Sri Aurobindo - The Smiling Master

Chapter 7

Humour on Matters ''Literary''

It is well known that Sri Aurobindo is a multisplendoured creative genius. Every field that he has touched he has adorned with a golden achievement. During his life he has been successively a teacher of extraordinary calibre, a politician of rare worth and, finally, a Mahayogi par excellence.

And as a creative writer how many diverse fields he has made bis area of exploration! And everywhere he has brought the master's touch of insight and excellence. To quote Amal Kiran's significant words,

"How shall we crown Sri Aurobindo? Is he greater as a Yogi than as a philosopher? Does the literary critic in him outtop the sociological thinker? Does he shine brighter as a politician or as a poet? It is difficult to decide. Everywhere Mount Everest seems to face Mount Everest."¹

Sri Aurobindo has been a poet even from his early teens. The earliest pieces of his poetry were probably written when he was in Cambridge in the late '80s of the last century; and the last lines of poetry - additions to his epic poem Savitri - he dictated to his scribe only a few days before he passed away in 1950. That is to say, his poetic career extends over a period of sixty years.

But Sri Aurobindo has been not only a great creative poet but at the same time an equally great literary critic too. And what is still more interesting to note in this connection is the fact that some of the celebrated contemporary poets of the English language who have not been able to appreciate in full the genre of poetry Sri Aurobindo has written, have been highly impressed by the eminent worth and quality of his literary criticism. One of them has gone as far as to say that while going through Sri Aurobindo's The Future Poetry and his Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art she felt like marking marginal lines almost on every page of Sri Aurobindo's writings, for they

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seemed to her so important for further reflection and future reference.

And the field of Sri Aurobindo's literary criticism has been so wide and varied! Some of the topics he has adequately dealt with are as follows:

The Essence of Poetry; Rhythm and Movement; Style and Substance; Poetic Vision and the Mantra; The Evolution of Poetry; The Character of Poetry; The Ideal Spirit of Poetry; The Sun of Poetic Truth; The Soul of Poetic Delight and Beauty; The Word and the Spirit; The Process, Form and Substance of Poetry; Sources of Poetic Inspiration and Vision; Poetic Rhythm and Technique; Beauty and Art; Appreciation of Poetry and Art; Poets, Mystics and Intellectuals; Poetic Creation and Yoga; Modern Poetry; Translation of Poetry; The Movement of Modern Literature; etc., etc.

Some of Sri Aurobindo's disciples have themselves been good poets and litterateurs. In answer to their pointed questions Sri Aurobindo often threw much significant light on different aspects of literature and literary creation. Now, our present chapter deals specifically with Sri Aurobindo's humour on matters 'literary'. So, leaving out other serious topics and views, we have chosen to append below a few illustrative examples of Sri Aurobindo's humorous observations touching themes of the literary domain. As everywhere else here too his sparkling genius does not fail to evoke our joyous smile and laughter.

But before we come to actual exemplification, let us prelude the chapter with a rather long quotation from Sri Aurobindo on the Irish genius, Bernard Shaw. The passage is of a serious nature but deals with the subject of humour. This will show Sri Aurobindo as a critic with his keen observation, penetrating analysis, luminous insight and powerfully felicitous expression.

Sri Aurobindo's Estimate of Bernard Shaw

"I do not think Harris' attack on Shaw as you describe it can be taken very seriously any more than can Wells' jest about his pronunciation of English being the sole astonishing thing about

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him. Wells, Chesterton, Shaw and others joust at each other like the Kabliwalas of old Calcutta, though with more refined weapons, and you cannot take their humorous sparrings as considered appreciations; if you do, you turn exquisite jests into solemn nonsense. Mark that their method in these sparrings, the turn of phrase, the style of their wit is borrowed from Shaw himself with personal modifications; for this kind of humour, light as air and sharp as a razor-blade, epigrammatic, paradoxical, often flavoured with burlesque seriousness and urbane hyperbole, good-humoured and cutting at once, is not English in origin; it was brought in by two Irishmen, Shaw and Wilde. Harris' stroke about the Rodin bust and Wells' sally are entirely in the Shavian turn and manner, they are showing their cleverness by spiking their Guru in swordsmanship with his own rapier....

Shaw's seriousness and his humour, real seriousness and mock seriousness, run into each other in a baffling inextricable melange, thoroughly Irish in character, - for it is the native Irish turn to speak lightly when in dead earnest and to utter the most extravagant jests with a profound air of seriousness, - and it so puzzled the British public that they could not for a long time make up their mind how to take him. At first they took him for a jester dancing with cap and bells, then for a new kind of mocking Hebrew prophet or Puritan reformer! Needless to say, both judgments were entirely out of focus....

