Talks on Poetry

TALK TWENTY-SEVEN

We have already made the rather startling statement that Mallarme is best summed up as the Symbolist Poet of Non-sense, Absence and Silence. But so far we have dealt in generalities: now we must come to the particular face and form, as it were, of this Holy Trinity of his art. We must not only feel the dedicated distance, the aesthetic inwardness in which he seemed to carry on his life as a poet in the midst of the physical and intellectual activity of Paris in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. We must also examine the complex composition of his mind before we study the mind of his complex compositions.

In his day Science had assumed undeniable authority. To ignore it seemed sheer escapism. The great Newton had stated in mathematical formulas the fixed laws of the heavenly bodies. According to Newton himself, the grand determinism of the starry processions proclaimed a divine law-giver. But the scientists who came after him had not the same gravity of mind as the discoverer of the Law of Gravitation. They were more interested in physical things as such, and the discovery made by him led them on to another philosophy than his.

They did not begin with a sense of God as he had done: they began with the physical phenomena themselves. They found them acting with a vast regularity which they could predict by means of their mathematics. Matter was there in front of them — it was an imposing fact. And Matter had a certain nature, and this nature had a certain mode of operation. So far as the telescope gave evidence there was no break in the sequence of cause and effect which constituted- the history of Matter. No divinity seemed to have a hand in the course of things. If there was a divinity, it had started the universe on its way and then left it to run on by itself. But these later scientific thinkers felt that such a divinity was rather superfluous. It was as good as non-existent sd far as the actual working_ of Nature was concerned. Nobody could say anything about the beginning of the world. Why then burden oneself with the idea of a God who never intervened in the affairs of the universe? Perhaps you may know what Napoleon was told by the famous French physicist Laplace. When the latter was explaining to Napoleon his theory of the way in which nebulas cooled down and contracted into solar systems according to strict mathematical

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laws, Napoleon asked: "Monsieur Laplace, where does God come in?" The reply rang out: "Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis." La place de Dieu, for Laplace, was nowhere! By Mallarme's time the atheism of such men had become established in the educated French mind. It seemed intellectually dishonest not to accept a Godless universe.

What about man in this universe? The scientists saw that man was made up of the same sort of Matter as the rest of the world. No doubt, this Matter in man appeared to be not only alive but also thinking — two functions which even the biggest nebula in the sky never exercised. But when the anatomical knife and the magnifying microscope probed into man's material constitution they could discover no special and separate life-force or mind-energy: Matter itself seemed to exhibit life and mind as two unusual properties. So the scientists thought it reasonable to suppose that here was only a complex organisation of the same stuff which was lifeless and mindless in the stone. Only the complex manner in which the atoms were organised led to the behaviour which we associate with vitality and mentality. The theory of Evolution pointed to man's relation with the animals and his development from the lower forms of life. All the higher functions of man could have evolved from those of the lesser types of living organisms. And there was little reason to believe that the simplest of these types did not evolve from certain states of non-living Matter. Thus nineteenth-century science came to the conclusion that man had no Soul, nothing that existed independently of the complex material organisation that is the living and thinking body.

Once more it was a Frenchman who presented this conclusion most cogently. What Laplace had done with the scientist's cosmos, Lamettrie by his book L'homme machine did with the scientist himself.

Against the atheism and materialism of Science many a poet and many a mystic protested. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley — these were witnesses to a greater truth than that of Science. But in the eyes of common sense what were the results of the activity of poetic mysticism? Nothing comparable to the steam-engine, the telegraph, the mill-machinery or the system of mathematical laws by which everything could be predicted with amazing accuracy. Coleridge puffed a good deal, in talk after talk, but a steam-engine puffed better. Blake wrote several enigmatic books at a great

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speed, but the Morse code of dots and dashes was a better series of engimatic signs and a telegram sent in it went much quicker than Blake's pen tracing out poems. Shelley spun out a number of fine visions, but the Cotton Mills spun more durable stuff and at a faster rate. Wordsworth spoke sublimely of a single Being present everywhere, but most people could not get into touch with this Being, while the mathematical laws which claimed to govern both the stars and the stones could be learned by anybody and found applicable with a mechanical uniformity which was more impressive than the monotony of much of Wordsworth's poetry. Yes, there were protests against the spread of atheistic and materialistic Science, but they were rather unavailing in the opinion of intellectuals; and especially in France where the intellect was more at play than in the England of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, nobody with brains thought of doubting the pronouncements of Physics and Physiology.

