The Thinking Corner

A Few Explanations

These causeries, for all their play of changing mood and personal idiosyncrasy, were not conceived merely as passing thoughts. Seriousness went to their making and they were intended to go a long way - yet with no burden of an abstract unbending mind. Depth of thinking was sought to be reached here by a vivid and many-sided though not imprecise and unmethodical movement: vision was to accompany logic.

But the yoking of the poetic intuition with the logical faculty might very well prove a worse hindrance for the common reader. The common reader had to be respected: I must not tie him up in colourful complexities and snatch him away from practical issues. So much, surely, I owed him. At the same time, my respect must avoid any pampering: it must not render me hesitant about asking him to crane his neck and catch what might normally pass over his head.

It is only by craning our neck towards the high and the far, while keeping our eyes open to what is below and around, that we evolve our brain and, by evolving it, raise the rest of our being and increase our general stature. One point, however, ought not to be forgotten by the writer who desires his reader to do neck-craning often: he should see to it that the reader, in being wanted to carry on that exercise, feels by virtue of an up-plucking power in the style as little strain as possible.

Honestly trying to fulfil this ideal I invite the public to my Thinking Corner. I am aware of various defects in the present volume; but I hope this honest trying, coupled with an attempt to give a manifold response to life as well as to literature with more than the surface of me, will somewhat excuse them with book-readers as it did with the readers of that popular literary magazine, The All-India Weekly, by whose kind permission these causeries have been collected.

K. D. SETHNA

The Fetish of Theory

I am sometimes asked what my "theory" is about the writing of a poem. The question finds me at a loss how properly to understand it. For, about the writing of a poem I have no theory if by that term is meant any notion that a poem should be in a certain style and make use of a particular type of words and concern itself with a limited field of themes. I know a poem to be just this: intensity of vision, intensity of word, intensity of rhythm plus the act of being a harmonious whole. The language may be common or kingly, the style simple or complex, the thought plain or picturesque, the emotion day-to-day or once-in-a-blue-moon. It does not matter what theme is chosen, what level of consciousness explored, what personal bent followed in manner of expression. No doubt, a certain type of poem may appeal to me more - but not for purely poetic reasons: the substance may be more in tune with my mood of the moment, my general character or my outlook on life. As art, all types are for me enjoyable and legitimate so long as those three intensities fuse and work out a harmonious whole. I should be just as hard put to it to limit my aesthetic enjoyment of the "fairness" of the fair sex. How can I bind myself, say, to admire merely this or that shape of the feminine nose and feel that other shapes cannot be formed by an equally poetic line of bone and flesh? I can stir to an aquiline swoop upon my attention as well as to a straight thrust at my heart or a breath-taking beauty that goes to my head with a retrousse leap!

Nor have I any theory to the effect that true poetry is what is written effortlessly and without toiling and moiling. Poetry is often supposed to be born perfect at one stroke, a flawless uninterrupted outburst. The result of striving and straining is declared to be no poetry. But what does Dante say about his Divina Commedia? "Si che m'ha fatto per piu anni macro" -which means that his poem made him "lean through many a

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year." If even a master-singer found that climbing Parnassian heights left hollows in his cheeks, what about less gifted folk? And the principal point is not how much you labour but what you produce thereby.

Aureoled flowers grow on the peaks of paradise: it is these that poets pluck, flowers that seem shining perfections, born without a moment's pain; but do you think they can be reached without the prodigious effort necessary to scale those peaks? To a few lucky ones the amaranthine blooms drop of themselves: the poet has only to open his palms and catch the glimmering charity. Others are not so blessed; but it is the same miracles they manifest, and these miraculous rhythms of beauty have to be considered, not the easy or arduous means employed to achieve them. Besides, some poets - especially those who receive their raptures easily -are content if their song-flowers come from heaven and do not worry whether they bring the full freshness and integrity of the altitudes. Though made of light, the petals in the act of being brought down to earth may bear stains and shadows left by the contact of mortal regions. No cheap sweat of the brain can wash them clean. The soul must travail and shed tears in order to restore that pristine perfection; and not many poets are willing to pass through this experience. Hence so very few create each time a living form of the highest radiance - a moulded flame without one flaw. Even Homer has his proverbial "nods", Shakespeare the "unblot-ted" roughnesses bewailed by Ben Jonson, and Milton the wooden sublimities he puts into the mouth of his Jehovah -yes, even Milton the arch-artist, for unfortunately his sense of art often proved stronger than his sense of inspiration and he was satisfied if his blank verse rolled majestic word and rhythm without all of it having the same fire of life. This fire, this animating breath is what the poet has to cherish; but to make each atom throb and kindle, a sleeplessly creative self-criticism is called for, a luminous labour of heart and mind.

"Creative" and "luminous" - that is what striving and straining have to be. Poetry cannot come of intellectual

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effort. But all effort is not intellectual: one can endeavour to plunge into the ultra-intellectual "inwardness" from which poetry seems mysteriously to emerge: one can labour and sweat to curb the mechanical and manufacturing intellect and make oneself a receptive instrument for "inspiration". Such labouring and sweating are often more than merely excusable: they are the sine qua non of the uniformly perfect, the necessary finishing touch that renders a piece of art supremely inspired everywhere.

*

Inspiration is not easy to "crib, cabin and confine" in a rigid theory. Even as one may approach it variously, so too one may manifest it in various shapes. A clever friend of mine remarked yesterday, apropos of the multiply-wrought character of certain poems, that to him the idea or the thing was paramount and that he preferred natural and spontaneous speech to literary expression. I could not see eye to eye with him since I felt he theorised too rigidly and made a number of arbitrary assumptions. In the correct sense, to be literary is to use language for creating vision, evoking emotion, building rhythm, in order to give a concrete state of being. To be literary is not to kill the stuff of an idea or a thing, but to set it living on our pulses. To be literary is not to be the opposite of "natural and spontaneous": on the contrary, it is to turn speech warm and winged. Warmth and wingedness are not the attributes of simplicity alone: they belong just as much to complexity. Whether one elects to be simple or complex should depend on what one's state of consciousness is. Either mode can be "natural and spontaneous". Complex richness or grandeur becomes stiff and artificial only when the idea or the thing is itself not complexly coloured or stupendous. There must be equivalence and correspondence between sense and speech: that is the true meaning of naturalness and spontaneity in the first place. In the second, the true meaning is an unforced freshness, so that nothing, however intricately opulent or

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massive, appears heavy and laboured. Poetry may mix Ormuz with Ind, but it must work with a hand that is born regal. Poetry may heap Pelion upon Ossa, but it must bring an energy intrinsically gigantic. In short, its designs, formed swiftly or slowly, must bear the look of having been executed with sovereign ease. That look, accompanying limpid effects or effects that are elaborate, is the consequence of the poet's tapping ultra-intellectual springs of creativity and that look is what proves naturalness and spontaneity. It has nothing essentially to do with writing without multiply-wrought ornament or magnitude or in a plain and straightforward manner.

There is no use in quoting in this connection Milton's dictum, "Poetry must be simple, sensuous, passionate" and underlining the word "simple" with the purpose of confuting me. We must not set the simplicity Milton had in mind at loggerheads with the complexity under discussion. Decoration, richness, pomp, magnificence, multifoliate beauty - all these are not tabooed by Milton: the ban falls only on the pedantic and the ponderous - intellectual deadweight, logical maziness - what is formed by putting parts together with an external constructive faculty instead of by a flowering out of the manifold from a vital creative centre. In short, simplicity is a synonym for the unforced freshness I have already spoken about. A contrast with complexity would come rather ill from Milton whose language no less than sentence-structure was far indeed from being plain and straightforward. It would come ill also because Milton was scholar enough to know that neither Aeschylus nor Pindar could be termed transparent or uncomplex. And he was too near the Elizabethan age to forget how gorged with metaphor linked to metaphor and how dazzling with picturesque piled-up epithets was the work of its supreme dramatists. Then there was, almost contemporary, the devious depth of Donne and the ingenious radiance of Crashaw. Had Milton lived in our own day he would have known and appreciated the whole Romantic Movement which, while markedly simple and

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direct on one side, was on the other luxuriant if not labyrinthine too. And he would have never been so foolish as to deny the furor poeticus to Francis Thompson in a passage like the following from Sister Songs:

Oh! may this treasure-galleon of my verse,

Fraught with its golden passion, oared with cadent rhyme,

Set with a towering press of fantasies,

Drop safely down the time,

Leaving mine isled self behind it far

Soon to be sunk in the abysm of seas

(As down the years the splendour voyages

From some long-ruined and night-submerged star),

And in thy subject sovereign's havening heart

Anchor the freightage of its virgin ore;

Adding its wasteful more

To his own overflowing treasury.

So through his river mine shall reach the sea.

Here is diction multiply-wrought in the extreme to a little masterpiece, effect added to exquisite and purple effect, a massing of rich details to disclose a single yet many-faced meaning, a running together of mutually illuminating images in a vivid complexity in which nothing is superfluous or awkward but everything apt and alive in conveying the poet's prayer that the verse to which his love for the child Viola Meynell had given substance and shape might survive his own death and, finding a place in the devoted heart of the man to whom she would belong in marriage, deliver its message to her most intensely and intimately.

*

Mention of images Brings me to another bit of rigid theorising: recently a critic condemned a book of poetry as "jejune and claptrap" on the sole score that the writer was using "cheap and much-flogged symbolism and metaphor".

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The criticism, without definite quotations to prove the point, is shallow, for what is important is the way symbols are employed and explored, the novel depths caught out of particular metaphors. The angle and power of sight have to be estimated - the moved precision with which the words carry their suggestive glow has to be weighed - the rhythm-lift by which the expressive effect goes home to the heart has to be measured. Once these things are found satisfying, we need make no bones about the symbolism being an old one, the metaphor familiar. If we read the Iliad in this year of grace 1945, with nearly three thousand years in-between crammed with poetic literature, we shall not find many new metaphors in it - nor, I suspect, did the ancient Greeks themselves, for all the similes were borrowed from familiar experience and were current in the unrecorded minstrelsy out of which the Iliad rose like a culminating blossom. But on that ground Homer does not become "jejune and claptrap": the splendour and nobility of his words, the swiftness and largeness of his rhythmic tone as well as the "high seriousness" of his mind of which both his word and rhythm were the expressive body remain great poetry for the good reason that they are sufficient to constitute great poetry.

By a process of abstraction - that is, pulling an image out of its context - it is possible to make out even the most striking vision-effects to be "jejune and claptrap". In poetry, the rose is an ancient symbol, both sacred and profane - it is also an ancient practice to talk of stars. I myself would advise a poet to avoid roses and stars because it is not easy to get new revelatory flashes out of them and one needs exceptionally superb language to make old revelatory flashes come through again to-day. But I would also advise a poet never to hesitate mentioning roses and stars if he could turn them to a new revealing significance, for the most profound test of originality is the distilling of such a significance from an ancient image or idea, just as the most astonishing feat of imagination is the sudden disclosure of a novel facet in scenes and experiences that are most familiar. A critic who is

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oblivious of this test has no acumen - he looks only at the superficies and judges poetry with the abstract intellect and not the concrete understanding. To the abstract intellect, fire and flame, flower and fragrance, bird and bird-song, sea and wave are all stimuli to cry "Chestnut!" Yet these phenomena can be as bright and fresh to-day in poetry as they were when the first poet spoke of them, provided, of course, genuine insight catches them up into lovely and harmonious language. The whole haunting music of Yeats's early verse could be dismissed as jejune claptrap with the charge that it is chockful of mystic roses and dim dreams and pale stars. But the fact stands that no more beautiful poetry has been written in the last fifty yeas. Yeats's verse is lyricism of the highest order because he has conjured up his vision with a new poignancy of profound emotion, a new witchery of revealing atmosphere, a new evocativeness of exquisite sound. One would be mistaken in considering any image per se, without the subtle tone and "slant" and penumbra given it by the poet in his dealing with the theme in hand.

Criticism is a difficult and delicate affair, demanding a lot of plastic self-adjustment. Catholicity of taste and sympathetic acumen are indispensable and to make a fetish of any fixed theory is to maim one's own mind.

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Science and Poetry

Have you read I. A. Richards's Science and Poetry? If you have not, you have missed a very sharp and well-phrased formulation, within a brief compass, of both the value and defect the poetic expression and poetic response in life have for a scientific-minded literary critic. Richards has a genuine concern for the general health and balance of human nature. He makes no denial of the richness poetry brings us. A most apt remark of his runs: "To live reasonably is not to live by reason alone - the mistake is easy and, if carried far, disastrous — but to live in a way of which reason, a clear full sense of the whole situation, would approve." And a clear full sense of the whole situation demands, according to Richards, a yielding of ourselves emotionally and imaginatively to the spell of poetry even though what poetry speaks of may be contrary to what science declares. In Richards's view, poetry enriches and nourishes that part of the mind which science with its unemotional, logical, mathematical temper leaves bare and starved. Only, we must steer wide of the notion that poetry has any bearing on truth, for poetry, to Richards, is the moved voice of desire and hope, not the speech of impartial and impersonal analysis of phenomena. Such an analysis alone can give truth - and the value of poetry is to be judged by another standard than that of truth or falsity of its statements: the relevant standard here, says Richards, is "serviceableness to the complete personality".

Richards's exposition of how poetry works and how it renders service is acute as far as it goes. He realises that words here are of immense weight and that they are to be taken not as mere signs standing for idea and intellectual meaning but with their entire body of sound and texture, their form which for Richards consists of the rhythm and feel of them individually as well as in collective arrangement. The effect of this form is on what he calls the complex of our interests, each stir therein shaking up our total system of

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inner needs until a new poise is attained. The new poise marks a balance of our conflicting impulses, an equilibrium and integration which account for the delightful and satisfied and fulfilling state poetry produces in us no less than for our perceiving a felicitous inevitability in poetic speech - an inevitability representative of the harmonised mood at work in the poet himself. The elaborate agitation and reorganisation of our interests by poetry has two branches: one is thoughts of what the words mean, the other and more important an emotional response leading to the development of attitudes or preparations for actions which may or may not occur. The emotional response comes before the meaning is fully grasped and does not altogether depend on it: it is the peculiarity of the poetic utterance that by its word-body, by the movement and sound of its words, it plays deeply and intimately upon us even though the meaning be elusive and seem as if almost absent. Richards cites as examples some of Shakespeare's Songs and, in a different way, much of the best of Swinburne.

All this is admirable psychology and artistic observation; but it is thwarted from reaching down to bedrock by a set of postulates Richards brings forth on the strength of his "science". Science, a la Richards, has outgrown the Magical View of the universe: that is, we have found that there are no worlds of Spirits and Powers which control events and which can be evoked and, to some extent, be themselves controlled by human practices. Now, argues Richards, there is the common assumption that poetry is divinely inspired - blown through the poet's mouth by the Gods; but as science has made a clean sweep of the Gods in favour of blind inexorable laws what poetry speaks need not be truth. The argument is, to my thinking, superfluous. If it is said that poetry does not use the coldly observing analytic intellect as its instrument and so does not give truth in the scientific sense, nobody can demur. Nor should anybody demur if it is said that even truth in the philosophic sense is not the business of poetry. Nor, again, ought there to be a demurring if it is further said

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that poetry is not an enouncer of truth in the mystic sense. Not truth in the historic sense either must be deemed poetry's objective. Poetry devotes itself to embodying in beauty of inwardly animated word and rhythm any phase of consciousness. Whether that phase of consciousness corresponds to any truth in the various senses mentioned above is not its main concern. Does it create beauty that lives and is not just put together? If it does, no more is necessary: the poet is left free to imagine, his mind is allowed to range as it likes. To aver that he fails to utter truth because science has done away with the Magical View and with the possibility of the divine afflatus is to import into the discussion a point that logically does not arise. It is a shot quite beside the mark, since poetry is never obliged to be an enouncer of truth.

Richards lets fly the shot because he wants to kill the defence of certain special statements made by many poets -statements about supernatural beings, statements about God. Science has banished all unearthly agencies and therefore their possible afflatus for poetry: how then, he asks, can poetic assertions about them be correct, how can these assertions have any authority? The double conclusion is in order, but it rests upon a double premiss with which it is easy to join issue. In my opinion, Richards's shot is not only beside the mark: it is also pretty feeble. The drift of recent physics away from mechanistic and materialistic theories cannot be neglected: a host of front-rank scientists have set their course towards the Magical View. Even apart from the idealistic "fifth column" within the camp of science itself, the Magical View can stand up and fight - and not on pure reasoning alone. Facts of observation, facts of experience can be enlisted for many levels of "Magical" reality - from occult creatures to the illimitable Ancient of Days. Anthropological scrutiny leaves a definite residue of genuine witchcraft; psychical research an undeniable residue of genuine spiritualism; experiments in telepathy and clairvoyance an impressive residue of hidden non-physical ranges of man's own powers; study of Indian yogic practice a cogent residue

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of superhuman states of existence beyond the body and brain, states partaking of a deathless In-dweller, a Cosmic Consciousness, a luminous Transcendent. It is an extremely facile and narrow survey that slurs over this evidence. Our scientific knowledge of the universe has increased, but the old magical dealing with it is not disproved; only the fatuous superficial side of that dealing is undermined - room enough is left for countering Richards on several grounds and for considering poetry a medium of supra-mundane truth diversely enouncing itself against the claims of his so-called science.

The point, however, is that no such room is wanted by poetry's essence. At the same time we must admit that Richards's shot is provoked by the ambiguity with which the poetic art is often conceived by poets themselves. Many poets feel that their job is to utter great metaphysical mysteries, to embody in words eternal verities pushing from behind the veil of the mortal and the transient - and it may be that they do act on occasion as authentic truth-enouncers. At least science has produced no conclusive testimony against the infinite Godhead and the immortal soul nor against occult presences. But a poet is not a poet inasmuch as he is a mouthpiece of "magicism" or mysticism. Whether he is such a mouthpiece or no is not the primary condition: the primary condition is word and rhythm beautifully expressing intense psychological activity on his part. What the poet keenly sees and feels is all the content required: it does not matter a whit in what direction the seeing and feeling is done. Poets may be seers and prophets of the Divine, but they are just as poetic when they talk of secular things - love and death and Nature's colourful complexity. Innumerable bursts of poetry occur with no reference, explicit or implicit, to the Magical View of the universe. Hear what John Presland makes a woman cry to her lover:

I am yours

Utterly, wholly; when I walk abroad,

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Jewelled and brocaded, I feel all men's eyes

Can see me naked, and from head to foot

Branded in red-hot letters with your name.

Or read the stanza in which Housman's death-obsession comes over his sight of an army marching away to the sound of its own band:

And down the distance they,

With dying note and swelling,

Walk the resounding way

To the still dwelling.

Or let the same lyrist present a bit of Nature:

The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing

In leafy dells alone.

Presland's verses, piercing, powerful, passionate, and Housman's of a melancholy at once exquisite and majestic in the first quotation and of a delicate sympathetic felicity in the second - have they anything to do with God or superhuman Spirits? If excellent poetry can be created without speaking of such entities, the Magical View does not essentially determine or affect the content of the poetic utterance. Poetry can take birth without the writer stating or implying a belief in that View. Its essence is not dependent on the enouncing of supra-mundane truths.

Having said this to disinfect the air of magico-mystical no less than scientific prejudices where poetic content is in question, we must look below the surface of the former. A probing is surely called for, since the Magical View of the universe is too persistently associated with poetry to be brushed aside as a sheer irrelevance. A sheer irrelevance it is in respect of poetic content. For it does not invariably reside there. To the message of first-class mystical and spiritual poetry the immediate counterblast is that of first-class poetry

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of an anti-mystical anti-spiritual kind. One can just as poetically deny as affirm the Divine. Poetry is as wide as man's being and echoes the thousand dissimilar moods of it. So we must leave content alone. But content is not all that is to poetry: there is also form. Is the idea of inspiration, of the divine afflatus bearing eternal verities - an idea as old as history - engendered by something in poetic form? I have already indicated that the existence of a divinity behind things has not yet been shown to be impossible: hence it is not absurd to ask whether poetic form gives invariably a glimmer of God. Let us, then, mark how poetry speaks rather than what it speaks. Poetry takes up any aspect of things, be it ever so grotesque, terrible, tragic or unspiritual, and by a wonderful mode of expression obtains out of it a form of irreproachable and perfect loveliness. Recall any line of true poetry: here is a pessimistic despairing note from Meredith -

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul

When hot for certainties in this our life!

And here is Meredith in a rapture over mortality -

Into the breast that gives the rose

Shall I with shuddering fall?

In both instances we have a sense of flawless form in the expression, a beautiful finality and absolute, an utter loveliness as of some Archetype. The visions, the emotions, the attitudes that have found voice are almost opposed: but either of the two bursts of poetry brings equally the contact of a supreme power of beauty. In doing this it appears to exercise a mode of consciousness that goes deeper than Richardsian science and to touch a perfect reality, a divine existence of which Richardsian science has no inkling.

Not in poetic content but in poetic form, in the inwardly animated manner of poetic speech, the Magical View seems basically involved and the Divine's touch disclosed. Only

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when we grasp this we shall discern why and how the poetic statement acts as it does. Unless we accept a divine disclosure by form we shall never have proper insight into the power of poetry. Because there is a divine disclosure the poetic word seizes us and works upon us so magically and because the disclosure is essentially by form it does so even when the meaning is hazy. Richards, though marking the strange satisfying and fulfilling effect of poetry and giving form importance, misses the profound issues of both. He chops logic over the poetic content and puzzles over the question whether it can be said to convey truth. He is knocking at the wrong door. Confronting the form which has already struck him as paramount, he should have tried to see all that it holds. If he had perceived the Perfect and Archetypal Presence there, he would have understood why when reading poetry we always get the feeling that compelling truths are spoken to us. Our intellects may not agree, our whole system of thought may be antagonistic to a poetic statement, yet we feel somehow as if a truth were expressed and as if we had to believe it. Whence the compelling power? It comes from the extreme of beauty with which the poetic statement is made. That archetypal extreme brings the force as of an incontrovertible ultimate truth, a supreme Real laying bare its secrets in language, and casting a spell of belief on us and bewitching us into conviction. What constitutes the seeming truth-impact on us is our experience of some divine absolute Loveliness which poetry unveils through every expression, so carving out every statement, so casting it as to make it figure forth that Loveliness. It is this experience through form that is misunderstood and sought to be supported or contradicted in terms of content when poetry speaks of the Godhead in any aspect.

Not gripping the sense in which the Godhead is an inalienable portion of poetry, Richards's fine psychological as well as artistic observations stop short half-way to the bedrock. His standard of "serviceableness to the complete personality" does inadequate justice to the delight as of

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revelation which is ours through the poetic experience. To grant poetry a useful enriching influence simply because it feeds the emotional side of us which finds no nourishment in neutral scientific truth-enunciations is to assume a semi-patronising attitude and ignore the vast civilising and evolutionary potentialities of poetic literature. Poetry does not just feed and balance the emotions: it touches indirectly the divine spark in the human, the beatific harmony hidden within. Richards's explanation of the feeling stirred in us of rightness and inevitability by the poet's word and rhythm as being caused by a movement of some emotional need or interest seeking to confirm itself or order itself with its fellows is left in the air if no stock is taken of the ecstatic finality, the transcendent perfection which great verse gives the impression of revealing. Unless we look on poetry as the hand laid upon our being by a divine Loveliness, we can in toto neither recognise the service it renders nor attach to it the value it deserves. Richards has the right instinct in holding poetry high, but he fumbles vaguely and off the track in justifying his instinct.

Once we note the defects of his book, there is no harm in praising its good qualities. In a lot of things it is a striking eye-opener for indiscriminate enthusiasts of poetry. And it carries many sensitive remarks on the poetic effect. One of the best is that a scholar, steeped in the poetry of the past and moved by a keen emulation and a passionate desire to place himself among the poets, will often produce work looking extraordinarily like poetry, his words may seem as subtly and delicately arranged as words can be, his epithets as happy, his transitions as daring, his simplicity as perfect, but in spite of everything his rhythm will give him away. Rarely does a critic appreciate with such definiteness the crucial role of rhythm. Richards has the feel of poetry in his blood; else he would not-respond so intensely to rhythmical nuances. Rhythm represents the inmost vitality of poetry, for it echoes the very pulsation without which the poetic excitement can never be the very heart-beat of the furor poeticus. It

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is regrettable that Richards should allow his natural equipment of unusual receptivity to be on the one hand hindered by a scientific dogmatism shutting out the Divine and on the other mis-engaged by the aesthetic fallacy of those who forget that form, not content, transmits the touch of divine authority we always get in poetry and that this touch is independent of any mystical or spiritual pronouncement poetry may make.

Once we note also the defects of the partisans of the Magical View - their identifying the essential function of poetry with the enunciation of this View - we can freely stress the insufficiency of the so-called scientific. Accepting the absolute of beauty, with which poetic masterpieces appear to be charged, as the contact their form gives of an archetypal Loveliness living and rejoicing within, behind, above the world and pressing for manifestation everywhere, we may affirm that the Magical View, with such a Loveliness as its peak-vision of reality, is automatically accepted the moment we appreciate poetry. For the very act of appreciation implies that we have secretly thrilled to that Loveliness through poetic form though poetic content may be secular or even materialistic and atheistic. Therefore, a scientist saying he appreciates poetry despite the Magical View being disproved is a curious spectacle. Equally curious is the spectacle of materialistic and atheistic poetry: it gives us the sense of a divine denial of divinity! The fundamental paradox of poetry is that however much it may voice Richardsian science its power of form is itself an indirect proof that the Magical View is valid and that the Godhead and the supra-terrestrial planes of Spirits are no fiction.

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"The Red Immortal"

Let me say at once that I do not have in mind either Lenin or Stalin. The word "red" here is not a synonym for "Soviet". It connects up with more natural and much older things than the economic system of Communist Russia - things like roses and human blood. To get my meaning you must ask what the red rose symbolises. The extreme beauty of a rose, steeped in crimson, stands, to the poetic eye, for the beauty-thrill between human beings, which we call love. It is the stir of love in our blood that Flecker named

The red immortal riding through the hearts of men.

Poets do not spin merely pretty phrases. They strain to pluck their language from the depths of things. And the term "immortal" is packed with a profound significance. The significance is twofold. Outwardly, love with its act of mating is the means by which the torch of life is handed down to the future by individuals doomed to die and pass. Love begets children and they continue the vitality which the parents give up after a certain length of years on earth. Love is the perpetuator of the race, mankind would perish without its "immortalising" touch. Nor does the touch as of an immortal lie only in the procreative process. Love has an inward lift and luminosity which seem more than human. To the ancient world it was a God, a superhuman Power that entered earthly beings and carried them in emotional and imaginative ecstasy beyond themselves. We have a less pervasive sense of the deific than the ancients; so the Eros of the Greeks and the Kama or Madana of old India is not always to our minds a living figure, a burning Presence. Vividly and fierily enough we are aware of falling in love, but we do not trace our feelings to a metaphysical entity, we stop short with psychological fact. Only our poets keep up the ancient occult sense. Our scientists look askance at the poetic

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approach to psychological fact, yet a little digging below the surface should make us less sceptical about its vision.

