Talks on Poetry

TALK EIGHT

We have said that Victor Hugo made history by using the word mouchoir (handkerchief) in a poetic drama. By the way, I myself made a bit of history last time by using not the word but the thing itself in an extraordinary context: absent-mindedly I wiped the blackboard with my mouchoir. I would have made still more history and, while being historical, made you hysterical if I had wiped my face afterwards with the chalk-powdered handkerchief. Well, something like acting so queerly was what the poetic pundits of England thought the first practitioners of Romanticism were doing: they were shocked at the manner in which the Romanti-cists were trying to change the whole face of poetry.

In England Romanticism started less violently than in France. There was no fighting except in black and white — but tempers ran quite as high as on that fateful night in the Paris Theatre, and pretty deep cuts were made by the vigorous play of polemical pens. The central figure in the Romantic Movement in England was William Wordsworth, though Burns and Blake may be consi-dered the pioneers in a general sense. You might think Words-worth was rather a contrast to Hugo. We have been accustomed to picture him as a sedate and philosophic solitary of Nature. But we must not allow our notion of him in middle or old age to colour or discolour the reality of him in his youth. Wordsworth learned his lesson in Romanticism not in England but in France. He was there just after the outbreak of the Revolution and had already tasted the intoxicating doctrines of Rousseau, the father of Modern Romanticism, both French and English. Wordsworth would even have been guillotined and lost his head if he had not taken it away from France in the nick of time. But, though he took his head away, he left his heart behind — and not exactly with any political party but with a very young person. Himself very young, he seems to have mixed up Romanticism with Romance. Some years ago it was discovered that the Archbishop-like Wordsworth of old age had in his youth a love-affair with a French girl named Annette Vallon and, just as Rousseau was the father of Anglo-French Romanticism, Wordsworth the Romanticist was the father of an Anglo-French baby.

I hasten to add that to my mind this love-affair had no significant bearing on either the development of Romanticism or the deve-

Page 64

lopment of Wordsworth. I mention it in order only to contradict the importance attached to it by some critics in connection with the sudden decline in Wordsworth's poetic powers a little past his middle age. Herbert Read is the chief exponent here, and he takes his cue from the fact that, although Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy did all they could to help Annette and the baby-girl, Wordsworth instead of marrying Annette moved away from her more and more and throughout his life concealed the early ro-mance from the world's eyes and never referred to it in his Prelude which is a poetic autobiography of his mind. Read argues that the poet refused to come to terms psychologically and morally with his feelings for Annette and thus created in his personality a split leading to loss of the emotional spontaneity which is essential for poetic health. According to Read, the emotional being was wil-fully ignored and hypocritically covered over and its conflict sub-merged, in order to achieve some sort of harmony in the surface consciousness: the submerged conflict took its revenge by drying up the fountains of poetry.

This theory is psychoanalytic. Psychoanalysis is the investigation into one's suppressed impulses and the interpretation of all phases of one's mental life in terms of what is thrust into or lurks in the subconscious. Psychoanalysis even goes further and traces all the higher mental manifestations to the mind's interest in one's physio-logical processes. I believe that it overshoots the mark a great deal and, in its preoccupation with the underworld of the subconscious, misses the in-world of the subliminal and the over-world of the superconscious which are the true sources of art and philosophy and religion and mysticism, however crossed here and there these things may be by miasmas from the subconscious.

Much folly is committed by the psychoanalytic approach. A recent book, written in all seriousness, by a thinker named Wisdom is foolish enough to account for the Idealistic philosophy of Berkeley by the state of his bowels! Berkeley's Idealism holds that matter is not a reality independent of mind but a phenomenon of mind itself and that it is ultimately composed of perceptions from which it is logically impossible to disengage a material world in its own right. Wisdom studies the medical reports about Berkeley and sums up the whole problem by saying in effect: "Everybody is intensely interested in the movements of his bowels, especially in the impressionable period of childhood. Poor Berkeley, ever since

Page 65

his childhood, suffered from looseness of bowels and from an early age was deeply imbued with the discovery that nothing solid came out of his system. As a result the philosophical system he built up could not admit anything so solid as an independent material world. Everything was liquidated into the subtle flux of mental experiences."