What those brains forgot was that man was the only creature who thought of asking whether he had a soul or not, whether there was a God or not. And they forgot that man, a minute speck on a tiny planet in the immense universe, could sit in judgment on the universe itself. And this he did by means of something which he called his mind and which, in spite of seeming to depend on the brain for proper functioning, was not felt in any way like a physical process. His most direct experience of his most intimate and momentous self-activity gave him a sense of the non-material. The scientific thinkers forgot too that to imagine this strange entity called mind as evolving from merely a play of physical atoms, however much we may endow them with attraction and repulsion, was to accept a more impossible miracle than to accept a non-material or spiritual origin for the physical universe — a Divine Being hidden within or behind phenomena and gradually manifesting itself as Matter, as Life, as Mind and pushing towards Supermind through even an Age of Atheism and Materialism.

Indeed, the scientists did not attend properly to the nature of the very thought by which they became scientific thinkers. They looked outward and the scientific picture they had built up from observation seemed to them all-sufficing. Also, in those days, Science had not passed through such a crisis as it has done in our own century. The cosmos looked clear-cut, orderly, self-contained: the very nature of the physical world appeared to be

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revealed by Newton. Pope summed up Newton's achievement:

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:

God said, "Let Newton be!" and there was light.

In our own day a poet has added:

But not for long. The Devil shouting, "Ho,

Let Einstein be!" restored the status quo.

Science in our day has become full of puzzling questions. Einstein's relativity theory and the quantum theory developed by Bohr and Heisenberg have made the physical universe so queer, so unpicturable in its ultimates that the mind gets almost a paroxysm in trying to conceive it.

In Mallarme's time things were different. The pronouncements of Science were in an absolutely assured tone. And Mallarme fell under their sway. But he did not set poetry at a discount. He felt that there was value in poetry and he felt that there was value in philosophy and he felt that religion had value. Still, according to him, philosophy could not stand in its metaphysical speculations against the concrete demonstrations of Science. Only one thing in Philosophy gripped him with an irresistible force. It was concerned with the problem of what are called Universals. It is a common-place that there are Universals and there are Particulars. Various objects confront us — a number of Particulars. Many of them resemble one another. Take flowers. Flowers are of various kinds that we term roses, violets, lilies. Looking at each variety, we make a generalisation: the rose, the violet, the lily. Each generalisation represents a Universal: that which makes every particular rose a rose is a Universal. A consideration of all possible roses leads us to what we label as the Rose. But while we know one rose or another and a collection of roses, what is this common essence of them all that is the Rose? Different roses have been in the past, are in the present, shall be in the future. There are roses in India and there are roses in England. Indian roses, like those elsewhere and at various times, have different shapes, different colours and different perfumes. Even the same rose is different in the morning, in the noon, in the evening. And yet all the different roses and the same rose in different conditions are called the Rose. Surely an

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odd thing, the Rose! It must be at the same time red and yellow and white, a folded bud and a crowd of petals and a fading fragrance. It must be something that Helen of Troy received from Paris — Homer's Paris, of course, and not Mallarme's — Paris the man to whom she was madly drawn and not Paris the city from which she might have run away frightened as if it had been her own husband Menelaus! And the Rose held in Helen's lily-slender fingers and watched by her violet-soft eyes must be the same as the Rose that suggested to the French poet Malherbe, when he wrote an elegy on the death of a friend's daughter, the two loveliest lines in French verse:

Rose, elle a vecu ce que vivent les roses,

L'espace d'un matin —

lines exquisitely rendered into English by John Chadwick (Arjava):

A rose, hers was the roses' span of living,

Which one brief morn consumes.

And the Rose of Malherbe's inspiration must be the same as that which the Mother once gave me to paint when I rose from pranam at her feet to look at the smile whose radiant beauty surpassed all the flowers in the world. Again, the Rose I got must be the same as the one which on that very day the Mother put into the hands of a sadhak whose habit was to go into a corner after the pranam and chew up the Mother's gift and make it a part of himself instead of letting it droop and crumble in the neck of a vase! Well, the Rose that can be said to have existed in diverse ages and diverse states and diverse places (including this sadhak's stomach) is bound to be a most mysterious thing. Philosophers have exercised their wits in telling us what it could be.

