Sri Aurobindo came to Me

APPENDIX I

The Ashram: Some Disciples

I have decided, not without hesitation, to write now about a few of the disciples I came to know in the Ashram who made on me an impression for a twofold reason: first because of their native aptitudes and secondly because of the characteristic manner in which each of them reacted to Gurudev's personality and guidance. I have undertaken to attempt this in order to correct a wrong stress I may have unwittingly given while paying my homage to one who has been the most unforgettable character that I ever came to know in my life. This I say apart from the deep debt I shall always owe him as much for having been what he was as for having come down in his compassion to one who was so utterly incapable of making any adequate return for what he received from such a donor for more than two decades. By 'wrong stress' I imply the over- emphasis I may have put on my own angle of vision because, when all is said, to each spectator his own vision must, inescapably, seem more important if not more trustworthy and real than that of all the rest put together. Do what one will, a man cannot break the shell of his ego which separates him from other egos. But even then surely he can, if he honestly tries, amend partly "the observer's error" — if I may borrow a scientific phrase — by comparing his own appraisement with that of some others.

To make my meaning clear I will begin straightway with an instance in point.

There was a young lady whom I met in the Ashram in 1928 who interested me because I was told that she had had some remarkable occult experiences. I must conceal her identity for

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reasons which I need not disclose. She came one day straight to my room and talked about music of which she knew something. Then she told me that she had had a previous guide if not Guru whose contact had given her the first push over the edge which made her topple subsequently into the delightful "abyss" of Sri Aurobindo's integral Yoga, as she put it smilingly.

I pricked up my ears at once. This was just what I had been aching for ! "God is !" I said to myself.

"And then? I asked eagerly.

"What then?" she laughed. "I came here. But I was puzzled when Mother first told me to open myself. But how was I to open myself?"— and so on.

But she did open: wasn't she an adept? How I admired her! And the result was that one day, while meditating, she saw a strange vision, namely that she was wholly separate from her body, roaming about in space, a witness to distant happenings. (This identical experience was related to me once more by an old sadhaka a few years later.) And she was staggered!

I was thrilled. For this was the experience I had heard so much about of the inner consciousness showing itself distinct and separate from the physical. An experience worth having in these days when consciousness is so triumphantly dismissed by scientific materialism as a function of the body, because this tends to establish that one can see without the eyes and know of things happening beyond one's horizon, things that could, besides, be verified, as was done by her many times.

Yea, I was deeply impressed!

But alas, she left a few years later. I must be cautious and say no more, only hint that she had to go because she could not (or would not, shall I say?) change beyond a point.

I learnt, incidentally that it was not enough to have such "experiences", however startling. One must aspire only for the most startling, of all experiences: the change of nature without which no abiding change of consciousness could be achieved.

But, unhappily for me, she induced in me an expectation that gave me no end of trouble. For I started meditating for hours

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but, alas, not even the shadow of such an experience so much peeped on the threshold of my expectancy! And I was told by others that this was because I failed to "open myself, which decided many who said that I might be a good poet and musician but not a good Yogi. Sol wrote to Sri Aurobindo in despair that I could not have any experiences because I could not "open" the closed doors of my inner being, as so many pointed out. I also wrote to him what someone else had told me — about there being a division in me — that is why I was where I was (what ever it might mean). I myself took it to mean that there was a self-contradiction in me which must have been the cause of the obstinate lack of response on the part of the Divine. In the end I wrote, crestfallen, that probably this self-contradiction or division was an index to my insincerity and the lack of response the inescapable retribution.

"To which he wrote back with his unfailing kindness and patience:

"The peculiarity you note — of self-contradiction in yourself — is universal: it is one part of the being which believes and speaks the right and beautiful things: it is another which doubts and says the opposite. I get communications for instance from X in which for several pages he writes wise and perfect things about the sadhana; then, suddenly without transition, he drops into his physical mind and peevishly and complainingly says, well, things ignorant and incompatible with all that wisdom. X is not insincere when he does that — he is simply giving voice to two parts of his nature. Nobody can understand himself or human nature if he does not perceive the multi-personality of the human being. To get all parts into harmony, that is the difficult thing.

"As for the lack of response, well, can't you see that you are in the ancient tradition? Read the lives of the saints — you will find them all (perhaps not all, but at least so many) shouting like you that there was no response and getting into frightful tumults and agonies and desperations until the response came. Many people here who can't say that they haven't experiences

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do just the same — so it does not depend on experiences. I don't advise the procedure to anybody, mind you. I only say that the feeling of your never having had a very concrete response does not mean that you will never have it and that fits of despair at having arrived nowhere do not mean that one will never arrive..."

I come now to a dear friend of mine about whom it is a joy to write. I warn the reader, however, that I lay no claim to be above bias. A saying of the great Goethe always raised an echo in my mind: "Aufrichtig zu zein kann ich versprechen, unparteiish zu zein, aber nicht."1 do not mean that I like, consciously, to say things in a friend's favour which my sober judgment is reluctant to sanction. But I do mean that when one is very fond of a person one becomes, willy-nilly, a little more vividly responsive to his qualities than can be fully approved by those who are uninfluenced by such a predilection. Naturally, one could here too — as in everything else — go on arguing the pros and cons till doomsday: whether sympathy is more likely to be nearer the truth than a cold critical appraisement. I feel no urge to swell the inconclusive babel of such a debate. So I will only repeat what Tagore told me once sighing, with a picturesque charm all his own (which I lack): "I really long to praise, Dilip! Some times it even grows on me like hunger or thirst. But I can't alas! Many there are of whom I feel like speaking appreciatively. But as I rush on, my critical intellect protests aghast and then I have to weigh my words. The result — a sorry tribute which often does more harm than good — to obviate which I have to keep silent rather than dole out an inadequate measure and feel like a niggard." May this apology suffice. Amen!

The friend who impressed me so deeply in the early years of my Ashram life was K. D. Sethna who has since become famous both as a poet and a priest of high — or shall I say, spiritual —journalism. I can clearly recapture with my mind's eye his delicate sensitive face which first attracted me with its fine

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'I can promise to be sincere but not impartial.

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crop of Christ-like whiskers which he discarded subsequently, to the universal regret of his friends and admirers. For we did admire it without pressing the 'resemblance' any further. And let me add, with a sigh, that those who have never seen him with his whiskers will never be able to appreciate our sigh over its merciless eradication. And then his eyes: how they radiated a keen though not unkind glint of intelligence! For he was nothing if not sympathetic and enthusiastic. Fortunately, he knew where to draw the line when expressing his sympathy in favour of this or that person.

Which brings me to his alert common sense. I have been told that Sri Aurobindo once said, in joke, that the Divine wanted the aspirants to surrender many things which they guarded jealousy but one thing they did surrender with alacrity which was .not exacted: common sense. Sethna was not one of these. For his common sense was never an absentee in his talks and adjudications which seemed remarkable to me as he talked and passed verdicts readily enough. I remember once (years later, when he had matured further) how he debated with Krishnaprem in my living-room. How I envied his dialectical intelligence!
And Krishnaprem not only admired his mental robustness in a frail physique but enjoyed to the full breaking a lance with him. But he had to go all out to hold his own against Sethna, which is saying much. Yes, Sethna was nothing if not perspicacious and wide-awake on top of being sensible. It was refreshing to talk with him and stimulating to differ from him, since even when one differed from his point of view one did feel that one was made to look at things from a new angle as it were. In a word, his talks were always suggestive. But to come now to something more important.

One meets clever people often, and highly intelligent people, too, now and then. But seldom does one meet an intelligence which aspires to be replenished at the fount of a deeper wisdom. Intelligence in itself is indeed admirable and none but a fool will deny its unquestionable utility. But what is not as often suspected, far less admitted, is that intelligence is a mediator

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not a creator. It can help in giving expression to something that it receives from somewhere to which it seldom wins a clue, but it cannot invoke that something — call it aspiration, knowledge, love and what not.

