Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Poetry and Art
SABCL - Volume 27
Part 3. Literature, Art, Beauty and Yoga
Section 1. Appreciation of Poetry and the Arts
Comparison of the Arts
Each Art Has Its Own Province [1]
I fear I must
disappoint you. I am not going to pass the Gods through a competitive
examination and assign a highest place to one and lower places to others. What
an idea! Each has his or her own province on the summits and what is the
necessity of putting them in rivalry with each other? It is a sort of Judgment
of Paris you want to impose on me? Well, but what became of Paris and Troy? You
want me to give the crown or the apple to Music and enrage the Goddesses of
Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Embroidery, all the Nine Muses, so that they
will kick at our publications and exhibitions and troop off to other places? We
shall have to build in the future — what then shall we do if the Goddess of
Architecture turns severely and says, “I am an inferior Power, am I? Go and ask
your Nirod to build your house with his beloved music!”
Your test of precedence — universal appeal — is all
wrong. I don’t know that it is true, in the first place. Some kind of sound
called music appeals to everybody, but has really good music a universal appeal?
And, speaking of arts, more people go to the theatre or read fiction than go to
the opera or a concert. What becomes then of the superior universality of music,
even in the cheapest sense of universality? Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack Room
Ballads exercises a more universal appeal than was ever reached by Milton or
Keats — we will say nothing of writers like Blake or Francis Thompson; a band on
the pier at a seaside resort will please more people than a great piece of music
with the orchestration conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. In a world of gods it
might be true that the highest made the most universal appeal but here in a
world of beasts and men (you bring in the beasts — why not play to Bushy and try
how she responds?) it is usually the inferior
things that have the more general if not quite universal appeal. On the other
hand the opposite system you suggest (the tables turned upside down — the least
universal and most difficult appeal makes the greatest art) would also have its
dangers. At that rate we should have to concede that the cubist and abstract
painters had reached the highest art possible, only rivalled by the up to date
modernist poets of whom it has been said that their works are not at all either
read or understood by the public, are read and understood only by the poet
himself, and are read without being understood by his personal friends and
admirers.
When you speak of direct appeal, you are perhaps
touching something true. Technique does not come in — for although to have a
complete and expert judgment or appreciation you must know the technique not
only in music and painting where it is more difficult, but in poetry and
architecture also, it is something else and not that kind of judgment of which
you are speaking. It is perhaps true that music goes direct to the intuition and
feeling with the least necessity of using the thinking mind with its strongly
limiting conceptions as a self-imposed middleman, while painting and sculpture
do need it and poetry still more. At that rate music would come first,
architecture next, then sculpture and painting, poetry last. I am aware that
Housman posits nonsense as the essence of pure poetry and considers its appeal
to be quite direct — not to the soul but to somewhere about the stomach. But
then there is hardly any pure poetry in this world and the little there is is
still mélangé with at least a homeopathic dose of intellectual meaning.
But again if I admit this thesis of excellence by directness, I shall be getting
myself into dangerous waters. For modern painting has become either cubist or
abstract and it claims to have got rid of mental representation and established
in art the very method of music; it paints not the object but the truth behind
the object by the use of pure line and colour and geometrical form which is the
very basis of all forms or else by figures that are not representations but
significances. For instance a modern painter wishing to make a portrait of you
will now paint at the top a clock surrounded by three triangles, 
below them a chaos of rhomboids and at the bottom two table castors to
represent your feet and he will put underneath this powerful design, “Portrait
of Nirod”. Perhaps your soul will leap up in answer to its direct appeal and
recognise at once the truth behind the object, behind your vanished physical
self,— you will greet your psychic being or your Atman or at least your inner
physical or vital being. Perhaps also you won’t. Poetry also seems to be
striving towards the same end by the same means — the getting away from mind
into the depths of life or, as the profane might put it, arriving at truth and
beauty through ugliness and unintelligibility. From that you will perhaps deduce
that the attempt of painting and poetry to do what music alone can do easily and
directly without these acrobatics is futile because it is contrary to their
nature — which proves your thesis that music is the highest art because most
direct in its appeal to the soul and the feelings. Maybe — or maybe not; as the
Jains put it, syād vā na syād vā.
I have written so much, you will see, in order to say
nothing — or at least to avoid your attempt at putting me in an embarrassing
dilemma. Q.E.F.
6 January 1936