At bottom he has the possibility in him of a modern Curtius, leaping into the yawning pit for a cause, a Utopist or a Don Quixote, - according to occasions, a fighter for dreams, an idealistic pugilist, a knight-errant, a pugnacious rebel or a brilliant sharp-minded realist or a reckless or often shrewd and successful adventurer. Shaw has all that in him, but with it a cool intellectual clearness, also Irish, which dominates it all and tones it down, subdues it into measure and balance, gives an even harmonising colour. There is as a result a brilliant tempered edge of flame, lambent, lighting up what it attacks and destroys, and destroying it by the light it throws upon it, not fiercely but trenchantly - though with a trenchant playfulness -

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aggressive and corrosive. An ostentation of humour and parade covers up the attack and puts the opponent off his defence. That is why the English mind never understood Shaw and yet allowed itself to be captured by him...

... I call him devastating, not in any ostentatiously catastrophic sense, for there is a quietly trenchant type of devasta-tingness, because he has helped to lay low all these things with his scythe of sarcastic mockery and lightly, humorously penetrating seriousness - effective, as you call it, but too deadly in its effects to be called merely effective....

As for his pose of self-praise, no doubt he valued himself, -the public fighter like the man of action needs to do so in order to act or to fight. Most, though not all, try to veil it under an affectation of modesty; Shaw, on the contrary, took the course of raising it to a humorous pitch of burlesque and extravagance. It was at once part of his strategy in commanding attention and a means of mocking at himself -1 was not speaking of analytical self-mockery, but of the whimsical Irish kind - so as to keep himself straight and at the same time mocking his audience. It is a peculiarly Irish kind of humour to say extravagant things with a calm convinced tone as if announcing a perfectly serious proposition - the Irish exaggeration of the humour called by the French pince-sans-rire; his hyperboles of self-praise actually reek with this humorous savour. If his extravagant comparison of himself with Shakespeare had to be taken in dull earnest without any smile in it, he will be either a witless ass or a giant of humourless arrogance, - and Bernard Shaw could be neither...."²

Let us now taste some specimens of Sri Aurobindo's humour on various matters 'literary'.

(1) "Don't differentiate between Rama and Shyama, brother]"

(The great medieval saint Kabir composed a song in Urdu, addressed to Lord Rama; Dilip Kumar translated this song into Bengali but in the process substituted Krishna for Rama. Sri Aurobindo commented on this change in the following words.)

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Sri Aurobindo: I have no objection to your substituting Krishna for Rama, and if Kabir makes any, which is not likely, you have only to say to him softly, 'Ram Shyam juda mat karo bhai', and he will be silenced at once.³

(2)"Oh, two by three plus four plus sevenl"

"What does he mean? that you can't write mathematics in verse? I suppose not, it was not meant to be. You can't start off

Oh, two by three plus four plus seven!

To add things is to be in heaven.

But all the same, if one thinks it worth while to take the trouble, one can express the mathematician's delight in discovery, or the grammarian's in grammatising or the engineer's in planning a bridge or a house. What about Browning's Grammarian's Funeral? The reason why these subjects do not easily get into poetry is because they do not lend themselves to poetic handling, their substance being intellectual and abstract and their language also, not as the substance and language of poetry must be, emotional and intuitive. It is not because they appeal only to a few people and not to the general run of humanity. A good dinner appeals not to a few poeple but to the general run of humanity, but it would all the same be a little difficult to write an epic or a lyric on the greatness of cooking and fine dishes or the joys of the palate and the belly.... Artistic or poetic value cannot be reckoned by the plaudits or the reactions of the greatest number."⁴

(3)"I can't stand Willy Wet-leg"

"Lawrence's poetry, whatever one may think of his theory or technique, has too much importance and significance to be lightly handled and the modernism of contemporary poetry is a fait accompli. One can refuse to recognise or legitimise the fait accompli, whether in Abyssinia or in the realms of literature, but it is too solid to be met with a mere condemnation in principle.

Apropos, the other day I opened Lawrence's Pansies once

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more at random and found this:

I can't stand Willy Wet-leg

Can't stand him at any price.

He's resigned and when you hit him

He lets you hit him twice.

Well, well, this is the bare, rocky, direct poetry? God help us! This is the sort of thing to which theories lead even a man of genius."⁵

(4) "To be a judge between the godheads?"

"I do not know what to say on the subject you propose to me - the superiority of music to poetry - for my appreciation of music is bodiless and inexpressible, while about poetry I can write at ease with an expert knowledge. But is it necessary to fix a scale of greatness between two fine arts when each has its own greatness and can touch in its own way the extremes of aesthetic Ananda? ... Who shall decide between such claims or be a judge between these godheads?...

