11
A resume and a look forward - the nature of poetry and its spiritual consummation -a defence of mysticism - the paramount significance of Romanticism's poetry of the Spirit - spiritual poetry and two styles: Classical and Romantic
In rounding off our survey we may cite a passage by Havelock Ellis on three famous personalities of the stage: it indicates with a fine imagination some essential qualities of the three strands we have traced in our subject.
"The word classic suggests to some people the coolly artificial, the conventionally unreal. Ristori was at the farthest remove from that. She was the adorable revelation of what the classic really means: the attainment of the essential in dramatic art by the road of a simplicity and a naturalness from which all superfluity and extravagance have fallen away, so that every movement is under control and every gesture significant. In classic art such as this, simplicity is one with dignity, and the last utterance of poignant intensity is brought within reach. Salvini was very different. He was not classic. He carried human passion to the utmost limits of expression on the basis of a robust physical force, and seemed to have an immense reservoir of emotion to feed his art. It was not his restraint that impressed one but the superb and never forced expansion of his energy. And finally there was Chaliapin, neither the classic perfection of art, nor the exuberant embodiment of romantic emotional energy, but with the seal on him of a serene and mysterious power that was aloof from the world."
We may make use of Ellis's impressionism without committing ourselves literally to its classification of the three artists concerned or to its ascription to them of the qualities defined. The Classicism of the Graeco-Roman poets as well as of Dante and Milton, Corneille and Racine, is the art Ellis attributes to Ristori. The Elizabethans - in one mode Marlowe
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and his fellow-dramatists, in the other Spenser and, in both, Shakespeare - practise what he sees as Salvini's art. The peak-point of the later Romanticism, the English poetry of the time of Wordsworth, carries the art that he conceives to be Cha-liapin's. For it passes beyond the cadre not only of Classicism but also of Elizabethan poetry. And this it does not merely because it is a Romanticism of the creative Intelligence rather than of the creative Life-force - an Intelligence differently coloured than the Classical, far more complex and brooding as well as instinct with "things not easily expressible". It exceeds the old cadre also because it lives really not by its moods and motives that are Romantic in the modern way or with an affinity to the Elizabethan, so much as, in Sri Aurobindo's words,1 "by its greater and more characteristic element, by its half spiritual turn, by Wordsworth's force of ethical thought and communion with Nature, by Shelley's imaginative transcendentalism, Keats' worship of Beauty, Byron's Titanism and force of personality, Coleridge's supernaturalism or, as it should more properly be called, his eye for other nature, Blake's command of the inner psychic realms." Fundamentally neither Classical nor Romantic, it blends the Classical and Romantic moods and motives, manners and techniques, functions partly from the plane of the old Classical poets and seems to catch that of the old Romantic ones by plunging the creative Intelligence into intense imaginative emotion - and achieves its own individuality most through raising by both imaginative emotionalism and a subtilisation of Classicism's inspired reason its modern complex curiosity of mind into a directness, serene and mysterious, of spiritual power exceeding the world we know in sensation, feeling and thought. It does not reject this world, it embraces and transforms its appearances and values -but from within and beyond it; it is a pervasion of Nature and life by a vision and experience aloof from their externalities, a revelation indeed of these externalities as the body of the Divine yet by an in-drawn or up-poised kindling with the Divine's secret consciousness.
No doubt, the nebulous and indefinite went considerably
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with that kindling because of the age's unreadiness for the strange power that seized the English Romantics. A more precise intellectual age had to intervene and even an extreme stress on the objective and material had to fall through scientific development and an exaggerated turn take place towards the crudely vitalistic - in order that a more mind-touched as well as matter-tinged foundation might be prepared for a return of the spiritual light to concretise in our being and in our literature its patterns of supernal Beauty and Truth. Yes, the mysticism of the English Romantics had many defects due either to flaws in their own temperaments or to shortcomings in the Zeitgeist. Again, the poetry it created did not sustain itself at such length as did that of Classicism or what the old Romanticism had produced: therefore none of its poets can be taken cumulatively as the equal of Homer or Dante, Shakespeare or even Spenser. However, its best work is genuinely of the first order - and the significance of that work is paramount by reason of the very nature, as explained by Sri Aurobindo, of poetry.
