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The complexity of the problem - the approach through Sri Aurobindo - the nature of poetry - the common poetic power, the differences of expression - differences of degree and of kind
Perhaps more ink has been shed in making a distinction between "Classical" and "Romantic" than on any other prob-lem in literature: already in 1936 F. L. Lucas1 could count 11,397 books, including his own. Once even some blood was about to be shed: on the night of November 25, 1830, the theatre at Paris where Victor Hugo's Romantic play Hernani was first shown became a roaring cockpit of combatant critics. But not always has much light been shed: possibly the heat of the discussion was too great to leave room for sufficient light. This does not mean that no guiding conceptions have emerged. But to give them proper shape we must look more coolly than is done by protagonists of the two schools, more closely than by onlooking commentators. And we must arrive at the shape from the living essence and be aware of the specific character of the soul seeking to create and vivify the shape.
It has been found difficult to confine Romanticism and Classicism within neat and tight formulas. Picking out a number of famous names listed on the one side or the other, F.L. Lucas2 dwells at some length on this difficulty. We need not go into it in detail. We may just illustrate an aspect of it which becomes relevant by our mention of Hugo and Hernani. Lucas quotes Lascelles Abercrombie as opposing Romanticism to Realism. By Realism· Abercrombie means not the literary creed of a Zola with its insistence on crude raw life but the utilitarian habit of mipd of a Bentham. "Romanticism," he writes, "is withdrawal from outer experience to concentrate on inner experience", as in Blake or Shelley or "Cubist painting". But Lucas points out how it was Classicism which raised a clamour against outer experience if it happened to be of a
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familiar kind. The Classicists even frowned at familiar language. Was not Hugo almost mobbed for flinging the homely word "mouchoif" ("handkerchief") in the midst of his Hernani' s sentimental and sonorous alexandrines?
According to Lucas, Hugo himself in his famous preface to that early play of his, Cromwell, associates Romanticism above all with "the grotesque". Christianity, with its sense of Sin, is said to have brought melancholy into the world by making man realise the paradox of his imperfect nature: as William Watson puts it -
Magnificent out of the dust we came,
And abject from the spheres.
With the melancholy sense of that paradox grew up the sense of the grotesque and hence the habit of mingling the grotesque with the tragic or sublime. Classicism is thought to forbid this kind of mixture, but actual life is said to confirm it. For instance, after signing Charles I's death-warrant, Cromwell and another of the regicides are reported to have bespattered each other's faces with the ink on their pens! Romanticism therefore is, to Hugo, really Truthfulness, "la verite". And yet, questions Lucas, what is grotesque in Wordsworth's Highland Maid or Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci or Musset' s Nuits or Yeats's Innisfree, poems which all critics have declared to breathe the utmost Romanticism?
Or, still within the Hugoesque sphere, we may inquire in Lucas's own spirit, how the substance of these poems bears out in any marked way the definition which, in passing, he quotes from the later Hugo and which W.H. Hudson3 takes as most significant - the definition making Romanticism a part of the general movement of the later eighteenth century for the emancipation of the individual: "liberalism in literature."
In Lucas's view, Romanticism is a variety of things and often contains queer combinations. As a broad catalogue of specific qualities he4 mentions: remoteness, the sad delight of desolation, silence and the supernatural, winter and dreari-
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ness, vampirine love and stolen trysts, the flowering of passion and the death of beauty, Radcliffe horrors* and sadistic cruelty, disillusion and death and madness, the Holy Grail and battles long ago on the Border, the love of the impossible. Over against these he5 enumerates certain features distinguishing Classicism: grace, self-knowledge, self-control, the sense of form, the easy wearing of the chains of art hidden under flowers, idealism steadied by an unfaltering sense of reality, the lamp and the midnight oil rather than the wine-cup. But he refuses to draw any too sharp line between the Romantic writer and the Classical. "Romanticism," he6 says, "is indeed as old as European literature - as old as the Odyssey. It is even older." He considers the legends of Greek mythology highly Romantic, nor does Greek Romanticism end for him with the fabulous and the fantastic in Homer: imagination breaks bounds in Aeschylus, passion snaps the leash in Euripides and strange as well as violent themes are found in much Greek drama. Touches of the Romantic occur in Latin literature too - in Ovid "with his love-lorn heroines", Virgil "with his Messianic broodings and his passionate Dido", Catullus "the Roman Burns'', Propertius ''the Roman Rossetti'' .7
In giving examples of Romantic lines, Lucas8 does not only mention Wordsworth's
Lady of the Mere
Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance.
