On India
THEME/S
I
IN the Illustrated Weekly of India (July 31,1949) appeared a comment on Sri Aurobindo's poetry. It was by C.R.M. in Books and Comments and written apropos of my study, The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo. After calling my book interesting, C.R.M. went on to say:
"For Mr. Sethna, Sri Aurobindo's Muse is a case of 'this side idolatry', and I am not so sure that genius is so rampant here as he claims. The merits seem to me to consist of a high level of spiritual utterance, abundant metrical skill, and a sound poetic sensitivity based on the classics and much akin to that of many of the more conservative masters. Sometimes it is as if Sri Aurobindo had taken the cream of Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson and stirred it to boiling point in the cauldron of his Muse. There are some first-rate passages of blank verse, e.g.
Only he listens to the voice of his thoughts, his heart's ignorant whisper,
Whistle of wind in the tree-tops of Time and the rustle of Nature.
"Elsewhere there are many pleasant lines of a derivative nature and it is interesting to find traces of the influence of that Yellow Book character, the poet Stephen Phillips, who was at Cambridge with Sri Aurobindo. The Tennysonian influence is still stronger:
And lightning 'twixt the eyes intolerable
Like heaven s vast eagle all that blackness swept
Down over the inferior snowless heights
And swallowed up the dawn.
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"This, in spite of, or because of, that horrible word 'twixt (a crutch for amateur versifiers!) might be from the Idylls, and, by stressing the resemblance, one does not mean to decry Sri Aurobindo's talents, for Victoria's laureate was a master of rhythm and a true delineator of beauty".
Naturally, as the author of The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, I could not let C.R.M.'s comment pass. I wrote him a letter and requested its publication. The reply, though not ungenerous, scarcely served my purpose. It ran: "I find your letter on Sri Aurobmdo's poetry very interesting and well-expressed (though it hasn't changed some of my opinions!) but I regret that my space is so confined that there is no room for it and we have no correspondence column in the Weekly. " As C.R.M. is a gifted writer of considerable popularity and his readers may accept his estimate of Sri Aurobindo, it is necessary that I should voice in Mother India what was originally meant for the Weekly.
The Originality of a Master of Yoga
C.R.M.'s paragraphs, though appreciative in places and hitting off the truth here and there, seem to me on the whole to miss the mark because of his rather cursory acquaintance with Sri Aurobmdo's poetry and a certain haste in making up his mind. When he says, "Sometimes it is as if Sri Aurobindo had taken the cream of Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson and stirred it to boiling point in the cauldron of his Muse", it is not easy to agree even if his statement be applied to Sri Aurobmdo's early work which is not that of a full-fledged Yogi; but when we come to his later work - especially his latest and longest, the epic Savitri, a Legend and a Symbol, to which I have devoted many pages in my book - the statement loses all relevance. Milton's intellectual theology, Wordsworth's half-philosophical half-emotional pantheism and Tennyson's vague religious idealism can hardly be equated with the vision and experience of a Master of Yoga. As for the manner, it is equally individual in its turns and tones. Except that Sri Aurobindo. like Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson, does not bring in the typical modernist idiom à la Eliot of The Waste
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Land, nowhere are these poets discernible in either the substance or the style of lines like
A body like a parable of dawn,
That seemed a niche for veiled divinity
Or golden temple-door to things beyond,
or,
The dubious godhead with his torch of pain
Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world
And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss,
A wandering hand of pale enchanted light
That glowed along a fading moment s brink
Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery s verge,
The superconscient realms of motionless peace
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.
These lines, with their direct mystical insight and their suggestive rhythm carrying the concrete life-throb of a Yogi's supra-intellectual consciousness, are not only different in a striking way from the typically Miltonic, Wordsworthian or Tennysonian poetry but also lead us to question C.R.M.'s phrase: "a sound sensitivity based on the classics and much akin to that of many of the more conservative masters." The term "conservative" is in itself debatable. What are called the "classics" are seldom conservative except in the sense that they are not flashy and flamboyant, addicted to involved conceit and confusing imagery, limping in metre and jaggedly irregular in form. If actually there are any conservative masters, the poet of Savitri is little akin to them in sensitivity. He has a warm suddenness of simile, a sweeping boldness of metaphor, a varicoloured intensity of vision, a breath-bereaving grandeur of intuition. Nor can the sensitivity shown in these things be said to have its basis in the classics, though the latter too are beautifully or powerfully vivid.