Some of them say that it is just a general idea we form after scrutinising particular instances and that the Universal does not exist anywhere except in our minds. These philosophers are known as Conceptualists. Others say that we do not have even a general idea: we have ideas only of particulars but we employ one and the same name for things which look similar: a Universal is simply a bit of noise we make. These philosophers are known as

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Nominalists. Still others, who are known as Realists, say that a Universal is a fact apart from and prior to the Particulars. And among these philosphers the most celebrated is Plato who, finding the Universal capable of being at all times and all places, regarded it as a reality unbound by space or time — a spaceless and timeless reality existing in some secret realm beyond the world of particular instances. To Plato, these instances are merely approximations to the Universal: the Universal is a perfection which is never fully realised in the things we know on the earth, a perfection in a transcendental Overworld. And there is a final unifying principle, a Universal of Universals, in which all the perfections coalesce. Mallarme found Platonism the most congenial view. But how was he to accept the Platonic Overworld when Science had told him that nothing was real except Matter? That was a problem he had to solve.

When he turned to Religion he saw that the aspirations of the religious-minded, the sense the great mystics have of a supreme Godhead, a high Truth and Beauty and Goodness, a fundamental Sat-chit-ananda, a limitless and featureless Nirvana, were experiences which gave a wonderful richness to life. The very idea of a perfect Existence, Consciousness and Bliss, deep within or high above, flushes life with a golden glow. Science impoverishes life by banishing such experiences and ideas. Science keeps the mind of man from soaring. It loads it down to day-to-day needs, common-place objects. It confines and constricts the emotions and covers everything with a grossness, a drabness. This is intolerable. We must not ignore or brush aside the lofty feelings inspired by Religion. And when Mallarme looked at both Philosophy and Religion he found that the Platonic Universal of Universals and the Divinity of Religion were essentially related if not identical and were just two ways of approaching the same Marvel. But both Platonism and the religious outlook made a certain demand on the intellect. Platonism required the conviction of a transcendental realm's existence. The religious outlook insisted on a real God and called for belief in Him. The intellect's assent to the actuality of these things was part and parcel of Philosophy and Religion. Yet Science set its face like flint against such assent. The ideal, the spiritual, could not be accepted as truths. Mallarme could not pass beyond Science — and yet he could not give up what Science denied. He had to find a way to keep both.

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His solution was Art. Art, in his view, consists only of a keenly enjoyed state of awareness. The poet conveys what he has visioned and felt, and we receive his vision, his feeling, and keenly enjoy it because it comes with a satisfying finality of flawless form. That is all. Art does not raise the question whether the poet's vision is of reality, whether his feeling is the response to a truth physical or supra-physical. Art is a self-contained self-sufficient delight of perfect self-expression. At its extreme it puts us in touch with an experience full of a beauty that seems to shine out from everything, a bliss that imparts the sense of some absolute. But no dogma, no doctrine is needed. We are concerned with enjoyment, our minds are involved in thrilling to the play of imagery, rhythm, significant design. According to Mallarme, this play gives us in its own fashion all that the highest philosophy and the deepest religion can, and it does not demand intellectual assent and consequently it does not demand that we intellectually contradict the verdicts of Science. We can accept Atheism and Materialism and still avoid the dead hand of these "isms" upon our whole being: we can avoid it by plunging ourselves with care-free enthusiasm into Art — Art with its exultations and its ardours and its idealisms. To counteract the grossness, the drabness, the down-to-earthness of Science, Art is a necessity. If we abandon what Art offers we make life not worth living — in spite of the steam engine, the telegraph, the mill-machinery and the mathematical formulas of Physics.

Of course, a little more acuteness of mind would have led Mallarme to argue: "If the entire value of life is centred in what Science cannot give, then surely Science has not said the last word on life and on the world in which life has come to hope and yearn, to aspire and be idealistic." And if Mallarme had been a little more of a mystic he would have been enabled to hold against the so-called concreteness of the material results of Science the con-creteness of spiritual realisation. To the genuine mystic, God is a reality to be seen and touched and embraced with subtle senses which for all their subtlety put us in relation to some undeniable substance — to him there are worlds beyond the physical, which he experiences with more solid sensation than anything he can lay his hands on — say, the clothes he wears. In fact, his sensation of those worlds and of his soul is like his sensation of his own body, while his sensation of the physical world is as of the clothes he wears. An outer reality covers an inner reality — both are concrete

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and just as clothes are meant for the body and not the body for the clothes and just as the body is more vividly an experience to us than our clothes so the inner reality is more significant and important, more directly known and more intimately felt.

