1. THE PRODIGAL POETIC PROMISE
(a)
The Irish mystic and poet, AE, has written:
The gay romance of song
Unto the spirit's life doth not belong.
And it is true that AE utters the core of himself best in chaste simple whispers. But the spiritual feeling caught in the series of great little books published by Harindranath Chattopadhyaya in his early days is like a jet of rainbow-flame. Sometimes the colours fuse into a white light, but usually they sparkle and quiver and trace in the veil between the outward and the inward a variegated rift, so to speak, through which may be poured with an ever-largening impetus the luxuries of the Eternal. No poet writing in English in our day has given such a prodigal promise to convey the Spirit's authentic thrill as Chattopadhyaya.
I have the good fortune to have my perusal of his works prefaced by a personal impression of him at the height of his career as a young man. It was in 1926, when he was 39 years of age, at one of the weekly soirees organised by an energetic Begum ambitious of having gifted artists appear under her auspices to a cosmopolitan circle. Every Sunday she made a new lion: I happened to be caught in the trap of her enthusiasm, just a fortnight before Chattopadhyaya was launched upon us as the most Numidian of all the lions she had rejoiced in. I must confess that my own poetry at that time was hardly even an articulate mew; all that was leonine about me was perhaps the sweep of my mane. My poetry, nevertheless, was applauded; and when on his Sunday Chattopadhyaya appeared, a well-meaning mutual friend
Page 161
intimated to him that a rising poet was in the audience. But there seemed at first no chance for him to meet that "poet" — so great was the pressure on his versatile genius to pack itself within the couple of hours during which he was to be on the stage. And I must say he was a volcano compared to the crackle of burning twigs that had been the talent displayed hitherto in that circle. I looked and listened and lost myself; for, as that resonant, richly flexible, deep-vowelling tone filled the ear and that expressive fiery-gestured figure crossed the eye, I felt a strange beauty run through my veins and beat upon the intellect's reserve and judgment, until the whole being awoke to the perception of some elemental force blowing through Chattopadhyaya's personality as through a flute of the most profound tremolo possible.
He recited his poems, sang his songs, acted snatches from his plays; uplifted, bewitched, impassioned his audience; and when the whole gorgeous hubbub was over, and the flashing eyes and floating hair became more recognisably a fellow human being instead of a mouthpiece of incalculable magic, I found myself beckoned to view them at close quarters. The words spoken to me were very kind, though a trifle patronising; I could see at once a genuine love for poetry wherever it might come from; but before we could slip into the technical intimacies in which all writers of verse delight, there was a call on him to please the other artists who had gathered in his honour. So I retired, with a resolve to buy his complete works at the earliest opportunity and try him out in cold print away from his voice and gesture which I felt could pass off what might be thin pseudo-Sufism as fumes of the unmixed Wine. When I did go through his books I noticed certain flaws which had been missing during the recital but which I had managed dimly to suspect by recollection in tranquillity on my way home. These were that his mind, very subtle and plastic though it was with an astonishing power of various profusion, did not sufficiently exercise a power of massive or concentrated control; and that his imagination lived in a state of dazzling speed capable of
Page 162
being magically creative but lacking somewhat in that self-understanding which broods and chisels and sifts patiently when the creative furor slackens. Deficiencies like these, if accompanied by a flow of inspiration whose tumultuousness can make them like weeds upon a mighty wave, may be negligible and on the whole nugatory; they may seem even inevitable as a price for that unique phenomenon — a poet possessed; for they can be the outcome of that peculiar and rare type of genius which can produce so much and so richly that there is neither the time nor the necessity to refashion and perfect what has been already done. In short, instead of correcting a slightly flawed poem, a poet may spend the same time writing half a dozen new ones, at least three of which may be born as miraculous as Aphrodite fresh from the foam. But Chattopadhyaya's verse did not give me the impression that he had reached such a height of lavish excellence: he had to his credit many brief masterpieces, but as often as not he betrayed a danger of letting his poems get finished without the substance attaining the true imaginative crystallisation, and there was also a danger of the vocabulary becoming more decorative than passionate. Hence the defects could not be excused; still, I had the firm intuition that the whole drift of his genius was towards the beautiful prolificity that covers up all peccadilloes; for I could not help marking that his fluency was exceptional though not quite marvellous and that not a single poem of his, even among those that were flawed, failed to exhibit in however partial a form qualities of the first order and through three-quarters of it a really valuable inspiration. It was this abnormal fact that confirmed my experience, during the recital, of contact with a poetic surge deep and original beyond measure.
Before looking at some of the short miracles by which Chattopadhyaya has given a secure longevity to his verse I must record a minor aesthetic irritation. For one thing, he makes an excessive use of certain hackneyed rhymes, though there also he is in the company of the Masters, for Crashaw in the most exalted flare of his religious aspiration couples
Page 163
"fire" with "desire" twice, with less than a dozen lines in between and only the plural to make a variation, while Swinburne who had the ingenuity to overcome the supposed unrhymableness of "babe" by producing that neglected poetic gem "astrolabe" could yet allow his inventive power to suffer complete paralysis whenever "fire" gleamed at him from the end of a line: like a penny in the slot it invariably drew out the stale delight of "desire". The same fault is to be laid at the door of AE, forbidding us to read him at a stretch, "crystal purities" though many of his poems are. Chattopadhyaya mixes this "fire-desire" cult with a side-worship of the "God-clod" twins, the former cheapening in a total survey the technical impression on a critic and the latter bringing in sometimes an almost bathetic turn.