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Rather a vividness most revolutionary is at work in the Aurobindonian sensitivity - simile, metaphor, vision, intuition, all are of an unusual inner experience mostly beyond the classics. Sri Aurobmdo's sensitivity is based on the classics in only one respect: it is neither morbid nor injudicious and has a certain poise and control even in the midst of extreme novelty and force. "Sound" it is, in the best connotation of the term, like the sensitivity of the classics, but its soundness, like that of theirs, is an attribute which makes for the genuinely great utterance as distinguished from the merely rushing, dazzling, distracting speech, and does not imply any imitativeness or want of "fine frenzy".
Is Sri Aurobindo's Early Blank Verse
like Tennyson's "Idylls"?
As regards the early blank verse, written mostly in the poet's own twenties and in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the comment that in it the Tennysonian influence, especially from the Idylls of the King, is the strongest strikes one as too sweeping. There is an audacious Elizabethan temper in this blank verse, and Milton, Keats , Arnold and the finest of Stephen Phillips are there as general influences much more than Tennyson. Least of all is the mood or the manner of the Idylls dominant. The early Tennyson had great lyrical and descriptive power, but the poet of the Idylls has, in the main, a marked lack of intensity and is more absorbed in decorating and elaborating the obvious and mirroring the rather mawkish sentimentality and prudish respectability of the typical Victorian temperament than in expressing profound vision and emotion. A considerable skill in metre and rhythm is there, but, except on rare occasions, it is not wholly charged with poetic inspiration . Creative energy, whether puissant or delicate, is wanting , and in its place we have an adroit yet somewhat empty elegance that is not seldom on the verge of being musically-turned prose. These faults are precisely what are most absent in Sri Aurobindo's youthful blank verse. Even when a Tennysonian influence may be traced, it is just the passion and the poignancy
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and the true poetic tone that render him non-Tennysonian. Consider this passage of Tennyson's in the middle of the Enid story:
O purblind race of miserable men,
How many among us at this very hour
Do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves,
By taking true for false, or false for true;
Here, thro' the feeble twilight of this world
Groping, how many, until we pass and reach
That other, where we see as we are seen...
Put it side by side with the following from Sri Aurobindo's Love and Death - part of a lament by a lover visiting the land of the dead - where to a superficial eye the Tennysonian influence may seem strong:
.... O miserable race of men,
With violent and passionate souls you come
Foredoomed upon the earth and live brief days
In fear and anguish, catching at stray beams
Of sunlight, little fragrances of flowers;
Then from your spacious earth in a great horror
Descend into this night, and here too soon
Must expiate your few inadequate joys.
O bargain hard! Death helps us not. He leads
Alarmed, all shivering from his chill embrace,
The naked spirit here...
A world of difference behind the surface resemblance should be evident. Sri Aurobindo is all vibrant and sensitive, the poetry is unforced, unflogged, and though the art is consummate there is little of the deliberative and consciously constructive. Genuine vitality is the distinguishing mark of the nineteenth-century Sri Aurobindo as it is of the twentieth-century one, and such vitality is the one thing that is mostly to seek in Tennyson of the Idylls. To look upon this Tennyson as "a master of rhythm and a
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true delineator of beauty" is as serious a mistake as to see him cropping up in Sri Aurobindo.
The Difference between "Traditional" and "Derivative"
It would be rash to deny influences in Urvasie or Love and Death, the works of Sri Aurobindo's youth. However, not only is the influence of the Idylls most faint, if at all, but also the other influences do not prevent the play of a fresh individual style reflecting an individual temperament and taking up the best of blank-verse masters into a new creation with qualities all its own of beauty and power:
Snow on ravine, and snow on cliff, and snow
Sweeping in strenuous outlines to heaven,
With distant gleaming vales and turbulent rocks,
Giant precipices black-hewn and bold
Daring the universal whiteness.
