CLASSICAL AND ROMANTIC
Classical and Romantic
AN APPROACH THROUGH SRI AUROBINDO
AMAL KIRAN (K. D. SETHNA)
SRI AUROBINDO ASHRAM
PONDICHERRY
First published 1997
(Typeset in 10.5/13 Palatino)
©Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1997
Published by and Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press
Pondicherry - 605 002
PRINTED IN INDIA
(0660/14.1.95/500)
We were doing Coleridge's Kubla Khan in the first year Poetry Class at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education in Pondicherry. When we had recovered enough from the intoxication of reading it and could ask critical questions, the very first and the most general and fundamental that arose were apropos of the line:
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted...
They were, "What exactly does the epithet 'romantic' mean here? And how does it reflect the mind of the movement in English and Continental literature called Romanticism as distinguished from the other called Classicism - Romanticism of which Kubla Khan is itself considered one of the quintessential products?"
These two questions were immediately followed by a third, "What has Sri Aurobindo written about those movements?" The teacher gave a series of talks, taking the views of a well-known English critic as his point of departure and, in the course of his discussion, touching on the opinions of some other writers of our day. As the aim was not to exhaust the contributions of modern critical thought, several pronouncements of fair interest in themselves were bypassed, and mainly an attempt made to put together, develop and apply the leading insights of Sri Aurobindo.
An expanded version of this attempt constitutes the present book. As Sri Aurobindo is not only a scholar in. many languages, a penetrating literary critic, a far-reaching philo-sophical thinker and a profound poet but also a master of spiritual illumination, a guide to the all-round inner development which he terms the Integral Yoga, it has been felt that concentration on an approach to the subject of "Classical" and "Romantic" through him is most likely to yield what is new as well as true.
K.D.S.
1962
1
The complexity of the problem - the approach through Sri Aurobindo - the nature of poetry - the common poetic power, the differences of expression - differences of degree and of kind
Perhaps more ink has been shed in making a distinction between "Classical" and "Romantic" than on any other prob-lem in literature: already in 1936 F. L. Lucas1 could count 11,397 books, including his own. Once even some blood was about to be shed: on the night of November 25, 1830, the theatre at Paris where Victor Hugo's Romantic play Hernani was first shown became a roaring cockpit of combatant critics. But not always has much light been shed: possibly the heat of the discussion was too great to leave room for sufficient light. This does not mean that no guiding conceptions have emerged. But to give them proper shape we must look more coolly than is done by protagonists of the two schools, more closely than by onlooking commentators. And we must arrive at the shape from the living essence and be aware of the specific character of the soul seeking to create and vivify the shape.
It has been found difficult to confine Romanticism and Classicism within neat and tight formulas. Picking out a number of famous names listed on the one side or the other, F.L. Lucas2 dwells at some length on this difficulty. We need not go into it in detail. We may just illustrate an aspect of it which becomes relevant by our mention of Hugo and Hernani. Lucas quotes Lascelles Abercrombie as opposing Romanticism to Realism. By Realism· Abercrombie means not the literary creed of a Zola with its insistence on crude raw life but the utilitarian habit of mipd of a Bentham. "Romanticism," he writes, "is withdrawal from outer experience to concentrate on inner experience", as in Blake or Shelley or "Cubist painting". But Lucas points out how it was Classicism which raised a clamour against outer experience if it happened to be of a
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familiar kind. The Classicists even frowned at familiar language. Was not Hugo almost mobbed for flinging the homely word "mouchoif" ("handkerchief") in the midst of his Hernani' s sentimental and sonorous alexandrines?
According to Lucas, Hugo himself in his famous preface to that early play of his, Cromwell, associates Romanticism above all with "the grotesque". Christianity, with its sense of Sin, is said to have brought melancholy into the world by making man realise the paradox of his imperfect nature: as William Watson puts it -
Magnificent out of the dust we came,
And abject from the spheres.
With the melancholy sense of that paradox grew up the sense of the grotesque and hence the habit of mingling the grotesque with the tragic or sublime. Classicism is thought to forbid this kind of mixture, but actual life is said to confirm it. For instance, after signing Charles I's death-warrant, Cromwell and another of the regicides are reported to have bespattered each other's faces with the ink on their pens! Romanticism therefore is, to Hugo, really Truthfulness, "la verite". And yet, questions Lucas, what is grotesque in Wordsworth's Highland Maid or Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci or Musset' s Nuits or Yeats's Innisfree, poems which all critics have declared to breathe the utmost Romanticism?
Or, still within the Hugoesque sphere, we may inquire in Lucas's own spirit, how the substance of these poems bears out in any marked way the definition which, in passing, he quotes from the later Hugo and which W.H. Hudson3 takes as most significant - the definition making Romanticism a part of the general movement of the later eighteenth century for the emancipation of the individual: "liberalism in literature."
In Lucas's view, Romanticism is a variety of things and often contains queer combinations. As a broad catalogue of specific qualities he4 mentions: remoteness, the sad delight of desolation, silence and the supernatural, winter and dreari-
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ness, vampirine love and stolen trysts, the flowering of passion and the death of beauty, Radcliffe horrors* and sadistic cruelty, disillusion and death and madness, the Holy Grail and battles long ago on the Border, the love of the impossible. Over against these he5 enumerates certain features distinguishing Classicism: grace, self-knowledge, self-control, the sense of form, the easy wearing of the chains of art hidden under flowers, idealism steadied by an unfaltering sense of reality, the lamp and the midnight oil rather than the wine-cup. But he refuses to draw any too sharp line between the Romantic writer and the Classical. "Romanticism," he6 says, "is indeed as old as European literature - as old as the Odyssey. It is even older." He considers the legends of Greek mythology highly Romantic, nor does Greek Romanticism end for him with the fabulous and the fantastic in Homer: imagination breaks bounds in Aeschylus, passion snaps the leash in Euripides and strange as well as violent themes are found in much Greek drama. Touches of the Romantic occur in Latin literature too - in Ovid "with his love-lorn heroines", Virgil "with his Messianic broodings and his passionate Dido", Catullus "the Roman Burns'', Propertius ''the Roman Rossetti'' .7
In giving examples of Romantic lines, Lucas8 does not only mention Wordsworth's
Lady of the Mere
Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance.
He finds the typical Romantic atmosphere in that reticently emotional line of Dante's where Francesca of Rimini, after she and her lover Paolo have come in their joint reading to a certain episode in the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, says:
quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante.
upon that day no fur did we read. ( K.D.S.)
The Romantic atmosphere is sensed also in that verse of Propertius:
• The reference is to the novels of Anne Radcliffe.
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Sunt apud infernos tot milis formosarum -
So many thousand beauties are among the Shades -
(K.D,S.)
and in those lines of Virgil:
Hie tibi mortis erant metae, domus alta sub Ida,
Lyrnesi domus alta, solo Laurente sepulchrum.
Here was the bourn of death for thee - lofty thy house
under Ida,
Lyrnesus' high-built house; in Laurentine soil thou art
buried. (K.D.S.)
The Classical Milton is said to have it -
And airy tongues that syllable men's names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses -
no less than Keats with his
magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Seeking a psychological basis for the associations which the words "Classical" and "Romantic" have for him as well as a reason for his feeling that a Classical writer can be Romantic and vice versa, Lucas takes a cue from Freud. "Much of the Freudian system may be pure moonshine", he9 remarks; but, because it emphasises "what goes on in our minds without our knowledge", he adopts for the sake of convenience its picture of the human "ego" as torn three ways between the "id", the "super-ego" and the "reality-principle". The "id" drives towards some object of desire; the "reality-principle" may cry, "It can't be done"; the "super-ego" may whisper, "It isn't done". The ego then pulls back the "id". To simplify things, it shuts its eyes to certain impulses and conflicts too difficult to
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resolve; it practises "repression", leaving them, however, to writhe unseen, so that what they do remains in the "uncon-scious". During sleep it is as if the "censor" who keeps the forbidden impulses submerged below consciousness relaxed his vigilance: the prisoners slip upward into experience as dreams, though even then they come more or less disguised to enjoy this temporary release.
"Now the lives men live and the art they make," opines Lucas,10 "depends enormously on how strict and oppressive, or relaxed and easy-going, are their sense of reality and their sense of the ideal, their consciousness and their conscience. Different periods vary widely in this - and, within periods, different individuals.... So considered, the differences between Classicism, Romanticism and Realism turn out, I think, to be differences mainly of degree; depending on the strictness with which, if we may call them so, the reality-principle and the super-ego control and censor emanations from the uncon-scious mind. The Realist writer tends to sacrifice everything to his sense of reality. The Classic, while ruthless towards some forms of unreality in the name of 'good sense', elaborately cultivates others in the name of 'good taste'; his impulses and fantasies are much more dominated by a social ideal, formed under the pressure of a finely civilized class .... The Romantic is ...a 'dreamer'. He may indeed, like a nightmare, be vividly realistic at moments. At moments he may be ruled, like the Classic, by a social ideal of conduct - partly social, at least, in its heroism and generosity, though in other ways rebelliously anti-social. But, essentially, he believes with Blake in letting his impulses and ideas run free.... If I had to hazard an Aristotelian definition of Romanticism, it might run - 'Romantic literature is a dream-picture of life; providing sustenance and fulfilment for impulses cramped by society or reality.' Whereas the world of Classicism, on the contrary, is wide awake and strictly sober."
No doubt, Lucas has caught hold of some genuine aspects of psychological truth. But he has failed to penetrate to the core of the subject. The mention of Freud in matters of poetry or art
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is itself an unpromising omen. The Freudian system emerges from the neuropathological clinic, and to transfer neuropatho-logy in a merely intenser shape to the operations and dis-coveries of poetic genius is crass folly. Such psychology ignores just the specific art-element in art, the glory and delight of the revelatory, the perfect in word and rhythm; and the subconscious or unconscious region it analyses is far too low and small. Lucas, keen as his aesthetic sensibilities are, appears to slur over this art-element. Again, though he accepts the Freudian picture not without dubbing it just an "as if",11 he seems too much impressed with the talk of submerged im-pulses and fantasies. A good deal in life - at least in the poetic phenomenon - occurs "as if" a lot more were involved.
According to Sri Aurobindo, the subconscious or the unconscious is not all that lies beyond our waking condition. He refers to the subliminal being, a hidden domain much greater, with powers like those of our own wakeful state but intenser, wider, finer, more varied, and with rarer ones too that are either absent from that state or present there only in embryo. Poetry, like all art, draws considerably on the subli-minal and discloses that domain's surprising realities in diverse patterns of image and sound. It can draw also on another domain - the superconscious - which is a diviner secrecy and ultimately the origin of all art-inspiration whether openly recognised as superconscious or no. Even modem psychology is not confined to the subconscious-or unconscious of the Freudian type. Jung's "Collective Unconscious" embraces a much richer depth of the unknown. To extend it only to the racial dimension is nothing but arbitrary and even to stop short with the universal is merely to confess the weakness of our vision. The Jungian pointer, fearlessly followed, is not solely to a farthest horizontal unknown: it is also to a far-thest unknown that is vertical - the Aurobindonian supercon-scious.
Often the two commingle in the poetic act. In addition, certain factors in the wakeful condition as well as in the processes below consciousness may lend their own colours.
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And, whatever form poetry may take, essentially its whole style and rhythm, Sri Aurobindo tells us, belong to our inmost self and employ the rest of our personality, outer or inner, as an instrument: the style and rhythm of poetry" are the expression and movement which come from us out of a certain spiritual excitement caused by a vision in the soul of which it is eager to deliver itself".12 He goes on to say: "The vision may be of anything in Nature or God or man or the life of creatures or the life of things." Yet what stamps poetic speech with a marvellous inevitability and absoluteness comes, according to him, through the soul-stress. The concept of the soul as the true centre of our physical, vital and mental existence both in outward functions and subliminal motions is necessary to mark the luminous creative joy - maker of significant forms of flawless beauty - that is the essence of art. And the stress of the soul represents in our personal being the original impulsion of the superconscious and transmits it in one psychological garb or another. "A divine Ananda, a delight interpretative, creative, revealing, formative - one might say, an inverse reflection of the joy which the universal Soul has felt in its great release of energy when it rang out into the rhythmic forms of the universe the spiritual truth, the large interpretative idea, the life, the power, the emotion of things packed into its original creative vision - such spiritual joy is that which the soul of the poet feels and which, when he can conquer the human difficulties of his task, he succeeds in pouring also into all those who are prepared to receive it. And this delight is not merely a godlike pastime; it is a great formative and illuminative power."13
One other citation from Sri Aurobindo may be made to indicate the general lines of his outlook on poetic inspiration. "What we mean by inspiration is that the impetus to poetic creation and utterance comes to us from a superconscient source above the ordinary mentality, so that what is written seems not to be the fabrication of the brain-mind, but something more sovereign breathed or poured in from above. That is the possession by the divine enthousiasmos of witch plato has
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spoken. But it is seldom that the whole word leaps direct from that source, that cavern of natal light ready-shaped and with the pure stamp of its divine origin, - ordinarily it goes through some secondary process in the brain-mind itself, gets its impulse and unformed substance perhaps from above, but subjects it to an intellectual or other earthly change; there is in that change always indeed some superior power born of the excitement of the higher possession, but also some alloy too of our mortality. And the character, value and force of the word of the poet vary according to the action of those parts of our mentality which dominate in the change, - the vital mind, the emotional temperament, the imaginative or reflective intellect or the higher intuitive intelligence.... But also there is in us a direct medium between that divine and this human mentality, an intuitive soul-mind supporting the rest, which has its share both in the transmission and the formal creation, and it is where this gets out into overt working, discloses its shaping touch or makes heard its transmitting voice that we get the really immortal tones of speech and heights of creation. And it is in the epochs when there is in the mind of the race some enthusiastic outburst or some calm august action of this intuitive power, intermediary of the inspiration of the spirit or its revelations, that make the great ages of poetry."14
By way of illustrating his statement Sri Aurobindo15 tells us: "In English literature this period was the Elizabethan. Then the speech of poetry got into it a ring and turn of direct intuitive power, a spontaneous fullness of vision and divine fashion in its utterance which it had not at all before and has hardly had afterwards. Even the lesser poets of the time are touched by it, but in Shakespeare it runs in a stream and· condenses to a richly-loaded and crowding mass of the work and word of the intuition almost unexampled in any poetry. The difference can be measured by taking the work of Chaucer or of subsequent poets almost at their best and of Shakespeare at a quite ordinary level and feeling the effect on the poetic listener in our own intuitive being."
Sri Aurobindo takes Chaucer's line -
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He was a verray parfit gentil knight -
to which for completer comparison with Shakespeare we may add from Chaucer the three other lines of the same passage, about that knight's noble deeds:
At mortal batailles hadde he bene fiftene
And foughten for our faith at Tramissene
In listes thryes, and ay slain his fo...
Now pass from "Chaucer with his easy adequate limpidity" to "Shakespeare's rapid seizing of the intuitive inevitable word and the disclosing turn of phrase which admits us at once to a direct vision of the thing he shows us"16 - Othello's account of his military life:
Of moving accidents by flood and field,
Of hair-breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach;
Of being taken by the insolent foe...
There "with quite as simple a thing to say and a perfect force of directness in saying it, it is yet a vastly different kind of directness".17 "It is not merely a difference of the measure of the genius, but of its source. This language of Shakespeare's is a unique and wonderful thing; it has everywhere the royalty of the sovereign intuitive mind looking into and not merely at life" with a "readiness to get through, seize the lurking word and bring it out from the heart of the thing itself.. .. We are most readily struck in Shakespeare by the lines and passages in which the word thus seized and brought out is followed swiftly on the heels by another and another of its kind, many crowding together or even fused and run into each other in a single phrase of many suggestions, - for this manner is peculiarly his own and others can only occasionally come near to it. Such passages recur to the mind as those in the soliloquy on sleep or the well-known lines in Macbeth,
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Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart.
His is often a highly imaged style, but Shakespeare's images are not, as with so many poets, decorative or brought in to enforce and visualise the intellectual sense, they are more immediately revelatory, intimate to the thing he speaks and rather the proper stuff of the fact itself than images. But he has too a clearer, less crowded, still swifter fashion of speech in which they are absent; for an example,
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word, -
which has yet the same deep and penetrating intuitive spirit in its utterance. Or the two manners meet together and lean on each other, -
I have lived long enough; my way of life
Is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf,
or become one, as in the last speeches of Antony, -
I am dying, Egypt, dying; only
I here importune death awhile, until
Of many thousand kisses the poor last
I lay upon thy lips.
But all have the same characteristic stamp of the intuitive mind rapidly and powerfully at work. .."18
And if we accept in its total import the nature of this intuitive mind that makes poetic speech at its intensest "the unity of a divine rhythmic movement with a depth of sense and a power of infinite suggestion welling up directly from the fountain-heads of the spirit within us"19 we cannot help
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emphasising that the so-called "reality-principle" does not weigh decisively with the true poet.
To him it is infantile to restrict the real to outward reality: his very breath of life is to transcend external consciousness and circumstance, just as it is a necessity for him never to stop content with mere feigning or fiction. In Sri Aurobindo's words:20 "The essential poetic imagination... is creative, not of either the actual or the fictitious, but of the more and most real; it sees the spiritual truth of things, - of this truth too there are many gradations, - which may take either the actual or the ideal for its starting-point." The aim of poetry, as of all art, is neither a photographic imitation of sensible things nor a fanciful furnishing or painting of them, but an interpretation by the images Nature "affords us not on one, but on many planes of her creation, of that which she conceals from us, but is ready, when rightly approached, to reveal".21 To allow the outward or objective to rule one's motives and ideas is to be a scientist, not an artist. The outer or objective is to the artist a source of interest as a mould of expression of an inner life and spirit: he is not concerned primarily with its process and machinery and the mechanic law of things. Always the natural world and the human drama call him to their depths through his own inner psychology. Even modem "realistic" art, which claims to give us a scientifically accurate presentation of life, exceeds the demands of outward things and starts from an inner view and, in consonance with subjective . claims of temperament and imaginative penchant, makes an arbitrary selection of motives, forms and hues, even as idealistic art makes a different selection. Of course, a certain objectivity is needed to make poetry live and the thing seen stand out before our eyes, but the creation is always out of the poet's self and not out of what he externally sees: "that outward seeing only serves to excite the inner vision to its work."22 The Classical poet - a Sophocles or a Virgil - no less than the Romantic has his mind environed by much more than the immediate physical reality, by even much more than the physical universe he imagines in his drama or epic: invisible powers of the sub-
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jective being, spiritual presences beyond the activities of men and of the elements are part of the reality-principle to which he stirs. Not that Lucas's view, of the relation either between material sensible actuality and the Classical poet or between this actuality and the Romantic, is quite off the mark. But it must be taken in the midst of diverse considerations and not too narrowly.
Further, Lucas in judging the differences between Romanticism and Classicism to be mainly of degree forgets that, except when in fact the Romantic and the Classical are blended as at times in certain poets, the Romantic moment of the Classical writer remains fundamentally Classical and so too the other way about. There is a basic difference which is not defined by mere theme or even mood - it is something in the manner of the vision, the disposition of the word, the run of the rhythm. The distracted Oedipus of Sophocles may resemble the mad Lear of Shakespeare, but they are caught in poetry of two distinct orders and neither theme nor mood can make Sophocles Romantic or Shakespeare Classical. Similarly, Dante rests Classical for all his poignancy and sensitivity. Lucas23 himself feels that though he has called several things in Greek poetry Romantic he would like not to exaggerate; for Homer and Aeschylus never sound the extreme Romantic note that is heard in Spenser and Marlowe, while Catullus in even his "Romantic frenzy" is still "Classically clear". Could we argue that impulses and fantasies were not as much at work? Should we put Aeschylus, for instance, below any Elizabethan in sheer imaginative fury? Lucas24 writes: "The rumour went that Aeschylus dipped his pen in the wine-pot. His imagery was so undisciplined. He roared like a bull, they said, piled up phrases like towers, talked mountains." How is it then that he, as Lucas25 admits, "never outrages common sense or common taste like Marlowe"? Nor is it that the Greek poets conceived of their art tamely: they felt it to be a storm sent into them by Heaven, a divine madness. The theory of God-given inspiration has entered European culture through the Greeks, and surely such inspiration - whether it blow in a continuous
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sweep or with a gradual and intermittent gust, whether it rush unbidden or answer a call - is a matter of depths, of ultimately what Sri Aurobindo terms the soul. To change the metaphor: something of the nectar quaffed by the immortals flows through Classical poetry no less than Romantic, and if the intoxication shows less flush in the former and if the enthou-siasmos even of an Aeschylus or of a Milton works with a hand that never trembles, the world of true Classicism cannot yet be described as "strictly sober". The more tempered look, the less agitated gesture, the suggestion of the lamp and the midnight oil rather than the wine-cup can only be hit off by a paradoxical phrase like "sober ecstasy", suggesting the exhilaration of one who, though deeply drinking of some luminous liquor, is still coolly able to carry it. The function of poetry, as Longinus who had nothing save Classicism before him recognised centuries ago, is neither to teach nor merely to please: it is to impassion and to transport. And does not a Classical poet himself, Milton, support Longinus? "It is probably by no accidental conjunction," writes M. H. Abrams,26 "that Milton, immediately after referring to Longinus (apparently for the first time in England) went on to introduce the pithy phrase that poetry is 'more simple, sensuous and passionate than rhetoric'."
But the glow of soul on the lips that is poetry can vary and, as between the Classical and the Romantic, the variation is covered more distinctly, widely, fundamentally in certain observations of Sri Aurobindo than in Lucas's "Aristotelian definition", acute as the latter is in several respects. Apart from being based on a psychology more developed than Freud's monotonous raking of the mire in search for the roots of the Goddess Saraswati's Lotus, these observations take the term "Romantic" itself outside the narrow historical and psycho-logical concept given it by Lucas who restricts it to the movement started at the end of the eighteenth century and regards as an anticipation of Romanticism whatever in Euro-pean literature reached in that movement its fullness in the direction of "dream-life", "spontaneous feeling", "liberation of the less conscious levels of the mind".
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References
1.The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (Cambridge), First Edition 1936; Latest Edition 1954, p. 4.
2.Ibid., pp. 9-14.
3.An Outline of English Literature (London), 1956, p. 171.
4.Lucas, op. cit., pp. 24-25.
5.Lucas, op. cit., p. 28.
6.Ibid., p. 55.
7.Ibid, p. 56.
8. Ibid, pp. 20-21.
9. Ibid., p. 30.
10.Ibid., pp. 31, 33, 35-36.
11.Ibid., p. 30.
12.The Future Poetry and Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry), 1972, pp. 14-15.
13.Ibid., p. 10.
14.Ibid, pp. 167-168.
15.Ibid, p. 168.
16.Ibid.
17.Ibid., p. 169.
18.Ibid., pp. 169-170.
19.Ibid., p. 14.
20.Ibid., p. 25.
21.Ibid.
22.Ibid., p. 34.
23.Lucas, op. cit., pp. 65, 87-88.
24.Ibid., p. 60.
25.Ibid., p. 65.
26.The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, 1953), p. 348 note 12.
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2
The "planes" of poetic expression - the psychological plane of Classicism: the creative Intelligence - the four phases of Classicism
We have quoted Sri Aurobindo as saying that the poet, by means of the images Nature affords us not on one but on many planes of her creation, aims essentially at interpreting what she conceals from us but is ready, when rightly approached, to reveal. "Many planes of creation" - it is through such a vision of things that we get Sri Aurobindo's formula of Classical and Romantic. But how shall we understand a plane of creation? We need not go into metaphysics: it is here sufficient for us to concentrate on the psychological aspect.
The variety of planes and the differences among them can be understood if we note what levels of experience the art-creating soul-stress and soul-sight may be employed to pre-sent in poetic form. We have already learnt from Sri Aurobindo of the change undergone by the divine enthousiasmos of poetic power when it passes through the mind after the intuitive soul has served as its inmost medium. He has pointed to various parts of our mentality dominating in the change. On these parts he1 has written elsewhere in general: "We take little account of the psychology of poetic genius and are content with saying that the word of the poet is the speech of the imagination or that he works by an inspiration. But this is an insufficient account; for imagination is of many different kinds and inspiration touches the mind at different levels and breaks out through different media before it issues through the gates of the creative imagination." Doubtless, "all poetry except that of the most outward kind, - a verse movement which is separable rather by distinction of form than power of the soul from prose, - is in its inmost inspiration and character intui-tive",2 and so one sort of poetry differs from another by "the level or the depth of the self from which the poetic intuition,
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usually modified in transmission, immediately acts"3: it differs by the intuition's "intervening psychological instrument rather than its primary initiating movement".4 The most common among the many dissimilar levels or depths of the self, serving as intervening psychological instruments, are named by Sri Aurobindo the subtle-physical, the vital and the mental planes. Beyond these are the rarely exploited planes where the inwardness necessary to all poetry plunges or rises to the directly mystical and spiritual consciousness.
Since man is typically a mental being and Sri Aurobindo speaks of inspiration touching the mind at different levels, we should more correctly say that man's poetry usually comes from the subtle-physical mind or the vital mind or the intellectual mind. The last is the mind proper, the first two are the mind functioning as what we may broadly term "sense" and "heart" in distinction from "thought".
The subtle-physical, the vital and the mental planes to which these terms point may be more clearly distinguished by the uses to which the "spiritual excitement" that all poetry starts from is put in the transmission. It may be used, says Sri Aurobindo,5 "to give a deeper and more luminous force and a heightened beauty to the perceptions of outward life or to the inner but still surface movements of emotion and passion or the power of thought to perceive certain individual and universal truths which enlighten or which raise to a greater meaning the sensible appearances of the inner and outer life of Nature and man".
The mystical and spiritual planes come into play "when the mind of man begins to see more intimately the forces behind life, the powers concealed by our subjective existence, and the poet can attempt to reveal them more directly or at least to use the outward physical and vital and thought symbol only as a suggestion of greater things".6 More fully do these planes manifest "when the soul in things comes nearer to man or other worlds than the physical open themselves to him".7 These planes attain their entire liberation in poetic form when the Divine, the Infinite, the Eternal, the One Self of all is either
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the possession of the poet or else at least find the poet sufficiently receptive to their very body and beauty, as it were, for them to put by their veils and fill moment after flashing moment of his creative speech.
Of course, in poetry of all kinds, sense, heart and thought no less than the basic soul-intuitiveness and the Spirit's original afflatus are concerned, so that all the planes function together; but this or that element, the power typical of one plane or another may be the matrix and determinant, the remainder acting in terms of its psychological bent and texture. In Sri Aurobindo's view, there is always a determinant matrix though there is no absolute fixity and an alteration of such a matrix is never quite ruled out. Every poet has on the whole an enduring cast of being, a persisting stand of consciousness.
And the cast, the stand are all the more enduring and persistent because they correspond mostly to the general psychological state in which the nation and the age to which he belongs happens to be. " ... the poetic vision, like everything else, follows necessarily the evolution of the human mind and, according to the age and environment, it has its levels, its ascents and descents and its returns."8 There are periods when "the eye of... man is turned upon the physical world about him, the interests of the story of life and its primary ideas and emotions; he sees man and his world only, or sees the other worlds and their gods and beings in that image also, but magnified and heightened".9 In such periods the human group and the poetry natural to it functions from the subtle-physical plane of being and consciousness. In other periods, man begins to intellectualise, but still on the same subject-matter: there is more introspection and what forces itself on his view when he turns more inward is the desire-soul with its intenser sensation and passions and then life and the world are seen with a new quivering sensitiveness and colourful longing. The human group living thus and the poetry appealing to its imagination through the sense-mind and the emotions have their being and consciousness deployed from the vital plane. In still other periods man is not content to let thought be involved in the
Page 17
desire-soul but detaches it and needs to know from a freer height what life and world and his own existence are: he tries with a calmer eye "to probe, analyse, get the law and cause and general and particular rule of himself and Nature".10 Then the human group and its poetry move on the mental plane: that is to say, the movement of their being and consciousness is to interpret outward and inward existence to the reasoning intelli-gence.
Most poetry is either of the subtle-physical, the vital or the mental plane - and most poetry, by the very turn of the human psychological constitution, has a prevalent plane, a single determinant matrix, that is mental or vital or subtle-physical. Consequently, a poet is Classical or Romantic, or whatever else we may designate him, according as he articu-lates habitually from a particular plane. And since a plane is something more definite and pervasive than merely a parti-cular side of our complex psychology, the Classical and Romantic to Sri Aurobindo cannot be distinguished by Lucas's "difference mainly of degree". Not that they can never combine or shade off into each other. They certainly can and also there are some common powers at work in both, even as the pure poetic essence is the same on each plane. But all this does not rub away genuine dividing lines.
Sri Aurobindo's reading of the psychological plane of Classicism is evident from several remarks of his. Thus Milton's poetry, amidst the posture and gait personal to him, is, in Sri Aurobindo's eyes, "a language of intellectual thought which is of itself highly poetic without depending in the least on any of the formal aids of poetic expression except those which are always essential and indispensable, a speech which is in its very grain poetry and in its very grain intellectual thought-utterance".11And he adds: "This is always the aim of the classical poet in his style and movement." He speaks also of "the lucid, restrained, intellectual and ideal classic form, in which high or strong ideas govern and develop the presenta-tion of life and thought in an atmosphere of clear beauty and the vision of the satisfied intelligence"12 and he calls the
Page 18
achievement of this form "the greatness of the Greek and Latin poets" who are the prototypes of Classicism. The plane of consciousness from which these ancients write is, to use another phrase of Sri Aurobindo's, "the creative poetic intelli-gence"13 and all Classical work done since bears the stamp of the same origin: "most classical poetry," says Sri Aurobindo,14 "is fundamentally poetry of the pure poetic intelligence." Broadly, Classicism is "the clear and straightforward expres-sion of thought with a just, harmonious and lucid turn".15 It "insists on the presentation of life, but for the purposes of thought; its eye is on the universal truths and realities of which it is the visible expression" .16 On the side of form, as a result of the type of intellectual power at work, the particular, though never effaced, is taken up into the general; and details, though never suppressed, are subdued to the whole.
But Classical poetry, we must remember, is not the sole possible product of the creative intelligence. The mind of thought can be different from what it is in this poetry. We have spoken of "the type of intellectual power at work" in Classi-cism. And the type is distinguished, as we can gather from the assertions of Sri Aurobindo, by a clarity, a straightforwardness, a bare loftiness or strength, a just and harmonious presenta-tion, a restrained and tempered beauty. When the intellectual mind becomes complex and crowded, its poetry is still of the creative intelligence but it is no longer Classical.
Further, Classical poetry succeeds in being a language of intellectual thought "without detriment to the vital power of the poetic spirit and the all-seizing effect of its word" because "there is a balance maintained between thought and life, the life passing into self-observing thought and the thought returning on the life to shape it in its own vital image.... A just balance between observing thought and life is the distinctive effort of classical poetry and that endeavour gave it its stamp in Athens or Rome or in much of the epic or classical literature of ancient India".17
However, Classicism is not all of one piece within its own psychological type. In Europe it has a history of four phases.
Page 19
The first and prototypal, the Graeco-Roman phase, especially in its Greek spirit, is marked by what Sri Aurobindo terms the dealing with life from a large viewpoint taken by "the inspired reason and the enlightened and chastened aesthetic sense" .18 What exactly are we to understand by "the inspired reason"? In general we may say that when the inspired reason is the medium of poetry "the external presentation of life gives place inevitably to an interpretation, a presentation in which its actual lines are either neglected or subordinated in order that some inner truth of it may emerge".19 In more detail and in the round we may consider the inspired reason to be strong thought-power seeing relations and connections between things and putting them into broad concepts to interpret the world, but a thought-power receiving some influence from agencies wider, deeper, higher than itself, an influence which it yet converts into mental terms so that ultimately it seems only the mind itself loftily inspired to a high clarity of life-vision. As for the enlightened and chastened aesthetic sense, we may take it to be the aesthetic sense which is very sensitive to the form-beauty of things but particularly the form-beauty that is general harmony, a shapely interrelated whole, and that stands forth in a sort of light satisfying the thought-mind and making a kind of chaste or poised fusion of beauty with truth - beauty in which no minutiae unduly stick out, truth in which the eye is steady upon the object yet always assimilates the external appearance into an inner interpretative presentation. This aesthetic sense operates also in the domain of emotion; it is itself a subtle feeling giving fineness to all other feelings and keeping the emotional nature within bounds, exercising ex-quisite "taste" and happy "measure" in matters of the heart and the passions, a smiling control and a shaping propriety over the elan of assertive individuality.