He finds the typical Romantic atmosphere in that reticently emotional line of Dante's where Francesca of Rimini, after she and her lover Paolo have come in their joint reading to a certain episode in the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, says:
quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante.
upon that day no fur did we read. ( K.D.S.)
The Romantic atmosphere is sensed also in that verse of Propertius:
• The reference is to the novels of Anne Radcliffe.
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Sunt apud infernos tot milis formosarum -
So many thousand beauties are among the Shades -
(K.D,S.)
and in those lines of Virgil:
Hie tibi mortis erant metae, domus alta sub Ida,
Lyrnesi domus alta, solo Laurente sepulchrum.
Here was the bourn of death for thee - lofty thy house
under Ida,
Lyrnesus' high-built house; in Laurentine soil thou art
buried. (K.D.S.)
The Classical Milton is said to have it -
And airy tongues that syllable men's names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses -
no less than Keats with his
magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Seeking a psychological basis for the associations which the words "Classical" and "Romantic" have for him as well as a reason for his feeling that a Classical writer can be Romantic and vice versa, Lucas takes a cue from Freud. "Much of the Freudian system may be pure moonshine", he9 remarks; but, because it emphasises "what goes on in our minds without our knowledge", he adopts for the sake of convenience its picture of the human "ego" as torn three ways between the "id", the "super-ego" and the "reality-principle". The "id" drives towards some object of desire; the "reality-principle" may cry, "It can't be done"; the "super-ego" may whisper, "It isn't done". The ego then pulls back the "id". To simplify things, it shuts its eyes to certain impulses and conflicts too difficult to
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resolve; it practises "repression", leaving them, however, to writhe unseen, so that what they do remains in the "uncon-scious". During sleep it is as if the "censor" who keeps the forbidden impulses submerged below consciousness relaxed his vigilance: the prisoners slip upward into experience as dreams, though even then they come more or less disguised to enjoy this temporary release.
"Now the lives men live and the art they make," opines Lucas,10 "depends enormously on how strict and oppressive, or relaxed and easy-going, are their sense of reality and their sense of the ideal, their consciousness and their conscience. Different periods vary widely in this - and, within periods, different individuals.... So considered, the differences between Classicism, Romanticism and Realism turn out, I think, to be differences mainly of degree; depending on the strictness with which, if we may call them so, the reality-principle and the super-ego control and censor emanations from the uncon-scious mind. The Realist writer tends to sacrifice everything to his sense of reality. The Classic, while ruthless towards some forms of unreality in the name of 'good sense', elaborately cultivates others in the name of 'good taste'; his impulses and fantasies are much more dominated by a social ideal, formed under the pressure of a finely civilized class .... The Romantic is ...a 'dreamer'. He may indeed, like a nightmare, be vividly realistic at moments. At moments he may be ruled, like the Classic, by a social ideal of conduct - partly social, at least, in its heroism and generosity, though in other ways rebelliously anti-social. But, essentially, he believes with Blake in letting his impulses and ideas run free.... If I had to hazard an Aristotelian definition of Romanticism, it might run - 'Romantic literature is a dream-picture of life; providing sustenance and fulfilment for impulses cramped by society or reality.' Whereas the world of Classicism, on the contrary, is wide awake and strictly sober."
No doubt, Lucas has caught hold of some genuine aspects of psychological truth. But he has failed to penetrate to the core of the subject. The mention of Freud in matters of poetry or art
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is itself an unpromising omen. The Freudian system emerges from the neuropathological clinic, and to transfer neuropatho-logy in a merely intenser shape to the operations and dis-coveries of poetic genius is crass folly. Such psychology ignores just the specific art-element in art, the glory and delight of the revelatory, the perfect in word and rhythm; and the subconscious or unconscious region it analyses is far too low and small. Lucas, keen as his aesthetic sensibilities are, appears to slur over this art-element. Again, though he accepts the Freudian picture not without dubbing it just an "as if",11 he seems too much impressed with the talk of submerged im-pulses and fantasies. A good deal in life - at least in the poetic phenomenon - occurs "as if" a lot more were involved.