I fear I must disappoint you. I am not going to pass the Gods through a competitive examination and assign a highest place to one and lower places to others. What an idea! Each has his or her own province on the summits and what is the necessity of putting them in rivalry with the others? It is a sort of Judgment of Paris you want to impose on me? Well, but what became of Paris and Troy? You want me to give the crown or apple to Music and enrage the Goddesses of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Embroidery, all the Nine Muses?

Your test of precedence - universal appeal - is all wrong. I don't know that it is true, in the first place. Some kind of sound called music appeals to everybody, but has really great music a universal appeal? ... a band on the pier at a seaside resort will please more people than a great piece of music with the orchestration conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. In a world of gods it might be true that the highest makes the most universal appeal, but here is a world of beasts and men (you bring in the

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beasts - why not play to Bushy, the Ashram cat, and try how she responds?) it is usually the inferior things that have the more general if not quite universal appeal.

On the other hand the opposite system you suggest (the tables turned upside down - the least universal and most difficult appeal makes the greatest art) would also have its dangers. At that rate we should have to concede that the cubist and the abstract painters had reached the highest art possible, only rivalled by the up to date modernist poets of whom it has been said that their works are not at all either read or understood by the public, are read and understood only by the poet himself, and are read without being understood by his personal friends and admirers.

... For instance a modern painter wishing to make a portrait of you will paint at the top a clock surrounded by three triangles, below them a chaos of rhomboids and at the bottom two table castors to represent your feet and he will put in underneath this powerful design, 'Portrait of N'. Perhaps your soul will leap up in answer to its direct appeal and recognise at once the truth behind the object, behind your vanished physical self, - you will greet your psychic being or your Atman or at least your inner physical or vital being. Perhaps also you won't....

I have written so much, you will see, in order to say nothing - or at least to avoid your attempt at putting me in an embarrassing dilemma."⁶

(5) "...our valleyed sake"

AK: In the line

"Of utter summit for our valleyed sake..."

what do you think of the turn 'our valleyed sake'? Can it pass?

Sri Aurobindo: 'For our valleyed sake' is a locution that offers fascinating possibilities but fails to sound English. One might risk, 'Let fall some tears for my unhappy sake' in defiance of grammar or humorously, 'Oh shed some sweat-drops for my

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corpulent sake'; but 'valleyed sake' carries the principle of the arsa prayoga (Rishi's licence) beyond the boundaries of the possible.⁷

(6) On the use of Latin-English neologism:

AK: In my lines -

This heart grew brighter when your breath's proud chill

Flung my disperse life-blood more richly in -

a terminal d will at once English that Latin fellow "disperse", but is he really objectionable? At first I had "Drove" instead of "Flung" - so the desire for a less dental rhythm was his raison d'etre, but if he seems a trifle weaker than his English avatar, he can easily be dispensed with now.

Sri Aurobindo: I don't think 'disperse' as an adjective can pass — the dentals are certainly an objection but do not justify this Latin-English neologism.

AK: Why should that poor "disperse" be inadmissible when English has many such Latin forms — e.g. "consecrate", "dedicate", "intoxicate"? ... I have a substitute ready, however:

Flung my diffuse life-blood more richly in.

But is not "disperse" formed on exactly the same principle as "diffuse"? By the way, does "dispersed" make the line really too dental, now that "Flung" is there and not the original "Drove"?

Sri Aurobindo: I don't think people use 'consecrate', 'intoxicate' etc. as adjectives nowadays - at any rate it sounds to me too recherche. Of course, if one chose, this kind of thing might be perpetrated -

O wretched man intoxicate,

Let not thy life be consecrate

To wine's red yell (spell, if you want to he 'poetic').

Else will thy soul be dedicate

To Hell -

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but it is better not to do it. It makes no difference if there are other words like 'diffuse' taken from French (not Latin) which have this form and are generally used as adjectives. Logic is not the sole basis of linguistic use. ... Archaism or neologism does not matter. 'Dispersed life-blood' brings three d's so near together that they collide a little - if they were farther from each other it would not matter - or if they produced some significant or opportune effect. I think 'diffuse' will do.

AK: What do I find this afternoon? Just read:

Suddenly

From motionless battalions as outride

A speed disperse of horsemen, from the mass

Of livid menace went a frail light cloud

Rushing through heaven, and behind it streamed

The downpour all in wet and greenish lines.

This is from your own Urvasie, written in the middle nineties of the last century!