Why do we have the imperative instinct to perpetuate the race? Why does the germ-plasm in us seek rapturously the endless future? There is, without doubt, something that refuses to be ended, something that wants to defeat the obstacles barring the assertion of its immortality. That elan runs through the whole of organic Nature and, evolved considerably though we are, it is still forced to find an indirect channel, our children, for expressing outwardly the Immortal in itself. The imperfect conditions of bodily life compel this indirectness, but does not even the compulsion take place because our love-gusto is the leap of a Godhead into the frailties and crudities of earth? We may call this Godhead our own secret Soul, deathless and limitless, trying to put its stamp upon the finite flux of matter. But, whatever the name we choose, a metaphysical entity, a power beyond our ordinary personal being and therefore a superhuman Presence, appears to be at work. Though a good deal of its work is groping and stumbling because of the frail and crude medium at its disposal, a light is there in each true lover, an upward cry, a straining towards beauty, an impulse of worship, an ache for permanence that show the human responding to a divine afflatus.

Paradoxical as it may seem, it is just the Red Immortal's riding through our hearts that renders them superior to the procreative desire. That desire arises from his urge to express outwardly his own undying nature; but in those in whom the inward expression is very strong, the physical act of sex can lose its urgency. So long as the body is subject to death and the individual form has to dissolve, the procreative desire cannot from the beginning drop out of love: almost the whole subconscious has its face turned towards the sex-act. What, however, can happen when the inner being is highly developed and sensitively attuned to the subtleties of Eros is that in the course of time an intense joy, a passionate fulfilment, becomes possible without coitus. One may even

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go so far as to say that even physical nearness is not necessary: men and women have felt their consummation in the mere experience of their love for each other, no matter how many miles lay between them, no matter if a whole lifetime of separation stopped them from contact. This is of course the inner phenomenon at a rare height; a lesser altitude is not out of reach for many deep natures. Pyscho-analysts dwell often on the danger of physical repression, and the danger may be real enough where the normal course of desire is forcibly dammed. But where spontaneity reigns, a different complexion is put on the problem. Some of the most memorable words in the autobiography of that master-psychologist of sex, Havelock Ellis, are: "the greatest of all revelations which my life with Edith brought me was this discovery that not only simple affection but the deepest passion of love can exist and develop continuously even when the relationship of sex in the narrow sense has ceased to exist.... That is a discovery with a significance for life and for the institution of marriage which has not yet been measured."

Both Havelock Ellis and Edith Lees were remarkable persons; their emotional natures were of an unusual fineness and the Red Immortal rode in great beauty through them. Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett were perhaps still more subtly attuned to the Godhead. All the same, there is an insistent imperfection in our being, that will not allow Eros to establish his empyrean within us. Perhaps no empyrean is possible until the Red Immortal turns us all to a direct mysticism, a Bhakti Yoga that is enamoured of the supreme Divine, instead of the religion of romance that seeks its beau ideal in human personalities. Havelock Ellis and Edith Lees had terrible tensions in spite of their extraordinary fineness; Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett could not avoid petty unpleasantnesses. We of grosser grain must expect innumerable shortcomings in our love-life.

Love rises and love falls; it is with us a Godhead without his proper heaven. One wishes to say to one's beloved:

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"Love is not merely a matter of the heart. The hands must love, the mouth must love. And they must do this not just by the hands embracing and the mouth giving kisses. Beyond the body of their adoration they must work. Various things the hands must do - things that are sometimes hard and bitter to the doer. And the mouth must use all speech to make the dear one happy. No thoughtless whim, no self-gratifying obstinacy should interrupt the music of love. Even when faults are to be corrected and follies checked, there must be in each word the compulsive sweetness as of a violent kiss. Let nothing take place which does not carry with it the pressure of love. Let not any moment bear the feeling that love has dimmed away into the background. There lies the absolute triumph of the God Eros."

But it is dangerous to stick top fanatically to this vision. Disappointment is the fate of those who forget earth's earthiness. After the first flaming, love becomes divided by many moods, sullied by diverse imperfections. It is not potent enough to change character permanently - all the little flaws of human nature come up to distort the dream one had of the grand passion. Love yields to self-will, to vanity, to a bitter urge of giving hurt: it becomes also one with a strange hate, a resentment of the surface-being at the profound grip one's lover has on one's soul. It grows often a rhythmless routine, a taking for granted of the heart's desire, without any eagerness to greet with welcoming warmth the least sign of its splendour. And yet one feels the splendid presence behind all these blots: in moments of crisis love does not fall, it is deep-rooted and its constancy flares up when abysmal darknesses challenge it. Even when there is no such challenge, it is its nature to rise at intervals to a dazzling richness and by one hour of ecstasy compensate for a hundred doubts and despairs. Behind the innumerable clouds that sweep across its face, it is a sun that never sets. It is fierily true in all fundamentals. But oh those details that look like rust on the great sheen! How they spoil the expectations of each day, blight the hopeful eyes that have not learnt to accept the

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insufficiencies of life! No human being is born who can keep at all times that first flaming of love and let no surface action deny the glory of the depths. It is too much to ask that human love should be a perfection through and through. We must ever combine the philosopher with the poet in us: then alone shall we understand that love in the body is an angel always at war with a demon and that it is a thousand small defeats with a few colossal victories making it the sweetest hell on earth.

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Sri Aurobindo's 72nd Birthday

On the fifteenth of this month, August, Sri Aurobindo reaches the age of seventy-two. But immediately we state that fact our minds are filled with a sense of contradiction. We used to speak of Tagore advancing in years and we speak now of Gandhi growing old: nothing strange is felt by us in our utterances. Sri Aurobindo, however, makes any calculation in terms of age a falsity.

Fundamentallly such a calculation errs because of Sri Aurobindo's mysticism. Both Tagore and Gandhi can be called great, but their greatness is of the human and not the divine type. The essence of Tagore is the poet, of Gandhi the moralist, of Sri Aurobindo the mystic. Though Tagore and Gandhi cannot be considered devoid of mysticism, the mystical Reality is in them an indirect power. The indirectness is shown by their predominant aims. The mystic in quest of the divine Spirit does not hold it as his predominant aim to write a Gitanjali or to practise satyagraha. Sri Aurobindo is a poet of the highest order and the moralist's effort at detachment from gross animal desires and egoistic motives finds fulfilment in him, but poetry and morality are not his ends: they are only the means of his master-passion. His master-passion is not brilliant poetic achievement for its own sake or the triumph of a human virtue: it is the sheer surpassing of the human level, the continuous union with the Supreme Being and the direct expression of that Being in all the ways of our nature.

Now, the Supreme Being is, first and foremost, a mighty transcendence of time and life, and infinite Consciousness and Bliss immutably seated above the waxing and waning of the world's years. A grand stanza of the ancient Upanishads, translated with revelatory force by Sri Aurobindo, catches in words that sovereign status: "There the sun shines not and the moon has no splendour and the stars are blind; there these lightnings flash not nor any earthly fire. For all that is

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bright is but the shadow of His brightness and by His shining all this shineth." What the rishis in the past attained is present in Sri Aurobindo, and he stands, among things that vary and fade, a smiling Eternity unbarred by appearances, unmarred by phenomena. To such a realisation how shall we apply our measure of moments and confine it within an age of seventy-two? Is it not incongruous to think of the Spirit's timeless plenitude that is Sri Aurobindo's deepest self as growing old as men grow old who live in the clutch of the temporal and the mortal?

But the Eternity that is above time and life is not the sole cause of the contradiction we feel. The divine Spirit is not utterly the opposite of time and life. When the Upanishads chant, "by His shining all this shineth", they do more than trace the source of our cosmos in the beyond. While opening our world-beglamoured eyes to the Truth whose infinity no light of earth equals, they do not cut off earth's light from that Truth. It is God who has emanated the world, the world is at bottom His own stuff of divinity: omnipresent, He pervades occultly all phenomena. The many-sided vision of the Upanishads no sooner found tongue in the grand stanza about the supra-cosmic "There" than it followed up with another as grand about the cosmic "Here" of the Divine. In Sri Aurobindo's vivid, vibrant and wide-sweeping English this Sanskrit mantra runs: "The Eternal is before us and the Eternal is behind us and to the south and to the north of us and above and below and extended everywhere. All this magnificent universe is nothing but the Eternal." A mystic par excellence, Sri Aurobindo is inwardly one with a Cosmic Consciousness supporting with a limitless peace a limitless activity, with an indivisible singleness a myriad variety of forms. Not this one body alone which we know as Sri Aurobindo is his reality. It cannot circumscribe the far-stretched continuity of his being and his becoming. In all quarters he feels his own self at work. He overflows the span of an individual life. The march of the centuries is not alien to him, the rising and falling and rising again of the endless

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energy around us is part of him in the union he has realised with the Beauty of ancient days that is ever new. Can seventy-two years in one particular physical form sum up such an existence?

When we have seen mysticism in its cosmic aspect as well as in its transcendental, we have still not said the last word about Sri Aurobindo. There is yet another aspect - the individual - rendering the concept of old age inapplicable to his seventy-two years. And here he brings a mystical achievement that goes further than any spirituality known in the past. Our universe is not merely the occult omnipresence of the Divine: it is also meant to be His manifestation. The immense unity and the immense multiplicity are pressing forward to express in the cosmic formula a divine life taking its start in the individual soul-spark which is enshrined in creatures and which one of the Upanishads englished by Sri Aurobindo sums up with intuitive intensity: "The Purusha that is within is no larger than the finger of a man; he is like a blazing fire that is without smoke; he is lord of his past and his future; he alone is today and he alone shall be tomorrow." An intricate evolution focussing itself in individuals and proceeding through rebirths of the individual soul is worked out from a beginning and a base that appear to be the opposite of everything divine. All mystics talk of evolving and manifesting the perfect Light: the perfect Light, according to them, can throw an aureole round life's hours and express sublimities and sweetnesses of a superhuman kind in the human mould. Yet a bound has been felt by all mystics, an irreducible imperfection in our members that compels us ultimately to drop them and look for the end of our soul's journey in a plane that is not terrestrial - a Vedantic Brahmaloka, a Buddhist Nirvana, a Vaishnavite Gokula or Heaven. Sri Aurobindo says that if the universe is meant to be the Divine's manifestation, there must lie in the bosom of the Spirit the secret of the universe's fulfilment. In some hidden Consciousness must be waiting the archetype, the perfect ideality of our whole embodied nature. He calls

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that Consciousness Supermind or Gnosis. The gnostic plane has created the evolutionary process. Our evolving nature is upheld by a truth of its terms, a truth of its varied individuality in the gnostic plane and it has been created for expressing fully on earth itself this prime perfection. To incarnate again and again in order finally to escape beyond for good does not justify the Soul's incarnating travail. And our terrestrial nature can have no divine rationale unless it be capable of being completely divinised. Have not our mind, our vital force and our physical form derived from God's self and substance? Surely then they are here for a Godlike existence and not simply to be used awhile and thrown aside: past yogis used them thus and threw them aside because the dynamics of the supramental Gnosis were not adequately possessed. A Godlike existence can signify nothing save living no longer on any level a victim to ignorance, incapacity, failure. From top to toe God must make us His habitation. From the highest peak of the mind down to the lowest chasm of the body we must live in the Immortal's consciousness.

The implications of such a living are almost incredible: they posit as a last rapturous result a physical transformation, a change of our very stuff of matter, so that the mortal in us puts on immortality in the most palpable sense! Ever since man awoke to his own incompleteness and to a perfect Presence concealed behind phenomena the dream of a divine earth has haunted him. He has sought the elixir vitae along a multitude of paths. Disappointment has met him wherever he has searched, for the right mode of searching has never been found by him. Even his spiritual masters have told him that though the terrestrial scene can display the paradisal lustre he cannot hope for an integral manifestation. Now comes Sri Aurobindo and proclaims that the earth-scene would never have been set by the Divine except for an integral display and manifestation of Himself, and that, however strange it may seem to the disease-suffering, decay-enduring, death-accepting experience that has been ours so

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far, a divinised body immune to "crass casualty" and harmonious with the undying Spirit that descends into it is a miracle inevitable in the long and arduous but all-consummating Yoga he is doing today and offering to all who follow in his footsteps.

It must be made clear that the Aurobindonian Yoga is not for selfish seekers of health and longevity. The physical transformation is the fifth act to a drama in which egoistic desire dies at every turn of the plot and only a vast aspiration for God goes from strength to strength. It is God and not the ego who, in answer to the aspiration, flowers in the mind, the elan vital and the body. No attachment to things gross is at the back of the body's change: the thirst for divine integrality alone is the alchemist. The body's change is insisted on as a grand finale because Sri Aurobindo deems it a slur on God's creative vision and a blindness to our raison d'etre in a God-emanated cosmos to leave any part of our complex being as radically impotent to be perfect. And not just the philosopher of the Integral Yoga does Sri Aurobindo act: mystical realisation is his work and his philosophy is born from his experience. By mystical realisation he moves ahead of mysticism's glorious past to the most golden lustre our time-process can enjoy - a future in which his so-called old age will prove a prelude to a radiant renovation of the physical cells in a manner we can scarcely imagine.

Sri Aurobindo, therefore, is not only unlike a non-mystic advanced in years; he is also unlike any other mystic bearing grey hair. To look at August 15 as bringing him to the dangerous ripeness of seventy-two is to forget this unique difference. His birthday is the symbol of a step forward in the complete birth of the Divine in the human.

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The Flame of D'Annunzio

Years ago I read a panegyric by Arnold Bennett upon the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio's novel The Flame of Life — that elaboration of his amour with the famous Eleonora Duse. Lately I went through the book. D'Annunzio the poet has tried to be at full blast in its prose. But I am afraid this heated prose has not the vibrant genuineness I prize. Though there is no doubt that D'Annunzio has an extremely expressive mind, his expression here is rarely shot with imagination enough to make it great poetic literature. I find him more a rhetorician than a poet. There is a basic want of piercing felicitous vision and intuition in his language, and to cover that lack he has brought an artificial vehemence, a forced intensity.

The true furor poeticus does not shout and gesticulate: it has a deep reserve in the midst of even its dithyrambs: one feels that the Word simply has to be itself and its revelation is secured, there is no need to usher it with stage-effect and a flourish of trumpets. D'Annunzio appears mostly to clutch his words by the hair and drag them out, and, even then, they are generally the wrong sort! Wrong not in the sense of entire inappositeness, for whatever is said has a point and a power, but both point and power are without the crystallised keenness which forms poetry. The creative idea and the creative vision are absent and instead we have the oratorical effect, the theatrical gesture. The theme of the book is excellent because it deals with lights and shades of emotion and character which are of considerable value; only, the treatment of them is not equal to their intrinsic worth.

D'Annunzio tries almost throughout to keep up a high pitch of imaginative excitement but succeeds in producing little except verbal fever. There comes to one in all supreme passages of literature a perfect balance of vision and word, of thought and tone. No excess is there, resulting in mere sound-fury or falsetto. Poetry has been described as a fine

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excess, but it is not an extravagance or a violence; it goes beyond the ordinary pitch of feeling and range of sight in order to give richness and magic, yet the strange new light falls as if from an atmosphere to which it is completely natural - it carries an authentic spontaneity, while D'Annunzio again and again seems to shake and fume and vociferate as though somehow the dream divine failed to glow and he were attempting to create a glaring heat to make us forget that the revelatory light is not there, it is quite true that in places the inspiration is genuine; still, he has the air of always giving us an apocalypse whereas in reality it is only brilliant fireworks that we get. The poet in him has seen and felt the wonder and beauty of Venice and the moonlight that is love; hence we cannot escape being filled with a sense of the greatness of the theme and the picture, yet this is in spite of the writer and his work! We receive the touch of stupendous upheavals of experience without actually being stirred to our foundations by the account of them in the book. The tone is generally too loud, the writer thinks we would not catch the deepest secrets unless he bawled them out. D'Annunzio has flogged his heart and mind and the outcome is a many-coloured shriek. A man of immature genius has written the book: the genius is perceived in a certain verve and rush but it is put at the service of a pseudo-aesthetic consciousness which likes to be showy and dramatic: it underlines thickly every little phrase as an utterance of superlative value and it overcrowds every moment of experience with superfluous tensions. The play of the poet in D'Annunzio is obscured by the lavishness of the actor: a thousand pities! - since a really beautiful and profound subject is treated, a subject which should have given rise to a piercing and mighty yet unpretentious splendour.

Surely, episodes occur where the language and attitude escape being hectic. Whenever Richard Wagner is introduced, we at once catch something genuine. The picture of him alive or in a faint or in the sleep of death is always impressive: somehow he seems to be the undeclared hero of

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the book - a hero mostly absent from the foreground of the story but present as a kind of ideal throughout. Perhaps D'Annunzio meant him to compare with Stelio Effrena, the central figure, and to confirm the portrayal of poetic frenzy attempted in the latter. I, however, find that he serves as a touchstone which shows up the rhetorical exuberance of Stelio by his quiet and tremendous authenticity. Other passages of beauty can also be extricated: I liked the whole incident of the dogs in Lady Myrta's garden - there is in it a speed of imagination and a sympathetic insight. Then, the visit to the workshop where delicate dreams are shaped to glassware is memorable. I wish everything were as truly conceived and executed, and the language everywhere charged with the poetic vision such as animates the phrase about the stones of Venice "along the hidden veins of which the human spirit rises towards the ideal as the sap ascends to the flower through the fibres of the plant" - or the simple yet vividly true sentence: "And the still formless work he was nourishing leapt with a great shudder of life" - or, finally, that most magnificent image in the whole book: "An infinite smile diffused itself there, so infinite that the lines of her mouth trembled in it like leaves in the wind, her teeth shone in it like jasmine blossoms in the light of stars - the slenderest of shapes in a vast element." Why cannot the man write always like that if he has a penchant for the prodigious? Or else why cannot he avoid the empty painted hysteria in which he so often luxuriates and express himself with a controlled beauty that never rings false?

Well, D'Annunzio has to be D'Annunzio, I suppose - and there must be many to admire him for being what he is. I cannot bring myself to worship either the writer or much of the man. The figure he cuts in Isadora Duncan's autobiography is very equivocal: one is made to think that he can play divinely the lover but at the same time there is an impression of shallowness and gush. It strikes me that there is too much conscious poetry about him - and whenever a thing like poetry which has to be deeply one with the pulse

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and the breath of life becomes outwardly conscious, it is liable to degenerate into a pose or at least an ornamental superficiality. The true poet is not over-anxious to flaunt the colours of his soul: his soul is too sensitive to bear a naked public exhibition - it is only to a few he undrapes himself and then too the undraping takes place almost unconsciously as if the secret form of his being caught fire with its own intensity and all the veils and coverings got burnt up. Or his genius and beauty reveal themselves by a mysterious movement which renders the veil concealing them vibrant with a dumb ecstasy, as it were - a warm darkness proclaiming most naturally the living light behind. No show, no unnecessary eclat but a wonderfully revelatory reticence - that is the mark of the poet in life. Or if the reticence is not always there, a spontaneous bubbling as of a crystal-clear spring is felt - a white laughter and luminosity held out by a nature that has the simple calm and unpretentious firmness of rock. In any case, a quiet strength and authenticity surrounds and frames all that shimmer and flow. No matter how keen the rush, how bright the rapture, there is invariably a quality of inspired sleep accompanying them: that is to say, a kind of unconscious naturalness and inevitability with nothing cheap and vulgar and theatrical about it, though this does not preclude the grand pride or godlike confidence that inspiration has in itself through a Dante or a Milton or a Shakespeare sonneteering about his "powerful rhyme" and its ability to outlast monuments of brass and marble. Sometimes the sterling artist and the gaudy actor co-exist: but we must never mix them up and even when we cherish the former we must realise how the latter flaws and diminishes him.

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A Poet's Sincerity

"All writing of poetry," says AE, "should be preceded by a passionate desire for truth and when the poet is writing he should continually ask himself, 'Do I really believe this? Is this truly what I feel?'" AE was himself a poet — but I am afraid his dictum must not be taken at its face-value.

We must not ignore the fact that a dramatist can be a poet. A dramatist speaks through a multitude of characters. No doubt, he often packs them with responses he has personally made to the world, yet nowhere does he write an accurate story of his own attitudes, and he writes great poetry through his villains no less than his heroes. Surely he cannot be believing all that his figures utter or even sympathising with all their feelings. If AE's dictum is correct, a dramatist like Shakespeare should never have penned quite a number of celebrated speeches such as Iago's or Lady Macbeth's, for he could never have answered satisfactorily to AE's "posers". We have to recognise that a poet's function essentially is not to transcribe his own convictions and experiences but to put himself into all sorts of minds and hearts and get with imaginative intensity what one might express if one held certain convictions and underwent certain experiences. This "if" is at the root of the poetic process. The poet is fundamentally a dramatist, and when he writes about personal things the man in him is merely one of the various parts he has the capacity to play! It may be argued that such cannot be the case, since he is already identified with the beliefs and feelings of the man in him whereas he has to attempt identifying himself with those not his own. But to produce poetry from the former he has to face them anew as if he were not already identified with them: the same searching pressure and penetration he gives the latter is required here also. Both are treated as material to be worked upon: what poeticises both is an aesthetically dramatic gesture of imaginative intensity. That is why few poems

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record exactly what the man has believed and felt: there is an exploring, in more or less measure, of what the "tones" of consciousness can be - deep within, far around, high above his actual state. The actual state is subjected to an imaginative transformation.

Wordsworth's famous Immortality Ode tells of the soul's existence before birth, and tells of it so sincerely and splendidly that one cannot help thinking Wordsworth actually held the belief if not had also a mystical and psychical memory of prenatal existence. Wordsworth was far from anything of the sort: on being questioned, he clearly disclaimed it: he had only an experience in childhood of a glory everywhere, in Nature and himself, a light and laughter of the Divine. The Ode as originally composed was much shorter and bore no passages about the soul's existence before birth. The profound psychical passages came later and were a further imaginative plumbing of the life-substance he had already plumbed imaginatively - his thoughts and emotions when a child. He was mystically dramatising. And yet he conveyed the impression of a splendid sincerity, as though he had put to himself AE's queries and after having been able to return an emphatic "Yes" composed the poem. A poem's sincerity, therefore, cannot be restricted to AE's all-too-simple formula of a passionate desire for truth.

How then are we to account for it? Can we say that to be imaginatively intense is to ring authentic? Not quite, for though our explanation is correct it does not say enough. It does not bring out the inevitability, the finality and the absoluteness of form we intuit in a poem. The ancients hit the nail on the head when they spoke of the poet, in the act of creating flawless art-form, as an instrument of hidden divine powers. We too preserve the ancient idea in the term we often employ in treating art: inspiration. But we burke its full contents. As long as we fail to accept with open eyes the miraculous working by which perfect beauty shines out in a poem, we shall never explain why a poem rings authentic without our needing to ask the poet, "Do you really believe

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this? Is this truly what you feel?" The sincerity of a poem has, at bottom, nothing to do with personal beliefs and feelings: it is a touch from behind the veil.

That AE should have overlooked this touch is rather curious: if ever a man could give evidence for inspiration, it was he. Song, he records somewhere, came to him spontaneously, without any conscious mental effort: it fountained from inner depths, whole and perfect. There is here indicated a play of forces that are beyond the poet's personality and though their nature is, as a rule, adapted to the bent and colour of that personality they are something greater than he and have a direction of their own. No sooner do we bring them in than the man's beliefs and feelings stop occupying the centre of the stage. Images dawn on him, significances flash across his thought, emotion-charged words fly through his consciousness, leaving his own beliefs and feelings far short of them. Not out of his own personal life but from some superlife behind, whose channel he is, the poetry takes birth, and it is quite possible that at times it is born not just suddenly and with a range beyond him but even in contradiction to what he really believes and truly feels!

The "divine afflatus" is the master-key to our understanding the poetic process. We do not need to put it aside because all poets do not act as if they were helpless reeds through which a mysterious wind blows its music. For the "divine afflatus" is always there in genuine poems: only the way of receiving it is not the same. AE had no travail to go through in getting his lyrics - they magically floated out to him. The one poet who in our time was as haunted and as much made a mouthpiece by unseen presences as AE, though in a different style and from a different plane, was Yeats; yet Yeats was the very opposite in method of composition. His rhythmic enchantments from "dove-grey fairylands" and from the "odorous twilight" of the Celtic Gods were created bit by bit, by patient brooding over single phrases or lines, writing and erasing and rewriting, deliberate self-critical endeavour. His habitual way of receiving

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inspiration after the first impact from within was by acute concentration and a massing of the energies of the consciousness to break open block after block the passage of the inner to the outer. The laborious method resulted in the secret spontaneity of inspiration, the "divine afflatus", bursting forth with a perfect grace equal to AE's and sounding in all places the note of sincerity.

A desire for that secret spontaneity and not for truth as envisaged by AE should precede song. Of course it is generally granted that poetry must not be valued according to philosophical, religious or scientific standards of truth, just as it must not be valued according as it edifies us morally. Beauty is what the poet is after and it was to uphold his freedom from allegiance to anything except beauty that the slogan of "Art for art's sake" was raised. Unfortunately, with the raising of this slogan beauty came to be improperly understood, and art's independence grew a justification of empty glitter, decadent decorativeness. Perhaps in a reaction against the misuse into which the slogan fell people like AE insist on beauty being not enough. Their real meaning is that art must be vital and deep. Yes, art must be vital and deep; but that solely implies that the artist must not capriciously and cleverly make up things: there must be a serious turning towards inspiration so that his work may have a godlike stamp. It is an inaccurate narrowing down of the godlike in art to fasten on it the ordinary connotations of truth or goodness, even as it is a superficialising of it to deem art a mere beautifying applied from without. It is also an illegitimate viewing of art to set up actual beliefs and feelings as an indispensable condition.

The right questions a poet should put himself while writing are: "Am I true to the visionary urge of inspiration entering my mind? Is my expression of feeling moulded by a sense of irreproachable beauty seizing like a godhead my heart?"

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The Megalomaniac

A moment's warmth and the intimacies of a handful can never be my terminus. I must either possess like a God or feel the universe alien and strive to destroy its endless multitudes by some mystical fiat of my consciousness. If I fail, I move among men like a dusky cloud, depressing them and myself losing all savour of life. Even the poet in me, whose natural being is to discover the veins of gold embedded in dull rock, keeps drifting with a listless countenance. I know that a Light dissolving every imperfection lives somewhere and that I have a home in it which on occasion I attain. But the sense of not having attained it for good is often the verge of lunacy for my wits and devours each poetic thrill as soon as it is born.