According to Sri Aurobindo, the subconscious or the unconscious is not all that lies beyond our waking condition. He refers to the subliminal being, a hidden domain much greater, with powers like those of our own wakeful state but intenser, wider, finer, more varied, and with rarer ones too that are either absent from that state or present there only in embryo. Poetry, like all art, draws considerably on the subli-minal and discloses that domain's surprising realities in diverse patterns of image and sound. It can draw also on another domain - the superconscious - which is a diviner secrecy and ultimately the origin of all art-inspiration whether openly recognised as superconscious or no. Even modem psychology is not confined to the subconscious-or unconscious of the Freudian type. Jung's "Collective Unconscious" embraces a much richer depth of the unknown. To extend it only to the racial dimension is nothing but arbitrary and even to stop short with the universal is merely to confess the weakness of our vision. The Jungian pointer, fearlessly followed, is not solely to a farthest horizontal unknown: it is also to a far-thest unknown that is vertical - the Aurobindonian supercon-scious.
Often the two commingle in the poetic act. In addition, certain factors in the wakeful condition as well as in the processes below consciousness may lend their own colours.
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And, whatever form poetry may take, essentially its whole style and rhythm, Sri Aurobindo tells us, belong to our inmost self and employ the rest of our personality, outer or inner, as an instrument: the style and rhythm of poetry" are the expression and movement which come from us out of a certain spiritual excitement caused by a vision in the soul of which it is eager to deliver itself".12 He goes on to say: "The vision may be of anything in Nature or God or man or the life of creatures or the life of things." Yet what stamps poetic speech with a marvellous inevitability and absoluteness comes, according to him, through the soul-stress. The concept of the soul as the true centre of our physical, vital and mental existence both in outward functions and subliminal motions is necessary to mark the luminous creative joy - maker of significant forms of flawless beauty - that is the essence of art. And the stress of the soul represents in our personal being the original impulsion of the superconscious and transmits it in one psychological garb or another. "A divine Ananda, a delight interpretative, creative, revealing, formative - one might say, an inverse reflection of the joy which the universal Soul has felt in its great release of energy when it rang out into the rhythmic forms of the universe the spiritual truth, the large interpretative idea, the life, the power, the emotion of things packed into its original creative vision - such spiritual joy is that which the soul of the poet feels and which, when he can conquer the human difficulties of his task, he succeeds in pouring also into all those who are prepared to receive it. And this delight is not merely a godlike pastime; it is a great formative and illuminative power."13
One other citation from Sri Aurobindo may be made to indicate the general lines of his outlook on poetic inspiration. "What we mean by inspiration is that the impetus to poetic creation and utterance comes to us from a superconscient source above the ordinary mentality, so that what is written seems not to be the fabrication of the brain-mind, but something more sovereign breathed or poured in from above. That is the possession by the divine enthousiasmos of witch plato has
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spoken. But it is seldom that the whole word leaps direct from that source, that cavern of natal light ready-shaped and with the pure stamp of its divine origin, - ordinarily it goes through some secondary process in the brain-mind itself, gets its impulse and unformed substance perhaps from above, but subjects it to an intellectual or other earthly change; there is in that change always indeed some superior power born of the excitement of the higher possession, but also some alloy too of our mortality. And the character, value and force of the word of the poet vary according to the action of those parts of our mentality which dominate in the change, - the vital mind, the emotional temperament, the imaginative or reflective intellect or the higher intuitive intelligence.... But also there is in us a direct medium between that divine and this human mentality, an intuitive soul-mind supporting the rest, which has its share both in the transmission and the formal creation, and it is where this gets out into overt working, discloses its shaping touch or makes heard its transmitting voice that we get the really immortal tones of speech and heights of creation. And it is in the epochs when there is in the mind of the race some enthusiastic outburst or some calm august action of this intuitive power, intermediary of the inspiration of the spirit or its revelations, that make the great ages of poetry."14
By way of illustrating his statement Sri Aurobindo15 tells us: "In English literature this period was the Elizabethan. Then the speech of poetry got into it a ring and turn of direct intuitive power, a spontaneous fullness of vision and divine fashion in its utterance which it had not at all before and has hardly had afterwards. Even the lesser poets of the time are touched by it, but in Shakespeare it runs in a stream and· condenses to a richly-loaded and crowding mass of the work and word of the intuition almost unexampled in any poetry. The difference can be measured by taking the work of Chaucer or of subsequent poets almost at their best and of Shakespeare at a quite ordinary level and feeling the effect on the poetic listener in our own intuitive being."