The chief names usually listed in Graeco-Roman Classicism are Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil and Lucretius. These six, all things considered, are indeed greater than the brilliant sextet: Pindar, Simonides, Sappho, Horace, Catullus, Ovid. There need be no quarrel on this score. But does
Page 20
Homer belong exactly to the same pychological plane as the others put with him? If we associate him with them it must be with a small reservation derived from Sri Aurobindo's insight. Sri Aurobindo, in the interests of accuracy, regards Homer as a poet not of the creative intelligence but of the subtle-physical plane at its work of creation. Homer's is a poetry of external life: he is the singer of man at the stage when "he turns first his view on the outward physical world and on his own life of outward action and concentrates on that or throws into its mould his life-suggestions, his thought, his religious idea, and, if he arrives at some vision of an inner spiritual truth, he puts even that into forms and figures of the physical life and physical Nature".20 "A primitive epic bard like Homer," Sri Aurobindo has said, "thinks only by the way and seems to be carried constantly forward in the stream of his strenuous action and to cast out as he goes only so much of surface thought and character and feeling as obviously emerges in a strong and single and natural speech and action."21 Such a poet does not typify the mental plane, even as he does not typify the plane of the Life-force - or, rather, since man is characteristically a mental being, we should say that Homer's is the subtle-physical mind and not the vital mind or the mind proper. But, as Sri Aurobindo observes, poetry "can reach great heights in this kind of mental mould, can see the physical forms of the gods, lift to a certain greatness by its vision and disclose a divine quality in even the most obvious, material and .outward being and action of man; and in this type we have Homer".22
Homer thus is not supreme in the strict Classical category where the eye of the poet rises to the clarities and widenesses of a thought which intimately perceives and understands life. As a result, his effect on the cultural consciousness of ancient Greece through his two epics was different from that of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides through their dramas. To quote Sri Aurobindo again: "The epic poems revealed the Hellenic people to itself in the lucid and clear nobility and beauty of an uplifting of life and an aesthetic sense of the humanity and divinity of man; the later art and poetry inter-
Page 21
preted to Athens her religious ideas, her thought, her aesthetic instincts, the soul of grandeur and beauty of her culture."23 But we may note that something of the essential Greek soul operates in Homer in the same way as in the later art and poetry. Lucidity, clarity, a high and fine delight of the beautiful are the features common to him and his successors, however dissimilar the planes from which he and they make poetry. There is another feature too that has to be considered. He has not their high and active intelligence nor their unremitting "high seriousness". He has a certain comedic or realistic vein which links him to Chaucer who also is a poet of outward character and act. There is the comic relief of "things like the burlesque life on Olympus, or Irus the beggar, or Ajax slipping in the offal";24 and there is the realism of Homer's humbler folk. Not that the later mind of Greece was divorced from laughter or from depiction of low life; the Greeks of the time of Aeschylus and Sophocles "staged a burlesque after each tragic trilogy",25 but they never mixed the genres. What, however, akins Homer to them is that nothing in his epics is allowed to be "fantastic enough to endanger the seriousness of the whole"26 and the low-life realism "is never in danger of making ridiculous the heroic side of his story. Thersites is speedily silenced; the swineherd of Odysseus remains 'the god-like swineherd', himself a king's son".27 More important still, Homer, unlike Chaucer, is no observer of external life "without any preoccupying idea, without any ulterior design, simply as it reflects itself in the individual mind and temperament of the poet":28 he is moved to reveal and idealise and thus, in a broad sense, to interpret and not merely present. "When we read the Iliad or the Odyssey, we are not really upon this earth, but on the earth lifted into some plane of a greater dynamis of life, and so long as we remain there we have a greater vision in a more lustrous air and we feel ourselves raised to a semi-divine stature."29 Again: "... it is the adventures and trials and strength and courage of the soul of man in Odysseus which makes the greatness of the Odyssey and not merely the vivid incident and picturesque surrounding circumstance, and it is
Page 22
the clash of great and strong spirits with the gods leaning down to participate in their struggle which makes the greatness of the Iliad and not merely the action and stir of battle."30 Yet again: "Homer with all his epic vigour of outward presentation does not show us the heroes and their deeds before Troy in their actuality as they really were to the normal vision of men, but much rather as they were or might have been to the vision of the gods."31
This vision is not of the intense vital plane, turning everything into moved thought and emotion and sensation of the life-soul, carried forward in its own passionate surge, nor is here the mind-soul's climbing to a freer height to get a clear and detached idea of life's workings, man seeking "to domi-nate his emotions and vital intuitions and see with the calm eye of his reason, to probe, analyse, get at the law and cause and general and particular rule of himself and Nature" .32 Homer subjects impulse and action to no change by the vital or mental vision, but his subtle-physical sight is intuitive and interpreta-tive - and, like the mental sight of his successors, it is so "on large and comparatively bare lines dwelling only on the salient details for a first strong and provisionally adequate view".33
Considering all this and the constant play of aesthesis, we may declare that if Homer worked from the subtle-physical plane the power which he kept the least subordinated to this matrix was the inspired reason and the chastened and enlightened aesthetic sense, just as what his successors kept the least subordinated to their matrix was the perception of external life, the steady eye upon the object. By a not wholly illegitimate extension of the psychological meaning of Greek Classicism we may for our purpose deem Homer Classical.
Standing on a common basis, each of the six masters in Graeco-Roman Classicism has his own quality.* Homer is eminent by the simultaneous presence of simplicity, ampli-tude, dynamic sweep, smoothness and splendour in his style. Aeschylus brings a packed terrific sublimity, daring in colour
* Illustrative quotations at the end of the Chapter.
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and image, at once weighty and impetuous. Sophocles shines out by calm elevation and measured wideness: as Arnold puts it, he gives the impression of seeing life steadily and seeing it whole: Newman speaks of his sweet composure and melodious fullness. Euripides carries his effect by a pointed versatile ease, a piquancy wedded to deep grace and a brilliance of quick pathos. Virgil is most chiselled, most euphonious, a blend of elegance and majesty, exhibiting a charming strength, a dignified sensitivity. Lucretius comes in rushing force and grandeur winged with philosophical imaginativeness.
Classicism has a later phase which continues the Graeco-Roman spirit of poetic utterance, but in its two great names it is the philosophical intellect ruled by theology: Dante brings mediaeval Roman Catholic thought to bear upon the cosmos, Milton post-Renaissance Puritan thought to survey the uni-verse. Their ancestor, as it were, in Graeco-Roman Classicism is Lucretius of De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), but there is no theology there, rather the very opposite, an anti-religious thought based on the theories of Democritus and Epicurus, also the story-element which plays through La Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost is absent. Dante is distin-guished by a severe and concise and clear-cut force of intellect with a strong intuitive drive which affects us as much by what is left suggestively unsaid as by what is incisively articulated with a few exact significant strokes. Emotion in him is deep but firm and he commands a power of primitive symbols, a pictorial narrative ability, a rich religious fervour, a sustained artistic form as in Virgil though not so elaborate as in the author of the Aeneid whom he took for his literary master. Milton is distinguished by a complex grandeur matched with immense and copious yet controlled energy. His too is a sensuous imagination over which the shadow of a very for- malistic religious intellect falls. He is capable of superb epic creativeness when inspired, but the art often becomes no more than externally constructive, though in sheer sculpture of rhythmic word it never fails.
The next phase of Classicism is the French, mainly under
Page 24
Louis XIV. It crystallises the French poetic genius, about which Sri Aurobindo writes that it is much more limited than the Graeco-Roman, much less powerful in inspiration. "For it deals with life from the standpoint not of the inspired reason, but of the dear-thinking intellect, not of the enlightened aesthetic sense, but of emotional sentiment. These are its two constant powers; the one gives it its brain-stuff, the other its poetical fervour and appeal."34 These two motives, which are of the very essence of the French spirit, have been faithfully adhered to and therefore French Classicism has almost always found a satisfying and characteristic form by which it has exercised a great influence from time to time on other Euro-pean literatures. The difference, however, of its quality from that of the Graeco-Roman we may gauge by understanding how the dear-thinking intellect differs from the inspired reason and how emotional sentiment varies from the enlight-ened aesthetic sense. The first may be defined as intellect which depends considerably on itself, believes itself capable, un-aided, to cope with the world, becomes argumentative and demonstrative rather than inspiredly lucid. When things are seen by it in an outward "rational" clarity, it thinks it has the whole truth. It is logical and analytic, while the inspired reason is not only more synthetic but has a background of keener intuitiveness. Emotional sentiment is feeling which on one side is fervent and on the other tender; which inclines towards heroic ardour as well as towards poignant sentimentality; which is at once a strength and a weakness of emotion and is capable of warm enthusiasm no less than lax infatuation; which stands on the verge of high chivalry and also on the brink of facile tearfulness. But, all through, it is considerably touched by the temper and climate of thought and is not sheer impulse or passion. For the dear-thinking intellect tends to give us not so much creation of life as studies of it, "thought about the meaning of character and emotion and event and elaborate description rather than the living presence of these things. Passion, direct feeling, ardent emotion, sincerity of sensuous joy are chilled... and give place to a play of senti-
Page 25
ment , - sentiment which is an indulgence of the intelligent observing mind in the aesthesis, the rasa of feeling, passion, emotion, sense...."35 One step more and these latter get thinned away into "a subtle, at the end almost unreal fineness".36 No such extreme attenuation happens in French Classicism in its golden age, but the perfect balance between thought and life is not maintained with the sovereignty peculiar to Graeco-Roman Classicism. However, the poetic achievement of French Classicism is admirable enough and its two motives at their best "give us, in Corneille, "a strong nobility of character",37 a pulsing and powerful rhetoric and, in Racine, "a fine grace of poetic sentiment",38 a clear controlled poignancy. Racine is also one of the world's master artists in expression, comparable in his own way with Virgil and Milton, a much lesser way in quality yet unique for evoking poetry from language of the commonest.
The fourth phase of Classicism comes in the so-called Augustan Age of England, the age of Dryden and Pope. As Sri Aurobindo remarks: "It took for its models the Augustan poets of Rome, but it substituted for the strength and weight of the Latin manner an exceeding superficiality and triviality. It followed more readily contemporary French models, but missed... their culture, taste, tact of expression, and missed too the greater gifts of the classical French poetry...."39
contributions are satire and the mock-epic. It practises a neat, clear, pointed utterance of superficial ideas in the form of
epigrams mostly struck out with the help of antithesis. There is a masterly treatment of the shallow and the commonplace. A robust vigour and a confident driving force are nearly always at the disposal of the writers and here they excel as a rule their nearest French exemplars. Although their diction becomes .conventionalised and artificial, governed by the desire to please the urbane intellect and the decorous sentiment, some memorable moments are there of steady incisiveness and metallic mobility in Dryden and of intense archness and effective clatter in Pope. Pope's truly imaginative moments are
Page 26
no more than a few lines. In the following he seems to hit off with real vision his own tragedy as poet:
Most souls, 'tis true, but peep out once an age,
Dull, sullen prisoners in the body's cage:
Dim lights of life, that burn a length of years,
Useless, unseen, as lamps in sepulchres.
Once or twice in Dryden we even get an instance of what the dear-thinking intellect can do supremely in an external manner when a deep inspiration blows through it. The opening of Religio Laici is eighteenth-century Classicism at its purest peak of poetry.'
The artificial and conventional nature of the style in this age can at once be seen by taking any lines from Homer and putting them before Pope's translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Here are two addressed by Ulysses in surprise to Elpenor who, unknown to his leader, had fallen overboard to his death in the sea and afterwards met Ulysses in the Underworld: Homer, in as straightforward a rendering as a somewhat corresponding metrical mould allows, would run:
How hast thou come, Elpenor, under the shadowy
darkness?
Camest thou faster on foot than I in my black-hued
galley?
Pope ' works these questions into four verses of elaborate superfluities:
O say, what angry power Elpenor led
To glide in shades and wander with the dead?
How could thy soul, by realms and seas disjoined,
Outfly the nimble sail and leave the lagging wind?
Ruskin, disgusted with the falseness of such poetry, has shown in contrast the exquisite sincerity of a line of Keats's which, though with a slight Romantic touch in the style, reflects part of the surprise uttered by Ulysses:
Page 27
How cam'st thou over the unfooted sea?
Even where there is no obvious falseness the characteristic level of eighteenth-century Classicism falls below the quality both of articulation and of the mind behind the voice that belongs to the truly Classical. We have merely to pick anything representative out of Pope and set it beside a similar culling from Milton (not even necessarily from Milton at his best in Paradise Lost), in order to prove the crudeness of this Classicism. Next to the satiric, the reflective vein is most congenial to Pope, as in
Know thy own point: This kind, this due degree
Of blindness, weakness, Heaven bestows on thee.
Submit. - In this, or any other sphere,
Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear:
Safe in the hand of one disposing Power,
Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.
Let us listen to Milton in the same vein and on his own blindness, the "degree" of "weakness" bestowed by Heaven on him and perplexing him as to how "to serve therewith" his Maker:
God doth not need
Either man's work or His own gifts. Who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state
Is kingly. Thousands at His bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.
We can feel at once that Pope's wisdom is not graceful in . gesture and sounds no depths but is jauntily skimmed off the clever brain.
To appreciate true classicism in all its aspects and not only the reflective and, even in this aspect, to appreciate it in the round, we may glance at it under four heads, saying of it what
Page 28
Denham, in the antithetical fashion dear to the eighteenth century, drew as his lesson in poetry from observation of the river Thames:
Though deep, yet clear: though gentle, yet not dull:
Strong, without rage: without o'erflowing, full.
The four heads cannot always be disengaged from one another; often all of them are fused, at times some go hand in hand, but a rough division can be made and illustrated. Of course, when non-English poets are illustrated, it is the originals rather than the translations that are to be considered, though the partly free translations attempt to approach them in quality and manner.
In the deep yet clear type, we may cite that "world-cry" from Horner:
I was the son of Zeus the Cronion, yet have I suffered Infinite pain.
(K.D.S.)
Equally magnificent in its expression of a similar motive in a more picturesque style is the voice of Aeschylus's Prometheus:
Aether divine, and Winds of swiftest wing!
Founts of all rivers! All the Deeps that know
The innumerable laughter of the waves!
All-Mother Earth, Sun's circle of all-sight!
What a God bears at the hands of Gods, behold.
The Sophoclean Chorus makes a masterpiece of sweetness and light:
O let a life be mine
In word and deed both reverent and pure -
True to those Laws whose feet, for ever sure,
Page 29
Tread still the heights divine!
For Heaven alone begot them, to endure -
Not our mortality
Hath power to bid them be;
On them Oblivion's slumber hath no hold;
Yes, God is great in them, and grows not old.
(Lucas)
A paradoxical aspect of the world-scene is laid bare by Euripides's pathetic irony:
When I remember that the gods take thought
For human life, often in hours of grief
To me this faith has brought
Comfort and heart's relief.
Yet, though a wistful understanding lies
Deep in my hope, experience grows and faith recedes:
Men's fortunes fall and rise
Not answering to their deeds.
(Vellacott)
Virgil has fine firm brevities of wisdom:
Facilis descensus Avemo...
Sed revocare gradum superasque evadare ad auras,
Hoc opus, hoc labor est.
Easy the descent into Darkness;
Turning our feet and escaping back to the shining spaces -
There lies the task and that is the labour.
Dante is at once tense and tender in his profundity:
Me la bonta infinita ha si gran braccia
Che prende cio, che si rivolge a lei -
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But infinite Goodness throws out arms so wide
They gather each soul straining back to it -
or
E la sua voluntade e nostra pace.
His will alone is our tranquillity. (K.D.S.)
And there is Milton with his "organ-voice", prophet-pitched in
And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples the upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for thou know' st. Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dovelike sat'st brooding on the vast abyss
And mad'st it pregnant. What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert eternal providence,
And justify the ways of God to men -
or keyed to splendid pride in
one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
What matter where if I be still the same? -
or majestically modulating to beauty:
Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling, and inshadiest covert hid
Tunes her nocturnal note.
Corneille is stately in his penetrating practicality:
Page 31
A vaincre sans peril, on triomphe sans gloire -
Defeating without danger, one conquers without glory -
Chaque instant de la vie est un pas vers la mort.
Each moment of our life is a step towards our death.
Lastly, Dryden's sublimation in his Religio Laici, of didactic thinking, almost as of prose, by a revealingly sustained image and a suggestive atmosphere conjured up by a deft play of vowels sounds and modulating consonants, cannot be omitted:
Dim, as the borrowed beams of moon and stars
To lonely, weary, wandering travellers
Is Reason to the soul: and as on high
These rolling fires discover but the sky,
Not light us here, so Reason's glimmering ray
Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way,
But guide us upward to a better day.
And as those nightly tapers disappear
When day's bright lord ascends our hemisphere,
So pale grows Reason at Religion's sight,
So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light.
To exemplify the gentle-yet-not-dull type we may begin with Simonides whose epitaph for the Spartan dead at Thermopylae is immortal for its sensitive understatement:
Tell them at Lacedaemon, passer-by,
That here obedient to their laws we lie.
Dante brings many lines of a vivid delicacy, like these from the passage where Beatrice descends from Heaven to the soul of Virgil on Dante's behalf:
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Io son Beatrice, che ti facio andare:
Vegno di loco, ove tornar disio:
Amor me mosso, che mi fa parlare.
Beatrice am I who now thy haste beseech:
Out of a place that lures me back I come:
Love brought me here and love impels my speech.
Milton has the famous passage:
Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise, or blame, nothing but well and fair,
And what may quiet us in a death so noble,
or this softly attractive simile:
Innumerable as the stars of night
Or stars of morning, dew-drops which the Sun
Impearls on every leaf and every flower,
or that smoothly defunctive music with which his epos ends:
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow
Through Eden took their solitary way.
Coreille has many a calm yet concise adequacy like
Cette obscure clarte qui tombe des Etoiles -
This shadowy light that falls here from the stars.
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Racine commands some remarkable effects, incantatory yet the gentlest:
Dans 1'orient desert quel devient mon ennui.
In the desert orient how my weariness grew!
(KD.S.)
Geoffrey Brereton says that this phrase comes without any hyperbole, on your own level, and has you by the throat before you can reflect. Perfect too in suave directness is the couplet:
Belle sans ornement, dans le simple appareil
D'une beaute qu'on vient d'arracher au sommeil.
Lovely with not one ornament, in the simple sweep
Of a beauty that has just been startled out of sleep.
For the strong-without-rage type, nothing can be better than Homer on the priest of Apollo returning with bitter thoughts after Agamemnon's refusal to give him back his captured daughter:
Silent he walked by the shore of the many-rumoured
Ocean -
(Sri Aurobindo)
or the subsequent description of the Sun-God himself as he descended towards the Greek camp to avenge the wrong done to his worshipper - a description rhythmed out with a poised irresistibleness and imaged with an audacious simplicity:
Down from the peaks of Olympus he came, wrath vexing
his heart-strings,
Over his shoulders carrying arrows and double-packed
quiver,
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And, with the speed of his moving, his silver bow shaken
about him
Clanged, and he came like the Night.
(K.D.S. - the first line from Sri Aurobindo)
Then take those terrible yet beautiful words of Clytemnestra in Aeschylus after she has thrown an embroidered robe upon her husband in his bath and killed him. She lifts the blood-stained robe and says:
Round him I flung, like a fishing-net escapeless,
These folds of fatal splendour; then I struck
Twice - and with twice-repeated cry of woe
His limbs gave way beneath him; where he fell,
A third time yet I hewed him, as in prayer
And sacrifice to the infernal Zeus,
Deliverer of the dead.
So on the earth he gasped his life away,
And from his lips burst forth a gush of blood,
That splashed me, like a shower of dark red rain;
And I rejoiced in it as wheat grows glad
With heaven's moisture, when the ear is born.
Lucretius is stupendous at times, as in those phrases where he describes the philosopher Epicurus, of whom he was a disciple, triumphing over the crude superstitions of popular religion that blocked the way of rational investigation:
Ergo vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra
Processit longe flammantia moenia mundi
Atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque
.
Therefore his vivid vigour of mind stood everywhere
victor;
Forward afar beyond the world's flaming walls he ventured,
Page 35
Crossing the measureless span of the all with his thought
and his dreaming.
Virgil can make us hear the very gates of the Gods swing formidably on their hinges:
Panditur interea domus omnipotenti Olympi.
Wide-open lay by that hour the house of omnipotent
Olympus.
Dante's restrained energy can be shown in countless lines: here is he invoking Apollo, the vanquisher of the uncouth presumptuous Marsyas:
Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue
Si come quando Marsia traesti
Della vagina delle membre sue.
Enter within my bosom and there breathe
The self-same power you had of singing when
You tore Marsyas from his body's sheath.
Milton teems with strength, large-swept as in
Millions of spirits for his fault amerced
Of Heaven and from Eternal Splendour flung
For his revolt, yet faithful how they stood,
Their glory withered. As, when Heaven's fire
Hath scathed the forest oaks or mountain pines,
With singed top their stately growth though bare
Stands on the blasted heath -
or dose-gathered as in
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Fall'n Cherub, to be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering -
or brief-cut as in
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.
Corneille provides many an occasion of dignified force, like
Rome n'est plus dans Rome, elle est toute ou je suis -
Rome is no more in Rome, it stands wherever I am -
or, in the opposite vein,
Je rends graces aux Dieux de n'etre pas Romain,
Pour conserver encore quelque chose d'humain.
I give my thanks unto the Gods that I am no Roman
But still within me keep some touches of the human.
The full-without-overflowing type may be instanced from the hexameters close on the opening of Homer's Odyssey:
Many the woes in his soul he suffered driven on the waters,
Fending from fate his life and the homeward course of his
comrades.
Them even so he saved not, for all his desire and his
striving,
Who by their own infatuate madness piteously perished,
Fools in their hearts! for they slew the herds the deity
pastured,
Helios high-climbing, but he from them reft their return
and the daylight.
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Virgil is the sovereign hand at this type, briefly marvellous:
O passi graviora! dabit deus his quoque finem -
Fiercer griefs you have suffered: to these too God will give
ending -
Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore -
Forth did they stretch their hands with love of the shore
beyond them -
or the verse that Arnold Bennett used to consider the most
musical in all poetry:
Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem.
Grief that no words can utter, O Queen, thou bid'st me
re-waken.
Dante also specialises in this genre - with a greater severity, his heart breaking yet backbone firm:
Tu proverai si come sa di sale
Lo pane altrui e com'e duro calle
Lo scendere e'l salir 1'altrui scale.
How bitter another's bread is, thou shalt know
By tasting it: and how hard to the feet
Another's stairs are, up and down to go.
(Laurence Binyon)
Milton the stern Puritan springs several surprises of the
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utmost poignancy held on the rein: those lines Arnold admired to excess for their closing sequence of long vowels, most of them in slow limping monosyllables enforcing the pathos of the sense:
Not that fair field
Of Enna where Proserpin gathering flowers,
Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis
Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world,
or the passage on the poet's own blindness:
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine -
also the phrases about the blind Samson, intensely subjective in
Dark, dark, dark amid the blaze of noon,
intensely objective in
Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves.
Racine is well-known for achieving with the most ordinary vocabulary, plainly set forth, a moving exquisiteness for which the Romantics and even other Classical writers need more elaborate means:
Ariane, ma soeur, de quel amour blessee,
Vous mourutes aux bords ou vous futes laissee?
Ariane, my sister, by what Jove's deep hurt
Died'st thou upon this shore that all desert?
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A little less subdued, he has still an essential simplicity as of conversation:
Impitoyable Dieu, toi seul as tout conduit.
God without pity, none but thou brought all to pass.
Even a shade of colour does not lessen the same heart-shatter-ing' directness and candour:
J' ai senti son beau corps tout froid entre mes bras.
I felt her beautiful body all cold within my arms.
1.
Sri Aurobindo, The Future
20.
Ibid., p. 190.
Poetry, p. 167.
21.
Ibid., p. 225.
2.
Ibid., p. 269.
22.
3.
Ibid.
23.
Ibid., p. 245.
4.
24.
Lucas, op. cit., p. 81.
5.
Ibid., p. 90.
25.
Ibid., p. 83.
6.
Ibid., p. 36.
26.
Ibid., p. 81.
7.
27.
Ibid., p. 82.
8.
28.
Ibid., p. 60.
9.
29.
Ibid., pp. 61-62.
10.
Ibid., p. 191.
30.
Ibid., pp. 225-26.
11.
Ibid., pp. 83-84.
31.
Ibid., p. 230.
12.
32.
13.
Ibid., p. 292.
33.
14.
Ibid., p. 343.
34.
Ibid., p. 46.
15.
Ibid., p. 86.
35.
Ibid., p. 227.
16.
Ibid., p. 54.
36.
17.
Ibid., pp. 226-27.
37.
Ibid., p. 87.
18.
38.
19.
Ibid., p. 65.
39.
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3
Romanticism and Classicism - the two phases of Roman-ticism - the psychological plane of the first phase: the Life-force of the Renaissance
When we turn to Romanticism we need to make two capital distinctions. We have not only to mark Romanticism off from Classicism. We have also to mark off two Romanticisms one from the other - and in a sense in which we do not mark off the various phases of the Classical. Differentiating Romanticism from Classicism, R. A. Scott-James1 labels as Classical the virtues and defects which go with the notions of fitness, propriety, measure, restraint, conservatism, authority, calm, experience, comeliness and in contrast he labels as Romantic those which are suggested by excitement, energy, restlessness, spirituality, curiosity, troublousness, progress, liberty, experi-ment, provocativeness. If Scott-James is accepted superficially, Classicism would seem to be a pretty tame affair and Romanticism rather hectic, even the spirituality attributed to it appearing dubious by being sandwiched between restlessness and curiosity. No doubt, the qualities mentioned are there, but in isolation from several others they look somewhat hap-hazard.
Thus it is a mistake to confine energy to Romanticism. If Homer and Aeschylus, Lucretius and Milton are not energetic, then one does not know what energy can mean. Only, theirs is an energy more contained, more organised than in the Roman-tics. Again, to give spirituality to Romanticism without grant-ing anything analogous to Classicism is to forget what a living sense of powers beyond the human is at work in the Greek poets as well as in Dante and Milton: Classicism is hardly a secular poetry in the ordinary sense of secularity. Also, we must guard against the misconception that a poet writing with restraint and calm and comeliness is debarred from being spiritual. Spirituality is possible to all temperaments and in all
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manners. Further, Romanticism cannot be spiritual by simply cultivating the excitement and liberty which are supposed to be absent from Classicism. If it becomes spiritual it is precisely by ceasing to be nerve-ridden or merely defiant of authority and by drawing upon possibilities of a subtle inner force and a subtle inner freedom. All we can say is that Classicism, as we historically know it, has been religious rather than spiritual because of the particular plane of consciousness within which it has functioned.
Historically, Classicism may be fully defined by three categories together. In manner of articulation, it is unorna-mented, measured, finished, attentive to the total effect. In turn of mind, it is systematic, lucid, beautifully general, broadly keen - its spirit is, as Sri Aurobindo2 says, "to bring out what is universal and subordinate individual expression to universal truth and beauty". In range of vision, it is mostly restricted to the intellect's power of seeing and comprehend- ing: what is beyond the intellect it does not intimately or directly touch: it goes by a religious thought and feeling rather than a spiritual perception close to the supra-intellectual reality. In that sense it is not "visionary". But, because it is not thus "visionary", it does not work by a process of the intellect: as Sri Aurobindo3 reminds us, it works just as much as Romanticism by "a large vision and inspiration", else it could be no more than pseudo-Classical, mere aestheticised intellec- tuality and not creative and interpretative art. On the other hand, all Romanticism is not visionary in the spiritual connotation. What can be called visionary in it is its soaring off easily into fantasy and wonder: its attraction towards the fantastic and the wondrous, however, keeps it more free than Classicism to exceed the limits of outer reality and develop an acuter inner sight and tend towards spiritual visionariness. Its power to do . this comes from its source's lying not in the creative Intel- ligence that is Classicism's plane or at least not in that part of this Intelligence where Classicism sees and comprehends. And the range of vision it enjoys is articulated in a manner that is coloured, expansive, wilful, enamoured of parts and particu-
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lars. Its turn of mind is saltatory and insatiate, strangely sug-gestive, passionately gripping, breaking onward from point after intensely seized point - its spirit is, as Sri Aurobindo4 declares, "to bring out what is striking and individual, and this it often does so powerfully or with so vivid an emphasis as to throw into the background of its creation the universal, on which yet all true art romantic or classical builds and fills in its forms".
Apropos of setting forth the universal or throwing into relief the striking and individual, Sri Aurobindo,5 with his wonted integrality of outlook, continues: "In truth, all great art has carried in it both a classical and a romantic as well as a realistic element, - understanding realism in the sense of the prominent bringing out of the external truth of things, not the perverse inverted romanticism of the 'real' which brings into exaggerated prominence the ugly, common or morbid and puts that forward as the whole truth of life. The type of art to which a great creative work belongs is determined by the prominence it gives to one element and the subdual of the others into subordination to its reigning spirit." The promi-nence, we may add, is itself determined by the plane of consciousness from which a poet habitually writes, and the plane keeps him Classical or Romantic in essence despite the opposite strain which to some degree is always there because of every human being's multi-planed existence.
So much for marking off Classicism and Romanticism from each other. What of the two Romanticisms we have mentioned? No doubt, they are bound to have more themes and moods in common than Classicism shares with either. How- ever, we must not be careless of a basic dissimilarity between the two manifestations of the Romantic - basic because, while the several manifestations of the Classical differ within the same plane, the early Romanticism belongs to a plane quite different from that of the later.
According to Sri Aurobindo, the historical mainspring of the early Romanticism is, paradoxically, the event known as "the Classical Renaissance": This phrase has led astray many a
Page 43
literary generalisation. It got coined because the event to which it applies occurred when the scholars of Classicism whose centre was Constantinople were scattered all over Europe with their precious manuscripts after the fall of that city to the Turks in 1453 and, by giving the right direction, completed a movement which had already started sporadically and on a small scale before them. These scholars and their books are said to have brought about a rebirth of the Graeco-Roman spirit: hence the noun "Renaissance" and the adjective "Classical". There is truth in both adjective and noun, but we should beware of taking them too naively. Lucas appears not to see them in the correct light. And he is partly misguided because, after defining Romanticism as fantasies and feelings that arise from dream-levels of the subconscious and break through the control of the reason, either healthily or morbidly, he applies even this somewhat narrow definition in a rather restricted way.
He6 looks upon the Middle Ages as the Golden Age of Romanticism and there the goldenest height is for him the romance-cum-fantasy of Aucassin and Nicolette with its dei- fication of love at once intensely, tenderly, unsophisticatedly. A testament of Romanticism to Lucas is also Malory's Morte d'Arthur where the essence of the tradition of Chivalry is distilled, though with less lovely art. The Renaissance he cannot consider Romantic because it "tended to look scorn on the rags of medieval romance". He sees in it merely a few attempts here and there to make a compromise between the "old Romance" and the "new Classics".7 But, he8 remarks, "these Renaissance attempts show the self-consciousness thatbesets all literary revivals" and "any self-conscious bookish- ness proves particularly deadly" when the half-conscious dream-levels have to find utterance. "In Tasso, or Spenser, or . Sidney's Arcadia there is a sickly taint of the factitious, of pastiche.... Even Ariosto, who shields himself behind a mocker's grin, with his interminable necromancers and magic steeds gives too much the impression of a grown man in a green garden playing at bears. And even in Shakespeare's
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Tempest Prospero's wand, I feel, has already cracked a little before he flings it from him; his magic volume grown a little dog-eared before he closes it for ever. Prospero is too close a cousin to Polonius, without being aware of the relationship; and his daughter remains a pretty poppet, beginning to fade into a Spenserian decline."9
We need not deny Romanticism to the Middle Ages. As Lucas10 period. It is in the eighth century that there grew up, beside official Latin which was called lingua Latina, a vernacular known as lingua Romanica. From its adverb Romanice comes the noun "Romance", applied first to old French (romanz), then to Provencal (romanco) and Spanish (romance), later still to the other Latin tongues. The word, from meaning the French vernacular, came to denote also the fictitious stories in verse or, afterwards, in prose that used to get composed in that vernacular. From denoting "fiction" it came to signify anyfantastic statement. In the seventeenth century it developed the further suggestion of "strange and dreamlike". In the eighteenth it attached itself, as Lucas remarks, "to Gothic ruins, wild landscapes, and other delightful mixtures of terror and sublimity, such as banditti". Its literary sense, as opposed to "Classical", first appeared in T. Wharton (1781-82), still attached to the Gothic but, as Lucas does not seem to remem-ber, also related to notions like "rough", "giant", "yore", "sombrous imagery", "magic", "visionary rapture".* In 1801 the German philosopher of art, Schlegel, argued that it could apropriately be applied to work of mediaeval inspiration .by contrast to what is "Classical", in the same way as "Romance", the language evolved by the barbarian invaders, was opposed to the Classical Latin of the Empire. But if we take the group of poets at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, who belong to what is called "the Romantic Revival", not only is simple mediaevalism exceeded but a host of new associations typical of modernism arose, and there
* See T. Wharton's poem on his conversion to "the classic page" caused by Reynolds' Window for New College Chapel.
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is too some affinity of interests and seekings with the Elizabethans, reminding us of J. Warten's reference to the Romantic as far back as 1753 in The Adventurer (No. 93): "Shakespeare has carried the romantic, the wonderful, the wild, to the most pleasing extravagance."*
In all this we are pretty distant from Aucassin et Nicolette and other fictions of the Middle Ages. But, of course, they can be granted Romanticism. There is the play in them of the fabulous, the fantastic, the dreamily amorous that Lucas considers the "whole of Romanticism and that is no doubt Romantic though surely not all that the Romantic may connote. How- ever, even where it or anything else we deem Romanticism does occur we may say it becomes characteristically Romantic not unless it is projected from another plane than the creative Intelligence of Classicism or at least another region of the planeon which Classicism functions. That is why the Romantic elements we may discern in the poetry of ancient Greece and Italy are always faint and elusive. That is also why the fictions of the Middle Ages are Romantic. But these fictions are hardly typical of that period: they are a side-product and there is a certain childlike prattle in them showing that the Romantic has not yet come into its own. Because they are such, Lucas is led to put them more or less on a par with the Romanticism he traces in Graeco-Roman literature: what he labels as an affinity between the two manifestations of the Romantic - "the healthy
* For the reader's interest the origin of the word "Classical" may be mentioned. Lucas tells us: "In Latin classis (perhaps from the same root as 'call') meant originally a 'host', military as well as naval. Good King Tullius divided his citizens into five grades, according to the arms they could afford. The richest, providing the cavalry and the heavy-armed phalanx (classis), were called classici ; the rest were infra classem . But classicus is not transferred metaphorically to writers until, seven centuries later, under the Empire, Aulus Gellius contrasts classicus scriptor with proletarius - 'a first-class, standard writer' with 'one of the rabble'. At the Renaissance the fact that the 'standard' writers of Greece and Rome were read . in class at school seems to have helped by confusion to produce that other sense of 'classic', as applied to any Greek or Roman writer, whether first-class or not. Thus 'classical', meaning 'standard', dates in the Oxford Dictionary, from 1599 (' Classicall and Canonicall'); meaning 'Greek or Latin', from 1607 ('Classical Authors'). Thence the epithet adapted itself to anything supposed to conform to the standards of classical antiquity." (Op. cit., p. 19)
Page 46
day-dreaming of a young imagination"11- with health or disease but simply with the absence, in two different ways, of the full force of Romanticism. The full force can arise only when a plane, or a portion of a plane, that is not the Classical creative Intelligence asserts itself as the basic determinant of existence and expression. To judge whether the Renaissance can be called Romantic and, if it can, what the total content of its Romanticism is, we must ask whether it was governed by the Classical mind and, if not, what did govern it.