Sri Aurobindo: I dare say I tried to Latinise. But that does not make it a permissible form. If it is obsolete, it must remain obsolete. I thought at first it was an archaism you were trying on, I seemed to remember something of the kind, but as I could find it nowhere I gave up the idea — it was probably my own crime that I remembered.⁸

(7) Literalness in translation:

Sri Aurobindo: ... The proper rule about literalness in translation, I suppose, is that one should keep as close as possible to the original provided the result does not read like a translation but like an original poem in Bengali, and, as far as possible, as if it were the original poem originally written in Bengali.

I admit that I have not practised what I preached, — whenever I translated I was careless of the hurt feelings of the original text and transmogrified it without mercy into whatever my fancy chose. But that is a high and mighty criminality which

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one ought not to imitate. Latterly I have tried to be more moral in my ways, I don't know with what success. But anyhow it is a case of "Do what I preach and avoid what I practise."⁹

(8)An Aurobindonian freak:

AK: In your sonnet Man the Enigma occurs the magnificent

line:

His heart a chaos and an empyrean.

But I am much saddened by the fact that the rhythm of these words gets spoiled at the end by a mis-stressing in "empyrean". "Empyrean" is stressed currently in the penultimate syllable, thus: "empyrean". Your line puts the stress on the second syllable. It is in the adjective "empyrean" that the second syllable is stressed, but the noun is never stressed that way, so far as I know....

Sri Aurobindo: ... Even if I had no justification from the dictionary and the noun 'empyrean' were only an Aurobindonian freak and a wilful shifting of the accent, I would refuse to change it; for the rhythm is an essential part of whatever beauty there is in the line.

P.S. - Your view is supported by the small Oxford Dictionary which, I suppose, gives the present usage, Chambers' being an older authority. But Chambers must represent a former usage and I am entitled to revive even a past or archaic form if I choose to do so.¹⁰

(9)"O voice of a tilted nose! ''

AK: The English reader has digested Carlyle and swallowed Meredith and is not quite unwilling to reJOYCE in even more startling strangenesses of expression at the present day. Will his stomach really turn at the novelty of that phrase [of mine] which you wouldn't approve: "the voice of a devouring eye"? "The voice of an eye" sounds rather idiotic, but if the adjective "devouring" is added the phrase seems to become effective.... If Milton could give us "blind mouths" and Wordsworth

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Thou eye among the blind,

That, deaf and silent, readst the eternal deep,

is there very much to object to in this visioned voice?

Sri Aurobindo: Can't accept all that. A voice of a devouring eye is even more re-Joycingly mad than a voice of an eye pure and simple. If the English language is to go to the dogs, let it go, but the Joyce cut by the way of Bedlam does not recommend itself to me.

The poetical examples have nothing to do with the matter. Poetiy is permitted to be insane - the poet and the madman go together: though even there there are limits. Meredith and Carlyle are tortuous or extravagant in their style only — though they can be perfectly sane when they want. In poetry anything can pass — for instance, my 'voice of a tilted nose':

O voice of a tilted nose,

Speak but speak not in prose!

Nose like a blushing rose,

O Joyce of a tilted nose!

That is high poetry, but put it in prose and it sounds insane."

(10)Poetry of the lower vital:

AK: Here is a poem which seems to me an expression of the lower vital - to use our yogic classification - lashed to imaginative fury. Any real possibilities along this line?

Sri Aurobindo: An expression of the lower vital lashed to imaginative fury is likely to produce not poetry but simply 'sound and fury', - 'tearing a passion to tatters' and in its full furiousness may even rise to rant and fustian. Erotic poetry more than any other needs the restraint of beauty and form and measure, otherwise it risks being no longer poetic but merely pathologic.¹²

(11)"Unspeakable rubbish, unhappily spoken"

AK: I should like to have a few words from you on the

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poetic style and technique of these two quotations. The first is...

The next quotation illustrates Kipling's Tommy-Atkins-music at its most vivid and onomatopoeic — lines considered by Lascelles Abercrombie to be a masterly fusion of all the elements necessary in poetic technique:

Lest you want your toes trod off you'd better get back at

once,

For the bullocks are walking two by two,

The "byles" are walking two by two,

The bullocks are walking two by two,

An' the elephants bring the guns!

Ho! Yuss!

Great — big — long - black forty-pounder guns:

Jiggery-jolty to and fro,

Each as big as a launch in tow —

Blind - dumb - broad-breached beggars o' battering guns!

Sri Aurobindo: My verdict on Kipling's lines would be that they are fit for the columns of The Illustrated Weekly of India and nowhere else. I refuse to accept this journalistic jingle as poetry. As for Abercrombie's comment, - unspeakable rubbish, unhappily spoken."