Another tendency which jars on one when it is aimless or distorts itself in what may be called, in Max-Nordauese, "echolalia" — a tendency capable of a fine haunting or else epigrammatic effect but not seldom an easy result of negligence and an instrument of perverse ingenuity or rhetorical barrenness. Shakespeare is notorious for his pun-mania and in his comic scenes one may excuse him provided he is neat and does not torture the language too much; but nobody can help jibbing at the immortal Will's becoming so unrhyth-mically willful as to write "your eye I eyed". Chattopadhyaya, who with myself is in private life a victim to Shakespeare's disease, keeps punning out of his poetry; still, even an innocent line like
And be the being I was meant to be
does not make charming homophony, nor does his later and most magnificent poetic phase gain by the sudden cropping up of a lesson in grammar such as
Began before Beginning was begun.
Far from having powerful or profound reverberations the
Page 164
phrase jolts against the tympanum as nothing except a thought-saving blatancy.... All this is rather by the way, for it would be perverse to insinuate that the genuine worth of his poetry is spoilt on the whole by occasional blots. And what that worth is can be conveyed only by superlatives.
It may not be out of place in appreciating Chattopadhyaya to defend him against a probable charge of being exotic and therefore overstrained or meretricious. Exoticism need not always be an artificial hot-house product; when it blossoms directly from an imaginative thrill, there is a sovereign excess about it which carries a high artistic potency of suggestion. The Song of Solomon is exotic in its poignant richness of word and vision; the Book of Job is exotic in the figurative revel of its grandiose closing argument; Spenser and Keats are exotic when they diffuse their heavily-charged sen-suousness. What is essential is that confusion should be avoided and some clear outline cling to the warm colour-riot both en masse and in the details, just as tropical efflorescence comes to the eye not only with a clean-cut fiery impact in general but also with a vivid distinctness of colourful particulars. Wherever in Chattopadhyaya at his best a tropical brightness is perceived, the hues compose unmistakable pictures crowding towards a total significance, though I dare say those who are used to a less warm and fertile atmosphere of mind may take time to adjust their perspective.
The difficulty is perhaps enhanced by the peculiar source of this poet's opulent ardour; for that source is the ancient mystic insight which feels a supreme Oneness behind and within the universe, an unfamiliar light consciously playing through the pageant of sky, passion of sea, prodigality of earth, and transmuting even the dull dross of shadow and ugliness to a hint or symbol round which the divine joy can irradiate. Once, however, a sympathetic insight is opened, the reader moves with ease among the spiritually sensuous intensities expressed by Chattopadhyaya and realises how grievous the loss might be if he were to find no entrance to the heart of this God-drunk music. There is an early poem
Page 165
which very well represents his exoticism in a certain aspect of the mystic mood:
You flood my music with your autumn silence
And burn me in the flame-burst of your spring.
Lo! through my beggar-being's tattered garments
Resplendent shines your crystal heart, my King!
Like a rich song you chant your red-fire sunrise,
Deep in my dreams, and forge your white-flame moon....
You hide the crimson secret of your sunset,
And the pure, golden message of your noon.
You fashion cool-grey clouds within my body,
And weave your rain into a diamond mesh.
The Universal Beauty dances, dances
A glimmering peacock in my flowering flesh!
Obviously, the stanzas do not grow according to an explicit logical method or paint their pictures with an eye to surface meaning. They must be considered by stepping a little back from the usual domain of the imagination and then the coherence and the clarity appear. The first two lines proclaim the combined peace and power of the divine presence as felt by the poet — the peace mellow and fruitful, the power a fiery bloom — in a kind of correspondence between the world without and the world within. The next two subtly connect up with the preceding pair by intimating with paradoxical felicity how the keenly felt divine presence within is able to manifest its glory despite the faults and frailties of human nature: we are reminded of Plato's famous rejoinder to Diogenes — "Your pride peeps out through the holes of your raggedness", but here it is the high and rare splendour of the spirit taking by surprise the poor surface self: not only the so-called beautiful but even the wretched does the King of Kings use for a gateway into the universe. The language again joins the ideas of peace and power:
Page 166
"crystal" indicates the cool virgin beauty which is yet here not void of a royal resplendence. The second stanza continues the same theme with a different set of images and symbols: the pulse of life in the poet is in tune with the spiritual throb at the core of each day's procession of sky-moods — flaring sunrise and sunset, midnight's lucid trance of moon and midday's unperturbed lustre. A slight technical immaturity of expression renders the poem at this point not so finished as might be desired, for "deep in my dreams" is too far to be easily understood with "You hide..." The final verse carries the dominant motif a step further by transferring the spirit's thrill to the very physical being: body and soul seem to fuse in one illimitable sensation of light, as if the entire cosmos were unfolding its secret to the individual. Clouds become soft serenities in him and the rain a gorgeous yet pure intricacy of life-movement whereby the flesh blossoms into perfection, and the whole cosmic spirit, drunk with its own infinite magnificence, traces there its rhythm of delight:
This is a climax of the exotic imagination, a figure and fantasy packed with the richest significance and consummating the fundamental idea by a last stroke of concrete colour.
A vision analogous in breadth and vivid cumulativeness of meaning to this grand finale, though by a puissant rather than a rhapsodical utterance, is William Watson's symboli-sation of the factor of disharmony in the world by the figure of the raven: he suggests the strange shadow whose raucous intrusion and weird touch are felt everywhere. Here is his concluding verse —
Coils the labyrinthine sea
Duteous to the lunar will,
But some discord stealthily
Vexes the world-ditty still,
Page 167
And the bird that caws and caws
Clasps Creation with his claws.