Sri Aurobindo takes Chaucer's line -
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He was a verray parfit gentil knight -
to which for completer comparison with Shakespeare we may add from Chaucer the three other lines of the same passage, about that knight's noble deeds:
At mortal batailles hadde he bene fiftene
And foughten for our faith at Tramissene
In listes thryes, and ay slain his fo...
Now pass from "Chaucer with his easy adequate limpidity" to "Shakespeare's rapid seizing of the intuitive inevitable word and the disclosing turn of phrase which admits us at once to a direct vision of the thing he shows us"16 - Othello's account of his military life:
Of moving accidents by flood and field,
Of hair-breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach;
Of being taken by the insolent foe...
There "with quite as simple a thing to say and a perfect force of directness in saying it, it is yet a vastly different kind of directness".17 "It is not merely a difference of the measure of the genius, but of its source. This language of Shakespeare's is a unique and wonderful thing; it has everywhere the royalty of the sovereign intuitive mind looking into and not merely at life" with a "readiness to get through, seize the lurking word and bring it out from the heart of the thing itself.. .. We are most readily struck in Shakespeare by the lines and passages in which the word thus seized and brought out is followed swiftly on the heels by another and another of its kind, many crowding together or even fused and run into each other in a single phrase of many suggestions, - for this manner is peculiarly his own and others can only occasionally come near to it. Such passages recur to the mind as those in the soliloquy on sleep or the well-known lines in Macbeth,
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Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart.
His is often a highly imaged style, but Shakespeare's images are not, as with so many poets, decorative or brought in to enforce and visualise the intellectual sense, they are more immediately revelatory, intimate to the thing he speaks and rather the proper stuff of the fact itself than images. But he has too a clearer, less crowded, still swifter fashion of speech in which they are absent; for an example,
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word, -
which has yet the same deep and penetrating intuitive spirit in its utterance. Or the two manners meet together and lean on each other, -
I have lived long enough; my way of life
Is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf,
or become one, as in the last speeches of Antony, -
I am dying, Egypt, dying; only
I here importune death awhile, until
Of many thousand kisses the poor last
I lay upon thy lips.
But all have the same characteristic stamp of the intuitive mind rapidly and powerfully at work. .."18
And if we accept in its total import the nature of this intuitive mind that makes poetic speech at its intensest "the unity of a divine rhythmic movement with a depth of sense and a power of infinite suggestion welling up directly from the fountain-heads of the spirit within us"19 we cannot help
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emphasising that the so-called "reality-principle" does not weigh decisively with the true poet.
To him it is infantile to restrict the real to outward reality: his very breath of life is to transcend external consciousness and circumstance, just as it is a necessity for him never to stop content with mere feigning or fiction. In Sri Aurobindo's words:20 "The essential poetic imagination... is creative, not of either the actual or the fictitious, but of the more and most real; it sees the spiritual truth of things, - of this truth too there are many gradations, - which may take either the actual or the ideal for its starting-point." The aim of poetry, as of all art, is neither a photographic imitation of sensible things nor a fanciful furnishing or painting of them, but an interpretation by the images Nature "affords us not on one, but on many planes of her creation, of that which she conceals from us, but is ready, when rightly approached, to reveal".21 To allow the outward or objective to rule one's motives and ideas is to be a scientist, not an artist. The outer or objective is to the artist a source of interest as a mould of expression of an inner life and spirit: he is not concerned primarily with its process and machinery and the mechanic law of things. Always the natural world and the human drama call him to their depths through his own inner psychology. Even modem "realistic" art, which claims to give us a scientifically accurate presentation of life, exceeds the demands of outward things and starts from an inner view and, in consonance with subjective . claims of temperament and imaginative penchant, makes an arbitrary selection of motives, forms and hues, even as idealistic art makes a different selection. Of course, a certain objectivity is needed to make poetry live and the thing seen stand out before our eyes, but the creation is always out of the poet's self and not out of what he externally sees: "that outward seeing only serves to excite the inner vision to its work."22 The Classical poet - a Sophocles or a Virgil - no less than the Romantic has his mind environed by much more than the immediate physical reality, by even much more than the physical universe he imagines in his drama or epic: invisible powers of the sub-
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jective being, spiritual presences beyond the activities of men and of the elements are part of the reality-principle to which he stirs. Not that Lucas's view, of the relation either between material sensible actuality and the Classical poet or between this actuality and the Romantic, is quite off the mark. But it must be taken in the midst of diverse considerations and not too narrowly.