(12) Abercrombiean acrobacy:

AK: Why have you bucked at my "azure" as a line-ending? And why so late in the day? Twice before I have used the same inversion and it caused no alarm. Simple poetic licence, Sir. If Wordsworth could write

What awful perspective; while from our sight...

and leave no reverberation of "awful" in the reader's mind, and if Abercrombie boldly come out with

To smite the horny eyes of men

With the renown of our Heaven

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and our horny eyes remain unsmitten by his topsyturvy "Heaven" - why, then, I need not feel too shy to shift the accent of "azure" just because of poor me happening to be an Indian. Not that an alternative line getting rid of that word is impossible - quite a fine one can be written with "obscure". But why does this particular inversion shock you?...

Your "through whom" in place of my "wherethrough" in another line is an improvement, but it is difficult to reject that word as a legal archaism inadmissible in good poetry. Your remark about "whereas" in my A.E. essay seemed to me just in pointing out the obscurity of connection it introduced between the two parts of my sentence, but the term itself has no stigma in it of obsolescence as does for instance "whenas": in poetry it would be rather prosaic, while "wherethrough" is a special poetic usage as any big dictionary will tell us, and in certain contexts it would be preferable to "through which", just as "whereon", "wherein", and "whereby" would sometimes be better than their ordinary equivalents. I wonder why you have become so ultra-modern: I remember you jibbing also at "from out" - a phrase which has not fallen into desuetude yet, and can be used occasionally even in a common context: e.g. "from out the bed".

Sri Aurobindo: I can swallow 'perspective' with some difficulty, but if anybody tried to justify by it a line like this (let us say in a poem by Miss Mayo):

O inspector, why suggestive of drains?

I would buck. I disapprove totally of Abercrombie's bold wriggle with Heaven, but even he surely never meant to put the accent on the second syllable and pronounce it Hevenn. I absolutely refuse to pronounce 'azure' as 'azure'. 'Perspective' can just be managed by making it practically atonal or unaccented or evenly accented, which comes to the same thing. 'Sapphire' can be managed at the end of a line, e.g. "strong sapphire", because 'phire' is long and the voice trails over it, but the 'ure' of 'azure' is more slurred into shortness than trailed

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out into length as if it were 'azyoore'.

I didn't suggest that 'whereas' was obsolete. It is a perfectly good word in its place, e.g. 'He pretended the place was empty whereas in reality it was crowded, overflowing'; but its use as a loose conjunctive turn which can be conveniently shoved into any hole to keep two sentences together is altogether reprehensible.

None of these words is obsolete, but 'wherethrough' is rhetorically pedantic, just as 'whereabout' or 'wherewithal' would be. It is no use throwing the dictionary at my head - the dictionary admits many words which poetry refuses to admit. Of course you can drag any word in the dictionary into poetry if you like, e.g.:

My spirit parenthetically wise

Gave me its obiter dictum; a propos

I looked within with weird and brilliant eyes

And found in the pit of my stomach the juste mot.

But all that is possible is not commendable. So if you seek a pretext wherethrough to bring in these heavy visitors I shall buck and seek a means whereby to eject them.

P.S. It is not to the use of 'azure' in place of an iamb in the last foot that I object but to your blessed accent on the last syllable. I will even, if you take that sign off, allow you to rhyme 'azure' with 'pure' and pass it off as an Abercrombiean acrobacy by way of fun. But not otherwise - the accent mark must go.¹⁴

(13)"0 vizhn! O pasbn! m'd'tashnl"

AK: The Oxford Dictionary seems to leave one no choice as regards counting the number of syllables in the word "vision" and its likes. I quote below some of the words explained as monosyllables in the same way as "Rhythm" and "prism":

Fashion (-shn)

Passion (pa.shn)

Prison (-zn)

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Scission (si.shn)

Treason (-ezn)

Vi.sion (-zhn)

As Dilip would say, qu'en dites-vous? Chambers' Dictionary makes "vision" a dissyllable, which is quite sensible, but the monosyllabic pronunciation of it deserves to be considered at least a legitimate variant when H.W. Fowler and F.G. Fowler -the name of Fowler is looked upon as a synonym for authority on the English language - give no other. I don't think I am mistaken in interpreting their intention.

Take "realm", which they pronounce in brackets as 'relm'; now I see no difference as regards syllabification between their intention here and in the instances above.