The end of this verse compares very fairly in poetic excellence, while contrasting in psychological attitude, with Chattopadhyaya's close. It is of interest also as what Chattopadhyaya himself might have written in the period subsequent to that which gave birth to his first book. He came like a bacchanal of paradise, scattering largesse of poetic joy; but soon another mood possessed him or, more accurately, shared his soul — the raven and the peacock existing now side by side. That this should occur one could have predicted from the acute sensibility of his nature. I remember that when I saw his face during the recital I said to myself, "Here is a highly strung temperament — clearly a man who would be moved to intense passion, either joy or grief, and would most probably veer from one extreme to the other — a mind borne away on great impulsive gusts, plunging headlong into whatever seems momentous to him, living, therefore, dangerously but with prodigious possibilities of development along the bent his mood assumes."
(b)
The bent of anguish which disengages itself from the various velleities of Chattopadhyaya's verse brings with it an intellectual confrontation of the world-problem. Not, to be sure, a logical arguing in poetry; a mental strength is what I mean and a faculty to catch, more often than before, intuitions through the aesthetic sensation. The old exoticism remains — accompanied by a more contemplative force, since there mingles with his acute experience of world-pain a longing to solve its great riddle. Faith, too, keeps its old fervour and thus the new philosophical temper in him accepts pain with open arms like an inscrutable beloved with whom he has to wrestle to the point of death before he can
Page 168
earn a surrender of all-transmuting bliss. Suffering is a sacred privilege to him: he is pushed by it not to blaspheme or even doubt, but nearer and nearer the goal he seeks. Though, like William Watson in the "Crow"-stanza, he can be puzzled by the spectre of discord haunting the world-ditty, he utilises the invasion of his being by it to raise to yet intenser a pitch his aspiration towards the ideal harmony. "Give me the sorrow that shall take me to the Holy of Holies," he seems to cry: "welcome grief and tears and heartbreak — if the sharp agony rend the inner veil, the salt tears corrode my chains, the heartbreak fling wide open a door to the All-Beautiful." He even regards pain as an indispensable means for attaining the godhead, since the sum of impurity in human nature is so massive that a burning sacrifice alone can destroy it to the full. A characteristic expression of this mood is in these twelve lines:
O pain, I love the lonely wine-red gleam
Within your deep and ever-wakeful eyes:
Old Arab in the dark tent of my dream
Under the burning skies.
Excess of ecstasy, immortal pain,
Comrade of love, companion of desire,
Lone Bedouin riding through life's desert plain
A camel of red fire.
Most splendid traveller of eternity
In whose first footfall the wide world began,
A holy Mecca in the heart of me
Awaits your caravan.
The poetic quality here is striking, but it is possible to overlook the implications which certain phrases have and which make that quality singularly rich for its thought-stuff. The eyes of pain are "deep and ever-wakeful" and "wine-red" not only because they have become sunken and blood-
Page 169
shot with sleeplessness; there dwells an unobscurable profundity in them and their red gleam reveals some hidden joy behind, a relish as of some rare wine that induces a mystic self-awakening. For this pain is the biting disappointment with things that pass turned into intense longing for the Eternal — a longing which by the splendour of its vision and the arduousness of its effort is miraculously bitter-sweet: just because the splendour is so great, the arduousness necessary to compass it is gigantic — the excess of the ecstasy causing the unbearable travail. The line "In whose first footfall the wide world began" adds a shade broader to the conception by envisaging the entire time-process as a difficult movement from eternity to eternity through the immortal Spirit's self-separation and self-pursuit, a long cyclic pilgrimage each individual can hasten in himself if he directs life's pain to a sacred end, "a holy Mecca" of prayer — that is, if he invites it to perform a mystic worship through his inner consciousness.
Another remarkable poem tinged by the same mood is "Challenge"; it has, besides, a more personal note:
You have done well
By having hurled me into such deep hell,
Since from its fires which burn my heart and eyes
I shall erelong arise
Like brave sweet incense to the peaks of time
Your feet could never climb!
Star in your high estate,
Who share not now the darkness of my fate!
Some sudden night you will begin to be
A nursling light in my eternity,
Since in deep sorrow I am being bent
To an unfathomable firmament.
The idea of suffering spiritualised is presented vividly by the similitude of incense rising self-offered to the Divine from a
Page 170
holocaust of human life: the epithets "brave" and "sweet" convey the exact psychological experience of sorrow accepted as a means to direct the soul of desire to a sacred end. A subtler and more powerful imagination leaps from the second stanza. By addressing his tormenter as "star" the poet not only suggests her once-idealised loveliness now standing aloof from his misery in cold disdain, but also enhances to an utter transcendence the mysterious "peaks of time" which he has declared unscalable by her feet. For, even star-height seems too poor compared with the altitude his soul has felt as its inevitable destiny. And what is this altitude? "An unfathomable firmament" wherein constellations are lost and light-years dwarfed into a negligible span — a lofty God-consciousness before which all other exalted states are nothing, but which the poet links up to "deep sorrow" by the apt word "bent". The metaphorical feat here has wellnigh no parallel in poetic literature for profound novelty, though others have figured the sky in language felicitous or striking. We have Blanco White's fine and adequate
This glorious canopy of light and blue —
there is Baudelaire's recherche exclamation,
Le Ciel! couvercle noir de la grande marmite —
and its less hectic counterpart in Fitzgerald's Omar,
And that inverted bowl we call the sky
Whereunder crawling coop't we live and die —
Shelley has an unforgettable image in speaking of Byron,
The Pilgrim of Eternity whose fame
Over his living head like Heaven is bent,
An early but enduring monument.
