Sri Aurobindo

The Hour of God

and other writings

VIII. Reviews

Shama'a

I was unable to greet duly the first appearance of this new magazine of art, literature and philosophy edited by Miss Mrinalini Chattopadhyay; I take the opportunity of the second number to repair the omission I had then unwillingly to make. The appearance of this quarterly is one of the signs as yet too few, but still carrying a sure promise, of a progressive reawakening of the higher thinking and aesthetic mentality in India after a temporary effacement in which the Eastern mind was attempting to assimilate in the wrong way elementary or second-rate occidental ideas. In that misguided endeavour it became on the intellectual and practical side ineffectively utilitarian and on the aesthetic content with the cheap, ugly and vulgar. The things of the West it assimilated were just the things the West had either left behind it or was already finishing and preparing to cast away. “Shama'a”, like “Rupam”, though less sumptuously apparelled, is distinguished by its admirable get-up and printing and is an evidence of the recovery of a conscience in the matter of form, a thing once universal in India but dead or dormant since the Western invasion. The plan of the review is designed to meet a very real need of the moment and the future: for its purpose is to bring together in its pages the mind of the Indian renaissance and the most recent developments of European culture. In India we as yet know next to nothing of what the most advanced minds of Europe are thinking and creating in the literary, artistic and philosophic field, — for that matter most of us, preoccupied with politics and domestic life, have a very inadequate information of what we ourselves are doing in these matters. It is to be hoped that this magazine will be an effective agent in curing these deficiencies. It has begun well: the editor, Miss Chattopadhyay, has the needed gift of attracting contributions of the right kind and there is in “Shama'a” as a result of her skill a pervading and harmonising atmosphere of great distinction and fineness.

The frontispiece of this number is a portrait by a modern English artist, J. D. Ferguson², and an article on his work by Charles Marriot is the most interesting of the contributions. It sets out to discover on the basis of the real as opposed to the accidental differences between the Western and the Eastern methods of painting the inner meaning of their divergence. The attempt to create an illusion of reality to the eye, to copy Nature, which was so long a considerable part of the occidental theory is regarded as a passing phase for which the introduction of oil paint gave the occasion, an accidental and not at all an essential difference: European art at the beginning was free from it and is now rejecting this defect or this limitation. Nor are other details of method, such as the use of cast shadows as opposed to a reliance on outline, the real difference. None of these things involve necessarily an illusion of reality, and even where that inartistic fiction does not intervene, as in the Italian fresco and tempera painting and in oil painting that reduces shadow to a minimum and relies on outline, the fundamental difference between the East and the West remains constant and unalterable. The fundamental difference is that the Eastern artist paints in two and the European in three dimensions. Eastern painting suggests depth only by successive planes of distance; the Western artist uses perspective, and while the use of perspective to create an optical illusion is an error, its emphasis on depth as a mental conception extends the opportunities of expressing truth. It is in any case in the use of the third dimension that there comes in the true and essential difference.

The writer then attempts to link up this divergence with the concepts of the two continents with regard to life. He hazards the suggestion that the separate planes of a Chinese landscape correspond to “the doctrine of successive incarnations, of separate planes of existence, each the opportunity of³ its own virtues”, and the occidental artist's “active exploration and exploitation of the ground between the planes of distance” corresponds to the West's view of this life as a continual discipline, the sole opportunity for salvation, a battle to be won now and here, and of “material facts not as evils in themselves and opportunities for asceticism and renunciation, but as tests of the spirit, good or bad according as they are used rightly or wrongly”, — an active exploration as opposed to a passive acceptance. I find it impossible to accept this ingenious idea: it strikes me as a little fanciful in itself, but in any case it is based on a misunderstanding of the Eastern mind. The usual Western error is made of confusing one strong tendency of Eastern philosophy for the whole of its thinking and a view of reincarnation is attributed to the East that is not its real view. The successive rebirths are not to the Eastern mind separate planes of existence, each independently the opportunity of its own virtues, but a closely connected sequence and the action of each life determines the frame and basic opportunities of the following birth. It is a rhythm of progression in which the present is not cut out from but one with the past and future. Life and action are here too and not only in the West tests of the spirit, good or bad according as they are used rightly or wrongly, and it is and must be always this present life that is of immediate and immense importance, though it is not and cannot in reason be final or irreparable: for salvation may be won now, but if there is failure, the soul has still its future chances. As a matter of historical fact the great periods of Eastern art were not periods of a passive acceptance of life. In India, the cradle of these philosophies, they coincided with an active exploration of the material universe through physical science and a strong insistence on life, on its government, on the exploration of its every detail, on the call of even its most sensuous and physical attractions. The literature and art of India are not at all a dream of renunciation and the passive acceptance of things, but actively concerned with life, though not as exteriorly as the art of the West or with the same terrestrial limitation of the view. It is there that we have to seek for the root of the divergence, not so much in the intellectual idea as in a much subtler spiritual difference.