"Self-conscious bookishness" there certainly is in this period, but is it really the dominant feature? Again, is the bookishness such that it would inevitably interfere with the true nature of fantasy and feeling and of whatever else may be Romantic? The talk about scholars from the capital of the Greek Empire and about the study of the ancient Classics is apt to incline one to think of intellectuality and pedantry inhibiting the play of the spontaneous being. But the truth is thatthe Renaissance in full flush, though its creative enthusiasm was fired by Antiquity with example on glowing example of great literature such as the Middle Ages rarely provided, was not notable for its intellectuality - at least for a revival of the Graeco-Roman intellect.
What the return of Classical literature fundamentally did is stated with accuracy by Sri Aurobindo.12 different countries, but one thing above all everywhere, the discovery of beauty and joy in every energy of life. The Middle Ages had lived strongly and with a sort of deep and sombre force, but, as it were, always under the shadow of death and under the burden of an obligation to aspire through suffering to a beyond; their life is bordered on one side by the cross and on the other by the sword. and loves it in excess; it is carried away by the beauty of the body and the senses and the intellect, the beauty of sensation and action and speech and thought, - of thought hardly at all
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for its own sake, but thought as a power of life. It is Hellenism returning with its strong sense of humanity and things human, nihil humani a me alienum puto ,* but at first a barbarised Hellenism, unbridled and extravagant, riotous in its vitalistic energy, too much overjoyed for restraint and measure."
The Renaissance is a revolt against the Middle Ages by way of explosion of the Life-force, an explosion effected by a revival of certain qualities prevalent in Classical Antiquity. The free-dom of thought and feeling, the aesthetic response to the loveliness of the natural world and to the human body's vibrant vigour, the large interest in individual self-expression and in earthly concerns - it is these features of ancient Greek culture that proved potent to release the suppressed sensuous vitality of Europe. The mind of the time was stirred also in its own proper nature by the mind of Hellas, but the Renaissance was so drunk with life, with the glory of the senses and emotions and passions expanding themselves in an opulent freedom, that it could not easily recover the lucid orderly intellect of the Classics. No doubt, the awakening of the mind of the time showed itself in the development of physical science with its stress on the study of Earth as against the stress on the contemplation of Heaven and Hell and Purgatory that had characterised the mind of the Middle Ages. But the new science itself was at the beginning borne along on a gust of the Life-force more than on a zest of the pure intellect. It was part of the same overbrimming and wide-faring vitalistic energy that inaugurated the sailing of the seas and the sweeping over unknown lands. Copernicus who charted the skies in a novel way was but another avatar of the same exploratory vitality that drove Columbus across the Atlantic and Magellan around the globe. The Life-force bursting out in all directions, towards the "Crystalline Sphere" above as over the orbis terrarum, .impelled the scientific mind. This mind as a power on its own, together with other intellectual powers that are sometimes associated with it but often separated from it, had already had
* Nothing human is alien to me.
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its initiation in Europe in the figure of Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo was not only an artist but a supreme intellectual and he stands at the head of the Renaissance for the rebirth of the Graeco-Roman civilisation in its intellectual aspects: he sum-marised the seeds of a new European intellectuality taking up the work of that civilisation in new life-moulds. But the vitalistic energy set free from the grip of the Middle Ages assumed the lead in the Renaissance and brought it to its full flush, and it was some time before the new intellectuality that had found its initial growth in Leonardo started to emerge. It was fostered by Francis Bacon, yet it may be said to have emerged in a recognisable form only with the advent of Galileo and to have reached a world stature, so to speak, not prior to Newton. Hand in hand with its development went the rise of a new Classicism - the Miltonic, the French and the pseudo-Augustan. And by the time this happened the tide of the Renaissance had started ebbing.
As part of the Renaissance's elan of the Life-force we have the literature of the first Romanticism and this literature is at its most expressive in Elizabethan poetry, both more powerful and more disorderly than the corresponding poetry in other countries. Sri Aurobindo13 speaks of the poetry of the life-spirit as "the pure and genuine romanticism". The poetry of the subtle-physical plane or of the creative Intelligence may contain a Romantic strain and, of course, all poetry of the life-motive (to quote another term of Sri Aurobindo's) is not necessarily Romantic any more than all poetic production from the plane of the Intelligence is bound to be Classical: still the real Romanticism springs from vital passion and power, the joy and pain, wonder and terror and beauty of the life-soul feeling, thinking, imagining, and turning everything into the values proper to its own drive of desire. The poetic work done in the beginning of the nineteenth century and usually called Romantic is entitled to that name because of complex factors at play which are lacking in the creations of the subtle-physical or of the Classically mental plane and Sri Aurobindo does refer to it as "Romanticism of the modern type";14 yet for him the speci-
Page 49
fically Romantic remains a certain sight and sensibility and speech of the vital energy such as we find amongst the Elizabethans.
Even Tasso and Ariosto whom Lucas criticises are not really Classical: they are Romantic but quasi-Romantic and open to criticism because something in the Italian spirit mingling with the Graeco-Roman cannot altogether express the soul of Romanticism as it can the soul of Classicism. Sri Aurobindo15 has well said: " An Italy with the Graeco-Roman past in its blood could seize intellectually on the motives of Catholic Christianity and give them a clear and supreme expression in Dante, while all Germanised Europe had only been stam- mering in the faltering infantile accents of romance verse or shadowing them out in Gothic stone, successful only in the most material form of the spiritual. In another direction, when it seized upon the romantic life-motive, the meeting-place of the Teuton and the Celt, we see it losing entirely the mystically sentimental Celtic element, Italianising it into the sensuous-ness of Tasso, and Italianising the rest into an intellectualised, a half imaginative, half satiric play with the superficial motives of romance, - the inevitable turn of the Italianised Roman spirit."
Wherever this spirit would be at work in the Renaissance literature of England we should have in Romanticism what Lucas terms "the taint of the factitious, of pastiche". But the English spirit is a mixture of racial strains opening it to possibilities of a plenary Romanticism and the censure di- rected against Tasso or Ariosto would hardly apply to Spen-ser's poetry on the whole or to Shakespeare's Tempest or any other play. The Teuton and the Celt whose meeting-place, according to Sri Aurobindo, is Romanticism are part and parcel of the rich composite English spirit in which, we may add with Sri Aurobindo, French and Latinistic influences have also had a say, reshaping a Teutonic Anglo-Saxon tongue and giving it " clearer and more flowing forms" and turning it " into a fine though difficult linguistic material sufficiently malle-able, sufficiently plastic for Poetry to produce her larger and
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finer effects, sufficiently difficult to compel her to put forth her greatest energies".16 The Teuton element makes for that "con-stant tendency of the spirit of English poetry, which loves to dwell with all its weight upon the presentation of life and action, of feeling and passion, to give that its full force and to make it the basis and the source and, not only the point of reference, but the utility of all else" .17 This element can, of course, find articulation on various planes, colouring each with its own genius. On the subtle-physical, it would create a poetry teeming with an externality of observation, like Chau-cer's. On the mental, its creation, unlike what was done through Milton in the main, would not be "a clear, measured and intellectual dealing with life, things and ideas"18 and a replacing of the external presentation of life by "an interpreta-tion, a presentation in which its actual lines are either neglected or subordinated in order that some inner truth of it may emerge". From the Teutonic mind we would have "poetical thinking or even poetical philosophy of a rather obvious kind, sedate, or vigorous, prompt and direct, or robustly power-ful".19 Examples can be drawn from the work of Dryden and Pope, Cowper and Scott and Browning. On the vital plane the Teutonic element would be far more at home poetically than the Latin, for nervous vehemence and energy of character and rush of incident are natural to its objective and dynamic bent; but the Romanticism it would achieve would be of an external kind, "sensational and outward, appealing to the life and the senses".20 Such Romanticism is "the ground-type of the Elizabethan drama".21 What prepares that drama for supreme poetic moments is the opposite element, submerged, half-insistent, in the English spirit: the Celtic.
The pure Celtic genius "seems to care little for the earth-life for its own sake, has little hold on it or only a light and ethereal hold, accepts it as a starting-point for the expression of other-life, is attracted by all that is hidden and secret".22 While the Teutonic genius goes by a strong vital instinct rather than by clear intellectual thought or force of imagination or intellectual intuition, the Celtic has a quick and luminous intelligence, a
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rapid and brilliant imagination, and also a "natural love of the things of the mind... left to it from an old forgotten culture in its blood which contained an ancient mystical tradition".23Here is "not the fine, calm and measured poetical thinking of the Greeks and the Latin races which deals sovereignly with life within the limits of the intellect and the inspired reason, but an excitement of thought seeking for something beyond itself and behind life through the intensities of poetical sight".24 When in English poetry the Celtic genius emerges from under the weight of its Teutonic companion and acts with it from the plane of the Life-force it casts into Teutonic Romanticism its own Romanticism of the delicate and beautiful, the imagina-tive and spiritual. "It awakens... a vein of subtler sentiment, a more poignant pathos; it refines passion from a violence of the vital being into an intensity of the soul, modifies vital sensuous-ness into a thing of imaginative beauty by a warmer aesthetic perception" and, throwing its force and fire and greater depth of passion across the drama, "makes it something more than a tumultuous external action and heavily powerful character-drawing".25 The nature of the plane through which it acts limits its inherent mysticism - and especially the Teutonic drive with which it coalesces in the Elizabethan drama makes it function with a somewhat embarrassed power, but the authen-tic Romanticism which springs to birth from that plane is by its help rendered again and again a plenary blaze.
No other critic has been so acute as Sri Aurobindo in analyses and distinctions. But several have recognised Eliza-bethan poetry as Romantic. Thus Scott-James26 speaks of Ben Jonson resisting the "unruly Romanticism of his time" be-cause, though he appreciated the fire that burned in his contemporaries, he saw that the very greatness of what Scott-James calls the "romantic splendour" of the age had its grave dangers. It is surprising that Lucas should fail to note that, whatever the tinge of "bookishness" in certain sections of Renaissance literature, the release of those parts of human psychology which, according to him, the Classical writer mostly keeps under control or at least prevents with the help of
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the "super-ego" and the "reality-principle" from wholly rushing out in their own rights is never so expressive as in Elizabethan poetry which not only gives English speech a new extraordinary intensity but is also full of the disorder and excess of new formation. Sri Aurobindo27 aptly describes it: "It springs up in a chaos of power and of beauty in which forms emerge and shape themselves by a stress within it for which there is no clear guiding knowledge except such as the instinctive genius of the age and the individual can give. It is constantly shot through with brilliant threads of intellectual energy, but is not at all intellectual in its innate spirit and dominant character. It is too vital for that, too much moved and excited; for its mood is passionate, sensuous, loose of rein; its speech sometimes liquid with sweetness, sometimes vehe-ment and inordinate in pitch, enamoured of the variety of its notes, revelling in image and phrase, a tissue of sweet or violent colours, of many-hued fire, of threads of golden and silver light."
If Elizabethan poetry is not a voice strongly charged with -among other and greater things beyond it -what Lucas, following Freud, terms the "Id", the desire-soul in us, and considers the essence of the Romantic, it is difficult to say what else can be so regarded. Occasionally he lets himself refer to Elizabethan poetry as Romantic, as when he writes about Schiller adapting in Classical mood "the Romantic pages of Macbeth"28 or when he tells us that the Romantic. pursues violent feelings and that, "like an Elizabethan dramatist, he may find them in the crudities of reality as well as in .the fantasies of dreams" and that "dreams themselves can be at times only too realistic" .29 He has also described Aeschylus's imagination as Romantic because it "ranges like Marlowe's among the echoing names of far countries of the world".30 Then he has remarked apropos of Euripides's Andromeda: "We who possess Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra cannot share the rage of Aristophanes at this first staging of romantic passion."31 Finally, he has the observation: "There is much, then, that is 'romantic' in classical Greek literature; yet it would
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be easy to exaggerate. Homer is never unreal as Spenser is; Aeschylus never outrages common sense or common taste like Marlowe."32 It is evident that Lucas is not unaware of Roman-ticism in Elizabethan poetry. Still, no whole-hearted and clear-eyed acknowledgment is forthcoming. Partial glows of the Romantic seem to be all he is prepared to grant, for his idea is that the Renaissance killed the Middle Ages and, in doing so, killed the truly Romantic until the latter was revived in a less healthy form several centuries after. Adventitious elements appear to have biased Lucas's judgment in relation to the poetry of the Elizabethans.
Even where he grants, as with Shakespeare, some play of the truly Romantic he yet makes reservations and talks of at most a successful compromise between Romanticism and Classicism. Shakespeare's allusions to Greek and Roman mythology, his adoption of Graeco-Roman themes in a few plays, his frequent laying of Plutarch's Lives under tax are only a thin veneer of Classicism over his utterly non-Classical verse: they are the tinges provided by the Renaissance's exultant interest in the literature of Greece and Rome, but the exultancy is predominantly Romantic at first and the Shakespearean poetry tinged by it is entirely so. We may deem Shakespearean Romanticism "self-conscious" if we like; it is not simple spontaneity; yet extreme spontaneity cannot be denied to it and the "self" of which it is "conscious" is basically the life-soul, the soul which is much more than the Freudian "Id" or "Libido" but which more than anything else in our psycho-logical being has to do with impulse and passion.
Indeed, Shakespeare is the greatest Romantic poet in the world or, to be more precise, the greatest poet of Romantic drama. The only figure that approaches him in the same genre in English literature is his own contemporary Marlowe. Amidst the extremely rich but often patchy and disorderly poetry of the Elizabethan period, Marlowe, though mostly wanting in power of creating characters or of building up their interaction into a convincing whole, stands out by "his highly coloured and strongly cut style and rhythm"33 as well as by
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detached scenes and passages and culminating moments of dramatic force in which his true genius which is lyrical and epic breaks through the form of drama. His genius, however, for all its megalomania is a narrow intensity. Only in Shakespeare does the poetry of the age display a consummate versatility and attain its perfect rondure.
1.The Making of Literature (London), 1946, p. 167.
2.The Human Cycle (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry ), 1949, p. 171.
3.Ibid, p. 172.
4.Ibid., p. 171.
5.Ibid., pp. 171-172.
6.Lucas, op. cit., p. 135; pp. 73-84.
7.Ibid, p. 85.
8.Ibid.
9.Ibid., pp. 85-86.
10.Ibid, pp. 16-17.
11.Ibid, p. 134.
12.The Future Poetry, p. 63.
13.Ibid., p. 192.
14.Ibid., p. 92.
15.Ibid., p. 42.
16.Ibid., p. 49.
17.Ibid., p. 54.
18.Ibid., p. 59.
19.Ibid., p. 50.
20.Ibid.
21.Ibid., p. 51.
22.Ibid., p. 54.
23.Ibid., p. 48.
24.Ibid., p. 51.
25.Ibid.
26.Scott-James, op. cit., pp. 120, 121.
27.The Future Poetry, p. 64.
28.Lucas, op. cit., p. 13.
29.Ibid., p. 15.
30.Ibid., p. 60.
31.Ibid., p. 62.
32.Ibid., p. 65.
33.The Future Poetry, p. 70.
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4
The climax of the first Romanticism: Elizabethan poetry -Shakespeare and Spenser
As a poet of Romantic drama, Shakespeare is - to quote Sri Aurobindo's words1 - "quite unique in his spirit, method and quality. For his contemporaries resemble him only in exter-nals'; they have the same outward form and crude materials, but not the inner dramatic method by which he transformed and gave' them a quite other meaning and value; and later romantic drama, though it has tried hard to imitate the Shakespearian motive and touch, has been governed by another kind of poetic mind and its intrinsic as distinguished from its external method has been really different. It takes hold of life, strings together its unusual effects and labours to make it out of the way, brilliant, coloured, conspicuous. Shakespeare does not do that, except rarely, in early imitative work or when he is uninspired. He does not need to lay violent hands on life and turn it into romantic pyrotechnics; for life itself has taken hold of him in order to recreate itself in his image, and he sits within himself at its heart and pours out from its impulse a throng of beings, as real in the world he creates as men are in this other world from which he takes his hints, a multitude, a riot of living images carried on a many-coloured sea of revealing speech and a never-failing surge of movement. His dramatic method seems indeed to have usually no other intellectual purpose, aesthetic motive or spiritual secret: ordinarily it labours simply for the joy of a multiple poetic vision of life and vital creation with no centre except the life-power itself, no coordination except that thrown out sponta-neously by the unseizable workings of its energy, no unity but the one unity of man and the life-spirit in Nature working in him and before his eyes. It is this sheer creative Ananda of the life-spirit which is Shakespeare; abroad everywhere in that age it incarnates itself in him for the pleasure of poetic self-vision."
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Sri Aurobindo2 continues: "All Shakespeare's powers and limitations, - for it is now permissible to speak of his limita-tions, - arise from this character of the force that moved him to poetic utterance. He is not primarily an artist, a poetical thinker or anything else of the kind, but a great vital creator and intensely, though within marked limits, a seer of life. His art itself is life arranging its forms in its own surge and excitement, not in any kind of symmetry, - for symmetry here there is none, - nor in fine harmonies, but still in its own way supremely and with a certain intimately metric arrangement of its many loose movements, in mobile perspectives, a succes-sion of crowded but successful and satisfying vistas. While he has given a wonderful language to poetic thought, he yet does not think for the sake of thought, but for the sake of life; his way indeed is not so much the poet himself thinking about life, as life thinking itself out in him through many mouths, in many moods and moments, with a rich throng of fine thought-effects, but not for any clear sum of intellectual vision or to any high power of either ideal or spiritual result."
To realise the dissimilarity of note in the very stuff of the utterance between the creative Life-force and the creative Intelligence we have only to juxtapose Shakespeare and Milton. Even a descriptive passage will serve: Shakespeare on wind and water apropos of Sleep's sealing up the eyes of the shipboy upon "the high and giddy mast" and rocking his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge,
And in the visitation of the winds
Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
Curling their monstrous heads and hanging them
With deafening clamour in the slippery clouds -
and Milton on the same theme, adopting as Shakespearian a style as possible to him yet betraying the less nerve-thrilled, more deliberate spirit of the intellect and its more generalised manner:
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Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild,
Up from the bottom turned by furious winds
And surging waves, as mountains to assault
Heaven's height, and with the Centre mix the Pole.
To get a clearer perception, listen to Hamlet's soliloquy:
To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to dream; ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.There's the respect,
That makes calamity of so long life...
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of!
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought...
or the soliloquy of Claudio:
Ay, but to die and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delightful spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world.
As Sri Aurobindo3 puts it, "the words get, one might say, into the entrails of vision and do not stop short at the clear measure of the thing seen, but evoke their very quality and give us
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immediately the inmost vital fibre and thrill" of what is described and interpreted. Now bend the ear to the accents of Belial's speech in Paradise Lost to appreciate the poetic vision active and vibrant as if directly in the grey cells rather than as a reflex there from the guts:
Our final hope
Is flat despair; we must exasperate
The Almighty Victor to spend all his rage,
And that must end us; that must be our cure,
To be no more. Sad cure! for who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated Night,
Devoid of sense and motion?
Even where in Shakespeare there is ostensibly a judgment on life, an idea that seems to belong to the thinking mind in its own rights, there is really - as Sri Aurobindo4 notes - a throw-up from the emotional or sensational being. Sri Aurobindo cites the second half of that drawn-out "thought" from Mac-beth:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
To employ a turn from another comment by Sri Aurobindo5 on the last four and a half lines, the thought bears the colour of an
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intuition of the life-soul and is conveyed to our minds in-tensely through our nerves of mental sensation. Compare these closing lines to those verses of Chaucer:
What is this life? What asketh man to have,
Now with his love, now in his colde grave,
Alone, withouten any companye?
In this phrase, which is one of Chaucer's rare moments of great poetry in the sense of the Arnoldian "high seriousness" of accent, we have a most touching pessimism nobly set forth in a general judgment with the help of two simple external observa-tions. One of them is pressed home: we realise the desolation of death because of that whole last line and the preceding adjective "colde". The other gets a bare mention, it is under-played, but its import is yet filled out satisfyingly in a negative manner: the positives of desolation suggest their unspoken opposites - the warmth and the near presence and the com-panionship of the beloved, which can so suddenly be snatched away from man. An art of masterly naivete is here, making us see and feel tragically how things are in their immediate outward reality. The poet has written memorably but from no more than a "subtle-physical" inwardness of imagination and with an easy adequate limpidity that deeply moves us without directly shaking up our sensations as Shakespeare does and tearing like him at our emotional roots.
The typical Shakespearian seizure of our vital being in the Macbeth-passage can be gauged also by comparing it to Gray's eighteenth-century "gem":
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour: -
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
The thought-mind is active here, not at considerable depth but in a sufficiently impressive fashion which renders the concep-
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tion moving, yet the chiselled imaginative rhetoric stirs us to think poetically rather than setting "our nerves of mental sensation" to feel the poetic idea.
Shakespeare's specific Life-force inspiration may be made to stand out by taking even a certain contemporary of his and putting him over against the dramatist. That contemporary is no less a figure than Francis Bacon whom several scholars consider to have secretly penned the plays and used Shakespeare as a convenient facade. Unfortunately for these scholars Bacon has left us some verse under his own name and we have just to hear it together with the Macbeth-lines in order to realise not only that Bacon was a mediocre poet but also that he functioned from a poetic plane quite unlike the Shakespearian. Here is how his Life starts:
The World's a bubble, and the Life of Man
Less than a span:
In his conception wretched, from the womb
So to the tomb;
Curst from the cradle, and brought up to years
With cares and fears.
Who then to frail mortality shall trust,
But limns the water, or but writes in dust.
Everything here is coinage of the reflective prose-mind, a sort of anticipation of eighteenth-century semi-didactic verse. Not a trace of the vivida vis from the vital consciousness that breathes in any pronouncement on life and death we may pick out from the famous dramas.
While we are about Bacon we may quote what Sri Aurobindo says in another context - the discussion of "Sight" as "the essential poetic gift" which renders Homer, Shake-speare, Dante, Valmiki, Kalidasa supreme poets. "There is often more thought in a short essay of Bacon's than in a whole play of Shakespeare's, but not even a hundred cryptograms can make him the author of the dramas; for, as he showed when he tried to write poetry, the very nature of his thought-power
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and the characteristic way of expression of the born philosophical thinker hampered him in poetic expression. It was the constant outstreaming of form and thought and image from an abundant vision of life which made Shakespeare, whatever his other deficiencies, the sovereign dramatic poet."6
Dwelling further on Shakespeare's powers and limitations, Sri Aurobindo7 writes: "His development of human character has a sovereign force within its bounds, but it is the soul of the human being as seen through outward character, passion, action, the life-soul, and not either the thought-soul or the deeper psychic being or the profounder truth of the human spirit. Something of these things we may get, but only in shadow or as a partial reflection in a coloured glass, not in their own action.... Nevertheless, his is not a drama of mere exter-nalised action, for it lives from within and more deeply than our external life. This is not Virat, the seer and creator of gross forms, but Hiranyagarbha, the luminous mind of dreams, looking through those forms to see his own images behind them. More than any other poet Shakespeare has accom-plished mentally the legendary feat of the impetuous sage Vishwamitra; his power of vision has created a Shakespearian world of his own, and it is, in spite of its realistic elements, a romantic world in a very true sense of the word, a world of the wonder and free power of life and not of its mere external realities, where what is here dulled and hampered finds a greater enlarged and intense breath of living, an ultra-natural play of beauty, curiosity and amplitude."
Next to Shakespeare in stature as representative of the Romanticism of the Renaissance stands Spenser. In him the strain of sheer vitalistic beauty in a fluid fineness, which is one of Shakespeare's qualities, reaches its fullest abundance, to-gether with a vein of dreamy subtlety which too in the stir and . passion of the master dramatist is not always in independent prominence. In both, the Life-force is not preoccupied with mere externalities: it demands to feel itself more and presses into the subjective being. The penetration, however, is not to a great depth. Sri Aurobindo hits off very well the Spenserian
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achievement in Romanticism as compared with the Shakes-pearian. After noting in the poet of The Faerie Queene a fault in the initial conception, a failure due to an over-absorption in the allegorical turn and to the weaving of an over-tangled skein of allegory, and after pointing out also defects in the execution by which what was intended as an ethical interpretative poem loses its way in faeryland and becomes a series of romantic descriptions and incidents, "a diffuse and richly confused perplexity, not a unity" - after dwelling on shortcomings of constructive power at the centre of Spenser's genius, Sri Aurobindo8 spotlights the essence of the Elizabethan Romanticism:
"Whatever Shakespeare may suggest, - a poet's critical theories are not always a just clue to his inspiration, - it is not the holding up of a mirror to life and Nature, but a moved and excited reception and evocation. Life throws its impressions, but what seizes upon them is a greater and deeper life-power in the poet which is not satisfied with mirroring or just beautifully responding, but begins to throw up at once around them its own rich matter of being and so creates something new, more personal, intimate, fuller of an inner vision, emotion, passion of self-expression. This is the source of the new intensity; it is this impulse towards an utterance of the creative life-power within which drives towards the dramatic form and acts with such unexampled power in Shakespeare; at another extremity of the Elizabethan mind, in Spenser, it gets farther away from the actuality of life and takes its impressions as hints only for a purely imaginative creation which has an aim at things sym-bolic, otherwise revelatory, deeper down in the soul itself, and shadows them out through the magic of romance if it cannot yet intimately seize and express them. Still even there the method of the utterance, if not altogether its aim, is the voice of Life lifting itself out into waves of word and colour and image and sheer beauty of sound. Imagination, thought, vision work with the emotional life-mind as their instrument or rather in it as a medium, accepted as the form and force of their being."
The emotional life-mind rather than the intellect proper can
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be traced at once as Spenser's poetic source if we hark back to the accents of Belial's speech in Milton or of that passage in Shelley about Heaven's light and earth's shadows and set them over against the lines in which Despair is represented as trying to lure man to self-destruction with the bait of peace and with the example of one who is pictured as having attained life's goal by dying:
He there does now enjoy eternal rest
And happy ease which thou dost want and crave,
And further from it daily wanderest:
What if some little pain the passage have,
That makes frail flesh to fear"the bitter wave?
Is not short pain well-borne that brings long ease,
And lays the soul to sleep in quiet grave?
Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas,
Ease after war, death after life does greatly please.
Spenser gives us merely a semblance of the reflecting mind; immediately we can recognise a poignant mellifluence of the same power that in Shakespeare is all a-tremble with passion: it is again as if not from the grey cells the poetry took off but from the guts though now with an imaginative rhythm sweetly lulling us into persuasion with a luxury of exquisite sensations posing as thoughts.
Both in Shakespeare and Spenser the flowing over of the Life-force in colourful or lambent extravagance changes the entire sense of poetic form from what it was under Classicism. And the change may best be described as an uprush of individuality within the aesthetic ensemble, corresponding to the same phenomenon in the psychology of the Renaissance. The spirit of Hellenistic humanism turned man's attention to himself and his personal possibilities: he was no longer a mere unit in a feudal social system functioning under divine sanc-tion. Social conformity or a grovelling before a supramundane authority ceased to be his main work. And this stress on the human individual and his vitalistic freedom affected aesthe-
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tics. As already noted, the clearness and orderliness of the Classical intellectual vision strove to subdue details to the totality and one of the main characteristics of an artistic product was that it could be felt very vividly as a whole. In Romanticism at its best there is still a feeling of the whole, for without it there can be no true art; but it becomes much relaxed and the details acquire a lot of importance - they assert themselves individually, even claim a certain right to stand by themselves in their own freedom - and, as a result, we have on the one side a greater richness of the parts than in Classical poetry and on the other a diffuseness of the general effect. This diffuseness has two aspects - a subtlety which is a lack of facile or too clear obviousness in the sense of form, a looseness which is a lack of keen focus in the view of a totality. The one is a quality, the other a defect: we have the former in Shakespeare, the latter in Spenser.
In several of Shakespeare's and Spenser's contemporaries we have a far more glaring version of the same defect in the basic idea and its execution.* And this conceptive and constructive defect in relation to a whole is just the large-scale working of a mental peculiarity which is almost everywhere in the Elizabethans."The Elizabethan intellectual direction," Sri Aurobindo9 has aptly said, "runs always towards conceit and curious complication and it is unable to follow an idea for the sake of what is essential in it, but tangles it up in all sorts of turns and accessories; seizing on all manner of disparates it tends to throw them together without any real fusion." And the parts themselves of the Elizabethan Romantic ensemble suffer at times from a lack of balance induced by a certain explosiveness in the details, a certain vehemence of tone and exuberance of mind. Thus many expressions, particularly in poets inclined to be continually forceful, are found scattered with failures to make striking images poetic or else with images
* We may make an exception of Ben Jonson and grant that he has the idea of construction, but, as Sri Aurobindo points out, "his execution is heavy and uninspired, the work of a robustly conscientious craftsman rather than a creative artist" (The Future Poetry, p. 68, fn.).
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that are themselves too artificial. Chapman yields place only to Marlowe in sheer force, but his vital gusto seizes on his intellect for ingenious effects that are Romantic poetry gone astray or berserk. For instance, he forgets Homer's nobility of restrained yet strong emotion and, not content to substitute muscular vigour and nervous rhythm, translates two magnificent lines from the Greek by a couplet in which the first part is padded rhetoric and the second a violent and extravagant conceit empty of all true or high feeling:
And such a stormy day shall come, in mind and soul I
know,
When sacred Troy shall shed her towers for tears of
overthrow.
Even when a verse is free from such startling falsities, there is often a jerkiness flawing it. An exceedingly fine phrase is another rendering from the Iliad:
When the unmeasured firmament bursts to disclose her
light.
But with a most sensitive ear Sri Aurobindo10 has commented that here is a rhythm which does not mate with the idea and the diction. There seems to be a strained and abrupt reaching out towards poetic height of tone, not the assured continuity of the really grand rhythmic ascension, a reflex of which we can feel in even Tennyson's translation of the same passage:
the immeasurable heavens
Break open to their heights, and all the stars
Shine...
Perhaps the jog-trot ballad metre disguised by Chapman as a fourteener makes it difficult to achieve more than a quick sudden canter instead of the epic roll and rise. But something in the very nature of the Romantic life-soul has a risky penchant
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for the loud and the bursting just as the Classical soul of the Intelligence has in its nature a dangerous proclivity to the flat and the rigid.
In summing up successful Romanticism of the Elizabethan kind we may adopt four heads to match those we took from Denham for Classicism. In the first place, we may talk not of clear depth but of a leaping inner coruscation showing up sharply or largely some general aspect of things. Sidney takes us straight, by such coruscation, into the midst of the Romantic genius when he seeks inspiration to write worthily to his love and ends the sonnet of his search:
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, Biting my tongue and pen, beating myself for spite, "Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and
write."
Marlowe makes Tamurlaine the mouthpiece of the vaulting ambition let loose by the Renaissance to combine power and knowledge:
Our souls whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest,
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.
Spenser suggests the joy of life that is the aim of the age by a lovely pointing of what is to be avoided - a line of melodious art in which, as a critic has marked, the pathos is enforced, after the rapid movement of the opening words, by the slowing down of the pace at the close, with two stressed syllables which disturb the iambic rhythm:
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Let me not die in languor and long tears.
Kyd has on rare occasions an emotionally dramatic as well as illuminating generality:
Oh eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;
Oh life, no life, but lively form of death,
Oh world, no world, but mass of public wrongs.
Shakespeare - inexhaustible energy and endless imagination -comes with a vivid advice to be ever on the move, alert to time's challenges:
Perseverance, dear my Lord,
Keeps honour bright: to have done, is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery. Take the instant way,
For honour travels in a strait so narrow
Where one but goes abreast: keep, then, the path;
For emulation has a thousand sons
That one by one pursue: if you give way,
Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,
Like to an entered tide they all rush by
And leave you hindmost;
Or like a gallant horse fallen in front rank,
Lie there for pavement to the abject rear,
O'errun and trampled on.
With equal vividness he flashlights too the ignorance and emptiness of ambitious human activity:
O, but man, proud man!
Drest in a little brief authority;
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, - like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,
As make the angels weep.
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And the poet of life abounding can suddenly conjure up a picture of all things as a glorious illusion:
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.
A most pregnant summing-up by him in a semi-Stoic semi-mystic tone is:
Men must endure
Their going hence even as their coming hither:
Ripeness is all.
In the second place, we have not as in Classicism a lively or firm gentleness but a subtly penetrating charm. Spenser is full of it, from the exquisite observation of a butterfly
Now sucking of the sap of herb most meet,
Or of the dew which yet on them does lie,
Now in the sun bathing his tender feet,
or of gnats in summer,
Their murmuring small trumpets sounden wide,
or of distant hill-water,
A trickling stream from high rock tumbling down,
to the sensitive description of regal arras
Woven with gold and silk so close and near,
That the rich metal lurked privily,
As feigning to be hid from envious eye;
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Yet here and there, and everywhere unwares
It showed itself and shone unwillingly;
Like a discoloured Snake whose hidden snares
Through the green grass his long bright burnished back
declares,
or of extreme remoteness from the world's din:
careless quiet lies
Wrapped in eternal silence, far from enemies.
A more quivering note of charm enters into other Elizabethans. Thus Ford:
You have oft for these two lips
Neglected cassia or the natural sweets
Of the spring-violet: they are not yet much withered.