Oh, I am beset with megalomania! It is not only because the visitations of exalted feeling are rare that dumb blanks occur in the history of my mind. Great inspiration can never be too frequent a capture - we are not strong enough to bear and retain the glowing pressure of deep significances - we are soft and yielding to the downthrusts of divinity, the sublime lights plunge through us and out of us because we hold up no sustained response to their cry and cannot catch their brightness on a firm tablet of memory. If our emotions could stand the impact of high heaven and resound to it instead of answering to rhythms that are commonplace, there would be more poetry in this world. But sometimes a most peculiar numbness debars me from clasping inspira-tion. It is not that the receptive vessel is weak or the skies are empty. Reflecting that in a thousand million years the sun will be a shrivelled ember, the earth a frozen sleep and no least stir of even a grass-blade pierce the silence, the inanimation, the winter without end and all that passion and poetry have built grandly in the spaces of human consciousness leave not a mark on the vacuity of that distant doom, I stand paralysed. An utter hopelessness comes over me; no stroke of my pen, however delightful, seems worth the

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trouble of lasting for a mere thousand million years. Does not every phrase claim, by the superb imagination burning in it, an eternity of existence? Why then should I be baulked of the Spirit's immortal right, why suffer the indignity of being fobbed off with a few paltry millenniums when God's own termlessness is my dream in all that I manifest of His creative glory? Most foolish to the practical sense - this petulance of the dreamer in me; but many a page that might have quivered into beauty is left by it a white desert like the snow of that inhuman epoch prophesied by Science as the tomb of all the wonder of words poetry sets winging through the ages.

If my work must perish and I go down the dark road even before, I must seek after a more durable power than is granted to the poet or his poetry. Nothing appears to me satisfying save the breaking of whatever walls guard me from self-loss in the Infinite. To bear the indifference of the winds and the tides, the aloof greatness of wheeling worlds that outsoar man's living, the magnificent and icy touch of the Cosmos, we must ourselves become a greatness, an immensity, a transcendence of all human heat. But a tiny creature who has in him the power to feel the weight of infinitude must be in essence an infinitude that has forgotten its own grandeur. The tremendous gap we suffer is the oblivion of a tremendous fullness which is our deepest life. I cannot help the intuition that we are equal to the Cosmos. But we can know our own immeasurable truth only by dying to the smallness of our ego, the littleness of the whole human race, the finitude of all earth, the limitations of even the sun and the moon and the planets heaped together in a colossal bonfire. Stripped of the least attachment, we must endeavour to become nothing short of a pure Existence stretched without end through space and time, free and featureless and immutable. No form, no period should confine us. That alone is master within us, which can stand outside each object and beyond each circumstance. Once that sovereignty is acquired, then without harm each object and circumstance can be

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embraced and our life throb with burning details.

You must be considering my "mysticism" a majestic mirage. What will you think if I fling at you the sublime perversenesses of my "spirituality"? You will deem me not just reverie-infested but also a grand Inquisitor putting the human heart-beat on the rack. For, I have a most difficult confession to force out of love's delicate mouth. I want lovers everywhere to admit to themselves that the orgasm is a tumultuous betrayer of what the wistful eyes and the hungry hands promised. Not the brief flare-up of the nerves lifted a beacon on the hilltop of the future to call forward love's limbs. Surely a mightier consummation haunted us - mightier than flesh clinging to flesh - mighter also than two souls hurling against flesh-barriers to become each other's possession. Abelard, what you were looking for when Heloise came to you was not Heloise but your own priesthood, the command of some absolute Beauty smiling above change. That is why the barred door of your refusal to look beyond her had to be pushed open by Fate smiting away your genitals like an obstinate padlock! But all are not made God's eunuchs in so crude a fashion, and their paths to Truth are cut short instead. In the lives of those who stir with a vague superhuman trouble that wears no familiar face, the stroke of Fate in some form or other is always in waiting. They are beaten down from their proud kisses and the embracing ease of their marriage-beds - down to the dust where they may learn to kneel and worship. But if we are wise and if all would behold the true light behind the surface glitter, lover would speak to lover: "Various miseries will befall us, time will tear many a precious portion out of our lives, and death may divide - who knows how early? - the touch that is our entire happiness. If suffer we must, since none can escape being vulnerable clay, why should we not turn to the Everlasting in the midst of the ephemeral and, separated, clasp yet the Wonder where all separations cease - not the blind clod of death but the shadowless Spirit within, that is always and everywhere one? There the ecstatic pain is found

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in which, by being cloven apart here, we shall know the love which holds together the quintessence of all things."

Cruel, no doubt, is my admonition. I myself who give it shudder at times. Yet I cannot deny the Truth, for hours are there when I stand in the presence of a Beauty and a Beatitude whose very invisibleness has the power to blot out the gold of our broad day. How can I wrong Thy kingship, O Spirit Eternal, by forgetting those hours? I am called and called beyond each mundane prize. Whatever Thy form, Thou unknown menace to my human heart, I love Thee. O sweet devouring Wideness - from above and around and below Thou comest. Nowhere can I escape Thee then; and at the first touch of Thy seizure of joy there is no desire left in me to escape!

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A Poet on Poetry

By far the boldest definition of poetry is A.E. Housman's in that much-in-little of a book, The Name and Nature of Poetry, which I have recently read again. Yes, the boldest - and yet it seems to be both natural and penetrating, a logical completion of the hints thrown out by other poets concerning their own art. Wordsworth's is well-known: "All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Byron, with his usual turn for rhetoric, expresses this spontaneity and power in a more impressive, almost threatening manner: "Poetry is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake." Shelley has a less psychoanalytic idea and prefers a philosophic statement when he is not making a highly poetic one: "Poetry is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind, and its birth and recurrence have no necessary connection with the consciousness and will." How many poets must recognise in these dignified phrases a cri du coeur about the divine caprices of the Muse! Still more discouraging appears Keats, quite a wet blanket with his simple and pointed utterance: "If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all." Of course anybody who knows Keats's own methods of composition will not commit the mistake of confusing naturalness with immediate fluency. A tree does not put forth its leaves all at once or in a full-grown condition - shape by shape and by various stages "the limpid glory" is born - and though some works of art may take birth like the Indian magician's mango tree, there are many and perhaps most that follow Nature's patient and progressive curve. So Keats's wet blanket is meant not for imaginative creators, however slow and piecemeal their labours, but for intellectual constructors without that something elemental which is evidently the sum and substance of what Wordsworth and Byron and Shelley are also driving at. Now comes Housman, himself a fine poet, and says that if poetry is not intellectual

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at its core and if its function is rather to transfuse emotion than convey thought, it must be defined essentially as independent of intellectual meaning and as consisting of a sort of thoughtless thrill! Indeed a dangerous view to broadcast when significance and unity are terribly at a discount in modern poetic experiments: it seems to put a crown on the head of gibberish and phantasmagoria - but one's fears are laid at rest by Housman. He illustrates his thesis by choosing no less a genius than Blake: this choice is a very nugget of the true gold of critical perception.

The traditional example of poetry neat and pure is Coleridge's Kubla Khan. Housman plunges still nearer the heart of things by selecting work which goes even beyond the non-moral, non-intellectual, sheer visionary delight of Xanadu. There is in Coleridge's perfect picture a meaning seizable by the normal intelligence - not surely a logical formula but all the same a harmony of images recognisable by the mind. The stately pleasure-dome, the underground river, the sunless sea, the caves of ice, the woman wailing for her demon lover, the maiden with a dulcimer, the poet-wizard with flashing eyes and floating hair are certainly uncommon, yet they are all made to cohere in a clear whole of revelation: though enchanted beyond humdrum reality, one understands these rare sights because the language renders each vivid and distinct and clean-cut. Blake, on the other hand, deals often in "embryo" images and "mysterious grandeurs": nothing is evolved, nothing given a definite mental verisimilitude. Take Housman's first quotation:

Hear the voice of the Bard,

Who present, past and future sees;

Whose ears have heard

The Holy Word

That walked among the ancient trees,

Calling the lapsed soul

And weeping in the evening dew;

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That might control

The starry pole,

And fallen, fallen light renew.

'O Earth, O Earth, return!

Arise from out the dewy grass;

Night is worn,

And the morn

Rises from the slumbrous mass.

Turn away no more;

Why wilt thou turn away?

The starry floor,

The watery shore

Is given thee till the break of day.'

Impossible not to be stirred by this music and this mystery, impossible, again, not to feel that a momentous message is spoken, a perfect harmony created though in a region other than the normal mind. But from what region has the poem derived?

Housman supplies a tentative answer. He says that all poetry goes back to "something in man which is obscure and latent, something older than the present organisation of his nature, like the patches of fen which still linger here and there in the drained lands of Cambridgeshire". His statement combines a deep truth with a disappointing ambiguity. "Obscure, latent, older" are correct terms because the region of poetry in us is unusual and secret and it is reached more through the ancient immediacies of sense and emotion than the intellect's sober newly-evolved poise. But sense and emotion do not per se make poetry: they are its effective mediums. It passes from the delight of sense to a subtle discovery behind appearances and plucks some central satisfying soul-thrill from transitory emotion. Laurence Binyon's

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And sweet the rose floats on the arching briar's

Green fountains sprayed with delicate frail fires

has a texture and range of vision to which the acutest sense-perception would seem rough and myopic, while his

What has the ilex heard,

What has the laurel seen

That the pale edges of their leaves were stirred?

What spirit stole between?

sheds a glimmer unknown to outward observation. Consider the speech put into Gruach's mouth by Gordon Bottomley: Gruach fastens in the lacing of her bodice below her throat the flower that has fallen from her lover's cap -

Lie there; move with my life-breath; ah, look up

And breathe again to me his earlier warmth,

As if the vital tremor of his person

Mixed with my heat that veins thy texture now.

Thou hast been set above his brow; sink down,

Bring down to me his head in here, in here.

Is that emotion? Yes and no. It "registers" natural passion with a strange revealing eye, it fills out with keen unnoticed relevancies a simple gesture and makes it ideally complete. Poetry conveys with intense word and rhythm an apt amazement, a flush of insight which brings in powers larger, subtler, more gripping than sense and emotion, in the same way as the "high seriousness" of a Sophocles and the profound charm that emanates from a Wordsworth are not intellectual ingredients so much as a wider revelation pitched in the key of the intellect. No doubt, poetry functions in us through a faculty which has not emerged altogether, but it is not sub-mental: its sweep and boldness and sudden spell or its slow masterful invasion and sorcery pierce through the crust of a theme by a supra-intellectual excitement. It is

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obscure too, but only with a superior light that is still hidden. In itself quick with a quintessence of our powers of sense, emotion, intellect, it may incline towards thought or towards feeling or towards sensuous rapture; its mark everywhere is a sovereign glow of concrete perception deeply penetrating into a thing - widely circling for all that is in vital connection with it - harmonising diverse matters by a touch on some basic substance in which they partake of one another's nature and attitude - arriving at its disclosures through a quick identification of subject and object as if whatever is external in appearance were really internal to the poet's self -and finally striking on a form of word and rhythm which seems to have an absolute and irreproachable beauty like a divine archetype. For the sake of a compact label, we may designate this manifold process as creative intuition.

Critics generally employ the term imagination. But that is inadequate because imagination is just the outer aspect of the activity present in the poetic phenomenon. What gets expressed through a poet is something more magical than his imagining; for, his imagination does not bring about an actual identity with its object so that the very heart of the object is shown forth under the colour of the moment's mood, nor an actual experience of the hidden oneness of several objects despite their differences, nor an actual participation in some realm of perfect beauty. In a poem, with its revelatory inwardness about things and its multiple felicity of illumining significance-expanding similes and metaphors and its expression as of an archetypal form, there is accomplished what the poet seldom accomplishes in his own consciousness - a contact with a single Cosmic Life whose common essence permits the interfusion of different parts, a contact with an Overworld of Perfection which the world here seeks to manifest. His imagination is the channel conducting a greater power to embodiment. It is the surface-display of a secret faculty that is more than human. At times the secret faculty comes to the surface in the poet's mind and then he feels he is not merely a mouthpiece of the Gods but

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himself a God for a few flashes. Mostly he remains no more than a medium who is worked from behind without being made truly aware of the greatness moving through him, somewhat as his own hand is worked by his brain without becoming truly conscious of the marvel it transmits to paper. So it is advisable to distinguish between imagination and intuition by saying that the poet imagines but the poem intuits!

All art is intuition self-expressed - in stone, colour, sound or language. And just because Blake in some of his poems provides us with the language of intuition in a mode that is least mixed with logico-intellectual elements - elements having the smallest importance in poetry - Housman's choice of him is so admirable: he catches the nectar of poetry at its very fount. Unfortunately, however, he is led in general to a theory that is one-sided. When he declares, "Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it", he means that an emotional turn of expression gives the poetic effect. Yet, if poetry is the rhythmic word of intuition, then surely the thing said has undeniable value. Not that any special theme or content is more suitable than another; but whatever the theme or content, the expression must be of its intuitive core. Always that intuitive core must be the thing said. Clothe something else than this core in language and the poetry is bound to suffer, no matter how emotional the manner of expression. Just as the poetic substance is seized as something other than a thought - it has undertones and overtones of suggestion the pure idea sadly lacks - so also no amount of emotive tremolo can supply it. The emotion, whether definite because of the clarity of the idea accompanying it or indefinite as in Blake's poem because the idea is "unev-olved", does not suffice. Just by being divested of a clear idea it does not grow the pure poetic stuff: it merely becomes nondescript and baffling. Where the intellectual content is elusive, the emotional too is the same: this is all that happens when in poetry the emotion is as sheer and neat as possible: no pure poetic stuff results.

That stuff is intuition - a type of substance sui generis,

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which without being itself thought or emotion bears the seed-form of both and wears the outward look of either, when it arrives through an atmosphere of the intelligence or of the heart; only, there is a magic transfiguration wherever it passes. But we must remember that intuition is not devoid of significance: Housman's dictum - "Meaning is of the intellect, poetry is not" - cannot be accepted without any reserve. He himself means and rightly enough that poetry is not determined by logical clarity or precision: to measure it by some accurate mental formulation of its meaning is to degrade if not to nullify its glory and beauty. But there can be a significance which is implicit, which is not exactly formulable -and that is the stuff of poetry. Besides, words have meaning and as poetry is the art of words it must have an articulate background more specific than any other art's - something more interpretatively opposed than in any other art to unrelated emotion-waves or to a series of sense-shocks constituting a helter-skelter of pictorial points. Else the dethronement of meaning might be used in justification of a would-be-profound turbidity, a confusingly colourful mysta-gogism or the vagaries of surrealist composition. Housman is far from that pitfall; the modern irrationalists are not. Blake is mysterious in essentially the same sense as, say, Shakespeare. "After life's fitful fever he sleeps well" moves us as art in the same essential way as anything from Blake, because in both cases the art-thrill is due to the fiery particle called intuition - the sole difference lying in the fact that through Blake the spark leaps from a level of consciousness other than the one from which it makes its saltus through Shakespeare. It seems vague to the normal perceptive power because that power is not accustomed to this kind of manifestation by the poetic particle, but there is here an order, a consistency just as concrete and real to a reader who is at home in mystic intuition as Shakespeare's poetry has for those who can grasp intuition on a "vitalistic" plane. In other words, Blake possesses a concrete and convincing substance, however difficult it may be for normal perception to appre-

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ciate his unusual vision; and just because that substance, that vision, is concrete and convincing at bottom, we are so moved by it in spite of its appearing to be vague and without an outward hought-texture. We cannot be moved in a similar fashion by a Cummings, a Raymond Lulle or a Tristan Tzara. To knock off meaning and pick up the raw emotion or the amorphous subconscious is not necessarily to get quintessential poetry.

In consequence, the test of poetry is not a certain quizzical state or a befuddlement caused in the reader; it is rather a sense of enlightenment, of a secret harmony, of a completeness that satisfies no matter in how mysterious a manner. The deep excitement it creates may show itself in physical symptoms such as Housman describes; yet to write as he does - "Poetry indeed seems to be more physical than intellectual" - is unwittingly to state a half-truth. While removing stress from the intellect it magnifies an accidental series of emotive reactions instead of the true intuitive satisfaction which alone discovers poetry. A sentimentalist will feel like crying, or find his hair bristle, or experience a sudden spearing of the solar plexus, when the villain of a story overpowers the beautiful heroine or the heroine falls into the hero's arms and is locked in the terrible suffocation of a never-ending kiss. On contacting great poetry a mind above tosh may have the physical disturbances Housman speaks of, but it will know great poetry even without them. Its presence is felt as in the words of Eliphas the Temanite quoted by Housman: "A spirit passed before my face." That, like Eliphas, Housman could also say, "The hair of my flesh stood up" shows, however, a noble sensitivity on his part, even if it takes us no nearer a criterion of poetic appeal. What that sensitivity can reveal to us is amply demonstrated throughout his book by his comparative responses to poetry. A more pointed and clear survey of the various grades of poetic excellence is not to be found elsewhere. As a theorist he may not be fully illuminating; as a practical critic he is at once brilliant and exquisite with an infallible taste.

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The Muse and the Mystic

A bright young man, himself a budding poet, wrote to me about my own poetry, appreciating certain pieces of a bold and pungent type, but deploring my general mystical trend as unmodern, divorced from hard facts like slums and brothels, flying away from the delights of sense, out of tune with the revelations of science, unhelpful towards "breasting" life's miseries, a stumbling-block to a true fulfilment of the poetic urge as well as a bar to a true rapport between author and reader.

I am glad my "modern" and "realistic" friend made his position so clear to me. But I am afraid that what he has made me see most clearly is that his position is rather muddled. His point about rapport, for instance, ignores the question of how poetry is to be approached. Why should mystical emotion and vision stand in the way of a reader's appreciation of my poetry as poetry? What does it matter if he does not agree with that emotion or vision? He is not asked to sit in judgment on their ultimate truth. They are to be approached through the poetic body they wear and are to be valued according to the beauty of that body. If people had the genuine aesthetic sense, all authentic poetry would come alive to them, whether the theme be mystical or no. Even the sheer occult would not strike them as quite a stranger. Of course a mystical bent in the reader helps to take him to the last depth of a poem that is "God-intoxicated", but a keen aesthetic sympathy on his part is enough to catch a luminous suggestive thrill, a moving manifold meaning. The blank and befuddled face with which he generally looks up from the pages of mystical poetry can very well be his own fault -unless it be a fact that mysticism and poetry are born enemies, the latter refusing ever to embody the former. They would indeed be irreconcilable if mysticism could never inspire a man to feel strongly and to see vividly - or else if the feeling were so strong and the seeing so vivid that his faculty

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of expression got quite upset. I do not think anybody who has studied mystical experience, much less anybody who has undergone it, will mark in it a lack of feeling or seeing. Expression, however, depends on the presence of the artist in a man's nature: a non-mystic will come a cropper just as hopelessly as a mystic if the artist in him is ill-developed and proves inadequate to hold in significant form the stuff of experience. No doubt, the mystical experience is more difficult to capture, but difficulty is one thing and impossibility is another. To read the ancient Upanishads or, in our own day, Sri Aurobindo is to render all talk of impossibility ridiculous.

The aesthetic approach puts in the right perspective most of the demands laid on the poet by my friend. I agree that no art should be entirely divorced from life, but the use of it should not be merely to help one to "breast" any one particular kind of misery. If poetry helps a person rotting away in a slum or working his way towards a scientific vision of the universe or else hungering for "the clean sweetness of lust", there is nothing to be said against it. Still, if it does not give nourishment to a man sitting in a palace of pleasure or stirred by inexplicable longings for the Eternal and the Infinite or groping through labyrinths of dream towards the ecstasy of Krishna's flute-call - if poetry is meant for only this, that or the other kind of man but has no value for all the moods of the human heart, then its essence remains un-grasped and unutilised. The correct way of making use of poetry is to get from it an influence of perfect beauty that gives one's consciousness an intensity, a subtlety, a sublimity, no matter what the contents and the style. All sorts of contents, all varieties of style can be poetically used and made fruitful for that growth of consciousness. To demand from poetry anything except that keen growth through the enjoyment of flawless and absolute expression is to miss its essence and impoverish its flowering.

My young critic's letter pleaded also that "poetry must be in the forefront of the modern struggle for an understanding

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of our most difficult age". This is not wrong if he does not narrow down the meaning of the word "modern". By that word he means "scientific". Poetry, however, cannot be the handmaid of science and nothing else. I welcome scientific poets with open arms, so long as they embody the scientific attitude in a poetic form and expression. If there is no intense sight, speech and rhythm there is no poetry at all. Can any amount of scientific attitude by itself give it the breath of living beauty without which it is no longer art? Let us face slums and brothels by all means, but let us get poetry out of them and not mere poverty and prostitution. Let us feel them like a whip of flame across our minds and not turn them into grist for the mill of an economic theory. Let us also not fix our eyes on slums and brothels only. Life has many other manifestations. Let us face too the "dark night of the soul" in search of the Divine and the excesses of the "star-struck debauchee of light". There are men who live in our own difficult age and are at the same time mystically inclined. Those who are not thus inclined embrace often an idealistic philosophy and do not believe in Dialectical Materialism or an atheistic brand of evolutionism. "The terrific achievement of modern English and American poets" which my correspondent speaks of in support of his scientific modernity is, I fear, pretty poor when compared to the work of Bridges, Masefield, Gordon Bottomley, Lascelles Abercrombie, AE and Yeats - none of them pledged whole-heartedly to science.

Yeats is acknowledged universally as the greatest English poet of our age. What does his poetry consist of? In his youth, a good amount of the most exquisite love-lyricism woven into patterns of Irish myth and mystic symbol; in his old age, a vigorous utterance on the one hand of a zest-ful, inquisitive, flesh-accepting, death-confronting realism touched by what seems a scientific attitude, and on the other hand of an occult and esoteric vision that regards all things here as a faint representation of some secret Spirit within us, of archetypes and archimages that are beyond the physical

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universe. Yeats was a many-sided genius and in his poems he focussed all those sides, with an underlying mystical sense which was somewhat ivory-towerish in his young days but altogether life-gripping in the days of his maturity. If the greatest English poet of our age can help us decide what poetry is and should be, then certainly it is not a handmaid of science or of "men among men" with a social-reformist and Marxist penchant. I bear no grudge against such men among men, provided they give us genuine poetry and do not shut their eyes to the possibility of genuine poetry being produced by other kinds of men who too grip life though from a different angle.

We must not make a fetish of the scientific and social-reformist angle nor deem mysticism a flight from the concrete world of the senses. Technological development cannot argue a higher stage of essential consciousness. Is a modern scientist more evolved in consciousness than Aristotle or Leonardo da Vinci? Is Stalin on a higher plane of being than Draco or Lycurgus or our own Buddhist Asoka whom H. G. Wells, himself a scientific mind, calls the most enlightened ruler the world has seen? Not the outer mould but the inner reality determines progress. Monarchy, oligarchy, aristocracy, plutocracy, democracy, scientific socialism are merely the outer moulds: they leave man basically the same half-beast and half-angel that he was when the Rig-Veda was composed. And it seems to me undeniable that only what the Rig-Veda aimed at can give us true evolution. There must be progress not horizontally alone: a vertical line must be struck, a movement leading from our present level of humanity to a superhumanhood, a change from the mental grade to a supramental. A defect, a limitation resides in the very quality and stuff of our present consciousness: it assumes a large number of guises, it is clothed in dress after startling dress of outer life - but its burning imperfection eats through all these wrappings, reduces them to dust and ashes and glares forth its own unchanging futility. Mysticism steps in here - either as a grand escape to a luminous Beyond or as

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a dynamic surcharging of the human with the Divine.

We who live in the age of Sri Aurobindo cannot be escapists. There is really nothing in mysticism to compel us to renounce earth and not attempt a radical reshaping of it. For, between Spirit and Matter no gulf yawns as between abstract and concrete. The Spirit is described by all who have realised it as more dense, more powerful, more actual to all our faculties than the table at which I am sitting and the typewriter at which I am banging away. It has a concreteness and substantiality which makes our flesh-contacts pallid and passionless in comparison. What we call the world of sense is not foreign to the Spirit. Doubtless, the senses are given a new mode of action, a hidden Godhead becomes real to them in every cosmic phenomenon even as to our ideative and emotional nature. This recasts our habitual desires and activities - we have no longer the narrow selfish grab, the small jealous clutch: our greediness and our grossness are lost, but we are not "sicklied o'er" with an impoverishment of the essence of sensuous rapture. Where in the whole literature of love is there a description more electric with concrete personal sensation than those of the mystical ecstasies of St. Teresa and Mirabai? Where in Nature-poetry is a stronger sense of substantial being invading all our powers of perception and meeting us everywhere and infinitely and in a million forms than in the spiritual intensities of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita? Neither life nor art grows anaemic through the mystical experience. And my bright young friend's apprehension that the mystic cuts himself off from sense-delight is founded on a very superficial idea which obscures the natural affinity of the mystic to the poet. Poetry's keenly passionate sensuousness is not vitiated but illumined and fulfilled by the keener passion and sensuousness of mysticism.

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The Process of Great Poetry

No lover of poetry but feels during its spell over him that he is granted the contact of a deeper and higher state of consciousness than the ordinary. Poetry at such moments is not a mere conspiracy by Dante and Shakespeare and Tagore to crown colourful invention king of our hearts: no doubt, we recognise that its primary work is to bring delight by vision and emotion and not offer demonstrable or verifiable truth, but the delight breathes a superhuman air and is no outcome of transfigured fantasy. Why then should we later look upon these moments with diffidence in their revelatory touch on our being? At times poets themselves shirk in retrospect a mystical explanation of their art; but such an attitude is a curious attempt to blindfold thought because of a "rationalistic" prejudice and to stand wonderingly agape without seeing what plainly stares one in the face.

Poetry attains the highest excellence possible to it through a twofold process of super-normal perception. In the first place, the poet, whether his vehicle of expression be the passionate life-gusto, the visionary thought-urge or the mystic elan, becomes a conscious power of self-identification with anything and everything. Our normal mind-stuff is being constantly moulded into sense-data and images; the sea beyond my window is caught by me through my mind-stuff taking a certain form representative of the object it contacts -a manifold form resulting from the various sense-instruments through which my mind-stuff works. When the object is not directly present, I can still recover its form by means of an image, a memory-representation. But both in immediate sensation and after-image, the form into which the consciousness is projected is something held as other than the very self of the knower; I do not feel one entity with the billows and, so long as I do not, I can only describe them in various general terms, scientific, practical, reflective or aesthetic. If I go beyond this manner of experience and feel

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their nature with a strange intimacy as if for the time being we were not separate but somehow identified, I shall be knowing them by what psychologists call empathy, "in-feeling" as distinguished from mere sympathy or "with-feeling". Total empathy is a rare phenomenon; what occurs more frequently is partial interfusion; and if at the interfused moment words could express my experience I should have at least the stuff of fine poetry: it would be as though the object sprang into eloquent self-awareness within me. If the awareness lived in a peculiar rhythm of subtly recurrent sound, I would have the pattern of fine poetry as well as its stuff. For poetic descriptions of a high value are based on various degrees of metrically rhythmed empathy: genuine poetry can never come without at least a spark of it, since its function is to give us a vivid and harmonious intuition of things, a language which reveals their hidden modes and their vibrant laws of existence.

Thus, Arnold seems to lay bare the very spirit of wide waters in a certain wasteful aspect, when he writes:

The unplumbed salt estranging sea,

or Yeats in his equally empathic line:

The murderous innocence of the sea.

Now, this faculty of blending one's self with an object in an intimate revealing way, or with a psychological situation so as to catch the inner throb of its significance as done by the words and rhythm of Sri Aurobindo's exquisitely pathetic

O my sweet flower!