Further, Lucas in judging the differences between Romanticism and Classicism to be mainly of degree forgets that, except when in fact the Romantic and the Classical are blended as at times in certain poets, the Romantic moment of the Classical writer remains fundamentally Classical and so too the other way about. There is a basic difference which is not defined by mere theme or even mood - it is something in the manner of the vision, the disposition of the word, the run of the rhythm. The distracted Oedipus of Sophocles may resemble the mad Lear of Shakespeare, but they are caught in poetry of two distinct orders and neither theme nor mood can make Sophocles Romantic or Shakespeare Classical. Similarly, Dante rests Classical for all his poignancy and sensitivity. Lucas23 himself feels that though he has called several things in Greek poetry Romantic he would like not to exaggerate; for Homer and Aeschylus never sound the extreme Romantic note that is heard in Spenser and Marlowe, while Catullus in even his "Romantic frenzy" is still "Classically clear". Could we argue that impulses and fantasies were not as much at work? Should we put Aeschylus, for instance, below any Elizabethan in sheer imaginative fury? Lucas24 writes: "The rumour went that Aeschylus dipped his pen in the wine-pot. His imagery was so undisciplined. He roared like a bull, they said, piled up phrases like towers, talked mountains." How is it then that he, as Lucas25 admits, "never outrages common sense or common taste like Marlowe"? Nor is it that the Greek poets conceived of their art tamely: they felt it to be a storm sent into them by Heaven, a divine madness. The theory of God-given inspiration has entered European culture through the Greeks, and surely such inspiration - whether it blow in a continuous
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sweep or with a gradual and intermittent gust, whether it rush unbidden or answer a call - is a matter of depths, of ultimately what Sri Aurobindo terms the soul. To change the metaphor: something of the nectar quaffed by the immortals flows through Classical poetry no less than Romantic, and if the intoxication shows less flush in the former and if the enthou-siasmos even of an Aeschylus or of a Milton works with a hand that never trembles, the world of true Classicism cannot yet be described as "strictly sober". The more tempered look, the less agitated gesture, the suggestion of the lamp and the midnight oil rather than the wine-cup can only be hit off by a paradoxical phrase like "sober ecstasy", suggesting the exhilaration of one who, though deeply drinking of some luminous liquor, is still coolly able to carry it. The function of poetry, as Longinus who had nothing save Classicism before him recognised centuries ago, is neither to teach nor merely to please: it is to impassion and to transport. And does not a Classical poet himself, Milton, support Longinus? "It is probably by no accidental conjunction," writes M. H. Abrams,26 "that Milton, immediately after referring to Longinus (apparently for the first time in England) went on to introduce the pithy phrase that poetry is 'more simple, sensuous and passionate than rhetoric'."
But the glow of soul on the lips that is poetry can vary and, as between the Classical and the Romantic, the variation is covered more distinctly, widely, fundamentally in certain observations of Sri Aurobindo than in Lucas's "Aristotelian definition", acute as the latter is in several respects. Apart from being based on a psychology more developed than Freud's monotonous raking of the mire in search for the roots of the Goddess Saraswati's Lotus, these observations take the term "Romantic" itself outside the narrow historical and psycho-logical concept given it by Lucas who restricts it to the movement started at the end of the eighteenth century and regards as an anticipation of Romanticism whatever in Euro-pean literature reached in that movement its fullness in the direction of "dream-life", "spontaneous feeling", "liberation of the less conscious levels of the mind".
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References
1.The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (Cambridge), First Edition 1936; Latest Edition 1954, p. 4.
2.Ibid., pp. 9-14.
3.An Outline of English Literature (London), 1956, p. 171.
4.Lucas, op. cit., pp. 24-25.
5.Lucas, op. cit., p. 28.
6.Ibid., p. 55.
7.Ibid, p. 56.
8. Ibid, pp. 20-21.
9. Ibid., p. 30.
10.Ibid., pp. 31, 33, 35-36.
11.Ibid., p. 30.
12.The Future Poetry and Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry), 1972, pp. 14-15.
13.Ibid., p. 10.
14.Ibid, pp. 167-168.
15.Ibid, p. 168.
16.Ibid.
17.Ibid., p. 169.
18.Ibid., pp. 169-170.
19.Ibid., p. 14.
20.Ibid., p. 25.
21.Ibid.
22.Ibid., p. 34.
23.Lucas, op. cit., pp. 65, 87-88.
24.Ibid., p. 60.
25.Ibid., p. 65.
26.The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, 1953), p. 348 note 12.
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