To quote Sri Aurobindo:2 "Poetry, even when it is dominated by intellectual tendency and motive, cannot really live and work by intellect alone; it is not created nor wholly shaped by reason and judgment, but is an intuitive seeing and an inspired hearing. But intuition and inspiration are not only spiritual in their essence, they are the characteristic means of all spiritual vision and utterance; they are rays from a greater and intenser Light than the tempered clarity of our intellectual understanding. They may be turned fruitfully to a use which is not their last or most intrinsic purpose, - used, in poetry, to give a deeper and more luminous force and a heightened beauty to the perceptions of outward life or to the inner but still surface movements of emotion and passion or the power of thought to perceive certain individual and universal truths which enlighten or which raise to a greater meaning the sensible appearances of the inner and outer life of Nature and man. But every power in the end finds itself drawn towards its own proper home and own highest capacity, and the spiritual
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faculties of hearing and seeing must climb at last to the expression of things spiritual and eternal and their power and working in temporal things and must find in that interpretation their own richest account, largest and most satisfied action, purest acme of native capacity. An ideal and spiritual poetry revealing the spirit in itself and in things, the unseen in the seen or above and behind it, unveiling ranges of existence which the physical mind ignores, pointing man himself to capacities of godhead in being, truth, beauty, power, joy which are beyond the highest of his common or his yet realised values of existence, is the last potentiality of this creative, interpretative power of the human mind. When the eye of the poet has seen life externally or with a more vital inwardness, has risen to the clarities and widenesses of a thought which intimately perceives and understands it, when his word has caught some revealing speech and rhythm of what he has seen, much has been seized, but not the whole possible field of vision; this other and greater realm still remains open for a last transcendence."
Now, the best work of modem Romanticism embodies for the first time in occidental literature the greater light falling with some sort of directness upon the poetic mind or, rather, the direct utterance of that light takes place on one side of the varicoloured phenomenon that is modem Romanticism. Here Romanticism, properly speaking, ceases, but we may continue to employ that name because some tendency towards that side is present, mixed with several others, in most of the remaining parts. It is with an eye to this tendency that Baudelaire seems to have defined the Romantic as not only "colour" and "intimacy" but also "spirituality" and "aspiration towards the infinite".
The soul acting, however elementarily on the whole, in its own right, with an explicitness of spiritual substance and style,an immediate self-expression of the supra-intellectual, rather than in terms proper to the physical mind, vital mind, intellectual mind: that is the reason for considering the significance of Romantic poetry paramount. In this poetry both the content and the form, such as the bardic urge throughout its history
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has secretly been driving towards, are pioneered in some mass. So it opens, even if intermittently, to the poetic art not only the largest territory native to it but also the perfect greatness of its own function.
Of course, one who fails to appreciate that the language of poetry moves ever to "seize in a peculiarly intimate light of knowledge by a spiritual identity"3 the inmost being of that which it is missioned to utter - one who looks askance at all mysticism would not agree. He would join hands with that critic of fine aesthetic taste and fascinating scholarship but limited psychological insight, whom we have often mentioned and who has little sympathy with the mystically orientated imagination of a Romantic like Coleridge and with this Romantic's metaphysical distinction between Imagination and Fancy. Apropos of Coleridge's letter to Thelwall in 1797 - "The universe itself, what but an immense heap of little things?... My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something great, something one and indivisible. And it is only in the faith of that, that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns, give me the sense of sublimity or majesty!But in this faith all things counterfeit infinity" - apropos of these words Lucas4 has written: "To minds without this mystical yearning it seems as strange to want the whole universe to have one essence as to want it to have only one colour - say, bright pink. It is no doubt possible to believe that the world about us is the Book of God, in which all phenomena are but symbols of Him; the Fancy playing with those symbols as a child that cannot read, the Imagination reading them as wholes by which in moments of vision it communicates with Him. It is possible to believe it: but why should one? Because of the wish to; and if one has not the faintest wish? I believe, though it cannot be proved, that this mystic eagerness for unity is due ultimately to a loss of nerve. As man has grown more individual and intelligent, he has grown more divided and solitary. Men are not lemmings -
Alone the sun rises, and alone
Spring the great streams.