Art thou too whelmed in this fierce wailing flood?

- this intuitive faculty, however exercised, has its root in the fact that the world is at bottom one single consciousness in diverse states. Any given state is, of course, experienced by

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the poet not in its utter purity but in association with his own temperament and mood: Aeschylus, viewing the foam-flecked shine and leap of the Aegean, heard unlike Arnold and Yeats

The innumerable laughter of the waves.

All the same, the flash of knowledge and the shock of feeling by identity are there, a brief transcendence of outward limits in order to merge in some intimate awareness behind the veil, implying that below the surface demarcations all things exist as moments of one universal Spirit whose sudden point of contact provides the poet's language with the common base of self and consciousness necessary for experiencing from the inside what seems normally outside him and foreign to his own being.

A further indication of the universal Spirit is given by the resort to simile and metaphor, perhaps the most characteristic turn which poetic empathy takes. No doubt, all figurative language limps, because everything has its uniqueness as well as its resemblances to other things, but in a successful figurative phrase the poet packs his vision of the same essence in two different objects. William Watson, interpreting a sea-scape -

And I beheld the waters in their might

Writhe as a serpent by some great spell curbed

And foiled -

or Shakespeare expressing how the mast-climbing shipboy's eyes are sealed up in a drowse and his brains rocked

In cradle of the rude imperious surge

conveys to us an extremely vivid perception of the hidden sameness between phenomena that in ordinary appearance are unrelated: two experiences are intermingled, two objects

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reveal the same significance, the same reality, the same fundamental oneness. The world, to the poetic vision, is a splendid scheme of mutually interpretative symbols which can be caught by intuition's plunge beneath the superficial limits and separatenesses. Each time a fine simile or metaphor is found, the poet's soul becomes a fiery focus wherein some light of the world-spirit's underlying multiple unity is brought to conscious prominence.

Nor is this all that constitutes the sovereign poetic process. It is just one side, the outflow of

An elemental life deep down within.

The other is a mirroring of an absolute beauty in the elemental vision. The great poetic phrase does not photograph: it transmutes the external appearance by displaying to us on any level of awareness the concealed core of actuality; it opens in us eyes other than the physical, the immediately extravert; it brings out a power or a delicacy which is the central stuff of a thing, the central quality of a situation, and which partakes of some intrinsic beauty whose thrill is the true life of the universe. It brings out this miracle by carrying its vision in a word-form and a rhythm-movement that have a sense of utter and inevitable perfection: the vision glimmers in a body of significant sound which converts whatever it echoes of sublime or grotesque, blissful or tragic, into a shape of loveliness irreproachable. There is an extreme of beauty felt in each true poetic creation, as though some divine archetype were embodied. The poetic insight into the common world-soul throws up interpretative values which have to be caught in a speech-form of ideal beauty: the proof of success is a certain completeness, a sheer aesthetic finality of expression. There is a hidden spiritual tone in all genuine inspiration, even though, on the surface, things ordinary are spoken of; but it is a tone which is conveyed through perfect aesthesis: the meaning is not directly mystical, only the art discloses by a complete and unimpeachable form of word

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and music some arch-image, some high absolute vibration whose broken shadows and vague quivers we contact in the time-world. What impregnates a line of verse with its sovereign tone is this ultimate presence. The urge to release it in word-music is what made Keats write about his poetic moods: "There is an awful warmth about my heart like a load of immortality."

One with a mystical bent of mind can disengage through the words and the rhythm of each fine poetic moment a Platonic ideality. The thought and the emotion deal with human or natural phenomena, but together with their overt appeal there can float to us, because of the utter perfection of form, a suggestion of transcendental values. I recollect how that line of Shakespeare's where he speaks of wintry boughs -

Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang -

set me wondering with its flawless music what supreme beauty of chaste aloofness it was that had worn the disguise of those chill and empty branches while hinting itself through words so magical. Tennyson's

Let the wild

Lean-headed eagles yelp alone

moved me in an analogous way, though here the allusion seemed to be of some highest beauty of intense and solitary power shining out in a symbol of fierce remote bird-life. That vision of suttee - remarkably un-Hudibrastic - by Butler,

Like Indian widows gone to bed,

In flaming curtains, with the dead,

changed to a spectacular leap of amor dei through an all-exceeding and self-consuming human gesture; while the wooing cadences in which Christabel's preparation for night is traced,

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Her gentle limbs did she undress

And lay down in her loveliness,

sounded to my imagination like a response to some exquisite Beyond of mystery. Seumas O'Sullivan's

And many rivers murmuring in the dark

came, again, sub specie aeternitatis — the evocative art filled the rivers and the murmuring and the dark with attributes above themselves, attributes of a plenary Creative Process by which some primeval chaos is vivified. When, however, I read in Wordsworth,

The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,

I had a sort of inner awakening as if the language struck with a direct breath of the transcendental, uplifting or in-drawing the imagination to a mystic rapture. I thought that this kind of poetry I myself would most desire to write because of the rarity of its rhythm as well as its revelation and the satisfying glow it kindled in something that was the root and core of me and by means of which alone I had strained always to draw from the sense of absolute aesthesis a secret religion.

In general, the poetic process requires no direct mysticism. For the universal consciousness can be touched by any faculty in us and the Archetype can set glowing the hues of a million moods. In art, beauty is all - though we must understand by the term a beauty of substance no less than style if we are to have poetic passion at the highest pitch. Not substance of this particular kind or that, but a sufficient subtlety or weight of meaning mated with music. And the poet who would prove a master in his own psychological domain - life-desire, thought-thrill or spirit-surge - must see that poetry dives and soars beyond the labouring brain and that the more quick the imaginative soul in him through a faithful self-consecration to his art, the larger the kingdom he will rule of magic sea and miraculous sky.

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Uttering the Unutterable

Speaking of a "metaphysical" poet, Dr. Johnson laid down the law to goggling and gaping Boswell: "If Mr. X has experienced the Unutterable, Mr. X will be well advised not to try and utter it." The advice, I am afraid, is not the Doctor's wit or sanity at its best. It is a superficially brilliant play on words, taking little stock of the uses and potentialities of the art of words.

Just consider the term "Unutterable". It is not mumbo-jumbo: it has a meaning. Strictly and frontally, it signifies a divine infinitude which is so marvellous and mysterious that it cannot at all be described in language. An additional background significance is caught in the anecdote of the Indian sage and his disciples who kept asking him what the Eternal was. Every time the sage kept silent. At last the disciples said to themselves: "We have the answer. The Eternal is the opposite of speech. The Eternal is Silence." Silence here stands for a supreme calm - a state of self-withdrawn imperturbable inexpressiveness behind the ever-mobile expression that is the cosmos.

To utter the Unutterable, when that term is literally interpreted, is to do no more than suggest by various verbal ways a Reality fraught with a blend of the two significances. The various verbal ways fall into four categories: words can define the Unutterable, point to the Unutterable, picture the Unutterable, induce the Unutterable. The defining is done by a direct statement, either with plain words or splendid, of our intellectual understanding of the term; the pointing by an indirect statement of the same comprehension; the picturing by the use of images or descriptive phrases that directly or indirectly stir our inner eye in the direction of that understanding; the inducing by the heart being stirred in this direction owing to the emotional associations of words and the suggestive rhythms they make by combining themselves in response to the thrilled state of mind in which the speaker

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or writer is. Words thus can intensely convey the sense of what is entirely beyond the capacity of words or else is opposed to their nature! That is the paradox forgotten by Dr. Johnson.

Perhaps the finest brief example of language employing all its resources to impart the Unutterable in a literal interpretation is a three-line snatch from a passage Sri Aurobindo once sent me out of an unpublished poem of his:

The superconscious realms of motionless peace

Where judgement ceases and the word is mute

And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.

Here defining, pointing, picturing, inducing are creatively held together to suggest a supreme transcendence and a supreme calm - "the Unconceived" and His "peace". A defining of the transcendence and the calm is accomplished by the epithets "superconscious" and "motionless" fixing clearly the condition stated, while the phrases about judgment ceasing and the word falling mute bring out still more positively its implications of unutterableness. The pointing occurs in the last line where "alone", without directly connoting the Unutterable, renders the transcendence and the calm complete and absolute, permitting no penetration or disturbance by any agent. The imagery pictures the condition, gives it an objectivity, so that much more than an idea of transcendence and calm is carried home to us and we seem to behold and touch them. The noun "realms", taken in conjunction with the adjective "motionless" soon after, confers on the condition stated the sense of a substantial extended Spirit-stuff that is entirely free from any feature or vibration. The adjective "pathless" reinforces this sense by negating the least cutting up of the stuff into this or that particularity or purpose or tendency and reveals cogently that our mind can never explore it, but at the same time there is also hinted that what can be spoken of in such terms must be concrete, must be relevant to the absence of a concrete

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thing like a path, and the relevance is stressed by the verb "lies" which has an association of the visible, if not even the tangible. A transcendence-ward and calm-ward direction of the heart is induced by means of the feeling the atmosphere of several words in these lines evokes and by means of the subtle pull of the rhythm. Rhythm has an inner aspect and an outer. About the inner in Sri Aurobindo's verses we can only say that it is a thrill of realisation on a plane of consciousness that appears to be divine, a plane of vast superhuman Yogic experience: this thrill embodying itself in the outer rhythm fills the sound with a potency to rouse in us some presence of that plane. The outer rhythm admits of more specific analysis. The first line has seven sibilants within a short compass, playing around four labials in the form of two "p"s and two "m"s - labials that involve the joining and parting of the lips: the total effect is that the mouth tends to be closed into silence but opens only for sibilating as when we put a finger to our lips and sibilate in order to quiet people and spread silence. The second line echoes and confirms the effect by continuing the "m"-sound and making in the first syllable of the markedly sibilant word "ceases" a suggestive rhyme to the word "peace" of the previous line. The last line does not lack a certain sibilance but its chief contribution is, first, through the term "alone" with its sound that goes ringing in us with a full roundedness because of its long "o"

Dr. Johnson, of course, has no inkling of the Aurobindo-nian art with its rare characteristics: immense supra-intellectual clarity and penetrating fathomless reverberation. But

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it would be unjust to hold that the school of Donne, Crashaw and Vaughan which he dubbed "metaphysical" could have no success in uttering the Unutterable and that his wisecrack puts it out of court. No metaphysical had Sri Aurobindo's large and close grip on the Unknown nor his plucking of the poetic word, at even the simplest, as though from the very depths that seem to be beyond speech. Still, the metaphysi-cals had flashes of mystic intuition and experience visiting their undeniable if intermittent poetic genius: they could not, therefore, be abject failures in what they set out to do. Nor did they set out every time to do literally what Dr. Johnson charges them with. In fact, no mystic poet takes the term "Unutterable" as always connoting something which tends to seal his mouth for good. Mostly, the Unutterable is to him not that about which nothing can ever be said; rather, it is that about which everything cannot be fully spoken since it is inexhaustible and, no matter how much we speak, something vast and wonderful will always be left over. Seen in a positive instead of negative form, it is that about which one can go on endlessly talking without exhausting its secret splendours, because, to quote Meredith,

Its touch is infinite and lends

A yonder to all ends.

That is, gleam after gleam, shade upon shade of the Deific can be captured in language and yet the sense will remain of the miraculous that no language can wholly compass and make satisfyingly understood or completely natural. As a rule no incompatibility exists in the mystic poet's mind between his declaring that he has intuited or experienced the Unutterable and his attempting to transmit in words not only that ecstatic fact but also some notion of the supernatural strangenesses within the Object of his intuition or experience - strangenesses like Vaughan's "deep yet dazzling darkness". The phrase of Vaughan may have been double Dutch to Dr. Johnson, obscurum per obscurius: it need not be that to

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someone who is receptive to mystical subtleties and brings, instead of the pragmatist's superficial intellect or the merely religious man's blind emotion, an intuitively wide and visioning turn of consciousness. Is there any reason why words should be for ever at loggerheads with the mystic's perception? Is not the deciding factor the psychological level at which they start functioning? The psychological level, for instance, of Dr. Johnson's own poetry would be quite impotent for the mystic's purpose. What about levels less brain-dense, more inward and "dreamy"? Cannot words arising there respond to the Eternal? The Divine would altogether preclude words only if He remained altogether unmanifest. Since the universe is continually His manifestation, no matter how hard to read aright, and since He lays Himself bare in diverse degrees in the rapt soul of the saint and the yogi, He cannot be quite averse to being disclosed - and what are words except a form of disclosure? Doubtless, the Divine, precisely because of His divinity, His transcendence of everything, will always in some manner exceed words; we must, nevertheless, remember that He is also an immanence, an omnipresence, an unfoldment, a power that inhabits all things and is everywhere and breaks out through veils, with the result that words can always be pregnant with His greatness, aura'd with His infinitude, revelatory of His supernature.

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A Book of Love

A friend of mine put Havelock Ellis's autobiography into my hands and asked me to read it and pay a tribute to its author. My friend is right in assuming that a tribute is deserved by Havelock Ellis. Perhaps the best tribute is to utter the paradox that the passing of Havelock Ellis leaves no gap in the world. It is the life either frustrated or cut short before fulfilling itself that leaves a gap. What is here left behind is a sense of rich plenitude - an achievement splendid in its calm completeness. Yes, the two characteristics of this man as embodied in his work were an unassuming poise and a thoroughgoing wide-sweeping efficiency. That combination gave him a strength which did not exhaust itself, however enormous the job it undertook. The several volumes of his studies in the psychology of sex were written with an undiminished confident vigour: the grasp over each topic was masterly and the feeling of the importance of the labour never flagged, so that in spite of severe opposition the writer's mind proceeded from start to finish without hurry, fear or weariness.

Havelock Ellis's efficiency is not mechanical, nor even merely scientific. He is no soulless collector of facts. The beginning of his career as author, a man deeply interested in the fountains of creative art no less than the springs of creative sex, he never loses the imaginative touch, the gift of vision, that is the privilege of the poet. In fact, he has written poetry, some of it unusually felicitous, most of it bearing the stamp of profound feeling though not always of expressive intensity. But his was not the vocation of the direct poet. It was through a fine balanced prose, casting clear glances in many uncommon directions, that he exercised the penetration and quick sympathy his nature possessed. And he was drawn to explore, with the eye of a scientist, regions which poetry plumbs only through a rapture of brief hurting flashes and sudden engulfing shadows - the regions of abnormal

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sex. To this exploration he devoted a large number of years; but even then he never lost contact with the experiments and adventures of art. No new genius in any sphere of art but found in Havelock Ellis an understanding that was deep as well as enthusiastic, the depth preventing the enthusiasm from being effusive, the enthusiasm saving the depth from heaviness of expression.

It is no easy task to bring a correct critical insight to the quick of one's own life. But Ellis's natural bent as well as his long psychological and analytic training helps him a good deal. So in spite of unavoidable defects his autobiography makes illuminating reading. A frankness that lacks no dignity and an emotional power that is no enemy to intellectual vision constitute its essence. Whether it will rank with the confessions of past times I cannot definitely say; I am no authority on autobiographical literature and must admit to my shame that I have not even read in full the one book which weighs so much with Ellis himself - Rousseau's. Rousseau was indeed the more dynamic genius and also the more talented artist, and surely he was a more significant figure too in the history of the human mind: according to Ellis, he was the most significant influence in the West after Jesus. I therefore dare say it would be demanding too much of Ellis to ask him to act Rousseau. But he was no mean moulder of the positive side of what has come to be known as modernism. He aided to bring sex into the sunshine, to blow the fresh air of health upon the morbid privacy into which sex had degenerated. If there is more sanity and tolerance and understanding in the world today, Havelock Ellis is responsible to a marked degree. And as man and artist he cannot be denied a substantial position - a position neither vast nor supercharged with the meaning of personality nor creatively pre-eminent, yet striking home to our sense of values with a revealing weight, intimacy and grace. His autobiography, quintessencing him, is sufficient proof of his genuine worth. Judged by the story it lays bare of a rich and serious soul in a style of varied force, it comes as a document

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of considerable light.

The story is unusual. The relation between Havelock and his wife Edith is far from being a conventional love-affair. Edith's soul is as complex as Havelock's, though set in a different key, and the entangling of their hearts follows the extraordinary curves of their characters. She is homosexual no less than heterosexual, Havelock is very exclusively the latter; he has no profound attachment to any man-friend, while she is often bespelled by women of charm and sensibility and talent. But the terms homosexual and heterosexual lose their precise and acute meanings with them because neither Havelock nor Edith is markedly sexual. Sex is not the insistent strain in the accords and discords of their emotional lives. By sex I mean here the physical act. They married without any vehement desire of body for body, and after a certain period the physical act had no place in their relationship. They felt no necessity for it - in fact, it seems to have been discarded as something slightly disharmonious for both. This is not to say that they never lived passionately. Theirs was a love more intimately moving than simple affection - and Havelock actually found that the absence of sex in the narrow sense made no whit of difference in his attachment to his wife in the most intense man-and-woman way.

"Passion transcends sex," he writes, and adds: "that is a discovery with a significance for life and for the institution of marriage which has not yet been measured." It is of course unlikely that so eminent an authority on the psychology of sex should have an utter aloofness from it. Ellis was not ah unnatural man; but he had an instinctive turn for lifting the elemental urge to a high level. All during his impressionable adolescence in Australia where the relations between men and women were often facile, that instinct was at play. One night, on board a ship, he found himself alone with a girl. They walked once or twice up and down the deck, and she remarked to him by way of opening the conversation: "Ain't the moon lovely?" Such a feeling of loathing rose up in the

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young Ellis that in a few minutes, after briefly responding, he said it was time to go below and wished her good night. That was the nearest approach he knew to intimacy with a strange woman. At another time, in London, he was asked by a streetwalker to accompany her home. Out of curiosity he went. But when he found himself in her apartment he could not fulfil her expectations. Putting his money on the table he left her forthwith. Even in his long friendship with that wonderful and beautiful woman, Olive Schreiner, the author of An African Farm, who came nearest his heart before he met Edith Lees, there seems to be a restraint in the midst of strong emotion. Both were free-minded to an extreme degree and yet they appear to have been lovers with a reservation. All this as well as his later sex-transcendence without any loss of true passion demonstrates the subtle stuff of which he was made: he was no gross animal as so many great men -like Goethe and Victor Hugo - are in spite of their lofty intellects.

But in one point Ellis fails in subtlety of spirit. The failure is associated with his having other women than his wife to minister to his emotional needs. Edith's nature - impetuous and excitable - was not quite what Havelock needed: there was in him a cry for restfulness, for a touch that would not merely kindle his mind and body and make them burn but also give them a calm soothing glow - a dawn-gleam and a sunset-shine no less than a noon-flush. These things he found in his cousin, the girl called Anne, and in later life, when Edith was no more, in the exquisite Francoise. No turmoils, no conflagrations with Anne and Francoise -therefore no such profound griefs and high exultations as with Edith, but, while the intense richness was missing, a serener and steadier and sweeter experience took its place. However, Edith remains, when all is said and done, the core of his autobiography - the years of his growth and the fulfilment of his literary and scientific destiny came with her and through her, for she was a woman of genius and the genius in him rose to full flowering under her radiance. It is a

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pity, therefore, that she could not satisfy all the cries of his heart. Was it because she was partly homosexual and consequently divided in her response to him? It is a fact that the first disappointment in their married lives fell to Havelock when he found her under the spell of another woman. Not that she grew cold to him; the same heat of attachment remained on her part but he discovered for the first time that she was two-natured and that side by side with the heat her being could feel for him she could carry on a warm self-devotion to a woman. He did not get anything fundamentally less than he had done before; but he found himself not the sole lord of her heart for the reason that her heart had two compartments of emotion, or rather, to put it more correctly though more paradoxically, there were two distinct hearts in her. In short, he saw that he could not have the whole of her, though what he had was more powerful and lasting than what women took from her. He remained to the end her paramount interest - yet it is always a blow to a man that he should be not the one and only interest with regard to sexual emotion. His own turning towards Anne happened a little after. I think it probable that if Edith had not revealed her homosexuality to him he would have felt less encouraged to give Anne that kiss with which their relationship sprouted. It is, none the less, a debatable issue whether the need of tranquil love which was in him and which Edith could not appease would not in any case have searched for an opening.

Where Havelock failed was the ease with which he satisfied that need, feeling quite justified because Edith had gone Sapphic. He says that both the instances were essen-tially alike, each person being "unfaithful" according to their sex-leanings. I detect a certain sophistry here. Havelock thought he had struck upon profundity in seeing the essential sameness of the two lapses. How he could with his fine understanding take such a viewpoint is hard to grasp. It should be clear that Edith's blow to him was much less than his to her. We must remember that she was not just homosexual: a strong heterosexuality was also at work in

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her. To this, Havelock administered a severe hurt by his attachment to other women. The element of jealousy was roused in her in a form and to a degree impossible for him because she did not wrong him at all with regard to his own sex. The wrong on either side would have been equal if both the parties had been two-natured. If she had established relations with any other man, Havelock would have known exactly what he inflicted on her by his relationship with other women. His own sufferings he could mitigate by his psychological understanding of sexual inversion and by his certitude that no man except himself ever dominated Edith's heart. Her sufferings lacked such solace: it is not easy to bring balm to a mind crossed with the shadow of infidelity by its mate. There was no adulterous extreme in the infidelity -Havelock never slept with Anne or any other woman during Edith's lifetime - but the romantic and the idealist in Edith were deeply wounded. Her health both of mind and body was sapped by the wound. That she rose in her heart high above it and let Havelock follow the path of his nature and did not permit the pain caused by her wound to prompt her to break inwardly with him shows her to be an extraordinary person and almost makes her more the heroine of the autobiography than Havelock is its hero.

To balance what I have said against him I must explain that, if Edith became capable of the subtle grace she showed, it was because she realised how great a man he was. He gave her something which she felt it would be foolish to throw away in peevish resentment over his emotional complications. These complications had so little of the base and the gross about them that they weighed little against the magnanimity of his being, the primacy he gave her in his heart, the superb sympathy and solicitude he brought her. If her genius helped him, his genius did the same to her. She knew that no man she came across wrapped her round with such warm depth. Others sought her out and even loved her but no gift came to her from so mighty a nature. Even his defects left him a finer man on the whole than any she knew

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in her entire life. This she recognised strongly enough despite the partial dementia which overtook her at the close and led her into farcical legal separation. Havelock emerges from his book with a grand stature - powerful and calm at the same time, erring yet magnificent - and for all his failure a great lover and a sensitive artist. The blend of lover and artist turns the last portion of his autobiography - the portion covering Edith's death - into a most moving testament. Every sentence rings true and beautiful, a restrained intensity of genuine love strikes again and again a Dantesque note. It is really a grand finale of golden feeling.

There is a wide store of wisdom scattered in the autobiography. Life's vicissitudes, art's complexities, problems of the individual and problems of the race are lit up by flashes of genius. I could make quite a substantial compilation of highly enlightening extracts. But the book is at bottom a liber amoris, a story of love's heart. So as a fitting illustration of the wisdom of that heart I shall pick out a passage which occurs apropos Olive Schreiner: "Olive Schreiner disliked my account of her book. She said it reminded her of a man in South Africa with a horse for sale, who, after admitting a long list of appalling defects in the animal, wound up by declaring emphatically, 'But, it's a damned fine horse!'... It seems to me that a critic who is not keenly aware of all the defects of a lovely thing which ravishes him is but a crude critic, whose opinion hardly counts. My attitude is the same even in love. The women whom I have loved and almost worshipped are women of whose defects I have been precisely and poignantly aware. The lover who is not thus aware seems to me a crude sort of lover, scarcely even a lover at all, merely the victim of a delusion, of which to rob him would be to rob him of his 'love'. I feel contempt for the 'love' that is blind; to me there is no love without clear vision, and perhaps also no vision in the absence of love."

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Poet and Mystic and Woman-Hunter

There are few figures in fiction with whom I feel more in sympathy than the one set alive by Charles Morgan at the centre of his novel, Sparkenbroke. Piers Tenniel, Lord Sparkenbroke, poet and mystic and woman-hunter - I seem to look into his heart and discover there with diamond concreteness something which is in the heart of every true idealist who is yet enmeshed in the crude flames that corrupt bodily desire. Bodily desire is not itself a sin: it can be a force of self-liberation like the urge of any other part of the being, if it goes burning with adoration and service at the feet of some visualised form of the Divine - but by getting caught in the snare of sex it becomes blind at the same time that it is hot, it dims in itself the light to discern what it is truly seeking. In Sparkenbroke the pull towards woman is one of three dominant motifs: poetry and the love of death are the other two. The connection between them all is simply a fiery aspiration to merge oneself in an infinite peace, a vast all-enveloping annihilation of the petty struggling ego and the commonplace world.

The fundamental experience of poetry is that the perfect word and the penetrating vision create a universe anew out of some great silence and some vast void. The sense of creation de novo is the real joy of poetry: there is suddenly a dissolution of the ordinary world - a gigantic blank is felt and against or within that blank the revelation of flawless form, the epiphany of impeccable rhythm. Perhaps it may be truer psychology to put it the other way round: the marvellous music and vision gradually unfold themselves by slowly destroying the common world and filling with their paradisal beauty the silence and the vacuity they create by that destruction. In any case, the limiting day-to-day world is blotted out and transcended: there is a liberation into freedom, into wholeness, denied by the harsh contacts and disappointing snipsnaps of routine existence, and as a result

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comes a fulfilling peace. This peace is of course caught for brief whiles and then too more as in a mirror of the consciousness than by actual identification with it, but its healing and liberating effect is intuited sufficiently to justify one's valuing very highly one's poetic experience.

Sparkenbroke puts it in the same category as what he calls death. For, death to him is no extinction: it is a final breaking out from the bondage of the restricted ego and the imperfect world. In a terse stanza which he is supposed to have written, the idea is crystallised:

Last night I flew into the tree of death:

Sudden an outer wind did me sustain:

And I, from feathered poppet on its swing,

Wrapt in my element, am bird again.

The poppet is the human soul forced to enjoy the gilded misery of a prison, but when the cage is flung open the spacious winds of eternity carry it into the world of trees which is part of its true home. The world of trees symbolises death, the lifting up of life into the freedom of the sweet firmament: a tree goes deep down under the clay like a dead body but it gets thus rooted only to rise above all clay, an inhabitant of air. Death, which is apparently a fall into the earth, is really a soar upward; it is part of the infinite where the prisoned poppet inhaling and breasting once more the clear unshackled ether remembers and resumes its true nature. But we must understand that Sparkenbroke's "death" is not the common failure of pulse and the dropping of lifeless limbs. The very fact that he considers the height of poetry to be analogous to death gives us a clue to his mysticism. Death is a condition of trance: it occurs even while one is living, though its completeness arrives only when physical dissolution leaves the soul entirely free to plunge into the Unknown. It has for Sparkenbroke a connotation similar to what it has for innumerable Indian Yogis awaiting through a life of spiritual ecstasy the hour of the

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supreme liberation, the Mahasamadhi of utter escape from the body.