Page 171
The last idea would be the most original as well as the grandest, if Chattopadhyaya did not exceed it by a further subtlety of boldness: to have pressed the optical illusion of the sky's bend into service of a condition of torture fraught with immense spiritual possibilities is feliciter audax to a supreme revelatory point. It represents to my mind Chattopadhyaya's summit in his young days in what I have distinguished as the capacity to receive intuitions through the poetic intelligence, just as the lines about the dancing peacock I have emphasised earlier are his climax through the aesthetic sensation.
The philosophy of suffering embodied in the two poems quoted above is not the sole expression given by him to his developing poetic intelligence. He does not become insensitive to the waves of beauty that in his earliest period flooded his being; the old joy remains despite the new sorrow, for all beauty seems to him the conquest won by the Spirit over the obstacles in the way of its universal manifestation, it is the constant sign of God's emergence and increase. The pain-motif brought in a certain ache for the supracosmic; and the theory of Maya, with a stress on some featureless light and peace beyond, plays a perceptible though not very prominent role henceforth in his verse. He has moods when the issue of suffering turned soulwards appears to be an escape into a "white hush" far from earth's panorama of change and even the beauty and delight possible here a path to a perfection behind the temporal and the manifest, behind also the larger occult planes that form earth's immediate background and from which the poets draw the multi-hued stuff of their dreams. At such times his colourful poetry becomes like the pictures of the young Andhra artist whose premature death he commemorates in a series of sonnets:
In the deep red, sweet yellow, quiet green
We see the gorgeous striving of your mind
Towards the perfect ultimate serene
Vision of Love which strikes all colour blind.
Page 172
The main trend, however, of his muse is to sing the Spirit as realisable within the time-process, so that the movement from eternity to eternity may mean the suffusion of each hour by the secret Splendour:
What do I seek beyond the golden edges of the earth?
Here is the Image clothed in light and mystery and fire.
In conscious hours our restless human hands can bring
to birth
All that the Spirit may desire.
The glories of beyond are here, the destiny of skies
Is being fulfilled on earth; the fate of every silver star
Is hidden in a seed. A sudden vision in my eyes
Plucks all the radiance from afar.
Where do you wander, restless heart? All that you seek
is born
Each moment in you, though you know it not, since
you are blind.
See, I am clothed in regal gold and purple cloths of morn
And mantled in the scented wind.
This cry, twelve lines long like much of his best verse, is a fitting note on which to end a survey of Chattopadhyaya's genius before its self-consecration for a couple of years to Sri Aurobindo's yoga in the Ashram at Pondicherry. But there are some other peculiarities of his work deserving notice. Here the aesthetic sensation and the poetic intelligence are openly allied, the lines
A sudden vision in my eyes
Plucks all the radiance from afar
being again a phase of the latter in an intuitive crystallisation of considerable power.
The seventy and odd sonnets, too, that we have from him
Page 173
during his early years illustrate more or less the same alliance; they give a very mature ring and they point to a rather prolific future in the genre, for he writes them with an inspired ease not usually to be found where a firm yet flexible tone and structure are requisite for success as in the Italian form, and Chattopadhyaya's penchant is for that: even when the sestet is English a la Shakespeare, the octave he generally builds with a Petrarchan punctiliousness of rhyme. The muscular energy other sonneteers employ is almost absent: instead, a nimble quickness executes the complexities — a magician and not a master-builder rears up the flawless fabric. There is no dearth of force whenever that is necessary, but it is of a man surefootedly leaping up difficult edges rather than strenuously climbing them. Alfred Douglas has written a sonnet with a curiously phrased sestet of great strength —
Only to build one crystal barrier
Against this sea which beats upon our days;
To ransom one lost moment with a rhyme
Or if fate cries and grudging gods demur,
To clutch life's hair, and thrust one naked phrase
Like a lean knife between the ribs of Time.
Critics might, like grudging gods, demur to the slightly histrionic shade, but the compressed aphoristic magnificence of the traditional sonnet-language is in ample evidence. Now listen to Chattopadhyaya:
One perilous moment wherein must be told
All the deep-hidden mysteries which lie
Within a lifetime's darkness like pure gold:
One moment lent to utter the great cry
Of love, which lost, Time greyly passes by
And leaves the world broken and bent and old.
The technique leans on a subtle urge, a widening out to fill
Page 174
the form and not a packing in as by Alfred Douglas, but the strength is there and as if to give conclusive proof of it the inverted foot made by "broken" violates the metre by a highly effective jerk emphasising the sense.
Taken ensemble, Chattopadhyaya's accomplishment in the sonnet-medium — before Sri Aurobindo's series of sonnets in 1939 — is perhaps the most notable in our century by its sustained poetry. Rupert Brooke has been awarded the palm by English critics but his work is too scarce and the highest inspiration peeps out just once or twice, whereas Chattopadhyaya has in almost every sonnet some genuine flash. The former has, however, one feature which is very striking and worth emulating — a vivid quaver and restless beauty expressed technically by anapaests and an unusual overrunning from line to line. Chattopadhyaya's vividness is due to colour and image, while the feeling-tone depends on the shortness or length of sentence, grammatical staccato or suspense. It is difficult to choose the very best when so much merit is scattered throughout: perhaps the following catches the typical accent in more than one variety:
Clouds close and clash across the starry deep
And darken every corner of the sky.