Shakespeare excels here with unanalysable undertones -
In maiden meditation, fancy-free,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang,
and with equally mysterious overtones that can make magic of what may seem nonsense:
Take, O take those lips away,
That so sweetly were forsworn;
And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn;
But my kisses bring again,
Bring again,
Seals of love, but sealed in vain,
Sealed in vain.
Not so elusive but still with a fascinating fantasy borne along
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on a baffling confluence of undertones and overtones is the dirge:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are corals made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Shakespeare is no less successfully "rich and strange" with a far more seizable meaning:
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman; the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things. unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothings
A local habitation and a name.
In the third place, there is instead of strength without rage a certain fiery gust. Marlowe is the grand exemplar in this type, either formidably,
Give me a look that when I bend my brows
Pale death may walk in furrows of my face,
or passionately,
Is it not passing brave to be a king,
And ride in triumph through Persepolis?
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or frantically,
Lo here, my sons, are all the golden mines,
Inestimable drugs and precious stones,
More worth than Asia and the world beside...
And shall I die and this unconquered?
or else piquantly:
To make whole cities caper in the air.
Davenant in a couple of exultantly powerful phrases shows his recognition of Marlowe's commanding strength: he says that Marlowe
Had in him those brave translunary things
That the first poets had; his raptures were
All air and fire...
(It is to be noted that the first line's rhythmic effect demands the first and the third syllables to be accented in "translunary", not the second as in present practice.)
Chapman has now and then a phrase striking with an exceptionally vivid vehemence at the imagination, like the one about Zeus who, favouring the Trojan Hector and looking wrathfully at the Greek galleys afar which Hector wanted to be set on fire,
wished in any wise
The splendour of the burning ships might satiate his eyes.
Shakespeare, less volcanic, is Marlowe's and Chapman's match with a finer force: Romeo by the side of Juliet -
O here
Will I set up my everlasting rest
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh -
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or Hamlet with his father's ghost -
the sepulchre
Wherein we saw thee quietly inurned
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws,
To cast thee up again! What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revist'st thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous? -
or Othello in a Marlovian outburst which still carries the finer Shakespearian self-possession within it and even hints the massed Miltonic style:
Like to the Pontic Sea
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne'er feels retiring ebb but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont,
Even so my bloody thoughts with violent pace
Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love,
Till that a capable and wide revenge
Swallow them up -
or Lady Macbeth providing a more weird and Romantically quivering analogue to the Classical Clytemnestra of Aeschy-lus:
Come, come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here;
And fill me from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood,
Stop up the access and passage of remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
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And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes;
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, 'Hold, hold!'
In the fourth place, instead of fullness without overflowing, an arrowy poignancy meets us, wonder-striking, passion-piercing, delight-evoking. Marlowe's Faustus stands in ecstasy before the vision of Helen,
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
or he agonises at the moment of his own deathwhen Mephisto-pheles threatens his soul:
O, I'll leap up to my God! - Who pulls me down? -
See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!...
One drop of it would save my soul, half a drop:
ah my Christ!.. .
Where is it now? 'tis gone: and see, where God
Stretcheth out his arms and bends his ireful brows!
Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!
The minor Elizabethans have also a transcendent piercingness at times, as Webster with
Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young -
or, less subtly yet at the end no less effectively, with
I have lived
Riotously ill, like some that live in Court,
And sometimes when my face was full of smiles,
Have felt the maze of conscience in my breast.
Oft gay and honoured robes their tortures try:
We think caged birds sing when indeed they cry.
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Webster can also mate the piercing with the picturesque:
I am acquainted with sad misery
As the tanned galley-slave is with his oar.
Ford is sometimes Webster's equal in both poetic and dramatic heart-arrowing:
O my lords,
I but deceived your eyes with antique gesture,
When one news straight came huddling on another
Of death! and death! and death! still I danced forward.
Shakespeare brings it in many modes: Romeo rapturously imaginative -
O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
She seems to hang upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear -
Othello at once opulently and wistfully fantastic -
Had she been true,
If Heaven would make me such another world
Of one entire and perfect chrysolite,
I'd not have sold her for it -
Lear with a fantasy of vehement sorrow:
Spit, fire! spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness,
I never gave you kingdom, called you children,
You owe me no subscription: then, let fall
Your horrible pleasures; here, I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man -
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or of a sorrow that is most naive yet a heart-breaking dis-tractedness:
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir -
Hamlet with a profound insight converting personal pathos into" a world-cry about whose third line a critic observes, "the breast actually labours to get through it":
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity a while
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story -
Macbeth deeply and desperately visionary about his murderer hands:
What hands are here? How they pluck out mine eyes;
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red -
Cleopatra bearing the deadly asp at her breast and gathering into a brief intense metaphor the whole drama of the situation and of her soul, what Sri Aurobindo11 terms "the disdainful compassion for the fury of the chosen instrument of self-destruction which vainly thinks it can truly hurt her, the call to death to act swiftly and yet the sense of being high above what death can do":
Come, thou mortal wretch,
With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate
Of life at once untie: poor venomous fool,
Be angry and despatch -
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Cleopatra again voicing - when her handmaiden apostrophises her dying sovereignty "O eastern star!"-her feeling of love's final and sweetest fulfilment through her lover's ministry to her heart, fulfilment as if in a rapt intimate motherhood at the very moment of asp-stung death:
Peace, peace!
Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,
That sucks the nurse asleep?
1.The Future Poetry, pp. 70-71.
2.Ibid., pp. 71-72.
3.Ibid., p. 169.
4.Life, Literature, Yoga: Some Letters of Sri Aurobindo, Revised & Enlarged Edition (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry), 1967, pp. 53-54.
5.The Future Poetry, p. 278.
6.Ibid., p. 30.
7.Ibid., p. 72.
8.Ibid., pp. 79-80.
9.Ibid., p. 76.
10.Ibid., p. 315.
11.Ibid., p. 316.
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5
The psychological plane of the. second Romantic phase: the complex modern mind of intellectual and imaginative curiosity - the contribution of "dreamers of daring tales" - the seminal significance of Rousseau
Looking at certain elements of the Renascence Romanticism - the curious, the audacious, the subtly sweet, the drive towards the intimately inward and strangely symbolic or at least allegoric and away from the pressure of the rational as well as the dogmatic - we might be disposed to mix up with it the Romanticism which came much later and to consider as almost its revival in a new garb that revolt against a pseudo-Classical Age of Reason by writers of the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth. But the voices of the new Romanticism are the beginners, as Sri Aurobindo1 says, of "Poetry as the fullness of imaginative self-expression of the entirely modernised mind... They are the free, impetuous but often narrow sources of these wider flowings. We see the initial tendencies which undergo a rapid growth of meaning and changes of form in the subsequent decades, until now all their sense and seeking have reached... a tense straining on many lines to find some last truth and utterance which must end either in a lingering decadence or in a luminous and satisfied self-exceeding. From the beginning this modern movement, in literature as in thought, takes the form of an ever widening and deepening intellectual and imaginative curiosity, a passion for knowledge, a passion for finding, an eye of intelligence awakened to all the multiform possibilities of new truth and discovery. The Renascence was an awakening of the life spirit to wonder and curiosity and reflection and the stirred dis-covery of the things of the life and the mind; but the fullness of the modern age has been a much larger comprehensive awakening of the informed and clarified intellect to a wider
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curiosity, a much more extensive adventure of discovery and an insistent need to know and possess the truth of Nature and man and the universe and whatever may lie hidden behind their first appearances and suggestions.... The soul of the Renascence was a lover of life and an amateur of knowledge; the modem spirit is drawn by the cult of a clear, broad and minute intellectual and practical Truth; knowledge and a power of life founded on the power of knowledge are the dominating necessities of its being. Poetry in this age has followed intellectually and imaginatively the curve of this great impulse."
That the essential note of the new Romanticism was not of the creative Life-force but of the creative Intelligence can easily be marked if, just as we put Shakespeare face to face with Milton or Chaucer or Bacon, we compare certain lines from the supreme Elizabethan to those of the most outstanding later poets. Harken to Shakespeare talking of passing away from the turmoil of human life - a verse already cited in the earlier comparison -
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil.
Then listen to Keats talking of dying with the nightingale's song a final music falling on deaf ears:
To thy high requiem become a sod.
Again, here is Shakespeare on release from the obstructive tangibilities of earth-existence by body-dissolution:
O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
See now Shelley utter a thought of reaching safety from life's ravage:
From the world's bitter wind
Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb.
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Or mark the way Shakespeare expresses a sense of oppression and misfortune:
Who would fardels bear.
To grunt and sweat under a weary life?
and compare it to Wordsworth's confrontation of universal mystery:
The heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world.
Then note how Shakespeare articulates the peace of death as an end to human fret:
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well,
and compare his speech with Shelley's about the transcendence of time's blind passage by Keats's soul:
He has outsoared the shadow of our night.
Or take Shakespeare's panegyric to the power of pleasing which Cleopatra's beauty possessed:
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women
Cloy the appetites they feed: but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies,
and put this praise side by side with that famous general reflection of Keats's:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness.
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Or try upon your artistic sensibility that Shakespearian "idea":
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we may,
and compare the response to it with what Wordsworth draws
by:
Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows
Like harmony in music; there is a dark
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, makes them cling together
In one society.
In Shakespeare at all times we have a quiver of the Life-force, a passion of the entrails, as it were, an impact on the sensational being, a most vivid vibrant word. In Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats we have a calmer fineness, the more conceptive intensity starting as if from the brain proper in imaginative action.
Sri Aurobindo himself has pointed out this difference while dwelling on the sovereign intuitiveness of the Shakespearian Life-force's speech and stressing the need to develop a corresponding intuitiveness in the modem poetic language which cannot quite return to that speech but takes off from where the later Romantics stood. Sri Aurobindo remarks that even the ideas that seem to belong to the region of the thinking intelli-gence have subtly in the Elizabethans a vitalistic inspiration. "It is sufficient," he2 says, "to compare Shakespeare's
Life's but a walking shadow,...
... it is a tale
Signifying nothing -
and Shelley's voicing of a kindred idea of transience,
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Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.
The one has the colour of an intuition of the life-soul in one of its intense moods and we not only think the thought but seem to feel it even in our nerves of mental sensation, the other is the thought-mind itself uttering in a moved, inspired and illuminative language an idea of the pure intelligence."
We may continue Sri Aurobindo's comparison by instancing a moment of life-pessimism in even a post-Romantic, a much later Romantic poet of the nineteenth century than Shelley. There Meredith, brooding on a situation of "Modern Love", is speaking not exactly of death but still of life's baffling tragedy that brings vast powers to work out almost a blind and null result:
Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life! -
In tragic hints see here what evermore
Moves dark as yonder midnight's ocean force,
Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse,
To throw that faint thin line upon the shore!
We may note that Meredith in these lines has a semi-Shakespearian turn of speech with a crowd of assimilated metaphors or close-pressing similes. The first two lines recall even more directly some of the verses preceding in the same passage those quoted by Sri Aurobindo -
The way to dusty death...
But the reflective mind proper rather than the Life-force thinking is vocal both in the general posture of Meredith's phrases and in his sound-movement. There is even a touch of
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self-conscious deliberative thought. On the whole, the inner urgency of vision finds tongue through a half-intuitivised intellect excitedly pressing idea and image into a complex pattern and appealing to a poetic stir in our grey cells.
Not that to write from the poetic intelligence as the basic plane is to be unemotional. A Romantic like Shelley appears often one long stream of emotion, and all the Romantics of his period insisted on the free flow of feeling. There is emotion in the Classical poets too. Indeed, without a moved language no poetry can exist, just as no poetry can exist without the wings of the imagination in the word. Both may be controlled, both may be let loose - but they must be present. In the Greeks and Romans, in Dante and Milton, Corneille and Racine, they are controlled, though often very intense - and the controlling actually adds at times to the effect of the intensity. In the Elizabethan Romantics they are mostly let loose, though even in the letting loose there is the Shakespearian way and there is the Chapmanian: the way of the outbreak whose pieces are as it were still held together when they fall and that of the disinte-grating eruption. The later Romantics frequently stand mid-way in this matter. They have often the overbrimming of the Elizabethans, but it is the thought-mind that yields to the cry of the heart and the entrails, and not the heart's or the entrails' cry that seizes on the mind of thought. This leads to a certain change in the emotion which is apparently drowning it, just as, on the contrary, the intelligence proper undergoes a change with the Elizabethans in being gripped by the emotion. The feeling-tone of the later Romantics becomes tinged with the thought-mind leaping into it and tends to be shimmering sentiment rather than the brave colour and surge of the passional nature. Further, into this sentiment enters the stress of a plane beyond either the life-soul or the mind-soul and creates the subtlest, the profoundest shade of the new Roman-ticism. Within a predominantly emotional appearance the final and total result is illustrated to perfection by one of the most beautiful of Shelley's lyrics:
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O World! O Life!O Time!
On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
No more - oh, never more!
Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight:
Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
The basic plane here, on which the emotion has played so poignantly but which yet softens the poignancy to a touch of deeply wounded thought and into which steals an indescrib-able unearthliness that is at once an ache and a glow, is the same as the one we find, with the thought unsubdued by the emotion and the unearthliness acting from behind a veil, in that passage from Shelley's own Hymn to what he significantly calls Intellectual Beauty, meaning thereby that the Beauty he worships needs for its apprehension a philosophical intui-tiveness such as makes an important part of the core of his being:
Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form - where art thou gone?
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever
Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom? ...
To drive home to our critical sensibility the common basis of
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both these excerpts in the creative Intelligence, the one highly charged with feeling, the other more tempered in its heart-cry as well as a little lower in poetic quality, we may take a pair of stanzas from each of two sonnets by Shakespeare. In these stanzas Shakespeare mixes reflection and emotion, but the basic life-plane declares itself in the response which "our nerves of mental sensation" at once return to the word-texture and the rhythm-movement:
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
0 how shall summer's honey breath hold out,
Against the wrackful siege of batt'ring days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong but Time decays? ...
That time of year thou may'st in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self that seals up all in rest...
The reason why a Romantic like Shelley is not easily recognised as functioning on a basis of the creative Intelligence is well hit off broadly by C. M. Bowra:3 "The Romantics were far from thinking that intelligence is unimportant or that thought is not necessary to poetry, but they insisted that this thought must be imaginative and not abstract and that it must look at all the qualities of things and not at their general natures ... But in their distrust of reason, as the eighteenth century under-stood it, the Romantics found themselves almost forced to concentrate on something which is not indeed irrational but
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might become so in less powerful hands. The result is that their poetry lacks that element of strict prolonged thought which gives an additional strength not merely to the great Greeks but to such writers as Racine and Goethe, whose strictly poetical power owes a great deal to the hard thought which has preceded composition and is indeed transcended in the poetry, but none the less is invisibly present and powerful. The Romantics have their moments of inspiring thought and wonderful insight, but they lack this special strength which comes from uniting sustained mental effort to poetry."
In Romantic poetry, unlike in Classical, thought does not stay for long within its own proper sphere: it either plunges into emotion or draws beyond the Intelligence upward towards spheres which the Classical poet receives influences from but never approaches - at least never with a conscious straining. The Romantic's approach, however, is not sufficiently assured: that is why his thought gets attenuated without his achieving very frequently the directness and clarity native to what is beyond it, and that is also why that directness and clarity are not able in him to keep strong thought going in an intuitive way and without its getting limited by the Intelligence's range of thinking. On the other hand, the plunge into emotion diffuses the thought and, in comparison, the thought of even the Elizabethan poet may seem more precise in spite of being values of the Life-force etched out into idea patterns. Part of the thought-diffusing emotionalism that is at times identified with Romanticism by some critics is due to a deliberate attempt by the intellectual being to undo its intellectuality and res-tore the passion and feeling and sensuous gusto that it has chilled and thinned away into sentiment verging at its extreme on an unreal fineness. "There is then an attempt," says Sri Aurobindo,4 "to get back to the natural fullness of the vital and physical life, but the endeavour fails in sincerity and success because it is impossible; the mind of man having got so far cannot return upon its course, undo what it has made of itself and recover the glad childhood of its early vigorous nature. There is instead of the simplicity of spontaneous life a search
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after things striking, exaggerated, abnormal, violent, new, in the end a morbid fastening on perversities, on all that is ugly, glaring and coarse on the plea of their greater reality, on exaggerations of vital instinct and sensation, on physical wrynesses and crudities and things unhealthily strange. The thought-mind, losing the natural full-blooded power of the vital being, pores on these things, stimulates the failing blood with them and gives itself an illusion of some forceful sensation of living." Much Romanticism on the European Continent took this way and acquired the taint which led Goethe to brand it as "disease", and much in post-Romantic literature, whether avowing itself as Romantic or no, has gone thus "decadent" in various forms. The makers of the English Romantic Revival seldom went far on the road to decadence. But even on that road the accent of the intellectual being is distinguishable from that of the Life-force. And in the English Romantics the true substance and form of thought can be traced more distinctly in the midst of all emotionalism and show these poets to be initial voices of the entirely modernised intellect imaginatively deployed.
Anticipations of the modern intellectual movement's inci-pient tendencies in poetry may be watched in three places. One is in certain post-Elizabethan poets of what has come to be labelled as the Metaphysical School for its fusion of intricate thought with sense-impressions and of far-fetched scholarship with immediate feeling and of supra-physical longing with fanciful sentiment. The chief names here are Donne, Marvell, Crashaw, Herbert, Vaughan. Mostly they fall between two stools - they have not the Elizabethan verve to carry off their ingenuities nor the real intellectual self-possession which can fulfil their striving beyond the Elizabethan tumult of the Life-force. But now and again, through the twisted nervous labour both sensuous and imaginative of Donne's wit and wisdom and through the at once homely and colourful, idealistic and amatory piquancy of Marvell, we get the anticipation of a later mental subtlety, and more often, through Herbert's simple penetrative fervours and Crashaw's lyrical many-hued reli-
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giosity and Vaughan's intellectual vision's luminous attempt at transcendence of itself, there glimmers out a presage of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats.
A forerunner more immediate in time as well as in several moods is the effort made by poets like Gray, Collins, Thomson, Chatterton and Cowper in the third quarter of the eighteenth century to break away, in Sri Aurobindo's words,5 "from the prison of the formal metrical mould, rhetorical style, limited subject-matter, absence of imagination and vision imposed by the high pontiffs of the pseudo-classical cult [Dryden and Pope and Johnson] . ... Some pale effort is made to recover something of the Shakespearian wealth of language or of the softer, more pregnant colour of the pre-Restoration diction and to modify it to suit the intellectualised treatment of thought and life which was now an indispensable element; for the old rich vital utterance was no longer possible, an intellectualised speech had become a fixed and a well-acquired need of a more developed mentality. Romanticism of the modem type now makes its first appearance in the choice of the subjects of poetic interest and here and there in the treatment, though not yet quite in the grain and the spirit. Especially, there is the beginning of a direct gaze of the poetic intelligence and imagination upon life and Nature and of another and a new power in English speech, the poetry of sentiment as distinguished from the inspired voice of sheer feeling or passion. But all these newer motives are only incipient and unable to get free expression because there is still a heavy weight of the past intellectual tradition... There is no sign of the sudden uplifting that after a few decades was to come as if upon the sudden wings of a splendid moment."
A third precursor of the new Romanticism's general psy-chological source is the poet to whom these singers looked back sometimes in the manner and movement of their verse and who was mainly responsible for the establishment of an authentically intellectualised speech in English poetry: Milton. Particularly in the early Milton of the Nativity Hymn, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus and Lycidas we have a richness and
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flexibility and supple penetrativeness which are almost lost in the later Milton's grandiose epic chant:
Oft, on a plat of rising ground,
I hear the far-off curfew sound,
Over some wide-watered shore,
Swinging slow with sullen roar;
Or, if the air will not permit,
Some still removed place will fit,
Where glowing embers through the room
Teach light to counterfeit a gloom...
I was all ear,
And took in strains that might create a soul
Under the ribs of Death...
And set to work millions of spinning worms
That in their green shops weave the smooth-haired silk....
Then sing of secret things that came to pass
When beldam Nature in her cradle was...
Here is a blending of Elizabethan Romanticism and the old Classicism and it looks forward to the nineteenth-century Romantic mind's composite manner. But the poetic intelligence, unlike in most of the Metaphysicals who came before Milton, is already master of the Life-force, though not aloof from that power's characteristic play. Only, this poetic intelligence is still of the old type and not of the modem variety. All the more is its alignment with the Graeco-Roman spirit visible in Paradise Lost where in his own style of packed Latinised English Milton presents us with imaginative structures of the inspired reason and the chastened and enlightened aesthetic sense. To this spirit we can no more return than to the Romanticism born of the impetuous Life-force which cared nothing for thought except as it enriched its own colourful swell. Not that the inspired reason and the enlightened
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aesthetic sense are absent in the new Romantics. In relation to their work Sri Aurobindo6 has written: "English poetry has got away from the Elizabethan outbreak nearer to a kinship with the mind and manner of the Greek and Latin poets and their intellectual descendants, though still, it is to be noted, keeping something, a subtle and intimate turn, a power of fire and ether which has become native to it, a legacy from the Shakespearian speech which was not there in its beginnings. This imagina-tively intellectual basis of speech remains constant down to the end of the Victorian era." Wordsworth's "resort to the straight-forward force of the simplest speech dependent on the weight of the substance and thought for its one sufficient source of power"7 has, at its best, something of true Classicism about it, as also has in its high moments the not infrequent recourse by him to a semi-Miltonic diction without Milton's compactness. Shelley in sections of Adonais and in large tracts of Prometheus Unbound (minus the lyrics), Keats in Hyperion and even Byron in some of his rare forceful sincerities have to a marked degree the same source of inspiration. But there has entered into that source a totally non-Classical afflatus, because of two things. First, the modem intelligence is of another mould than the ancient Classical and is far removed from even the Miltonic mind whether in its initial delicacy and suppleness or in its final Classicism of power and massiveness and sheer intellectual vision. Secondly, as never before in so consistent a shape in occidental literature, there falls upon this poetic mind a higher light which occasions temporarily a speech which is sheerly from above the human mentality.
The modern intelligence, says Sri Aurobindo,8 "sets more comprehensively to work, opens itself to all manner of the possibilities of truth and to a crowding stream and mass of interests, a never satisfied minuteness of detail, an endless succession of pregnant generalisations." It is too thronged "with subtle thought-matter, too brooding, sensitive, respon-sive to many things" - often things "not easily expressible" -to be capable of a "new Parthenon... whether in the white marble subdued to the hand or in the pure and lucid spacings
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of the idea and the word" .9 Turned on Nature, this mind, in its functionings outside poetry, "has led to the immeasurable development of the observing and analysing eye of Science."10 Turned on man in his external visible being, it has been the cause of a large and "minute enquiry into the origins and antiquity and history of the race, into the sources of its present development, into all its physical, psychological, sociological being and the many ideal speculations and practical aspira-tions of its future which have arisen from this new knowledge of the human being and his possibilities".11 Turned on man in his internal invisible part, it has been the mainspring of a "growing subjectivity, an intense consciousness of the I, the soul or the self, not in any mystic withdrawal within or inward meditation, or not in that pre-eminently, but in relation to the whole of life and Nature. This characteristic distinguishes modern subjectivism from the natural subjectivity of former times, which either tended towards an intense solitary inward-ness or was superficial and confined to a few common though often strongly emphasised notes. Ancient or mediaeval indivi-duality might return more self-assertive or violent responses to life, but the modern kind is more subtly and pervasively self-conscious and the stronger in thought and feeling to throw its own image on things, because it is more precluded from throwing itself out freely in action and living. This turn was in fact an inevitable result of an increasing force of intellectual-ism; for great intensity of thought, when it does not isolate itself from emotion, reactive sensation and aesthetic response, as in science and in certain kinds of philosophy, must be attended by a quickening and intensity of these other parts of our mentality".12
No doubt, the strong scientific penchant in the age has set up an ideal of objectivity, of an outward-gazing vision and brought about in literature the phenomenon of so-called Realism. But always "the self-conscious thinking of the modern mind which brings into prominent relief the rest of the mental personality and stamps the whole work with it"13 gets into the way of the strictly objective or realistic ideal. And the
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subjective trend betrays itself all the more when the love of close and minute observation that distinguishes the age is channelled into psychologising. For, the moment we begin to psychologise closely and minutely in relation to whatever human situation is held up for objective study and especially the moment we go below the surface "we are at once preparing to go back into ourselves. For it is only through our own psychology, through its power of response to and of identification with the mind and soul in others that we can know their inner psychology; for the most part our psychological account of others is only an account of the psychological impressions of them they produce in our own mentality. This we see even in the realistic writers in the strongly personal and limited way in which they render the psychology of their creatures in one or two always recurring main notes upon which they ring minute variations".14 Also in Realism's main notes there is "an exaggeration and overstressing which betrays its true character, the posthumous child of roman-ticism perverted by a pseudo-scientific preoccupation".15 Even its fondness for the littlenesses, imperfections, uglinesses, morbidities in man's life and psychology as if they were the whole or the greater part of him and as if life "were a psychological and physiological disease, a fungoid growth upon material Nature",16 is not unconnected with Romanti-cism which too "laid a constant stress on the grotesque, diseased, abnormal, but for the sake of artistic effect, to add another tone to its other glaring colours. Realism professes to render the same facts in the proportions of truth and science, but being art and not science, it inevitably seeks for pro-nounced effects by an evocative stress ..."17 The subjective trend is betrayed by this pressing towards a conspicuous vividness as well as by the original choice of one or two main notes for expressing "reality".
In poetry with its deeper founts of creation, objectivism is even more shot with the subjective personality and the work becomes a history of the poet's own soul in the guise of objective expression. The attempt at deliberate impersonal
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presentation shows itself, on a near scrutiny, to be the shaping of everything by a "strong subjective personality... into a mask-reflection of its own characteristic moods".18 And where - not only in poetry but in all imaginative literature - the ideal is not avowedly objective or realistic, the creative mind, conscious with greater acuteness of the self within that really does the whole work everywhere, tends often "to turn to it for a theme or for the mould of its psychological creations, to a conscious intimate subjectivism."19 Then we have a constant sifting of delicate shades of desire and reverie, a pressing towards more and more inward realities, a plunging or rising by the intellect itself towards hidden fountains beyond it in order to bathe its own faculties in a finer light, an emphasising of the desiring, dreaming, aspiring, intuiting individuality and of its rights and ideals against all outer powers, a defence of the personal self's precious uniqueness against social order or traditional authority.
The modern mind's close and minute eye and touch upon outward Nature has led in poetry to an imaginative and sympathetic concentration on her sights, sounds, objects, sensible impressions, a detailed and intimate visualisation of her appearances and an effort to go beyond appearances to a close communion with her soul, as it were. "The older poetry," writes Sri Aurobindo,20"directed an occasional objective eye on Nature, turning a side glance from life or thought to get some colouring or decorative effect or a natural border or background for life or something that illustrated, ministered to or enriched the human thought or mood of the moment at most for a casual indulgence of the imagination and senses in natural beauty. But the intimate subjective treatment of Nature, the penetrated human response to her is mostly absent or comes only in rare and brief touches. On the larger scale her subjective life is realised not with an immediate communion, but through myth and the image of divine personalities that govern her powers.... Nature now lives for the poet as an independent presence, a greater or equal power dwelling side by side with him or embracing and dominating his existence.
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Even the objective vision and interpretation of her has deve-loped, where it continues at all the older poetic method, a much more minute and delicate eye and touch in place of the large, strong and simply beautiful or telling effects which satisfied an earlier imagination." But where modern poetry "goes beyond that fine outwardness, it has brought us a whole world of new vision; working sometimes by a vividly sugges-tive presentation, sometimes by a separation of effects and an imaginative reconstruction which reveals aspects the first outward view had hidden in, sometimes by a penetrating impressionism which in its finest subtleties seems to be coming back by a detour to a sensuously mystical treatment, it goes within through the outward and now not so much presents as recreates physical Nature for us through the imaginative vision" .21
Sri Aurobindo22 continues: "But the direct subjective ap-proach to Nature is the most distinctly striking characteristic turn of the modern mentality. The approach proceeds from two sides which constantly meet each other and create between them a nexus of experience between man and Nature which is the modern way of responding to the universal Spirit. On one side there is the subjective sense of Nature herself as a great life, a being, a Presence, with impressions, moods, emotions of her own expressed in her many symbols of life and stressing her objective manifestations.... On the other side there is a sensitive human response, moved in emotion or thrilling in sensation or stirred by sheer beauty or responsive in mood, a response of satisfaction and possession or of dissatisfied yearning and seeking, in the whole an attempt to relate or harmonise the soul and mind and sensational and vital being of the human individual with the soul and mind and life and body of the visible and sensible universe."
Man's modern outlook on himself, in the warp and weft of Space and Time and in the stress of the universe and in all that is meant by his present, past and future, started poetically by an excited responsive valuing of, as Sri Aurobindo23 recounts, "all that had been ignored and put aside as uncouth and
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barbarous by the older classical or otherwise limited type of mentality. It sought out rather all that was unfamiliar and attractive by its unlikeness to the present, the primitive, the savage, mediaeval man and his vivid life and brilliant setting, the Orient very artificially seen through a heavily coloured glamour, the ruins of the past, the life of the peasant or the solitary, the outlaw, man near to Nature undisguised by conventions and uncorrupted by an artificial culture or man in revolt against conventions, a willed preference for these strange and interesting aspects of humanity, as in Nature for her wild and grand, savage and lonely scenes or her rich and tropical haunts or her retired spots of self-communion. On one side a sentimental or a philosophic naturalism, on the other a flamboyant or many-hued romanticism, superficial mediae-valism, romanticised Hellenism, an interest in the fantastic and the supernatural, tendencies of an intellectual or an ideal transcendentalism, are the salient constituting characters. They make up that brilliant and confusedly complex, but often crude and unfinished literature... which forms a hasty transition from the Renascence and its after-fruits to the modernism of today which is already becoming the modernism of yester-day" - the literature which stretches in France from Rousseau and Chateaubriand to Hugo and takes on its way Goethe, Schiller and Heine in Germany and covers in England Burns and Byron and the five names that stand out in the annals of the second phase of Romanticism and give to it not only, as the others do, its distinction from both Classicism and the post-Renascence Romantic outburst but also a new character pregnant with the promise of an utmost luminosity in future poetic expression.
That luminosity is almost with us in a few poets gifted with an exceptional insight, who seem to be helping the Day of the Spirit to widen out of the dawn-flush spelled by those five names. But the modern mind, turning to look for things beyond Nature and man, met with a long-persistent blankness due to the growth of scepticism and denial in the wake of science. A protracted fight ensued between the old faiths and
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the new sciences, in which often the former could make only a difficult self-defence or keep to past beliefs with "a doubtful and tormented, a merely intellectual or a conventional cling-ing".24 Now, however, the atheistic and materialistic cry does not ring defiantly any more and there has been a revolution in scientific thought itself compelling a plastic, more speculative approach. Outside this thought, "with the return to subjective intuition and a fresh adventuring of knowledge and imagina-tion into the beyond, modern poetry, freed from the sceptical attitude, is beginning in this field too to turn the balance in its favour as against the old classical and mediaeval literature" .25 The spiritual vision it is gaining is nearer, less grossly human, more authentically supernatural; the new "symbols it is beginning to create and its reinterpretation of the old symbols are more adequate."26 The promise is being slowly fulfilled of the time when the ebb of positive faith was to some extent compensated for by a light and force of inspiration that came into the work of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats and carried again and again the influences then abroad beyond themselves.
The influences thus uplifted were those which had found expression in the vehement idealism of the French Revolution and in German transcendentalism and Romanticism. They too were, in several respects, a help against the growing sceptical bent, but they were intellectual in their idea and substance though not untouched with keener fires than the intellect commands. In the understanding of these influences that underwent in the minds of those five English poets, each a remarkable individuality, a sudden transformation, we must look upon Rousseau as the key figure. Of both the French Revolution and much in German Romanticism and, indirectly, of even the transcendentalist philosophy in Germany he is the original inspirer and he has in him, amidst much miasma, some vague breath of
An ampler ether, a diviner air
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that came into the world of European poetry with Wordsworth.
But before we turn our gaze to this key-figure we may distinguish a trend of mind which ran parallel with Rous-seauism and contributed to the Romantic Movement a nuance sometimes blending with Rousseauism and sometimes stand-ing as an additional ingredient of the post-Rousseau mentality. Wordsworth himself, in a passage of his :Prelude recollecting "the golden store of books" devoured during holidays from Cambridge, has indicated that trend as part of his own being:
The tales that charm away the wakeful night
In Araby, romances; legends penned
For solace by dim light of monkish lamps;
Fictions, for ladies of their love, devised
By youthful squires; adventures endless, spun
By the dismantled warrior in old age,
Out of the bowels of those very schemes
In which his youth did first extravagate;
These spread like day, and something in the shape
Of these will live till man shall be no more.
Dumb yearnings, hidden appetites, are ours
And they must have their food. Our childhood sits,
Our simple childhood sits upon a throne
That hath more power than all the elements...
The preparers of the precious food, the servitors of childhood's royalty are blessed by Wordsworth and hailed as "dreamers" and "forgers of daring tales",
Who make our wish, our power, our thought a deed,
An empire, a possession, - ye whom time
And seasons serve; all Faculties to whom
Earth crouches, the elements are potter's clay,
Space like a heaven filled up with northern lights,
Here, nowhere, there, and everywhere at once.
Romanticism as the triumphant magic of bold or tender reverie
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wandering over the past and the remote, relishing even the sombre and the weird, was a slowly growing force independent of Rousseau. But it matured as a world-factor when it entered into the Movement whose originator was that earthquake of a Frenchman.