Or take the passage in which Pururavas paused not on the plains nor on the foot-hills
But plunged over difficult gorge and prone ravine
And rivers thundering between dim walls,
Driven by immense desire, until he came
To dreadful silence of the peaks and trod
Regions as vast and lonely as his love.
That the blank verse should be nineteenth-century in certain respects was inevitable, since it belonged to that period; but this in itself is no fault at all. And to say that it has "many pleasant lines of a derivative nature" is both to be patronising out of turn and to be deficient in close and keen scrutiny. To characterise as merely pleasant the poetic intensity that is Sri Aurobindo's is to be perilously near the level of the flapper who called the Himalaya "so sweet" and the Falls of Niagara "so dinky". To talk of his being "derivative" is not only to forget the genius-touch that can
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make all shadows of past masters part of an entirely novel chiaroscuro but also to perpetrate a confusion between the derivative and the traditional. Sri Aurobindo's blank verse can be called traditional. But to be traditional is not to be debarred from originality and greatness. While being traditional, one can be, if one has the genius, as original and great as Homer, Virgil, Lucretius, Marlowe, Milton, Keats. An infinite diversity is possible within traditionalism, and numberless heights and depths of vision and emotion can be reached through traditional technique. There is quite an amount in the later work of Sri Aurobindo that breaks new ground in technique and also goes psychologically beyond the general sources of poetry in the past; hence he cannot be dubbed altogether traditional. But wherever he is such, he is in the line of the masters and, though I do not idolatrously accept everything written by Sri Aurobindo as being always "tops", I consider the epithet "derivative" utterly misguided.
A Singular Oversight and a Strange Insensitiveness
The particular quotation C.R.M. has made in this connection does not show Sri Aurobindo at his most typical. I admit that it is not one of his best moments. But apart from its being neither Tennysonianly "idylls" - like in especial nor in any distinguishable way derivative, I should like to protest in the first place that it is robbed of its own proper effect by a singular oversight by C.R.M. Can anyone make grammatical sense out of the line about lightning? Suspended solitarily in front of those about "all that blackness", it has neither point nor bearing. It acquires meaning and relevance only if we quote it together with a few preceding it and restore the mutilated passage thus:
...and with a roar of rain
And tumult on the wings of wind and clasp
Of the o 'erwhelmed horizons and with bursts
Of thunder breaking all the body with sound
And lightning 'twixt the eyes intolerable,
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In the second place, I should like to protest that C.R.M.'s stricture on the word '"twixt" in the lightning-line is insensitive. He regards this word as horrible and calls it "a crutch for amateur versifiers". Strange that a word which can be found in all the best poets from Spenser downwards and which has nothing unpoetic about it except that twentieth-century poets do not frequently employ it should be criticised at just the place where it is most appropriate. When William Watson spoke of a time
Pendulous 'twixt the gold hour and the grey
he was certainly not propping himself up in amateur versification; the word is subtly expressive of brief delicate suspension. Even more apt is it in Sri Aurobindo's line. Look at it carefully, listen to it attentively. Does it not carry the precise suggestion of lightning? The same reason that makes the word "blitz" so appropriate for lightning applies here.
Coming finally to the quotation which C.R.M. rightly judges to be first-rate -
Whistle of wind in the tree-tops of Time and the rustle of Nature -
I may remark that it is not strictly a sample, as his description puts it, of blank verse. It is blank verse only in the sense that there are no rhymes. It is not pentametrical with an iambic base, as English blank verse is. It really illustrates the hexameter rhythm which Sri Aurobindo, shedding new light on quantitative prosody in English, achieves with striking inspired originality. To demonstrate this originality as well as the excellence of his blank verse and the remarkable revelatory force of his recent mystical poetry is the
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main aim of my book. C.R.M. has said hardly anything about my detailed treatment of my theme in this book, the patient careful critical analysis with which I have attempted to substantiate my thesis. Poetry is a "ticklish" affair and one must live with any poet's work a good deal and often with the help of somebody steeped in it, if one is to get over the surfaciness of impression to which one is liable, what with the fads and fancies that are most at play in one's reactions when the impact on one is of something directed not at one's "rational" mind but at one's temperament and taste and instinct-factors which if not specifically trained to be catholic are likely to trip up even critics like Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold and Eliot. May I hope that C.R.M. whose writings are often acute as well as charming will give my book a closer reading and, instead of being in a hurry to pass judgment, open himself more sensitively, more discerningly, to the Aurobindonian inspiration?