The difference is that the Western artist, — the Western mind generally, — is led to insist on the physical as the first fact and the determinant, as it is indeed in vital truth and practice, and he has got hold of that side of the truth and in relation to it sees all the rest. He not only stands firmly on the earth, but he has his head in the terrestrial atmosphere and looks up from it to higher planes. The Eastern has his foot on earth, but his head is in the psychical and spiritual realms and it is their atmosphere that affects his vision of the earth. He regards the material as the first fact only in appearance and not in reality: matter is to him real only as a mould and opportunity of spiritual being and the psychical region is an intermediary through which he can go back from the physical to the spiritual truth. This it is that conditions his whole artistic method and makes him succeed best in proportion as he brings the spiritual and psychical truth to illuminate and modify the material form. If he were to take to oil painting and the third dimension, I imagine that he would still before long break out of the physical limitations and try to make the use of the third a bridge to a fourth and psychical or to a fifth and spiritual dimension. That in fact seems to be very much what the latest Western art itself is trying to do. But it does not seem to me in some of its first efforts to have got very high beyond the earth attraction. The cubist and the futurist idea have the appearance of leaving the physical view only to wander astray among what one is tempted to call in theosophic language astral suggestions, a geometry or a movement vision of the world just above or behind ours. It is just so, one imagines, that a mind moving in those near supramaterial regions would distortedly half see physical persons and things. Mr. Ferguson's⁴ portrait is of another kind, but while perfectly though not terrestrially rational in its rhythm, seems to be inspired from a superior sphere of the same regions. It is a powerful work and there is a strong psychical truth of a kind but the spirit, the suggestions, the forms are neither of heaven nor of earth. The impression given is the materialization⁵ of a strong and vivid astral dream. The difference between this and the psychic manner of the East will at once appear to anyone who turns to the much less powerful but gracious and subtle Indian painting in the first number.

Another article of some interest on “Art and History” by John M. Thorburn gives us much writing in an attractive style and some suggestive ideas, but there is a soft mistiness about both as yet too common in attempts at intuitive thinking and writing which makes it a little difficult to disentangle the ideas and get at their relation and sequence. The thought turns around rather than deals with national temperament and its shaping influence in art and there is a comparison in this respect between the French and English⁶ temperament on one side and the German or the Russian on the other. But the attempt does not get deep. The line taken is that the distinguishing characteristic of the French and English mind are the critical faculty, humour, a sense for character and for the common as well as the uncommon, for detail as well as principle, a power of social adaptation or readaptation, the instinct in the English to carry on, in the French to change and reconstruct, and all these are connected together and are the fruit of Graeco-Roman civilisation. The writer thinks that the Graeco-Roman tradition and its true development in the modern world is the only saving ethical and political ideal, at least for Europe, — a salutary saving clause. At the same time he has found his highest artistic satisfaction in German music and rates the relative power of Russian literature and possibly the music above the recent artistic work of Europe, and he is perplexed by the coexistence of this superiority with Russia's social instability and with Germany's lack of literary humour and of the sense for character. And, though this reserve is not expressly made, Germany cannot be taxed with lack of the social constructive faculty, seeing that it was the German who in far back times developed the feudal system and has more recently perfected the modern industrial order. And yet Germany is distinctly outside the Graeco-Roman tradition. He discovers that Germany lacks the reflective critical faculty, that there is “something in the German artistic and philosophical temperament at variance⁷ with social good”, “Strangely hostile to the ethical and artistic ideal of Greece or the administrative and harmonising genius of Rome.” Germany is entirely instinctive, at the mercy of her temperament, unable to liberate herself from it, instinctive in her music, her philosophy too an instinctive movement, reflection never able to get outside itself or even to feel the need to do so. As for Russia, hers is the kind of art that is an expression of the division and breaches of human society rather than of its wholeness or its peace, an art born of Nature's error and not like the French and English of her truth. It seems, however, that the art born of Nature's error, of her suffering and ill health is more wonderful and alluring than the art born of her ordered ways.

After all is said, the truth of Nature is only a partial and defective truth and her error only a partial error: there is no necessary harmony at least in the finite between what we value as goodness and what we value as beauty. And the solution of all the contradiction is to be sought in the “experience of the effort of the finite spirit to come to a fuller consciousness of itself or of a universe that only uses that spirit as an instrument towards its own self-knowledge, self-perfection or self-interpretation”. The conclusion is unexceptionable, but the line of thought leading to it stumbles needlessly in pursuit of a false clue.