I am afraid many (especially "the intellectuals") will take umbrage at this — what they will call — disparagement of the intellect. But alas, one cannot both eat one's cake and have it: one cannot glimpse something higher than what the mind can reveal and yet retain unimpaired one's faith in the mental. That is why most intelligent people fight shy of mystic wisdom. They are not wrong in dreading this, for the savour of the higher joys is not merely creative, but destructive also, being by its very nature subversive of the status quo.

Those who are not born with an exceptional intelligence are somewhat fortunate as they have no axe to grind in favour of the status quo established and jealously guarded by the intellect. But those who have once tasted of intellectual joys find it not a little hard to relinquish what they have grown to love. That is why I admired Sethna more than I admired many another who claimed being advanced sadhakas, to the deep chagrin of Sri Aurobindo. For when somebody once claimed that he was an advanced sadhaka and men like Sethna were mere poets he wrote: "Why X's claim to be an advanced sadhaka and what is the sense of it? It resolves itself into an egoistic assertion of superiority over others which is not justified so long as there is egoism and the need of assertion, accompanied as it always is by a weakness and a turbid imperfection which belie the claim of having a superior consciousness to the inadvanced sadhaka. It is time these crudities disappeared from the Ashram atmosphere."

This is not irrelevant. For Sethna impressed me the more because he not only never made such a claim to having reached "asuperior consciousness" but also he had the uncommon wisdom of common sense to see that one should accept what the Guru said even if it seemed— as it often enough must, intellectual egoism being what it is — unacceptable to one's mental

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preconceptions. That is why he often helped me by bowing to Sri Aurobindo's verdicts even though he too, like me, wanted first to understand with the mind as far as one could achieve it. Luckily for him, he had an advantage over many another who came to the Ashram with deep religious samskaras (formulations) and could thus pour his heart's worship, unstintedly, at the altar of the Master. This I say with full knowledge of its implications. For I myself dared not compare Sri Aurobindo with some of his predecessors whom I need not name. But Sethna could — and with an honest conviction. It was this honesty married to an intelligence which drew me to him more and more for I have been sometimes roused to oppose some sadhakas who talked with disrespect about past prophets and seers. I myself did not feel any call to compare, because I could not at the .time feel quite the same degree of enthusiasm about Sri Aurobindo as Sethna did. Here I have to admit that he scored over me in his gurubhakti. But what I found personally rather charming of him was that he never flaunted the initial advantage he had in coming to Sri Aurobindo with a clean heart-tablet on which no other holy figure had been etched. This was personally of any living critic who has read Sri Aurobindo's poetry so thoroughly and acquired such a deep grasp of both its poetical beauty and technical mastery, insomuch that he may easily be adjudged a specialist in these two capacities. (I say 'living critic' because Chadwick has, alas, departed this life — about whose outstanding poetical gift and sadhana I will have a good deal to say presently.)

Naturally I liked Sethna also because he was, like Chadwick and myself, a poet who continued all along to be a recipient of Sri Aurobindo's letters on poetry. I was fond of his poems too but as my knowledge of English verse was rather poor at the time, I could not sufficiently appreciate his technique. Still I loved some of his poems even in those days — nearly twenty years ago — and translated them, which knit us together into a

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closer bond. One such poem which was singled out for special praise by Gurudev was entitled This Errant Life which I must quote in full if only to bring out the side of aspiration to his nature:

This errant life is dear although it dies;

And human lips are sweet though they but sing

Of stars estranged from us; and youth's emprise

Is, wondrous yet, although an unsure thing.

Sky-lucent Bliss untouched by earthiness!

I fear to soar lest tender bonds decrease.

If Thou desirest my weak self to outgrow

Its mortal longings, lean down from above,

Temper the unborn light no thought can trace,

Suffuse my mood with a familiar glow.

For 'tis with mouth of clay I supplicate:

Speak to me heart to heart words intimate,

And all thy formless glory turn to love

And mould Thy love into a human face!

When I sent Gurudev my Bengali translation he wrote, commenting:

"Amal's¹ lines are not easily translatable, least all into Bengali. There is in them a union or rather fusion of high severity of speech with exaltation and both with a pervading intense sweetness which it is almost impossible to transfer bodily without loss into another language. There is no word in excess, none that could have been added or changed without spoiling the expression, every word just the right revelatory one — no colour, no ornamentation, but a sort of suppressed burning glow, no similes, but images which have been fused inseparably

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' Sethna was given by Gurudev the name of "Amal Kiran" which means "The Clear Ray". I have reverted to his original name as he is better known outside as K. D. Sethna.

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into the substance of the thought and feeling — the thought perfectly developed, not idea added to idea at the will of the fancy, but perfectly interrelated and linked together like the limbs of an organic body. It is high poetic style in its full perfection and nothing of all that is transferable. You have taken his last line and put in a lotus-face and made divine love bloom in it, — a pretty image, but how far from the glowing impassioned severity of phrase: 'And mould thy love into a human face!"'

I shall pass by the constant and ready help plus encouragement which Sethna has given me all along in my poetic aspirations in English as that will be going beyond the immediate and urgent aim of this humble homage to one under whose aegis we in our little colony endeavoured to follow, as best we could, the ideal that has drawn us together. I will refrain, for the same reason, from enumerating his other rare qualities such as his sheer love of poetry or innate generosity which prompted him to praise many a budding Ashram poet. But I might as well write here of my fruitful contact with the great poet A.E. for which Sethna was partly responsible. It happened like this.

Sethna, and later Chadwick, used to give me valuable subsidiary advice about English prosody and verse-making which I was learning under the direct guidance of Sri Aurobindo. I will have more to write, in a subsequent chapter* on our Master's corrections and counsels and so will confine myself here to Sethna who became the leader of our little cenacle almost as naturally as a courageous man becomes the leader of a party of timid pilgrims. One day without telling him, I sent A.E. a few of his poems along with some extracts from Sri Aurobindo's future Poetry which moved us to a deep admiration, extracts such as (I quote these from a then diary of mine):

"All art worth the name must go beyond the visible, must reveal, must show us something that is hidden."

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* See Chapter 'Poet-Maker' Ch. IX

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"So poetry arrives at the indication of infinite meanings beyond the finite intellectual meaning the word carries."

"Poetical speech is the spiritual excitement of a rhythmic voyage of self-discovery among the magic islands of form and name in these inner and outer worlds."

'The aim of poetry, as of all true art, is neither a photographic or otherwise realistic imitation of Nature, nor a romantic furbishing and painting or idealistic improvement or her image, but an interpretation by the images she herself affords us not on one, but on many planes of her creation, of that which she conceals from us, but is ready, when rightly approved, to reveal."
And so on.

Also I asked A.E.'s permission to publish my translations of some of his lovely poems like Warning, Krisna etc.

I enclosed also a poem on silence written by a friend, a poem which I could not sincerely sympathise with; I wrote that I held all! wordy eloquence about silence somewhat suspect.

He sent me his kind reply written in his own hand (that is not a typed letter) in which he signed himself A.E (his pen-name) aid not George Russell.

The letter was from Dublin and was dated January 6, 1932:

"Dear Dilip Roy,

"Your letter has come at a time when I am too troubled in mind to write, as I would like, about the poems you sent me. Yes, you have my permission to translate the verses or any other poems you may desire.

"I think the extracts from Sri Aurobindo very fine, and the verses you sent of Mr. Sethna have a genuine Poetic quality.
There are many fine lines like

'The song-impetuous mind.'

The Eternal Glory is a wanderer,

Hungry for lips of clay.'

"Many such lines show a feeling for rhythm which is remarkable since the poet is not writing in his native but a learned language. I refer to this because the only advice one writer can give another rightly is technical criticism. The craft of any art,

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painting, music, poetry, sculpture, is continually growing and much can be taught in the schools. But the inspiration cannot be passed on from one to another.

So I confine myself to a technical criticism.