Holding their breath under a sullen sweep
Of sudden rain, the lakes and meadows lie....
Loud wind and storm have hushed the croak and cry
Of frog and cricket. Lightning flashes leap
Like amber serpents from the grey-black sleep
Of clouds, and earth seems like a blind man's eye!
But tranquil dreams the sky behind the storm
And the clear stars burn with a fleckless flame
Beyond the veils which the dim clouds have drawn
Across them, as the dreams serene and warm
In me though storm-clouds cover up Thy name
At times between the weeping dusk and dawn.
Page 175
Chattopadhyaya's performance with the sonnet has in a particular context disclosed a quality not represented in the above — a quality which is neither the poetic intelligence nor the aesthetic sensation, but can only be described as creative insight: the rhythm and the language, though not superior as art to what is done elsewhere, are then of a kind eminently desirable by one who seeks to utter the Spirit from increasingly authentic sources, for the word-music bears upon its surge an experience, or at least the reflection of an experience, proper to occult planes not easy of access. Chattopadhyaya has not written any poem woven all of this rare light, but in places it breaks through and we have a magic and an intonation practised by only a few poets in their most spiritual moments. I shall give three examples, two occurring outside the sonnet-sequences. He sees once the twilight fall like some great benediction of quiet from the sky over "the ripening gold of ricefields" — yet there is no quiet in his own heart and the "black storm" raging in it threatens to destroy for him the spell:
What lips are these which strive with shadowy breath
To extinguish the rich flame upon the height?
In the words and the music of these lines the atmosphere of the very spell and the weird darkness opposing it enters: it is not just explained or imaged — the veil has been stirred aside from across mysterious regions. On another occasion he writes of "plying swift oars of inwardness" in "a dim boat of dreams" and passing beyond all time and change until he reaches
the city of old sleep
Where the lone ways are crowded with white peace.
The whole occult picture is made to grow real, one feels oneself actually in that unknown place — the poetic suggestion from there has come out pure and sheer, helped by the vowellation, the trio of spondees and, in a line of mono-
Page 176
syllabic slowness, the significant dissyllable "crowded" as if by its single occurrence to enforce the fact that it was only with aloof calm that the ways of the sleep-city were packed. Four lines in one of the sonnets upon the young Andhra artist's death reflect the most intimate mystic revelation intuited by Chattopadhyaya direct on some inner plane:
Departing, you have left a track of light
Over the solitary ocean-deep
Of my dark soul across which day and night
My body voyages like a boat of sleep.
The vision and the experience emerge by degrees, gather more and more concrete fulness until in the last line the native vibration of them flows out. The total effect is a highwater-mark of creative insight.
At this point I might have said:
"If the faculty of creative insight develops side by side with the exotic and the mental strain for Chattopadhyaya's genius, we must have, as a result, work of unprecedented depth as well as exuberance and power. Already in 1934, when he has joined Sri Aurobindo's Ashram, the bulk of his work is sure of a permanent place in English literature: he will hardly lie on a lower level than AE and Yeats; but they have come to the fading hour of life, all their triumphs lie behind them — Chattopadhyaya is still in mid-career and his future is big with a versatile fruition to which it is hard to assign cautious boundaries. There is a flow in his richness that is prophetic of diverse self-fulfilment on a grand scale with regard both to the swelling number of individual poems and to work executed in large proportions. Among shorter poetic forms one kind strikes us as hardly exploited elsewhere by his published books. In them we come across rhapsody bejewelled with sense-colour, reflection alive with apposite simile and metaphor, vision vibrating with imagery of truth — but the personal emotion-cry of a lyric directness is not often heard. Lyricism is present, yet rarely direct and
Page 177
personal as for instance in Shelley, and when the peculiar mood is felt it is not with the mystic touch discoverable in all places. Chattopadhyaya has responded to the Divine as a presence suffusing Nature, haunting the kingdom of thought, sweeping down strange curves of world on unfamiliar world other than this; what he has not awakened to is the Divine as a person, an archetype of the human nature — face and lips and hands and feet that are perfect and at the same time like ours by a close warmth.
''Shelley and Yeats mix the ideal and the real in a manner that is mystic by imagination, not by experience: Emilia Viviani was in fact nothing save a fancied symbol of the Soul within Shelley's soul, and the woman with odorous twilight about her tresses and about her mouth is a mere shadow hinting by gesture here and there the Rose of all Roses enshrined in Yeats's heart. But the personal emotion burns none the less, joining its heat to the light of high dreams: in Chattopadhyaya the two elements fall almost apart as if he could not somehow adjust a blending of the human shade and the divine substance — except on a couple of occasions and then too not in the finest vein. The purely human love-poems, though not negligible, suffer by comparison with the unstrained fire in the mystic pieces: only one stands out, altogether non-mystic yet steeped in witchery, to indicate his potentialities if ever he were to fill himself with a passion for God as a spiritual body, an archetype of the human. This extraordinary lyric should take its place beside Robert Bridge's 'Awake, my heart, to be loved, awake, awake!' Bridge's stanzas have ranked with the supreme cries of English lyricism by an exalted sweetness; this poem of Chattopadhyaya's is a more simple rapture but just for that simplicity works perhaps a more intimate magic:
My love and I will meet each other again,
O joy, it is going to be soon and very soon.
And when we meet we will kiss each other's pain,
Kiss each other's pain away under the moon.
Page 178
Though I have wounded my love she will come to me,
For she, my love, is generous, she is so kind.