II
Mr. P. Lal has issued "A Testament for our Poets". He has some pointed and pertinent things to say, but he spoils their effect by falling foul rather violently of one about whom Francis Watson, in a broadcast on English Poetry from India, said that he was the one Indian poet whom Yeats had singled out as writing creatively in English. Yeats is well-known for his somewhat supercilious manner towards Indo-English poets: hence a comment like this from him has a rare value - particularly as he was himself one of the greatest contemporary poets in the English language. Mr. Lal seems to have been exceptionally unfortunate in his choice of Sri Aurobindo as a whipping post.
His own personal preference is for "realistic poetry, reflecting... the din and hubbub, the confusion and indecision, the flashes of goodness and beauty of our age". There is nothing intrinsically objectionable in this penchant, provided it does not deprive one of sensitiveness to other kinds of poetry. But there must be no particular philosophical shade attached to the word "realistic" as if poetry that is not a product of so-called "realism"
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were a dressing up of unreality. Art is out of touch with reality only when its expression is abstract or imprecise instead of in concrete and vivid terms. Reality, for art, is simply that which is real to the artist and which he can best seize in perfect form with concreteness and vividness.
Wrong Approach
Such a position is not altogether repudiated by Mr. Lal - in broad theory. But he has grave limitations of perception and sympathy, rendering his theory itself a little hazy, and he cannot help bringing into it his temperamental preferences. He reacts against romanticism on the one hand and "criticism of life" on the other. In condemning Sri Aurobindo's epic Savitri and warning Indian poets to keep away from the Aurobindonian brand of verse if they wish to do anything worth while, he also betrays a most serious lack of response to spiritual poetry.
He, of course, protests that he cannot be considered totally unsympathetic to poetry of a spiritual order. "I can read", he says, "the Divine Comedy with pleasure , St. John of the Cross is a marvellous poet, poems of Kabir and Chandidas are exquisite, T. S. Eliot 's Ash- Wednesday is an excellent poem of spiritual tension, confusion and resolution which I can read with great enjoyment and recall with surprising accuracy and detail." Well, the protest is far from convincing. Dante was a first-rate religious poet , not a spiritual or mystic one : he was well-versed in theology, perfectly conversant with the living symbols of the Catholic creed, his imagination was finely and powerfully touched by religious fervour, but there never was any invasion of his consciousness by the superconscious and he had not the temperament or the experience of the Saints who figure in his Paradiso. By the way, apart from certain later portions, the Divine Comedy is not even directly religious poetry: only its setting is in terms of religion. T. S. Eliot also is in part an effective poet of religious feeling and idea: the tension , confusion and resolution in Ash- Wednesday are not spiritual in the true sense and they are more misty than mystic. Not that a state of mind is not infused into us by them but they give
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us neither the concreteness nor the intensity of spiritual vision and mystic experience. Mr. Lal's ignorance of this fact proves that he has no clear idea of spiritual poetry.
St. John of the Cross is a real mystic and in his poems there is the immediacy of inner contact with the Eternal. But they are spiritual and mystic in a certain way - a highly personal devotion-coloured lyricism, deeply intense yet not charged with the powerful amplitude of vision and vibration such as we find in verses of the Upanishads, verses which seem to be the Infinite's own large and luminous language. Kabir and Chandidas are somewhat in the same category, though with a difference of tone and temper. They are indeed, as Mr. Lal says, exquisite and they are authentically spiritual, but again more intense than immense and the masterful mantric expression is not theirs. If Mr. Lal responds to St. John of the Cross and to these two Indian singers he is not without all spiritual sympathy: still, he cannot be said to show any sensitiveness to the kind of inspiration that is Savitri. We are not surprised that he fails to appreciate it.