"You, like many Indians, are so familiar with your great traditions that it is natural for you to deal with ideas verging on the spiritual more than European writers do. The danger of this when writing poetry is that there is a tendency to use or rather overuse great words like 'immensity', 'omnipotence,' 'inexhaustible, ''limitless' etc. By the very nature of the ideas which inspire you, you are led to use words of that nature because of a kinship with the infinity of the spirit. But in the art of verse if one uses these words overmuch they tend to lose their power just as painting in which only the primary colours would weary the eye.

"I would ask Mr. Sethna to try to reserve the use of such great words, as a painter keep his high lights, for the sun and moon or radiant water and the rest of his canvas is in low tones. So the light appears radiant by contrast. English is a great language but it has very few words relating to spiritual ideas. For example the word Karma in Sanskrit embodies a philosophy. There is no word in English embodying the same idea. There are many words in Sanskrit charged with meanings which have no counterpart in English: Dhyani, Sushupti, Turiya, etc., and I am sure the languages which the Hindus speak today must be richer in words fitted for spiritual expression than English, in which there are few luminous words that can be used when there is a spiritual emotion to be expressed. I found this difficulty myself of finding a vocabulary though English is the language I heard
from my cradle.

"I hope Mr. Sethna will forgive my saying all this . I do so because I find a talent in the verses you sent me and do not wish him to do without such burnishing as a fellow craftsman can help to give.

"Will you tell your philosophic friend who praises silence that with the poet the silence cannot be for ever? He sings and then keeps silent until the cup is filled up again by sacrifice and

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meditation and then he must give away what he gets, or nothing more will be poured into his cup. The secret of this is that through the free giver the song flows freely and whoever constrains life in himself, in him it is constrained. There is indeed the Divine silence, but we do not come to that being by negation."

Sethna submitted his comments on this letter to Gurudev who wrote back:

"If you send your poems to five different poets, you are likely to-get five absolutely disparate and discordant estimates of them. A poet likes only the poetry that appeals to his own temperament or taste, the rest he condemns or ignores. (My own case is different because I have made in criticism a practice of appreciating everything that can be appreciated as a catholic critic would.) Contemporary poetry, besides, seldom gets its right judgement from contemporary critics even.

"Nothing can be more futile than for a poet to write in expectation of contemporary fame or praise, however agreeable that may be, if it comes; but it is not of much value; for very poor poets have enjoyed a great contemporary fame and very great poets have been neglected in their time. A poet has to go on his way, trying to gather hints from what people say for or against, when their criticisms are things he can profit by, but not other wise moved if he can manage it — seeking mainly to sharpen his own sense of self-criticism by the help of others. Difference of estimate need not surprise him at all."

Sethna asked him next a pointed question (which will be readily inferred from his reply) to which the answer came again: "Your letter suggested a more critical attitude on A.E.'s part than his actual appreciation warrants. His appreciation is, on the contrary, sufficiently warm: 'a genuine poetic quality' and 'many fine lines' — he could not be expected to say more. The two quotations he makes certainly deserve the praise he gives them and they are more over of the kind, which A.E. (and Yeats also) would naturally like. But your poem, This Errant Life, selected for special praise, has no striking expression, like these standing out from the rest, just as in a Greek statue there would

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be no single feature standing out in a special beauty (eyes, lips, head or hands) but the whole has a harmoniously modelled grace of equal perfection everywhere as, let us say, in the perfect charm of a statue by Praxiteles. This — apart from the idea and feeling which goes psychically and emotionally much deeper than the idea in the lines quoted by A.E. which are poetically striking but have not the same subtle spiritual appeal; they touch the mind and vital strongly but the other goes home into the soul....

"His remarks about 'immensity' etc. are very interesting to me; for these are the very words, with others like them, that are constantly recurring at short intervals in my poetry when I express not spiritual thought, but spiritual experience. I knew perfectly well that this recurrence would be objected to as bad technique or an inadmissible technique; but this seems to me a reasoning from the conventions of a past order which cannot apply to a new poetry dealing with spiritual things. A new art of words written from a new consciousness demands a new technique. A.E. himself admits that this rule makes a great difficulty because these 'high light' words are few in the English language. His solution may do well enough where the realisations which they represent are mental ones or intuitions occurring on the summits of consciousness, rare 'high lights' over the low tones of ordinary natural or occult experience (ordinary, of course, to the poet, not the average man); there his solution would not violate the truth of the vision, would not misrepresent the balance of harmony of its actual tones. But what of one who lives in an atmosphere of these high lights — in a consciousness in which the finite, not only the occult but even the earthly finite, is bathed in the sense of the eternal, the illimitable infinite, the immensities or intimacies of the Timeless? To follow A.E.'s rule might well mean to falsify this atmosphere, to substitute a merely aesthetic fabrication for a true seeing and experience. Truth first — a technique expressive of the truth in the forms of beauty has to be found, if it does not exist. It is no use arguing from the spiritual inadequacy of the English language; the inadequacy does not exist and even if it did, the language will have to be made

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adequate. It has been plastic enough in the past to succeed in expressing all that it was asked to express, however new; it must now be urged to a farther new progress .In fact the power is there and has only to be brought out more fully to serve the full occult, mystic, spiritual purpose."

And then he went on in another letter:

"What you say may be correct (that our oriental luxury in poetry makes it unappealing to Westerners), but on the other hand it is possible that the mind of the "nature will be more international than it is now. In that case the expression of various temperaments in English poetry will lave a chance.

"If our aim is not success and personal fame but to arrive at the expression of spiritual truth and experience of all kinds in poetry, the English tongue is the most wide-spread and is capable of profound turns of mystic expression which make it admirably fitted for the purpose; if it could be used for the highest spiritual expression, that is worth trying."

And then in another letter:

"The idea that Indians cannot succeed in English poetry is very much in the air just now but it cannot be taken as absolutely valid.... At present many are turning to India for its sources of spirituality, but the eye has been directed only towards Yoga and philosophy, not to the poetical expression of it. When the full day comes, however, it may well be that this too will be discovered, and then an Indian who is at once a mystic and a true poet and able to write in English as if in his mother-tongue (that is essential) would have his full dance. Many barriers are breaking, moreover, both in French and English there are instances of foreigners who have taken their place as prose- writers or poets."

I have been at some pains here to labour this point because I feel it necessary to combat the unhelpful attitude of those who cannot create and yet presume to adjudicate on our highly laudable attempt to express our deepest perceptions in English, as also because I feel sure, among other things, that Sri Aurobindo will be recognised in future not only as a poet but also as a

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poet-maker. It will take me too much space to bring out what I mean when I say this. So I will confine myself at present to saying that those of us who have seen not one, but many poets flower under his inspiration (some of whom had never before written a single poem) cannot possibly accept the verdicts of those who have no access to such data, for the simple reason that no-experience is incompetent per se to adjudicate on the validity or otherwise of experience.

But before I conclude my account of Sethna I must stress something about his poetic perspicacity and insight, the more because these native gifts, which matured rapidly under Gurudev's fostering, he utilised religiously not only to understand our Master's special contribution to poetry, but — what is more important for the public'— to pave the way to a more .critical and deeper understanding of his genius by his luminous studies, in different journals, of Sri Aurobindo's form and message. I am myself definitely persuaded — even from what little I have imbibed with my limited receptivity of the supreme beauty of his epic Savitri — that he will be regarded as by far the greatest poet of this age, a new epoch-maker in poetry, or to quote from Sethna's own estimate:'

"On the brow of this giant we must place a crown of triple triumph. For, Sri Aurobindo has done three exceedingly rare
things. First, he has to his credit a bulk of excellent blank verse — a statement possible about poets we can count on our fingers. At least five thousand lines in the Collected Poems and Plays, published a few years back, are a diversely modulated beauty and power with no appreciable fall below a fine adequacy and with peak after peak of superb frenzy. They put him cheek by jowl with Keats in both essence and amount. The huge epic Savitri, still unfinished, is a marvel which places him at once in the company of the absolute top-rankers by a sustained abundance of first-rate quality. Add to living lengths of blank verse a

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' Quoted from his book. The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo — (Sri Aurobindo Circle, Bombay).