Pour more goldenly, light of day, on the tree!
Touch the leaves at twilight more tenderly, wind!
Though I have spoken to her unbeautiful words,
Though I have broken her heart she will come again.
Sing more sweetly at dawn, O beautiful birds!
Slip more silverly over the stones, O rain!
The spontaneous technique is beyond praise: the varied tremolo of glide-anapaests, the effective truncation of initial feet in the more ecstatic lines, the euphonious surprise of other less usual stress-arrangements — and running through all these modulations a play of long vowels and ringing liquids and lapsing sibilants. It is a pity we do not have more of this impassioned imaginative delicacy in Chattopadhyaya's verse — but that may be because its complete outflow has waited for the true bent of his personal emotion to manifest itself: that is, in the mystic way, as all other parts of his nature have done.
"A second line of development is towards creations of long breath, poems or poetic dramas conceived and constructed largely, bold sweeping canvasses whereon the fullblown prolificity of which he seems capable if signs can be believed shall paint some story of the soul with occult planes of forces and personalities and godheads as its theatre. The plays he has produced ere now are fine poetry but the blank verse tends to be a rich monotone because of a lack of strong variations in style and rhythm; besides, they are too brief to claim a royal afflatus of idea and craftsmanship. That he would write short poems in abundance enough to put him on a par with any other English poet who has done the same is certain. But to deal out a generous quantity of excellent quality in small and separate outbursts is not the sole factor determining poetic rank; the decisive factor which lifts one clean to the top is the gift of designing a spacious, a palatial, a
Page 179
multitudinous unity. By this time, the thirties, we know only one attempt to make mightily; but Hardy's Dynasts is a sprawling greatness. Though its plan has behind it an intention more intricate and extensive than the Iliad, it lacks the organic control the latter, for all "our vagueness about its single authorship, exhibits so lucidly to the mind, and it suffers also by an unsteady poetic fire in the various parts. If Chattopadhyaya makes something even less colossal yet large and poetic enough, if he fashions a new Prometheus Unbound, essays and finishes another Hyperion or rebuilds a Paradiso, in terms of a fresh and mature mystic originality, he will stand like a giant in the dawn of a new era, his masterpiece gathering its lines of light from a creative Sun beyond both our day and our darkness."
2. THE GLORIOUS POETIC FRUITION
How far have my hopes and prophecies about Harindranath Chattopadhyaya come true? At a moment of crisis in his personal life he joined the Ashram of Yoga which had sprung up in Pondicherry round Sri Aurobindo. Two years he lived there — two glorious years in which he did the poetic work of two lifetimes, so abundant and so uniformly excellent were the poems of various kind he rattled off at breakneck speed on his typewriter. But this phenomenon came to a sudden halt when something in the man proved too rigid for the transforming pressure Sri Aurobindo was putting on all his disciples. Something refused to change and Chattopadhyaya, instead of humbly withdrawing from the "brave, new world" emerging in the Ashram, rose in revolt, flung away the luminous power that was lifting his poetic genius to its climax and plunged back into the melee of common life. He could have kept sweet his inner contact with the Master, even though the outer association had been split. Then the result of his departure would not have been a stop in genuine inspiration. The old mystical beauty of his work no less than the new light that had suffused it vanished. Its place was
Page 180
taken by a communistic enthusiasm, a passion of the proletariat, turning out excited propaganda in verse relieved at extremely long intervals by the true poetic flash. Various concerns of an all-too-common kind also occupied the forefront of his mind. Art has an alchemic touch that can turn to gold anything on which its fingers may fall, but all men have not the capacity to carry the philosopher's stone wherever they go. There are trends of genius as there are trends of character, and while Chattopadhyaya the mystic could voyage through magic seas of poetry and discover golden countries, Chattopadhyaya the "comrade" and commoner could not wield the sickle to gather any rich harvest and the hammer in his hand could only drive nails into a coffin for his own dying poetic spirit. This, to the mind of any critic who has seen his work under Sri Aurobindo, is the most appalling tragedy that has overtaken the world of art in our day.
After his break-away from Yoga, he has published two books compiled from the output of his Ashram days. They scarcely represent the many-sidedness and range of his creativity. As they are the only ones somehow allowed to slip from the stranglehold he has applied to his mystical penchant, the public cannot adequately appreciate what Yoga did for him. But even these meagre volumes are packed with supreme qualities. The poems are of an intense inner life figured forth in several styles. The most prevalent is a lyric fluency simple to the point of spoken speech yet alive with the most rich and profound suggestion. Perhaps this style is best illustrated by Shaper Shaped:
In days gone by I used to be
A potter who would feel
His fingers mould the yielding clay
To patterns on his wheel;
But now through wisdom lately won
That pride has died away,
I have ceased to be the potter
And have learned to be the clay.
Page 181
In bygone times I used to be
A poet through whose pen
Innumerable songs would come
To win the hearts of men;
But through new-got knowledge"
Which I hadn't had so long,
I have ceased to be the poet
And have learned to be the song.
I was a fashioner of swords
In days that now are gone,
Which in a hundred battlefields
Glittered and gleamed and shone;
But now that I am brimming with
The silence of the Lord,
I have ceased to be sword-maker
And have learned to be the sword.
In other days I used to be
A dreamer who would hurl
On every side an insolence
Of emerald and pearl;
But now that I am kneeling
At the feet of the Supreme,
I have ceased to be the dreamer
And have learned to be the dream.