To pierce to the very centre of Rousseau's significance we must recall the extraordinary experience he had in 1751. He has described it in a letter to M. de Malesherbes eleven years later: "I was going to see Diderot, then a prisoner at Vincennes; I had taken in my pocket a Mercure de France and I glanced at it as I walked. I came on the question set for discussion by the Academy of Dijon which gave occasion for my first essay. If ever anything could resemble a sudden inspiration, it was the movement which took place in me at that moment; all at once I felt my mind dazzled by a thousand lights; crowds of ideas appeared there at the same time with an inexpressible force and confusion; I felt my head seized by giddiness, like that of drunkenness; a violent palpitation oppressed me, my breast heaved. Not being able to breathe while walking, I let myself fall down under one of the trees in the avenue and spent there a half-hour of such agitation that on rising I found the front of my vest bathed with tears I had no idea I had shed. Oh, dear Sir, if I could ever write a quarter of what I saw and felt beneath that tree, how clearly could I present all the contradictions of our social system, with what force I could reveal all the abuses of our institutions, with what simplicity I could show that man is naturally good, and that it is through these institutions alone that men become wicked."
It is extremely curious that the sentence which is the keynote of this strange account - "all at once I felt my mind dazzled by a thousand lights" - should be caught up by Wordsworth in a more objective form when, speaking of the "dreamers" and "forgers of daring tales", he refers to the magic "Faculties" that find
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Perhaps he has imaginatively touched the blending-point within himself between the Romanticism he is describing and the Romantic Rousseauism to which he has given a sublimation in his own best work. Perhaps the blending-point is further lit up by those other lines in his passage -
Our childhood sits,
That hath more power than all the elements ...
For, did not Rousseau, when he held that "man is naturally good", imply the state of Nature such as every individual experiences during his unsophisticated childhood? And did not Wordsworth, while sublimating Rousseauistic Romanticism, see childhood come "trailing clouds of glory" from God, possessed of a faculty to which all things appear
Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream?
Now to Rousseau's own extraordinary experience. The main points standing out of the episode are: first, the experience is mystical and charged with illumination and intuition, a breaking from some psychological region of direct sight and direct feeling beyond the human into the normal conscious-ness; second, the part which receives the supernormal vision and truth-touch is the thinking mind where immediately the "thousand lights" become a crowd of ideas simultaneously present; third, the complexity and force with which the mystical experience occurs creates a brilliant confusion and a violent stir both emotional and nervous. The thinking mind is the dazzled and disordered recipient of truths that go home to it from above itself and it is the medium of them to the heart and the vitalistic being which at the same time give a most moved response and are quite thrown off their balance. And the truths with which the thinking mind is seized revolve round the seeing and feeling that man holds within him in his
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ultimate nature the essence of goodness and that this essence is covered up by an artificial growth of complicated and iniqui-tous externalities miscalled civilisation and that, if the exter-nalities could be removed and free spontaneous expression allowed to man's core of being, all problems would be solved. The truths may be summed up in the cry which Rousseau subsequently evoked all over Europe: "Back to Nature" - and they may be interpreted to mean a return from the rigidly and intricately patterned outward consciousness to some inward and basic soul-simplicity and from the mazy over-develop-ment of the arts and sciences of civilisation to a poetic primitiveness, a simple and uncorrupted life in imaginative accord with elemental earth, in which there is utter freedom of the individual and yet a collective harmony, a blissful blend of anarchy and order, the establishment of a Golden Age such as the myths and legends of all humanity report to have existed in a pre-history when the human was not divorced from the divine.
A general aspect to note is that here we have an experience which is mystical without falling into the framework of con-ventional Christendom. Rousseau is the first individual in Christian Europe who, according to Havelock Ellis, "presents a typical picture of 'conversion' altogether apart from any conventional religious creeds". By "conversion" Ellis must not be understood to mean anything comparable to what hap-pened to the great spiritual mystics, a new subsequent living in the depths close to the Light revealed to them: Rousseau's "conversion" resembles theirs in only the kindling up of the being, as if by some power beyond it, to its principal life-work, the highly inspired receiving of a "mission" and the unes-capable sense of it ever after.
What happened to Rousseau and the significance of the . happening are in their fundamental form a seed-gleam of English Romanticism at its intensest. This significance, as developed by Rousseau himself and as it took shape in the movement he started, was something much less profound though extremely powerful, a mixed mass which also contri-
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buted several shades to English Romanticism itself no less than to the Romanticism of the Continent. The illumination and intuition from beyond the intellect got confused with the warm chaos their sudden descent had awakened in Rousseau's emotive and instinctive parts. The suprarational did not altogether disappear, but it got inextricably swirled into the infra-rational. The intellect which was meant to be the vehicle of the former put itself at the service of the latter. The soul-simplicity towards which the higher truths were driving was identified with the untutored heart of a love that knows no restraint, an extravagance of impassioned sentiment. The innocent and harmless freedom that is the soul's natural life grew the more dubious fight of the individual ego against all restrictions, social, political, moral, religious. The nostalgic cry of "Back to Nature", instead of bringing up the original unencrusted image of the divine in the human, argued the human itself in its primitiveness to be the divine and conjured up the picture of a "noble savage" happy amidst wild scene-ries. The mystical experience which had stood clear of Chris-tianity and indeed of all established religion changed into an exclusive cult of the private conscience: God and the dwelling by the individual on his own ethico-religious impulse were taken to be the same thing so that ultimately whatever ethico-religious self the individual felt within him replaced the sense of deity and the whole of ethics and religion was summed up in the formula: "Il faut etre soi", which signified that all one's duty lay in being one's self without contradiction, without any other need than to attain one's own happiness. The inner Life which the utilitarian philosophers had scorned and towards which Rousseau directed men's minds came to be intended by him not, as by the Saints, to put men into contact with their supreme origin and their Lord, but rather to halo every person's singularity and to justify every idiosyncratic revolt.
However, through the entire low-pitching, by Rousseau's temperament, of the revelation he had enjoyed ran still a great and glimmering idealism with a democratic sweep, and the vast vague emotions and instincts which pulled that revelation
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down and took hold of his intellect could win almost the whole age to his side by the very force of that intellect and by the sudden flash within it as of an axiomatic verity. His intellect was often the artist of a specious logic, but while the argument might be debated the words carried a ring of sincerity and conviction, a rhythm as of a prophet's passionate directness, and there was an easy perfection of form which added to his persuasiveness, and often round an emotional statement hung the nimbus of an ecstatic vision caught by a mind of thought tending to move with a brooding as well as soaring intricacy. It is the conjunction of all these factors that made him the progenitor of the French Revolution fired, amidst its various excesses, by the grand slogan of Liberty, Equality and Frater-nity which arose from the political formula given by him in his Contrat Social to his Utopian reveries - the inspirer of German transcendentalism in which his insistence on the inner subjective determinant and judge played so decisive a role that Kant, who demonstrated the innate thought-categories and the conscious self as the unifiers of experience into a totality and who argued a God-given moral imperative within each heart, used to hang on the walls of his bare study no picture except the portrait of this Frenchman - the initiator of modem Romanticism and its " solitary thinkings", its " divine discontent", its communion with Nature, its drive towards ineffable depths of sentiment, its semi-philosophical push to exceed the mere Reason, its dreams of an ideal futurity on earth, its apotheosis of individuality on one hand and of universal sympathy on the other. Even the profoundest species of this Romanticism, the English, which escaped much of the violently hectic and bizarre, or else the effusively melancholy, to be found in France and Germany as the offspring of Rousseauism on the debit side, owed many of its poetic ideas and urges . in their germ form to the prose-writer of the Discours sur l'Inegalite, Emile, the Nouvelle Heloise, the Reveries and the Lettres a Malesherbes no less than the Contrat Social and the Confessions.
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1.The Future Poetry, pp. 95-96.
2.Ibid, p. 278.
3.The Romantic Imagination (London), 1957, p. 289.
4.The Future Poetry, p. 227.
5.Ibid., pp. 92-93.
6.Ibid., pp. 171-72.
7.Ibid., p. 115.
8.Ibid., p. 191.
9.Ibid., p. 192.
10.Ibid., p. 97.
11.Ibid., p. 98.
12.Ibid., pp. 103-04.
13.Ibid., p. 105.
14.Ibid., pp. 106-07.
15.Ibid., p. 102.
16.Ibid., pp. 101-02.
17.Ibid., p. 102.
18.Ibid., p. 104.
19.Ibid., p. 107.
20.Ibid., p. 97.
22.Ibid., pp. 97-98.
23.Ibid., pp. 99-100.
24.Ibid., p. 109.
26.Ibid., p. 110.
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6
The climax of the second Romanticism: poetry of the Age of Wordsworth - the Romantic quintessence of Kubla Khan
In appearance, the second Romantic Movement started in England at the end of the eighteenth century by a revolt against the artificial "poetic diction" of the pseudo-Augustan Age. Wordsworth asked for a natural language and, though in some respects he went to an extreme by insisting on almost conversational naivete, what ultimately he and his contemporaries wanted was a living speech not ruled by a too externalised mind. Naturalness connoted the mind of thought expressing itself vividly from a depth of the being.
Here it is interesting to observe that the pseudo-Augustans had themselves claimed naturalness as their guiding principle. "If you had asked them," remarks G. H. Mair,1 "to state as simply and broadly as possible their purpose they would have said it was to follow nature, and if you had inquired what they meant by nature it would turn out that they thought of it mainly as the opposite of art and the negation of what was fantastic, tortured or far-sought in thinking or writing." Theirs was a revolt against the Elizabethans and the Metaphysicals, and naturalness to them spelled urbanity, good sense, mode-ration, distrust of emotion, good breeding. These qualities are not intrinsically objectionable: in their true form they are some aspects of an authentic Classicism and make fine poetry indeed in the works of Horace who, next to Virgil, was the most famous figure in the circle of poets around the Roman Emperor Augustus. The bane of the pseudo-Augustans was an over-exter-nalisation of the cultured mind. Against this so-called naturalness the new Romantics with their Rousseauistic cry of "Back to Nature" urged the charging of the intellect with not only ele-mental spontaneity but also intuitive subtlety and profundity.
The philosopher Whitehead has suggested that the new
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Romantic Movement was really a reaction from the mecha-nistic view held by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries under the sway of the Newtonian development of physics. The whole universe was to physics a machine and, though the mind. of man was granted its own non-material essence, the body of man came under the mechanistic category and even the mind was regarded with a mechanistic eye. As Edmund Wilson2 puts it, human nature came to be reduced to a set of principles according to which it invariably acted. Everything was strictly rationalised. In poetry also the role of the imagination was diminished - it was made out to be a sort of decorative aid to the play of the logical intellect and systematised sentiment. The form of poetry lay as well under the shadow of the mechanistic philosophy. Corresponding to the theorems of physics, there were the geometrical plays of Racine and the balanced clicking couplets of Pope.
Whitehead points out that Romanticism refused to look on the world as mechanism and saw it as organism: the Romantic poet perceives, in Edmund Wilson's words,3 "that nature includes planets, mountains, vegetation and people alike, that what we are and what we see, what we hear, what we feel and what we smell are inextricably related, that all are involved in the same great entity" . Things and sense-impressions, matter and mind are interfused and they constitute a reality in which every element implies and - as Whitehead has it - "prehends" another by a sort of feeling so that all the parts are what they are because of one another and because of a whole which by being present in some manner in each part makes them mutually "prehensive" and serve as members of an organic totality and not a mechanical aggregate.
About the first book of Wordsworth's Prelude whitehead4 says: "Of course, Wordsworth is a poet writing a poem, and is not concerned with dry philosophical statements. But it would hardly be possible to express more clearly a feeling for nature, as exhibiting entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal presences of others" - and he quotes as a typical passage:
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Ye Presences of Nature in the sky
And on the earth! Ye Visions of the hills!
And Souls of lonely places! can I think
A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed
Such ministry, when ye through many a year
Haunting me thus among my boyish sports
On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills,
Impressed upon all forms the characters
Of danger or desire: and thus did make
The surface of the universal earth
With triumph and delight, with hope and fear,
Work like a sea?...
Whitehead5 continues: "Shelley is entirely at one with Words-worth as to the interfusing of the Presences in nature." Here is the opening stanza of his poem entitled Mont Blanc:
The everlasting universe of Things
Flows through the Mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark - now glittering - now reflecting gloom -
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters - with a sound but half their own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild woods, among the Mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.
Whitehead's comment6 is: "Shelley has written these lines with explicit reference to some form of idealism, Kantian or Berk-leyan or Platonic. But however you construe him, he is here an . emphatic witness to a prehensive unification as constituting the very being of nature."
The thesis put forward by Whitehead is not fictitious, but if the Romantics foreshadowed a philosophy of organism it was with an approach entirely different from his and they were not
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confined to the organic formula. Whitehead does not take vitality and mentality as powers underlying materiality and exceeding the physical universe which may be considered ultimately a certain expression of them though an expression. often appearing to obscure, obstruct and even deny them. To him they are manifestations of a universal reality which, though not the materialist's lifeless and mindless matter in motion with the phenomena of life and mind as certain complexities of physico-chemical action, is still a process of mere "events" with what we call the body as the centre of each vital and mental experience that is ours and the entire physical universe as the enlarging circumference of a pattern with which this experience is somehow continuous, for no expe-rience can be bound down to just one place but is the actualisa-tion of everything everywhere, a member of a worldwide organism and itself an organism on a small scale. No primacy is given by Whitehead to life and mind, and his system of "events" he finally distinguishes from materialistic mecha-nism by terming it "organic mechanism".7 The great Roman-tics would have been horrified on being accused, as Whitehead can be, of taking away with the left hand what is conceded with the right. Their rebellion against mechanism went far beyond giving, however "soulfully", an organic complexion to the mechanism. They could never have agreed to thinking that their intuitive subtlety and profundity lay in a poetic approxi-mation to Whitehead's philosophy.
However, it is true that the soul of man felt ill at ease in the world, pictured by eighteenth-century physics, of iron law and rigid structure. When the individual looked into himself deeply, he found not a well-ordered world but fantasy, conflict, mystery, aspiration, a sense of "things not easily expressible". It was with this in-look that Rousseau gave birth to modern Romanticism. And it was the same in-look that, piercing farther than Rousseau, unsealed on a sudden the springs of a Splendour that nourished for the first time the poetic mind of Europe - "except," as Sri Aurobindo8 adds, "in so far as the ancient poets had received it through myth and symbol or a
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religious mystic here and there attempted to give his experience rhythmic and imaginative form. But here there is the first poetic attempt of the intellectual faculty striving at the height of its own development to lock beyond its own level directly into the unseen and the unknown and to unveil the ideal truth of its own highest universal conceptions." The attempt can be seen in various forms: Blake's touch on the inner psychic realms and on vivid occult "Visions of Eternity" as well as his huge mythological imaginings that spoke at times as from a thick shining cloud into which the rational intellect seemed caught up - Coleridge's supernaturalism, his seizure of a terrible haunting indefiniteness, his projection of weird influences from hidden worlds into the midst of primitive and symbolic or else idealistic and rhapsodical thinking - Words-worth's pantheistic entry into Nature's inner being of infinite peace and also his elevated ethical thought in tune with that empathy and his occasional snatches of regions beyond the intellect which are the soul's home before physical birth and which sweep into the mind's word the breath and brightness of a direct intuitive seerhood - Shelley's imaginative ethereal-ised Platonism capturing the essence of the ideals of light, love and liberty by a semi-pantheistic semi-personalised vision of a single Spirit and of secret entities from "some world far from ours", whose intense rapturous contact he conveys by his enchanted and iridescent lyricism - Keats's worship of perfect Beauty, a soulful sensuousness rising on the wings of a partly mythopoeic partly idealistic thought yearning towards some dream-shrine where Beauty fuses with Truth.
What about those two other poets who are usually banded with this neo-Romantic group: Burns and Byron? Sri Aurobindo9 has accurately gauged Burns: " ... Burns has in him the things which are most native to the poetry of our modern .times; he brings in the new naturalness, the nearness of the fuller poetic mind, intellectualised, informed with the power of clear reflective thought, to life and nature, the closely ob-serving eye, the stirring force of great general ideas, the spirit of revolt and self-assertion, the power of personality and the
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free play of individuality, the poignant sentiment, sometimes even a touch of the psychological subtlety. These things are in him fresh, strong, initial as in a forerunner impelled by the first breath of the coming air, but not in that finished possession of the new motives which is to be the greatness of the future master-singers." Yes, the mind of the new age is active in Burns on several sides; what is lacking is, on the one hand, the supra-intellectual urge which most characterises "the future master-singers" and, on the other, their deeper artistic effect which cannot be achieved merely by the frank and unartificial and sturdy lyricism so frequently commanded by Burns. This effect he misses because his view of life is too close to the outsides and surfaces: "sometimes only does it suggest to us," writes Sri Aurobindo,10 "the subtler something which gives lyrical poetry not only its form and lilt and its power to stir, - all these he has, - but its more moving inmost appeal." As for subtlety charged with magic or mystery, there is perhaps one sole bit in Burns, presaging the true temper of the Romantic Revival -those two lines that enchanted Yeats with their symbolic colour:
The wan moon is setting ayont the white wave,
And time is setting with me, Oh!*
Byron belonged to the great Romantic group with a more genuine right and is the most vigorous voice among them, but he too is weak in the characteristic element which shone forth in their poetry - the Celtic element which is one ingredient of the English genius, mingling as a refining and developing force of visionary insight with the more prominent Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic ingredient of concrete earthiness either fresh and simple or robust and practical. Byron carries still a living shadow of the.eighteenth century: it is somewhat
• Yeats slightly misquoted the lines when he praised them:
The white moon is setting behind the white wave,
And Time is setting with me, O!
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symptomatic that his favourite poet should be Pope. But his frequent rhetoric has a picturesque individual note which is at the same time a splash of the sea of the Life-force and a gust drawn from the high searching wind of the poetic intelligence peculiar to the modern Romanticism. In this individual note there is a tendency to pose and make a pageant of his heart, and it introduces a certain falsity and exaggeration into his work. Yet here he has the defect of the self-conscious new Roman-ticism and not of either the deliberative pseudo-Classicism or the impulsive and aggressive Romanticism of the Elizabethan Age. Nor was that defect unaccompanied by qualities that render him an outstanding figure of the Rousseauistic epoch by his sensitiveness to mountain and sea with an elemental vehemence gathered from his rebellious endeavour to exceed life's ordinary limits by a titanism bursting with power of personality, an endeavour hardly mystical in its appearance yet not unrelated in its deeper substance to the elan of mysticism in his greatest contemporaries towards the super-human. What may be called spiritual in it is the Byronic sense that man for all his error and sensuality is yet an archangel fallen and not a merely superior pig in an Epicurean sty. This sense comes much short of his greatest contemporaries' vision of man returning to godhead, but, as Sri Aurobindo11 states, "it reposes on, it is the obscure side of a spiritual reality". Except for rare hints of that reality, "he could not break through the obstructions of his lower personality and express this thing that he felt in its native tones of largeness and power".12 What he felt drove outwards mostly through a tremendous assertion of individual freedom.
In Byron the passion for liberty and the insistence on individuality that were wide-spread by Rousseauistic Romanticism reached their acme - finding, as Sri Aurobindo13 .says, their "voice of Tyrrhenian bronze" - just as Wordsworth marked the climax of this Romanticism's communion with Nature and Shelley the extreme of its unrestrained sympathy. But that passion and that insistence burned bright too in Wordsworth and Shelley, not to mention Blake. They mixed
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with other motives, philosophical and emotional, yet it is noteworthy that temperaments so different had the same basic desire to enjoy personal freedom and to make every individual free. Sometimes the new Romanticism is even defined as. typically a revolt of the individual. And indeed the deeper aspect of this Romanticism, the revolt against mechanism, may itself be interpreted in terms of individualism. For what was in revolt was the personal vision the Romantic poet had of the world within him. Face to face with that world he - to quote Wilson14 again - "either set himself like Wordsworth and Blake to affirm the superior truth of this vision as compared to the mechanical universe of the physicists or, accepting this mechanical universe, like Byron or Alfred de Vigny, as external to and indifferent to man, he pitted against it, in defiance, his own turbulent insubordinate soul''.
In all cases individualism was aflame - and we are reminded of the Hellenistic and humanistic stress on the indi-vidual in the Romanticism of the Renascence. But here is no outcome of the mere Life-force's upsurge. In the Renascence there was no stress on individualism in principle - no formu-lated recognition of it. Modernism with its more intellectual character is individualistic with a certain self-justifying ges-ture. And there is also a profounder context for its assertion of personality and for its view of society as not a rigid whole subordinating the members but a group of free individuals spontaneously associating with one another. There is a dif-ference here from the Renascence explosion of individual zest - the riotous giantism of Rabelais, the curious and happy self-regard of Montaigne, the artistic egotism of Benvenuto Cellini, the perplexed individualistic passion and powerful expanding enthusiasm of the half animal half god heroes of Shakespeare. The individualism of the second Romantic Movement was geared to an idealism fraught with religious and philosophical aspirations.
In their effect on art-form, however, the two Romantic Movements are almost at one: the sense of the artistic whole is no longer as emphatic as in Classical creations, and the units
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making up the ensemble - words, phrases, paragraphs, sections - draw more attention to themselves, stand out more in their own right, their own richness, and the contour of the totality is proportionally more diffuse. As already remarked in relation to the old Romanticism, this diffuseness has two sides - either a subtlety in the sense of general form or else a looseness in the view of the whole.
The change in form-feeling is acutely illustrated by one of the most Romantic poems, Coleridge's Kubla Khan. It was published as the transcript of a fluctuant dream and as a mere fragment, but to the typical Romantic mind it is as good as a coherent totality and a complete composition. The individual pictures and imaged significances appear nearly independent and self-contained in their fascinating blend of vividness and vagueness, and there is a quick shift from one to another, occasionally almost a leap, as from the stately pleasure-dome to the sunless sea and from the deep chasm to the wailing woman and from the mingled measure heard on the waves to the Abyssinian maid and from that damsel with a dulcimer to the poet himself. Yet behind this suggestive variety the Romantic mind perceives a connection - an underlying general mood of sensuous-symbolic fantasy. The poem is a whole not by a recognisable idea developed in a regular or manifold imaginative manner but by a delicate or bold multi-aspected-ness of imaginative-emotional and intuitive-sensuous mood strongly enveloping the idea. Nor is there a real end in the Classical fashion: instead, we have at the close of the last two magnificent lines -
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of paradise -
a word - "paradise" - which at once takes us back to the beginning of the poem where Xanadu is pictured as an ideal place of beauty, fantasy and grandeur. Paradise seems to be the supernal archetype of which Kubla Khan's Xanadu is an earthly reflection. Again, in the two lines just preceding the above -
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Weave a circle round him thrice
And close your eyes with holy dread -
the mention of going three times round the inspired poet. recalls the verses at nearly the beginning after the unforgettable description of the pleasure-dome beside the river Alph -
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round.
Thus the poem's commencement and termination are suggestively tied together. The image of the circle is itself vaguely suggestive of the whole piece being subtly rounded off, as well as of the main theme being some powerfully guarded per-fection.
Apart from constituting a characteristic Romantic ensemble, Kubla Khan is notable for providing a partial definition of Romanticism itself in the words:
But oh that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green slope athwart a cedarn cover -
A savage place! - as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover.
We may recall that a strong trait of the Rousseauistic mind was its love of solitude. But by solitude Rousseau did not mean a cottage in the country. He made this pretty clear again and again. "Never has a land of plains, however beautiful it may be, seemed beautiful to my eyes," he once wrote, bringing, as Havelock Ellis notes, a new sensation into literature, if not into life; "I need torrents, rocks, pines, dark forests, mountains, rough paths to climb by. precipices that fill me with fear." The landscape beauty that, as Ellis remarks, "appealed to the classic mind was easy and luxurious, pleasant to all the senses and good to rest in". Rousseau not only moved away from human crowds, saying that he would rather be among the
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arrows of the Parthians than among the glances of men; he also sought out wild places, places untouched and untrimmed by men, tameless solitudes. Before Rousseau and the Romantics, such solitudes were shunned. The region which was to become a century later the home of the Lake School was for most people in Addison's time, as to Roger North, a land of "hideous mountains". Madame de Stael, even after Rousseau, called Switzerland "une magnifique horreur". But there was something in the individualistic and rebellious spirit of Romanticism that responded to and craved for perilous and savage sceneries defiant of man. Mixed with this response and craving was the feeling of strange unearthly presences haunt-ing remote and comfortless expanses: solitude and the super-natural went together. It is this mixture that those lines of Coleridge's illustrate as well as label.
By this mixture Romanticism has been considered by us to be partially defined - and, if we stick to the immediate conno-tation of the phrase "solitude and the supernatural" apropos of the lines quoted, the whole of the Romantic adventure is not compassed. But if we try to look into the ultimate suggestion of it we may reach all the mystical in Romanticism through it. For "solitude" implies Nature free from humanisation, Nature as it is in itself, Nature's own being, the strange Presence that lives in various moods for Wordsworth and his successors. "The supernatural", associated with the natural thus understood, implies that these various moods are not only of an elemental life in individual things but also of entities that belong to other dimensions than our universe and use this life as if it were a projection of their own, entities by which lonely and savage places become "holy and enchanted". And just as separate places have their "souls", as it were, both natural and super-natural, so too the totality of solitary Nature is one great elemental life that is a projection of a divine infinity, a Pantheos whose body is the world but whose spirit, while manifesting in the world and even constituting it, transcends Nature -
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A light that never was, on sea or land.
Of this transcendence Kubla Khan itself supplies a hint in the word with which its spell of music attains its climax: "para-dise."
Coleridge's "romantic" connects up with words in two other poets of the same period, echoing in significant ways the term Romanticism. In the idea of solitude and enchantment, it is linked to Wordsworth's phrase about his Lady of the Mere
Here an additional shade is imported by the epithet "old" - a nostalgia half sad half blissful as for a lost Eden of marvellous beauty and tenderness and heroism. In the idea of the super-natural, Coleridge's "romantic" joins with the sense of unearthly realities in Keats's lines:
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows,
where a straining of thought and emotion towards a myste-rious ecstasy neighbouring the Spirit's infinitude glimmering afar is faintly felt - lines that breathe some hidden intimacy to be realised between this infinitude and the human imagination and heart of the poet.
Apropos of both the supernatural and this intimacy we may revert to Kubla Khan and mention that in its closing part it provides a vivid picturisation of the Romantic view of poetic inspiration. Not only is the poet portrayed as one who has known paradisal raptuies: he is also declared to have seen the vision of a strange form that creates music and whose remembrance by the poet would make him a musical creator:
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A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
The Abyssinian maid represents an occult denizen of the poet's soul-depths, dusky with its dream-distances - a won-drous creature of his being's mystical abyss, already hinted objectively by "that deep romantic chasm". And within the abyss he catches the rhythm of the Divine Spirit's height which is connected with that recess: the height is called "A bora" by Coleridge through the vague recollection of a Miltonic phrase which also shows Coleridge's "Abora" and his "paradise" reflecting each other:
Nor where Abassin Kings their issue guard,
Mount Amora, though this by some supposed
True Paradise under the Ethiop Line
By Nilus' head...
In the recollection the initial "Am" gets altered to "Ab" as if to render subtly evident the link with the suggestion of depth -"abyss" - in the adjective "Abyssinian". No doubt, the alteration is related to dream-state echoes from Coleridge's probable knowledge that a mountain in Abyssinia was called Aba Yared and from his reading in Bruce's Travels to the Source of the Nile that between a pair of ridges in Abyssinia ran two tributaries of
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the Nile - Abola and Atbora. But the b-sound wafted with the echoes need not have been accepted: the creative process in poetry has always an imaginative rationale, a symbolising significance. As this process does not go by strict logic, the rationale is embodied in factors like alliteration, assonance," recurring metrical rhythm, refrain, multiple association of a word, even a submerged pun, variations of the prose-order by means of inversions, transferred epithets, ellipses - factors that force separate phrases and stanzas to hold together and the poem to become a unified instantaneous totality. Especially are these factors functional in a Romantic poem where individualism of detail and mysticism of mood repel all the more the logically progressive tendencies of prose. So the fundamental reason why the damsel with a dulcimer (a phrase which itself also exemplifies poetic logic by alliterative effect) sings of Mount Abora rather than of Mount Amara is that the dream-state echoes provided the poet with a verbal instrument to achieve a connection of occult sense, a unifying spiritual glimpse. The connection is closer with the help of such an instrument than if it were left to a collocation by geography, both the singer and the sung height Amara being understood to belong to Abyssinia.
The Abyssinian maid whom Coleridge sets forth as thus joined in music to an unknown altitude is what the ancients named the Muse; she is a Romantic version of the Goddess of Song, a version in which the strange is merged with the beautiful.* But more than strangeness is conjured up: a direct concreteness of experience is implied, a contact with the occult and mystical by immediate vision (... "in a vision once I saw") instead of by a faint far sense of it in the mind of the poet when the afflatus passes through him. Modern Romanticism knew a powerful palpable impact of the supernatural in the process of poetic creation. It created from an intense inwardness as if from a dimension of supra-terrestrial dream, though it never
* Cf. "For Pater Romanticism was the addition of 'strangeness' to beauty" (Lucas, op. cit., p. 12).
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disdained the terrestrial and ever aligned it with the dream-mysterious, the trance-radiant. And Kubla Khan quintessentialises the Romantic creativeness not only by picturing the poet as striving to create through a revival within him of mystical reverie, but also by itself being the product of a strangely beautiful dream-experience sought to be revived by Coleridge.
Sri Aurobindo15 has said about this poem: " ... it is a genuine supraphysical experience caught and rendered in a rare hour of exaltation with an absolute accuracy of vision and authen-ticity of rhythm." We may add that what the vision and rhythm have conveyed of Supenature is snatch upon semi-surrealistic snatch of a Platonic symbolism building up a mystical truth in a magical space-time. To quote Kathleen Raine on Coleridge: "He platonized even in his dreams - if Kubla Khan was entirely a dream; for the symbolism of the Neoplatonists is central to the poem. Nor is this surprising, for from his letters we know that Coleridge had been reading their works shortly before it was written. There is Plotinus' sea, or lake, of material existence, the 'non-entity' that is the term of a descending series of orders of being. This descent itself is symbolized by a river that, in the Orphic theology, issues from the night of the Unmanifest - (the same that in Cabbalistic writings flows from the dark Aleph) to the Stygian lake of matter:
... where waters white
Burst from a fountain hid in depths of night,
And thro' a dark and stony cavern glide,
A cave profound, invisible...
In the mutable sea of material existence are reflected (accord-ing to the Platonic philosophers) the realities of the world of Ideas.
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves
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is an image that must recall to any Platonist those shadows that, in Plato's famous fable, the prisoners saw cast upon the walls of the cave in which they were imprisoned, and mistook for realities; or, as Plotinus mythologizes the same concept (or conceptualises the myth), the image which Narcissus saw in the flowing stream of Nature, and mistook for enduring reality. The symbol of a river flowing from a hidden and mysterious source is one to which Coleridge returns in his critical writings. The sense in which he uses it is essentially the same as 'Alph, the sacred river' of Kubla Khan."16
Thus the earthly city of the historical Mongol emperor is poetically fused at the same time with the sense of an arche-typal paradise and with a supernatural image of itself which, in association with other images from beyond the earth, com-poses a kaleidoscope of the mysticism lying in one form or another at the deepest heart of the second Romanticism.
1.English Literature, Modern -1450-1939 (Oxford University Press, 1944), p. 90.
2.Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle (Charles Scribner's Sons, London-New York, 1945), pp. 3-4.
3.Ibid., p. 5.
4.Science and the Modern World (Pelican Books, Middlesex, 1938), pp. 102-103.
5.Ibid., p. 104.
6.Ibid., p. 105.
7.Ibid., p. 98.
8.The Future Poetry, p. 91.
9.Ibid., p. 93.
10.Ibid.
11.The Future Poetry, p. 119.
12.Ibid.
13.Ibid., p. 117.
14.E. Wilson, op. cit., p. 4.
15.Life, Literature, Yoga, p. 161.
16.Samuel Taylor Coleridge: P. Selection of His Poems and Prose by Kathleen Raine (The Penguin Poets, Middlesex, 1957), p. 15.
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7
The Natural and the Supernatural in Romanticism - Wordsworth's complex mysticism of Nature
To the Romantics the supernatural was a wide mystery with many recesses and revelatory aspects. The one thing it was not was some Aloofness excluding the natural. Its activity as Nature was - to revert to Whitehead's language - organic, but in the ultra-Whiteheadian sense that finds perhaps its most philosophical account in Wordsworth's poetry when he writes in the Ninth Book of his Excursion:
To every Form of being is assigned
An active Principle: - howe'er removed
From sense and observation, it subsists
In all things, in all natures; in the stars
Of azure heaven, the unenduring clouds,
In flower and tree, in every pebbly stone
That paves the brooks, the stationary rocks,
The moving waters, and the invisible air.
Whate'er exists hath properties that spread
Beyond itself, communicating good,
A simple blessing, or with evil mixed;
Spirit that knows no insulated spot,
No chasm, no solitude; from link to link
It circulates, the Soul of all the worlds.
This is the freedom of the universe.
Here we may add: "And this is Nature supernatural." For piquancy's sake we may note that by this natural supernatural-ism the Soul of all the worlds with whom we commune by seeking solitude is said by Wordsworth to be itself aware of no solitude, no "romantic chasm", since it is an omnipresence overflowing the divisions and parts that are its unnumbered visible forms, an Infinite in which all that looks confined
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partakes of an inviolable liberty without barriers of space or time. And it is because of this secret spiritual Whole, not only affecting the parts and thereby rendering them more than elements of a mechanical aggregate but also existing in its own . right as transcendent of them, that Nature is precious to Wordsworth: Nature he loves not for its beauty alone - he loves it basically for the liberation it promises beyond the mortal, the finite:
Whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
Is with infinitude and only there.