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large number of sublime or delicate shorter pieces, mostly in rhyme, and we have a further testimony of Sri Aurobindo's creativeness. But what is of extraordinary import is that among them we have a body of successful work in a medium that has eluded English poets: quantitative metre. Sri Aurobindo has solved once for all the problem of quantity in English — a feat which gives the language "a brave new world' of consciousness. Quantitative metre is the second tier in Sri Aurobindo's poetic crown. The third is not merely a revelation of strange rhythm-moulds, but also the laying bare of a rhythmic life beyond the ranges of inspired consciousness to which we have been so far accustomed. To bring the epic surge or the lyric stream of the quantitative metres of Greece and Rome in English is not necessarily to go psychologically beyond the ranges of inspiration we find in the epic or lyric moods of England. It could very well be just an opening up of fresh movements on psychological planes already possessed by those moods. Over and above opening up such movements Sri Aurobindo discloses planes that have been secret hitherto except for stray lines here and there, occurring as if by a luminous accident. Only the ancient Vedas and Upanishads embody with anything like a royal freedom these ranges of mystical and spiritual being, hidden beyond the deepest plunge and highest leap of intuition known to the great masters. Sri Aurobindo stands as the creator of a new Vedic and Upanishadic age of poetry."

I do not feel called upon to apologise for giving such a long quotation from Sethna's book, the less because I cannot help a deep regret that we, Indians, who have already flowered, at our loveliest, into no mean creators in English poetry should have elected to cling to a cautious if not timid silence about Sri Aurobindo's epic achievement in poetry (an achievement which has been making history while we remain standing in a non committal hush) simply because we want to play safe and so dare not give our verdicts lest our highbrow English tutors reverse it later on. I will not go into the cause of the unresponsiveness on the part of the English, but I feel I owe it to truth to

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speak out my deep conviction: that not to know Sri Aurobindo as a poet will be, in the near future, to argue oneself unknown as a critic and lover of poetry. Fortunately Krishnaprem (formerly Ronald Nixon) has made some atonement at least for the silence of his compatriots, the English, by writing in his tribute to Savitri:

"Such poetry can only be written either in the early days before the rise to power of self-conscious mind or when that particular cycle has run its course and life establishes itself once more in the unity beyond, this time with all the added range and power that has been gained during the reign of mind. It is an omen of the utmost significance and hope that in these years of darkness and despair such a poem as Savitri should have appeared. Let us salute the Dawn."

And one must congratulate him — the more because he is English — on his courage for having anticipated a hackneyed objection thus: "The English Language has been given to the world and its usages and limits can now no longer be determined exclusively by the ears of the islanders whose tongue it originally was. Those who would remain sole rulers of their language must abjure empire." But to revert to Sethna.

I have felt this about him and a few others, isolated appraisers of Sri Aurobindo's poetry,' that when, in the not too-distant future, Sri Aurobindo will have been acknowledged by the whole world as by far the greatest of modern poets to whom the mantric word came as native as soaring to the eagle, this first small band of ardent admirers led by Sethna shall receive the smile of the great Goddess of Poetry, Saraswati, not only for having (in the words of Chesterton)

"......watched when all men slept

And seen the stars which never see the sun."

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' For there have been a few others like Sisir Kumar Ghosh of Shantiniketan, Srimati Latika Ghosh, Sri Rajanikant Modi, etc.

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but also for having readily acquitted themselves of their sacred responsibility, the sense of which prompted them to "salute the Dawn" they had seen and announce the high Herald of a new consciousness in poetry, who sang vibrantly of Earth's deepest aspiration and highest 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...

Outstretching arms to the unconscious Void,

Passionate she prays to invisible forms of Gods,

Soliciting from dumb Fate and toiling Time

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,

Joy that drags not sorrow as 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.¹

After Sethna it was Chadwick who came to impress me most. But I have not said one thing about Sethna which is too important to be left out — a particular quality of his which I could never admire sufficiently and which, I believe, Chadwick also

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' Savitri, Book I, Canto IV

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appreciated, especially because he himself had much of it: the aspiration after perfection in everything one produces. I well remember how Sethna used, in the olden days, to type out poems that had made an impression on him. When he showed them to me he would take great pains to explain why he admired them and which lines stood out. His intellect, sharp as a razor-blade, was always critical and wakeful but he did not let it get blunt or complacent with the laurels he went on winning.
Rather he whetted it the more sleeplessly as he evolved and one of the reasons why he admired Sri Aurobindo so fervently was the fillip he always gave to this aspiration after perfection which was congenital with him. I recollect how Sethna's eyes used to fasten upon those parts of his poems which Sri Aurobindo had underlined and how it made him see, in minute detail, the relative inferiority of those which had not been so marked. I for one had never been able to scan the difference very clearly before Sethna told me, but when I saw what he meant, it did afford me a definite clarification if not actual illumination. Now that he has already amply fulfilled the prophecy of H.G. Wells who had remarked, on seeing an early essay of his, that "this young man will go far", I cannot help feeling a real joy which I stress thus because it is not nearly as personal as it looks. For every aspiration after perfection of a seeker belongs to all in the sense that all true seekers can claim not only to share in it but also to profit by it. That is why all who appreciate aspiration must delight in Sethna's clear thinking and his striving for perfection as the savour of its fruit improved continuously with time till all doubts were put out of court. This is not a mere tribute of a friend who may indeed be a little partial, but of one of the most eminent judges of mental clarity and deep insight — Krishnaprem —who wrote to me only the other day about Sethna's contributions in Mother India: "He writes brilliantly. I sometimes think that his editorials are the only clear-thinking ones being written in India today. But what a world we live in! Darkness at noon! If we did not know that nothing can escape from Sri Krishna's hands, the prospect would be one of utter blackness."

To come now to Chadwick. His temperament accorded in many ways with mine, and he always helped me by correcting my English poems which he liked very much, he said. His deep mastery of the technique of English poetry left a lasting impression on my mind eager to possess English prosody. He too in his turn wanted to profit by what little I could tell him about our music which he came gradually to love, so much so that one day after hearing a few hymns to Krishna which I sang for him he wrote, in his poem, Musician:

Splendour beyond conceiving

wave against wave

of swirling light uprear their sinuous crests

and are thrust forward in a seething foam

of melody

within the listening coves

and over the untrod sandways

of the heart!

Once a friend of mine, Madame Miller, visited the Ashram. She was a Viennese and a famous opera-singer and we sang together a song of Chopin: "In mir klingt ein lied." Then she sang a number of solos. Chadwick was intoxicated and immediately after the music wrote a lovely poem and dedicated it to her:

Subdued the light at the gray evenhush,

As the shadowy helmets of night's vague host

Make dim the East and the North and the South.

Spendthrift day keeps but a dwindling heap of gold

Low on the westward margins of the sky.

Spirit with wings of light and darkness

Sail through the fast-closing gates of the West

And bear me out of the world,

The world that is frozen music (but the perfomers were faulty).

Haply the high-flashing fountains of song

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Play still in Supernal Eden

And the air is a diamond undimmed by Time's

misadventures.

The unchanging light of the One, enmeshed in the

murmuring spray,

Builds all the colours of the soul.

And the speechless telling of mysteries

Leaves them in the song-hidden heart of Light.

And how he loved to talk of Sri Aurobindo. He was sick, he used to tell me, of the European civilization and had definitely turned his back on its message of science and materialist rationalism even though his mind was grounded in the scientific and mathematical philosophy of the West. Nevertheless he .wrote to Sri Aurobindo such humble letters almost petitioning him to shed light on his super-brilliant and yet avid, famished mind. Few people know how deep was his reverence for Sri Aurobindo's achievements in poetry even in the 'thirties when we used to hear breath-taking rumours of Savitri still in deep purdah. Chadwick and I once reminded him of it in concert but Sri Aurobindo only wrote back that he wanted to revise it thoroughly but had "no time to dally with the Muses." "It's the Supramental", Chadwick used to whisper to me in a mock-solemn tone. And I used generally to retort something irreverent about the Supramental looking very much like leaving us in the lurch, at which he would chuckle in glee. And then, becoming grave like a tomb: "But I ought to repent if not tremble, Dilip, since we believe in blasphemy, if you don't " Then more seriously: "But I do like this, you know, your cracking jokes with Gurudev!"