Mallarme was neither a very acute thinker nor a very intense mystic. But he was a very acute and intense knower and feeler of Art. The poet in him was the chief person: he ate and drank and moved and worked and slept as if by sheer concession to his neighbours: he wrote poetry and talked about poetry and meditated on poetry with the whole passion of his being. And it was this identification of himself with poetry that led him to reject Science as the sole sufficing activity and even led him to criticise it for its mechanisation, its lifelessness, its earthiness. But since Science had for him the monopoly of truth he had to regard the experiences of Art in a peculiar way. He could never entertain the possibility of their pointing to anything real. He could never ask himself: "Although Art in itself makes no demand for intellectual assent, may not its intensities and wonders yet be signs of the true, the real?" Art he summed up in the words Reve and Mystere: the artist's activity is a surrender to Dream, an absorption in Mystery. And since we. cannot put any substance into Art's Dream, give any reality to Art's Mystery, we must regard them not as an actual Presence but as an unreal Absence, not as Existence but as' Non-existence, a Nothingness, a Neant. But to say "Absence" and '"Nothingness" is not to employ negative terms. Art has the capacity to fill our being with its richness. The Absence haunts and enchants, the Nothingness appeases and liberates. They are positives, not negatives. They are an unreality, yet a divine one. And this divine unreality is more precious than anything we accept as actual. Mallarme speaks of poetry being concerned with fictions, phantoms, falsehoods, but he uses these words not in their ordinary meanings: these fictions are more worthy of pursuit than 'facts, these phantoms satisfy as no physical sensation can, these falsehoods are more life-giving than scientifically observed verities and the objects around us in our daily animal existence. Art is Mensonge, a Lie, but this Mensonge has a gloire that is missing from all the truths on the lips of Newton's successors. It deserves the whole-hearted and single minded devotion of a man. In fact, in Mallarme's view, we do not do justice to its value unless we dedicate ourselves to it.

So he became the high-priest of Poetry, the mystic of Aestheti-

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cism. And his Aestheticism, with its Reve that is Absence and its Mystere that is Neant or Rien, may be described as poetic expres-sion conjuring up a sense of two things. First, forms and figures, images and pictures emerge as it were from some secret ether of unearthly lights and shadows behind the world we know. Secondly, these forms and figures play beautifully and blissfully about against a background that is a void, an indeterminate infinity in which everything gets lost, an infinity of the inconceivable and inexpressible, an infinity of Silence. Those unearthly images and pictures are crystallisations of the formlessness of the supreme Silence. They are marvels absent from all terrestrial realities — for example, the ideal Rose that is never to be found in any conglomeration of petals we can see or smell or pluck — or devotedly devour! And these absent marvels are suggestive of the vacuous ineffable into which they are always on the verge of vanishing. This does not mean that Mallarme is vague in his visions. The idealities of Absence are well-defined in their strangeness, but the strangeness comes charged with a power that draws our mind into depth on depth of something for which no words can be found and to which no image can prove adequate. Mallarme thus is not a poet of the shimmering Shelleyan wash: he is very precise, but bewildering in what he makes precise. And through that bewilderment he wants to give us, as Shakespeare would have said, "thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls" — or, as Mallarme himself would have put it in less intelligible language, he wants to knock queer image against queer image until from their shock a flash is born, revealing a Shape which no one in the world is and, through this Shape, the unworldly No-one that alone can take such a shape.

I suppose you are quite puzzled. That is just what Mallarme would have appreciated. If you could properly make out what he says he would consider himself to have failed. When a young person once told him that she had understood one of his poems after brooding over it a while, he exclaimed: "What a genius you are! You have so soon understood what I the author am still trying to understand after twenty years!" But if you said that he wrote Nonsense he would be happy, for Nonsense is the opposite of all that the reasoning intelligence can make head or tail of, the reasoning intelligence which is the chief power of Science as well as in one way or another the chief power of what we call Common-

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sense. Yes, Mallarme would have liked being called a poet of Nonsense — but he would not be Mallarme if he let you rest satisfied that you had got hold of him by the right end in saying so. Nonsense in Mallarmean poetry is not the meaningless: it is the Meaning which the reasoning intelligence cannot grasp. According to him, this intelligence grasps what really has no value — the world of physical events and all in the mind that is close to physical facts and correlates them in mathematical theory. Only that which is beyond the range of this intelligence is the truly significant, for it is the glow of the Dream that provides the raison d'etre to our eyes and it is the Mystery that supplies to our mouths the justification of speech.

We may now provisionally sum up. Mallarme's aim in poetry is to write such Nonsense as brings up to our vision exact yet enigmatic images that transcend our experience of the physical world and to combine these images in a manner baffling to the reasoning intelligence and by this combination instil in us the vivid feeling of a wondrous Void where world and thought seem beatifically extin-guished and even the most strange imagery dissolves and the most Mallarmean language dies away into the unutterable.

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