Sri Aurobindo

Early Cultural Writings

(1890 — 1910)

Part Two. On Literature
Bankim Chandra Chatterji

IV. His Versatility

Whenever a literary man gives proof of a high capacity in action people always talk about it as if a miracle had happened. The vulgar theory is that worldly abilities are inconsistent with the poetic genius. Like most vulgar theories it is a conclusion made at a jump from a few superficial appearances. The inference to be drawn from a sympathetic study of the lives of great thinkers and great writers is that except in certain rare cases versatility is one condition of genius. Indeed the literary ability may be said to contain all the others, and the more so when it takes the form of criticism or of any art, such as the novelist’s, which proceeds principally from criticism. Goethe in Germany, Shakespeare, Fielding and Matthew Arnold in England are notable instances. Even where practical abilities seem wanting, a close study will often reveal their existence rusting in a lumber-room of the man’s mind. The poet and the thinker are helpless in the affairs of the world, because they choose to be helpless: they sacrifice the practical impulse in their nature, that they may give full expression to the imaginative or speculative impulse; they choose to burn the candle at one end and [not] at the other, but for all that the candle has two ends and not one. Bankim, the greatest of novelists, had the versatility developed to its highest expression. Scholar, poet, essayist, novelist, philosopher, lawyer, critic, official, philologian and religious innovator, — the whole world seemed to be shut up in his single brain. At first sight he looks like a bundle of contradictions. He had a genius for language and a gift for law; he could write good official papers and he could write a matchless prose; he could pass examinations and he could root out an organised tyranny; he could concern himself with the largest problems of metaphysics and with the smallest details of word-formation: he had a feeling for the sensuous facts of life and a feeling for the delicate spiritualities of religion: he could learn grammar and he could write poetry.

What shall we say in the presence of this remarkable versatility? Over-borne by the pomp of it and the show, shall we set it down as an adjunct of intellectual kingliness? Yes, to have it is an adjunct of intellectual kingliness, but to give expression to it is an intellectual mistake. To give impartial expression to all your gifts is to miss your vocation. Bankim was never so far led astray as that. His province was literature, prose literature, and he knew it. His lyrics are enchanting, but few; metaphysics he followed at the end of his life and law at the beginning; and he used scholarship and philology, simply as other great writers have used them, to give subtlety of suggestion and richness of word-colour to his literary style. Even in the province of prose literature, where he might have worked out his versatility to advantage, he preferred to specialise. He never stepped unpardonably out of his province, but he was occasionally led astray by this or that lure to allow small drains on his fund of energy; and so far as he did so, he sinned against his own soul. The one great and continuous drain was the tax put upon him by official drudgery. Under the morbid and wasteful conditions of middle-class life in India genius, when not born in the purple, has put before it, like the fair Rosamund of Norman romance, a choice between two methods of suicide, the Services and the Law. It must either take the poisoned bowl or the dagger. And in this limited circle of professions the Educational Service with its system of respites and remissions, and the Executive Service with its indirect rather than direct tax on the pure intellect, present, it may be, the points of least repulsion. But they are none the less a fearful drain because they are, under existing circumstances, necessary.

In this versatility Bankim was only a type of the intellectual Hindu. This gift, at once a blessing and a curse, is the most singular characteristic of those two Hindu races, which have the destinies of the country in their keeping. It is the evidence of our high blood, our patent of nobility among the nations; for it comes of the varied mental experience of our forefathers, of the nation’s three thousand years of intellectual life. But it is at the same time a rock ahead, of which the Hindu genius has yet to pilot itself clear. To find your vocation and keep to it, that is not indeed a showy, but it is a simple and solid rule of life. We however prefer to give an impartial expression to all our gifts, forgetting that the mind is as mortal and as much subject to wear and tear as any perishable thing, forgetting that specialism is one condition of the highest accomplishment, forgetting that our stock of energy is limited and that what we expend in one direction, we lose in another. We insist on burning the candle at both ends. This spirit appears in our system of public instruction, the most ingeniously complete machine for murder that human stupidity ever invented, and murder not only of a man’s body but of a man’s soul, of that sacred fire of individuality in him which is far holier and more precious than this mere mortal breath. It appeared too with melancholy effects in the literary fate of Kashinath Telang. It was one reason why he, a man of such large abilities, the most considerable genius a highly intellectual people has produced, yet left nothing to which the world will return with unfailing delight. Telang, it is true, worked mainly in English, a language he had learned; and in a language you have learned, you may write graciously, correctly, pleasingly, but you will never attain to the full stature of your genius. But it was a yet more radical mistake that he, whose power was pre-eminently literary, as any eye trained to these things can see that it was, yet allowed it to run in every direction except the very one that nature had marked out for it. Bankim was more fortunate. He wrote in his own beautiful mother-tongue, his best work was literary and his immense originality would in any case have forced its way out. But one cannot think without a pang of the many delightful master-pieces he might have brought into his garner, if he had had leisure to work single-heartedly in the field of his richest harvests. The body of work he gave us in nearly forty years of intellectual activity amounts to ten novels, two critical works on religion and some scattered literature. Small in quantity, it is pure gold in quality. And it may be that in no case would he have written much. Nature gives us quartz profusely and mixed alloy in abundance, but pure gold only in rare parcels and infinitesimal portions.

Earlier edition of this work: Sri Aurobindo Birth Century Library: Set in 30 volumes.- Volume 3.- The Harmony of Virtue: Early Cultural Writings — 1890-1910.- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Asram, 1972.- 489 p.