Often I showed him Gurudev's repartees. A sample: I had written after a talk with Chadwick about the Christian conception of the sheep (parishioners) and the Shepherd (the pastor, I believe): "Well, Guru, since Chadwick has driven me to the wall (how can I cope with him in argument?) I will try henceforth to bleat faith and humility like a trembling lamb and not roar doubts like a dying lion."

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To which Gurudev answered: "Good, especially because one must be the lamb of God before being His lion." And how Chadwick laughed! His English sense of humour and his mischievous chuckle always refreshed me after I had my fill of the sombre faces around me. It was thus that our affection grew through levity, music, poetry and day to day struggles with our egos. "But it's all maya, Chadwick," I often told him, specially when he felt gloomy about the deplorable state of the world to which "we also were contributing", as Chadwick used to remark. But that was just why he worshipped Sri Aurobindo to whom he had dedicated an exquisite poem. I loved it and read it out to my friends and posted copies of it to our enemies, because the tribute here was from a brilliant Englishman and not a lack-lustre Indian:

RED LOTUS

(Sri Aurobindo's Consciousness)

That living Lotus, petal by petal unfolding,
Which through the mists of this avidya looms,
Vicegerent of the Sun, nowise withholding
The light we lack in Maya's nether glooms.

O Puissant heart amidst whose raptured shrining
A nameless Love is garbed in Name's disguise,
Last metronome to mortal things assigning
A fadeless rhythm wrung from Dawn's echoing skies.'

"A nameless Love is garbed in Name's disguise" — the line came to me in a haunting strain in those days for a twofold reason: first because he weaved with the magic of his rhythm and psychic emotion, vigilantly controlled by his English austerity, an aura round Sri Aurobindo which was as real in its

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' I have quoted only two out of the four verses he wrote. See his Poems, p. 177

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beauty as it was opulent in its mystic implications and secondly, because he expressed with his exquisite diction an adoration which was even more potent for its rich suggestiveness than for its immediate content of meaning. Every time I read his poems I realised anew as it were what he had meant when he had once said to me, half-apologetically: "Do not think that the English as a race baulk at emotion, Dilip. Quite the contrary. We are a race with a rich background of profound emotion, the stuff poets are made of. But we are shy. What I mean is that while you, Bengalis, sail exultantly on the crest of your emotion — we, English, don't like to be caught expressing our feelings too vividly. If you do not understand that, you miss something very important about our inner make-up."

But there was something else which was borne home to me through his poems which I must attempt to describe as it opened to me a new vista, so to speak, especially when he recited them with his delicately-cadenced inflexion: I got rich glimpses through his authentic English pronunciation — with its accent, caesura and intonation — of something akin to a revelation about the capacity of melody inherent in English poetry. To explain this I shall have to go back a little.

It so happened that at the time Sri Aurobindo was graciously experimenting, at my request, with some Bengali poems of mine and giving me, day after marvellous day, exquisite English counterparts to the samples I sent up. The poems he composed showed an astonishing correspondence, in lilt and accent, with the samples I sent him of our Bengali bases. (I was just then experimenting in the converse direction — which he encouraged and enjoyed to the full: I was trying to transcribe English bases with their modulations and stresses into Bengali.) In the course of such researches I once claimed that Bengali was richer in melody and variety of metrical structures if not in suggestiveness and substance. Whereupon he, after warning me that my "estimate was marred by the personal or national habit" and conceding that the English language is not naturally melodious like the Italian

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and Bengali — no language with a Teutonic base can he", added that "it is capable of remarkable harmonic effects and also it can, by a skilful handling, be made to give out the most beautiful melodies."

I was still a little unconvinced about this, naturally — as I was to realise later — because I had hitlherto to neither made a serious study of English verse nor developed an ear for what Sri Aurobindo meant when he wrote to me that, unlike Bengali and Italian, "English is difficult and has to be struggled with in order to produce its best effects, but out of that very difficulty has arisen an astonishing plasticity, depth and manifold subtlety of rhythm." This was borne home to me by Chadwick's poems and, incidentally, made me realise how inept my remarks had been. For I remember that in the beginning I could not vividly feel the beauty of his poems, but as I was in those days writing English poems myself under his, Sethma's and Gurudev's tuition, I was thrilled to discover one fine morning that I had grown richly alive to the lovely melodic effects he wove in many of his poems — so suddenly that I was reminded of a letter of Sri Aurobindo's in which he consoled me for my inability to be similarly receptive to painting.

"Don't be desperate," he wrote in a (colloquial style, "about your incapacity as a conniosseur of painting. I was far worse in this respect; knew something about sculpture, but blind to painting. Suddenly, one day, in the Alipore jail, while meditating, I saw some pictures on the walls of the cell and lo and behold! the artistic eye in me opened and I knew all about painting except of course the more material side of the technique. I don't always know how to express, though, because I lack the knowledge of the proper expressions, but that does not stand in toe way of a keen and understanding appreciation. So, there you are: all things are possible in Yoga."

I labour this point because Chadwick himself achieved a somewhat similar feat in poetry — "struggling and striving to listen with the inner ear" — till one day something opened in him, as he told me; once, and he went (on producing, one after

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another, his lovely lyrics which delighted everybody, as e.g. when he wrote his poems on Laelia on which Sri Aurobindo bestowed superlative praise:

For the moon-pale feet of Laelia the still night sheddeth dew,
Or at noon in the white-rose garden — doomed with a trance of blue-
Blossoms with jade-white petals before her feet are shed
And fall from the dreaming rose-trees, with never a leaf of red.

Your name is fading music upon my worship's mouth;

It spills in langorous fragrance from lilies of the South;

It is the odorous night-flower wherewith your locks are bound, —
Or the moon-pale soul of roses caught in a mesh of sound'

I experienced something akin to ecstasy when he used to recite:

"Your name is fading music upon my worship's mouth;"

as it made me realise in a new way what Sri Aurobindo termed

"psychic inspiration" in a letter to me in 1931 when I tried to

translate Shelley's famous lines:

I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the heavens reject not:

The desire of the moth for the star,

Of the night for the morrow,—

The devotion to something afar
. From the sphere of our sorrow?

I must quote his letter in full as it will partly explain why he

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' I have quoted only two verses to economise space, as well as because to quote long poems in prose is undesirable. But lovers of melody in English poetry must read his poems on Lealia and Moon inspired by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.

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bestowed such lavish praise on Chadwick's poems.

"Your translation of Shelley's poem is vulnerable in the head and the tail. In the head, because it seems to me that your words are open to the construction that human love is a rich and precious thing which the poet in question unfortunately does not possess and it is only because of this deplorable poverty that he offers the psychic devotion, less warm and rich and desirable, but still in its own way rare and valuable! I exaggerate perhaps, but, as your lines are open to a meaning of this kind, it tends to convey the very reverse of Shelley's intended significance. For in English 'What men call love' is strongly depreciatory and can only mean something inferior, something that is poor and not rich, not truly love. Shelley says in substance: "Human vital love is a poor inferior thing, a counterfeit of true love, which I cannot offer you. But there is a greater thing, a true psychic love, all worship and devotion, which men do not readily value, being led away by the vital glamour, but which the Heavens do not reject though it is offered from something so far below them, so maimed and ignorant and sorrow-vexed as the human consciousness which is to the divine consciousness as the moth is to the star, as the night is to the day. And will you not accept this from me, you, who in your nature are kin to the Heavens, you, who seem to me to have something of the divine nature, to be something bright and happy and pure far above the sphere of our sorrow? Of course all that is not said but only suggested, but it is obviously the spirit of the poem,— and it is this spirit in it that made me write to Amal the other day that it would be perhaps impossible to find in English literature a more perfect example of psychic inspiration than these eight lines you have translated....As to the tail, I doubt whether your last line brings out the sense of 'something afar from the sphere of our sorrow.'