The article is interesting chiefly as an indication of the perplexity of a certain type of European mind hesitating and held back in the grasp of the old that is dying and yet feeling the call of things that draw towards the future. The superstition of the perfect excellence of the Graeco-Roman tradition as rendered by England and France — more strictly the Latinised or semiLatinised mind and the Renaissance tradition — survives; but as a matter of fact that tradition or what remains of it is a dead shell. The Time-Spirit has left it, retaining no doubt what it needs for its ulterior aims, and is passing on to far other things. In that evolution Germany and Russia among European nations have taken a leading place. Germany has failed to go the whole way, because to a strong but coarse and heavy vital force and a strict systematising scientific intellect she could not successfully bring in the saving power of intuition. Her music indeed was very great and revolutionised the artistic mind of Europe, not because it was instinctive, but because it was intuitive, — because it brought in a profound intuitive feeling and vision to uplift through the conquered difficulties of a complex harmony a large and powerful intelligence. Her philosophy was at first a very great but too drily intellectual statement of truths that get their living meaning only in the intuitive experience, but afterwards in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as in Wagner it developed the intuitive vision and led to a deep change in European thinking. But the life of Germany remained still unaffected by her higher mind, well-organised, systematic but vitally and aesthetically crude, and she has failed to respond to the deepest forces of the future. The stream has turned aside to Russia, Russia deeply intuitive in her emotional and psychic being, moved through her sensibilities and aiding by a sensitive fineness there a yet imperfect but rapidly evolving intuitivity of the intelligence. It is clear enough that the labour of the soul and mind of Russia has not arrived at victory and harmony, but her malady is the malady and suffering of a great gestation, and her social instability the condition of an effort towards the principle of a greater order than the self-satisfied imperfection of the GraecoRoman tradition or of the modern social principle. The martyrdom of Russia might from this point of view be regarded as a vicarious sacrifice for the sin of obstinacy in imperfection, the sin of self-retardation of the entire race. It is at any rate by some large and harmonising view of this kind and not by any paradox of superior values of good and truth resulting in inferior values of beauty and negative values of no good and no truth flowering in superior values of beauty that we are likely best to understand both the effort of the finite spirit and the effort of the universe through it towards its own self-perception and self-interpretation.

The only other article of any length is a second instalment of Babu Bhagawan⁸ Das's “Krishna, a Study in the theory of Avataras”, which contains much interesting matter and especially some very striking citations from that profound and beautiful work, the Bhagawat Purana: but the renderings given are rather modernising paraphrases than translations. There is a brief essay or rather the record of a reflection by Mr. Cousins on “Symbol and Metaphor in Art”, quite the best thing in thought and style in the number: a translation by Mr. V. V. S. Aiyar of some verses of Tiruvalluvar done with grace and a fluid warmth and colour — perhaps too much fluidity and grace to render rightly the terse and pregnant force that is supposed, and surely with justice, to be the essential quality of the poetic style of the Kurral: a dialogue in poetic prose, “The Vision”, by Harindranath Chattopadhyay, in which we get imagination, beauty and colour of phrase and a moving sentiment, — but not yet, I think, all the originality and sureness of touch of the poet when he uses his own already mastered instrument, — and another prose poem by V. Chakkarai inspired by Rabindranath and executed with a sufficient grace. All these together make up an admirable number.