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But at moments, realising that 'nous sommes irremediable-rnent seuls', the mind grows sick and giddy and runs for refuge to the mystic's trance - or the totalitarian state."
The sarcasm about "one essence" and "only one colour - say, bright pink" - is utterly jejune. The Unity for which Coleridge ached and which Imagination as distinct from Fancy was supposed to discern or achieve did not abrogate multi-plicity and difference: in fact, Coleridge emphatically declared that without dissolving or submerging them the Unity reigned. And, after all, the intuition of such Unity is at the back of all our thinkings and doings. Do we not regard all men as partaking of a common essence of human nature? Do we not regard even an individual as somehow integrating a thousand different things into a single-toned essential being? Even a work of art is never appreciated unless a basic all-unifying essentiality is perceived: the more Classical a work the more evident and explicit, though not more potent or precious, this essentiality. And while saying this we imply too an essence of Classicism or Romanticism enabling us to put various apparently dissimilar poems under one head or the other. Whether we hold atheistic and materialistic views or the philosophy of minds like Coleridge, we always proceed as if a Unity existed and acted within diversities without annulling them. It is only extreme mystics of the One who metaphysicise about and seek for a featureless cosmos-annihilating "bright pink". Romantic mysticism gloried, on the contrary, in a million shades and even gave them the utmost prominence it could while sensing within them what Shelley termed "one harmonious soul of many a soul".
To equate mysticism with "loss of nerve" is sheer prejudice. No doubt, Coleridge happened to be a man who produced the impression of suffering from such a loss - but when he wrote that letter and The Ancient Mariner and the first part of Christabel he was full of life and had not surrendered his will to laudanum: his vitality was almost always a-dance, as Hazlitt and others have recorded. Even Kubla Khan, the poem that carne to him during an opium dream, was penned at a time
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when his nerves were very far indeed from being enfeebled by drug-taking. To describe Wordsworth at the peak of his power as running, sick and giddy, for refuge to the trance of the mystic is simply to indulge in nonsense. If ever there was a man who combined a superb sensitivity with an austere and poised strength of character and an innate happiness, it was the poet who spoke of being again and again visited by "that serene and blessed mood" when
We are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul...
And as for Shelley, although he sometimes described himself as one who
can scarce uplift
The weight of the superincumbent hour,
he has also indicated the true situation of a soul whose ardours were so great that nothing prized by ordinary mortals could satisfy the desires and hopes of a force in him like the "wild West Wind" and who therefore felt baulked. Has he not cried to that Wind,
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud,
and has he not asked with intense imagination that elemental fury to bear him towards fulfilment:
Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! -
and it was no wan weakling who declared:
my spirit's bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given.
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What about Blake? Many in his own day considered him mad, but nobody thought him a sick or feeble madman. We may remember how he forcibly ejected from his garden the dragoon Scholfield who had answered him impertinently and how he had threatened to knock out his eyes. Nor did Blake stop there. When the dragoon, outside the garden, started swearing and giving blows, Blake took him again by the elbows from behind and pushed him forwards down the road about fifty yards - the soldier all the while raging and cursing and endeavouring to turn round and strike Blake. The verdict of our own time on Blake in the point concerning us is well summed up by T. Earle Welby:5 "Few men have been so sane or made so much of a success of life on their own terms. He chose to live chiefly in the other world, but he always knew what he was about in this; his just contempt for mere reason did not prevent him from following it in worldly matters. And as he lived a busy, purposeful, happy life so he died the happiest of deaths, making the rafters of his poor room ring with the songs of joy he improvised and sang on his death-bed."