If I make these criticisms at all, it is because you have accustomed me to find in you power of rendering the spirit and sense of the original while turning it into fine poetry in its new tongue which I would not expect or exact from any other translator." Much as I would like to, I cannot enlarge further on

Chadwick's poetry for exigencies of space as also for the fact that I must not, in focussing too much light on his poetic achievements, lay myself open to the charge of throwing into the shade a much more important aspect of his personality, namely, his spiritual aspiration which made him leave his country, family and even his English habits and cleave unwaveringly to the lead given by Gurudev — even when he knew that his days were numbered. But before that I must speak of another side to his nature which made him love Sri Aurobindo: his love of liberty which made him abhor all forms of dogmatism, fanaticism, and collective tyranny which the devotees of dictatorship worship the world over. He used to emphasise often with a subdued accent of rapturous admiration Sri Aurobindo's "oceanic tolerance and catholicity of spirit" which made him write in his Synthesis of Yoga:

"The sadhaka of the integral Yoga will make use of all these aids according to his nature; but it is necessary that he should
shun their limitations and cast from himself that exclusive tendency of the egoistic mind which cries, "My God, my Incarnation, my Prophet, my Guru' and opposes it to all other realisation in a sectarian or a fanatical spirit. All sectarianism, all fanaticism must be shunned; for it is inconsistent with the integrity of the divine realisation.

"On the contrary, the sadhaka of the integral Yoga will not be satisfied until he has included all other names and forms of
Deity in his own conception, seen his own Ishta Devata in all others, unified all Avatars in the unity of Him who descends in the Avatar, welded the truth in all teachings into the harmony of the Eternal Wisdom."

"I realise, Dilip," he used to tell me now and then, "how hard it must be for you to be fair to us, Englishmen, the more because we have been far from fair to you. But believe me, the real Englishman abhors nothing so much as an inroad into personal liberty. Russell is an instance in point. I consider him great — in spite of his obvious limitations — because he typifies in him two great traits of the English character at its best:

love of fairness aid love; of individual freedom. That is why I feel often a trifle sad when some of you talk as though there were little to choose between, the Nazi or Russian tyranny an the British. Don': misunderstand me. I cannot, as you know, possibly approve of our four imperialists who talk of the empire and Rule Britannia. Bit I tell you that if the British were capable of responding to the philosophy of Marx and totalitarianism, the world today would soon cease to be a fit place for any man who calls himself civilsed." How prophetic he had been was amply attested within a few years when, after the fall of Dunkirk, England stood alone for a whole year against the triple alliance of Germany, Japan aid Italy while Russia stood by, having made that infamous pact with Hitler. But in those days (before 1939) — with Hitler sill in the offing — we ignored him, the more because we disliked the British tyranny so much and knew of Hitler so little. N3 wonder many of us could not fully respond to Chadwick's justified abhorrence of totalitarian imperialism. I remember also how I loathed the British imperialism with all my heart. So one? or twice there was a strain between us when it was I who was blame in that I was intolerant and so failed to realise fully the innate ;greatness of his nature which had made him cut away from his moorings in spite of the opposition of his friends and relations, and the deep discomfort he stood up to in choosing to stay with those who so often lost sight of his noble nature because of the veil of his shy refinement and British reserve. I must confess I truly realised this only after his death in 1938.1 was not, it the time, in Pondicherry; when I returned I was told how resolutely he had refused to return to England for better medical treatment. "I would die in India where my Guru is," he said and lie did, mot wavering once from his vow even when he was desparately ill.

When I look back in retrospect, I see that I have come to love the British primarily because of three men: Bertrand Russell, Krishnaprem (alias Ronald Nixon) and Chadwick. Of these Chadwick was distinctive in a peculiar way. For while Russell remained British and Krishnaprem became out and out a Hindu,

only Chadwick combined in him the rich, aristocratic refinement of the British at its loftiest with a rich responsiveness to an Indian outlook on life and on the Guru which his love of individuality must have found not a little difficult to undersign. How strongly this love had taken root was expressed in his poem entitled 'Totalitarian' which made me fully alive, for the first time, to the infernal horror it symbolized. That what he had seen in 1936 (when it was composed) proved to be literally true subsequently, during the dark days of the Hitlerian hell-regime, must testify to the authentic power of vision that had lain latent in his nature, a power which opened in him under the aegis of Sri Aurobindo. With this much by way of introduction I shall now give the poem:

Night was closing on the traveller

When he came To the empty eerie courtyard
With no name.

Loud he called; no echo answered;

Nothing stirred:

But a crescent moon swung wanly,

White as curd.

When he flashed his single sword-blade

Through the gloom,

None resisted — till he frantic,

Filled with doom,

Hurled his weapon through the gloaming,

Took no aim;

Saw his likenesses around him

Do the same:

Viewed a thousand swordless figures

Like his own —

Then first knew in that cold starlight

Hell, alone.

Sri Aurobindo was deeply impressed by this poem and

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considered it as, among other things, strikingly original. On learning this, Sethna invited his comment on it drawing his attention to Walter de la Mare's poem, The Listeners, to which it seemed to bear some affinity:

"De la Mare's poem has a delicate beauty throughout and a sort of daintily fanciful suggestion of the& occult world. I do not know if there is anything more. The weakness of it is that it reads like a thing imagined — the images and details are those that might be written of a haunted house (on earth which has got possessed by some (occult presences. Arjava must no doubt have taken his starting point from a reminiscence of this poem, but there is nothing else common with De 1a Mare — his poem is an extraordinarily (energetic and powerful vision of an occult world and every phrase is intimately evocative of the beyond as a thing vividly seem and strongly lived it is not on earth, this courtyard and this crescent moon, we are .at once in an unearthly world and in a place somewhere in the Soul of man and all the details, sparing, with a powerful economy of phrase and image and brevity of movement but revelatory in each touch as Opposed to the dim moonlight suggestions supported by a profusion of detail and long elaborating development in De la Mare— of course that has its value also — make us entirely feel ourselves there. I therefore maintain my description 'original' not only for the latter part of the poem but for the opening also. It is not an echo, it its an independent creation. Indeed the difference of the two poems comes out most strongly in these very (first eight) lines.

The faint moonbeams on the dark stair

That goes down to the empty hall...
The dark turf' neath the starred and leafy sky

are a description of things on earth made occult only by the presence of the phantom listeners. But

... the empty eerie courtyard

With no name

or

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... a crescent moon swung wanly,
White as curd

are not earthly, they belong to a terrible elsewhere, while the latter part of the poem carries the elsewhere into a province of the soul. This is the distinction that makes the perfect successfulness of Arjava's1 poem."

But I must come now to his deepest aspiration which impelled him to turn to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo and made him "on wings of faith mount up toward the solar fire" as he put it in his poem entitled Wings.

I put the name of the Mother first as in his case (unlike my own) it was she who gripped him first. It came about like this.

One morning as I was experimenting with a new metre in .Bengali — it was in 19301 think — I was told by someone that an Englishman, one Professor Chadwick from Lucknow, wanted to see me.

He came with a letter of introduction from my old friend, Professor D. P. Mukherji. There was something striking in his face which drew me at once to him, the more as he looked rather delicate and walked with a limp.

Before I give the substance of our conversation, I must remind the reader that I am concerned with giving but the gist of what passed between us as I cannot possibly remember all that we talked about on that day.

"I came to India," he said, "in quest of a spiritual wisdom in which she is rich and of which Europe is definitely bankrupt today."

"And then?"

"Well, I am going back — home."

"But you are still a professor in Lucknow, I understand?"

"Yes," he smiled, "but I am going to resign directly. Because..." he added, "I came here to learn — not to teach."

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' The name of Sri Aurobindo gave to Chadwick. It is a Sanskrit word meaning simplicity, straightforwardness.

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I was reminded at once of Krishmaprem whose name I mentioned.

