The Thinking Corner

The Attack on Romantic Idealism

The romantic temperament is on the decline. To surround sex with the idealistic imagination is fast becoming unfashionable. It is regarded as playing a sort of secular "stooge" to that "arch-enemy of progress", the religious and mystical tendency. That is one aspect of the attack - scientific naturalists telling "visionary" poets to cut their colourful "cackle" and come down to brasstacks of animal reality. The other aspect of the attack is derived, surprisingly, from just the opposite quarter - the camp not of scientific naturalists but of those who have developed a spiritual world-view and seen the need of an inner Godward growth. Aldous Huxley makes the character who is his own mouthpiece in After Many a Summer tear Robert Browning to shreds for setting up what may be called a religious cult of sexual love instead of looking at things as Chaucer did in a purely physical and animal-human light. Huxley says that to idealise and romanticise sex is to put an extra barrage in the way of true mysticism. Chaucer had nothing save his appetites between himself and God, while Browning, it is argued, had not only his appetites but a whole mistland of the mind built up to supply a halo for his concupiscence and to persuade him that his love-tinctured animality was a highly desirable thing and that the state of mystical blessedness was merely an intensification of the state of happy and poetic-mooded marriage!

In my opinion, Huxley oversteps the mark. Browning does act silly at times; yet it is not true that for the mystic in man the Chaucerian mentality has less obstacles than the Browningesque. In the former we have a sharp demarcation between the high and the low, there is no effort to align the two parts; so the ordinary life is conceived as quite an animal activity while the mystical is seen in terms of pure spirit, with a denial of any possibility of the animal having the seed of the Divine hidden in it. The outcome is that the mystical life becomes an extreme self-mortification, a castigating of the

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animal all the time, a cruel asceticism which mutilates the physical being and renders the mind grandiosely masterful in a perverse way and ultimately leads to a cramming of the subconscious with suppression to such a point that there is an explosive upsurge whose end is either the fate of Paphnutius in Anatole France's Thais or else the sanctimonious hypocrisy which marred the annals of medieval monkhood. What the Browningesque inspiration is trying to do is to build a bridge between the low and the high. Its defect lies in its putting too much emphasis on the middle term, painting up that term as almost an ultimate in itself because it draws elements from both sides in a kind of harmony. But through giving sexual love a more than physical significance by enveloping it with the idealistic imagination, poets like Browning prepare the crude animal component of man for finding the concealed truth behind its appetites.

What is it that sex in the body is seeking? To complete the fragmentary individual, to surpass his limits, to gain ecstasy, to placate his urge towards perpetuation. Does sex in the body achieve this aim? Its self-completion and self-transcendence are a short spell of happy illusion, its ecstasy is feverish and sporadic and temporary, the perpetuity it desires is attained vicariously by the individual's being prolonged only in his offspring. It is therefore a failure and its brief phases of pleasurable excitement, besides fading into the humdrum and the commonplace, are always counterbalanced by periods of acute suffering and heartbreak owing to its attachment to frail and finite forms. Hence something more than the body's functions must be discovered to take sex nearer its goal. The first movement towards this something more is Browningesque romantic idealism which is nothing else than the experience of sex on subtle planes of consciousness where the hold of the raw and rigid physical is diminished. The subtle planes have windows opening to the psychic and the spiritual ethers, and through those windows the light of the Divine can steal in and a sense of what is

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intrinsically vast, rapturous and deathless start stirring. The poetic mind creates out of the substance of the subtle consciousness a quasi-mysticism which, while pretending to itself all manner of excellences that are not there, implants vague tendencies in the being towards the authentic truth, velleities of genuine God-vision - a state of groping and stumbling readiness for the real revelation. And those who do happen to strain their eyes out of this dream and see directly the blaze of the Spirit become not morbid self-mortifiers cutting off the body from the soul with an unhealthy other-worldliness, but synthetising unifying harmonising mystics who behold God hidden everywhere and read in life a promise of God's kingdom on earth. So Browning has his use and the mistland of his romanticism is not altogether an opaque many-hued veil cast for ever upon the face of truth. It is a thinning veil necessary in order to uplift the animal in us by means not too sheerly spiritual - it is an evolutionary device, accustoming the unregenerate part of us gradually to the glow of God. To mysticise about sexual love and not accept it in pure animal-human terms is at the same time a mistake and a help: a mistake if the Browningesque attitude is magnified into a grand terminus, a help if it is made a rainbow-passage to the divine Sun.

Huxley's attack on romantic idealism errs not merely because it fails to discern an evolutionary need. It errs also because he puts too much emphasis on the Impersonal Divine, the featureless infinite Spirit, the luminous "Cloud of Unknowing" into which the soul can rise out of its human individuality. He forgets that we have in our highest parts two sides - the impersonal and the personal, the cool intellectual and the hot emotional. He forgets that we have a finite body and a being with an individual face and mould of nature and cast of character. What must be the spiritual truth underlying our personal and individual being? Is that being of ours, with its ardent cry for form and name, a mockery, a hollow sham we must outgrow and discard for a supracosmic transcendence or else hold here as an antithesis to the un-

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differentiated Infinite within or at best as a halting instrument of that formless and nameless glory? Surely an integral insight must posit behind this a divine Person, a spiritual individuality, not cramped and fragmentary but the focus of an infinite splendour, the crystallisation of the Limitless and the Eternal for a play of diversity in unity. A perfect mystical fulfilment must therefore realise a divine Person no less than a divine Impersonality. It is towards the former that romantic idealism tries in a half-blind manner to drive us. Romantic idealism - the giving of trailing clouds of more than human glory to the person of one's mate and the emotional aching to merge oneself in it - foreshadows the cult of the Saviour and the Avatar, the supreme Mother and the All-Creatrix, the biune Godhead of Shiva and Parvati. It is the half-way house to the religion of the devotees, the bhaktas, the Sufi singers of the perfect Beloved.

I think that to perceive a truth behind romantic idealism is also to tend, when the spiritual turn is taken, towards the Aurobindonian vision in which Matter is not rejected as untransformable. Romantic idealism wants not just a fulfilment of the inner personality in us, it wants as well a creative radiancy and perfect perpetuation of the outer. Crude passion craves to be creative without being radiant, perpe-tuative without the dream of perfection. Romantic idealism falls short of its dream and its desire, but they are there and point to an important aspect of evolution. The traditional Yogas look upon romantic idealism's dream and desire as a misplaced projection outward of what is possible to the full in the inner nature alone. In their view, the soul can realise immortality and divinity, the body will always resist enlightenment and be a slave to disease, decay and death. But such a view is surely partial: if the universe is not an illusion, the Spirit must hold in itself the power to divinise and immortalise the outer as well as the inner self, the very body must share in the ultimate apotheosis. And is there not an intense figuration of the perfectly beautiful and blissful body, a most poignant cry for the apotheosis of physical existence,

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in the love-poetry of the romantic idealists? These love-poets do not merely rise from the gross material into the subtle planes of sex shot with inklings of the psychic and the spiritual; they wish the gross material itself to be refined and irradiated by the psyche-touched and spirit-glimpsing subtle. In the consciousness of non-Yogic life this seems to approximate emotionally and imaginatively to the Aurobindonian afflatus. The fact that as soon as one takes up the Yogic life one has to aspire for a total transformation of all impulses, however subtle-planed, that break out in sexual love does not diminish the potentialities of romantic idealism to serve in the meanwhile as a magical semi-mediator between earth and heaven.

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