P.S. I must admit, however, what struck me after typing the preceding. In the preface to the Oxford Dictionary it is said that it has not been thought necessary to mention certain pronunciations which are familiar to the normal reader, such as that of the suffix "-ation" (ashn). Does this mean that a word like "meditation" is to be taken as three syllables only? According to my argument there seems no alternative; and yet the example looks very much like a reductio ad absurdum.

Sri Aurobindo: You may not have a choice - but I have a choice, which is to pronounce and scan words like vision and passion and similar words as all the poets of the English language (those at least whom I know) have consistently pronounced and scanned them - as dissyllables. If you ask me to scan Shakespeare's line in the following manner to please H.W. Fowler and F.G. Fowler,

In mai/den med/itation / fan/cy free,

I shall decline without thanks. Shakespeare wrote, if I remember right, "treasons, stratagems and spoils"; Shelley, Tennyson, any poet of the English language, I believe, would do the same — though I have no books with me to give chapter and verse. I

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lived in both northern and southern England, but I never heard vision pronounced as vizhn, it was always vizhun; treason, of course, is pronounced as trez'n, but that does not make it a monosyllable in scansion because there is in these words a very perceptible slurred vowel sound in pronunciation which I represent by the '; in poison also....

This is my conviction and not all the Fowlers in the world will take it away from me. I only hope that the future lexicographers will not 'fowl' the language any more in that direction; otherwise we shall have to write lines like this -

O vizhn! Opashnl m'd'tashnl h'rr'p'lashnl

Why did the infern'l Etern'l und'take creash'n?

Or else, creat'ng, could he not have al ford'd

Not to allow the Engl'sh tongue to be Oxford'd?

P.S. I remember a book (Hamerton's? some one else's? I don't remember) in which the contrast was drawn between the English and French languages, that the English tongue tended to throw all the weight on the first or earliest possible syllable and slurred the others, the French did the opposite - so that when an Englishman pretends to say strawberries, what he really says is strawb's. That is the exaggeration of a truth - but all the same there is a limit.

AK: ... I should like to ask you a few questions suggested by your falling foul of the Fowlers. The poetic pronunciation of words cannot be accepted as a standard for current speech -can it? On your own showing, "treason" and "poison" which are monosyllables in prose or current speech can be scanned as dissyllables in verse; Shelley makes "evening" three syllables and Harin has used even "realm" as a dissyllable... All the same, current speech, if your favourite Chambers' Dictionary and as well as my dear Oxford Concise is to be believed, insists on "evening", "precious" and "conscious" being dissyllabic and "realm" monosyllabic...

... the Concise Oxford Dictionary is specially stated to be in

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its very title as "of Current English"; is all its claim to be set at nought? It is after all a responsible compilation and, so far as my impression goes, not unesteemed. If its errors were so glaring as you think, would there not be a general protest? Or is it that English has changed so much in "word of mouth" since your departure from England? This is not an ironical query - I am just wondering.

P.S. Your exclamatory-interrogatory elegiacs illustrating the predicament we should fall into if the Fowlers were allowed to spread their nets with impunity were very enjoyable. But I am afraid the tendency of the English language is towards contraction of vowel-sounds, at least terminal ones...

Sri Aurobindo: Where the devil have I admitted that 'treason' and 'poison' are monosyllables or that their use as dissyllables is a poetic licence? Will you please quote the words in which I have made that astounding and imbecile admission? I have said distinctly that they are dissyllabic, - risen, dozen, maiden, garden, laden and a thousand others which nobody (at least before the world went mad) ever dreamed of taking as monosyllables.

On my own showing, indeed! After I had even gone to the trouble of explaining at length about the slurred syllable e in these words, for the full sound is not given, so that you cannot put it down as pronounced maid-en, you have to indicate the pronunciation as maid'n. But for that to dub maiden a monosyllable and assert that Shakespeare, Shelley and every other poet who scans maiden as a dissyllable was a born fool who did not know the 'current' pronunciation or was indulging in a constant poetic licence whenever he used the words garden, maiden, widen, sadden etc. is a long flight of imagination.

I say that these words are dissyllables and the poets in so scanning them (not as an occasional licence but normally and every time) are much better authorities than any owl - or fowl -of a dictionary-maker in the universe. Of course the poets use licences in lengthening out words occasionally, but these are exceptions; to explain away their normal use of words as a

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perpetually repeated licence would be wild wooden-headedness (5 syllables, please)....