Infinitude that is also Eternity - a release from barriers of time as well as space: this is what Nature supernatural holds out to Wordsworth, as he realised most vividly during his journey through the Simplon Pass when he "entered a narrow chasm" which carries to its deepest suggestion the Romanticism conjured up for us by Coleridge's "savage" and "holy" and "enchanted" gorge:
The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls.
And in the narrow rent at every turn
Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and regions of the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light -
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.
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The sense of both Eternity and Infinity through Nature is the core of the philosophy and religion of Romanticism. It makes it more than what is commonly understood as Pantheism or, rather, it makes it the true Pantheism as distin-guished from the false. In that travesty the defects of Nature are taken to characterise God since God and Nature are believed to be identical instead of the former exceeding the latter even though constitutive and pervasive of it. Words-worth himself was accused of identifying God with Nature, and we may be deluded into agreeing with his accusers on the evidence of a line like
... God and Nature's single sovereignty,
which occurs in the 1805 version of The Prelude and which he altered in the 1850 version to
... Presences of God's mysterious power
Made manifest in Nature's sovereignty.
E. H. de Selincourt holds that the poet was here trying "to cover up the traces of his early pantheism". It is true that the later Wordsworth inclined more towards orthodox Christia-nity and was eager not to be found tainted with what orthodox Christians took to be Pantheism. But in his own earlier Pantheism the "single sovereignty" he spoke of did not cabin God within Nature: it merely refused to make Nature extra-neous to God. In the 1805 version he clearly combined, as C. Clarke has stressed, the singleness of God and Nature with God's transcendence by writing of
... Nature's self, which is the breath of God
and repeating the metaphor from breathing in the lines:
Great God!
Who send'st thyself into this breathing world
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Through Nature and through every kind of life
And mak'st man what he is, Creature divine ...
The early Wordsworth once actually went out of his way to repudiate vehemently the charge of identifying God with Nature. In a letter to Mrs. Catherine Clarkson in 1814 about the misinterpretation by her friend of the religious views expressed in The Excursion, he wrote: "Where does she gather that the author of The Excursion looks upon Nature and God as the same? He does not indeed consider the supreme Being as bearing the same relation to the Universe as a watch-maker bears to a watch. In fact, there is nothing in the course of religious education adopted in this country, in the use made by us of the Holy Scriptures, that appears to me so injurious as the perpetually talking about making by God. Oh! that your correspondent had heard a conversation which I had in bed with my sweet little boy, four and a half years old, upon this subject the other morning. 'How did God make me? Where is God? How does He speak? He never spoke to me.' I told him that God was a spirit, that he was not like his flesh which he could touch, but more like his thoughts, in his mind, which he could not touch. The wind was tossing the fir trees and the sky and light were dancing about in their dark branches, as seen through the window. Noting these fluctuations, he exclaimed eagerly . 'There's a bit of him, I see it there!' This is not meant entirely for Father's prattle; but for Heaven's sake; in your religious talk with children say as little as possible about making."
Obviously Wordsworth's God is more than visible and tangible Nature, but He is not all outside Nature: He is not the maker of a world quite other than Himself: the world is His own emanation and it is what it is - good, bad, indifferent -through a difference of manifestation or non-manifestation by His substance in terms of space and time, of matter and life and mind. The later orthodox Wordsworth himself does not forget completely this emanation-sense of his early days. He can still refuse to make God stand over against Nature as a watchmaker
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facing a watch: he seeks a via media between orthodox Christianity and Nature-mysticism by conceiving Nature as a piece of art, an imaginative creation in which God's Self gets expressed with an inner warmth and intimate subjectivity as a poet's being gets expressed in a poem and as a watchmaker's soul does not get expressed in a time-piece. The young Wordsworth, of course, is entirely an emanationist. To him God, even when seeming absent, is yet concretely within Nature and keeps everywhere a possibility of revealing the infinite and the eternal of His true Self which is also the ultimate being of Nature. It is such a divinity that Wordsworth speaks of in his perhaps most-quoted lines:
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains...
It is worth noting here that the Spirit who is God is in the mind of man who perceives and thinks no less than in the objects perceived and thought about by man. Being Spirit, He would be most intensely accessible in man's own conscious-ness, and the search of God within is Wordsworth's master-message provided we do not cleave it from his constant sense that the withinness is not restricted to humans but is the same vast Wonder everywhere, a depth of meadows and woods and mountains just as much as of ourselves, a depth which awakens in us most when we search for it as a Wideness one in all, a Depth that is at once Bliss and Strength and Illumination
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and Righteousness. Yes, Righteousness too, an "inner light" which guides and elevates and shows the highest "duty" not through mere dry precept framed by the outer mind but through a soul-intuition bringing "vital feelings of delight" and largening the individual conscience to the secret power of a controlling law felt operative from behind all appearances of Nature. That is why Wordsworth could say to "Duty" -
Flowers laugh before thee on their beds
And fragrance in thy footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh
and strong
- and that is why he is not striking a mere sentimental note when he writes -
One impulse from a vernal wood
Can teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good
Than all the sages can.
Wordsworth's is a morality of Nature-mysticism and not of Nature-sentimentalism. He is not blind to "Nature red in tooth and claw" any more than he is blind to the wickedness in man, but beyond both goes his poetic sight to the secret Godhead that is the truth of man's being and he strives for a life-suffusing Apocalypse full of "the joy of elevated thoughts".
Unfortunately it must be admitted that after an extra-ordinary decade of creative experience Wordsworth the moralist got the better of the mystic in him just as the intellectual in him got the better of the poet. But we are discussing him as the embodiment par excellence of the new Romanticism in England. And to complete our picture we must glance at two other sides of his natural supernaturalism. We have described his God as both immanent and transcendent. We may touch now on one implication of the transcendence which is not generally recognised: a double-shaded implication - what we,
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quoting a phrase of Wordsworth's own, may call "unknown modes of being" and what in addition we may call after Plato the prenatal bliss of the soul. Both the shades join with suggestions floating or flashing out from Coleridge's Kubla Khan. The woman wailing for her demon lover and haunting the romantic chasm is matched by the episode, recounted in The Prelude, of the boy Wordsworth pushing off the shore in a boat found tied to a willow tree within a rocky cove, the moonlight all about him, his view fixed
Upon the summit of a craggy ridge,
The horizon's utmost boundary; for above
Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.
We are told how, suddenly, as he rose upon the stroke and the boat went heaving through the water, from behind that steep crag which had appeared to be the sole limit of the scene,
a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And, growing still in stature, the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the covert of the willow tree.
Home the boy went through the meadows, in a grave mood -
but after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
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Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea, or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.
Here, no less than in the lines where he recounts how, after stealing trapped woodcocks, he heard
Low breathings coming after me, and sounds Of undistinguishable motion, steps Almost as silent as the turf they trod,
we have the occult, as genuine as in any spectral perceptions of Coleridge's - or of Blake's, either, when he speaks of
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
or when, dazzled by the dreadful beauty he symbolises as "Tyger", he asks,
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
The occult is also as genuinely in Wordsworth as in any visionary sensation of Shelley's, though in a more formidable shape of vagueness than the Shelleyan
Dreams and adorations,
Winged persuasions and veiled Destinies,
Splendours and glooms and glimmering Incarnations
Of hopes and Fears, and twilight Phantasies.
The vague and the formidable, however, are not the sole features one may contact in the mysterious regions tran-scending our universe. There are also "the milk of paradise" and the unshadowed lovelinesses hinted by Blake -
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Ah, Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun;
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller's journey is done -
and the more magical felicities that haunted Shelley through-out his life as if he were an exile from them and that are poignantly evoked by him in the last lines of the lyric To Jane:
Though the sound overpowers,
Sing again,
With thy dear voice revealing
A tone
Of some world far from ours,
Where music and moonlight and feeling
Are one.
This far world figures in Wordsworth too in those lines of his Immortality Ode:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home.
It is this prenatal populating of Heaven by human souls that, according to Wordsworth, makes the child see Heaven all about it, the earthly "Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves" transmitting the light of their own archetypes, as it were, from the beatific Beyond.*
* Wordsworth once made a disclaimer that he never took the idea of prenatal existence seriously: he considered himself to have merely put it to an apt poetic use. But in the Ode it is inalienable part of the context of ideas sprung from his own childhood-experience of God clinging all about his soul. Whether he accepted it intellectually as an article of faith or no, it cannot be expelled from his experienced mysticism of Nature.
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Indeed a complex mysticism of Nature is Wordsworth's, hardly covered by a superficial use - complimentary or pejorative - of the term "Pantheism". But the term in its deepest and largest connotation is most apt, particularly because all that is on earth is enveloped by it with supreme significance. Wordsworth's eyes pierced to the paradisal and the eternal through the mundane and the temporal -
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears -
and death was robbed of the fearful visage it bears to the uninitiated, but there was no stress on a hope beyond the grave. Nature was tinged with God enough to create the "cheerful faith"
that all which we behold
Is full of blessing,
and the stress was on realising the "glory" and the "dream" here and now, amid the daily dust:
Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in this very world, which is the world
Of all of us, - the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!
Perhaps Wordsworth uttered the last word on his complex mysticism - though in a style more epigrammatic than mys-tic - when he apostrophised the Skylark:
Type of the wise, who soar yet never roam,
True to the kindred points of heaven and home.
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8
Romantic Pantheism and its philosophy - Coleridge on the Imagination -Keats on Beauty and Truth
In a general way all the great Romantics of Wordsworth's time are true to the "type of the wise" illustrated by him when he let his poem To a Skylark end as an answer in the negative to its owri opening question:
Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky,
Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound?
C. M. Bowra1 rightly remarks: "There are perhaps poets who live entirely in dreams and hardly notice the familiar scene. But the Romantics are not of their number... We cannot complain that by their devotion to the mysteries of life the Romantics failed to appreciate life itself. It is of course true that they do not belong to the company of the universal poets, like Homer and Shakespeare, in whom everything human touches some chord and passes into music. But they are closer to common life than Pope or Dryden, even than Milton or Spenser. It would be hard to think of another man who combined, as Blake did, an extraordinary power of vision with the tenderest compassion for the outcast and the oppressed, or who, like Shelley, used his Platonic musings to unfold an enormous scheme for the regeneration of the world. Even the staid Wordsworth found a new source of profound poetry in the humble creatures of fell and waterside, in leach-gatherers and old huntsmen, small girls and idiot boys. Even so devoted a lover of physical nature as Keats came to see that the poet must not detach himself from mankind, but live in compas-sionate understanding of it. And this understanding was in many ways new. It has a new tenderness which is far removed from the aristocratic dignity of the Augustans or the princely splendours of the Elizabethans. In their attempts to under-
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stand man in the depths of his being, the Romantics were moved by convictions which give a special humanity to their poetry."
This humanity we often forget under the keen glow of their sense of divinity. But the two are inseparable and complementary. Blake's most famous poem, containing the stanza -
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire! -
ends with:
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
About Shelley who would seem to be a sheer "sun-treader" Sri Aurobindo2 has written: "If the idea of a being not of our soil fallen into the material life and still remembering his skies can be admitted as an actual fact of human birth, then Shelley was certainly a living example of one of these luminous spirits half obscured by earth; the very stumblings of his life came from the difficulty of such a nature moving in the alien terrestrial environment in which he is not at home nor capable of accepting its muddy vesture and iron chain, attempting impatiently to realise there the law of his own being in spite of the obstruction of the physical clay.... Light, Love, Liberty are the three godheads in whose presence his pure and radiant spirit lived; but a celestial light, a celestial love, a celestial liberty. To bring them down to earth without their losing their celestial lustre and hue is his passionate endeavour, but his wings constantly buoy him upward and cannot beat strongly in an earthlier atmosphere. The effort and the unconquered diffi-culty are the cause of the ethereality, the want of firm earthly
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reality that some complain of in his poetry. There is an air of luminous mist surrounding his intellectual presentation of his meaning which shows the truths he sees as things to which the mortal eye cannot easily pierce or the life and temperament of earth rise to realise and live; yet to bring about the union of the mortal and the immortal, the terrestrial and the celestial is always his passion."
Against a suggestion that Shelley's Skylark should be purged of the three or four stanzas where the "blithe spirit" which is the Skylark is likened to human and corporeal things, and that the poem should be "left winging between the rainbow and the lightnings and ignorant of anything less brilliant and unearthly", Sri Aurobindo3 contended in a letter: "Shelley was not only a poet of other worlds, of Epipsychidion and of The Witch of Atlas; he was passionately interested in bringing the light, beauty and truth of the ideal super-world from which he came into the earth life - he tried to find it there wherever he could, he tried to infuse it wherever he missed it. The mental, the vital, the physical cannot be left out of the whole he saw in order to yield place only to the ethereal and impalpable. As he heard the skylark and felt the subtle essence of light and beauty in its song, he felt too the call of the same essence of light and beauty elsewhere and it is the things behind which he felt it that he compares to the hymn of the skylark - the essence of ideal light and beauty behind things mental, the poet and his hymns, behind things vital, the soul of romantic love, behind things physical, the light of the glow-worm, the passionate intensity of the perfume of the rose. I cannot see an ordinary glow-worm in the lines of Shelley's stanza - it is a light from beyond finding expression in that glimmer and illumining the dell of dew and the secrecy of flowers and grass that is there. This illumination of the earthly . mind, vital, physical with his super-world light is a main part of Shelley; excise that and the whole of Shelley is no longer there, there is only the ineffectual angel beating his wings in the void; excise it from the Skylark and the true whole of the Skylark is no longer there."
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As with Wordsworth, so with Shelley, the hope of mingling the Here and the Yonder was intense and concrete through Pantheism. As with the older poet, so with the younger, there was no blindness to the insufficiency of life and of things as they commonly are: in fact, if they had been blind to it they would have lacked the passion of that hope; but equally would they have lacked this passion if they had not seen a glorious oneness of spiritual reality secretly present in the universe -heart of its heart, even stuff of its stuff - and often revealing itself to the poet's eye and holding the promise of a great transfiguration of man's existence. The vision of that glorious oneness is again and again the most natural to Shelley -"natural" in both the meanings of the term. Without even introducing explicit mysticism he can suggest an enchanting Apocalypse through a simple panorama:
And the blue noon is over us,
And the multitudinous
Billows murmur at our feet,
Where the earth and ocean meet,
And all things seem only one
In the universal sun.
More philosophically expressed, his mysticism centres in the Power
Which wields the world with never-wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath and kindles it above,
and in "the one Spirit's plastic stress" which "sweeps through the dull dense world", and in
That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
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By man and beast and earth and air and sea
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst...
About this Pantheism of Shelley's, which the Roman Catholic poet Francis Thompson who was deeply sympathetic to the Shelleyan imagination found yet extremely incongenial, no truer words have been written than by another Roman Catholic poet, Alfred Noyes. He reads in it no real conflict with essential Christianity where also God is spoken of as He "in whom we live and move and have our being". When Shelley sings of the young Keats,"Adonais", becoming by his death a portion of universal Loveliness, he does not mean a dissolution into material Nature as Thompson supposes: he means, says Noyes, an entry into a divine Spirit within Nature and to be part of it is not to be individually annulled, either. Here is neither the sleep of death in which our dissolved elements circulate in Nature's veins, as Thompson thought when con-sidering Shelley's Pantheism, nor a loss of individuality in some universal Being. It is, Noyes explains, "a perfected harmony, embracing, completing every individual note, and making it more, not less, itself". The sounds and odours and beams in the Garden of the Sensitive Plant about which Shelley has elsewhere sung "were not mingled and confused by their interpenetration. Their essential forms were not blurred. They became sharper and more definite in their communion. They moved 'like reeds in a single stream', in the consummate music of the One and the Many. It was not an extinction, much less a degradation of the individual, but an apotheosis. The being of Keats too is not conceived as merged and lost in the Universal Spirit:
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are."
To be more precise and positive: the being of Keats is not only said by Shelley to suffer no self-loss in the Spirit that is
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universal - it is also seen shining in some dimension of reality high above, which is like a starry eternity and whose height is unmistakably hinted in the line just preceding the above quotation:
Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven...
A transcendent dimension of ultimate truth and supreme life is visioned through Pantheos.
Coleridge too at the peak of his poetic production lived in the same complexly pantheistic outlook and inlook. He even tried to make an argued philosophy of them. The thesis in it that concerns us may be briefly indicated. Considering the two states of form-consciousness in man - the state of sensation in which an external world is experienced and the state of imagi-nation in which forms like those of this world are combined and transfigured to make a world of our own - Coleridge looked upon the experience of external objects as a passive or at least automatic repetition in us of a constant creative act of ordered imagination by a universal Being and he looked upon our imaginative experience as the universal Being's creative faculty actively at work in the individual, co-existent with the individual's conscious will. The two experiences he named the Primary Imagination and the Secondary Imagination. In both, the individual partakes of the universal, though in different ways, and both are founded in a basic oneness of the universal and the individual and, in both, it is the spirit that is subject in one aspect, object in another: "The Intelligence tends to objecti-vise itself and... to know itself in the object." But if the individual is really to enter into the universal, instead of functioning in some sort of separation and alienation as he ordinarily does, he must take his experience of sensation not passively or automatically but with an activity of his consciously exercisable imaginative power. Objects received in mere sensation tend to be not only externally given but also dead and mechanical: when the imaginative power works upon them, "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-
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create", they are received with a living sense in us of the original Creativity by which they are projected within the universal consciousness. As a result, they undergo two changes. In the first place, they become congenial to our mind and are felt as its own. In the second, while being enveloped by our mind, they get penetrated and read as symbols - symbols not merely standing for something behind them, for paradisal perfections, but also sharing in the Infinite Mind and them-selves suffused with Supernature. We then, says Coleridge, appreciate the position of the philosopher Malebranche, that we see all things in God. This actively imaginative sensing of what the active imagination of God has created is the source, whether recognised or not, of the highest poetry. In the highest poetry, according to Coleridge, the barrier between mind and matter, subject and object, seems miraculously broken down. He writes: "To make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature - this is the mystery of genius in the Fine Arts. Dare I add that the genius must act on the feeling, that body is but a striving to become mind - that it is mind in its essence!" In its culminating intensity, the imaginative interpretation of things and our-selves within a commonalty of Infinite Mind passes into the mystical realisation that is pantheistic no less than alive to "unknown modes of being", the occult presences, and the transcendent glories of "God who is our home" and from whom the soul comes into terrestrial birth with what Plato calls "reminiscence".
The actively imaginative sensing, however, is not confined to the mystical apprehension or to the poetic vision. In fact it occurs every time Nature is enjoyed as beautiful or sublime, for, according to Coleridge, beauty and sublimity cannot be divorced from the spectator's awareness of significance in Nature. As Scott-James4 puts it: "That notion of significance could not be accounted for by any analysis of the separate sensations of which the vision appeared to be composed. Therefore, though it arose from the impression that is given, it could only be by some power in the soul that a character was
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discovered in it. [Coleridge] attributed it to a faculty of the soul, which gives what it receives, and receives what it gives -and this act, a volitional act, of bringing to nature something which it was capable of accepting, or of voluntarily accepting from nature that which the imaginative mind was so constituted as to receive, implied for Coleridge a 'common ground' between nature and the spirit, between the symbol and the mind which could recognise it or create it." In the poet's own words:
... we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does nature live!
Ours is the wedding-garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allow' d
To the poor, loveless, ever-anxious crowd:
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud,
Enveloping the earth!
And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and powerful voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element!
Further, the mind imaginative, the "shaping spirit of Imagination",
This beautiful and beauty-making Power,
as Coleridge calls it in the same poem, is not cloven apart from reason just as it is not cloven apart from feeling. It does not dispense with logic or with scientific observation, but it holds them subservient to itself instead of being dominated by them; or, rather, it assimilates them and is in its total aspect an intellectual as well as passionate maker of the beautiful from its own beauty. For, it answers in its own manner to the original divine Imagination which must also be a divine Reason creating a cosmos fraught with significance and system and
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charged with the goal of revealing in one way or another the workings of Supernature within the natural. It is a human glimpse of the supreme imaginative Creativity, so that, in Wordsworth's phrase, it
Is but another name for absolute power
And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,
And Reason in her most exalted mood.
We may even say that by its very essence the Imagination cannot but be such a fused agency. For, in Coleridge's view, it is an agency whose master job is to fuse diverse elements, it is "esemplastic", as he dubbed it in a curious Greek coinage intended to connote "into-one-moulding".* Even in its pri-mary function which is automatic and seems passive, there is a secret associative action gathering together the sensations of colours, sounds, odours into "wholes", into objects of per-ception: a form or mould is brought to the data of sense, concentrating and synthesising them. In its secondary function, especially as a poetic or artistic power, the Imagination is more refinedly, more deeply esemplastic and differs from Fancy in precisely that Fancy constructs only patchworks from memory and combines things without real synthesis, "plays with fixities and definites", while Imagination, as we have already noted, "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to re-create". Not that Imagination annuls anything in the fusion: the elements remain individual but lose their exclusiveness. Imagination is the shaper of beauty and, to Coleridge, the Beautiful "is that in which the many, still seen as many, become one." On the other hand, Fancy brings together dissimilar objects by some superficial resemblance through which is suggested no depth of significance making the dissimilars interpenetrate and strike on a common essence: it is a practitioner of ingenuity and not of insight as is Imagination.
* Lucas (op. cit., p. 164, fn. 1) remarks that the word would really mean "into-in-moulding" and that elsewhere Coleridge makes the necessary correction to "es-eno-plastic". It is the incorrect form, however, that has passed into currency.
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But, if Imagination were itself exclusive instead of being an integrated manifold, a unity-in-multiplicity, it could hardly be "esemplastic", hardly exercise the function "by which one image or feeling is made to modify many others, and by a sort. of fusion to force many into one". The harmony it effects must answer to a nature of harmony within itself: that is why Coleridge hails it not only as "beauty-making" but also as itself "beautiful".
Coleridge could not but think of Imagination as what Wordsworth terms it in those three lines, for actually he came to his theory of it as distinct from Fancy by the unforgettable experience of finding it so in Wordsworth's own poetry. He has recorded this experience in a passage which is itself memor-able: "While memory lasts, I shall hardly forget the sudden effect produced on my mind, by his recitation of a manuscript poem... there was here no mark of strained thought, or forced diction, no crowd or turbulence of imagery... It was not however the freedom from false taste... which made so unusual an impression on my feelings immediately, and subsequently on my judgment. It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed; and above all the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere,and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dewdrops... This excellence, which in all Mr. Wordsworth's writings is more or less predominant, and which constitutes the character of his mind, I no sooner felt, than I sought to understand. Repeated meditations led me first to suspect... that fancy and imagination were two distinct and widely different faculties, instead of being, according to the general belief, either two names with one meaning, or, at furthest, the lower and higher degree of one and the same power."
It is clear that in implying Wordsworth's poetry to be imaginative and not fanciful he pointed by the term "ima-
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gination" to some faculty of the soul by which, while the objects observed were being modified, there was no mere "arbitrary bringing together of things that lie remote", no aggregating and ingenious presenting of impressions drawn from memory, but the creating of an indissoluble oneness in which the imaginative beauty could be both felt and under-stood. Not only did the heart warm to it: the understanding also went out to embrace it. The unique quality of this result by a "beautiful and beauty-making Power" was that at the same time it awoke emotion and satisfied the reason. For here was a faculty of insight that rendered beauty a thrill of some inner truth of the universe - a faculty whose ultimate flowering is a complex pantheistic mysticism.
Towards this flowering all the five great Romantics had a nisus. Even Keats who is on the whole more aesthetic than mystic has wonderful moments of that nisus and his aesthe-ticism is never without a tinge of it, however subdued. In his Ode to a Nightingale, he recognises the bird's song to be revelatory of a timeless order of things through a phenomenon of Nature repeating as a single ravishment within diverse forms across the march of the ages:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same voice that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien com;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.
Similarly in the Ode on a Grecian Urn he took not beautiful sound but beautiful form, a visible silence, as a glimpse-giver of the timeless, the divine inner verity of things:
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O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
As a comment by Keats himself on the mystical meaning of these two most famous poetic passages from his work, espe-cially of the second, there could not be anything more succinctly apt than the following from a letter of his to Benjamin Bailey: "I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination - What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth - whether it existed before or not - for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love; they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty... The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream - he awoke and found it truth."
"Adam's dream" is, of course, a reference to Milton's story in Paradise Lost of how when Eve was created Adam saw Eve's existence in a dream and this existence continued, as it were, from dream into reality, as if the dream were itself creative of what was true, what really existed. To Keats, the Imagination, creator of Beauty, reveals something which, whether already seen as real or not, is still an undeniable reality, an actual existence, a truth inhering in our world though not always perceived by the gross sense. This truth is a dream-perception, a discovery made by an inwardly creative faculty which in the act of creating or dreaming the beautiful awakes to and lays bare a world within our world just as real as the objects we usually honour with that name. And this dream-creation of the true is also in a further sense like Adam's dream. Eve who continued into reality from that dream was a creation by the
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Divine Power: Adam's dream partook, as it were, in that creation and was a translation into human terms of an activity which was divine. Similarly, Keats's "truth of the Imagination" is ultimately a human reflex of what a Divine Power, some Eternity which teases us out of thought, has visioned into existence through shape and sound and colour of the natural universe.
Perhaps a hint of Keats's fundamental mood in speaking of "the truth of the Imagination" may be read in the phrase he has coupled with this expression - "the holiness of the Heart's affections". "Holiness": there we have a religious approach, a spiritual attitude - the intuition of the Divine in the Heart's finest movements. And these movements are intimately re-lated by Keats to those of the Imagination, for, "they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty", Beauty which the Imagination seizes in things. The epithet "essential" too is a hint of the revelation both the Heart and the Imagination effect: it points us to a divine depth of reality, the Platonic world of essences that are the eternal truths of the objects we here experience, the Platonic domain where exists behind the Nightingale whose voice was heard on Hampstead Heath the essentiality to which Keats could say:
We may pause a moment to consider how "all our Pas-sions", and not only "Love", create "essential Beauty" when they are raised to the sublime pitch. Evidently, "Love" is conceived as having the Beautiful for its raison d'etre, a passion fired by a creative vision of some lovely perfection inherent in the beloved. Similarly, all other desires springing from the genuine emotional being, the heart, if kindled to their intensest . and immensest, are idealists, lovers of something supreme, visionaries and revealers of an ideal form in the object desired, conducers to what Keats in another letter terms "fellowship with essence" - "essence" here under the aspect of Beauty. Thus "all our Passions" are a species of imaginative energy -
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and, conversely, the Imagination that seizes the Beautiful is a species of passionate energy. Does not Keats himself, in a communication to George and Georgiana Keats, write: "the yearning passion I have for the beautiful"?
All in all, Keats's pursuit of the "beautiful and beauty-making Power" which Coleridge talked of was a creative idealistic process which - in Wordsworth's language - came always to add to the experience of day-to-day life and nature
the gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet's dream.
The passage, therefore, from the letter to Bailey is not only a succinctly apt comment on the stanzas we have quoted from Keats's two greatest Odes. It is also eminently in tune with the core of the new Romanticism, the animating philosophy and religion of that movement, as figured by Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley no less than by Coleridge with whom they held views more or less in common about the Imagination.
1.C. M. Bowra, op. cit., pp. 13,285.
2.The Future Poetry, pp. 125,128.
3.Ibid., pp. 528-29.
4.The Making of Literature (Martin Secker & Warbung Ltd., London, 1946), p.220.
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9
The qualities and defects of Romanticism, English and Continental - the Romantic pointer to a new poetry of the Spirit
"If we wish to distinguish a single characteristic which differentiates the English Romantics from the poets of the eighteenth century," writes Bowra,1 "it is to be found in the importance which they attached to the imagination and in the special view which they held of it... Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, despite many differences, agreed on one vital point: that the creative imagination is closely connected with a peculiar insight into an unseen order behind visible things... They brought to poetry not merely surprise and wonder and vision, which after all may be found in much great poetry, but something else which was more characteristically their own and may perhaps be regarded as the central quality of their art. In their vivid perception of visible things, they were almost in the same moment to have a vision of another world, and this illuminates and gives significance to sensible things in such a way that we can hardly distinguish them from the mysteries which they have opened and with which they are inextricably connected... The Romantics believed that what matters most is this interpenetration of the familiar scene by some everlasting presence which illuminates and explains it. It is this which makes Romantic poetry what it is, and this above all is due to the Romantic trust in the imagination, which works through the senses to something beyond and above... Unlike their German contemporaries, who were content with the thrills of Sehnsucht, or longing,and did not care much what the Jenseits, or 'beyond', might be, so long as it was sufficiently mysterious, the English Romantics pursued their lines of imaginative enquiry until they found answers which satisfied them. Their aim was to convey the mystery of things through individual manifestations and
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thereby to show what it means... The unseen world is more vividly present because it is displayed in a single actual case... The powers which Wordsworth saw in Nature or Shelley in love are so enormous that we begin to understand them only when they are manifested in single, concrete examples... The essence of the Romantic imagination is that it fashions shapes which display these unseen forces at work, and there is no other way to display them, since they resist analysis and description and cannot be presented except in particular instances... In them we see examples of what cannot be expressed directly in words and can be conveyed only by hint and suggestion."
One wonders how a Movement which Bowra has thus distinguished with admirable accuracy in the sentences we have strung together from him can ever be adequately described by Lucas's formula about Romanticism. We may recall some of his labels: "spontaneous feeling", "the release of the Unconscious", and some of his definitions: "The essential difference between Classicism and Romanticism is that the control exerted by the conscious mind, particularly by the sense of reality and the sense of society, is strict in the first - while in the second it is relaxed, somewhat as in drunkenness or dream",2 or again: "The eighteenth century had always had at its ear two voices, like the warning Daemon of Socrates; one whispering'That is not intelligent', the other 'That is not done'. Romanticism seems to me, essentially, an attempt to drown these two voices and liberate the unconscious life from their tyrannical repressions. Like the accom-panying French Revolution, it is the insurrection of a submerged population; but this time, a population of the mind." 3 Even when Lucas concedes that "the description of Romantic literature as simply 'dream-work' does not quite suffice" and that" except in an extreme form, it does usually retain a superego, an ideal of conduct, often a highly quixotic one" and that the "dream-life" he has in view is what we have a feeling of in poems like Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci or Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner or Morris's The Haystack in the Floods4 - even
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when he opines that "health, both in life and in literature, lies between excess of self-consciousness and excess of impulsiveness, between too much self-control and too little"5 and that "the Romantic intoxication of the imagination suspends the over-rigid censorship exerted by our sense of what is fact and our sense of what is fitting",6 he is too far out in tracing to the Freudian Subconscious or Unconscious the Movement in English poetry which began in 1789 with Blake's Songs of Innocence and ended in its typical characteristics with the deaths of Keats and Shelley.
Doubtless, the Freudian "impulses and drives" had a say in certain parts of this Movement and a much greater one in the Romanticism of the Continent which it shares as well as exceeds. Sri Aurobindo7 has called the general Romantic literature of the period "brilliant and confusedly complex, but often crude and unfinished" and he has further said: "Much of it we can now see to have been ill-grasped, superficial and tentative; much, as in Chateaubriand and in Byron, was artificial, a pose and affectation; much, as in the French Romanticists, merely bizarre, overstrained and overcoloured; a later criticism condemned in it a tendency to inartistic excitement, looseness of form, an unintellectual shallowness or emptiness, an ill-balanced imagination. It laid itself open certainly in some of its more exaggerated turns to the reproach, - not justly to be alleged against the true romantic element in poetry, - that the stumbling-block of romanticism is falsity."
But in his summing-up, Sri Aurobindo8 has not only said: "Nevertheless, behind this often defective frontage was the activity of a considerable force of new truth and power, much exceedingly great work was done, the view of the imagination was immensely widened and an extraordinary number of new motives brought in which the later nineteenth century developed with a greater care and finish and conscientious accuracy, but with crudities of its own and perhaps with a less fine gust of self-confident genius and large inspiration." Sri Aurobindo9 has also said, marking the distinction of the
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English Romantics: "The superiority of the English poets who lead the way into the modern age is that sudden almost unaccountable spiritual impulse, insistent but vague in some, strong but limited in one or two, splendid and supreme in its rare moments of vision and clarity, which breaks out from their normal poetic mentality and strives constantly to lift their thought and imagination to its own heights, a spirit or Daemon who does not seem to trouble at all with his voice or his oestrus the contemporary poets of continental Europe." And, further, Sri Aurobindo10 brings a keen ear to distinguish the several shades of the English Romantic speech: "We find the tongue of this period floating between various possibilities. On its lower levels it is weighted down by some remnant of the character of the eighteenth century and proceeds by a stream of eloquence, no longer artificial, but facile, fluid, helped by a greater force of thought and imagination. This turn sometimes rises to a higher level of inspired and imginative poetic eloquence. But beyond this pitch we have a fuller and richer style packed with thought and imaginative substance, the substitute of this new intel-lectualised poetic mind for the more spontaneous Elizabethan richness and curiosity; but imaginative thought is the secret of its power, no longer the exuberance of the life-soul in its vision. On the other side we have a quite different note, a sheer poetical directness, which sometimes sinks below itself to poverty and insufficiency or at least to thinness, as in much of the work of Wordsworth and Byron, but, when better supported and rhythmed, rises to quite new authenticities of great or perfect utterance, and out of this there comes in so.me absolute moments a native voice of the spirit..."
Sri Aurobindo is not blind to the defects of these pioneers of a new poetry in the history of the West. About the tendencies that suddenly developed in them out of Rousseauistic Romanticism, he11 writes: "Insufficiently supported by any adequate spiritual knowledge, unable to find securely the right and native word of their own meaning, these greater tendencies faded away or were lost by the premature end of the poets who might, had they lived, have given them a supreme utterance."
