Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

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TO DILIP KUMAR ROY

The terms "saint" and "saintly" are used very loosely in English, just as "spiritual" and "mystical" are applied to anybody who believes in and thinks about supernormal and supernatural things and experiences. But we must take the English language in hand and chisel the meaning of its great words to represent precisely the inner life. I suppose French is worse stilt: spirituel means in it "mentally sparkling" - even an atheist and materialist and sensualist can be spirituel!

The Protestant Reformation had much to do with befogging the English language in regard to the inner life. The Roman Catholics had more or less accurate notions about the difference between ethical goodness and saintly radiancy -though I dare say that in some instances they reduced the difference to a crude presence of what were called miraculous phenomena. But the canonisation of a man came about after much scrutinising of his life and its sources of activity, a careful study of the subjective as well as objective quality of his being. That is why even the Pope who is the head of the Church is not by virtue of his mere moral and religious eminence called a saint. Among the Protestants, whoever lives a life of sexual abstinence and charity and service is a saint: often the sexual desideratum is dropped altogether and a "saintly" prelate or missionary can have his bellyful of wedded licence without the least tarnishing of his halo!

I don't know what exactly to say about the term "rishi". Sri Aurobindo has explained its root-meaning and applied it to Bankim Chandra Chatterji for his discovery of the mantra of India's renascence in "Bande Mataram" ("I bow to you, O Mother!"). In its highest connotation, "rishi" means one who brings about the creative expression of the secret divine spirit of things, either in word or action, preferably in both, as the composers of the Veda did. You have asked about Tagore. If

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he attained, on the plane proper to him, a supreme creative pitch in his poetry of the inner life or of mystical and spiritual realities, he could be hailed as a rishi. In a general sense, the poet who gives sovereign expression from the inside, so to speak, to any plane becomes a rishi, no matter if he does not touch the mystical and spiritual aspect of things. Thus I suppose Shakespeare can be described as the rishi of the plane of the Life-Force. I myself, however, prefer to give a mystical and spiritual tinge to the term - so that the profound Mother-worshipping fervour of Bankim Chandra would make him a rishi in his vivid and visionary national anthem while the emotional patriotism of Iqbal in his richly imaginative "Hindustan Hamara" wouldn't. So too would I deem Tagore a rishi in his intensest ecstasy of utterance only where he reveals, in the light of his own word-plane, realities of the inner being or of Super-Nature. And here I should like to point out that in all true rishi-poems there is illumination as well as rapture, a seerhood no less than the soul's lyricism. Certain parts of Gitanjali have this double quality - so do others that are not devotional at all. Devotionalism is not the sine qua non. I don't think one could designate Tagore's "Urvasie" devotional, but I am inclined to rank it among his finest rishi-creations.

It is necessary to say, however, that the poet in one could be on many occasions a rishi but as a man one might be very far from it. To be a rishi as a man one must be something much more than intellectually wise and culturally accom-'plished. One's judgments and actions must spring from some divine depth.

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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:

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if it has inspiration it fulfils itself and is perfectly sincere. A poem's sincerity or "truth" lies in its 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 - its truth or sincerity does not consist in whether its 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 people want to measure one's outer life entirely by one's poetry and vice versa, 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 an unspiritual life were in a spell of inspiration to dash off some perfect pieces of spiritual moods he 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 egoist and altruist, fool and philosopher, solitary and society-hunter. The man and the artist do not always coincide; art is often, if not at all times, an outrush of hidden splendours of the subliminal and the supraliminal through one side of the man, the side 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.

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Your letter reached me this morning, setting right the peccant line in Hymn to Grace, setting right also your rather exaggerated depreciation of X as well as of yourself. You are

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writing finely at present in English - some of your stuff being more than fine - excellent and splendid. Your Bengali work I am unfortunately unable to savour, but I can guess that if you could write so well in English you must be superb in Bengali. Of course, I cannot say I like your English work everywhere. I am, I fear, much harder to please than your friend whose opinion on your Serpent-poem you quote. At the same time I hope I am more catholic in my tastes than most critics and more alert to detect shades of beauty. By the way, why do you talk of "leaving" some good work in Bengali? The word "leaving" suggests that you have made up your mind to kick the bucket sooner or later. Why this easy knuckling-under to Pallida Mors? Why this unwillingness to accept the beautiful burden of the Aurobindonian immortality by way of physical transformation as an ideal?

As regards AE and Yeats, I don't see what makes you think I do not find the former splendid. I like him very well; only, I cannot say he is a greater poet than Yeats. I surmise Sri Aurobindo will be much astonished if you tell him that Yeats is not a great poet. AE was by far the more luminously greater man and there were some traits in Yeats which were repellent - arrogance, pontificality, acidity - but these traits were the defects of a certain type of rigid greatness and though repellent in themselves they formed part of a personal whole which was very impressive because they were all the time accompanied by the positives of which they were the negatives - proud unbreakable fighting will, occult or wizard sight, contempt of pretentious mediocrity and refusal to suffer fools gladly. Even if they had been cheap or common instead of impressive, his poetry would not have become less great in our eyes any more than the few ugly traits in Beethoven's character make his music less grand for us or the best work of Wordsworth the poet less wonderfully seerlike because of the massive stupidity that in the man Wordsworth was the reverse of what in the obverse was a profound wisdom. Yeats's verse is most enchanting, most haunting - exquisite in suggestion, exquisite in rhythm. His

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suggestion is not always strictly formulable but has on our inner being an impact which thrills and illumines in an unforgettably subtle way.