As for the pursuit of woman, it seems at the first blush inconsistent with this high transcendentalism; and I am afraid Sparkenbroke does not make it anywhere quite clear how exactly the act of love shines in his imagination. In the girl Mary he discovers a beauty which appears to absolve and renew him, as he himself puts it; it is a beauty which strips him of bondage and sets him breathing a freer air; it is not merely his mind which is thus quickened, even his body feels elevated - and it feels so because the love he has is not mainly sensual. For the first time, the body is not the important thing: he has been a fool and tried to get the acme of self-extension in the mere physical desire-loosening orgasm of coitus. He had never found it and, thinking that some person at last would make all the difference in the world, he had drifted from trial to trial until his name had become a byword for libertinage. And surely a libertine he was, but not that alone: he was a libertine because he had failed to be what he was aspiring after: it was not shameless libertinage he was seeking, but, since he could not find the Ideal through the first woman he had lain with, he went from one to another and so through a whole series of fruitless affairs. The orgy of lust, the frenzied entwining of limbs - this was not sufficient to open the doors of self upon vistas of wonder, this could not be the fulfilment of a Sparkenbroke's hunger. Never did he feel with the woman by his side a consuming contact of the Ideal. He knew bitterly in his heart that he had merely cohabited with ordinary human beings and not fused his senses and his mind with a channel of some transcendental beauty. When, however, he awakens to the miracle that is Mary he realises that till now he had but read the verse of human form and now alone has he touched embodied poetry.

The act of love with her, he imagines, would dissolve his petty ego and give him the measureless peace that comes from the disappearance of the imperfect and fragmentary

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hours that make up normal life. She would be the tree of death into which his soul would fly and feel a bird again, a denizen of eternity's blue. But somehow the physical act is never consummated: they come to the verge of it without taking the plunge. The hand of circumstance is not the only factor to be considered in understanding why the plunge is never taken; a finer force stays them, as if the bodily union were not the centre of love's fulfilment. Perhaps there was some deep intuition at work behind the plot of the story, an intuition that sex could never bring the transcendental rapture that was drawing Sparkenbroke through the burning labyrinths of his life. Indian wisdom has from the beginning warned mystics against the delusions of sex, not just against its most external manifestation but even against the subtle weavings of inner desire. Sparkenbroke, of course, has no notion of this wisdom and so he follows the blind alley, with the one saving grace that while loving Mary he abstains instinctively from the extremity of actual coitus. We do not quite regret the blind alley; for that futile search is closely connected with all the other motifs in the book - and the result is unforgettable descriptions of the workings of a poet's mind, a story beautiful with a profound chiaroscuro of character and written in a style which, whether puissant or delicate, displays a creative felicity. A book that will live because it helps us die in the Sparkenbroke sense!

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Yeats and Shaw

Yeats once wrote to Dorothy Wellesley: "Shaw has written a long, rambling, vegetarian, sexless letter, disturbed by my causing 'bad blood' between the nations."

It is curious to find any act of the most efficient fighter of our day described thus. The very efficiency of Shaw's fighting seems to have misled Yeats. Measured against Shaw, Yeats on the war-path can be nothing but frustrated rage, a weakling with a sword in his hand but unable to wield it; he can only scowl and spit. Shaw is like a fencing expert, parrying blows and dealing death-wounds with such smooth ease, such effortlessness, such absence of violent waste that he appears to many eyes "vegetarian" and "sexless". But you have just to look around and you will see the corpses mounting up. It is also a certain intellectual impersonality in Shaw, a freedom from pseudo-romantic fog, that creates that impression and hides from Yeats the clean supple strength. Shaw may not strike out of sheer feeling; he lifts everything to the cerebral plane - above mere meat and sex, so to speak - but that does not make his activity anaemic and impotent. He sublimates his elemental nature into idea-force: that is all. The force is superb and intense - only, it issues through the channel of thought.

"Long" and "rambling" are another pair of inapt and superficial adjectives. If Shaw is "long", it is because he is both inexhaustible and many-angered - he has much to fight and plenty of energy to go on fighting. "Rambling" is a misobservation of his intellectual fecundity: he has everywhere the fencing-expert's skill that never fails to touch the right spot, but he has a multiplicity of strokes and a delight in complex movements and gestures - leaping here, prancing there, driving at the midriff, thrusting at the heart, sticking into the jugular. He loves to play with his opponents in an intricate all-wounding manner; he does not want merely to kill, he wants also to expose on as many sides as possible the

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rottenness of which his opponents are composed; he "rambles" over their whole bodies and attacks them from every quarter and with his entire repertory of strokes either fiercely pointed or furiously sweeping.

And then there is the laughter running through each rapier-flash. Such confidence is Shaw's that he pokes fun with his deadly jabs and cuts capers while slashing at people's follies. The caper-cutting has another aspect too: he acts a bit of a clown while making his antagonists look fools, because he wishes to relieve the duel of overgrimness on either side and to save himself from pompous pretentiousness and the pride that may render him forgetful of his own humanity.

Yeats makes no mention of this double-edged humour. Just as he missed the Shavian idea-force and ingenious gusto, I suppose he would have dubbed the Shavian laughter lack of seriousness.

Yeats's "blind spot" towards Shaw is regrettable. However, we must not conclude he has less valuable things to give us than Shaw. The two men are different and bring us different treasures. Shaw is the analyst mind and the ironic spirit taking art as their instrument; Yeats the mind of insight and the spirit of aristocracy, fused with the artist. Yeats is certainly more artistic and has in his work a closer touch with "inner" realities. Shaw does not know these realities intimately even when he champions some mode of them like the Life Force as conceived by him, a vast urge in the world to attain through trial and error a deific consciousness. The occult, the visionary, the hierophantic are not truly his domain: he can probe them but without getting to their heart, for to get to their heart one needs a glowing intuitive faculty plucking words out of one's depths and not just a sharp intellect with a gift for imaginative rhetoric. Yeats in his own sphere cannot be equalled by Shaw: there is much more food for our souls in a few "Celtic" or else "Byzantine" poems of Yeats's than in all the forceful argumentation set to drama in Man and Superman or Back to Methuselah. The same

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holds good between Yeats's essays and Shaw's prefaces.

But when Yeats impinges on the field of the intellect, with its demand for an argus-eyed acuteness, he must suffer by comparison with the Shavian genius. Political science, whether concerned with national or international affairs, is not, generally speaking, a poet's metier, what though the poet may have passed from reveries and wizardries to "passionate masterful personality". The early Yeats was a rapt whisperer of enchantments, the later Yeats a man of intense will dabbling in ideas and handling many matters besides soul-secrets. Still, "passionate masterful personality", go as it may through a noticeable thought-process, does not tend to a satisfying play of the intellect proper if made the keynote not merely of poetry where it is quite in place but also of all the departments of one's life. It leads to a marked self-grooved condition, not caring to enter into the skins of those who hold a vision dissimilar to one's own; it encourages neither an open mind nor a real detachment -states that are requisite for genuine intellectual activity.

Shaw too is full of personal penchants: he nonetheless works them out like a logician, capable of seeing all the points of his antagonists and therefore capable of refuting them if they are weak or readjusting his own case to make it more strong: Yeats's temper as well as method is unShavian: even outside poetry he feels like a pontiff and the reasons he brings forth have an air as of revelation, a tincture of poetry, but he is mostly blind to the merits or demerits of a case from the standpoint of the pure intellect which has to preserve a calm dispassionate centre amidst the whirl of personality. A certain intolerant heat and a leaning towards Fascism were characteristic of Yeats in old age. The latter came from a confusion of Fascism with aristocracy and the superman's strength, the former from that strain in him which developed as a reaction against his early dreaminess and which insisted on the "vigour of blood" and even made him ribald in his last writings. Shaw does not lack zest and energy but they are more of the nerves than of the blood and his penetrating

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intellect is lord over them. He seems to Yeats bloodless and to be insufficiently gripping the stuff of the world. The impression is not false if Shaw's dramatic characters are put by, say, Shakespeare's: it is wrong if meant to charge him everywhere with defective force and dispersed light. Shaw is one of the greatest breakers of Victorian hypocrisy and sentimentality: the nineteenth century's citadel of sham received the strongest, most vital blows from Shaw; its unhealthy air was made bright and clean most by the laughing and penetrating Shavian sunshine. Shaw gets indeed dwarfed by Yeats when that poet is profound and mystical, but on the planes of politics and sociology and moral convention as well as of the critical intellect in general it is Yeats who becomes the pigmy - wholly unconvincing when he denies edge and elan to G. B. S. on his own grounds and pronounces him a long-winded bore or an empty meanderer.

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Sight and Insight

TWO WORKINGS OF THE POET'S EYE

To write poetry one must go with one's subject into one's heart and imagination and identify it with them so that what one expresses of it may come out intimately vibrant and visible. But one can express either the surface of one's subject or the depth of it, create either an outward glory or an inward splendour.

The Eagles of Robinson Jeffers and D. H. Lawrence

All poetry is an inward way of speaking: still, it may not always speak of the inward stuff of its subject. And this in spite of the subject being what is called "subjective": for instance, a statement about love may provide us with the delicacy or power of that emotion without penetrating these aspects and getting, however passingly, at secret sources and hidden nuances. Similarly, an objective theme - a scene, situation, inanimate thing or living creature - may be treated. Even then the poetry can be indeed great, as in that picture by an American writer, Robinson Jeffers:

An eagle

Was perched on the jag of a burnt pine,

Insolent and gorged, clothed in the folded storms of his

shoulders.

And yet something in us remains unsatisfied: we miss profound significances. When they are supplied us, we feel that the greatest poetry is created, as in D. H. Lawrence's apostrophe to the eagle of New Mexico:

Sun-breaster,

Staring two ways at once, to right and left;

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Masked one

Dark-visaged

Sickle-masked

With iron between your two eyes;

You feather-gloved

To the feet;

Foot-fierce;

Erect one;

The God-thrust entering you steadily from below,

You never look at the sun with your two eyes.

Only the inner eye of your scorched broad breast

Looks straight at the sun.

Here we have a seeing that captures most intensely the psychology of the bird. Robinson Jeffers did not go beyond an audacious intensity of "gross" description - with some suggestive strokes pointing to the "subtle" but without the direct revelatory keenness with which Lawrence plucked the aquiline soul through the aquiline body.

Prof. Dhingra's Day and Night

Vision that is insight and not mere sight - there is the ideal formula, provided of course genuine feeling is present to bring the insight home to our pulses. In view of this formula I am set questioning whether a poem I read recently of Professor Baldoon Dhingra's fulfils wholly the promise it holds forth in four stanzas out of its five. It is an excellent piece of work, the words warm and felicitous, the rhythm appropriately supporting the sense - everything truly poetic with the activity of the heart and imagination. It is called Day and Night:

Day is a golden grain of corn

Which the sun sows:

Night is the crow that eats the corn

Before it grows.

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Around, around that field the world

Ever the crow

Follows the sower as he walks

Still to and fro.

O look behind you, sun, to see

Who follows black -

Ironic and laconic - on

Your patient track.

He will not turn, he will not see -

Or does not care;

Ever he flings his seeds to be

Night's golden fare.

And if some day the sun should tire,

With dark wings furled

The crow of night would pause and perch

Upon the world.

When undeniable beauty and power of sight confront us, it may seem cantankerous to suggest that the concluding four lines merely pack up the poem in an impressive manner instead of impressively completing it. The sower's rich generosity and persistence, the crow's sinister pursuit and attack appear to lead us on to some disclosure of the depth of their continual drama. A phrase like "Your patient track", in a poem whose style is simple yet pregnant, hints some secret purpose the sun may be waiting to accomplish and not only a good-natured tolerance or a quiet endurance. The fourth stanza is a wondering if the sun is deliberately not stopping the night-crow from spoiling his work or just being careless with a mechanical bounty. A living interest is shown in the riddle - but the conclusion has only a memorable surface vision accompanied by effective sound, rather than any "pointer" to a possible solution. No doubt, the tone and turn of what has preceded it do not allow of a definite answer -

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nothing except a probability of intention can be conjured up. But I feel that some probability or other of intention must be offered us and not simply the supposition, however vividly presented, that if the sun should get weary, night would be triumphant. The contrary supposition - namely, that if the crow should give up following the sun there would be a victory of day - might just as well have been stated. Why did Professor Dhingra choose the former? Is there any vital inevitability about it? He seems to have preferred a dark supposition to a bright one - the ominous design seems to have appealed to his fancy more than the happy pattern. But his inspired whim, so to speak, does not carry with it a touch of inward finality. If I were he, the last stanza would run:

Perhaps he dreams the luminous corn

Eaten by night

Will make at last the sable flesh

Break into light.

A Liberty with Keats

To attempt correcting a poet is a "ticklish" job. Often, while one may get a more meaningful rounding-off one cannot be sure that one has kept an equal amount of poetry. But I am in a somewhat reckless mood and from this adventure I will pass to a more dangerous liberty - a slight modification in a passage that has become famous. I refer to the grand finale of Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn:

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.

Critics have noted that the entire concluding phrase after the

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closing quotation-marks sticks out with a personal didactic vehemence. Such a quivering and thrusting after-thought is considered by some of them inartistic. In my opinion, it is not inartistic so much as artistic in a violent fashion - violent because of the use of the word "ye". That word is abrupt and is brought in unprepared without any overpowering necessity. If Keats was desirous of shaping a statement and lesson that should break out of the closed contemplative world he had built around the Urn, why did he not say "we" instead of "ye"? That would have been more in tune with the turn of his language in this very stanza where he had already the first-person plural pronoun:

Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity.

as well as:

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man.

The "us" and the "ours" introduce an element outside the Urn and the reverie it evokes, but theirs is a natural function: they generalise the observing consciousness, they make humanity co-witness with the poet - and if there were "we" in the last line it would continue that element and serve the essence of Keats's purpose of special direct and didactic emphasis on the Urn's message, without a sudden shooting off at a tangent of pronoun and bringing in a certain uncontrolled note.

Does the poetic effect really get less? I doubt it. If it does, I have another emendment up my sleeve to retain "ye" and yet avoid its hurried sharpness: we must shift the closing quotes to the very end of the stanza, so that the two "ye"s would connote man, to whom the Urn addresses its message. The argument that "man" is singular and "ye" plural has little weight. We are inclined to believe that "you" is

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singular as well as plural, while "ye" is plural only: but were not both of them originally plural and interchangeable while the singular was "thou"? When "you" began to be employed in the singular, "ye" also became applicable in the same sense though it was more common in the plural. Even today it substitutes the singular "you" in familiar phrases like: How d'ye do? What d'ye think? Thank ye, I tell ye. If Keats himself had put the closing quotes where I have, his semi-Spenserian proclivities would have prevented him from saying "you": it would have been too prosaic for his taste. He would certainly have liked to say "thou", but that would have started quite a confusion since he had already faced the Urn with "thou". So the sole alternative for him would have been "ye".

It can be averred that Keats omitted to use "we" or else to change the place of the closing quotes, because he exercised only sight, he perceived the outside, as it were, of the inspired call he had heard to lay an emphasis and impart a lesson; he did not quicken with insight, a perceiving of the inner conditions of that call, the subtle as distinguished from the gross harmony to be expressed.

A Puzzle in Yeats

This perhaps may look a somewhat strained application of the difference between sight and insight. But a general application of that difference should cover various cases -verbal and technical - where suggestions are followed which, though inspired enough, do not arise from levels below the immediately realisable. Sometimes, however, a puzzle is set us - we are unable easily to determine what is true insight verbally and technically. Thus in a poem of his early "dreamy" period Yeats had written:

Then slowly answered he whose hand held hers.

Later he corrected the line:

Then slowly he whose hand held hers replied.

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Here more appears to be done than to avoid an inversion: the sense of a slow answer seems enforced by delaying the word "replied" as much as possible. Our first impression is of insight replacing sight. Yes, our first impression and not our final one. For a little thought should make us ask: Is not "replied" the wrong kind of word at the end of a line in a dreamy context? Has it not, where it stands, a clinching sound of a somewhat lively matter-of-factness? It has no sufficient subtle in-tone of wistful feeling and sense of graduality. The first version of the line did not have in word-arrangement a very apparent sense of a slow response, yet it did have a word - namely, "answered" - which itself has not only the necessary in-tome but also a slower movement than "replied". Besides, the inversion adds by its delicate delaying of "he" a further touch of suspense. Yeats's seeming change from sight to insight in the second version is therefore a deceptive phenomenon: real insight is in what he originally wrote.

Three Poets on Death

Reverting to the straightforward shade given to the terms "sight" and "insight" at the beginning of this causerie, let me wind up by quoting again the poet I commenced with -Robinson Jeffers. I shall put a passage by him side by side with one from Swinburne and another from Spenser. In a well-known poem Swinburne asks us to be thankful

That no man lives for ever,

That dead men rise up never,

And even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.

The verses are fine sight - with a faint attempt in the last line at probing by the word "safe" the subject of death's desirability. Take now Spenser's picture of Despair tempting man to self-destruction by the subtle lure of peace:

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He there does now enjoy eternall rest

And happie ease, which thou doest want and crave,

And further from it daily wanderest:

What if some little paine the passage have,

That makes fraile flesh to feare the bitter wave?

Is not short paine well borne, that brings long ease,

And layes the soule to sleepe in quiet grave?

Sleep after toyle, port after stormic seas,

Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.

Here is sight passing into insight - a little in the first three lines, considerably in the remainder. Exquisiteness of image and melody is at its acme in conveying to us the strange deathward feeling that exists in us as a sort of natural opposite or complement to our desire for more and more life and through that feeling some tranquil beatitude which is immortally alive is "insighted" in an indirect yet haunting manner. A similar revelation is wafted to us, as it were, on the breath of the yearning for cessation and repose in Robinson Jeffers' poem Night:

O passionately at peace when will the tide draw

shoreward?

Truly the spouting fountains of light, Antares, Arcturus,

Tire of their flow, they sing one song but they think

of silence.

The striding winter giant Orion shines, and dreams

darkness.

And life, the flicker of men and moths and the wolf on

the hill.

Though furious for continuance, passionately feeding,

passionately

Remaking itself upon its mates remembers deep inward

The calm mother, the quietness of the womb and the egg,

The primal and the latter silences: dear Night it is memory

Prophesies, prophecy that remembers the charm of

the dark.

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And I and my people, we are willing to love the

four-score years

Heartily: but as a sailor loves the sea, when the helm is

for harbour.

This is grand, with a sweep of imagery to which the varied American continent and the Pacific coast where the poet lives make suggestive contributions. A wider and more complex mind than Spenser's is at work, and though the Spenserian poetry is not less perfect in picture and cadence and its insight is essentially the same, our response now is more mysterious and churned out of depths more distant. The intuition of some immortal tranquillity and beatitude invades us still indirectly through the deathward feeling: but the vast theme of Night touches it to what I may call a more Nirvanic issue while the expressions at the end of the seventh line and in the whole of the eighth and at the opening of the ninth give a more transcendental sense to death's withdrawal of us from world-activity. Just one step further and we should be in the midst of an insight into the mahasamadhi spoken of by ancient spiritual India - the flight at last and for ever into an Eternity motionless and featureless by the soul that has liberated itself through Yoga from attachment to earthly things. The final step is not taken of visioning the Vedantic or Buddhist "primal and latter silences": short of it the poet treats his subject with masterly imaginative penetration.

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"That Vulgar Squashy Word"

It was the word "loveliness" recurring in a book of poems by Yeats that drew from a modernist reviewer this sneering phrase. To talk of loveliness seemed a sign of utter "low brow", a display of backboneless gush. We must be cerebral, cynical, psychoanalytic: we must not run after outmoded things like beauty. Ingenuity and scepticism and an itch in the genitals mark the truly advanced mind. Of course, vulgar and squashy things still interest people, but these people are relics of a regrettable past and stand pretty near the bottom in the modernist scale. The developed intelligence is bored by idealism, the search for a divine spirit shining through vestures of decay strikes it as fatuous, romantic reveries are to it a camouflage for the sexual appetite.

I dare say we have had too much misty idealism, and desire of the moth for the star, and delicate dreaming of the beloved. I can appreciate the point of the story in which a young man on a ship's deck at night tells the strange girl next to him, "Look at the elusive dance of moonbeams on the water at the horizon" and the girl shuts him up with "Oh chuck it! My cabin number is 26." I can sympathise with the chap who rebelled against the cloying consolations offered him on his mother's death and blurted out: "Stop all this gabble of my mother passing on and passing over and going before; mother did none of these things: she just died." I can congratulate Douglas Goldring on his mockery of Ethel Manin when once she slipped into writing treacly stuff about beauty in a popular magazine: great artists do not prate in a sissified voice about beauty, they sturdily create it in obedience to some master-urge within that keeps a visionary fire burning in their hearts and minds in the midst of common, frivolous and even indecorous talking and living.

But when a Spenser, a Shelley, a Keats, a Morris or a Yeats speaks of loveliness, we cannot dismiss it as a vulgar and squashy word. They mean something that is neither

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facile nor cheap, weak nor watery. They are not avoiding clear and keen thought, they are not letting themselves go soft and wet all over. It is their clearest and keenest thinking that leads them to perceive a perfection behind all phenomenal forms and breaking through these forms to the mind's eye. It is their disciplined and uncorrupted heart that feels the ecstatic touch of a light beyond the least fault or fading. To discover loveliness and transmit the marvel of the discovery - either by directly speaking of it in profound tones or by presenting a concrete revelation of the lovely - this may be called the one and sole function of the artist. All supreme artists have declared loveliness to be a reality and a reality distinct from the vulgar and squashy. Homer did it when he made Helen come to the battlements of Troy and walk before the elders who had just been bitterly bewailing the loss of so much life for a mere woman. As soon as they caught sight of the daughter of Leda, they forgot their lamentation and slapped their thin thighs and cried out that it was surely worth the travail and the carnage. There was here no mawkish sentimentalism nor camouflaged sex: it was an immediate vision of the Perfect irradiating the mortal. And when the early Yeats spoke of seeing

In all poor broken things that live a day

Eternal Beauty wandering on her way

and the later Yeats, in spite of forsaking Celtic wizardries and incantations and taking to athletic hardness of thought and style, could still bring in the old and much-used word "loveliness" with all its half-romantic half-mystic associations, he exhibited no shopgirl sloppiness spreading a pseudo-holy haze around a purely animal hunger. He meant a glorious presence which the deep heart and the subtle mind could not help recognising, no matter what might be said by a clever and blase reviewer with Herr Freud's theory sitting like an incubus on the top of his "high brow".

The modernist critic, objecting to Yeats's "loveliness",

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registered a malady which is peculiar to our age and which may be called deliberate absorption in infra-vitality. Such absorption disdains, on the one hand, all uplook to an Ideal and, on the other, all proportion and harmony. It must be distinguished from the cast of mind created by vitality pure and simple. Vitality is not totally crude - it has a groping nisus towards greater and greater intensity of consciousness and it has an urge towards shapeliness and symmetry, though the symmetry and shapeliness it achieves are not always illuminated but are often "dreadful" like the tiger's as visioned in Blake's poem. What is really crude is infra-vitality -the chaotic impulses and influences that surge from the Freudian "unconscious" below the observable life-manifestations. It is these impulses and influences that the modernist is preoccupied with. Not that he gets wholly submerged in it; he does not give up the intellect - no, he has an intellect sharp enough, but it is not synthetic and constructive; it just analyses and aggregates and it is bent all the time on examining and enjoying the processes of infra-vitality instead of intensifying with an idealistic trend the vague uplook of the life-force and instead of straining towards some super-mind as well as super-life in which all things half-formed, distorted, jumbled here find their fulfilment and archetype, their flawless proportion and concord. It subserves in diverse ways the call of amorphous excitement - not indeed amorphous in the sense that there are no concrete points to fix upon but in the sense that these points are not so organised as to produce any significant and luminous pattern.

Now, amorphous excitement, no matter if accompanied by the analytic intellect, cannot yield art of any value. Art does have overtones and undertones, haloes and penumbras -in short, mysterious and immeasurable suggestions beyond what is actually said. But it is not amorphous: there is a crystallised centre radiating definite meaning, though the lines of clear light may go dimming and fading into infinity. The mysterious and the immeasurable surround something that can be seized as a design of emotion and imagination as

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well as of word and rhythm. And there is also that quality, of being felt as a whole, which the Greeks considered the sine qua non of art. No work of art can be haphazard, inconclusive, issueless. The modernist is not content to break the old metrical form and set up in its Stead a jarring free verse without any basic unity of subtly recurrent rhythm. He wallows in discords of substance on top of discords of form. Nor do these discords consist of sublime or exquisite fragments of emotion and imagination thrown helter-skelter into a jagged heap. The details that make up the chaotic ensemble are themselves mostly caught from the chaos of the infra-vital and come as disgusting grotesques: they drip with obscenities, they exude suggestions of psychological and physical slime. When they are not chunks of shapeless sensation or of vague velleity and disintegrated glimpses piled together, they are bits of misshapen clarity accumulated into an elaborate confusion. Then their main feature is an intentional mingling of bathos and dirt. The grandeur of spirit which distinguishes the older poetry is replaced by an insistent pettiness and oddity, the beauty of vision which past poets sought gives way to a clever delight in the debased or the diseased. Thus "the multidinous seas" of Shakespeare are said to "yap like a Pekinese". "Epileptic larks", extremely unShelleyan, fill the sky. And the nightingales which, from Greek times onward, have inspired singers to their most sensitive apprehension of the strange magic that is mixed with common clay, exhibit to the eye of the modernist poet no mystery beyond their "droppings".

Associated with the turning away from all things "rich and strange" is the purposive fall in quality of language. The term "loveliness" is representative of a whole series of terms which have been known as poetic. The modernist hears in such terms a facile falsetto - a refusal to use language with individual freshness, a slipping into empty decoration. He is not quite wrong from a certain standpoint: his revolt is justified if made against a limited hothouse vocabulary brought forth again and again. Great poets have never let

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themselves be ruled by a finicky elegance. Not only the artificial diction which was in vogue during the eighteenth century in England but also the rainbow-tinted phraseology which had no room for common turns is regarded by the great poet as an enemy of the genuine inspired style. The modernist would be on the right track if he shared this attitude: he, however, runs to the other extreme and would have nothing rainbow-tinted, nothing even touched with any splendour or delicacy. Everything must be to him of the earth earthy if not of the muck mucky and everything must be free of turns suggestive of the sublime or the exquisite. There must be no wingedness in the words, no gleam on them from sun or moon or star. What a silly old ranter Shakespeare seems to him when he makes Antony declare to Cleopatra about their days of love:

Eternity was in our lips and eyes,

Bliss in our brows' bent, none our parts so poor

But was a race of heaven.

It is not just the mood that is idiotic here for the modernist: the way of speech is so unreal and fantastically high-faluting. How much more truth-gripping and home-reaching both in mood and manner are lines like:

Nero and his sycophants

Are violating their uncles and aunts.

Of course all modernist poetry does not disdain the winged word, nor is its penchant for ordinary locutions invariably a path to the vapid and the passionless or else the feverish and the disjointed. There is an affinity in certain quarters to the style of the seventeenth-century metaphysicals - a complexity of what Eliot calls sensuous thought: the poet feels his curious thought instead of lumping it upon feeling, his idea and his image are one vital intricacy, as in Hume's

The old star-eaten blanket of the sky

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or in Auden's

Soon through the dykes of our content

The crumpling flood will force a rent

or in MacNeice's

The little sardine men crammed in a monster toy

Who tilt their aggregate beast against our crumbling Troy.