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The poets of the spiritual dawn had no clearly seen or no firmly based constant idea of the kind of work which the Light in them demanded: "they get at its best only in an inspiration over which they have not artistic control, and they have only an occasional or uncertain glimpse of its self-motives. Thus they give to it often a form of speech and movement which is borrowed from their intellect, normal temperament or culture rather than wells up as the native voice and rhythm of the spirit within, and they fall away easily to a lower kind of work. They have a greater thing to reveal than the Elizabethan poets, but they do not express it with that constant fullness of native utterance or that more perfect correspondence between substance and form which is the greatness of Shakespeare and Spenser."12
With a critical grip Sri Aurobindo13 sets in proper psychological relation to its immediate past and to the succeeding age the English Romantics' "brilliant and beautiful attempt to get through Nature and thought and the mentality in life and Nature and their profounder aesthetic suggestion to certain spiritual truths behind them." "This attempt," he explains, "could not come to perfect fruition, partly because there had not been the right intellectual preparation or a sufficient basis of spiritual knowledge and experience and only so much could be given as the solitary individual intuition of the poet could by a sovereign effort attain, partly because after the lapse into an age of reason the spontaneous or the intenser language of spiritual poetry could not always be found or, if found, could not be securely kept. So we get a deviation into another age of intellectual, artistic or reflective poetry with a much wider range, but less profound in its roots, less high in its growth; and partly out of this, partly by a recoil from it has come the tum of recent and contemporary poetry which seems at last to be . approaching the secret of the utterance of profounder truth with its right magic of speech and rhythm."*
* This was written in the middle of 1918, when Whitman, Meredith and Stephen Phillips were recent and Carpenter, AE and Yeats were contemporary.
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Yes, Sri Aurobindo has eyes wide-open to the defects of the English Romantics who were singers of a complex Pantheism, but his criticism proceeds from above and not below: he gives no quarter to any disposition to minimise these poets or to see their highest inspiration as other than genuinely revelatory of a divine Reality. Apropos of the reason why they could not live wholly up to the Light in them he14 writes: "This failure to grasp the conditions of a perfect intuitive and spiritual poetry has not yet been noted, because the attempt itself has not been understood..." The first gap in understanding lay in the critical mind of the nineteenth century. "That mind was heavily intellectualised, sometimes lucid, reasonable and acute, sometimes cloudily or fierily romantic, sometimes scientific, minutely delving, analytic, psychological, but in none of these moods and from none of these outlooks capable of understanding the tones of this light which for a moment flushed the dawning skies of its own age or tracing it to the deep and luminous fountains from which it welled."15 What is here said about the nineteenth century in general applies equally to obtuse or unsympathetic critics of our own day, particularly those who tend to read Freudian forces in the entire Romantic Movement and do not discern in its greatest manifestation what Wordsworth called
The feeling of life endless, the great thought
By which we live, infinity and God,
and the presence of - in Wordsworth's lines again -
that serene and blessed mood
In which the affections gently lead us on, -
Until the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motions of the human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things -
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the mystic mood in which the
Wisdom and Spirit of the universe
is directly touched and in which, on the one side, it is felt as an "everlasting motion" and, on the other,
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence.
Perhaps it may be urged that certain statements by the Romantics themselves point, in a broad sense, Freudward. Has not Wordsworth declared: "All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"? Certainly, but the declaration was meant to condemn the literary artifice of the eighteenth century and make poetry natural and sincere, true to the heart. All poetry has to express feeling - but also more than feeling. Has not Wordsworth defined it further as "Emotion recollected in tranquillity"? According to him, the powerful feelings which find a spontaneous overflow are not the immediate ones which an object or occasion arouses: they are what a tranquil recollection resuscitates by looking upon that object or occasion with an inward eye. The poetry that is "emotion recollected in tranquillity" is at the same time tranquillity supporting and enveloping emotion, and the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings is engendered by a calm and deep and brooding gaze of the visionary mind. Has not Wordsworth warned us against taking spontaneity to be that of a careless or thoughtless person? He says: "Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply." He condemned the abstractions of both the dry intellect divorced from life and of the merely pragmatic "prudential understanding", but what he wanted was always "a supreme comprehensiveness of intellect and passion" and his ideal was always to be
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he whose soul hath risen
Up to the height of feeling intellect.
It is the "feeling intellect" to which, according to him, the master faculty of poetic creation becomes possible: Imagination, the visionary insight whose activity he believed with Coleridge to resemble the workings of the "Infinite Mind".
To forget that the Romantic Movement was an imaginative soar from the basis of the feeling intellect is to misconstrue its entire genius. To forget this was also the folly of several practitioners of the new Romanticism. Sri Aurobindo, regarding that Romanticism as the early child of "modern intellec-tualism"16 which differs from the Classical mind, pierces to the essence of its genius and puts his finger too on the mistakes of some of the Romantics. The whole passage17 - from which we have already made an extract when dealing with the Miltonic mind and the modern - is worth close attention:
"The poetry which arises from this mentality is full of a teeming many-sided poetic ideation which takes up the external and life motives not for their own sake, but to make them food for the poetic intelligence, blends the classical and romantic motives, adds to them the realistic, aesthetic, impressionist, idealistic ways of seeing and thinking, makes many experiments and combinations, passes through many phases. The true classic form is then no longer possible; if it is tried, it is not quite genuine, for what informs it is no longer the classic spirit; it is too crowded with subtle thought-matter, too brooding, sensitive, responsive to many things; no new parthenon can be built whether in the white marble subdued to the hand or in the pure and lucid spacings of the idea and the word: the mind of man has become too full, complex, pregnant with subtle and not easily expressible things to be capable of that earlier type of perfection. The romantic strain is a part of this wider intelligence, but the pure and genuine romanticism of the life-spirit which cares nothing for thought except as it enriches its own being, is also no longer possible. If it tries to get back to that, it falls into an affectation, an intellectual pose
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and, whatever genius may be expended upon it, this kind cannot remain long alive. That is the secret of the failure of modem romanticism in Germany and France. In Germany, Goethe and Heine alone got away from this falsity and were able to use this strain in its proper way as one enriching chord serving the complex harmonic purpose of the intelligence; the rest of German literary creation of the time is interesting and suggestive in its way, but very little of it is intimately alive and true, and afterwards Germany failed to keep up a sustained poetic impulse; she turned aside to music on the one side and on the other to philosophy and science for her field. The French mind got away very soon from romanticism and, though greatly enriched by its outbreak into that phase, went on to a more genuine intellectual and intellectually aesthetic form of creation. In England with the greater spontaneity of its poetic spirit the mistake never went so far. The poetry of the time of Wordsworth and Shelley is sometimes called romantic poetry, but it was not so in its essence, but only in certain of its moods and motives. It lives really by its greater and more characteristic element, by its half spiritual turn... Only in drama was there, owing to the prestige of Shakespeare, an attempt at pure romanticism, and therefore in this domain nothing great and living could be done, but only a record of failures.
"The"pure romanticism" of which Sri Aurobindo speaks is, as we have already expounded at an early stage, of two sorts, both of them arising from the creative Life-force: "the external Teutonic kind sensational and outward, appealing to the life and the senses" and "the delicate and beautiful, the imaginative and spiritual Celtic romanticism".18 The two are mixed up, according to the composite English genius, in the Elizabethan Romanticism, the first preparing "the ground-type of the Elizabethan drama", while the second "throws its... beauty and force and fire and its greater depth of passion across the drama and makes it something more than a tumultuous external action and heavily powerful character-drawing".19 In the new Romantic Age of English poetry, which is founded not on the Life-force but on the creative Intelligence, we have three
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elements at work. One is the Teutonic - "much poetical thinking or even poetical philosophy of a rather obvious kind, sedate, or vigorous, prompt and direct, or robustly powerful, but not the finer and subtler poetical thought which comes easily to the clear Latin intellect".20 This element we find in "Wordsworth in his more outward moments", in "Byron without his Titanism and unrest".21 Next is something of the "fine, calm and measured poetical thinking of the Greeks and the Latin races which deals sovereignly with life within the limits of the intellect and the inspired reason" .22 This occurs in the more elevated Wordsworthian passages as well as in parts of Shelley's Alastor, Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, Adonais and of his fragment, The Triumph of Life; also in sections of Keats's Hyperion, here and there in the famous Odes and almost wholly in the fragment of an Ode ending with the line,
Leaving great verse unto a little clan.
But neither of these elements creates the typical new Romantic Age whose birth is from a Celticism of the Intelligence, "an excitement of thought seeking for something beyond itself and behind life through the intensities of poetical sight" and brings in "a look upon Nature which pierces beyond the outsides and her external spirit and lays its touch on the mysteries of her inner life and sometimes on that in her which is most intimately spiritual"23 At its intensest this Celticism "fitrives to rise beyond the English mould, seems about to disengage itself and reveal through poetry the Spirit in things".24
The Celtic intensity of the new Romanticism is sometimes sought to be affined to the temper of the Middle Ages. Lucas25 says that the mediaeval is no essential part of the Romantic, but what he means is that the essence of the Romantic is the mind taking a holiday from the rational and the restrained and letting loose the Unconscious and that this need not always take a mediaeval form. Mediaevalism, however, he does regard as a main affinity of the Romantic, for, as he26 says, the Middle Ages, besides idealising passion, were "mystical,
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mysterious, and remote". But these adjectives connote for him27 the Mediaeval man's abeyance of the critical faculty, inordinate love of wonders, sense of fay and goblin and devil about him in endless anarchy: for Mediaeval man always anything might happen. Surely this has some relation to certain moods of a poem like The Ancient Mariner or Christabel: what relation has it to the larger sweep of the supernatural that the Celtic intensity brings? And even in The Ancient Mariner Coleridge goes far beyond mediaeval superstition and fantasy, the haunting horrors in Gothic settings that in his time were being revived by several writers who wanted to be "Romantic": his poem broke into "a boundless sea", as Bowra28 remarks, "with days of pitiless sun and soft nights lit by a moon and attendant stars", a spaciousness and grandeur and loveliness of Nature are here, a delighted dwelling on seascape and skyscape and on creatures of the deep and the air, a shaking of the human soul to vague inner recesses, a sinking of it to subtle agonies and a soaring of it to secret ecstasies, a sense of the unity of all creation in a strange universal love, a complex spiritual symbolism woven into primitive gestures. We are no longer in the Mediaeval mind, but only in a mediaevalised version of the new Celtic intensity. Mediaeval-ism was one of the strands in the Romantic imagination, but even as such it was seldom left uncoloured through and through by a vision more magical, more profound.
In Keats's La Belle Dame sans Merci too we have a mediaeval setting - "knight-at-arms", "pacing steed", "an elfin grot", "a lady in the meads" who was "a faery's child" - but again we are in the light of a Celtic vision, a vast and intense subtlety is hinted in the dream which the ailing knight speaks of at the end:
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried - 'La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!'
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We are in the presence of some perilous World-Witchery, some alluring Maya of the life of the senses and the passions, a reverse side to the obverse which feels the Divine in the heart's affections and in the imagination's truth-revealing embrace of the beautiful on earth. Shelley is tinged by the Mediaeval also: witness, among other things, his "high-born maiden in a palace-tower". The Romantic attitude in general towards love was, as Sri Aurobindo29 has written, "sentimental and emotional, attempting to lift it out of the coarseness of life into a vital-mental idealism", and it tried "to resuscitate the attitude of chivalry and the troubadours". But there was much more in it for Shelley. Epipsychidion, that apostrophe to Emilia Viviani which, together with Prometheus Unbound and Adonais, is considered by Sri Aurobindo30 as the most typical work of Shelley's of long breath, is not just a rhapsody of Mediaeval love: at its most blazing it seeks to kindle to a kind of cosmic soul-emotion through the sensuous and sentimental, through the enamoured heart's response to
All that is insupportable in thee
Of light and love and immortality!
Sweet benediction in the eternal Curse!
Veiled glory of the lampless Universe!
Even the religious consciousness of the Middle Ages cannot be said to reincarnate in the spirituality that shines through Wordsworth and Shelley. Shelley had to deny the Christian God in order to reach the Divine. Wordsworth, like Coleridge, conformed to the Christian faith in later life, but at the crest of their poetic creativity they subscribed to what we have called a complex Pantheism. Blake too stood outside the Christian conventions: though he spoke constantly of Christ and identified the supreme fact of both poetic experience and spiritual life as "Jesus the Imagination", he poured scorn on the religion of the churches no less than on the Christian Deism which the scientific eighteenth century invented for its convenience. And Jesus the Imagination is fundamentally a tran-
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scendental truth, the realm of Eternity whose reflection or shadow is the world of Time:31 eternally He is both One and Many, for he is an infinite Being and Body of "flexible senses" which, when contracted at will, behold multitude and, when expanded, see "as One Man all the Universal Family" .32 Jesus the Imagination is also called the Universal or Eternal Man, and our whole world is really this Universal Man broken up in a false vision and striving towards self-completion:
. ..Man looks out in tree & herb & fish & bird & beast
Collecting up the scatter'd portions of his immortal body
Into the Elemental Forms of every thing that grows...
In pain he sighs, in pain he labours in his universe
Sorrowing in birds over the deep, & in the wolf
Over the slain, and moaning in the cattle, & in the winds,...
And in the cries of birth & in the groans of death his voice
Is heard throughout the Universe; wherever a grass grows
Or a leaf buds, The Eternal Man is seen, is heard, is felt,
And all his sorrows, till he reassumes his ancient bliss.33
With the whole world a state of the Eternal or Universal Man, each of us holds the Divine Imagination in ourselves and even the universe seen without is really within.34 An infinite Presence whose multiple centres are in our own bosoms, an All-God or Pantheos who is All-Man or Pananthropos, a Divine Humanity secretly perfect and waiting to be realised in an inner vision which embraces all outer things and holds them in an eternity of Jesus: such is Blake's Christianity and this Christianity is essentially at little variance with Wordsworth. A certain Gnostic element in Blake lacks in the unfettered Nature-love which is intrinsic to Wordsworthian spirituality, yet there are passages of exquisite or sublime Nature-responses in Blake because of his sense of what is within or beyond Nature and shining out through everything for the man of developed imaginative sight. Just as Wordsworth finds divine blessings everywhere, so too does Blake see all things alive as holy35 and believes that if the doors of perception were
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cleansed each natural object would appear to man as it is, infinite.36
All the great Romantics, though differing in particulars, stand together in their mysticism and, with whatever roots in the past, shoot beyond the religious consciousness of the Middle Ages and orthodox Christianity. Indeed, remarks Sri Aurobindo,37 the drift of the modern mind in the spiritual direction "is too large in its aim and varied in its approach to be satisfied by any definite or any fixed symbolic or hieratic method, it cannot rest within the special experience and figures of a given religion. There has been too universal a departure from all specialised forms and too general a breaking down of the old cut channels; in place of their intensive narrowness we have a straining through all that has been experienced by an age of wide intellectual curiosity to the ultimate sense of that experience." If there is any affinity to things past, it is most to the many-sided monistic, monotheistic, pantheistic, polytheistic synthesis of the occult, the mystical, the spiritual we come upon in the Indian Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita.
1.C. M. Bowra, op. cit, pp. 1, 271, 289-290, 290, 10, 291, 10, 10, 10.
2.Lucas, op. cit., p. 35.
3.Ibid., p. 42.
4.Ibid., p. 55.
5.Ibid., p. 233.
6.Ibid.
7.The Future Poetry, p. 100.
9.Ibid., p. 111.
10.Ibid, pp. 115-116.
11.Ibid., p. 91.
12.Ibid., p. 111.
13.Ibid., p. 59.
14.The Future Poetry, p. 111.
15.Ibid.
16.Ibid., p. 191.
17.Ibid, pp. 191-192.
18.Ibid, p. 50.
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19.Ibid., p. 51.
20.Ibid, p. 50.
22.Ibid.
23.Ibid.
24.Ibid.
25.Lucas, op. cit., p. 47.
26.Ibid, p. 46.
27.Ibid., pp. 71-73.
28.Bowra, op. cit., p. 55.
29.Life, Literature, Yoga, p. 88.
30.The Future Poetry, p. 127.
31.Op. cit., pp. 605-606 (A Vision of the Last Judgment).
32.Ibid., p. 664 (Jerusalem, Ch. 2, plate 38, II. 17-20).
33.Ibid, p. 355-356 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Eighth,LL. 561-563, 576578,580-583).
34.Ibid, p. 709 (Jerusalem, Ch. 3, pL. 71,LL.15-19).
35.Ibid., p. 160 (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, A Song of Liberty, Chorus).
36.Ibid., p. 154 (ibid., pi. 14).
37.The Future Poetry, p. 114.
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10
The mind of Romanticism and the Victorian sequel - The spiritual note in the older poetry, Classical or Romantic, and in the second Romanticism
We may hazard the guess that the promise given by modern English Romanticism will be fulfilled most perfectly if certain recent glowings of the mystical in English poetry blend with influences of a spiritually resurgent India to seize most intimately on the soul of that Movement and carry it beyond the Spirit's dawn-flush known to it in the old days. The mind at work in it rose suddenly from a submerged racial being which, whatever developments in its own line may be attained by it in a later England or even Europe, seems to have little chance to arrive at utter completion within the context of psychological race-factors dominant at present in the West.
This mind, revolting against the superficiality of the eighteenth century's pseudo-Classicism, was not a direct continuation of the intellectuality developed by Milton after the Metaphysicals had partly freed themselves from the Elizabethan Life-force though without quite passing beyond its quivering nerves and therefore without acquiring properly the typical qualities of the creative Intelligence. In the field of the true intellectuality brought forth by Milton, "a new larger endeavour in the same field might have been expected which would have set before it the aim," says Sri Aurobindo,1 "of a richer, deeper, wider, more curious intellectual humanism, poetic, artistic, many-sided, sounding by the poetic reason the ascertainable truth of God and man and Nature. To that eventually, following the main stream of European thought and culture, English poetry turned for a time in the intellectual fullness of the nineteenth century; that too was more indistinctly the half-conscious drift of the slow transitional movement which intervenes between Pope and Wordsworth."
Among the Romantics themselves there is a pointer to it in
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the work of Keats. Sri Aurobindo has some interesting remarks on it. He considers Keats and Shelley as "perhaps the two most purely poetic minds that have used the English tongue; but one sings from the skies earthwards, the other looks from earth towards Olympus. Keats is the first entire artist in word and rhythm in English poetry, -not grandiose, classical and derived like Milton, but direct and original in his artistry, he begins a new era .... Alone of all the chief poets of his time he is in possession of a perfect or almost perfected instrument of his native temperament and genius, but he had not yet found the thing he had to say, not yet seen what he was striving to see. All the other high things that interested his great equals, had for him no interest; one godhead only he worshipped, the image of divine Beauty, and through this alone he wished to see Truth and by her to achieve spiritual delight and not so much freedom as completeness. And he saw her in three of her four forms, sensuous beauty, imaginative beauty, intellectual and ideal beauty. But it is the first only which he had entirely expressed when his thread was cut short in its beginning; the second he had carried far, but it was not yet full-orbed; towards the third and highest he was only striving, 'to philosophise he dared not yet', but it was from the first the real sense and goal of his genius."2 Not in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, not even in the great Odes does Sri Aurobindo see the real soul of Keats: this "inner genius... lay in that attempt which, first failing in Endymion, was again resumed in Hyperion. It was the discovery of the divine Idea, Power and living norm of Beauty which by its breath of delight has created the universe, supports it and moves towards a greater perfection, inspires the harmonies of inward sight and outward form, yearns and strives towards the fullness of its own self-discovery by love and delight."3 By "the intimation of it in his work, his growing endeavour to find it and the unfulfilled promise of its discovery and unique fullness of expression" Keats belongs in spirit to the "prophetic, but half-foiled singers of the dawn"4 of mysticism that was the English Romantic Movement. Yet he prepares another epoch than that of mystical Romanticism.
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Not having had time before his too early death to find his way into the deepest sanctuary of the secret temple of ideal Beauty entered by him, what stood out as most effectively and cumulatively Keatsian was "a rich, artistic and sensuous poetical speech" .5 It is as if the spiritual seeking of the age stopped abruptly short and prepared to fall down a multicoloured incline to "a subsequent poetry which turns from it to seek poetic Truth or pleasure through the senses and an artistic or curiously observing or finely psychologising intellectual-ism"6 - the poetry of the Victorians.
The work of these poets is sometimes considered a continuation of Romanticism and indeed it is "opened up to some mountain-top prospects, struck across by some moments of prophecy"7 which recall the achievements of their predecessors. But, on the whole, Romanticism is felt only in the form of this work, not in its spirit; or else the spirit keeps the shadow of Romanticism, not the substance. And the sheer poetic inspiration is also much less. Sri Aurobindo8 writes: "The descent from the uncertain but high elevations of the first romantic, half spiritual outbreak is very marked, baffling and sudden. This is not in the nature of a revolt, an energetic audacity of some new thing, - except for a moment in Swinburne, - but a change of levels, a transition to other more varied but less elevated interests, the substitution of a more curious but less impetuous movement. The rich beauty of Keats is replaced by the careful opulent cultivated picturesqueness of Tennyson, the concentrated personal force of Byron by the many-sided intellectual robustness and energy of Browning, the intense Nature poetry and the strong and grave ethical turn of Wordsworth by the too intellectually conscious eye on Nature and the cultured moralising of Arnold, the pure ethereal lyricism of Shelley by Swinburne's turgid lyrical surge and all too self-conscient fury of foam-tossing sound, and in place of the supernatural visions of Blake and Coleridge we have the mediaeval glamour and languourous fields of dream of Rossetti and Morris."
The Victorians, however, are much closer to the soul of the
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new Romanticism than are those who preceded it. The intellectual endeavour in the immediate predecessors was "paltry, narrow and elegantly null" ,9 the poetic sight a power of making abstractions pointed by rhetorical means. One of the best passages in Pope is - interestingly enough - on a kind of Pantheism:
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul;
'That, changed through all, and yet in all the same;
Great in the earth as in the ethereal frame;
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,
Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent;
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,
As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart;
As full, as perfect, in vile Man that mourns,
As the rapt Seraph that adores and burns:
To him no high, no low, no great, no small;
He fills, he bounds, connects and equals all.
The lines are undeniably effective and are poetic by just managing to bring in some element of rhythmic emotion and vision, but there is a preponderance of thought and sentiment over the really imaginative "feeling intellect", save in the phrases about Nature and God and about the "rapt Seraph" and in the third and the terminal couplet. Also, the rhetoric by its too sweeping tone falsifies somewhat the truth expressed. We have only to hark back to the passage from Wordsworth already quoted as his most philosophical statement on Pantheism, to appreciate the change the Romantic vision introduced into the poetry: he is talking of "an active principle" assigned to "every Form of being":
howe'er removed
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It circulates, the Soul of all the worlds,
Portions of this are still not the imagination freely on the wing, the mind of prose drags at it here and there; yet the poetic breath blows authentically in every line and, like the soul of whom Wordsworth speaks, joins all together and uplifts even the heaviest phrase into a whole of true vision charged with a "feel" of Pantheism and not merely an idea of it: depths in us are stirred and an inner sight is opened. In passages where Wordsworth is most Wordsworthian the impact both poetic and pantheistic is more intensely unlike anything an eighteenth-century thinker in verse could couplet out; for Wordsworth has not only a finer poetic gift but lives more genuinely in the heart of what he poetises. Pantheism is to him an entry by his own subjective self into the Universal Spirit whose body is Nature:
many an hour in caves forlorn,
And mid the hollow depths of naked crags
He sate, and even in their fixed lineaments,
Or from the power of a peculiar eye,
Or by creative feeling overborne,
Or by predominance of thought oppressed,
Even in their fixed and steady lineaments
He traced an ebbing and a flowing mind,
Expression ever varying!
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Again, he has touched the Universal Spirit by exceeding the body-sense not only outwards but also inwards, plunging towards the profundities of the Self of selves. That is why he has written, uttering what to the ordinary religious mind of his time must have struck as a blasphemy:
For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
Deep - and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.
All strength - all terror, single or in bands,
That ever was put forth in personal form -
Jehovah - with his thunder and his choir
Of shouting Angels, and the empyreal thrones -
I pass them unalarmed. Not chaos, not
The darkest pit of lowest Erebus,
Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out
By help of dreams - can breed such fear and awe
As fall upon us often when we look
Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man -
My haunt, and the main region of my song.
The poetic tone, though not the idea and feeling, is here akin to Milton's and indeed Wordsworth wrote the passage after remembering Milton's invocation to Urania, one of the grandest by that Puritan poet:
... Thou with Eternal Wisdom didst converse,
Wisdom thy sister, and with her didst play
In presence of the Almighty Father, pleased
With thy celestial song. Up led by thee
Into the Heaven of Heavens I have presumed,
An earthly guest, and drawn empyreal air,
Thy tempering. With like safety guided down,
Return me to my native element;
Lest, from this flying steed unreined (as once
Bellorophen, though from a lower clime)
Dismounted on the Aleian field I fall,
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Erroneous there to wander and forlorn.
Half yet remains unsung, but narrower bound
Within the visible Diurnal Sphere.
Standing on Earth, not rapt above the pole,
More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged
To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days,
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round,
And solitude; yet not alone, while thou
Visit'st my slumbers nightly, or when Morn
Purples the East. Still govern thou my song,
Urania, and fit audience find, though few.
All the Romantics of Wordsworth's time, and not he only, were admirers of Milton and reflected something of his manner the moment they ceased to be directly lyrical. But, while Milton at his best is superb, his mind is more external than theirs. Even Byron who is the most external-minded among them has at times a speech with a keener edge of bright inner perception about it than Milton, though in sheer poetic quality he is on the whole nowhere near him. Thus the hail of Milton's Satan to the infernal regions to which he is condemned is from
Immortal vigour, though oppressed and fallen
and from
A mind not to be changed by place or time
and who holds that
The mind is its own place and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
But Byron presents the dreadful greatness of the fallen Archangel in one swift forcible concentrated phrase:
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his eye
Glared forth the immortality of Hell.
Again, Milton is unsurpassably powerful in conveying the terribleness of Satan's fall and punishment:
Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms.
Yet we should hope in vain from him for the fearful preternatural imaginativeness of the lines where Byron shadows out his Manfred's unspeakable guilt:
a tyrant spell
Which had its birthplace in a star condemned,
The burning wreck of a demolished world,
A wandering hell in the eternal space.
The mind of the later Romantics is freer from the limits of a Classicism of the inspired reason looking outwards: a subtler sweep is in it not only of rhythm but also of vision and aspiration. Con those words of the Lord of Pandemonium:
What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield ...
In their own context the words are a monstrous defiance of Heaven, but let us for the moment put aside their use by Satan and concentrate only on the essence of power in them, by which the apparently defeated transcends defeat. There is yet something in the psychological movement which, despite the
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motive of defeat-transcendence, is narrow in imagination and rigid in emotion, as compared with Wordsworth's profoundly stirring visionary assurance to the Negro liberator of Haiti, Toussaint L'Ouverture, in the day of his downfall:
Thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind.
The same can be said in comparison with Shelley's passionately noble conclusion to his drama about Prometheus in revolt against all autocracy of the Magnified Ego whether by a human king or a priest-conceived God of wrath and terror:
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory.
Almost everywhere in the best Romanticism of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries we can. trace the pulsing of pinions more subtle than any that Classicism could unfold in its habitual soars. The pulsing has diverse moods behind it, but there goes with it the same rarefied puissance. We have this puissance in Coleridge's excitement:
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free,
We were the first who ever burst
Into that silent sea -
in Shelley's pensiveness:
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We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought -
in Keats's wonder:
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific - and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise -
Silent, upon a peak in Darien -
in Blake's ambiguity:
O Earth, O earth, return!
Arise from out the dewy grass;
Night is worn,
And the morn
Rises from the slumberous mass.
Turn away no more;
Why wilt thou turn away?
The starry floor,
The wat'ry shore,
Is giv'n thee till the break of day -
in Wordsworth's delicacy:
The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face -
even in Byron's sentimentalism:
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So, we'll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
On the Continent the Romantic imagination is both less ethereal and less audacious. The typical French mind, even while revolting from Classicism, retained something of the Classical manner. Edmund Wilson10 has an acute comment here: "It is enlightening to compare Shelley's lyric which begins 'O World! O Life! O Time!' with the poem of Alfred de Musset's which begins 'J'ai perdu ma force et ma vie'. These two lyrics are in some ways curiously similar: each is the breath of a Romantic sigh over the passing of the pride of youth. Yet the French poet, even in his wistfulness, makes epigrammatic points: his language is always logical and precise; whereas the English poet is vague and gives us images unrelated by logic. And it will not be till the advent of the Symbolists that French poetry will really become capable of the fantasy and fluidity of English."
German Romanticism, on the other hand, is vague enough, but there is not much luminosity in its cloudiness and whatever thrill of ecstasy it has is more morbid, more nihilistic. Bowra quotes Novalis's letter to Caroline Schlegel in this connection: "I know that imagination is most attracted by what is most immoral, most animal; but I know how like a dream all imagination is, how it loves night, meaninglessness, and solitude." Bowra's comment11 is: "This was not what the English Romantics thought. They believed that the imagination stands in some essential relation to truth and reality, and they were at pains to make their poetry pay attention to them." For the rest, the German Romantics made unsatisfied longing
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an end in itself and gave a large part in their minds to belief in hallucinations and magic - things which the English Romantics put in a secondary place and mostly absorbed into a higher motive.
But even on the Continent a stir of rarefied puissance is occasionally at work and its presence is felt in moments of wistful fancy from Heine:
Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
Lm Norden auf kahler Hoh.
Ihn schlafert; mit weiber Decke
Umhiillen ihn Eis und Schnee.
Er traumt von einer Palme,
Die, fern im Morgenland,
Einsam und schweigend trauert
Auf brennender Felsenwand.
On a bare northern hillside
A lonely fir-tree grows,
Nodding in its white mantle
Of ice and driven snows.
And of a palm its dream is
That sorrows, mute, alone,
In some far land of morning
On hills of burning stone. (Lucas)
It brushes past us when love in Hugo defies time:
Votre aile en le heurtant ne fera rien repandre
Du vase ou je m'abreuve et que j'ai bien rempli.
Mon ame a plus de feu que vous n' avez de cendre;
Mon coeur a plus d'amour que vous n'avez d'oubli.
Your flying wings may smite, but never can they dash
The cup which I have brimmed and where my lips I wet.
My heart has far more fire than you can dim with ash,
My soul more love than you can make my soul forget.
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A breath of it is on us when Hugo's Gastibelza ends that song of pathos and ardour about Dona Sabine:
... la nuit gagne
Le Mont Falou -
Le vent qui vient a travers la montagne
Me rendra fou!
... over Mount Falou
Night hangs her sway -
The wind that comes across the mountain will blow
My wits away! (K.D.S.)
It is the indefinite atmosphere of the scene in Musset,
Ou la mer vient mourir sur une plage endormie.
Where the sea comes to die on a shore asleep.
Anything like this - and much more what English Romanticism gives us - is enough to show up the grosser body of the Miltonic flight. And where the intense subtlety becomes an explicit or suggestive spirituality the bounded nature of that flight is painfully obvious, no matter if the organic artistry of it be unimpeachable. Follow sensitively the beat of that celebrated apostrophe in Paradise Lost
Hail, holy light, offspring of Heaven first-born!...
Bright essence of bright effluence increate!
and now trace the motion of mind and language in Wordsworth's line:
or his
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a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
or else Shelley's
The Light whose smile kindles the universe,
Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly;
Life like a dome of many-coloured glass
Stains the white radiance of eternity...
There is a mystical quickening which makes the intellect of these Romantics a medium of inspiration quite dissimilar to that of the Classical poets. Even a mystical mood in Milton -
thou, Celestial Light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight -
has too external a tone, too thought-out a formulation. Wordsworth, in a far shorter phrase, can suggest most illu-minatively the mystical mood by speaking not even of supra-mundane things but of mere daffodils remembered:
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.
The same intellectual externality, though never superficiality, may be contrasted in the verse where Milton faintly mixed the "pantheistic" with the "neoplatonic" -
Thou Sun, of this great World both eye and soul -
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to Shelley's still intellectual yet profoundly pregnant phrase put into the mouth of the Sun-Spirit:
I am the Eye with which the universe
Beholds itself and knows itself divine.
Milton's religious intellectuality as differentiated from the intellectuality living in a mystical atmosphere is too patent in his exhortation to all natural powers to declare God's greatness: when he comes to the Winds and Pines he says:
His praise, ye Winds, that from four quarters blow,
Breathe soft or loud, and wave your tops, ye Pines,
With every Plant, in sign of worship wave.
But how intensely inward with a transcendent atmosphere without even breathing of God's name is Wordsworth's response to outward Nature one early May morning:
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep.