The eagerness of psychoanalysts — or, as the fashionable term goes, psychiatrists — to find concealed complexes and hidden disorders in the mind lands them at times in sheer fantasy. There was a boy who was thought by his parents to be acting rather oddly. I suppose he was not conforming very much to their de-mands or expectations; talented children, no less than young ruffi-ans, are often like that. The mother of this boy took him to a psychiatrist. The mighty man of mental science wanted to get the spontaneous response of the boy's subconscious. So he fired at him the startling question: "What would happen if I cut off your right ear?" The boy at once replied: "I would hear everything half." Then the psychiatrist asked: "What would happen if I cut off your left ear also?" The boy unhesitatingly answered: "I wouldn't be able to see anything." "Ah, there you are," muttered the psychiat-rist with grim pleasure and a knowing look at the parent. He took the mother aside and whispered: "We shall have to examine this matter very deeply. Something abnormal is evidently at work in a hidden way. We'll gradually bring it up to the surface and effect a cure." The boy and his mother went home. The lady was as puzzled as the psychiatrist by the boy's answer. But she was not entrenched in psychoanalytic pseudo-profundity. So she did the most natural thing and directly asked her son: "Johnny, why did you give that queer reply — that if both your ears were cut off you wouldn't be able to see anything?" Johnny smiled and said: "Why, mamma, if both my ears were cut off, my cap would come down over my eyes. How would I then see anything?"

It goes without saying that there was no return next day to the psychiatrist's clinic. But let us return to Wordsworth. I consider Read's reading Of Wordsworth's poetic decline to be far-fetched. There were seeds of the decline from the very beginning. For one thing, Wordsworth began under the influence of the 18th century and broke off from it under the influence of the new ideas that were sprouting in France, new ideas that had nothing directly to do with having a romance with a mademoiselle of Paris or any young

Page 66

lady. And he lost his Romanticism when he lost his ideal of political liberty and his intuition of the One Spirit within the physical universe as well as within the mind of man and mani-festing its presence through both Nature and life.

This intuition was the deepest essence of Wordsworth the poet: when we think of him it is always lines like those in the Tintern Abbey poem that come up to us —

...And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,

A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

I may remark, en passant, that Tennyson considered the phrase,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

the grandest line in English poetry. It is, at least, one of the grandest and as long as Wordsworth was alive to the feeling it expressed he kept in touch with his own genius and the genius of Romanticism. His decline started when he moved away from the two persons who were most responsible for keeping alive in him this feeling: his friend Coleridge and his own sister Dorothy. The mind of Coleridge, at once soaring and systematic, quicksilvery and mountainous, sensitive and poised, was a great help and so too was Dorothy's intense happy Nature-insight and highly imagina-tive human sympathy. An unfortunate series of incidents sepa-rated Wordsworth from Coleridge. Wordsworth was not physically separated from Dorothy, but his marriage with Mary Hutchinson withdrew him psychologically from her. Besides, he had always a dry intellectual in him plus a prosaic moraliser, and this part of his personality which had been fused with the visionary poet and Nature-lover in his early days got the upper hand as he became increasingly obsessed with his own importance as a Teacher and as

Page 67

he got further and further drawn to the Orthodox Christian Church after falling away from the beautiful blend of Pantheism and Transcendentalism that had grown in him from his own perso-nal mental-spiritual experiences.

The ideal of political liberty which had been like a golden flame in both his heart and mind, broadening his vision and sharpening his sympathies and nobly humanising his "sense sublime" of the Universal Spirit — the ideal of political liberty, he lost when he found that the overthrow of the old order in France by the intellec-tual and emotional earthquake of the Revolution gave a chance to a man like Napoleon to get the whole country into his grip and to menace the independence of neighbouring nations in Europe and even the security of insular England. Wordsworth became a stern Tory and a supporter of Puritan institutions: he even went to the extent of devoting several dull sonnets to the theme of Capital Punishment! His change of mind is a little complicated. We can, of course, understand his anti-Napoleon attitude. Perhaps the strong-est single factor here was Napoleon's treatment of the Negro who liberated Haiti from French rule — Toussaint L'Ouverture. Tous-saint is a figure worth a small digression. So I'll tell you something about him.

Haiti, also known as Santo Domingo, was a French possession in the West Indies. The influx of the new ideas about liberty, whose fount was the work of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists and Rousseau, was as much French as was the actual sovereignty that denied liberty to this colony of Negroes. So at the spur of French ideas Toussaint led an insurrection against the French. This re-minds us of what happened in our India. Our democratic inspira-tion, our desire to be free from British Rule drew strength from the same source — England — from which hailed the Imperialism that held us subject. With the growth of the English language in India there grew in Indian minds the liberalism of English political thought. It is Wordsworth who opens a sonnet with the thrilling phrase:

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue

That Shakespeare spake...

Well, when educated India adopted the Shakespearean tongue, the seeds of the country's freedom got sown and the grave of

Page 68

British Imperialism began to be dug. India could say cheekily to her rulers:

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue

Your Shakespeare spake....

