Our Light and Delight

15

Some Famous People Admired by the Mother

The mother never hesitated to admire quite openly whoever impressed her as of extraordinary merit. Right from my early years in the Ashram — from 16 December 1927 onwards — I heard her speak enthusiastically of Ysayë. To her he was the greatest violinist possible. I had never come across his name before she uttered it. I do not see why, since, as I later learnt.

Eugène Ysayë, born in Belgium at Liège in 1858, studied not only at the Liège Conservatoire but also at Paris and from 1918 to 1922 conducted the Cincinnati Orchestra, made several tours of Great Britain, the last in 1923, eight years before he died, and won sufficient international fame. My idols in violin-performance were Kubelik, Kreisler and more directly Heifetz whom I, along with Lalita, heard in Bombay and even met offstage where Lalita out of enthusiasm took off a gold-chain from her wrist and presented it to him. I also knew of the almost legendary Paganini who had lived from 1782 to 1840.

But on listening to the Mother's praise of Ysayë I came to believe that he must have been superior to all of these. He could not have been so memorable to a being with such profound insight into the values of art unless he had been the very personification of the spirit of violin-playing. I remember her once alluding to his presence as having a head like a lion's. Even before she spoke at a little length about him in one of her evening sessions of Questions and Answers¹ at the Playground in 1953. I had known from her that something of Beethoven's power had possessed him or had reincarnated in him.

She regarded the musician César Franck highly for his pure psychic inspiration. Her admiration for Bach and Beethoven is well known, but perhaps it is not so commonly understood

¹ Centenary Edition Vol. 3, p. 106.

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that Wagner also was to her one of the greatest musical phenomena, though not always of such unmixed quality as those two. I recall a special reference by her to one of his operas. I recall it all the more distinctly because I happened to distinguish myself on the occasion by being the only one to be able to name the opera about which she was speaking. She could not get the title from her own memory and nobody in the company — we were more than a dozen and a half, including Nolini, Amrita, Pavitra (Philippe Barbier St.- Hilaire). Datta (Miss Dorothy Hodgson) and Shantimayi (Mrs. Jeanette Macpheeters) — could help her out. With some hesitation I dared to whisper in the midst or the general silence: "Parsifal." The Mother gave an exclamation of pleasure and said: "Yes, Yes." It would seem that this bit of knowledge on my part — as well as at a later date the mention of 1066 (which every schoolboy mugs) as the year of the Battle of Hastings — established for me a reputation for practical omniscience in the history of human achievement, a reputation which soon reached Sri Aurobindo's ears through the Mother's wonder at all that I appeared to know.

Rodin the sculptor, a contemporary, was to her an outstanding genius. Her mention of him brought to her face an expression as of grateful happiness kindled by his superb art. In judging writers she distinguished between those who had an elemental creative force and those who were perfectionists in their art. She gave Victor Hugo as an example par excellence of the former category, saying, "Such people are not very careful, they may misspell or even make mistakes in grammar, but their rushing inspiration carries them on to great results." Among the perfectionists she listed Flaubert: "He does not produce in such abundance but the little he writes is flawlessly done." Perhaps among writers of her own day she admired Anatole France the most. His style struck her as the very quintessence of literary prose. Sri Aurobindo also has ranked him among the great prose-stylists. The Mother had all his works in her private collection. At the beginning of April 1955, when I composed a long essay on French Culture and India and quoted a sentence from Anatole France and underlined an English author's notion that it was untranslatable in a direct fashion, the Mother took up the challenge and, after explaining to me some fine points of

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French idiom, wrote: "To translate France the most simple and short sentence is always the best." Her rendering appears at the end of the passage which runs in my essay:

"...Has not the agnostic Anatole France, ironical about the aspirations of the all-too-human, pitiful of blind pieties, shown also the irony of the negative attitude, the piercing pitiableness of the denying posture, when he penned that sentence of delicate inexplicable nostalgia: 'Ce que la vie a de meilleur, c'est I'idée qu'elle nous donne du je ne sais quoi qui n'est point en elle.' A sentence, we may observe, that is typical also of the beautiful directness of French prose in even the glimmers it gives of the far and the faint, a combination of the subtle with the simple and straightforward, a fearless use of the almost colloquial without sacrificing euphony. Paul Bloomfield remarks that this sentence is as mellifluous in French as it would be awkward in English if translated word for word; and we may add that the soul of its liquid elegance as well as of its pellucid poignancy would be a little missing even in the finest English rendering: "The best in life is the idea it gives us of a something that is not in it."¹

The Mother had met Anatole France. She gave us her impression: "He presents his works as someone detached and cool, but in life he was a very emotional person. I could clearly perceive this," Almost a rival in her eyes to France as regards perfect French prose, though with a different style, was Jules Remain. His multi-volumed novel, Men of Goodwill, in its French original gave her great pleasure both for its language and for its subtle precision of psychological observation. She told Udar to read it. But when Amrita asked if he too could do so she refused. It would seem that its frankness in sexual matters would have brought it unnecessary trouble for Amrita's non-experienced vital being, whereas Udar was too blasé to be affected. I am sure the Mother would have thought of me also in the same way as of Udar.

It was rather surprising to see her admiring Lenin. Sri Aurobindo is reported to have thought highly of him as an instrument of progressive change in despotic Russia just as he adjudged Mustafa Kamal for Sultan-ridden Turkey, and

¹ The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo (Mother India, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1968), pp. 201-202.