The closing portion of the magazine is devoted to notes and criticisms. Several closely printed pages are given to a critical review of Professor S. Radhakrishnan's work on the Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore by Mr. J. B. Raju. The criticism gives unhappily, in spite of its interest, an impression of ability very badly used, for it is throughout what a criticism of this kind should not be, censorious, hostile, bitterly incisive and sometimes almost brutal in the inimical tone of its phrases. A philosophic discussion should surely be conducted in a graver and more impersonal tone. In addition there is a criticism by dissection so discursively and incoherently minute that it is impossible to form a coherent idea of the thought the work animadverted upon actually does develop. I have not read the book in question, but Professor Radhakrishnan is well-known as a perfectly competent philosophic critic and thinker and it is impossible to believe that anything he has written is, as this criticism constantly suggests, a mere mass of imbecile inconsequence. I gather that his offence is to have done exactly what he should have done, that is, to represent the thought of Tagore, — who is a poet and not a metaphysical dialectician but an intuitive seer, — as an intuitive whole: the dry-as-dust intellectual formalism of analysis demanded of him by his critic would have been in such a subject grotesquely out of place. A still greater offence is that he has endorsed the poet's exaltation of the claims of intuition as superior, at least in a certain field, to those of the intellect. Mr. Raju seems to think that this claim consecrates “a mistaken and obsolete psychology”, the “infatuation of a certain glamour which in the popular imagination hangs⁹ round the ancient words, mysticism and intuition”. Mistaken, if you choose to think so; but obsolete? What then are we to make of Bergson's intuition, James' cosmic consciousness, Eucken's superconscient, the remarkable trend towards mysticism of recent scientists, mathematicians, thinkers, the still more remarkable speculations of contemporary Russian philosophers? These men at least are not irresponsible poets or incompetent dupes of the imagination, but psychologists of the first rank and the most original contemporary thinkers in the philosophic field. Mr. Raju's defence of the claims of the reason is well enough written, but it is founded on contentions that once were commonplaces but are now very disputable assertions. Indeed, if the most recent thought has any value, he is himself open to the retort of his own remark that he is the victim of a mistaken and obsolete psychology. Mr. Raju may be right, the modern psychologists and philosophers may be wrong, but the time has passed when the claims of intuition could be dismissed with this high, disdainful lightness. The subject, however, is too large to be touched at all within my present limits: I hope to return to it hereafter.

The review contains some poetry but, Mr. R. C. Bonnerji's gracious and cultured verses apart, all is of the aggressively modern type. There are a number of poems taken or quoted from the American journal Poetry that are one and all of the same stereotyped kind of free verse. Eleanor Hammond's “Transition” turns upon a pretty emotion and Evelyn Scott's “Fear” on an idea with fine possibilities, but as usual in this kind the style has no trace of any poetic turn or power but only a tamely excited and childlikely direct primitive sincerity and the rhythm is more aggressively prosaic than any honest prose rhythm could manage to be. C. L.'s “All was his” is good in thought and conscientious in style but the rhythm is hopelessly stumbling and lame: but then perhaps it is written on some new metrical principle, — one never knows in these days. The noteworthy poem of the number is Henry Ruffy's “London Nocturne”, placed, I presume as a study in significant contrasts, opposite Mukul Dey's drawing of Tagore. It is an admirable specimen of the now dominant vitalistic or “life” school of modern poetry. Personally, this school does not appeal to me. Its method seems to be to throw quite ordinary and obvious things violently at our eyes and their sense effects and suggestions at our midriffs and to underline the effects sometimes by an arresting baldness and poverty of presentation and sometimes on the contrary by a sensational exaggeration of image or phrase. Thus the poet tells us in one luminous line that

A policeman's clumsy tread goes slowly by,

and in another makes us hear

Another policeman trying doors this way,

a “car of Juggernaut”

Tuff-tuffing, clattering, clashing, chaos-crowned,

a muddled clatter, voices confused, a shrieking whistle, solemn clock strokes “muttering ere they die,” that

Fade like a halo or a dying sigh,

another motor “humming a bee refrain”, with its snorting, trumping, disdainful speed horn

Striking the silence like a flash of flame,

a luckless harlot, a heavy horse hoof, the clank clank of a cab, silent wheels, jingling harness, and this succession of sounds leads up to the vision of a sly slinking white-face dawn, wan, thin and “sickly ill”, a slight-formed sylph

Drawing her veil to show a death-pale form.

A feverishly acute impression of a London night is forced on the sense soul in me, but this poetry does not get beyond or give anything more: the poet's policemen and tuff-tuffing clattering crowned chaos of a motor car carry no meaning to me beyond the dreary fact of their existence and the suggestion of a sick melancholy of insomnia. But it seems to me that poetry ought to get beyond and should give something more. I do not deny the possibility of a kind of power in this style and am not blind to the aim at a strong identifying vision through something intuitive in the sense, a felt exactness of outward things, but an inartistic and often unpoetic method cannot be saved by a good intention. Still this is the kind of writing that holds the present in England and America and it demands its place in the purpose of the magazine. I hope however that we shall get often a relief in strains that go beyond the present to a greater poetic future, — let us say, like the exquisite rhythm and perfect form of beauty of Harindranath's poem in the first number.

All criticism of thought or personal preference apart, almost everything in this number is good in matter and interesting in its own kind. “Shama'a” already stands first among Indian magazines in the English tongue for sustained literary quality and distinction of tone and interest.

² 2003 ed.: Fergusson

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³ 2003 ed.: for

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⁴ 2003 ed.: Fergusson’s

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⁵ 2003 ed.: materialisation

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⁶ 2003 ed.: and the English

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⁷ 2003 ed.: temperament that is at variance

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⁸ 2003 ed.: Bhagavan

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⁹ 2003 ed.: still hangs

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