Even Keats who was once supposed to have been snuffed out by a critic's article and to have languished into extinction with hopeless love is now known to have been a plucky man quite ready to face his own shortcomings and to strive energetically to surmount them, a man with a fund of humour and great power of endurance and even pugnacious physical courage. His early sentimental vein has nothing essentially to do with the mysticism of Beauty with which his Endymion is sensuously a-wash. Two of the celebrated Odes, with their stronger fibre, have the same mystical tinge and the unfinished Hyperion, where the discovery of the divine Idea, Power and living norm of Beauty creating, sustaining and developing the universe is taken up more explicitly, shows him at his strong. est. To confuse with loss of nerve the high-strung temperament of the poet and the fever of idealistic aspiration, is pretty poor psychology. In Hyperion both that temperament and that fever are there, but we can feel strength in the very texture and movement of the verse as well as in individual lines like
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Be thou therefore in the van
Of circumstance; yea, seize the arrow's barb
Before the tense string murmur,
and
To bear all naked truths,
And to envisage circumstance, all calm,
This is the top of sovereignty.
Are these the accents of a man who has made a desperate nerve-stricken plunge towards the mystically imaginative vision?
Lucas's conception of mysticism is another instance of his lack of psychological acumen. It reminds us of a criticism of mystics penned by Leonard Woolf, to which Sri Aurobindo gave a reply in a letter to a disciple. What concerns us from this reply is the rebuttal of Woolf's argument that mysticism and mystics have always arisen in times of decadence, of the ebb of life, and that their loud "quacking" is a symptom of the decadence. Sri Aurobindo's comment6 runs: "This argument is absolutely untrue. In the East the great spiritual movements have arisen in the full flood of a people's life and culture or on a rising tide and they have themselves given a powerful impulse of expression and richness to its thought and Art and life; in Greece the mystics and the mysteries were there at the prehistoric beginning and in the middle (Pythagoras was one of the greatest of mystics) and not only in the ebb and decline; the mystic cults flourished in Rome when its culture was at high tide; many great spiritual personalities of Italy, France, Spain sprang up in a life that was rich, vivid and not in the least touched with decadence. This hasty and stupid generalisation has no truth in it and therefore no value."
We may add that even mystics who wanted everything to be "bright pink" were not marked by any loss of nerve either before or after taking to spiritual practice and samadhi. Buddha who preached Nirvana was a most majestic and radiant
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presence, enjoying and disseminating an ineffable equanimity, and his limitless calm was not inconsistent with an indefatigable energy so that he strikes us as perhaps the most dynamic spiritual personality who ever worked for Love, Truth and Righteousness and created a new epoch. Shankara, the other supreme apostle of the featureless Infinite, packed more dynamism into a short life of thirty-one years marching up and down India for intellectual battle than any atheist or materialist obsessed with a manifold teeming cosmos (or chaos) has done. Nor did Buddha or Shankara turn mystic by a loss of nerve: a deep and compassionate realisation like Buddha's of world-woe was hardly a case for the psychoneurologist's clinic, while Shankara was almost a born monist of the Spirit. Their monism was indeed "bright pink" rather than an anaemic white and stood for energy instead of enervation. And what about Plotinus, the master of the "Alone"? The wise and peaceful figure that emerges from the Enneads and from the account of Porphyry is not in the least of a man becoming a mystic through loss of nerve or showing any symptoms of such a malady in his trance-swept life.
The suggestion that if the great Romantics who were mystically inclined had not turned towards mysticism they would have craved for some version of the totalitarian state as an alternative is egregious. The Romantic Movement, with or without the passion for the One omnipresent who is from everlasting to everlasting, was fiery with love of liberty. If Wordsworth had not been a pantheist he would still have written:
We must be free or die who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake...
No amount of conservatism in his old age made him abjure the gospel of true liberty as distinguished from thoughtless license. Those who remained liberals to their dying day can be suspected even less of desiring to be tyrannised over or to have their individuality annulled, and sticking to liberalism only
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because mysticism had already smoothed out their fret and fear. One may pertinently ask how the mystical and the liberal could go together if the mystic's trance helped the same malady for which the totalitarian state would also provide a cure. By sheer affinity the politics would veer away from love of freedom.