Poetic Communication
Here we are likely to have a couple of paragraphs from his own article thrown at our heads by him. He has written: "The job of all poetry is to convey an experience which the reader has not himself experienced but to which he is made sympathetic by the rhythm, linguistic precision and incantation of the poem he is reading.... The good poem must be able to communicate an emotion to me even when I have only the faintest intellectual, and no emotional, idea of what that emotion is."
But surely there must be something in the reader to serve as a point d'appui for the poet 's effort at communication. Else we shall be obliged to reject Lycidas as no poetry because Dr. Johnson found it crude and unmelodious, Wordsworth 's Lyrical Ballads as sheer prose because Jeffreys remarked, "This will never do". Shelley's work as valueless because Matthew Arnold shook his head about it, Swinburne's early lyrics as meretricious stuff because Morley castigated them ruthlessly. And, mind you,
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these were no small and narrow critics on the whole. If they could have a blind spot on their critical retina and prove unreliable on occasion, Mr. Lal who is obviously restricted in his general sympathies and semi-perceptive of the spiritual light in poetry can hardly hope to impress us by his statement: "When I read any passage from Sri Aurobindo's 'epics', a sick-as-stale-lemonade shiver gallops up and down my spine at a rate impossible to compute" - or by his description of Savitri -like verse as "greasy, weak-spined and purple-adjectived poetry" , "a loose expression of a loose emotion" - or by his warning that unless poets like him band together and produce a Manifesto "there is every likelihood that the blurred, rubbery and airy sentiments of a Sri Aurobindo will slowly clog our own poetry".
Spiritual Vision and Philosophy
One point we may grant the preposterous Mr. Lal. If poets like him tried to write in Sri Aurobmdo's vein without any of the Aurobindonian discipline of consciousness and mystical drive of the inner being, they might very well turn out in verse a painted anaemia of pseudo-spirituality. Spiritual poetry cannot be written on the cheap, but that does not mean that what Sri Aurobindo writes answers to Mr. Lal's designation of Savitri. Prima facie, a master of spiritual experience, with a consummate knowledge of the English language (Sri Aurobindo was educated from his seventh to his twenty- first year in Eng land), is not likely to pen feverishly feeble inanities and pass them off as mysticism. If he is in addition an intellectual and a philosopher of giant proportions, all the less probable is it that his mystical expression should be greasy and weak-spined and purple-adjectived . At his worst he might be in danger of seeming elusive and esoteric or else remote and recondite. Mr. Lal 's terms are absolutely irrelevant and incorrect.
One cannot tax with either gaudiness or prettification Sri Aurobindo's revelatory glimpses of Super-nature:
The ways that lead to endless happiness
Ran like dream-smiles through meditating vasts:
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Disclosed stood up in a gold moment's blaze
White sun-steppes in the pathless Infinite.
Nor can one accuse of empty effusiveness his packed profound depiction of what man in his ignorance of the meaning of his life and of his high and splendid fate never sees in the dynamics of world-history:
Only the Immortals on their deathless heights
Can see the Idea, the Might that change Time's course,
Come maned with light from undiscovered worlds,
Hear, while the world toils on with its deep blind heart,
The galloping hooves of the unforeseen event,
Bearing the superhuman rider, near
And, impassive to earth s din and startled cry,
Return to the silence of the hills of God;
As lightning leaps, as thunder sweeps, they pass
And leave their mark on the trampled breast of Life.
Nor is there any pompous vacuity in his brief suggestive conjuration of the human deepening into the divine:
Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient,
or in that phrase about the divinised consciousness's vivid play of self-disclosure within its own universal oneness:
Idea rotated symphonies of sight,
Sight was a flame-throw from identity.
All this is pure spiritual vision which seems to have made little impression on Mr. Lal during his reading of Savitri. But Savitri is spiritual philosophy as well as spiritual vision, and Mr. Lal is equally at sea with a poetry that fuses the philosophical mind with mystic symbolism and revelation. Else how could he miss the concreteness and vividness of a large-idea'd utterance like:
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Thought lay down in a mighty voicelessness;
The toiling thinker widened and grew still,
Wisdom transcendent touched his quivering heart:
His soul could sail beyond thought s luminous bar;
Mind screened no more the shoreless Infinite.
Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed
Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars
The super cons cient realms of motionless peace
Or take the following philosophically spiritual lines:
Immense realities took on a shape:
There looked out from the shadow of the Unknown
The bodiless Namelessness that saw God born
And tries to gain from the mortal's mind and soul
A deathless body and a divine name.
The immobile lips, the great surreal wings,
The visage marked by Superconscient sleep.
The eyes with their closed lids that see all things,
Appeared of the Architect who builds in trance.
Or consider a passage like this - an example of something that occurs very frequently in Savitri - about earth's aspiration and her future fulfilment:
An inarticulate whisper drives her steps
Of which she feels the force but not the sense;
A few rare intimations come as guides.
Immense divining flashes cleave her brain...
A vision meets her of supernal Powers
That draw her as if mighty kinsmen lost
Approaching with estranged great luminous gaze...
Outstretching arms to the unconscious Void,
Passionate she prays to invisible forms of Gods,
Soliciting from dumb Fate and toiling Time
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What most she needs, what most exceeds her scope,
A Mind unvisited by illusion's gleams,
A Will expressive of soul's deity,
A Strength not forced to stumble by its speed,
A Joy that drags not sorrow for its shade.
For these she yearns and feels them destined hers:
Heaven s privilege she claims as her own right.
Just is her claim the all-witnessing Gods approve,
Clear in a greater light than reason owns:
Our intuitions are its title-deeds;
Our souls accept what our blind thoughts refuse.
Earth s winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven,.
The impossible God s sign of things to be.
It would really be a critical apocalypse if one could learn from Mr. Lal where in any of these magnificent excerpts is a stale-lemonade quality or a riot of blurred, airy and rubbery sentiments. One might as well look for an orgy of purple adjectives, or weak-spined greasiness, or loose emotion loosely expressed, in the profound sighted and high-thoughted slokas of the Gita. Transposed to the plane of spiritual vision and spiritual philosophy, illumined and enlarged in the consciousness of a seer-sage, all that Mr. Lal demands of a true poem is here in abundance: "a choreographical pattern within a state of tension produced in a refined sensibility" - "language used precisely, nobly and with a sense of purpose".
Unjust Criticism
To be sure, the whole of Savitri is not uniformly inspired, but that is natural. In a long epic narrative in which a story is unfolded or a sequence of experiences developed, inspiration has to build sober bridges, so to speak, between the glories of its dramatic moments. Even Dante who is more uniformly inspired in his Divine Comedy than most of the other great epic poets has his slightly relaxed periods. And as for Homer in the Iliad and Milton in Paradise Lost, they either nod or plod on occasion and still
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remain mighty names in the roll of poetry.
Even when the verse is not a sober bridge between the glories of dramatic moments, there is bound to be in a poem of considerable length and ample range of subject an inequality in the expression. What we have to appreciate in Savitri is the rareness of the inequality and the presence of some authentic minimum of inspiration in the passages where the afflatus tends to sink. According to Mr. Lal there is no authentic inspiration of any kind in the following:
All there was soul or made of sheer soul-stuff
A sky of soul covered a deep soul-ground.
All here was known by a spiritual sense:
Thought was not there but a knowledge near and one
Seized on all things by a moved identity...
Life was not there but an impassioned force,
Finer than fineness, deeper than the deeps,
Felt as a subtle and spiritual power,
A quivering out from soul to answering soul,
A mystic movement, a close influence,
A free and happy and intense approach
Of being to being with no screen or check,
Without which life and love could never have been.
Body was not there, for bodies were needed not,
The soul itself was its own deathless form
And met at once the touch of other souls,
Close, blissful, concrete, wonderfully true...
Well, can we say to Mr. Lal: "You are right for at least once"?
