II
I hope my introductory words have toned up the reader to an interest in Paradise Lost and in the difficult job I have taken on myself under the influence of the ardours and rigours of Milton's epic inspiration. But before I actually start, let me evoke two pictures in which our poet does not directly figure yet which may aid our minds better to appreciate him.
Go back to 1834. A British ship is on way to India. In those days it used to take five months to make the voyage and there were many hazards: the ships were far more at the mercy of storms than our modern luxury-liners. And this particular boat was caught in a storm. If we may quote from Paradise Lost, it was surrounded by
a sea, dark, wasteful, wild,
Up from the bottom turned by furious winds
And surging waves, as mountains to assault
Heaven's height, and with the centre mix the pole.1
A complete catastrophe was feared. Men were rushing about the deck and all hearts were flurried - all except one. A young man stood in a corner and with a firm low voice was reciting Paradise Lost, as if by its superb organised thunder he could quell that hullabaloo of the elements. This was Thomas Babington Macaulay going to India, destined to mould the educational policy of the foreign rulers there and to spread in our country the literature of his own, including Milton's epic. He was perhaps not altogether gracious in the way he pushed English literature forward at the expense of indigenous writing. But now as he stood on that pitching and tossing deck of the frail merchantman he seemed almost to shadow out something of the heavenly Power that Milton describes as going forth to create our universe in the Chaos which was, according to his epic, like an outrageous sea and
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to which that Power addressed its creative fiat. To quote
Paradise Lost again:
"Silence, ye troubled waves, and thou Deep, peace!"
Said then the omnific Word: "your discord end!"2
I do not know how and when exactly the discord around Macaulay ended. But even if it had continued for a full day, he could have gone on reciting the epic. For he knew the whole of it by heart. He once declared that if all the copies of this poem were destroyed he could reproduce it correctly down to the comma. And, in knowing it by heart, his affections were really engaged. Of all the poetic masterpieces of the past he loved it the best, and the very first piece of his own writing that burst into fame in the world was a long brilliant essay on Milton.
Essay on Milton - this brings us to our second picture. Instead of a young Englishman going to India, we have a younger Indian at Cambridge, the University of both Macaulay and Milton. This Indian undergraduate has lately come up from St. Paul's School of London, the very school which Milton had attended. Now the year is 1890. On the second of December the student, aged 18, pens a letter to his father across the seas. The subject is an invitation the previous night to coffee with one of the dons in whose room was waiting "the great O.B., otherwise Oscar Browning." Don't mix up Oscar Browning with either Robert Browning who often wrote poetry like prose or Oscar Wilde who often wrote prose like poetry. Oscar Browning was a super-don, nothing more, but he had a fine literary sense and could pick out good writing - poetry or prose - unerringly. The letter from King's College, Cambridge, after calling O.B. "the feature par excellence of King's", reads: "He said to me: ''I suppose you know you passed an extraordinarily high examination. I have examined papers at thirteen examinations and I have never during that time seen such excellent papers as yours (meaning my classical papers, at the scholarship examination). As
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for your essay, it was wonderful.' " Then the letter to the fond father continues in a personal vein: "In this essay (a comparison between Shakespeare and Milton), I indulged my oriental tastes to the top of their bent, it overflowed with rich and tropical imagery, it abounded in antitheses and epigrams and it expressed my real feelings without restraint or reservation. I thought myself that it was the best thing I had ever done, but at school it would have been condemned as extraordinarily Asiatic and bombastic."
Thus the earliest piece of worthwhile critical writing we know of as Sri Aurobindo's was on Milton as well as Shakespeare - reminding us in one-half of it of Macaulay's first famous theme. There is the further curious coincidence that the earliest piece of writing by Milton himself, which the world came to know of, was a poem on Shakespeare, a tribute published in the Shakespeare Folio of 1632 though written a couple of years earlier. And it is not only in a style dramatic, bright with epigram, charged with "metaphysical" wit and imagery: in addition, it hints a comparison between Shakespeare's spontaneous exuberance and Milton's own laboriously reached perfection during that period:
... to the shame of slow-endeavouring art,
Thy easy numbers flow...3
Some further facts in connection with Milton and Sri Aurobindo deserve our notice. When I asked Sri Aurobindo in 1933 about influences of other poets on his own work, the first name he mentioned, after speaking of his older contemporary Stephen Phillips, in relation to Love and Death, was Milton. He wrote: "I dare say some influence of most of the great English poets and of others also, not English, can be traced in my poetry - I can myself see that of Milton, sometimes of Wordsworth and Arnold...."4 Again, just as his earliest critical writing (which unfortunately has not survived) dealt at some length with Milton, the last general critical pronouncement he made on a poet's work was on
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Milton's achievement. In May, 1947, he wrote in a long letter on his own poetry a passage broadly comparing Lycidas and Paradise Lost. I may quote some lines: "If Lycidas with its beauty and perfection had been the supreme thing done by Milton even with all the lyrical poetry and the sonnets added to it, Milton would still have been a great poet but he would not have ranked among the dozen greatest; it is Paradise Lost that gives him that place. There are deficiencies if not failures in almost all the great epics, the Odyssey and perhaps the Divina Commedia being the only exceptions, but still they are throughout in spite of them great epics. So too is Paradise Lost. The grandeur of his verse and language is constant and unsinking to the end and makes the presentation always sublime."5
I may remark that this estimate is a little different from the one which Sri Aurobindo gave in The Future Poetry nearly a quarter century before. In some literary matters Sri Aurobindo in his later years shows, if not quite a change of view, at least a certain change of emphasis. And he granted to Milton a somewhat higher status than he had already done. In The Future Poetry6 he had said: "Paradise Lost is assuredly a great poem, one of the five great epical poems. of European literature, and in certain qualities it reaches heights which no other of them had attained, even though as a whole it comes a long way behind them... Paradise Lost commands admiration, but as a whole, apart from its opening, it has failed either to go home to the heart of the world and lodge itself in its imagination or to enrich sovereignly what we may describe as the acquired stock of its more intimate poetical thought and experience. But the poem that does neither of these things, however fine its powers of language and rhythm, has missed its best aim." In the later view, Sri Aurobindo, though not in the least unconscious of Milton's shortcomings, the disparities between the initial and the subsequent Books of the epic, is yet inclined to allow those sustained powers of language and rhythm a truer inward animation in even the inferior portions than he was ready to
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do in The Future Poetry. For, after saying in his 1947 letter, "I am prepared to admit the very patent defects of Paradise Lost", he can still call for a sympathetic sense and affirm: "We have to accept for the moment Milton's dry Puritan theology and his all too human picture of the celestial world and its denizens and then we can feel the full greatness of the epic."7
Sri Aurobindo has written several other things on Paradise Lost. We shall draw upon them as we go along. At the moment we are concerned with generalities and with the way Milton gets broadly related to Sri Aurobindo. The most striking and important relation, though perhaps the most general and impersonal, is that the two sole full-blown epics that have seen the light in English are Milton's Paradise Lost - 10,565 lines - and Sri Aurobindo's Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, whose lines add up to 23,813 in the 1954 edition.