There could be no possible reply to such a demand: all replies would be self-contradictory. France too of 1791, France of the Revolution, could not logically oppose Toussaint's insurrection. The new regime in the mother-country liberated the slaves. And then Toussaint reciprocated by accepting French rule and the office of Commander of Santo Domingo. But Napoleon, on rising to power, sought to re-enslave the colony. Toussaint resisted him, and with his small army of ill-fed ill-clad ill-armed Negroes he humiliated every force sent to subdue him. The pick of the French army he foiled by his military genius. Once when the French had driven his ragged troops into the hills, he had the brain-wave to make them sing La Marseillaise against the enemy. What French-man could fight La Marseillaise! The French soldiers were be-wildered and unnerved and Toussaint drove them into the sea. Not only was he a leader of extraordinary gifts: he was also a man of spotless character, the utmost integrity. To all lovers of liberty in Europe as well as to all admirers of greatness he shone out from the small island of Santo Domingo, a rival of quintessential quality to the great Napoleon. Napoleon who could stand no rivals planned to ruin him. All the more a cause of annoyance to the mighty Emperor was this Negro because he had styled himself "Bona-parte of Santo Domingo". Napoleon sent an offer to discuss terms, guaranteeing safe conduct. Toussaint who never broke his word put absolute trust in the Emperor's offer and went unprotected on board the French ship where the conference was to be held with the Emperor's representatives. As soon as he sat down at the table he was declared prisoner. Without any trial he was thrown into a dungeon near the French Alps, a dungeon so miserable that when a model of it was once shown to Napoleon he shut his eyes and ordered the model to be taken away. Toussaint was allowed to rot in captivity. Once his gaoler forgot to give him food for some days! Starved and chilled, Toussaint was found dead. Wordsworth was so moved by the heroism and martyrdom of this Negro that he wrote one of his finest sonnets to him, a poem ending with the immortal cry:

Page 69

Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

And love, and man's unconquerable mind.

From his championship of Toussaint we might expect Words-worth to have strengthened all the more his old ideal of political liberty. But the growing resentment he felt against Napoleon led him to believe that a phenomenon like Napoleon would have been impossible if the French Revolution had not occurred and under-mined the ancient order of feudal Europe. Liberalism he saw as a danger everywhere, a potential mother of revolutions and a poten-tial grandmother of Napoleonic despotisms. So all liberal move-ments were to be checked and democracy kept at bay.

Wordsworth could not comprehend the paradox that was Napo-leon. All Europe was against the France of the Revolution. All Europe was planning to crush the new movement. Napoleon rose as the organiser of his country. France had initiated a liberal order but could not hold it together. The forces of the French Revolu-tion were in practice more destructive than constructive: they could make their hatreds take effect but not their loves get rea-lised. The slogans of Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite were a divine music hanging over a human chaos. If Napoleon had not come with his Titanic genius and gripped the country for his own ends, the old Europe would have swamped the new France. Napoleon by compelling his country into a unity enabled it to stand against the united onslaught. By the endless campaigns of his military ambition he not only kept France going but broke the back of the opposition. The new France could thus have an opportunity to get organised as a force for the future. Sri Aurobindo, in an early article, has well hit off the role of Napoleon by calling him "the despot of liberty, the imperial protector of equality, the unprin-cipled organiser of great principles". A man like Napoleon is born to carry out a certain vast work: true to some unplumbed instinct in himself he sweeps on, careless of human codes and inhibitions: he can be egotistic and cruel, committing a number of actions which could have been avoided but were not avoided because the energy at work was no human consciousness but an elemental agent from beyond the earth sent in a human form to achieve a great end. Of course such an energy may outlive its usefulness and Napoleon did so and had to be eradicated. But he was not merely a colossal self-aggrandiser: he was a formidable instrument of the

Page 70

Spirit of Progress. And if Wordsworth had possessed sufficient insight he would have at the same time sung the praises of Tous-saint and recognised the Vibhuti, the man of a superhuman mis-sion, in the destroyer among whose victims Toussaint unfortunately figured. France herself had the needed insight, though uncon-sciously, and by putting herself under Napoleon's spell she got reborn, however imperfectly, as the home of the progressive mind of man, the centre of free civilisation in Europe.

Wordsworth, by falling out of tune with the France for which he had been so enthusiastic as a youth and by making a political volte-face, helped to finish digging for the Romanticist in him the grave which his loss of Nature-mysticism was fast preparing. The eighteenth century returned to him, and his sense of self-impor-tance hardly noticed the uninspired revenant, the ghost come back. Long-faced sermonising and flat philosophising, which had been visible without being predominant in even the grand days of his Romanticism, asserted themselves and they justify on a broad survey of both his early and later work the satirical sonnet written by J. K. Stephen. Wordsworth himself has an excellent sonnet, beginning:

Two voices are there; one is of the sea,

One of the mountains: each a mighty Voice...