"I know him," he nodded, "and he has got something, I felt. But not I."

"Have you read anything of Sri Aurobindo?" I asked, after a pause.

"Not yet," he answered almost apologetically, "though I have bought some of his books here. But," he added after a pause, "it ' is not books I thirst for. I want something more — concrete and living."

He spoke hesitantly and blusher every now and then.
"I quite understand," I said blandly- "But Sri Aurobindo does not write books for the pastime of word-spinning. He throws out rich clues to the concrete. Here?, at least, I speak from experience, not book-lore."

"I am afraid you have misunderstood me a little," he flustered again, "I didn't exactly want to convey that — but never mind. The point is: I am disappointed. My fault I suppose. But then," he smiled shyly, "I am perhaps too English to the core and therefore a little opaque, inevitably, to what you in India call the light of the spirit."

It was my turn to feel embarrassed now.

"I didn't mean it as a reproach,"' I pleaded. "But perhaps you have also misunderstood me a little. I wish you had come here when Sri Aurobindo could be seen. For to see him is to cease to be 'opaque.' For he is built of the stuff light is made of and it is a light that speaks."

"I wish so too," he said ruefully. "For I have heard so much about the radiance that resides in him. But it is not to be. I am sailing soon."

"And you won't come back?"

He shook his head. "Not likely. Why should I, since no light

has spoken to me, so far?"

A silence fell

"Would you care to see the Mother?" I suggested at a venture, for something to say.

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He gave me a quick look.

"The Mother? Who is she?"

In those days (in the 'thirties) the Mother was very little known outside. So I chased away an upsurge, a feeling of disappointment. Besides, he looked so sincere and ingenuous — almost guileless! I told him a good deal about her and her sweet personality- But I ended with a friendly note of wanting.

"But you see, hers is a personality that grows on one," I hazarded diffidently. "For I know several persons on whom she had made very little impression at the start — but who, with time, have come to worship the very ground she treads." No sooner had I made the last remark than I rued my impulsiveness.

"I thank you very much for telling me," he said. "And you may be sure I would like to see her very much. But the point is
would she care to see me?"

"Well, I can at least ask her," I answered. "Only —" He fixed me with a steady scrutiny.

"I will be frank with you," I said with an awkward smile, "though Mother says I am often a wee bit too frank with the
wrong kind. But as you are different —"

"Oh, thank you," he laughed. "I hope I won't let you down." That decided me. For though normally he looked rather taciturn, his face changed entirely when he laughed. It cleared up the atmosphere instantly.

"It seems unlikely," I said returning his laughter. "But listen, it's like this. I came here only the other day, so to say, and know very little about Yoga and its occult wisdom and perhaps understand even less the ways of Sri Aurobindo and Mother. For instance I have seen Mother take certain decisions but her reasons have, as often as not, left me guessing. Naturally I am drawn to her — otherwise I would not be able to stay here even a month, not to mention a year — but my acceptance of her being hedged about with uncertainties I do not know how far she tallies in reality with my mental picture of her. But I hold her in high esteem for all that, and therefore must make one request to

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you: in case you are disappointed with her, please keep it to yourself as otherwise you would be hurting the feelings of us all who owe her loyalty because she is, in effect, as much our Guru as Sri Aurobindo, if you know what I mean."

He gave me a patient hearing and looked grave.
"I understand," he said with his characteristic refined nod of the head, "and you may be sure that I shall not only approach her with humility but give her all the respect that is her due."

"I am much relieved," I answered, cheerfully now. "You must let me tell you something else. I said just now that I know very little about Mother and Sri Aurobindo. But this I do know that they are made of a very different stuff from that of most men I have met. To give just one instance. I have met many Gurus. These invite eminent disciples, generally speaking. But not Mother and Sri Aurobindo.1 In fact he has given us to understand that we are not to persuade anybody even to see them, far less to accept them." And, I went on to add a little hesitantly, "I have a feeling that they are none-too-eager to invite the merely curious or the complacent intellectuals who want to have easy interviews to be able to air their opinions on things utterly beyond their ken."

He took in the sting in the tail unflinchingly. Then he lowered his eyes shyly as was his wont and smiled as it were to himself. Then suddenly he lifted his eyes to mine. His face was flushed again.

"You have put it well," he said, laughing once more. "Perhaps a little too well, if you will pardon me for saying so. But," he added a trifle ironically, "though I can't deny my past and so must be labelled an 'intellectual' as you put it — believe me, I didn't come here to stay where! am. For I came here to win a

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1 "Well-known or unknown has absolutely no importance from the spiritual point of view. It is simple the propagandist spirit. We are not a party or a church or religion seeking adherents or proselytes. One man who earnestly pursues the Yoga is of more value than a thousand well-known men." This he wrote subsequently in a letter, in 1935.

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passport, if I could, to your time-old wisdom of the spirit— and that as a seeker, not a critic."

I was impressed by the note of transcendent sincerity in his delicately-cadenced voice and strikingly-intellectual physiognomy. Besides, his face looked so emaciated and pale that it touched a chord in my heart.

I went straight to the Mother. She gave him an appointment the next morning in our library down-stairs.

He was shy — to the point of being tongue-tied and did not ask many questions. The few he did ask I do not remember. I only remember Mother putting to him some questions on her own.

"I understand from Dilip that you want spiritual wisdom", she began in her characteristic manner — simple and direct yet sympathetic and interested.

He flushed — almost fidgeted — under her calm scrutiny. "That's right

." "Why?" she asked.

He looked at her, reddened once more, then answered in a low voice:

"Because I find life void of meaning and am persuaded that only spiritual wisdom can fill the void."

"I understand," Mother answered in a kind tone. "And then?"

He lifted his eyes to hers just for a split second.

"I came to India to find it. But — I didn't find it."

Mother smiled, then said:

"One receives in the measure of one's receptivity." He winced. A little after, he queried:

"How is one to grow in receptivity?"

"By sincerity and trust. Sincerity in one's seeking and trust in the Divine Grace." Then after a pause: "Sincerity you have. Only you must learn to accept that you can get the response you want in proportion to your trust in Grace."

She spoke with such an utter simplicity that my heart misgave me. How could an intellectual of his type respond to such a simple call, I wondered! Surely it was not for this he had "crossed the seven seas," to put it in the words of Krishnaprem.

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I went to see him at the station that evening. Just before the train left he made a remark which I shall never forget.

"Why did you feel so diffident about her? I have never been so overwhelmed by anyone as I was by her this morning."

His stress on the word "overwhelmed" I found overwhelming! Why, Mother had hardly had a real talk with him!

And yet that one brief interview changed the whole course of his life. A few months afterwards he wrote to me a letter, from England, asking me very simply if Mother would accept him. She did and he came a month later and stayed with me for some time. Then he wanted more solitude. Mother gave him a flat where he lived in an almost cloistered seclusion, day after lonely day, writing poetry and meditating. Occasionally he visited me to help me in my English poetry or else to listen to my music which he loved passionately.

One morning he called on me and showed me a letter he had just received from Gurudev. And he read it out to me in great delight:

"As for acquiring the sense and the power of rhythm, reading the poets may do something, but not all. There are two factors in poetic rhythm, — the technique (the variation of movement without spoiling the fundamental structure, right management of vowel and consonantal assonances and dissonances, the masterful combination of the musical element of stress with the less obvious element of quantity) and the secret soul of rhythm which uses but exceeds these things. The first you can learn,, if you read with your ear always in a tapasya of vigilant attention to these constituents; but without the second what you achieve may be technically faultless and even skilful but poetically a dead letter. This soul of rhythm can only be found by listening in to what is behind the music of words and sound of things. You can get something of it by listening for that subtler element in great poetry, but mostly it must either grow or suddenly open in yourself. This sudden opening is what can come in Yoga if the power wishes to express itself in that way. I have seen both in myself and others a sudden flowering of capacities in every kind of

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activity come by the opening of consciousness, — so that one who laboured long without the least success to express himself in rhythm becomes a master of poetic language and cadences in a day. It is a question of the right silence in the mind and the right openness to Word that is trying to express itself— for the Word is there ready formed in those inner planes where all artistic forms take birth, but it is the transmitting mind that must change and become a perfect channel and not an obstacle."