I do not know why you speak of my 'favourite' Chambers'. Your attachment to Oxford is not balanced by any attachment of mine to Chambers' or any other lexicographer. I am not inclined to swear by any particular dictionary as an immaculate virgin authority for pronunciation or a papal Infallible. It was you who quoted Chambers' as differing from Oxford, not I. You seem indeed to think that the Fowlers are a sort of double-headed Pope to the British public in all linguistic matters and nobody could dare question their dictates or ukases — only I do so because I am antiquated and am living in India. I take leave to point out to you that this is not yet a universally accepted catholic dogma. The Fowlers indeed seem to claim something of the kind, they make their enunciations with a haughty papal arrogance condemning those who differ from them as outcasts and brushing them aside in a few words or without a mention. But it is not quite like that....

If the Oxford pronunciation of 'vision' and 'meditation' is correct current English, then the confusion has much increased since my time, for then at least everybody pronounced 'vizhun', 'meditashun', as I do still and shall go on doing so....

But you suggest that my pronunication is antiquated, English has advanced since then as since Shakespeare. But I must point out that you yourself quote Chambers for 'vizhun' and following your example - not out of favouritism - I may quote him for 'summation' - 'summashun', not 'shn'....

So your P.S. has no solid ground to stand on since there is no 'fixed' current speech and Fowler is not its Pope and there is no universal currency of his vizhn of things.

Language is not bound by analogy and because 'meditation' has become 'meditashun' it does not follow that it must become 'meditashn' and that 'tation' is now a monosyllable contrary to all common sense and the privilege of the ear. It might just as well be argued that it will necessarily be clipped farther until the whole word becomes a monosyllable. Language is neither made nor developed in that way - if the English language were so to

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deprive itself of all beauty by turning vision into vizhn and then into vzhn and all other words into similar horrors, I would hasten to abandon it for Sanskrit or French or Bengali - or even Swahili.

P.S. By the way, one point. Does the Oxford pronounce in cold blood and so many set words that vision, passion (and by logical extension treason, maiden, garden etc.) are monosyllables? Or is it your inference from 'realm' and 'prism'? If the latter, I would only say, 'Beware' of too rigidly logical inferences. If the former, I can only say that Oxford needs some gas from Hitler to save the English mind from its pedants. This quite apart from the currency of vizhns....

It seemed to me impossible that even the reckless Fowler -reckless in the excess of his learning - should be so audacious as to announce that this large class of words accepted as dissyllables from the beginning of (English) time were really monosyllables. After all, the lexicographers do not set out to give the number of syllables in a word. Pronunciation is a different matter. Realm cannot be a dissyllable unless you violently make it so, because 1 is a liquid like r and you cannot make a dissyllable of words like 'charm', unless you Scotchify the English language and make it char'r'r'm or vulgarise it and make it charrum - and even char'r'r'm is after all a monosyllable. Prism, the ism in Socialism and pessimism, rhythm can be made dissylabic; but by convention (convention has nothing to do with these things) the ism, rhythm are treated as a single syllable, because of the etymology.... The French pronounce rhythme reethm... without anything to help them out in passing from th to m, but the English tongue can't do that, there is a perceptible quarter vowel or one-eighth vowel sound between th and m - if it were not so the plural rhythms would be unpronounceable. I remember in my French class at St. Paul's our teacher (a Frenchman) insisted on our pronouncing ordre in the French way - in his mouth orrdrr; I was the only one who succeeded, the others all made it auder, orrder, audrer, or some such variation. There is the same difference of habit with words like rhythm, and yet conventionally the French treatment is

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accepted so far as to impose rhythm as a monosyllable. Realm on the other hand is pronounced truly as a monosyllable without the help of any fraction of a vowel."

(14) "Damned! that is to say, romantic."

AK: Yes, the line "... so grief-hearted, strangely lone" is pretty poor. How would you exactly hit off the "quality" of its failure?

Sri Aurobindo: The line strikes at once the romantically sentimental note of more than a hundred years ago which is dead and laughed out of court nowadays. Especially in writing anything about vital love, avoid like the plague anything that descends into the sentimental or, worse, the namby-pamby.... Romantic poetry could be genuine in the early nineteenth century, but the attempt to walk back into it in the year 1931 is not likely to be a success, it can only result in an artificial literary exercise.¹⁶

NB: [Guru, this is my latest poem]:

"O sleepless star in the calm snow-white shore,

Open my barren heart to thy profundity

And make its wilderness more and more

A golden vision of thy prophecy.

On my dim hours thy glimmering shadow falls

And paints their edges with a timeless brush.

Transparent figures on its invisible walls

Are carved from rocks of thy luminous hush.

White flocks of birds perch on its towering height;

A gleam of heaven sparkles on their wings

And from the cavern of their soul of light

A nectarous flow of fountain music springs.

Their bright ethereal voices I can hear

Like echoing notes of a far wind-blown lyre;

They seem to break upon my listening ear

In rhythmic waves of magical moon-rose fire.