No finer and at the same time no plainer statement of the self-dedication which animates Yoga can be offered. The new Chattopadhyaya does not sing for singing's sake but because each song streams from the silence of the divine Spirit growing within and floats him into a yet deeper realm of the same Spirit. However, while the lyric light displayed by Shaper Shaped needs no interpretation, unfolding as it does its profundities like a bud opening into a flower — exquisitely natural — and calling for no effort on the reader's part to respond to its revelation, the stuff of a poem like The Shepherd
Page 182
has a different quality and appeal. Here too is a natural felicity, a flowerlike process, yet we feel at once that this flower with the mystical aroma has not risen from the outer mind sown with seeds of the inner divinity. It is a growth in another region of consciousness than Shaper Shaped, a region where the inward is expressed not in an outward language but in a language that has itself the turn and rhythm of inwardness. The mind feels somewhat baffled, for an order of reality is imaged, which exists beyond our mind's usual vision of Nature. The mystical life is not presented here through earth-symbols so much as carried bodily out, as it were, from its profound plane: the symbols belong to an unknown dimension and may seem surrealistically incomprehensible in a strange luminous way instead of the murkily fitful way adopted by Surrealism in Europe. To a brooding attention, the poem loses its bright inconsequence and becomes concrete and harmonious, a masterpiece of what I have termed creative insight:
My soul is a shepherd
Leading the sheep of hours
Silverly across wide silences
Strewn with singing flowers.
He is driving his lonely
Old gray-silver sheep
Towards the solitary fold
Of inward-shining sleep.
They are gathered slowly
Into the soundless fold
Where they are long rows of silver
Washed in hushed gold.
Read the poem three or four times, not by the eye alone but with the ear attentive to a slow subdued intoning. The rhythmic effect is as important as the vision-stimulus, for the
Page 183
vision is of a "subliminal" region to which we are unaccustomed and, unless the rhythm is absorbed, the living thrill, the vibrant sense of the reality brought into view will escape. There is a deep vowellation throughout, and across it runs a thin or thick sibilance: wideness and profundity are suggested, with a sweep through them into a spiritual quiet. In the second and third stanzas the predominant vowel is the long o: it brings here a sense of entry into some large yet enclosed secrecy of inner space. Growing into a state of purity and calm "strewn" with lovely spontaneities of inspiration and concentrating all its awareness of the time-process into a movement towards the Timeless, the consciousness is pictured as passing into a condition of trance wherein the diverse aspects of the purified human nature are steeped into a divine silence, a divine illumination — "long rows of silver/Washed in hushed gold." The sibilance of that closing phrase is remarkable. Added to the effect of washing and hushing, there is subtly indicated the increase or change from the soul's silver to God's gold by the deepening of the thin s-note into the thick sound of sh.
It is difficult to align this poem with any particular trend in English verse. The general stuff of atmosphere and rhythm has affinities with stray passages in Blake, but Blake has a more nocturnal touch, so to speak — he gives us mystery rather than revelation. Yeats's twilight, with its fairy and mythic hues, is also close to the tone here, but a more genuinely spiritual light is present in The Shepherd, an Indian rather than an Irish trance. The impression is as of something Yeatsian crossed with AE — not the magical occult but the mystical occult. Chattopadhyaya has struck a vein of far-reaching originality, with novel possibilities of poetic expression.
A poem equally out of the way on the whole, though not equally consistent in plane of inspiration with regard to the parts, is the sonnet entitled Mask. This sonnet is not exactly typical of Chattopadhyaya who writes as a rule from the plane of vivid thought: no doubt, mystical vision and spiri-
Page 184
tual experience grip that plane, yet they assume the form and rhythm of the thinking mind. No bit of poetic excellence is thereby lost: only, the turn of language and the cumulative sound-suggestion are not such as would be found if he wrote directly from planes of consciousness above the mind — the planes that break upon us in the ancient Upanishads. The highest Upanishadic range is wellnigh impossible to catch except in a few isolated moments: no published work of Chattopadhyaya's shows it. The middle ranges are not beyond a spiritual poet's reach: it is their presence in Mask that makes it stand out from Chattopadhyaya's usual style. The usual style, when austere and not lavish, speaks thus of a spiritual realisation:
...the naked everlastingness
Which nor by pleasure nor by pain is stirred,
Being a hush that bears no human word
Nor deed nor dream nor passion as a burden,
Since it exists unto itself, a truth
That ages not but, gifted with a youth
Won from the lonely Light of God as guerdon,
Its path is pure and smooth.
The substance is drawn from above the mind: the language and rhythm instead of leaping out straight from there are transposed to a mental key. It is high poetic utterance with the accent of a Sophoclean chorus without the precise choric measure. But the style is of the spiritualised mind: another style is possible, not more poetically perfect yet more spiritually vibrant. The peculiar excellence of that rare style can be gauged if we set the sonnet Mask side by side with the quotation just made and if we compare in its own octave or sestet the lines that are spiritualised mind to those that are sheer spirituality:
Beyond your many-coloured moods I bear
The flowering white monotony of foam,
Page 185
The diamond dimness of the domed air
And the deep Mood which silence makes its home.
In me, the Timeless, time forgets to roam,
Drunk with my poise, grown sudden unaware,
Offering up its noontide and its gloam,
Withdrawn in a lost attitude of prayer.
I have grown illimitably alien
To the brief gaudiness of time and space,
A thing immortal beyond mortal ken,
Evasive essence that you cannot trace.
Here, even here, amidst a crowd of men
I hide the light behind a human face.