Perhaps their inevitable juxtaposition has led many a critic in India to describe Sri Aurobindo's blank verse in Savitri as Miltonic. Also perhaps because Sri Aurobindo, like Milton, energises and expands and uplifts us, criticism is led to this description. But, while to be Miltonic is to impart energy, expansion, upliftment, all that imparts them need not be in Milton's style. Savitri differs from Paradise Lost both in style and substance, word-craft and vision. We shall dwell on the difference at a subsequent stage. Here we shall emphasise only the similarity of essential effect in terms of the energetic, the expansive, the uplifting. Cast your mind back to the perils of the journey through the unknown that Satan ultimately attempted. Now feel the dangers of a luminous and ecstatic soul-exposure - an experience through which Savitri's father, the Yogi-king Aswapati, passed:
His nature shuddered in the Unknown's grasp.
In a moment shorter than Death, longer than Time,
By a power more ruthless than Love, happier than
Heaven,
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Taken sovereignly into eternal arms,
Haled and coerced by a stark absolute bliss,...
Hurried into unimaginable depths,
Upborne into immeasurable heights,
It was torn out from its mortality
And underwent a new and bourneless change.8
In a less sweeping and more controlled yet equally powerful language Sri Aurobindo gives us Savitri, the Avatar of the Supreme Mother, confronted by a mysterious Presence who works in the dark depths of our evolving universe and demands of her a sacrifice suited to her divine humanity:
One dealt with her who meets the burdened great.
Assigner of the ordeal and the path
Who chooses in this holocaust of the soul
Death, fall and sorrow as the spirit's goads,
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.9
Sri Aurobindo has said that in certain qualities Paradise Lost reaches heights which no other epic has surpassed. "Rhythm and speech," he tells us, "have never attained to a mightier amplitude of epic expression and movement, seldom to an equal sublimity."10 Then he refers to "that peculiar grandeur in both the soul and manner of the utterance and in both the soul and the gait of the rhythm which belongs to him alone of the poets."11 But with those two passages from Savitri before us - examples of many similar articulations - we may say these "heights" were never reached again until Sri Aurobindo composed his own epic. For, poetic grandeur, inward and outward, of a rare eminence indeed is resonant in them and I am sore tempted to analyse the technique serving as the vehicle of the spiritual afflatus. But I am not speaking on Sri Aurobindo and I have already devoted two books to the Aurobindonian inspiration and art, one of them
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still unpublished as a whole though all its parts have been printed in various journals. What I may just remark apropos of the resonance of the passages is that many a passage of such grandeur was dictated rather than written by Sri Aurobindo. And the lucky scribe, Dr. Nirodbaran, testifies that at times there was a rush of composition: once two or three hundred lines were dictated non-stop and few of them required reshaping afterwards. Paradise Lost, too, was not written out by Milton at all: it is unique among European epics in that everything was dictated, and when we think of the conditions under which Milton created most of it,
with mortal voice unchanged
To hoarse or mute, though fall'n on evil days,
On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues,
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, And solitude,12
the picture of young Macaulay, threatened with shipwreck, reciting the Miltonic pentameters, is rather apposite: the ship of state, whose course Milton had helped to steer, the Commonwealth established by Cromwell, was sinking when he commenced Paradise Lost and the poet's own life was soon threatened. But the dictating voice never faltered. Poetically no less than morally it kept fluent and steady. And it is with its poetic fluency and steadiness that I shall begin my comment proper on the inspiration of Paradise Lost. I shall spotlight not any scene from the great story told in the poem but the scene of the poet in the act of composing his masterpiece. This scene, of which the unfaltering dictation forms part, is necessary to bear in mind if the true quality of the poem is to come alive to our imagination.
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Notes and References
1.Bk. VII, 212-15.
2.Ibid., 216-17.
3.On Shakespeare, 9-10.
4.Life - Literature - Yoga, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry (1952), p. 69.
5.Ibid., p. 60.
6.The Future Poetry, pp. 117, 118.
7.Life - Literature - Yoga, p. 60.
8.Savitri, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry (1954), p. 92.
9.Ibid., p. 21.
10.The Future Poetry, p. 117.
11.Ibid.
12.Bk. VII, 24-8.
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