These are instances of a cleverness that is not cold and barren, a speech that reflects an amalgamation of different modes of experiencing and therefore employs common and even colloquial terms as an integral and living part of its message. But here our own time is not rebelling against anything truly poetic: it is merely adapting to itself a style which is no less poetic for not being purple and which has had a creative past not in the seventeenth century alone but also among the Elizabethans and on rare occasions in so solemn and majestic a bard as Milton, not to mention the more lyrical Blake and the more dramatic Browning. This style is perfectly defensible so long as it does not put on exclusive airs and parade as the sole poetic medium or, worse still, the highest. It would scarcely merit castigation as a lifeless sham. Nor does it lie exposed to the charge of shutting out words instinct with the delicate or the splendid: it has no prejudice against the Yeatsian cry. In fact, Yeats himself is a practitioner of it in portions of his later period. The real foe to be fought is the manner of the analytic infra-vitalist who, with his curious mixture of the "highbrow" and the spasmodic "Unconscious", pretends to write poetry while pushing away in experience as well as utterance the very source and stuff of poetic inspiration: loveliness.

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Great Meanings

There is the famous case of the examinee who on being asked to paraphrase the well-known words from Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn -

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter -

wrote: "It is nice to listen to music, but much nicer not to." We may be inclined to laugh at the ingenious fool. Do we, however, understand Keats rightly? Most of those who have not read his poem think he meant that new and unfamiliar tunes are more enjoyable than the ones to which we have been accustomed. In fact, this is not at all what he had in mind. He was talking of the carved figures on an ancient vase used for storing the ashes of the dead: some of these figures were shown as playing on pipes, and Keats began to imagine what airs must have been played. Since the figures were in stone, those airs could never be heard, and their being unheard stimulated his mind to an imaginative delight which surpassed all experience of actually hearing melodies. What is supremely sweet, according to the poet, is that which a subsequent line mentions: "the ditties of no tone" which are piped not to "the sensual ear" but to "the spirit". In general, the pleasures of the outer senses are declared to be far less intense, far less valuable than those of the inner world of creative dream.

Even without the context, a little brooding on the Keats-ian phrase can give us a clue to its delicately deep significance. But with the majority the absence of the context is likely to diminish the exact bearing. Quite otherwise does such an absence act in the instance of Shakespeare's

One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin.

Held by itself, this line has passed into a proverb and has

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served numberless occasions. Shakespeare, however, had no general application in view nor even the particular shade it carries on the lips of his lay admirers. Students of his work know that he did not mean any quality which wins all hearts and brings together widely differing minds by being natural or spontaneous in the midst of artificialities and affectations: he was just referring, as can be gathered by considering the entire context, to a peculiarity common to all mankind, a special trait found everywhere and at all times - namely, the liking for things which have a novel modern glittering appearance:

One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin -

That all, with one consent, praise new-born gauds,

Though they are made and moulded of things past;

And give to dust that is a little gilt

More laud than gilt o'er dusted.

The present eye praises the present object.

Instead of connoting some lovely gesture expressive of the unspoilt side of human beings, the poet was putting his finger on an almost superficial tendency in most persons. This does not in the least mar his poetry: what he wants to say he says in a masterly fashion, the usual Shakespearean felicity and force are there, but the sense is felt by us to be not so precious as that which we misread by taking the line in vacuo.

Sometimes the popular interpretation, though inaccurate, is not inferior to the poet's original drift. Dante's Divina Commedia closes with the line:

L'amor che muove il sole e l'altre stelle,

which may be Englished:

The love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Christendom has been haunted for centuries by this grand

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finale to its greatest poem and, as a rule, understood it to imply God's universal dynamic harmonising love by which the whole creation is kept going. Christ's insistence on God being love has made us believe that a poet like Dante who lived when Christianity was at its peak of power in men's lives could not have intended anything else. Yet Dante did not consciously lend his line the precise shade we see in it. Medieval theology a la St. Thomas Aquinas was coloured by Aristotle's philosophical outlook. Steeped in that theology and giving it glorious poetic form, Dante has here a hint about Aristotle's solution of the problem of how the cosmos is related to God. Aristotle regards God as eternal and immutable, the Arch-perfection that simply IS, the changeless Being beyond motion and relation: how then is the cosmos set moving? In a short pregnant sentence the Greek philosopher suggests the way: "Like one beloved, God moves the cosmos." In other words, without Himself moving or having any relation with the cosmos God is the cause of the latter's movement because the latter cannot help loving an object so perfect as God and, by its love, is set a-stir to its mighty periodic rhythms. Of course there are difficulties in the Aristotelian position and the deity of St. Aquinas's system is not altogether conceived after the Greek thinker, but the inspiring and subtle idea that the spheres were driven by a love-urge for the Divine remained and shaped that verse of Dante's:

The great Florentine's phrase has kindled in a recent poet a vision unlike both the original and the one commonly supposed to be there by the mass of Christians. The mystic nuance has receded and its place is taken by a humanistic-cwm-scientific shade. Sir John Squire, influenced by Dante's picture of heavenly bodies touched to activity by love, has created another in which he has fused the concept of gravitational attraction among them with that of powerful fellow-feeling such as would constitute and keep going a happy peaceful orderly society. Indeed a splendid burst are his lines:

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Divine magnificent spirit of man that will face

Invincible ever the battle with hopeless odds

And cannot but dream ere he falls of a time and a race,

Of a day when the world of man maturer grown

Will live without law in perfect wisdom and grace,

Like the solar system hanging in awful space,

Its parts sustained serenely by love alone.

The simile of the last two lines is couched in terms of a simple grandeur that make a rare poetic climax - there is a true Dantesque transfiguration of ordinary words and natural rhythms - the vowels repeat or vary with large solemn suggestions, the consonants bear amid their diversity significant echoes the most telling of which is the drawn-out sibilance with its far-flowing, wide-spreading, deep-hushing effect. Dante's afflatus has not been shamed by the change of sense and attitude it has undergone in Sir John Squire's modernised version of its medieval burden.

Perhaps the most exquisite deepening of shade a line has acquired by being separated from its companions is our interpretation of Virgil's

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

No poet, since the Aeneid was written two thousand years ago, but has felt in his heart and soul the beautifully poignant appeal of these words. Again and again the same cry has been let forth by others - yet never with the piercing perfection of the Virgilian phrase. Wordsworth with "The still sad music of humanity" and Wilfred Gibson with "The heartbreak at the heart of things" try to catch the Roman poet's majestic pathos - and fall short despite their fine accents by a world of difference. Virgil has a magical brevity of suggestion in his first three words and the whole line has an unaffected strength and nobility: Wordsworth with his two adjectives seems to make a slight effort, Gibson is endeavouring to impress by his repetition of the word "heart",

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while Virgil is profound without forcing his language in the least - and his rhythm is an unsurpassable aid of sound to the sense. No translation of the line into English can catch all its inner impact. Word for word, we shall have:

There are tears of things and all that is mortal

touches the heart.

An inadequate substitute on the whole - but the phrase "tears of things" is by itself flawless in summing up the fact of a fundamental sorrowfulness in the stuff of earthly life. Wherever the English language is spoken, men think of the Virgilian "tears of things" and regard that small snatch of poetic speech as the truest and loveliest bit of insight into the core of our perishable world. So it would surprise most people to learn that when taken together with the full context the Latin for that snatch loses the absolute of its wonderful significance in all English renderings I have come across. Virgil is relating how his hero Aeneas and the faithful friend Achates, after suffering shipwreck, arrive on the African shore and wander up to a temple and chance upon a frieze of engravings in which scenes of the tale of Troy are depicted. Aeneas is greatly moved by this discovery and raises a moan in which not a single English translator of Virgil from Dryden down to our day has introduced the "tears of things". When we study the original we cannot help seeing that the "of" in that phrase can have another sense in its Latin form than the possessive: it can be equivalent to "for". Often in Virgil this sense is to be found - at least once again with the very word "lachrymae". And the present context has been taken to simply demand it. The passage, if we English it in toto, is supposed to run: "What land, Achates, what region in the world is not full of our travail? Lo, Priam! Here too there are rewards for excellence, there are tears for things and what is mortal touches the heart." Evidently, if "for" substitutes "of", the meaning the world has so far put into Virgil's line evaporates. Even with "of", unless we pull the line apart from

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its companions, the great meaning is not unavoidable. The universally applicable philosophy of it is not quite gone, but the dominant note is an intense emotion applied to a particular incident with just an undertone of general reference, and even that reference has not the sudden and deep magic, the revelatory grip the line acquires when isolated.

It is difficult, though, to believe that a hyper-conscious artist like Virgil was unaware of the extra depth and felicity his line could show if presented in its own separate right and if understood with "of" rather than "for". He had the unique gift of hiding in sentences bound up with their own context a general and universal revelation. Describing, for instance, the ghosts of men whose bodies have had no burial, he speaks of their miserable agelong waiting and longing before being ferried across the underworld river Acheron to the place of blind rest:

Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.

A line of extreme poignancy, this, - meaning (in Flecker's version)

They stretched their hands for love of the other shore.

Detached from its context it expresses the whole of human hunger through the centuries, the agonised desire for what is always beyond, what is ever inaccessible. The selfsame cry that comes to us from the verse about the "tears of things" meets us here once more: it is the typical Virgilian sadness. Though infused into particular incidents or situations the cry carries in Virgil an all-pervading tone, and as if to render it universal he gives it to us in complete lines standing like detachable poetic embodiments of a philosophical vision. The line about "lachrymae rerum" is not only complete and detachable: it is also free from any obvious links of syntax with those that precede and follow. Virgil the master-craftsman who brooded and chiselled endlessly could not

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have been oblivious of the marvel that would happen as soon as the pickers and cullers of poetry got busy.

Yes, I am sure Virgil knew his own possibilities. But not all poets do. For, they are not always open-eyed critics of themselves. Often their best work is valued by them below the really good. Poetry comes from behind and above the wakeful brain: what even the deliberate artists do is no more than break down laboriously the obstacles between the inner and the outer to afford the ultra-mental magic and mystery a clear passage undisturbed by the brain's abstract and prosaic tendencies. Even these artists - and much more those who write with rushing fluency because the intervening passage is already uncluttered - channel out utterances they do not wholly plumb. At times, in the middle of a secular pronouncement a strange sacred accent begins to ring; on other occasions, thoughts are voiced which find their full cogency in the light of years yet to be. The poetic afflatus, though operating through persons and periods, is bigger than they, and not seldom the inspirations of several hidden planes pour together. The hunt for meaning, therefore, is made a many-sided adventure and a plastic standard of understanding and judgment is introduced. This is as it should be: poetry, for all the finite matter it may hold in its embrace, is a seer of the infinite - bringing, directly or obliquely, with richness or reticence, the concrete yet boundless touch

that lends

A yonder to all ends.

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Literary Leaps

I have been busy the last half hour at the game of turning the pages of a bookseller's catalogue and letting the titles serve my mind as leaping-boards. Some have landed me in memories, others in speculations. Here is an announcement that Dostoievsky is being republished in a uniform edition. The first two novels brought out are Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazhov. How well I remember reading the former! Night after night I read it, just before dropping asleep, and its picture of a murderer's mind was so overwhelmingly vivid that I would get a most uneasy sensation of being myself the culprit. As a rule, the villain of a story is not the chief character: in Crime and Punishment the villain is the hero and dominates the story so that the reader's conscious-ness is helpless under his spell. The reader always tends to get identified with the hero of a tale - the most thrilling enjoyment of a book derives from this strange temporary blending of characters. And when a genius of almost occult comprehension and intensity like Feodor Dostoievsky depicts a villain-hero, the result is almost "possession" in the case of the reader. Yes, what a genius! - I have seldom come across a more gripping narrative. The sense of form on the whole is not perfect, but the semi-chaos which Dostoievsky creates is so full of astounding harmonies of terribly poignant, dreadfully pathetic, darkly splendid soul-subtleties that one eagerly excuses all shortcomings, all absence of French finish. To be able to manifest a conception which is such a beautiful monster is a miracle far beyond the patient rounding-off practised by less inspired, less elementally creative spirits.

I went through Tolstoy's Anna Karenina immediately after Dostoievsky: Tolstoy is indeed a master in his own field, even a fine hand at arousing the moods of pity and terror, but how weak and watery seemed the sorrowful vicissitudes and emotional crises which he described, in comparison to the

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ghastly grandeur of Dostoievsky's tale of murder, harlotry and drunkenness! Crime and Punishment is no mere shocker; nor is it just a Zolaesque compilation of ugly details - it is an interfusion of the squalor and distortion of physical poverty with the power and mystery and nameless horror of some occult region. But across all this night there wanders a beauty that can nearly be named mystical: just as the oppressive phantasmagoria of Dostoievsky's epileptic genius is unearthly, so too the relieving features are tense with a light surpassing that of earth's loveliness. There are incidents in the book which simply take your breath away with their sudden glow of significance. I say "sudden" because it is out of a perspective of gloom and perversity and anguish of lost souls that by a peculiar pressure on extreme points he draws his momentary apocalypses.

Middleton Murry thinks the Brothers Karamazhov is Dostoievsky's masterpiece. I am going to take a plunge into it and set right the lacuna that has long been glaring in my education. But I have a premonition that, no matter how much wider its canvas or more explicit its mystical element, it will not be so quintessential a surprise in making us ask again and again: "What fire is here whose heat is hell but whose light heaven?"

Among other continental authors listed in my catalogue I am held a while by the name of Rainer Maria Rilke. There is an essay by Olive Gordon: Rilke's Symbolism. Rilke is not altogether unknown to me, though I can't say I speak on him with authority. I have dipped into his work, but as he was a German I could only contact him through a translation just like Dostoievsky. The translation had much force and subtlety, yet the sheer poetic revelation was often lacking save in scattered moments of pregnant imagery. Hence his meaning seemed to me a little strained on the whole as if he were not quite in possession of his own depths: the words pursued and caught at the vision, getting intuitively lit up here and there without serving continuously as faithful mirrors of the mystical. I doubt whether the term mystical is applicable: it

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would be better to say Rilke has the sense of a Mystery and an Ideality behind phenomena in general, and in particular behind those of his own artistic inspiration. In his earlier work he strives to express that sense through vaguely profound moods which pass after shadowing forth a strange moving half-realised picture in the midst of many interesting ideas. In his later compositions he projects on several occasions a striking symbol and displays an admirable grip on its contours - a moulded strength is evident then and the poetry is finer than elsewhere: only, it might have been finer still if that grip had been less and the symbol had been felt emerging by its own intensity. Rilke has a keen brooding eye, a many-sided, dextrous, penetrating mind, not lucidly so in the French way in spite of his long association with France, but with a denser and more packed Teutonic movement. Behind the eye and the mind are a passionate inspired idealism and a perception of hidden realities. He lived with a strong and poignant subjectivity which sought ever to carve itself out and fill objective forms, almost to get identified with them, its self-disclosure being solely through their line and colour and attitude. He was aware of an evolving process in himself, quickening his daily experience to a poetic elan towards heights and depths by a powerfully focussed looking at and into concrete things: this concentration on "things" was one of the art-secrets he derived from Rodin the sculptor. I don't believe Rilke rose to the authentic spiritual or plunged to the pure mystical. All the same, he must be a fascinating and vista-opening if somewhat difficult and mazy poet in the original because of the glowing sensitiveness which tried in him to feel its way inward through a fusion of natural sight and symbolic suggestion. Even in an English rendering he is worth taking in one's cultural stride.

Of course I am writing all this rather off-hand, with no relevant quotations to bear me out. Possibly I have missed the precise nature of Rilke's genius. So don't get too impressed with my impression - he may have more to lay bare to

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others than to me on the mystical and spiritual level, or less on the idealistic and introspective.

Funnily, the only complete quotation from Rilke I can drag out of my mind is just a curiosity, bringing in an unusual simile which many perhaps would consider disgusting in the context where it occurs. Lament for Jonathan is a delicately emotional expression of David's famous grief, but the aching softness of the mood is suddenly broken by the words:

For here and there in my most timid places

Have you been plucked out from me like the hair

That grows inside the arm-pits.

In a way, the simile is not out of tune with the atmosphere of sensitive intimacy pervading the poem. Yet some failure of taste is perceived and though one is struck by the ingenuity one is unsure about the poetic appeal. It is not that a simile should be drawn from great things in order to be adequate to a great situation: even the odd and the grotesque can be suitable, but a true poetic touch has to come through them. Otherwise we have fancy instead of imagination - a difference which, I hope, is made clear by Leslie Mitchell's book advertised in my catalogue, The Poet's Mind.

In my opinion, what is lacking in fancy and brimful in imagination is feeling and seriousness and harmonious vision. The expression of fancy is from the clever mind that constructs and connects: there is not enough heart-stir, sense of importance and movement of integration. A poetry which is a cross-breed between fancy and imagination is a type much indulged in by the so-called metaphysical school of the seventeenth century in England - a type of inspired "conceit", in which highly incongruous elements stand together and are forced into mutual service without perfect integration but with sufficient feeling and seriousness behind the ingenuity. I remember Crashaw writing somewhere about Christ on the Cross, that the purple in which he was clothed

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came from the wardrobe opened in his side. Christ, according to the Bible, was wounded by a spear in the ribs by one of the Roman soldiers and blood flowed out and covered him. Crashaw's version of this is very fanciful, with a good deal of incongruousness, yet somehow he pulls the effect through and his manner and rhythm have an intensity and lift and vision-grip that affine fancy to imagination. Absolute poetry is not there; still, the poetic quality is undeniable. The absolute kind has no discord of central conception: it can be full of surprises, the most unfamiliar similes and metaphors may be at play, yet the vision is harmoniously integrated at the core. The elders sitting and talking on the battlements of Troy Homer compares to grasshoppers because of their thin legs and screechy voices. Though one receives a sort of shock, it is a shock wholly assimilable into the poetic passion of the narrative; it is not the intrusion of the clever mind endeavouring to produce a startling effect; rather is it a leap of the imagination itself to a certain extremism. Neither Crashaw nor Homer are plumbing any notable depth in the instances I have cited, but Homer easily achieves poetry that is perfect of the surface-kind, Crashaw in spite of his rich point is touch-and-go, precariously poised on the edge of perfection.

Inspired "conceit" has mostly that slight falling short of the absolute. Even Donne who has an extraordinary gift for aligning disparate elements does not poetically go home with utter finality when he is "conceited". His ideas and his emotions are very valuable, they at once arrest us by their depth: what keeps them from transforming themselves into absolute poetry is a certain over-fantasy of wit. Different, however, from Homer's unstrained novelty in the grasshopper-image and also from Donne's or Crashaw's self-conscious out-of-the-wayness is the wit of lyricism like Lovelace's in his celebrated farewell to his mistress:

Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind,

That from the nunnery

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Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind

To wars and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,

The first foe in the field,

And with a larger faith embrace

A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such

As you too shall adore;

I could not love thee, Dear, so much,

Loved I not honour more.

It is impossible not to notice how clever the whole conception and the individual figures are. Lovelace has pictured fighting as the search for a new mistress, making him unfaithful to his sweetheart, and in contrasting the two loves he has discovered points which by a paradox turn them one, his duty to his king and country proving in him precisely that nobleness which alone would render his attachment to his beloved so worthy of the beloved's beautiful self. Then look at that image of a nunnery - an image quite incongruous if taken in a literal sense, for a nunnery is the very place where love between man and woman cannot happen; but the vision impinges on us as right because of certain words used -"chaste breast", "quiet mind" - and because of the hell-let-loose of war which stands opposed to the peacetime pursuits of love, the violences of Mars which make the excitements of Eros seem in comparison an almost conventlike calm occupation. Any metaphysical poet would have envied the many-faceted ingeniousness of this lyric, but what is present in Lovelace is rarely theirs in their ingenious moods. Absolute poetry of a deep enough variety is created here by the fancy getting immersed in and subdued to a heart-stir, a sense of importance and a movement of integration. The clever features do not stick out with a brainy brilliance: they are caught into the inner being's light and harmony, they become an aristocracy of wit, a sort of born paradoxicality and natural curiousness instead of the thrusting parvenu sort

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that belongs to the outer being. Of course, the conceits of the metaphysicals are not complete upstarts: they often show blue blood, but the blue is not sheer.

Something upstart also spoils a deal of Elizabethan poetry, as it does in another fashion much of modernist verse. Together with a certain explosiveness and want of control, it makes Chapman's translation of the Iliad not only inadequate Homer but even inadequate first-class inspiration of a non-Homeric species. I expect James Lloyd's The Poetry and Philosophy of the Iliad, which my catalogue announces as soon-to-be-published, will distinguish perfectly balanced strength from jerky boldness as well as imaginative surprise from fanciful extravagance. I expect too that the author will discuss how imaginative philosophy differs from intellectual and that he will touch on the diverse branches of the former. Homer certainly does not start a train of imaginative argument on life's why and whence and whither, as Lucretius often does, Dante in several places, Milton not seldom, Goethe at times, Shelley on occasion, Wordsworth repeatedly, Lascelles Abercrombie in a notable measure, Hardy to a certain extent, Sri Aurobindo in a good part of his middle-period work. Neither does Homer pause at scattered points to impress on us directly his vision of broad basic issues. Nor does he consciously give us — like the above-mentioned poets when they are not imaginatively arguing in a continuity or by fits and starts - vision-masses concretising various aspects of his attitude towards ultimate reality. Homer has many wise generalisations on conduct, uttered by the numerous characters in his epic, but they do not constitute an explicitly consistent outlook on the nature of the world. What can be called the philosophy of the Iliad, the Homeric position vis-a-vis broad basic issues, is not anything particular we can put our finger on in the poem: it is a significant aroma sent forth by the whole, a suggestive atmosphere which we feel when the poem is absorbed in toto. When I try to render explicit what is implicit in the Iliad, I find three main elements interplaying in its philosophy. First, a tragic sense of all

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things on the earth - love crumbling into dust, beauty losing its proud radiance, laughter pierced through at the end of each moment. Then there is the courage that faces all with a gusto and a glow of warrior energy wearing its wounds like a garland and feeling at the heart of things a burning red even when all is grey and ashen. The final element is an admiring awe confronting the unknown power that strikes and breaks us down and brings our purposes to nought: a perception that this power is an Immensity which transcends the standards of moral judgment we apply to whatever frustrates us, a faith that a grandeur, a mighty loveliness is before us, whose working we cannot condemn even while again and again with twisted mouths of suffering we ask why the light of day should fall like a whip across our bodies... Perhaps I have put in too romantic a language the vision and attitude of a classical poet, but the vital substance of them is, I think, not misrepresented.

It would be interesting to observe how far they recur in other epics. C. M. Bowra's study, From Virgil to Milton, might be helpful. The table of contents reproduced in my catalogue from his book prompts me to - but no! I won't say to what it prompts me. Enough of these leaps: I must draw myself back from making out of them a round-the-world tour.

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Time's Gap

Who could have believed that from Edith Sitwell of the rather equivocal fame of self-consciously clever and deliberately perverse effusions like

Jane, Jane! tall as a crane,

The light comes creating down the lane,

one would get the magnificent lines:

That old rag-picker blown along the street

Was once great Venus. But now Age unkind

Has shrunken her so feeble and so small -

Weak as a babe. And she who gave the Lion's kiss

Has now all Time's gap for her piteous mouth.

Aeschylus might have had a hand in them - Aeschylus of the grandiose and compact audacities. Marlowe might have moulded them - Marlowe with his sublime violence. Here is not only the technical mastery of a Major Poet - a felicitous force of word, an expressive play of rhythm, a living movement of metre. Here is also a Major Poet's keenness and depth of vision - in a sort of crescendo reaching its climax in the last line. The four lines preceding the last make a striking picture of contrasts, intensifying the fall that is its significance. But the last is more than a spectacle shaking the heart, it is a piece of philosophic insight touching the very soul in us and the poetry of it is one of the world's summits of inspiration, fusing that insight by a flash of rare imaginative and verbal genius with the idea of an old woman's toothless mouth. Such a mouth - caved-in, devoid of grip and charm, vacant of the gleam of laughter - becomes a symbol of what the poet feels to be the basic nature of the world: a lack in the very stuff of existence, a gap that is the essence of all time! To Edith Sitwell the whole process of earthly life seems a revolving of empty purpose and hollow

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activity; everything temporal is fundamentally futile, miserable, issueless. And this sense is conveyed to us overwhelmingly by her adding, to the sheer condensed power of the phrases in which it is couched, that splendid foil of opposite meaning in the expression, "she who gave the Lion's kiss", and by carrying the heightened vision of the words in a scheme of rhythm and metre marvellously apt.

It is worth looking at the scheme. Mark first how the m-sound and the p-sound recur - a run of labials bringing the lips into pronounced play as though to emphasise the fact that the mouth is being spoken of. Note next that these sounds are equally distributed between the entities to be combined - namely, "Time's gap" and "piteous mouth": thus a sort of resemblance and equivalence is set up. Then observe, in the different way each pair of "m" and "p" functions, the suggestive clinching of that resemblance and equivalence in identity. The words "Time" and "gap" end with labials and have a final shutting of the lips as their characteristic, while "piteous" and "mouth" begin with labials and are characterised by an initial opening of the lips: the effect is as of Time's gap being enclosed and held within the mouth and of the piteous mouth breaking and widening out into that gap! By this inspired device the two things mentioned are led to participate in each other, as it were, and their fusion in the imaginative philosophy of the poet is rendered natural, logical, inevitable. Even without this device, the pronouncing of the phrase "Time's gap" tends to create a kind of collapsing of the lips upon each other, somewhat akin to the soft unresistant closure of the lips of a toothless mouth; but the suggestion would not be so complete and convincing, nor, again, would the voidness that is the meaning common to both the entities be completely and convincingly suggested if there were not the special sound produced by the words "Now all" before "Time's gap" and a special disposition of metrical accents in the line. "Now all" has a ring of open space, of a large hollow - particularly as one word terminates with a long vowel-sound and the other

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begins with a similar though not the same form of quantity, so that the non-separation of the two vowel-lengths by any consonant-sound increases and intensifies the general ring of emptiness and wideness. Lastly, the role of the sibilant note has to be appreciated; it runs over from the concluding part of the line before, and what is there a gust of aggressive strength turns gradually here a fading sigh in tune with the tragic significance and the poet's compassion.

As to the metre, the chief features are the dense stressing of the first half of the line, the sparse stressing of the second, and the inverted foot in which the two halves meet. In the first half, "now" bears a semi-stress, "all" a full one and so do "Time's" and "gap": only "has" is almost unaccented. The three full stresses coming together serve a double purpose. Seeming to make a tremendous weight sinking down and more down and still more down, deep and deeper and yet deeper, they suggest the gap to be endlessly abysmal. Again, they seem to mass close and then drive in so huge a fact as "all Time's gap" into so small a space as an old woman's shrunken mouth. The line's other half has two stresses thrown among four light syllables. The light syllables are a way of suggesting vacuity - a way all the more appropriate when the vacuity in question is a small space, a feeble thing. They help also to release in a delicately wavering flow the emotion that is getting pent-up, close-knit, compactly intense through the accumulated stresses -and the glide anapaest of the final foot, slightly hurrying the voice, adds to the movement an extra note of poignance. The inverted foot in the middle of the line - joining the two halves - introduces, by holding a stress where a "slack" should be and vice versa, a sudden break which gives not only increased prominence to the word "gap" but also a hint of the cracking up and giving way implied in this word, a hint supported by the falling movement characteristic of the trochee.