I am sorry that even this concession is out of the question. Read without prejudice, the passage or all its comparative inferiority has nothing to sicken us. There is a balanced systematic development of the theme of soul-stuff being all, and the lines -
Seized on all things by a moved identity -
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cannot be bettered for accurate expression in a certain style, the phrase "near and one" is particularly pregnant for any alert intellect and the word "seized" is concrete and vivid as is also the word "moved": a suggestive picture comes before the inner sense. The lines that provoke Mr. Lal to the utmost sarcasm are -
Finer than fineness, deeper than the deeps.
The second line is an echo of a turn we find at times in some Upanishads, it is a sort of paradoxical pointing of extremes and is not devoid of attractiveness or effectiveness: here it is particularly apt because the soul, in Yogic realisation, is the inmost entity of the inner world and the subtlest of all subtle forces. The first line is deemed by Mr. Lal an attempt at Miltonese which succeeds in being mere wind. He is mistaken in both respects. Miltonese is more grandiose in language and less direct in suggestion. This is a straightforward style and statement expressing the truth that on the occult "plane" where Soul is the determining principle there is a pure essence of vitality in both its ardent and its dynamic aspects, rather than what we know as Life Force. Of course, these lines and all the rest of the passage would hardly make an impact on a reader who has allowed the glib use of the word "soul" by wishy-washy and vacuous sentimentalists or by pseudo-mystics to spoil his stomach for it. Still less would an impact occur if a reader has from the very beginning no feel of what the soul could be like and looks upon every mention of it as a gaseous falsehood. Mr. Lal labours under a serious deficiency of soul-sense. Most non-mystic readers are somewhat in the same case, but not all lack so completely a sympathetic instinct for something which to the mystic is more "close, blissful, concrete, wonderfully true" (a phrase, by the way, very felicitously worded and rhythmed) than even his bodily existence. Mr. Lal himself says vis-à-vis the passage: "I see nothing; there is nothing I can hang on to." This could just as well be because of his own superficiality as because of the supposed lack of poetry in the lines.
Not that Sri Aurobindo is here at his best. But if we admit that
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Sri Aurobindo is perhaps here at his worst we still pay him a tremendous compliment. For the lines, by their harmonious significance and word and rhythm, remain poetry for all their falling below such bursts of inspiration as we quoted earlier - and even those examples cannot provide a really adequate notion of the sustained splendours Savitri has to offer nor of the huge variety of poetic merit in it, passage s of a spiritualised "natural magic and mysticised "human interest" as well as Yogicised philosophy and direct occult insight into the individual and the cosmos . Yes, the lines remain poetry and become more poetic when taken in their proper context as part of a fuller record in which is set alive before us an actual experience of the plane of the World-Soul. Terms like "soul-stuff' and "sky of soul " and "deep soul-ground" acquire a degree of concrete meaning that cannot arise when the passage is tom from what goes before and comes after and when no indication is supplied of the totality of which it is an integral and almost inseparable portion.
Mr. Lal does injustice to the passage by the way he has presented it and the attitude he adopts towards it. But the worst crime he commits against the critic's office is to choose from Sri Aurobindo a passage that is not plenarily Aurobindonian, and declare it to be all that Sri Aurobindo is capable of throughout the nearly thirteen thousand lines published in Volume I of Savitri. This is an act of suppressio veri and suggestio falsi. betraying a want of scruple added to limitation of aesthesis. No doubt, Savitri is not always easy to appreciate , it is mostly a new kind of poetry with a vision and language caught as if directly from hidden heights and depths and breadths of a more than human consciousness . Sri Aurobindo himself felt that it would take time to obtain wide recognition. But for an unprejudiced reader of quick, supple and penetrating imagination there is enough in it of recognisable excellence to win for its author the richest laurel s especially among his countrymen who may be expected to respond more readily to a sovereign spiritual utterance.
If, however, every Indian reader turns out to be like Mr. Lal, I can only sigh and quote two lines - "a state of tension produced in a refined sensibility" and "language used precisely, nobly and with
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a sense of purpose", I suppose - from one of Mr. Lal's own recent and definitely non-Aurobindonian poems:
Here in dejection
I don't know what to do.
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