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My slumbering moments one by one arise

In the firmament of thy divinity:

Each is a miracle of thy Paradise

Burdened with a mysterious prophecy."

Guru, do you think a little star can do all that?

Sri Aurobindo: I don't!

NB: There seems to be a lot of paint and colour.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, it is all colour and nothing else.

NB: Either the poem is exceeding or damned - which?

Sri Aurobindo: Damned! that is to say, romantic.

Let me say again that in condemning things as romantic, it is because they are of the wilted echo kind. "Nectarous flow", "fountain music", "bright ethereal voices", "echoing notes", "far wind-blown lyre", "break upon my listening ear" etc. are perhaps new to you and full of colour, but to experienced readers of English poetry they sound as old as Johnny, — one feels as if one had been reading hundreds of books of poetry with these phrases on each page and a hundred and first book seems a little superfluous.... The third and fourth stanzas are hopeless. Where the deuce does your inspiration draw these things from? From remembered or unremembered reading or just anyhow? It looks as if some unknown nineteenth century poet from time to time got hold of you to unburden himself of all his unpublished poetry.¹⁷

(15) "Oh damned fine, damned damned damned fine!

Sri Aurobindo (to AK): You seem to demand a very rigid and academic fixity of meaning from my hastily penned comments on the poetry sent to me.... My judgment does differ with different writers and also with different kinds of writings. If I put 'very good' on a poem of Shailen's it does not mean that it is on a par with Harin's or Arjava's or yours. It means that it is very good Shailen, but not that it is very good Harin or very good Arjava. 'If very good were won by them all', you write! But, good heavens, you write that as if I were a master giving marks in a class. I may write 'good' or 'very good' on the work

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of a novice if I see that it has succeeded in being poetry and not mere verse however correct or well rhymed - but if Harin or Arjava or you were to produce work like that, I would not say 'very good' at all.... If I write 'very good' or 'excellent' on some verses of Dara about his chair, I am not giving it a certificate of equality with some poems of yours similarly appreciated - I am only saying that as humorous easy verse in the lightest vein it is very successful, an outstanding piece of work. Applied to your poem it would mean something different altogether....

You all attach too much importance to the exact letter of my remarks of the kind as if it were a giving of marks. I have been obliged to renounce the use of the word 'good' or even 'very good' because it depressed Nirod - though I would be very much satisfied myself if I could always write poetry certified to be very good. I write 'very fine' against work which is not improvable, so why ask me for suggestions for improving the unimprovable?...

Incidentally, even if my remarks are taken to be of mark-giving value, what shall I do in future if I have exhausted all adverbs? How shall I mark your 'self-exceeding' if I have already certified your work as exceeding? I shall have to fall back on swears "Oh damned fine, damned damned damned fine!"¹⁸

(16) "Surprised to see your remark on my remark}."

NB: My poem is only a 'fine' sonnet! Can you clarify?

Sri Aurobindo: Again what the damn do you mean? When an English poet achieves a fine sonnet, he feels like a peacock and spreads his tail - and you say, "only a fine sonnet!" Well, I am damned! Surprised myself to see your remark on my remark.¹⁹

NB: What have you opined about my poem - 'good' or 'grand'? What's the word?

Sri Aurobindo: It was good. I forgot that you didn't like "good" poetry, only 'fine' and even 'very fine'. Let us then promote it to "fine", but stop short of 'grand'.²⁰

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NB: What's your opinion on today's poem, Sir?

Sri Aurobindo: Quite successful.

NB: "Quite successful" only? When will this be followed by a little more warmth and exhilaration, can you predict?

Sri Aurobindo: Well, I can write, if you want: "Superlative! Extraordinary! Unimaginable! Surprising! Inexpressible! Ineffable!" That ought to be warm and exhilarating -²¹

NB: How is this sestet, Guru?

Sri Aurobindo: Very pleasing. (Going to use new adjectives occasionally.)

NB: Some other new adjectives? Oh Lord, no! Your 'pleasing' pleases me not!

Sri Aurobindo: Dear me, dear me! I was tired of writing 'fine' and 'beautiful' (you forbid "good") and thought I was very clever in getting a variation. You are hard to please! What do you say to "nice"? "exhilarating"? "epatant", "jolt, tres jolf, "surprenant, mon cher"? Let's have some variety, sir.²²

Thus ends our chapter on Sri Aurobindo's humour on matters 'literary'. Let us now pass on to the chapter on the poet-maker's humour.

REFERENCES

NB. For what the abbreviations stand for please consult Bibliography on page 439.

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