I congratulated him.

"So that is how you have so suddenly blossomed into a poet, have you? — because 'something suddenly opened in yourself?"

"Well, I have been turning out verses," he laughed, flushing ."But to be a poet — it's not nearly so easy, you know. I have to concentrate hard to produce a single poem."

"Yes, Nirod told me about your British doggedness once, I think."

"I mean to persevere," he answered, "the more as Sri Aurobindo has been kind enough to encourage me."

"He always does," I agreed. "He has taken no end of trouble for me; has even translated some of my Bengali poems into English, fancy that!"

A few days later he met me in the Ashram and told me that he had again a present to make to me: another letter from Gurudev.

I invited him to tea in great joy.

"I have got something which will delight you, Dilip," he said, as I handed him his cup. "For he has paid the Christian back in his own coin, if you know what I mean."

(We had had a somewhat hot debate, a few days before this, on Christianity versus Hinduism.)

His humility always moved me — the more as I was myself very sensitive and never could smile if and when Gurudev or the Mother frowned. Then he read it out to me:

"Arjava,

It is especially difficult for the Christian to be of a piece,

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because the teachings of Christ are on quite another plane from the consciousness mf the intellectual and vital man trained by the education and society of Europe — the latter, even as a minister or priest, has never been called upon to practise what he preached in entire earnest. But it is difficult for human nature anywhere to think, I feel and act from one centre of true faith, belief or vision. The? average Hindu considers the spiritual life the highest, reveres the sannyasi, is moved by the bhakta; but if one of the family circle leaves the world for spiritual life, what tears, remonstrances, lamentations! It is almost worse than if he had died a natural death. It is not conscious mental insincerity — they will argue lake Pundits and quote shastra to prove you in the wrong; it is unconsciousness, a vital insincerity which they are not aware of and which uses the reasoning mind as an accomplice.

"That is why we insist so much on sincerity in the Yoga — and that means to have all the being consciously turned towards the one Truth — the. one Divine. But that is, for human nature one of the most difficult of tasks, much more difficult than a rigid asceticism or a fervent piety. Religion itself does not give this complete harmonised sincerity — it is only the psychic being and the one souled spiritual aspiration that can give it."

"How beautifully he writes, Dilip!!" Chadwick remarked. "How crystal clear! Not a trace of haziness any where. No abracadabra, wanting to show off and yet how luminous — shedding light without heat — like his eyes!"

He talked like that. Never effusive but always conveying luminously something he deeply felt.

He told me once that he was not going to live long. I don't know still the nature of his last ailment, but his health had been undermined by shell-shock and he had always been exceedingly nervous by temperament. Also he suffered much and long whenever there was a friction between him and others. And every time this happened he retired it a deeper seclusion till in the end he became almost a recluse. I met him indeed in the Ashram where we went daily to have the Mother-'s blessings. But though

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he always greeted me cordially, he looked more and more distant. I used to feel a little pain at his deepening retirement, but when I read his poems which he sent me from time to time, I felt amply compensated. He had indeed blossomed out into a fine poet! Also he showed me some of the letters that had passed between him and Sri Aurobindo relating to English metres. I was overjoyed as these helped me materially besides making me realise how much he had profited by Gurudev's craftsmanship and mastery over the intricacies of the English metre. He used to go into ecstasies over his new experiments in quantitative metres!

But I am afraid I am tending to grow "prolix" — an epithet he often used by way of disapproval. So I must now come to the end of my story.

When his health deteriorated, I felt a little anxious and one day when he came at my request to read out to me some of his latest poems — it was for the last time — I asked him why he looked so pale and emaciated.

"I haven't been keeping good health lately, Dilip," he said simply. "But it's no use worrying. And then I never had your robust health, you know. What energy you have! I envy you!" "Never mind about my energy," I deprecated. "But why don't you go back home for a change?"

"No. Whatever is to happen must happen here. I will not go back to my people though they are writing letter after letter. No, Dilip, let's talk of something more worth while. What have you been writing of late?"

"I have been translating some poems. Here is one from a Hindi song of Abul Hafiz Jalandhari.¹ Sri Aurobindo has given it special praise."

He read it and suggested just one or two minor changes; then said: "You have now learnt to handle our iambics, Dilip. Congratulations."

____________________

'The poem is entitled "Pledge" in my book Eyes of Light.

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"But wait a minute — where are your poems?"
"Well, here are two I wrote last month."
And he read them out beautifully. I shall give only the closing verse of each

O hearts that are empty of giving,
Lips that lie famished for song,
How you hiddenly hunger for living
And dream to the star-born throng.

And then:

O running of Light in the Silence
O silvery morning star,
May then Dawn be the; wordless answer
Of beauty no loss can mar.1

"Beautiful," I said, "though a trifle sad."

"But life is no very jolly, Dilip — it never has been."

"But it shall be."

"I'd like to believe that,'" he said after a pause, "and only because..." he looked at me and added: "because I came to know them — him and the Mother,"

After his passing away in 1938 his poems were sent to Krishnaprem. I feel there can be no more fitting epitaph to the great departed than his beautiful Foreword:

"It must be new twelve years since Chadwick and I sat together on the banks of the Ganges at Benares, talking far into the night of dreams that lay dose to our hearts, dreams that had brought us together as they had brought us both to India. Of his past I knew little save that it included a fellowship at, I think, Trinity College Cambridge, and that a distinguished Cambridge philosopher entertained great hopes from his brilliant abilities in mathematical philosophy of the specifically 'Cambridge' sort.

___________________

'Poems by Arjava, pp. 285-S6.

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Somewhere between the chinks of his academic career I surmised an initiation into the Kabalistic tradition and there was that in his eyes which showed unmistakably that it was not for the sake of a professorship in a provincial university that he had left his friends at Cambridge and crossed the seven seas.

"Once more we met in a university bungalow at Lucknow, a background that I think we both found to be an utter irrelevance, and then we departed, I to the North and he to the South where he had found his Guru in Sri Aurobindo. There is the Ashram in Pondicherry, he lived for the last ten years, shedding at the feet of his Guru the burden of all that the world counts valuable in order to find the hidden treasures for which most men have no eyes.

"Of his life and sadhana there under the name of Arjava it is not for me to speak. That it brought about a profound psychic transformation in his nature is clear from the fact that he, whose language had hitherto been limited to the arid propositions of intellectual philosophy, became a poet and, with the aid of poetry, entered the inner worlds of which, till then, he had but dreamed.

"Traditionalists and those who take a narrow view of sadhana will perhaps wonder what poetry has to do with Yoga. The truth is that the reintegration of the psyche that is brought about in sadhana has the effect of releasing unsuspected powers that were lying latent in the heart of the sadhaka, as indeed, they are in the hearts of all. We read in books of Yoga that "by meditating on Her who shines in the Root Lotus with the lustre of ten million Suns, a man becomes a Lord of Speech and...pure of heart, by his deep and musical words, serves the greatest of Gods.' The truth of such words, nowadays too often assumed to be mere empty praise, is witnessed to by these poems left behind by Arjava when, at what seems to us the early age of forty, the Sovereign Dweller in his heart decided to withdraw to inner worlds.

"The mere literary critic will admire the delicate dream-like beauty of these poems, but, unless his insight is more than merely literary, he will go no deeper, for they deal with the mysteries of

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the inner life and only he who can read their symbols will be able to penetrate to their heart. For Arjava,, as is shown in the poem entitled Correspondences, Nature was a shrine in which each form seen in the flickering firelight of the senses was a shadow of realities that lay within, shining in the magical light of the secret Moon which was the Master-light of all his seeing the central image of so many of his poems.

"In the midst of our personal sadness at his early departure let. us remember that this path is one which leads through many worlds and that, as Sri Krishna said, nehabhikrama nasho 'sti for him who treads it there can be no loss of effort."

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