Stephen sums up Wordsworth's double poetic character thus:

Two voices are there: one is of the deep;

It learns the storm-cloud's thunderous melody,

Now roars, now murmurs with the changeful sea,

Now birdlike pipes, now closes soft in sleep:

And one is of an old half-witted sheep

Which bleats articulate monotony,

And indicates that two and one are three,

That grass is green, lakes damp and mountains steep,

And, Wordsworth, both are thine: at certain times

Forth from the heart of thy melodious rhymes

The form and pressure of high thoughts will burst:

At other times — good Lord! I'd rather be

Quite unacquainted with the A B C

Than write such hopeless rubbish as thy worst.

Page 71

It is interesting to note that the central figures of both English and French Romanticisms were very flawed poets, superb on one side, dreary or windbaggy on the other. And the reason why so much of the dreary remains in Wordsworth and so much of the windbaggy in Hugo is the same: a huge conceit that led them to overwrite themselves. Hugo was a more tempestuous person, hence his conceit is louder in accent. Wordsworth was a more reserved man, hence his conceit is quieter in tone. But there is in both the conviction that everything they uttered was a revelation and that consequently the more things they uttered the luckier the world would be. The conviction came all the easier because in fact many of their utterances are revelatory. Hugo was the less mystical of the two and, from our standpoint, his revelations are the less precious. But to be precious as spiritual effects does not imply from the poetic point of view the superiority of these effects to others. As poetry, Hugo's less mystical verses are of equal value as Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey lines or the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. That is why the greater mass of excellent Hugoesque poetry makes its author stand very close to the sheer First Class in Sri Aurobindo's eyes while the smaller corpus of excellent Wordsworthian poetry keeps its author at a further distance.

The first of the two poems of Wordsworth just mentioned formed part of the book named Lyrical Ballads which came out in 1798, much before Hugo's splash into poetry, though not earlier than Rousseau's famous Romanticist books in prose. Lyrical Ballads was the joint work of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Cole-ridge had The Ancient Mariner in this publication and it was as organic to the new Romanticist Movement as that other of Wordsworth's. But Wordsworth was the more powerful, more comprehensive, more harmonised poet and he is the more central figure and it was his Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads that constituted the first Manifesto of English Roman-ticism. Like Hugo's championship of common words, Wordsworth had his demand for normal speech in poetry instead of what had been practised in most of the eighteenth century, an abnormal speech trying to be poetic by avoiding straightforward and simple expression. You must have heard of Poetic Diction. Well, it is true that poetry has at times a special speech, words and phrases not easily usable in prose discourse; for poetry brings into action a

Page 72

higher range and pitch of vision and emotion than does prose, and certain subtleties and profundities and splendours of that higher range and pitch have a spontaneous language more delicately multicoloured or rainbowlike on the one hand and more richly dazzling or sunlike on the other than the spontaneous language of the philosophic or scientific intellect's conceptual clarities on the one side and common life's unchiselled simplicities on the other. But there is a true Poetic Diction and there is a false Poetic Diction. I shall illustrate both. But let me finish first with the fight over Wordsworth's innovation in poetry and over Romanticism in general.

Lyrical Ballads was attacked in the periodical which was then pontificating on poetic values, the periodical entitled The Quarter-ly Review. A very dogmatic and downright reviewer, one Francis Jeffrey, started to hit out even more in The Edinburgh Review when Wordsworth published his Poems in Two Volumes in 1807. How wrong-headed was the hitting can be realised if we observe that some of the best poetry of Wordsworth was slashed the most. Over the Immortality Ode Jeffrey shook his head and passed the damning sentence: "This will never do." But neither Coleridge nor Wordsworth was chicken-hearted. They went on in their Romanticism, and Wordsworth by sheer persistence created the new taste by which he and Coleridge subsequently came to be enjoyed.

Many, however, were the battles the enemies waged, and one of the fiercest was against the young John Keats. Keats's Endymion was torn into ribbons. Not that this poem was blameless. It had immaturities, and Keats was fully aware of them, but the imma-turities were closely intertwined with genuine poetic expression, and on the advice of his friends as well as on his own judgment Keats chose to let the poem go out into the world.

The bell has rung. So we must leave the classroom and also go out into the world — some of us, let us hope, like Indian Endy-mions, or perhaps I should more imaginatively say: "like Indymions".

Page 73