Perhaps Lucas is prejudiced against the mysticism of the Romantics because, though he has uttered many a sensitive appraisal of Romantic poetry qua poetry, he is Classicallyminded and finds true strength and solace in what he7 cleverly labels as "the romantic Classicism of Greece, the romantic Realism of Iceland and of Hardy, the gaily realistic Classicism of eighteenth-century France". But the greatest classics, even while untinged by the mystic's vision and rapture, were yet deeply religious and felt their finest poetry, whether religious in theme or no, to be a channel through which blew the breath of the Divine. If the word of the greatest Classics is to be credited, the beliefs of the mystics cannot be delusions. Mysticism consists merely in trying to live out intimately the sense which the Classics have of the Divine and in making that the all-shaping centre of our life and in intuiting everywhere "the one Spirit's plastic stress".
Maybe Lucas is under the apprehension that a cult of mystically Romantic poetry would spell a depreciation of Classical verse. But to consider the significance of such poetry paramount does not render Classical verse negligible nor the rest of Romantic work itself, whether old or modern, fit for neglect. For one thing, there is not enough of the new utterance and not enough of variety in whatever there is of it, so a lover of poetry would not be quite satisfied, he would strain his eyes towards the Classical creations as well as the Elizabethan abundance, not to mention the modern Romantic work that is not directly spiritual. Further, from the purely poetic viewpoint, the Classical and the Elizabethan production and this portion of modern Romanticism are as excellent as the soul's speech of, to use a broad phrase of Sri Aurobindo's, "the inmost in the inmost way"; the lover of poetry could hardly
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bear to ignore them. Then we have to note that the peculiar mode of word and rhythm distinguishing such speech is not confined to the explicitly spiritual or even the suggestively spiritual and can take up the substance and style proper to any plane - the Graeco-Roman Intelligence's, the Elizabethan Life-force's, the many-dimensioned modern mind's - and, uplifting them, charge them with unfathomable value and vibration so as to put them well-nigh on a par with what that speech carries. Just as the spiritual theme in itself does not ensure speech in the "inmost way", so the Divine, the Infinite, the Eternal, the essential One do not need to be indicated for the mode of word and rhythm to be the Spirit's own. The most famous line of Virgil -
Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt -
which is untranslatable with a truly effective literalness but to which a literal a peu pres is C. Day Lewis's
Tears in the nature of things, hearts touched by human
transience -
is a sovereign example of this mode without involving the Divine. Nor is the Infinite recognisable clearly or obscurely in Shakespeare's
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
or the Eternal in his lines to Sleep:
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the shipboy's eyes and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge?
And where is the essential One in that other passage on insomnia, where Macbeth, after killing Duncan during sleep, reports the hearing of a dreadful voice addressing him by all
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the three names by which he is known:
Still it cried, 'Sleep no more!' to all the house:
'Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more!'
Also, it would be a rather irresponsible imagination which would identify the Supreme Spirit in Marlowe's lines about Helen:
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? -
or else in a more general poetic sweep like Leopardi's
Insano indegno mistero delle cose.
The insane and ignoble mystery of things.
(Sri Aurobindo)
Surely the basic soul-thrill is in all true poetry, but on that account all poetry should not unreservedly be considered spiritual. We must keep certain distinctions if we are not to be gaseous. In both Shakespeare and Marlowe there is a dealing with reactions of our vitalistic being or the thoughts that spring out in the life-mind under the pressure of sensation, passion, emotion. No transcendental view of things is involved, though a touch of the occult comes in the Macbeth-lines. Virgil's verse has also no such view, even if it does rise to a universal level out of a passage related to particular objects and incidents. The phrase of Leopardi, a wild indignant pessimism instead of the Virgilian majestic sadness, holds no recognisably spiritual notion, either. As Sri Aurobindo8 observes about the absolute poetic word and rhythm which in such citations are of the same quality as in the occasional master-articulation of the Spirit in Wordsworth or Shelley: "It is not any strict adhesion to a transcendental view of things that constitutes this kind of
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poetry, but something behind not belonging to the mind or the vital and physical consciousness and with that a certain quality of power in the language and the rhythm which helps to bring out that deeper something." Hence non-mystical poetry has effects which we can ill afford to neglect in our enthusiasm for the mystical which, off and on in modern Romanticism, expresses in the inmost way the secrets that are inmost.