Not that Milton is utterly devoid of the true spiritual inspiration: a touch of it enters the rhythm of the summons to every creature to extol
Him first, Him last, Him midst, and without end-
a line which Wordsworth as good as lifted for the close to his reading of the natural sights in the Simplon Pass as the symbols of Eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end -
and in one phrase Milton catches the topmost spiritual height:
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity,
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but the height seems in its own context not quite conscious of the empyrean it inhabits, while Wordsworth without referring to Eternity can give us in his picture of the mind of the scientist Newton a concrete "feel" of unknown spiritual widenesses:
a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
And there is a dissimilarity in the way the spiritual substance and rhythm come in: what is somewhat absent in the Miltonic reception of the supra-intellectual is an intimate thrill of it which the later Romantics sometimes have, despite their mental expression where intimacy and thrilling of any kind are less natural than to vital speech. The Classical Milton, passing from the religious to the mystical, gets on rare occasions the thought-mind magnificently uplifted, but there is not the play of the illuminative intuition in the very grain of the substance and the very texture of the rhythm. The visionary "feel", though arising out of the Creative Intelligence rather than from the creative Life-force as in Shakespeare, yet recovers and holds "as its central secret something akin to the older poet, a greater straight impact and natural body of intuitive intensity"12 that Milton can command
We may here quote some passages by Sri Aurobindo on the nature of poetry and on Shakespeare and this recovery at times by the later Romantics of the main power of his peculiar poetic penetrativeness. All genuine poetry, according to Sri Aurobindo,13 has its origin in a plane of our being above and beyond our personal intelligence, a region of "supermind" where things are seen in "their innermost and largest truth by a spiritual identity and with a lustrous effulgency and rapture and its native language is a revelatory, inspired, intuitive word limpid or subtly vibrant or densely packed with the glory of this ecstasy and lustre." It is the inrush of this supramental glory into brain and heart and nerve that creates the psychological phenomenon noted from of old as poetic inspiration. But rarely does the supreme significant word come direct and
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unaltered: ordinarily there is, as it were, a cloud of formless light from which we have to disengage or reshape substance and speech with the help of our own faculties while they are excited by the influx from above. The influx plunges first into "an intuitive self in the depth of each of our parts of being, hid in sense, life, heart, mind".14 This self is the transmitting agent, a subliminal secrecy, through which the inspiration emerges into one or another part of our composite psychology that happens to be habitually dominant in us. The more these parts are near and awake to the subliminal soul-mind, the more intuitive the utterance within our subtle-physical or our vital or our intellectual consciousness. And the more the secrecy that is the transmitting agent breaks open outward, the greater the body of the supramental sight and rhythm in our utterance.
The transmitted sight and rhythm may be overtly mystical or no: the sheer poetic quality is not affected, for this quality is determined not by overt mysticism but by the intuitiveness of expressive turn. And it is by being thus intuitive in superabundance that Shakespeare is well-nigh the most remarkable poet the world has seen: the secret of his pre-eminence is the intuitive seizing again and again of the word from the very heart of the thing seen. English poetry after him, by getting intellectualised, lost much of this power, though in Milton it gained a more dynamic amplitude of imaginative thought as distinguished from imaginative sensation and emotion. The later Romantics have often a clear, strong, large and luminous manner, but by functioning from the more deliberative mental rather than the more spontaneous vital plane they too.lack comparatively in "the searching audacities of the intuition". Still, now and then, there emerges, as Sri Aurobindo15 puts it, "a certain effort to recapture the Shakespearian potency and intensity accompanied by a new and higher element in the workings of the poetic inspiration. When we try to put a name on it... we can see that this is an attempt to return to the fullness and the awakening turn of the direct intuitive expression on a subtler and more ethereal level." Sri Aurobindo cites as successes in this effort some lines of Keats:
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The journey homeward to habitual self!
and
... solitary thinkings, such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven...
"These lines of Keats," he16 observes, "are Shakespearian in their quality, they have recovered the direct revealing word and intimate image of the full intuitive manner, but they enter into a world of thought and inner truth other than Shakespeare's; by the passage through the detaching intellect and beyond it they have got to the borders of the realm of another and greater self than the life-self, though there we include and take up life into the deeper self-vision."
The new intensity has a thrill of imaginative sight and sound unlike that of even whatever mystical suggestion may occur accidentally in Shakespeare. Not only is the thrill different from the more obvious kind of suggestion like the lines with a hint analogous to the second Keats-quotation's - the question asked by Hamlet to his father's ghost about his appearing as he does,
So horribly to shake our dispositions
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls.
The thrill differs also from mystical-seeming suggestions at their keenest, either through an impetuosity of human love -
Eternity was in our lips and eyes,
Bliss in our brows' bent, none our parts so poor
But was a race of heaven -
or through an imaginative sensation's indefinite depth as of "strange seas" -
In the dark backward and abysm of time.
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Here, as everywhere else in the old Romanticism, "the vision is felt through the vital mind and heart before it finds expression": the later Romantics, whether in their simplicities or in their richnesses, make their revelations through the intellec-tualised consciousness which, "observing life from above is in itself a higher thing than the vital and emotional mind which responds more immediately and powerfully to life, but is caught in its bonds",17 and out of a sublimation or intensification of this consciousness, neighbour of mightier and profounder realities, "there comes in some absolute moments a native voice of the spirit".18
In European poetry of the time the spiritual note is also heard here and there. The greatest figure of Italian Romanticism, Leopardi, was a kind of paradox, for he made a cult of classicism and hated the word "Romantic", understanding by it Mediaeval trappings such as his father had immured him amongst during his boyhood. But there was in him not only a queer blend of the emotional Byronic despair and the Stoic defiance of a Vigny: there was also the belief in the bursting of great truths with startling suddenness and ecstatic vividness over which the mind has little control and there was the desire to feel (sentito),as well as know (conosceva) the truth. However, where the English Romantics felt a positive divinity everywhere, Leopardi had the living sense of an Infinite Nothing which he embraced with an unflinching gusto. This Nothing makes for him all life endless filth and frustration; but a hint is found in a few places in his work that that is because the human ego is imprisoned in its desires. If the ego could stand bare and free, the Nothing might be what, watching once a solitary hill and a far hedge screening the horizon, he seemed to apprehend - space beyond space and "supernal silence and un-fathomed peace" measured, as it were, by the wind's murmur among the leaves nearby. Time present and time past are caught up into timelessness:
... Cosi tra questa
Immensita s'annega il pensier mio:
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E il naufragar m'e dolce in questo mare.
... So
In this immensity my thought is drowned
And sweet to me is shipwreck in this sea.
(Bickersteth)
A still greater figure on the Continent, Goethe, with all his urge towards Classicism in the years of his maturity, cannot escape the Romantic drive towards "things not easily expressible" and one of his best-known passages not only suggests the inexpressible but counts name-giving to be unimportant, even reprehensible. It is the pantheistic reply of Faust when asked if he believes in God. It ends:
Und drangt nicht alles
Nach Haupt und Herzen dir,
Und webt in ewigem Geheimnis
Unsichtbar sichtbar neben dir?
Erfull davon dein Herz, so grob es ist,
Und wenn du ganz in dem Gefuhle selig bist,
Nenn es dann, wie du willst,
Nenns GlUck! Herz! Liebe! Gott!
Ich habe keinen Namen
DafUr!Gefuhl ist alles;
Name ist Schall und Rauch,
Umnebelte Himmelsglut.
Does not the whole world press
Into your heart and brain,
And the eternal secret float
Round you, hidden and plain?
Fill to the brim your soul
From that full blessedness,
Then name it as you will,
Love, Rapture, God!
I have no name for it, none,
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The heart is all, and the name
Nothing but clamour and smoke
Clouding the glow of the sky.
(Helen Stawell and G. Lowes-Dickinson) .
Spoken by a lover, the passage is more Shelleyan than Wordsworthian, but it compasses too the essence of Wordsworth's feeling, in a more excited voice than his - his feeling, for instance, in those lines that close the description of "the growing Youth" watching from the naked top of a bold headland the sun rise and bathe the world in light:
... Far and wide the clouds were touched,
And in their silent faces could be read
Unutterable love. Sound needed none,
Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drank
The spectacle: sensation, soul and form,
All melted into him; they swallowed up
His animal being; in them did he live,
And by them did he live; they were his life.
In such access of mind, in such high hour
Of visitation from the living God,
Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired.
No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request;
Rapt into still communion that transcends
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise,
His mind was a thanksgiving to the powers T
hat made him; it was blessedness and love!
Another passage worth quoting from Goethe is the often-cited conclusion of Faust - words at once weighty and winged, in which several Romantic elements reach a fine spiritualisation through the idealistic in_tellect:
Alles Vergangliche
Ist nur ein Gleichnis;
Das Unzulangliche,
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Hier wird's Ereignis;
Das Unbeschreibliche,
Hier ist's gethan, D
as Ewig-Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan.
All things that pass
Are symbols alone;
Here into Fullness
Each failure is grown;
Here the Untellable
Crowns all endeavour,
The Eternal Feminine
Leads onward for ever. (K.D.S.)
And it was Goethe who stated perhaps most clearly the non-exclusiveness of the Romantic Pantheism, the complexity of it which did not set it over against other "isms" about God. He wrote to Jacobi: "I cannot be satisfied with only one way of thinking. As a poet and artist I am a polytheist, as a scientific investigator a pantheist, and one just as much as the other. If I need a God for my life as a moral person, there is provision for this also. Things in Heaven and earth form a kingdom so wide that only all the organs of all beings could grasp it." There is a small inaccuracy here, for Goethe as a poet was a pantheist as well as a polytheist, and most pronouncedly so; but his mention of polytheism is enlightening, casting into relief the experience of all poetic imagination, since that imagination perceives feeling entities everywhere: Wordsworth with his "Presences of Nature" and "Souls of lonely places" was polytheistic no less than pantheistic.
Goethe as the greatest poetic intellect of the age was most aware of the conceptual implications of the spiritual bent in him. But the spiritual cannot be said to lie at his very core and lead at times to a direct visionary intimation of godhead; neither, for all his lavish use of nouns like "Infinity" and "Eternity" and "Divinity", can it said to be the most Hugo-
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esque part of Hugo, much less to verge him on concrete mysticism. The reverse is the case with some of the English Romantics. They may fall often into thinness or bareness because of an insufficient development in them of a supporting body to their unusual inspiration, but the spiritual note not only emerges in its true rhythm in some of their utterances but also seems the ultimate centre of their being and the echo of a genuine mystical intuition. If we are asked to name the most Shelleyan lines of Shelley we cannot help quoting:
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The longing for something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow,
and the fragment which he wrote a few months before his death and which is uniquely intense with an aspiration touched by the Ineffable:
I loved - oh, no, I mean not one of ye,
Or any earthly soul, though ye are dear
As human heart to human heart may be,
I loved I know not what; but this lone sphere
And all that it contains, contains not thee,
Thou whom, seen nowhere, I feel everywhere.
Perhaps the most Wordsworthian of Wordsworth's lines are that quatrain,
Love had he found in huts where poor men lie,
His only teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills,
and the fragment retrieved by Hugh de Selincourt, not suggesting poignantly like Shelley's a perfect Beyond which is at once here and not here, but magnificently emphasising a single-selfed omnipotent Within:
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One interior life
In which all beings live with God, themselves
Are God, existing in the mighty whole,
As indistinguishable as the cloudless east
At noon is from the cloudless west, when all
The hemisphere is one cerulean blue.
1.The Future Poetry, p. 91.
2.Ibid., pp. 129-30.
3.Ibid., pp. 130-31.
4.Ibid., p. 131.
5.Ibid., p. 116.
6.Ibid, p. 94.
7.Ibid, p. 132.
8.Ibid., pp. 132-33.
9.Ibid., p. 91.
10.E. Wilson, op. cit.
11.C. M. Bowra, op. cit., p. 5.
12.The Future Poetry, p. 278.
13.Ibid., p. 279.
14.Ibid.
15.Ibid., p. 172.
16.Ibid., p. 173.
17.Ibid., p. 172.
18.Ibid., p. 116.
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11
A resume and a look forward - the nature of poetry and its spiritual consummation -a defence of mysticism - the paramount significance of Romanticism's poetry of the Spirit - spiritual poetry and two styles: Classical and Romantic
In rounding off our survey we may cite a passage by Havelock Ellis on three famous personalities of the stage: it indicates with a fine imagination some essential qualities of the three strands we have traced in our subject.
"The word classic suggests to some people the coolly artificial, the conventionally unreal. Ristori was at the farthest remove from that. She was the adorable revelation of what the classic really means: the attainment of the essential in dramatic art by the road of a simplicity and a naturalness from which all superfluity and extravagance have fallen away, so that every movement is under control and every gesture significant. In classic art such as this, simplicity is one with dignity, and the last utterance of poignant intensity is brought within reach. Salvini was very different. He was not classic. He carried human passion to the utmost limits of expression on the basis of a robust physical force, and seemed to have an immense reservoir of emotion to feed his art. It was not his restraint that impressed one but the superb and never forced expansion of his energy. And finally there was Chaliapin, neither the classic perfection of art, nor the exuberant embodiment of romantic emotional energy, but with the seal on him of a serene and mysterious power that was aloof from the world."
We may make use of Ellis's impressionism without committing ourselves literally to its classification of the three artists concerned or to its ascription to them of the qualities defined. The Classicism of the Graeco-Roman poets as well as of Dante and Milton, Corneille and Racine, is the art Ellis attributes to Ristori. The Elizabethans - in one mode Marlowe
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and his fellow-dramatists, in the other Spenser and, in both, Shakespeare - practise what he sees as Salvini's art. The peak-point of the later Romanticism, the English poetry of the time of Wordsworth, carries the art that he conceives to be Cha-liapin's. For it passes beyond the cadre not only of Classicism but also of Elizabethan poetry. And this it does not merely because it is a Romanticism of the creative Intelligence rather than of the creative Life-force - an Intelligence differently coloured than the Classical, far more complex and brooding as well as instinct with "things not easily expressible". It exceeds the old cadre also because it lives really not by its moods and motives that are Romantic in the modern way or with an affinity to the Elizabethan, so much as, in Sri Aurobindo's words,1 "by its greater and more characteristic element, by its half spiritual turn, by Wordsworth's force of ethical thought and communion with Nature, by Shelley's imaginative transcendentalism, Keats' worship of Beauty, Byron's Titanism and force of personality, Coleridge's supernaturalism or, as it should more properly be called, his eye for other nature, Blake's command of the inner psychic realms." Fundamentally neither Classical nor Romantic, it blends the Classical and Romantic moods and motives, manners and techniques, functions partly from the plane of the old Classical poets and seems to catch that of the old Romantic ones by plunging the creative Intelligence into intense imaginative emotion - and achieves its own individuality most through raising by both imaginative emotionalism and a subtilisation of Classicism's inspired reason its modern complex curiosity of mind into a directness, serene and mysterious, of spiritual power exceeding the world we know in sensation, feeling and thought. It does not reject this world, it embraces and transforms its appearances and values -but from within and beyond it; it is a pervasion of Nature and life by a vision and experience aloof from their externalities, a revelation indeed of these externalities as the body of the Divine yet by an in-drawn or up-poised kindling with the Divine's secret consciousness.
No doubt, the nebulous and indefinite went considerably
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with that kindling because of the age's unreadiness for the strange power that seized the English Romantics. A more precise intellectual age had to intervene and even an extreme stress on the objective and material had to fall through scientific development and an exaggerated turn take place towards the crudely vitalistic - in order that a more mind-touched as well as matter-tinged foundation might be prepared for a return of the spiritual light to concretise in our being and in our literature its patterns of supernal Beauty and Truth. Yes, the mysticism of the English Romantics had many defects due either to flaws in their own temperaments or to shortcomings in the Zeitgeist. Again, the poetry it created did not sustain itself at such length as did that of Classicism or what the old Romanticism had produced: therefore none of its poets can be taken cumulatively as the equal of Homer or Dante, Shakespeare or even Spenser. However, its best work is genuinely of the first order - and the significance of that work is paramount by reason of the very nature, as explained by Sri Aurobindo, of poetry.
To quote Sri Aurobindo:2 "Poetry, even when it is dominated by intellectual tendency and motive, cannot really live and work by intellect alone; it is not created nor wholly shaped by reason and judgment, but is an intuitive seeing and an inspired hearing. But intuition and inspiration are not only spiritual in their essence, they are the characteristic means of all spiritual vision and utterance; they are rays from a greater and intenser Light than the tempered clarity of our intellectual understanding. They may be turned fruitfully to a use which is not their last or most intrinsic purpose, - used, in poetry, to give a deeper and more luminous force and a heightened beauty to the perceptions of outward life or to the inner but still surface movements of emotion and passion or the power of thought to perceive certain individual and universal truths which enlighten or which raise to a greater meaning the sensible appearances of the inner and outer life of Nature and man. But every power in the end finds itself drawn towards its own proper home and own highest capacity, and the spiritual
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faculties of hearing and seeing must climb at last to the expression of things spiritual and eternal and their power and working in temporal things and must find in that interpretation their own richest account, largest and most satisfied action, purest acme of native capacity. An ideal and spiritual poetry revealing the spirit in itself and in things, the unseen in the seen or above and behind it, unveiling ranges of existence which the physical mind ignores, pointing man himself to capacities of godhead in being, truth, beauty, power, joy which are beyond the highest of his common or his yet realised values of existence, is the last potentiality of this creative, interpretative power of the human mind. When the eye of the poet has seen life externally or with a more vital inwardness, has risen to the clarities and widenesses of a thought which intimately perceives and understands it, when his word has caught some revealing speech and rhythm of what he has seen, much has been seized, but not the whole possible field of vision; this other and greater realm still remains open for a last transcendence."
Now, the best work of modem Romanticism embodies for the first time in occidental literature the greater light falling with some sort of directness upon the poetic mind or, rather, the direct utterance of that light takes place on one side of the varicoloured phenomenon that is modem Romanticism. Here Romanticism, properly speaking, ceases, but we may continue to employ that name because some tendency towards that side is present, mixed with several others, in most of the remaining parts. It is with an eye to this tendency that Baudelaire seems to have defined the Romantic as not only "colour" and "intimacy" but also "spirituality" and "aspiration towards the infinite".
The soul acting, however elementarily on the whole, in its own right, with an explicitness of spiritual substance and style,an immediate self-expression of the supra-intellectual, rather than in terms proper to the physical mind, vital mind, intellectual mind: that is the reason for considering the significance of Romantic poetry paramount. In this poetry both the content and the form, such as the bardic urge throughout its history
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has secretly been driving towards, are pioneered in some mass. So it opens, even if intermittently, to the poetic art not only the largest territory native to it but also the perfect greatness of its own function.
Of course, one who fails to appreciate that the language of poetry moves ever to "seize in a peculiarly intimate light of knowledge by a spiritual identity"3 the inmost being of that which it is missioned to utter - one who looks askance at all mysticism would not agree. He would join hands with that critic of fine aesthetic taste and fascinating scholarship but limited psychological insight, whom we have often mentioned and who has little sympathy with the mystically orientated imagination of a Romantic like Coleridge and with this Romantic's metaphysical distinction between Imagination and Fancy. Apropos of Coleridge's letter to Thelwall in 1797 - "The universe itself, what but an immense heap of little things?... My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something great, something one and indivisible. And it is only in the faith of that, that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns, give me the sense of sublimity or majesty!But in this faith all things counterfeit infinity" - apropos of these words Lucas4 has written: "To minds without this mystical yearning it seems as strange to want the whole universe to have one essence as to want it to have only one colour - say, bright pink. It is no doubt possible to believe that the world about us is the Book of God, in which all phenomena are but symbols of Him; the Fancy playing with those symbols as a child that cannot read, the Imagination reading them as wholes by which in moments of vision it communicates with Him. It is possible to believe it: but why should one? Because of the wish to; and if one has not the faintest wish? I believe, though it cannot be proved, that this mystic eagerness for unity is due ultimately to a loss of nerve. As man has grown more individual and intelligent, he has grown more divided and solitary. Men are not lemmings -
Alone the sun rises, and alone
Spring the great streams.
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But at moments, realising that 'nous sommes irremediable-rnent seuls', the mind grows sick and giddy and runs for refuge to the mystic's trance - or the totalitarian state."
The sarcasm about "one essence" and "only one colour - say, bright pink" - is utterly jejune. The Unity for which Coleridge ached and which Imagination as distinct from Fancy was supposed to discern or achieve did not abrogate multi-plicity and difference: in fact, Coleridge emphatically declared that without dissolving or submerging them the Unity reigned. And, after all, the intuition of such Unity is at the back of all our thinkings and doings. Do we not regard all men as partaking of a common essence of human nature? Do we not regard even an individual as somehow integrating a thousand different things into a single-toned essential being? Even a work of art is never appreciated unless a basic all-unifying essentiality is perceived: the more Classical a work the more evident and explicit, though not more potent or precious, this essentiality. And while saying this we imply too an essence of Classicism or Romanticism enabling us to put various apparently dissimilar poems under one head or the other. Whether we hold atheistic and materialistic views or the philosophy of minds like Coleridge, we always proceed as if a Unity existed and acted within diversities without annulling them. It is only extreme mystics of the One who metaphysicise about and seek for a featureless cosmos-annihilating "bright pink". Romantic mysticism gloried, on the contrary, in a million shades and even gave them the utmost prominence it could while sensing within them what Shelley termed "one harmonious soul of many a soul".
To equate mysticism with "loss of nerve" is sheer prejudice. No doubt, Coleridge happened to be a man who produced the impression of suffering from such a loss - but when he wrote that letter and The Ancient Mariner and the first part of Christabel he was full of life and had not surrendered his will to laudanum: his vitality was almost always a-dance, as Hazlitt and others have recorded. Even Kubla Khan, the poem that carne to him during an opium dream, was penned at a time
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when his nerves were very far indeed from being enfeebled by drug-taking. To describe Wordsworth at the peak of his power as running, sick and giddy, for refuge to the trance of the mystic is simply to indulge in nonsense. If ever there was a man who combined a superb sensitivity with an austere and poised strength of character and an innate happiness, it was the poet who spoke of being again and again visited by "that serene and blessed mood" when
We are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul...
And as for Shelley, although he sometimes described himself as one who
can scarce uplift
The weight of the superincumbent hour,
he has also indicated the true situation of a soul whose ardours were so great that nothing prized by ordinary mortals could satisfy the desires and hopes of a force in him like the "wild West Wind" and who therefore felt baulked. Has he not cried to that Wind,
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud,
and has he not asked with intense imagination that elemental fury to bear him towards fulfilment:
Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! -
and it was no wan weakling who declared:
my spirit's bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given.
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What about Blake? Many in his own day considered him mad, but nobody thought him a sick or feeble madman. We may remember how he forcibly ejected from his garden the dragoon Scholfield who had answered him impertinently and how he had threatened to knock out his eyes. Nor did Blake stop there. When the dragoon, outside the garden, started swearing and giving blows, Blake took him again by the elbows from behind and pushed him forwards down the road about fifty yards - the soldier all the while raging and cursing and endeavouring to turn round and strike Blake. The verdict of our own time on Blake in the point concerning us is well summed up by T. Earle Welby:5 "Few men have been so sane or made so much of a success of life on their own terms. He chose to live chiefly in the other world, but he always knew what he was about in this; his just contempt for mere reason did not prevent him from following it in worldly matters. And as he lived a busy, purposeful, happy life so he died the happiest of deaths, making the rafters of his poor room ring with the songs of joy he improvised and sang on his death-bed."
Even Keats who was once supposed to have been snuffed out by a critic's article and to have languished into extinction with hopeless love is now known to have been a plucky man quite ready to face his own shortcomings and to strive energetically to surmount them, a man with a fund of humour and great power of endurance and even pugnacious physical courage. His early sentimental vein has nothing essentially to do with the mysticism of Beauty with which his Endymion is sensuously a-wash. Two of the celebrated Odes, with their stronger fibre, have the same mystical tinge and the unfinished Hyperion, where the discovery of the divine Idea, Power and living norm of Beauty creating, sustaining and developing the universe is taken up more explicitly, shows him at his strong. est. To confuse with loss of nerve the high-strung temperament of the poet and the fever of idealistic aspiration, is pretty poor psychology. In Hyperion both that temperament and that fever are there, but we can feel strength in the very texture and movement of the verse as well as in individual lines like
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Be thou therefore in the van
Of circumstance; yea, seize the arrow's barb
Before the tense string murmur,
To bear all naked truths,
And to envisage circumstance, all calm,
This is the top of sovereignty.
Are these the accents of a man who has made a desperate nerve-stricken plunge towards the mystically imaginative vision?
Lucas's conception of mysticism is another instance of his lack of psychological acumen. It reminds us of a criticism of mystics penned by Leonard Woolf, to which Sri Aurobindo gave a reply in a letter to a disciple. What concerns us from this reply is the rebuttal of Woolf's argument that mysticism and mystics have always arisen in times of decadence, of the ebb of life, and that their loud "quacking" is a symptom of the decadence. Sri Aurobindo's comment6 runs: "This argument is absolutely untrue. In the East the great spiritual movements have arisen in the full flood of a people's life and culture or on a rising tide and they have themselves given a powerful impulse of expression and richness to its thought and Art and life; in Greece the mystics and the mysteries were there at the prehistoric beginning and in the middle (Pythagoras was one of the greatest of mystics) and not only in the ebb and decline; the mystic cults flourished in Rome when its culture was at high tide; many great spiritual personalities of Italy, France, Spain sprang up in a life that was rich, vivid and not in the least touched with decadence. This hasty and stupid generalisation has no truth in it and therefore no value."
We may add that even mystics who wanted everything to be "bright pink" were not marked by any loss of nerve either before or after taking to spiritual practice and samadhi. Buddha who preached Nirvana was a most majestic and radiant
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presence, enjoying and disseminating an ineffable equanimity, and his limitless calm was not inconsistent with an indefatigable energy so that he strikes us as perhaps the most dynamic spiritual personality who ever worked for Love, Truth and Righteousness and created a new epoch. Shankara, the other supreme apostle of the featureless Infinite, packed more dynamism into a short life of thirty-one years marching up and down India for intellectual battle than any atheist or materialist obsessed with a manifold teeming cosmos (or chaos) has done. Nor did Buddha or Shankara turn mystic by a loss of nerve: a deep and compassionate realisation like Buddha's of world-woe was hardly a case for the psychoneurologist's clinic, while Shankara was almost a born monist of the Spirit. Their monism was indeed "bright pink" rather than an anaemic white and stood for energy instead of enervation. And what about Plotinus, the master of the "Alone"? The wise and peaceful figure that emerges from the Enneads and from the account of Porphyry is not in the least of a man becoming a mystic through loss of nerve or showing any symptoms of such a malady in his trance-swept life.
The suggestion that if the great Romantics who were mystically inclined had not turned towards mysticism they would have craved for some version of the totalitarian state as an alternative is egregious. The Romantic Movement, with or without the passion for the One omnipresent who is from everlasting to everlasting, was fiery with love of liberty. If Wordsworth had not been a pantheist he would still have written:
We must be free or die who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake...
No amount of conservatism in his old age made him abjure the gospel of true liberty as distinguished from thoughtless license. Those who remained liberals to their dying day can be suspected even less of desiring to be tyrannised over or to have their individuality annulled, and sticking to liberalism only
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because mysticism had already smoothed out their fret and fear. One may pertinently ask how the mystical and the liberal could go together if the mystic's trance helped the same malady for which the totalitarian state would also provide a cure. By sheer affinity the politics would veer away from love of freedom.
Perhaps Lucas is prejudiced against the mysticism of the Romantics because, though he has uttered many a sensitive appraisal of Romantic poetry qua poetry, he is Classicallyminded and finds true strength and solace in what he7 cleverly labels as "the romantic Classicism of Greece, the romantic Realism of Iceland and of Hardy, the gaily realistic Classicism of eighteenth-century France". But the greatest classics, even while untinged by the mystic's vision and rapture, were yet deeply religious and felt their finest poetry, whether religious in theme or no, to be a channel through which blew the breath of the Divine. If the word of the greatest Classics is to be credited, the beliefs of the mystics cannot be delusions. Mysticism consists merely in trying to live out intimately the sense which the Classics have of the Divine and in making that the all-shaping centre of our life and in intuiting everywhere "the one Spirit's plastic stress".
Maybe Lucas is under the apprehension that a cult of mystically Romantic poetry would spell a depreciation of Classical verse. But to consider the significance of such poetry paramount does not render Classical verse negligible nor the rest of Romantic work itself, whether old or modern, fit for neglect. For one thing, there is not enough of the new utterance and not enough of variety in whatever there is of it, so a lover of poetry would not be quite satisfied, he would strain his eyes towards the Classical creations as well as the Elizabethan abundance, not to mention the modern Romantic work that is not directly spiritual. Further, from the purely poetic viewpoint, the Classical and the Elizabethan production and this portion of modern Romanticism are as excellent as the soul's speech of, to use a broad phrase of Sri Aurobindo's, "the inmost in the inmost way"; the lover of poetry could hardly
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bear to ignore them. Then we have to note that the peculiar mode of word and rhythm distinguishing such speech is not confined to the explicitly spiritual or even the suggestively spiritual and can take up the substance and style proper to any plane - the Graeco-Roman Intelligence's, the Elizabethan Life-force's, the many-dimensioned modern mind's - and, uplifting them, charge them with unfathomable value and vibration so as to put them well-nigh on a par with what that speech carries. Just as the spiritual theme in itself does not ensure speech in the "inmost way", so the Divine, the Infinite, the Eternal, the essential One do not need to be indicated for the mode of word and rhythm to be the Spirit's own. The most famous line of Virgil -
Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt -
which is untranslatable with a truly effective literalness but to which a literal a peu pres is C. Day Lewis's
Tears in the nature of things, hearts touched by human
transience -
is a sovereign example of this mode without involving the Divine. Nor is the Infinite recognisable clearly or obscurely in Shakespeare's
or the Eternal in his lines to Sleep:
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the shipboy's eyes and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge?
And where is the essential One in that other passage on insomnia, where Macbeth, after killing Duncan during sleep, reports the hearing of a dreadful voice addressing him by all
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the three names by which he is known:
Still it cried, 'Sleep no more!' to all the house:
'Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more!'
Also, it would be a rather irresponsible imagination which would identify the Supreme Spirit in Marlowe's lines about Helen:
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? -
or else in a more general poetic sweep like Leopardi's
Insano indegno mistero delle cose.
The insane and ignoble mystery of things.
Surely the basic soul-thrill is in all true poetry, but on that account all poetry should not unreservedly be considered spiritual. We must keep certain distinctions if we are not to be gaseous. In both Shakespeare and Marlowe there is a dealing with reactions of our vitalistic being or the thoughts that spring out in the life-mind under the pressure of sensation, passion, emotion. No transcendental view of things is involved, though a touch of the occult comes in the Macbeth-lines. Virgil's verse has also no such view, even if it does rise to a universal level out of a passage related to particular objects and incidents. The phrase of Leopardi, a wild indignant pessimism instead of the Virgilian majestic sadness, holds no recognisably spiritual notion, either. As Sri Aurobindo8 observes about the absolute poetic word and rhythm which in such citations are of the same quality as in the occasional master-articulation of the Spirit in Wordsworth or Shelley: "It is not any strict adhesion to a transcendental view of things that constitutes this kind of
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poetry, but something behind not belonging to the mind or the vital and physical consciousness and with that a certain quality of power in the language and the rhythm which helps to bring out that deeper something." Hence non-mystical poetry has effects which we can ill afford to neglect in our enthusiasm for the mystical which, off and on in modern Romanticism, expresses in the inmost way the secrets that are inmost.
Nevertheless, if the Spirit is the fundamental reality and if all evolution tends towards manifesting it, the suggestion of the spirit and even more the revelation of it are the ultimate call upon poetic genius. Particularly precious is the answer to such a call if, in the suggestion and revelation of what is above and beyond and behind the apparent world and its external or superficial occurrences and its vital or mental depths immediately at the back of these phenomena, all of mind and life and matter itself tends to discover, as in the finest expression of the mystical by modern Romanticism, not its dissolution into figures and values alien to it but its own final beauty and truth.
Of course, we are talking of the basic vision, word-turn, rhythm-thrill that are spiritual and that have got embodied in a recognisable though yet incipient form in modern Romanticism. All these basic factors are a matter of plane of consciousness. But if we restrict ourselves to mere ways of articulation, then, while we would still have to urge that the chief determinant of the Classical or the Romantic is the plane of consciousness and that even the prevalent way of articulation peculiar to either is due to this plane, we should grant that the way is not confined to it. As between the planes respectively of Graeco-Roman Classicism and Elizabethan Romanticism, the ways are bound to differ in the main because the pure creative Intelligence and the sheer creative Life-force have on the whole distinct attitudes and gestures of self-manifestation. Even the way of the new Romanticism, by the characteristically modern intelligence behind it, is bound to differ on the whole from those of both these poetic phenomena. But the spiritual consciousness as such is not one plane among many: it is a plane which while being above all the rest can bring a greater
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vitality of its own no less than mentality and also one expressive way of mentality as well as another: the way typical of Classicism is open to its supra-Classical consciousness just as much as that which distinguishes the new Romanticism. In fact the new Romanticism itself shows several ways in its articulation when it as it were surpasses the plane of the modern Intelligence and grows directly a voice of the Spirit. If the unfathomable value and vibration which the Spirit's own voice imports into poetry can be imported into Classical poetry without a transcendental view of life being expressed, surely the Classical way of articulation can be adopted by the Spirit for expressing such a view. What impedes the Spirit's complete expression is the Classical kind of Intelligence and not the Classical way of articulation. This Intelligence is mostly drawn into this way: the way itself is not a monopoly of it and can be taken up with ease by a plane of consciousness which, as we have said, is in its essence supra-modern and not merely supra-Graeco-Roman or supra-Elizabethan and can therefore talk in Classical style just as naturally as in any other.
Stylistic Classicism is not in the least alien to the Spirit. And where modern Romanticism rises into spiritual utterance it is often stylistically Classical. When Shelley writes:
Stains the white radiance of eternity,
he is certainly not Classical in style; but when he precedes these lines with
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly,
we might be listening to a Sophocles in a truly spiritual instead of merely religious mood. Wordsworth writing
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears
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or even
Thou, over whom thy immortality
Broods like the Day
is not in style Classical; writing
... Thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
That they were born for immortality
he might have been a Milton letting the creative Intelligence be replaced by a light from beyond it. Thus, Classicism, in manner though not in matter, will be part of the spiritual speech whose primary genuine outburst in the West came at the apex of modern Romanticism - an outburst which must be granted, from the evolutionary standpoint, paramount significance in a total computation of "Classical" and "Romantic".
1.The Future Poetry, p. 192.
2.Ibid., pp. 90-91.
3.Ibid., p. 279.
4.Lucas, op. cit., pp. 174-175 (fn. 1).
5.T. Earle Welby, A Popular History of English Poetry (London), p. 183.
6.SABCL, Vol. 22, Letters on Yoga, p. 185.
7.Lucas, op. cit., p. 236.
8.Savitri (Centenary Edition), pp. 802-03.
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