have read your article on Bhatkhande. Very interesting: the character came home to me as a sublimation of a type I was very familiar with when in Baroda. Very amusing his encounters with the Pundits — especially the Socratic way of self-depreciation heightened almost to the Japanese pitch. His photograph you sent me shows a keen and powerful face full of genius and character.

February, 1937

The end

¹ A had asked: “Saintsbury as good as declares that poetry is Shelley and Shelley poetry — Spenser alone, to his mind, can contest the right to that equation. (Shakespeare, of course, is admittedly hors concours.) Aldous Huxley abominates Spenser; the fellow has got nothing to say and says it with a consummately cloying melodiousness! Swinburne, as is well known, could never think of Victor Hugo without bursting into half a dozen alliterative superlatives, while Matthew Arnold it was, I believe, who pitied Hugo for imagining that poetry consisted in using ‘divinité’, ‘éternité’, ‘infinité’, as lavishly as possible. And then there is Keats, whose Hyperion compelled even the sneering Byron to forget his usual condescending attitude towards ‘Johnny’ and confess that nothing grander had been seen since Aeschylus. Racine, too, cannot be left out — can he? Voltaire adored him, Voltaire who called Shakespeare a drunken barbarian. Finally, what of Wordsworth, whose Immortality Ode was hailed by Mark Pattison as the ne plus ultra of English poetry since the days of Lycidas?

“Kindly shed the light of infallible viveka on this chaos of jostling opinions.’’

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² The result is bound to be like Landor’s rewriting of Milton — very good Landor but very bad Milton.

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³ Le Cygne by Mallarmé.

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⁴ Le Cygne and Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poë by Mallarmé.

Poems by Sri Aurobindo. See Collected Poems (Centenary Edition, 1972).

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⁵ Poems by Sri Aurobindo. See Collected Poems (Centenary Edition, 1972).

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⁶ Poems by Sri Aurobindo. See Collected Poems (Centenary Edition, 1972).

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⁷ Poems by Sri Aurobindo. See Collected Poems (Centenary Edition, 1972).

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⁸ Le Cygne and Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poë by Mallarmé.

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⁹ Sibyl by A.E.

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¹⁰ Dectora: No. Take this sword

And cut the rope, for I go on with Forgael....

The sword is in the rope —

The rope’s in two — it falls into the sea,

It whirls into the foam. O ancient worm,

Dragon that loved the world and held us to it,

You are broken, you are broken. The world drifts away,

And I am left alone with my beloved,

Who cannot put me from his sight for ever.

We are alone for ever, and I laugh,

Forgael, because you cannot put me from you.

The mist has covered the heavens, and you and I

Shall be alone for ever. We two — this crown —

I half remember. It has been in my dreams.

Bend lower, O king, that I may crown you with it.

O flower of the branch, O bird among the leaves,

O silver fish that my two hands have taken

Out of the running stream, O morning star,

Trembling in the blue heavens like a white fawn

Upon the misty border of the wood,

Bend lower, that I may cover you with my hair,

For we will gaze upon this world no longer.

Forgael (gathering Dectora’s hair about him):

Beloved, having dragged the net about us,

And knitted mesh to mesh, we grow immortal;

And that old harp awakens of itself

To cry aloud to the grey birds, and dreams,

That have had dreams for father, live in us.

— Yeats, The Shadowy Waters.

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¹¹ From The Stolen Child and The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland.

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¹² Just a few of the roses gathered by the Isar

Are fallen, and their blood-red petals on the cloth

Float like boats on a river, waiting

For a fairy wind to wake them from their sloth.

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¹³ To the book, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, edited by Aldous Huxley.

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¹⁴ These remarks are apropos of the following poem by George Santayana:

There we live o’er, amid angelic powers,

Our lives without remorse, as if not ours,

And others’ lives with love, as if our own;

For we behold, from these eternal towers,

The deathless beauty of all winged hours.

And have our being in their truth alone.

...and I knew

The wings of sacred Eros as he flew

And left me to the love of things not seen.

’Tis a sad love, like an eternal prayer,

And knows no keen delight, no faint surcease.

Yet from the seasons hath the earth increase,

And heaven shines as if the gods were there.

Had Dian passed there could no deeper peace

Embalm the purple stretches of the air.

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¹⁵ Of Plato’s Banquet.

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¹⁶ These remarks are apropos of a statement of a famous scientist that mystics and spiritual men the world over have in general been always men of very average intelligence, a handful of rare instances excepted.

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¹⁷ An admirable many-sided intelligence and an acute critic discussing penetratingly or discoursing acutely or constructively on many problems or presenting with force or point many aspects of life, he is not a creator or disseminator of the great illuminating ideas that leave their mark on the centuries.

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¹⁸ Caesar’s speech about the Sphinx in Shaw’s play, Caesar and Cleopatra.

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¹⁹ F. Harris’ biography of Shaw, edited and published by Shaw himself after Harris’ death.

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²⁰ “We are all prone to the malady of the introvert, who, with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes upon the emptiness within.” B. Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (Allen & Unwin, London, 1930), p. 160.

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²¹ This is apropos of a quotation from Anatole France which D had sent to Sri Aurobindo, saying, “Brotteaux, one of the unabashed scoffers in Anatole France’s Les Dieux ont soif, throws this hearty fling at God in the face of Father Longuemare, the pious Priest....

‘Either God would prevent evil if he could, but could not, or he could but would not, or he neither could nor would, or he both would and could. If he would but could not, he is impotent, if he could but would not, he is perverse, if he neither could nor would he is at once impotent and perverse; if he both could and would why on earth doesn’t he do it, Father?’

“I send this to you as I immensely enjoyed the joke and am sure you would too, hoping you would have something to fend it off with.”

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²² Psychology by William James.

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