Nevertheless, if the Spirit is the fundamental reality and if all evolution tends towards manifesting it, the suggestion of the spirit and even more the revelation of it are the ultimate call upon poetic genius. Particularly precious is the answer to such a call if, in the suggestion and revelation of what is above and beyond and behind the apparent world and its external or superficial occurrences and its vital or mental depths immediately at the back of these phenomena, all of mind and life and matter itself tends to discover, as in the finest expression of the mystical by modern Romanticism, not its dissolution into figures and values alien to it but its own final beauty and truth.
Of course, we are talking of the basic vision, word-turn, rhythm-thrill that are spiritual and that have got embodied in a recognisable though yet incipient form in modern Romanticism. All these basic factors are a matter of plane of consciousness. But if we restrict ourselves to mere ways of articulation, then, while we would still have to urge that the chief determinant of the Classical or the Romantic is the plane of consciousness and that even the prevalent way of articulation peculiar to either is due to this plane, we should grant that the way is not confined to it. As between the planes respectively of Graeco-Roman Classicism and Elizabethan Romanticism, the ways are bound to differ in the main because the pure creative Intelligence and the sheer creative Life-force have on the whole distinct attitudes and gestures of self-manifestation. Even the way of the new Romanticism, by the characteristically modern intelligence behind it, is bound to differ on the whole from those of both these poetic phenomena. But the spiritual consciousness as such is not one plane among many: it is a plane which while being above all the rest can bring a greater
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vitality of its own no less than mentality and also one expressive way of mentality as well as another: the way typical of Classicism is open to its supra-Classical consciousness just as much as that which distinguishes the new Romanticism. In fact the new Romanticism itself shows several ways in its articulation when it as it were surpasses the plane of the modern Intelligence and grows directly a voice of the Spirit. If the unfathomable value and vibration which the Spirit's own voice imports into poetry can be imported into Classical poetry without a transcendental view of life being expressed, surely the Classical way of articulation can be adopted by the Spirit for expressing such a view. What impedes the Spirit's complete expression is the Classical kind of Intelligence and not the Classical way of articulation. This Intelligence is mostly drawn into this way: the way itself is not a monopoly of it and can be taken up with ease by a plane of consciousness which, as we have said, is in its essence supra-modern and not merely supra-Graeco-Roman or supra-Elizabethan and can therefore talk in Classical style just as naturally as in any other.
Stylistic Classicism is not in the least alien to the Spirit. And where modern Romanticism rises into spiritual utterance it is often stylistically Classical. When Shelley writes:
Life like a dome of many-coloured glass
Stains the white radiance of eternity,
he is certainly not Classical in style; but when he precedes these lines with
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly,
we might be listening to a Sophocles in a truly spiritual instead of merely religious mood. Wordsworth writing
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears
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or even
Thou, over whom thy immortality
Broods like the Day
is not in style Classical; writing
... Thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
That they were born for immortality
he might have been a Milton letting the creative Intelligence be replaced by a light from beyond it. Thus, Classicism, in manner though not in matter, will be part of the spiritual speech whose primary genuine outburst in the West came at the apex of modern Romanticism - an outburst which must be granted, from the evolutionary standpoint, paramount significance in a total computation of "Classical" and "Romantic".
References
1.The Future Poetry, p. 192.
2.Ibid., pp. 90-91.
3.Ibid., p. 279.
4.Lucas, op. cit., pp. 174-175 (fn. 1).
5.T. Earle Welby, A Popular History of English Poetry (London), p. 183.
6.SABCL, Vol. 22, Letters on Yoga, p. 185.
7.Lucas, op. cit., p. 236.
8.Savitri (Centenary Edition), pp. 802-03.
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