The inner state depicted is not altogether the same as that in the preceding quotation or even in The Shepherd. Still, it has affinities with them which render a comparison fruitful. The inwardness suggested by
Nor deed nor dream nor passion as a burden
carries a rhythm and motion of wings different from
Though the former has a revelatory force of its own, I should say there is more subtle illumination in the latter, more intuitive breadth, more rapt closeness to the spiritual reality, even as there is more of these things in that picture of a high heavenly mood of night-coloured mystery —
than in the picture of spiritual agelessness gifted with
Page 186
a youth
Won from the lonely Light of God as guerdon.
The same more and less of sheer spirituality is perceived if the close of the sonnet —
I hide the light behind a human face
is weighed against the two lines immediately before it:
It is not merely the presence of images or of visual terms that constitutes the differentia. We can have a penetrating mystical figure, as in another poem —
Then life begins to know itself at last
As an immortal moving pyramid
Conscious of the arcane within it hid,
A pyramid of glow which does not cast
The shadow that it did —
and feel none the less that a quality of spirit-stuff — at once ample and intense, far-sounding and close-throbbing in the rhythm as well as in the word and the vision — draws a dividing line between the two kinds of mystical exaltation.
Between The Shepherd and Mask the dividing line is thinner in some respects. Even the products of the spiritualised mind have no absolute gulf separating them from those of sheer spirituality. Influences from the latter steal across, influences of amplitude and height. What, on the other hand, is common to Mask and The Shepherd is direct intensity and light. The feeling and seeing in both are spiritually intimate, the vision is so worded and rhythmed that it invades us with a tangible concreteness of the
Page 187
Unknown. But the Unknown has many domains, and there is missing in The Shepherd the wind of an eagle's passage through unbounded space. Its style is a dip shiningly inward, whereas that of the intuitive parts of Mask is a kindled soar upward in broad circles from an inward starting-point.
As pure poetry, however, all styles can sit on equal thrones. And Chattopadhyaya's work is full of throned inspiration. It would be a shame if he suppressed for good the immense bulk of verse to which his two years of Yoga gave birth. His later life having been out of tune with mysticism, he might not have cared for so masterful an expression of spiritual truths. But what has art to do with the man's phases? Each phase can be, for art, of paramount value; art is any substance caught up in an insightful perfection of form; if Chattopadhyaya was still an artist at heart, no matter with what communistic or hedonistic bent blocking his outlet, he should not have muffled a voice from his past that had rung so beautifully true. Nor should he have let himself be cowed by the superficial tendency of the public to declaim against an artistic creation if it did not reflect the man as he might be at the moment. Few artists are on a par with the height and depth of consciousness opening up before us in their works. It would be crass folly for anyone to charge a spiritual poem with being pretentious, should the poet not be a practising saint twenty-four hours of the day. A good poem stands by itself: if it has inspiration it fulfils itself and is perfectly sincere. A poem's sincerity or truth lies in the verse being a faithful transcription of something fine in the heights and depths of our consciousness, regions that are mostly far away and hidden from our normal state — the sincerity or truth does not consist in whether the poetic revelation agrees altogether with the poet's day-to-day outer life or even with the actual experience with which the poem began. That is the first thing to understand about art. If Chattopadhyaya has written spiritual poetry of a truthful order in the artistic sense, why should he be debarred from publishing it? What can be pretentious about such a pub-
Page 188
lication? If poeple want to measure one's outer life entirely by one's poetry, they are going the wrong way about a most delicate business. It is their fault and not the poet's or his poetry's. Great poetry does not pose: the simple reason is that it is truly inspired. In art, mere intellectual ingenuity, mere rhetoric, mere artifice of word and rhythm are the only poses. So true is this that if a man leading a non-spiritual life were in a spell of inspiration to dash off Shaper Shaped, The Shepherd and Mask they would nowise stand condemned as hypocritical. It is not in the least beyond possibility that such a phenomenon should take place. As Whitman said, each of us contains multitudes, and a personality at once poetic and mystical can very well appear in brief flashes among the jostling crowd within us of egotist and altruist, fool and philosopher, solitary and society-hunter. The man and the artist do not always coincide: art is often if not ever an outrush of hidden splendours of the subliminal and the supraliminal through one side of the man that is afire with a sense of beauty and quick with creative genius. Provided this particular side serves as a transparent medium, a work of art can be held as authentic, with no stain of pose upon it.
Only from one point of view the publication of the gigantic wealth Chattopadhyaya gathered during his Yogic years would cause a mood of bitterness. Knowing the wonders he created and dreaming of the miracles such genius would foreshadow, we should be bound to make a wry face. A man whose genius has at its roots the mystical aspiration ruins himself by shedding the mystic in him. Perhaps he cannot really shed that side, but he can keep it choked and rob year after year of the most golden fruition. Despite all weakness and obstacle he should treasure and cherish the mystical spark until the day when it can burst into a myriad tongues of flame. The more he does that treasuring and cherishing, the greater will be his fulfilment. And what a superb fulfilment Chattopadhyaya could have had! The sorriest thing that can be spoken about him is such an exclamation. That is the epitaph of damning praise his
Page 189
admirers dread they would utter if they saw the mystic's magnificence which the "comrade" and commoner have kept unpublished.
One judgment, however, can be boldly pronounced. No matter how short he has fallen of the empyrean accessible to him, the complete publishing of the poetry born in his two years of Yoga will prove Harindranath Chattopadhyaya the writer of the largest number of first-rate poems of brief length the world has been enriched with by one single man.
Page 190
Home
Disciples
Amal Kiran
Books
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.