Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Philosophers, Intellectuals, Novelists and Musicians

Was Shaw a Mystic? [2]

I admit that in the real, experiential sense Shaw is not a mystic, though definitely religious at the core — in an unconventional way of his own. Nor does he belong to the company of the giant abstractionists. He is a philosopher only in as much as his outlook on basic realities is, unlike as in poets, sufficiently argued and interpreted by him in relation to general issues of philosophy and life, and a mystic philosopher only from the western view-point.

At that rate anybody is a mystic or a philosopher and these two words have no longer any value. 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.

The right of Plato [to be considered a mystic] is regarded as beyond question; Spinoza with his “amor intellectualis Dei” is, outside the Catholic Church, also hailed as such; and even Kant I have found looked upon in the same light. In our own day it is common, I believe, to refer to Bergson or Bradley as mystical.

Regarded, looked upon by whom? It was not so in my time at least in Europe. Plato was never called a mystic then; Hegel was regarded as a transcendentalist but no mystic; if you had called Kant or Spinoza mystics people would have stared. To believe in the Absolute or something metaphysical or supraphysical does not make one a mystic philosopher, nor does belief in the élan vital or a dry and geometric amor intellectualis Dei. The Neo-Platonists and the Neo-Hegelians stand on the border. If all these are the Western view-point packed in one mystic box, it is a very new Western view-point, a new language of confusion in this age of confusion, I suppose. It must be like the idea of spirituality in the minds of many people in the West in which mind and spirit are the same thing and to have a fine feeling or an idealistic thought is the very height of spirituality.

I should like to know whether, in your opinion, Shaw comes off badly in comparison with Wells or Chesterton or Russell as a thinker. And do you mind expatiating on Shaw as a dramatist and a writer of prose?

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 contemporary fame; Shaw has more chance of lasting, but there is no certain certitude, because he has no atom of constructive power. He has constructed nothing large, but he has criticised most things. At every 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 view-points 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 purely 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. His personality may help him, as Johnson was helped by his personality to live.

Shaw is not a dramatist; I don’t think he ever wrote a 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, a few 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.

May 1932