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to have helped him with his spiritual force to bring about the Revolution against Czardom. It was only with the advent of Stalin that Sri Aurobindo turned his spiritual force against communist Russia, Communism in its Stalinist "Asuric" form was anathema to him. Here it would be well to realise that the politicians in charge have to be differentiated from the common folk. Both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had a warm appreciation of the Russians in general. They are, according to her, a fine people, capable of devotion and self-offering, who were coerced into a mould not suiting their innate tendencies. Lenin, however, was esteemed by the Mother for his tremendous mental power. She once declared in a "Prosperity-Room" talk:

"When he suffered a stroke he lost all ability to speak. The language seemed lost to him. But by sheer exercise of his will he drew the language-consciousness back into himself from the mind-plane which exists independently of the brain." What he did is a curious comment on his avowed philosophical beliefs. A Dialectical Materialist à la Marx, he did not accord mind a separate status from the complexly organised grey matter of the cerebrum, and yet his own experience was obviously of a distinct mental personality dealing masterfully with the brain's shortcomings under paralysis.

Apropos of Materialism and Atheism I may set down what the Mother declared concerning fitness for the Yoga that she and Sri Aurobindo were exemplifying and teaching. "I don't care," she said, "whether a man is a religious one or an unbeliever. What matters to me is the stuff of which he is made. If he has fine stuff I can work on him. His intellectual opinions may be anything and will not come in the way of his inner response to me." Not only will mere spiritual belief fail to bring a man into relation with the Mother, but even spiritual experience can keep him still apart from her. I have heard her comment on a person who had been meditating with her: "People sit before me and go into meditation and are quite pleased with the spiritual state they feel themselves in — and yet they may not be at all in contact with me. Nothing may pass between me and them. They can be in a world of their own which has no relation with my consciousness, with the work which I am here to do." Of course, the Mother in her non-personal aspect would be in

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touch with every kind of spiritual experience anywhere. What is at issue is the Integral Yoga of Supramental Descent and Transformation whose radiating centre was the embodied Divine Mother gathering around her all those children of hers who had in these times a special affinity with her mission and brought both their qualities and defects to lay at her feet in loving self-surrender.

In connection with prominent spiritual figures I have heard the Mother speak at first-hand only the Abdul Baha, son of Baha-ullah, founder of the Bahai religion. She knew him intimately in Paris and some notes of hers regard him as a truly God-realised leader, though he never drew complete adherence from her and she refused to commit herself to any set religion. On one occasion she remarked in my presence: "When Abdul Baha used to lift his hands, palms upward, to pray, I could see Light descending into him from above."

I do not recollect anything in particular said about Théon, with whom she had been associated for several years both in Paris and in Algeria. But I may quote a few lines of Sri Aurobindo's, penned in 1936, which have not been published so far, I wrote to him: "I should like to know something about Théon who is said to have taught the Mother in Egypt. What role has he played in this new manifestation of yours?" Sri Aurobindo replied: "Theon was merely the Mother's guru in occultism — he had some idea of the aim to be achieved, but got much of it wrong. Moreover, what was true came from his wife and was not originally his."

One evening in the "Prosperity-Room" that talk turned on sleep. The Mother said that if one could go deep enough in the sleep-state and touch even for a second the Sat-chitananda consciousness which is in our inmost recesses one would awake completely refreshed. It is not the length of time spent in sleep but the quality of the time spent that relieves and refreshes one. Somebody mentioned Napoleon's capacity to snatch a short spell of sleep even in the midst of the loudest cannonading on the battlefield. The Mother said: "The great actress Madame Sarah Bernardt had the same remarkable ability." From the manner in which these words were spoken, I could surmise a profound admiration in general for the character of that extremely gifted figure of the trench stage during the Mother's days in Paris.

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Discussing mental detachment, the Mother referred to Bernard Shaw: "He has a mind completely free from conventions. It stands apart and can look at things as well as at ideas with an unattached power. Beyond this I cannot say anything about his mental quality."

A stray remark about "Kaka" Kalelkar, a prominent Maharashtrian social leader, comes to mind. He paid a few days' visit to the Ashram in the middle 'thirties. Several people found him a bit of a Puritan with some rigid Gandhian scruples. But the Mother was pleased with him and said something like: "He has a clear clean character, a nature well-disciplined, a good preparatory ground for something higher."

During the Korean War of 1950-51 the Mother expressed a high opinion of General MacArthur. She considered him one of the great military figures of history, comparable to soldiers like Wellington. There was also an appreciation of his bent of mind vis-a-vis Stalinist Communism and its force at work in Mao's China in the early days of Mao's triumph over Chiangkai-shek. As long as MacArthur was commanding the American forces in Korea one might expect the right decisions in the necessary work of containing Stalin's ambition to get a hold over the entire world: one might also expect his actions to serve as a check on any gamble by Stalinism to start a global clash of arms. Her point of view was totally the opposite of Truman's. Truman sacked MacArthur for putting forth suggestions aggressive towards Red China which was at that time serving as a base for the supply of electric power to North Korea, besides sending out an unofficial army of million Chinese "volunteers" against MacArthur's troops. MacArthur believed that readiness to strike by air beyond the Yahl River which formed the frontier between North Korea and China would best deter the latter from open future participation in the war, a participation which could lead to Russia coming into the picture against America and thereby swelling the hostilities to global proportions. I wrote a long article in Mother India exposing the folly of Truman's act. The Mother gave me on 17 April 1951 a paradoxical-sounding thought-provoking message on the situation. It said: "We are sorry to say that the dismissal of MacArthur may well be one more big step towards a new world-wide war."

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