It may be argued that, though perfect vitality of metre and rhythm as well as of words deftly arranged has produced

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poetry of a high order, I am not justified in assigning to the vision of this poetry a keenness and depth and a philosophic insight touching the very soul in us. The reader may ask : "Is not the vision lop-sided, blind to life's beauty and richness and conducive to a defeatist despair? Would not penetration and profundity lead to a more balanced, a less pessimistic philosophy? Isn't this a negation of all soul-feeling, a sheering off from the soul rather than a touching of it?" If the "spirit" of Edith Sitwell's lines could answer back, it would say:

"No, I do not exaggerate one aspect of life at the expense of another. I do not shut my eyes to beauty and richness, for I actually speak of them, I refer to great Venus and the Lion's kiss. I know that beauty and richness are present in life - yet is it not true that they are being constantly assaulted and that life ends not with beauty and richness but with ugliness and impotence, old age and death, the decrepitude of the body and the ultimate decline into dust? There is here no permanence of beauty, no continuance of richness. Although they come and cast a radiance over us, their ostensible end is the opposite of themselves. If through privation we could attain to plenitude and, after suffering and frailty, reach happiness and strength on earth, then the earth-process would be a praiseworthy phenomenon. If old age and death, if the dropping of the flame of life were not the tragic finale, then Time would not be the ghastly gap that it is. All our splendours are made of fragile stuff: they carry within them a seed of their own perishing: they are instinct with misfortune and mortality. Did not Virgil cry, sunt lacrimae rerum - 'there are tears of things'? Did not Nashe lament:

Brightness falls from the air,

Queens have died young and fair,

Dust hath closed Helen's eye.

Has not Housman declared that pride and pageantry and power and passion

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Walk the resounding way

To the still dwelling?

And what about the greater than these - Gautama Buddha? Has he not summed up all earth-existence in one word; dukkha, sorrow? Surely he did not mean that pleasures were not there; his vision cut through these pleasures and found in them that essence of all sorrow - impermanence; and he saw too that the ultimate of each life, however sprinkled with passing pleasures, is a weakening of limbs and a failure of energy, a wrinkling of beauty and a loss of richness. No sensitive soul but must feel all Time to be a gap. Indeed, this feeling and none other is the first true sign of the soul in us. Men who are undeveloped never realise earth-existence to be a ringing of diverse changes on a fundamental theme of misery. They suffer, yet never pass a disillusioned judgment on life. And they do not because there is not roused in their consciousness a supreme ideal beyond themselves, a longing for perfection, a dream of the immortal and the eternal. To have an awakened soul is inevitably to perceive Time's gap, the enormous inadequacy of what the earth has to give, the basic incapacity of earth to satisfy us and to bring us our fulfilment. No doubt, this is a negative perception and we must have a positive one of the Divine, the Deathless, the Ever-luminous. But the negative is an immense necessity, and without its burning within our heart like a hunger that finds no food in temporal shows, how shall we turn our eyes inward and upward to the Godlike? This negative is pregnant with God's plenty, and except from its dark womb no leap can there be towards the boundless Light. The Light that is boundless may be attainable only after death and send us during life no more than a few broken rays, or else by some miracle it may be caught even here and now; but always we must have, in order to fill with its immeasurable beatitude and power, a vast void within us created by a sense of all Time's gap! Such a sense does not land us in defeatist despair: it is born from the deific, the perfect, lying secret in

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the human, the fallible, and by it alone is our soul touched through earthly wrappings and bestirred to quest for the Absolute. Can you deny it keenness and depth, can you refuse to call it a philosophic insight in which Truth is a-glow?"

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The Attack on Romantic Idealism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Peacock Lute

Sarojini Naidu flashed out that phrase in a poem - Professor Bhushan has caught it on the title-page of his excellent new anthology of poems written in English by Indians. Both are acts of inspiration. The fine phrase becomes a focus of special significance when applied to Indian poetry in any form.

A peacock is commonly known for three things: the abundant colour of its plumes, its keen dancing - and its look of vanity. But the vision of the East has not found the peacock invariably vain: to be self-delighted has for the Indian a profound sense as well as a superficial one, since self-delight can stand for an independence of outward objects or occasions for finding life sweet and a plunging towards the centre of our being for the source of joy no less than light and strength, the deep centre where the human and the divine meet. It is because that profound sense is there that the peacock could become in our legends Sri Krishna's own bird.

To be called a peacock is not for the Indian poet both a criticism and a compliment. It is altogether a compliment -yet one which in order to be deserved necessitates a certain rising above any gratified lapping up of it. A feeling of dedication is surely implied if one is to be considered Sri Krishna's bird. One's heart must be offered to the ideal beauty and, just as one derives one's inspiration from it, so too must one pass on to it whatever praise is one's lot: "Thine the power and therefore Thine the glory!"

Soulwardness and the feeling of dedication, however, are not all that the Indian poet is meant to have. They can easily lead to an austere otherworldly attitude - and such an attitude he must avoid. He has to be at the same time most inward and most outward, translunary and sublunary. The world of sense - shining hues and glowing harmonies - he must embrace and make his life's instrument. Images from the visible and the tangible are to be mated by him with the

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Unknown. Upon his blood-stream the music of the spheres has to tremble: without this music his poetry will be crude, but without that blood-stream his poetry will be thin. Whatever the Indian saint may do, the Indian poet cannot renounce the world and still be a poet. He has to be what Sri Krishna's bird symbolises - a combining of soulwardness and the feeling of dedication with a wealth of bodily colour and an intensity of bodily rhythm: he must unfold variegated feathers and set his feet dancing, while his heart is drawn inward and upward beyond them.

Won't the combining create a conflict in him? No. For to be drawn beyond these things is not to be in love with a supreme void. The poet, Indian or otherwise, is essentially an archetype-hunter. His other-world is not a negation of this but the perfect original of it which is here broken and fragmentary, emerging slowly and with struggle. In taking up physical colour and rhythm he is not going over to the utterly undivine: his song is not a blow against the silence of God nor his magnificence a violation of God's mystery. Deep in the divine silence, far in the divine mystery, dwells the pattern and plan which the world is striving to manifest. That is the poet's basic vision, whether he openly acknowl-edge it or no. Divest him of it and his frenzy is lost. It is at work not only when triumph burns on his lips but also when those lips are ashen with despair. For, if they triumph because the poet sees the archetypal beauty shining out through things that are wry and fleeting, they despair for no other reason than that the selfsame beauty is found by him to be obscured. What the poet's joy discovers and what his agony misses are one: some sheer and sovereign Perfection. In poetry the hunger that is appeased and therefore laughs and the hunger that is robbed of sustenance and therefore wails are both of them at bottom a hunger for the Archetypal through the modes and movements of the phenomenal.

And because this one single hunger is behind all poetry, all poetry seeks faultless form - the mot juste, the unimprovable phrase, the sentence without a defect, the stanza

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that is an unflawed whole, and through such absolutes a expression the poet gives them. If not all the while in what he says, then in the manner of his saying, the Archetypal is ever his quest and goal. But he seeks it and attains it ever through the phenomenal. The marble of Phidias and Ustad Isa, the pigments of Rembrandt and the Ajanta Buddhists, the word-stuff of Shakespeare and Sri Aurobindo - all these are phenomenal, even as the figures and designs and images that stand out from the work of those masters to convey its message are caught from the world of phenomena, the sphere of sense.

No, there is no conflict in the poetic art between the Beyond and the Here. The man may know a keen strife in his breast between them: the poet may even voice the strife, but afire to make a faultless form from phenomenal substance, he transcends it in his art by the way he voices it: he cannot succeed in his poetry without harmoniously combining in the absolute beauty of his expression the Here and the Beyond. So the peacock, as Sri Krishna's bird, is the right essence of his lute - and all the more right if he is an Indian, for then the matter no less than the manner draws the two worlds together.

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Some Matters of the Muse

Knowing that I have been enamoured of the Muse for quite a long time, a reader who is anxious to absorb her influence has asked me some questions about the appreciation of poetic quality, rhythm-values, mystical tones, the inevitable form.

The questions are far from easy to answer, because the analytic mind is not the prime judge in poetry. The critical intelligence can distinguish shades, elucidate imagery, point out technical effects, but all this after something else has felt and recognised inspiration, the divine afflatus. Vision, word, rhythm - these three are so closely related, so charged with one another's essence, that the act of poetic recognition is immediate, single, instinctive and cannot be replaced by mental analysis. When I say 'immediate', I do not mean that one feels at once the inspiration of a poem: often a greater familiarity is required and the first impression fails to carry home the rhythmic rapture. What I mean is that, whenever the thrill of poetry is experienced, it is a direct thrill, and not indirectly determined or constructed by a process of thoughtful observation. Of course, thoughtful observation must come and make the qualities of a poem clear and lead one's instinct to the details, as a magnifying glass reveals points the normal sight does not catch. But even the magnifying glass rests for its effectiveness on the direct sense of sight and the first recognition of poetic stuff is also like an act of sight, the seeing as of a lovely face and dazzling with the ecstasy thereof, before one has had even the time to differentiate the Greek, Roman, Anglo-Saxon or Indian shape of the nose, the brown, hazel, blue, or black colour of the eyes or any other particulars which do not constitute beauty but merely serve to classify it.

The classification, the minute study, the understanding of how the parts are held together - all this, as I have said, are fine things and give one's instinct an ever wider field. If, however, the instinct is not ready with its tongue of flame to

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taste the nectar, all that the analytic mind can do is like feeding with delicacies a person whose palate has been rendered insensitive by a roaring cold! I do not wish to declare that the very fact of having a normal palate is sufficient to assure the epicure's thrill or (to pick up the old image) the fact of having a pair of eyes is a guarantee that one will respond to every impact of facial beauty. One's receptivity, whether of palate or vision, needs often to be cultivated: one must live with finenesses in order to develop a sharp recognition - but what one develops is an instinct, a quick sensation, a living 'aesthesis', and no amount of intellectual explanation can create it or understanding substitute it. Live among finenesses, dwell with a large variety of them, try to savour what is their general essence, let their particular thrills come to you side by side - until you get an ever-wakeful, many-sided keenness which knows at a touch that the Gods are here and this is Indra and that is Agni and the lordliest of them is Surya!

As to rhythm-values, I do not know exactly what my correspondent wants me to say. Surely he is able to mark out power from delicacy, the sound that seizes him by its grandeur from that which steals into him and holds him spellbound, the swift sweeping music from the subtle and melodious and haunting air. Perhaps he means the sifting of the rhythms native to the different planes of inspiration. That is not a difficult job so long as the planes are not above the mind or in the occult back-spaces - a little acquaintance with the vivid quivering nerve-poignancy and passion that is Shakespeare's is enough for noting the less vibrant play with one's guts and more resounding impact on one's grey cells which Milton offers. Other intensities, too, are within the reach of one's instinctive recognition. Shelley's or Keats's or Swinburne's, since we have plenty of them. Not that the plenty renders them cheap but it has been possible to the poet and perceptible in its peculiarity to the reader because the centres of consciousness from which it was showered or irradiated are not far removed from the life we know in our

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finest or keenest moments. It is only when the treasure that lies deep within or high above is brought to us that the trouble begins. The 'overhead' rhythms, as Sri Aurobindo calls the poetry that in spiritual experience seems to descend from some vastness above the brain-centred mind, need expert sensibility on our part for their nuances and stages to be distinguished and I dare say a good bit of Yoga. What, however, is not so hard to acquire is the sense that a rhythm in question is 'overhead' or no: for this we must have, together with the essential aesthetic touch, a glimmer of spiritual aspiration, an intuiting of the wideness beyond the intellect or the depth behind the heart of emotion or preferably both combined. I think a very faint intuiting of this sort most of us have and especially those of us who have the aesthetic bent, but we are likely to be confused often and to mistake the mental sweep for the spiritual spaciousness if we do not keep company a long while with the authentic 'overhead'. I know of no better method of absorbing the specific 'overhead' quality than the constant repetition of lines that bear it, the incessant intoning of them until they vibrate through the being.

In this connection it may be helpful to look at a poem once submitted to Sri Aurobindo for comment. Sri Aurobindo found it to be charged with sheer spiritual inspiration in its first five lines but, in its last five, effective with thought-expression of the Spirit instead of powerful in the 'overhead' way. The poet had hammered out these concluding lines very carefully, making them hold his full meaning in a suggestive form. Yet he had felt a vague uneasiness which woke into realisation the moment Sri Aurobindo pointed out the change of plane. The poet had not been able to distinguish the mental sweep from the spiritual spaciousness; their difference he recognised immediately when the word of criticism came from Sri Aurobindo. The poem, of course, could have stood as it was - but the gadfly had been let loose and the poet could not rest till the rarer note was completely caught. Here is the work as it stood at first:

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Thank God for all this wretchedness of love -

The close apocalypt fires that only prove

The shutting of some golden gate in the face!

Not here beside us burning a brief space

Of time is ecstasy. Immense, above,

An ageless womb calls like a blue abyss

Hung over the pale mind; there, by the grace

Of a heart pain-broken into widenesses,

Life like a burst of pinion-beats can move

Through a glowing gap of sun to infinite bliss!

Read the opening part now with the rewritten ending - the only change in the former being the replacement of the word 'time' in the fifth line by 'life' since 'time' gets more appropriately used towards the close -

...Immense, above,

The shining core of a divine abyss

Awaits the earth-unglamoured lonely gaze,

The tense heart broken into widenesses.

All quiver and cry of time is splendoured there

By an ageless alchemy smiling everywhere!

How is one to say what is mentally mystical and what is spiritually so? Before one can analyse the particular modes of expression in all their details, one gets the impression of word and rhythm as a single unit, the movement of the style; to feel this is to know in the first place whether a line or a passage is inspired or not, and, in the second, whether it derives from this plane or that. I do not think the version that is mental betrays any marked defect of inspiration. As far as mental style goes, the idea is completely and harmoniously and effectively embodied in language - the requisite degree of vividness and colour is there, the right kind of suggestive mould of speech, and the mot juste too is in evidence, as will be admitted on considering the consistent import of terms like 'broken', 'burst', 'gap', and the way a word like 'burst'

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connects up that import with the sense of freedom suggested by 'widenesses' and sustained by 'pinion-beats' and, again, the natural agreement between the word 'beats' and the word 'heart'. But in spite of admitting the felicity of the phrases, one perceives that an attempt is made to represent a mystical or spiritual event or experience instead of that experience-event taking possession of the language and becoming one with it. A couple of turns of speech confirm this perception: 'like a blue abyss' somehow strikes one as an indirect way of suggesting the Spirit, while 'by the grace' is almost a logical explanatory construction and is deficient in sheer real-sense, if I may so call the right kind of feeling we must get of the content or theme-stuff of mystical poetry. 'Pain-broken' has also a similar air of semi-directness, semi-explanation. Nothing of this effective a peu pres, this forceful approximation, is present in the second version: the spiritual reality speaks its own language, moves at its own pace and exercises its limbs, as it were, in utter freedom, cutting whatever figure it chooses and revealing any colour it finds natural to itself. All this one feels as an undifferentiated single impression if one takes to the two versions an alert aesthesis. Afterwards the critical mind brings out its magnifying glass to enlarge the aesthetic field.

At this point I may say a few words on the place rhythm has in inspiration - one of the queries put me by my correspondent. Rhythm has three technical aspects: it is the mode in which stressed and unstressed syllables are combined, it is the arrangement of vowel-sounds and consonant-sounds, it is the disposition of quantitatively long and short syllables. In the classical tongues, quantity played a very prominent role: in English it has become a minor factor owing to the preponderance of accent, but in all good writing and especially in poetry it adds a subtle effect which cannot be neglected if the meaning is to be supported phonetically or at least if proper weight is to be given to words without making them heavy and if they are to move without getting too light and feathery. Stress and non-stress must so occur that a

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metrical base is preserved and yet an obvious monotony avoided - a lot of variation either marked or delicate must come in and not arbitrarily but in accordance with the sense and emotion of each line. The vowels and the consonants have to fit in with one another and not run confusedly in an inharmonious hurry, except for deliberate effects as they do at times in Browning. All these elements viewed externally form what Carlyle would have called the mechanism of rhythm as contrasted with its organism - with the living natural process which is the inspired afflatus taking sound as its medium, its expressive body. No amount of mere skill or mechanical adjustment of words will create inspiration: the outer rhythm cannot live unless there is an inner rhythm, a vibration in the being, caused by the indescribable something which rushes through the consciousness. The true rhythm, therefore, is a play of stress, assonance and quantity under the shaping life-breath of the inner self, a response made by word-sounds to the subtle pulsation of soul-excitement. Mind you, I am not saying 'words' but 'word sounds', for, though the rhythm is fused with the language, it has a power beyond the mere significance of words, a power of profound suggestion by sounds reproducing the quiver of consciousness that seeks self-expression through articulate language. It is because of this power that every writer and all the more a poet arranges his words in a certain way in preference to another, although both the ways may convey the same mental meaning and even when the rejected pattern expresses more precisely the thought from a logical standpoint. The poet permits himself liberties with the ordinary construction of the language and observes metrical form because of the sound-suggestion exceeding in a magic manner the sense-suggestion and possessing the potency to create more than a state of understanding - that is, a state of being, an experience of the soul. Hence, in poetry which is after all an art and concerned with soul-states rather than with logical processes, rhythm is more than anything the essence of inspiration and, to an expert ear, the surest mark of dif-

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ference between the various planes from which inspiration makes its glowing assault upon us.

Now some remarks about the inevitable form. To know what it is, we must be extremely sensitive to the texture, the order and the rhythm of words. Perhaps the texture is most easily appreciated. Take a line like the following from Sri Aurobindo, which suggests some divine presence at work in the phenomenon of dawning day -

A slow miraculous gesture dimly came.

I need not rub in the fact that none of the parts can be replaced: each is the right one in significance and atmosphere. It also goes without much emphasis that a substitute like

Miraculous, slow, a gesture dimly came

not only gives, by changing the places of the epithets, a suddenness that runs counter to the graduality to be suggested, but also seems absurdly to make slowness either the explanation, the essence, of the miracle or just a tagged-on afterthought weak and watery behind the rich import of 'miraculous'. What may not be realised at once is that even to alter the word-order chosen by Sri Aurobindo to

A gesture, slow, miraculous, dimly came

or

Dimly a slow miraculous gesture came

would spoil the effect. Though the very order of the epithets is retained, the revelatory suspense is diminished by either the noun 'gesture' or the adverb 'dimly' being introduced too soon. Further, both the variants tamper with the spontaneous single impression by the epithets and noun on the one

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hand and the adverb and verb on the other. That impression is most vital, and no separate prominence must be given to one part of the combination by thrusting the noun markedly in front or suspending the adverb too much in advance. Finally, the rhythm is slid out of its correct tempo by such manipulation: the lingering though ample tone, the large power calmly drawn out are lost in a somewhat flat narrowness in the first alternative and in a rather abrupt jump in the second. The subtle undertone and overtone, the secret sound-significance which creates in our intuitive being the actual feel and thrill of the divine act described are diluted if not completely abolished. This modification is the most damaging of all. But, I am afraid its blow to the inevitable form is the hardest to appraise, because the analytic mind which is never the prime judge in poetry is more helpless here than anywhere else. To appreciate what has happened, one must be long enamoured of the Muse, one must meet her with the surrendered aesthetic heart.

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Some Points about Poetry

The first canto of the greatest epic since Paradise Lost has at last seen the light! Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol makes its entry on the world-stage in the first eleven pages of Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual published from Calcutta on August 15. With the rare depth and magnificence of this poem of Sri Aurobindo's I have already dealt in a special essay in the Second Annual (recently reviewed in the All-India Weekly) of the Sri Aurobindo Circle of Bombay. Savitri marks a new age of mystical poetry, and all lovers of literature as well as mysticism will await with wonder-lit eyes further instalments of it.

The first canto is accompanied by a series of excerpts from letters written by Sri Aurobindo about certain characteristics of mystical verse in general and of the particular kind with which he himself is occupied. These excerpts are at once profound, suggestive and acute, and the concluding fourteen pages which explain the workings, especially on the poetic path, of a Consciousness far beyond the mind are a piece of "metaphysical psychology" and literary criticism which is supremely inspired. It would be foolhardy for me to discuss this part in a short causerie. But I may jot down some of my own opinions as regards a few of the other matters treated here.

One point concerns repetition of words in poetry. There are critics who are over-fastidious, who insist on a continual novelty and think it a deplorable defection of genius for a poet to bring in any word again which has already been used close-by. Thus, Coleridge looks at those phrases in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra -

Her gentle women, like the Nereides,

So many mermaids, tended her i' the eyes,

And made their bends adornings: at the helm

A seeming mermaid steers -

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and noting the occurrence of "mermaids" and "mermaid" with no more than a line and a half between, remarks on "mermaids": "I strongly suspect Shakespeare wrote either 'sea-queens' or rather 'sea-brides'". Alternatively he suggests "submarine graces". Well, I for one strongly suspect that Coleridge's judgment, when he wrote this, was a little misted by his unfortunate addiction to laudanum. The repetition aids the atmosphere, renders the picture of strangeness and luxury more keen, direct, insistent: to knock out "mermaids" would be to weaken the fabulous appeal.

One cannot make a cut-and-dried rule about word-repetition. Even if no aim is perceived, one need not always be strict. In my view, much depends on the character of a poem. If it is a leap at top speed from thought to thought, image to image, feeling to feeling in a series of loosely developing coruscations, one hardly notices the minute details of language. In Shelley, repetitions of words happen in an easy natural quickly flowering manner which does not clash with the general ease and naturalness and swift efflorescence of his verse: on the contrary, it often adds to its peculiar charm. The same applies to Harindranath Chatto-padhyaya at his best. It applies a good deal to Swinburne also, but at Swinburne's best the repetition is not always unconscious: he is frequently a deliberate artist in sound, a maestro in orchestration, and echoes are developed into almost an art within an art and we at once grasp the complex beautiful ends they serve. There are other styles too where word-recurrences do not glare out as faults. For one instance, the bare and simple, almost colloquial "artless" style of certain ballads and lyrics. For another, the rapid palpitating metaphor-gorged multiform Shakespearian splendour. Where, however, the poetry is the work of a more brooding inspiration, packed with cunningly drawn-out substance and moulded with passionate precision, bearing everywhere the trace of "the chaos-ending chisel-smite", then each phrase is a unit that draws attention, each word stands by itself even while forming an organic part in the whole harmony. In such

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work the grounds for repetition should always become clear and take a definite shape in the reader's mind with regard to the meaning, just as the whole poem cuts a more marked and significant shape than the other types. If those grounds are not perceived, we become conscious of a flaw, a sort of oversight by the poet: there is little room here for innocent recurrences or merely euphonious reiterations: they would be out of tune with the general temper and manner. Of course, deliberate significant effects by means of repetition are not confined to poems broodingly created. They can find a place in every sort of poetry; so also can those that form a leitmotif, a key helping the mind to keep open to the main theme, like the word Ritam (Truth) in many Vedic hymns. What I object to is the unpurposive recurrence in a text of carefully intense poetry - unpurposive in that it does not come with a luminous point, as it should, where everything is close-knit and all the parts seem to call out to be considered in detailed relation to one another. I object as well to a too near-by echo in verse that flows with easy celerity or flashes along with many-mooded energy, when this echo could have been avoided without much difficulty but is let be because of slipshodness. At the same time, I do not deny that on occasion it is preferable to repeat a word, no matter if with a small interval: a synonym may not be as alive with meaning. I make no fetish of simply avoiding any repetition: sensitive weighing of the particular occasion, sensitive perception of the general harmony, sensitive insight into the individual nature of a poet's creative afflatus must be our guides. I agree with Sri Aurobindo that we must not blindly kowtow to the rigid ban put up by "a certain kind of intellectual elegance" or "a refined and classical taste" born of the decorous intelligence and ministering to the "cultured entertainment and amusement of the highly civilised mind".

Coming to another matter, what Sri Aurobindo says about the usual criticism levelled at both philosophical and mystical poetry appears to be admirable. Sensation and emotion need not keep thought out of poetry, as some

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romanticists, surrealists and "pure-poetry"-mongers urge. Thought has its own rights, and for a certain completeness and comprehensiveness of expression it is most necessary, provided of course no abstractness makes it dry and heavy and its terms a technical jargon unsupported by any living truth of vision or experience. Also, the mystic is perfectly justified in treating of things which may seem abstract to the ordinary man but are most concrete to himself through his unusual range of vision and experience, provided again he takes care to carry over into his poetry their concreteness. There are places in Savitri where the common reader is likely to cry "Philosophical Abstraction" or "Metaphysical Unreality", but I would say "More palpable than matter, more tangible than flesh"; for a subtilising of the senses and an inner intuition can arrive at the concreteness and actuality of what is described. One line, however, in the first canto of Savitri I am not quite confident about: it speaks of a vague stirring in the primordial darkness from which our world has evolved: it says that some nameless buried discontent

Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance.

The words "teased" and "wake" are vivid, the terms "In-conscient" and "Ignorance" are not utterly devoid of self-explanation; they do hint a difference which can in general be felt to justify their being contraposed and there is no bad taste in speaking of the Inconscient being teased or Ignorance being wakened, since to spiritual experience they are concrete realities. Absolutely dry and abstract the line is not; and yet in its suggestive pregnancy I miss the full poetic turn that everywhere else carries Sri Aurobindo triumphantly through "strange seas of thought". Not that I want a bringing out of the entire philosophical content of the word "Inconscient" or the Vedantic idea of the Ignorance as the power behind the manifested world. All that I wish to say is that the line lacks somewhat the direct symbol drive or self-illuminative energy we meet in other verses from Savitri like

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Opponent of the glory of escape,

The black Inconscient swung its dragon tail

Lashing a slumberous Infinite by its force

Into the deep obscurities of form

or

And the blind Void struggles to feel and see -

verses with a similar drift of the Inconscient teased into a waking of Ignorance. Perhaps just a line more, carrying a few deft touches by the mystic seer and artist, would give the playing of the two terms against each other the subtle exegesis or the occult animation by which the least soupcon would be removed of abstract and technical jargon?

A third matter finely expounded by Sri Aurobindo is the freedom we must have from what may be designated the Johnsonian critical method if we are properly to appreciate the essence of mystical and spiritual poetry. This method expects a precise logical order in thoughts and language, jibs at all that is not sober and restrained, anathematises all association of contraries, excess or abruptness or crowding of images, disregard of intellectual limitations, departures in technique from established canons. Sri Aurobindo shows how it would stumble over the Veda. Even with poetry not markedly mystical it hopelessly flounders. "What would the Johnsonian critic say," asks Sri Aurobindo, "to Shakespeare's famous lines:

Or take up arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them...?