I remember a chorus in one of his dramas: the refrain is -"God has not appeared to the birds"- and it seems to mean that all creatures except man have a sort of fullness and finality and contentment because they are fixed types, as it were, in their outer conscious being and do not have man's restless aspiration, an aspiration rendered unbearable to himself no less than disturbing to the world in general by his inkling of the Divine Presence that turns all natural life unsatisfying for him. Two verses have stuck in my mind out of that chorus:

The gier-eagle has chosen his part

In blue deeps of the upper air

Where one-eyed day can meet his stare:

He is content with his savage heart.

God has not appeared to the birds....

And where are last year's cygnets gone?

The lake is empty. Why do they fling

White wing out beside white wing?

What can a swan need but a swan?

God has not appeared to the birds....

In my opinion, this, though not Yeats at his most Celtic, is poetry of a marvellous beauty - extremely suggestive, moving and musical. To get into the spirit of its vision and word and vibration is to enter a rare world of revealing intensity and, if one is a poet, to subtilise and enrich one's expressive possibilities as one can scarcely do with the help of any other contemporary poet except Walter de la Mare in some of his finest lines.

AE at his highest is as great as Yeats but he hasn't Yeats's

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subtly rich incantation-effect. AH is a much greater poet than Walter de la Mare - yet there is at times a certain depth of magical sound in the latter which is usually absent from AE. This does not cast any slur on AE's inspiration or art, but it points to a special quality of incantation which, without being at all complex and purple in language, is packed with shade upon shade, tone behind tone, of beauty. Take this simple-worded stanza from de la Mare's All that's past:

Very old are the woods;

And the buds that break Out of the brier's boughs,

When March winds wake, So old with their beauty are -

Oh, no man knows Through what wild centuries

Roves back the rose.

1 believe AE in his own way enters a neighbourhood of this depth of magical sound on a few isolated occasions - one is perhaps the poem Germinal which is different in theme-spirit but not quite different in tune-spirit. Does he ever break into the Yeatsian charmed circle? (Of course I have mostly the early Yeats in mind.) AE's remaining outside it does not, I repeat, diminish his worth as a poet. He has his own music even as he has his own moods. But there is a spell-binding by words, which Yeats commands very often and AE very seldom. AE can be delicate and intuitive, colourful and revelatory: what he does not have as a rule is that verbal spell-binding - an art which to those who are sensitive to the soul of words is most precious.

It is Harindranath Chattopadhyaya's not possessing this art in the large majority of his work that drew from Krishna-prem [Ronald Nixon] an unfavourable comparison of him with Yeats. Krishnaprem, like Arjava [J.A. Chadwick] and unlike you, is intoxicated with Yeats - and rightly so. Yet to make Yeats the touchstone of poetry is misguiding; for the

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spell-binding art of subtly rich incantation is one of the rare modes of poetry and does not comprise all the poetic modes. We might as well judge poetry by Sri Aurobindo's "overhead" tones: these tones make a still rarer mode and if we set up the unfathomable responses they create in us as the criterion of art we shall entirely miss the value of the large bulk of the world's poetry. I recollect Sri Aurobindo's saying, when you showed him Krishnaprem's verdict on Harindra-nath, that to condemn the latter because he was not Yeatsian was unfair. Take Sri Aurobindo himself in his early vital-mental work like Love and Death. There is a passage in that blank-verse narrative, the speech of the Love-God Kama or Madan, to which I had somewhat failed to respond, preferring the long haunting passage on Ruru's descent into the Underworld through the rush of the Ganges into ocean-depths. Our friend Arjava (John Chadwick) had considered it one of the peaks in that poem. I asked Sri Aurobindo what his own private opinion was. He wrote back:

"My own private opinion agrees with Arjava's estimate rather than with yours. These lines may not be astonishing in the sense of an unusual effort of constructive imagination and vision like the descent into Hell; but I do not think I have, elsewhere, surpassed this speech in power of language, passion and truth of feeling and nobility and felicity of rhythm all fused together into a perfect whole. And I think I have succeeded in expressing the truth of the godhead of Kama, the godhead of vital love (I am not using 'vital' in the strict Yogic sense; I mean the love that draws lives passionately together or throws them into or upon each other) with a certain completeness of poetic sight and perfection of poetic power, which puts it on one of the peaks - even if not the highest possible peak - of achievement. That is my private opinion - but, of course, all do not need to see alike in these matters."

(10.2.1932)

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