He would say, 'What a mixture of metaphors and jumble of ideas! Only a lunatic could take up arms against a sea! A sea of troubles is a too fanciful metaphor and, in any case, one can't end the sea by opposing it, it is more likely to end you.' " Sri Aurobindo defends Shakespeare and argues that Shakespeare knowingly accepted the mixture because it

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brought home, with an inspired force which a neater language could not have had, the exact feeling and idea that he wanted to bring out. The case is put very well indeed for romantic poetry and the liberty with images which it legitimately takes - to the complete discomfiture of the Johnsonian critic. I may add, however, that romanticism is not the only cause of Shakespeare's way with images. In romantic poetry itself there are two ways of using imagery -that of poets like Spenser, Milton and Tennyson and that of poets like Shakespeare and Donne. Donne differs from Shakespeare in several respects and is a much inferior and less harmonised poet on the whole and often he falls between two stools - the afflatus of the elan vital and the inspiration of the pure mind - but both these poets have a certain affinity in their treatment of language and metre, their manner of thinking out a theme, their attitude towards images. Imagery is with them functional, it is a means of thinking and feeling, they think and feel in a sensuous fashion. Their imagery is not something added to the thought and the emotion: the adding can be most beautifully and harmoniously done, but it will still remain more a pictorial and artistic value than a direct and native mode of intellectual significance and emotional suggestion. Shakespeare's images often run into one another because he is trying not always to present a coherent pictorial description but rather to give flashes of the aspects of his thought, the turns of his emotion. His similes and metaphors are less to be realised in their sensory properties than in their meaning and mood. The sensory properties remain a little hazy - not in their individual picturisation but in collective effect: hence mixed, fused, changing images. A recent writer, noting some of these points in Shakespeare, quoted the phrase:

Was the hope drunk

Wherein you dressed yourself?

Such a phrase would be impossible to find in Spenser or

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Tennyson, it would be very rare in Milton for all his compact force.

As for a quick play of varying images in mystical poetry, there is a striking passage in the first canto of Savitri, where a symbolic picture of dawn is built up by one suggestion piled upon another. "An errant marvel with no place to live" is felt to be soliciting in the midst of "the night's forlorn indifference"; then comes "a slow miraculous gesture's dim appeal"; then "the persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch" is on "the inert black quietude"; then "a wandering hand of pale enchanted light" takes "a gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge"; then we have "one lucent corner windowing hidden things"; then

The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak

From the reclining body of a god;

then a pallid rift is mentioned and the rift widens into a luminous gap; then all changes into "a brief perpetual sign", followed by an "iridescence" of the Unknown; then comes a blaze and Dawn builds a magnificent aura. Quite a race of rapid transitions is here - free from a strict logical chain. But it is worth observing that all the images, however different, have yet an underlying consistency: they all have a certain community of mystical atmosphere. The image that seems most at variance with the rest is the falling cloak; and if it had stood by itself it might have been a bit of an intrusion in even a context of swiftly altering figures; but it is made a perfect success by "the reclining body of a god". Just the suggestive mystical touch is brought which, though not introducing some sort of even distant affinity in the image as such to what goes before and comes after, provides it with the common basis the various other images have and thus renders it an organic part of the many-sided and many-shaped phenomenon described.

No doubt, the Johnsonian critic would fall foul of the passage despite the subtle single thread on which the beads

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of dissimilar cuts are strung, just as the opposite kind of critic would fail to see poetry where any philosophising shows its head. We have to avoid the mistakes of both and bring a receptiveness which while not accepting the rhythmless vagaries of ultra-modernism is yet plastic enough to answer the diverse demands of true inspiration. All the more plastic has it to be for taking the living impress of mystical and spiritual poetry, in especial when that poetry comes Auro-bindonianly to create a new age.

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Critics' Complaints

Not all can sup with satisfaction on poetry and when poetry is mystical the stomach and the palate are still more disgruntled. Even good critics come out with various complaints. I happen to be addicted to the mystical Muse and have received quite an assortment of criticisms, a part of which it might be of interest to consider in brief for the literary or psychological questions raised.

The Regret About "Preciousness"

There was the English professor who, though giving high praise, regretted "the tendency to be precious and not simple enough". But can mystical and spiritual poetry that is deeply dyed in the unknown be ever simple? No matter how bare and straightforward the style and ordinary and current the words, will not a certain lack of simplicity result from the very nature of the experience embodied - an experience which is a play of figures and values remote from ordinary vision, rare and elusive to normal thought, sublime or subtle in a way that is not seizable by common perception? The precision of mystical and spiritual poetry is intuitive and not intellectual, its exactitude is "revelatory" and does not make always a clear-cut mental picture. Even where a directness is practised and images are subdued, a difficulty will be felt not so much in understanding the meaning of individual words or phrases as in grasping in a living manner the insight that is uttered. The difficulty grows when imaged spiritual poetry is written - and spiritual poetry has to be imaged and symbolic if the veiled opulence of mystical realisation is to be caught in speech. To suit that opulence and be faithful to the atmosphere and light and contents of the strange inner "planes" a particular type of artistry is demanded, words with a certain aura or suggestive glow are required. This brings, on top of lack of simplicity, an element of preciousness. I for one have

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found both unavoidable - especially when I have tried to write with a word-vision and word-vibration drawn straight from what I have called inner planes without the normal poetic intelligence serving as paraphraser or interpreter. Sometimes an interpretative light may be present, but it is not the light of imaginative thought: it is something that appears like imaginative thought when really it is another mode of consciousness of which swift and wide-flashing thought is an imitator. That mode of consciousness acts even more by a suggestive quality in the rhythm-tone than by cast of vision or mould of speech; but in any case it does not yield its significance immediately to the mind and tends in its cumulative effect to produce an impression of "preciousness" because it has an aloofness, a rarity, a far-away flame calling for a style that must be at once vivid and fastidious.

The Charge of Being Vague and Abstract

Then there was another professor, an Indian, who too showed admirable comprehension of several points connected with mystical verse and who also absolved me from a probable charge of preciousness and said that words like "gloriole", "sidereal", "alchemy", "nectarous" were consistent with the atmosphere of my inspiration and with the nature of the experience I sought to embody. But he suggested that the kind of vision I brought was vague and that I was inclined to be abstract. I should think that abstractness does not arise, as my critic declared, by the use of expressions like 'vastnesses', 'omnipotence', 'agelessness' - so long as the poetry is profoundly felt, and especially when there are touches of vision accompanying the emotion. Nor is vision necessarily vague because it is too unfamiliar to be quickly grasped. My critic offered me phrases from Francis Thompson as examples of vivid mystical vision. But to be authentic mysticism, one's images and metaphors have to be alive with a subtle inner reality. Francis Thompson has that "aliveness" in many of his poems, but I am afraid the

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phrases quoted to me were poor mysticism: theirs is a vividness that holds nothing subjective or subtle. To call the stars "the burning fruitage of the sky" is to convey no spiritual height or depth, no hint of the Divine - it is only a beautiful and concrete image, a vision no doubt, yet not any glimmer of the beatific vision - it is merely a poetising of the ordinary man's wonder without even an appreciable quiver of the ordinary man's worship. "Tellurian galleon" and "coerule pampas" belong to the same category. A mystical vision of "the Infinite with its associations of grandeur and awe" calls for a different style: sight, sense, sound, all these have to be brought from deeper centres of one's being than the imaginative intelligence, as Vaughan does in

I saw Eternity the other night

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

All calm as it was bright.

Here a profound metaphor is used and the rhythm is mystically "inward". But there is no need of direct metaphors even, provided that that tense "in-tone" is present. The suggestion of true mystical and spiritual states is in such lines as Wordsworth's

The silence that is in the starry sky.

The sleep that is among the lonely hills

or

The light that never was on sea or land.

In directly imaged verse, a rare mystical and spiritual atmosphere is reached in his

The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep

and the very acme of it in

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Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone,

There is here something in the way of seeing and feeling, in the mould of phrase and above all in the stir of the rhythm, that goes deeper than the imaginative intelligence, the verses plunge to the rapt psyche within us and break it open to the amplitudes of the Divine. In the last two instances the metaphors are perhaps clear enough, but in this type of poetry the basic suggestions are very often of a wideness and a lordly light or else an immense masterful mystery that are not easily vivid to the normal imagination and cannot etch a picture immediately on the mind. The consciousness has to train itself to receive the unusual impact, the uncommon vibration before a "certain abstract quality in the tone" reveals itself as a subtle concreteness, a living intensity. Warmth there is, but not always drawn from "nature and human life"; rather, I should say that the warmth is drawn from nature and human life but is not invariably directed to familiar objects, it moves out into unknown ethers and there envelops realities and not abstractions, but realities which are not generally felt by the reader at the first blush. Mystical and spiritual poetry of this kind is not intrinsically bare or even as a rule austere, though its style tends to compactness: it is an exploration of undiscovered countries and both eye and ear have to get accustomed for the hues and harmonies of those regions to come home to the heart.

The Censure on Compound Words

Another censure passed on mystical poetry such as I had attempted was on the repeated employment of compound words. Particularly the compound of abstract nouns was condemned. Well, even such compounds may be quite living in their context but appear half-dead when torn out of it. The concrete is preferable on the whole to the abstract; yet all words in poetry cannot and need not be concrete in connotation. Abstract compounds must not be judged by a

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comparison with concrete ones nor must they be asked to impart by themselves any colour to the poetry - they must be taken sui generis, and in their own class what counts is point, power, sonority, rhythmic subtlety. Although a frigidity, a vitreous quality may be a possible danger, the frigid and the vitreous is frequently felt on first impression and dissolves in the general flow of vision and emotion and remains only when the compound is exhibited in vacuo. "Passion-prayer", for instance, has an intensity of significance as well as sound in a context where two peaks lifted like two hands in prayer are spoken of - prayer that is passionate not only because it is keen but also because those two peaks are regarded as "companion-crests" of "a mystic parenthood", and their combination, their union, which is figured within one halo formed for both of them by a full and perfect moon behind them, is seen as an act of spiritual passion that is occultly creative. Again, "truth-glory" may not appeal if looked at in isolation, but take it in the phrase:

Truth-glory naked in the immortal Mind -

and the word "naked" gives at once a concrete and visual suggestion to the compound noun and evokes the suppressed "sight", the implication of brightness, of light, in the word "glory".

Some compound epithets from Keats and Thompson were quoted by my critic as of the right poetic sort. They were fine; but Thompson's "tawny-coloured" though poetic enough, does not strike me as anything subtle when applied to a desert - it belongs to the effective outward style of poetry and even so it brings out vividly and precisely what everybody sees about a desert and does not lay bare a new aspect: there is no surprise of significance in it as perhaps there would be, say, in a compound of noun and epithet like "lion-coloured" or "tiger-tawny". A compound of any kind must not only represent, it must reveal, in order to be of paramount quality. A fair example is in a line I read the other day:

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The tiger with his fire-whipped hide,

where the urgent ferocity of the tiger is suggested no less than his tawny colour and striped appearance. In mystical poetry the subtle nuance is all the more requisite in a compound. And so long as it is there, either in the paired words themselves or by association with their context, the frequency of compounds must not be objected to. Of course a plethora of them is hardly advisable, but it is not always easy to cry "Too much!" with justification when one is confronted by a poetry where elaborateness of expression, however beautiful, might be less true to its spirit than a running revelation of many brief lights or else a quick piling up of restrained richnesses.

The Suspicion of Heavy Ornamentation

There was criticism also of a certain way of putting things. The line,

Roses of heaven rooted in sapphire hush,

indicating what we, despite our soul being "a paradise blown down", have the potentiality to surpass, was said to limn no picture in the reader's mind and to be not more beautiful than a simpler locution like: "the shining stars in the stillness of the blue sky". The defect of this criticism is that the raison d'etre of the line is missed. I admit there is not greater beauty here - but there is certainly more force running through the beauty. It is not, however, for its force as such that the expression is moulded thus: it is for its appropriateness, its organic place in the poem where it stands, its verbal point. The chief mistake in judgment is that the line is taken to be merely about stars. These roses of heaven are not shining stars nor is the sapphire hush the still blue sky. I was not rhetorically referring to the constellations and saying that the fully realised human spirit will be greater than all the lights of

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the firmament. I am speaking of an order of spiritual existence - the unfallen high powers of the supernatural world, call them Gods or angels or seraphs or what you will. Unlike the human soul which is like "a sun deflowered, a leprosy of light", these are suns or stars in full bloom, unwithered uncrumbling splendours that have not got dislodged from the quiet and fathomless heiht of divine bliss but are still "rooted" there. The word "rooted" is extremely significant and also most apt when throughout the poem the imagery has been of flowers of fire. "Roses" also is therefore organic and is no decorative term: it suggests a glowing plenitude of beauty and bliss as no other word would in this particular context of spiritual symbolism. The epithet "sapphire" too holds a sense of richness, a glowing preciousness, that is in tune with the terms used in another line:

The shredded silver and the shrunken gold.

It is absurd to suspect a stiff, heavy, roundabout, recondite ornamentation here.

The Misconception About Mysticism

Each of the critical opinions I have so far referred to errs in one respect or another in its bearing on the values of mystical poetry. None, however, betrays a serious lack of the soul's subtle senses. But there was one critic who found himself utterly at a loss in a domain where Nature and Supernature fuse in vision, familiar shapes and colours are moulded by unknown modes of being. And though he talked of the unconquerable will that could keep the Spirit alive even when the body was battered and broken, it was only in connection with the poetry that could be written about the heroism shown in the desperate writhing warfare recently ended between the forces of freedom and those of tyranny. He did not realise that if the Spirit could be a burning beauty even when the physical form was overwhelmed it must be a

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substance and a power greater and more lasting than what we commonly look upon as the concrete world and that a poetry which penetrates into the deeper places of the Spirit touches reality in an intenser and more perdurable form, brings forth images and archetypes out of spheres of consciousness that are a finer harmony of shape and significance than the data of experience offered us by the outer mind. The Spirit is more substantial, more concrete than Matter which is one of its aspects and all that is in the so-called real world is but a poor reflection of what is dynamic in the Spirit, waiting there to be released upon earth. The Spirit is not a dream or an abstraction: it is the prime stuff, the basic world into which the mystic enters and out of which he brings creative light through the doors of worship, self-surrender, concentration, meditative vision, Yogic practice. Not only is the critic in question unaware of the Spirit's depths and heights that are more real than "the grimness and horror of the war as waged in Europe and China" but he is also unaware that if the Spirit is the prime stuff and the supreme Archetype it is not a denial of things that are here but their essential truth, not an ascetic emptiness or a passionless purity but living light, throbbing colour, intense shape, rich movement, concrete ecstasy. Sense and emotion do not die in it, vista and vision are not lost in it: the Divine is not a remote inanity, the Divine is both personal and impersonal, coming to us in various ways, meeting us as the indefinable yet most living Vast at one time and at another as a personal centre of that vastness, the Lord, the Lover, the Avatar, the Guru.

Mysticism is not "morbid" or "neurotic" or "erotic" if it speaks in terms of love and passion and sensuousness; rather, what is ordinarily felt as sensuous and passionate love is only the outer, incomplete, fragmentary form of the deep heart's intensity that turns to the Divine and touches it everywhere. Emotional and sensuous love of God is not repressed sex breaking out in a region where it has no place: it is the basic urge in man for ideal beauty and perfection finding its true and illumined outlet - all through the ages the

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human heart has found its fulfilment in a Krishna, a Buddha, a Christ or in the worship of the supreme Creatrix, the Virgin Mother, the Goddess Kwannon. Face and figure are not strangers in the realm of Spirit - the Divine is heard, seen, touched, and if any Yoga is to be fruitful it must yearn with sense as well as soul, the whole complex of human nature must be bent on the Divine, for then only can the Divine be experienced in its fullness and its luminous substantiality. Unless the Spirit is loved concretely as if it were physical and material without the imperfections of such things, there can be no mystical LIFE and no mystical ART. No mystic has loved or written poetry without that concrete full-blooded love; for this alone can contact and incarnate the stuff of Spirit - all else floats as mere concept and speculation. It may be clever to call it "the irrepressible copulative urge camouflaged" and to see in its literary expression thwarted desire finding "an outlet in a neurotic love-poetry in which the object of true worship which the poet dare not name openly is masked by a philosophical concept of Ultimate Reality". May I point out that the mystical urge is neither dry philosophy nor ascetic puritanism? It is a leap of the soul, a whole-hearted desire for union with Eternal Beauty, a kind of sexless sex, a passion based on continence. Nothing arid or barren here - everything a fire that purifies without destroying the senses and the emotions. Until one understands this fire burning intensely in an atmosphere of peace, one will understand neither mysticism nor mystical poetry.

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Mail-bag Musings

A man of letters is often taken to be a man with infinite leisure for letter-writing. His mail-bag bursts with queries and some of them push the interrogation mark to the farthest ends of the universe! But questions are a good stimulus and one who is pelted with them begins to look about him with new eyes and in directions undreamt of. Here are a few I pick out of a recent barrage with a direct or indirect relation to a causerie on literature.

Confucius and a Curious Classification

A correspondent echoes the "intrigued" uncertainty felt by Bertrand Russell about a saying of Confucius. "Men of virtue," declares Confucius, "love the mountains, men of learning the sea." A very attractive classification, admits Bertrand Russell but he scratches his head and confesses himself beaten. I think it is not really too curious or cryptic: the Chinese philosopher was using his imagination, and an imaginative approach will light up the main points of his meaning. Virtue implies an effort at self-exceeding, at rising higher and higher than the normal run of life - as mountains seem to lift themselves, tier on tier, above the earth. It is also a process of discipline, a giving of definite shape to oneself -like the formation of clear controlled contours mountains have undergone. Again, it is a striving after something which is believed to be unchangeable through the ages, after an ideal that is lasting and does not vary but is the same for ever - like the steady and stable shape the mountains uprear. Finally, it is an arduous work - hard, as it were, like the granite of mountains. Learning has an endlessness, space beyond space, horizon beyond horizon. It is manifold, taking a thousand forms, falling into a thousand movements. It is an exploration of the unknown, a diving into strange depths, a searching for hidden treasures. In all these respects it is like

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an experience of the sea. Furthermore, it has a reflective quality, it mirrors the truths of high heaven but is content like the sea to mirror them instead of reaching out towards them for actual possession as mountains appear to do.

Gandhian Satyagraha

Confucius was a man both of virtue and learning. Our Mahatma Gandhi is mainly the former. But, of course, all that is done by a virtue-seeking man need not be right. Sometimes, virtue can be mountainish in the sense of what Gandhi himself calls "a Himalayan blunder" and it can be such a blunder even when one least suspects it. A correspondent asks me whether I have read R.R. Diwakar's book, Satyagraha: Its Technique and History and whether I endorse the policy of Gandhian Satyagraha. I have not gone through the book in question and I believe Satyagraha has a certain force in certain circumstances, but Gandhi's desire always to "play cricket" and not take advantage of an opponent runs to dangerous quixotism. The Gandhian satyagrahi, playing cricket, does his best to expose his stumps freely or else to put his leg where his bat should be and court an l.b.w. If he uses his bat he lifts the ball to an easy catch. Mostly, he throws away his bat instead of hitting out. To a fast ball he offers his body and gets black and blue with hurts. He does everything to make the other! side win - and expects as a result that the opposing captain's heart would melt at the sight of so much self-immolation and an order would be given by him to allow every ball to be slogged to a beautiful "six"! The amazing thing is that the Gandhian satyagrahi, with his fasts, his meek bearing of lathi charges, his open intimation to the police of what he would do, his willing offer of himself for imprisonment did fill the British Government with shame and won many compassionate concessions. One cannot help admiring for a time this novel and not ignoble method. But soon it becomes clear that, though it is effective for a few immediate gains by a subject nation, it must slowly tend to

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undermine the instinct for struggle. Early success in the method would render a people passive if not also soft, lead the nation to depend on pity and, when pity failed, make it go under instead of fighting with righteous fury and coming out on top. Besides, satyagraha can be an absolute "misfire" when practised against a type like Hitler who brought a diabolic strain which unlike the human mind and heart is impervious to appeals to conscience and to attempts to create a sense of moral shame and stir up fellow-feeling. To offer satyagraha, as Gandhism advised, in the face of Hitlerism would be to pave the smoothest and shortest way to the destruction of all that mankind has cherished.

"Saint" and "Rishi"

Mention of Gandhi leads me to the correspondent who, among other things, asks me to consider how loosely the terms "saint" and "saintly" are used in English. Yes, they are, just as "spiritual" and "mystical" are applied to anybody who believes in and thinks about supernormal and supernatural things and experiences. But we Indians must take the English language in hand and chisel the meaning of its great words to represent precisely the inner life. I suppose French is worse still: "spirituel" means in it "mentally sparkling" -even an atheist and materialist and sensualist can be "spirituel"!

The Protestant Reformation had much to do with befogging the English language in regard to the inner life. The Roman Catholics had more or less accurate notions about the difference between religio-ethical goodness like our Gandhi's and saintly purity and radiancy arising from mystical communion with the Divine Presence within - though I dare say that in some instances they reduced the difference to a crude cluster of what were called miraculous phenomena. But the canonisation of a man came about after much scratinising of his life and its sources of activity, a careful study of the subjective as well as objective quality of his being. That is

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why even the Pope who is the head of the Church is not in virtue of his mere moral and religious eminence called a saint. Among the Protestants, whoever lives a life of sexual abstinence and charity and service is a saint: often the sexual desideratum is dropped altogether and a 'saintly' prelate or missionary can have his bellyful of wedded debauchery without the least tarnishing of his halo!

My correspondent asks me to say something also about the term "rishi" and decide if it can be applied to Tagore. Well, Sri Aurobindo has explained its root meaning and applied it to Bankim Chandra Chatterji for his discovery of the mantra of India's renascence in the song Bande Mataram, that cry of obeisance to the divine Mother Spirit which is felt behind India's idealistic and soul-questing activity down the ages. In its highest connotation, "rishi" means one who brings about the creative expression of the secret divinity of things, either in word or action, preferably in both, as did the composers of the Vedas and the Upanishads. If Tagore attained, on the plane proper to him, a creative pitch in his poetry of the inner life or of mystical and spiritual realities, he could be hailed as a rishi. In a general sense, the poet who gives sovereign expression from the inside, so to speak, to any plane becomes a rishi, to matter if he does not touch the mystical and spiritual aspect of things. Thus I suppose Shakespeare can be described as the rishi of the plane of the Life Force. I myself, however, prefer to give a mystical and spiritual tinge to the term, so that the profound Mother-worshipping fervour of Bankim Chandra Chatterji would make him a rishi in his national anthem while the emotional patriotism of Iqbal in his Hindustan Hamara would not. So too would I deem Tagore a rishi in his intensest ecstasy of utterance only where he reveals, in the light of his own word-plane, realities of the inner being or of Supernature. And here I should like to point out that in the true rishi-poems there is illumination as well as rapture, a seerhood no less than the soul's lyricism. Certain poems of Tagore's Gitanjali have this double quality - so do others that are not

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devotional at all. Devotionalism is not the sine qua non. I don't think one could designate Tagore's Urvasie as devotional, but I am inclined to rank it among his finest rishi-creations.

It is necessary to say, in passing, that Tagore the poet was on many occasions a rishi but Tagore the man was on the whole far from it. To be a rishi as a man one must be something more than intellectually wise and culturally accomplished, and morally scrupulous. One's judgments and actions must spring de profundis, one must be caught up into the divine depths of one's nature and live there and relate one's outer life to those secret splendours.

The Mystical Afflatus

The complete rishi is a rarity today and even a belief in rishihood is rare enough in these sceptical times. But it must be recognised that one must approach mysticism with some caution, keeping a sharp and clear eye to distinguish the spurious from the true. On the other hand, one must not be rigid or single-tracked in one's approach, laying over-stress on this turn or that of the mystical afflatus whether in life or poetry. A correspondent of mine expresses distrust of the mystical afflatus because he fears it often leads to a fruitless introversion and a hallucinated happiness that have no issue in action, no world-transforming power like that of the great Saints of Christendom. Mysticism of the type he has in mind is truly "cheap and jejune" - but it is no mysticism at all: it is something "pseudo" and it is not less hollow when it tries to be active - its activity has that sickening self-satisfied sanctimonious odour which can never be the keen though subtle oxygen of a new life for mankind. In poetry, mysticism becomes "cheap and jejune" when there is not enough imaginative plunge, enough emotional tension, enough intellectual alertness. To write confusedly in a colourful style or to make one's verse a thin haze of personified abstractions -this is to be false and futile. A certain obscurity is bound to occur at times in the genuine mystical self-expression, but

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there must also be the vision-stir and the living touch in the writing that give one the impression that here is reality, no matter if this reality be of an order not normal to day-to-day experience. Blake, for example, has poems cutting no precise figure in the mind; yet we feel because of the life-throb in the style a sense of profundity and an emotion that has a grandeur in it. Another kind of effect is produced by the vivid vagueness, if I may so put it, of Yeats's Celtic insight: depths are awakened in us and a lovely mist begins to wash the being to a new quiver of delight. The mist is not penetrated everywhere by our eyes, but our eyes are given a keenly focussed picture of it so that its presence becomes a strange reality evocative of unsuspected dimensions in our consciousness. This sort of mystical poetry may be called "moonlit" - there is another that is a "sunlit" wideness and clarity, not logical clarity but a revelatory interpretative power sweeping one towards horizons larger and more splendid than those of the natural world. Whether these horizons exist in a supernatural plane or in man's labyrinthine mind is not a question with which a critic is directly concerned: it suffices that they seem to exist, have an air of reality, affect us deeply, enrich our consciousness and touch springs in us of finer and subtler action among our fellows. The mystical afflatus of both the moonlit and the sunlit varieties is to be found again and again in the best poets and it is nothing to be "uneasy" over. Nor is it in actual life any more than in literature a thing to be distrusted or regretted so long as it is clear of inane or else effusive falsity. I join with my correspondent heartily in looking askance at the Inane and the Effusive going about in pontifical robes.

A Critic Run Amok

We must beware, however, of mistaking because of its supernormality such tinsel for real spiritual magnificence. And we must beware also of jibbing at somebody who faces it on his knees, though with a poised, sanely scrutinising

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attitude and a far from hysterical gesture. My remarks are provoked by a review, sent by another correspondent, of Prof. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar's book Sri Aurobindo. The review is signed P.M. and my correspondent is much upset by what he terms its stupidity.

Looking behind the stupidity I suspect an inferiority complex at work in P.M. If I might play Chesterton I should say that P.M. feels acutely that he is no A.M. In other words, he feels that he is a sort of light that can do nothing but go winking and has neither the colourful hope of dawn nor the intense achievement of noon. I should add, too, in the same punning vein, that with the sense of sinking there is mixed in P.M. the tendency of westering: he leans toward the values of the modern West and is obsessed by the mightiness of English writers in their own tongue. Now, these two strains of his inferiority complex - first, the impression that Sri Aurobindo towers far above him in everything, that even Prof. Iyengar has written an interesting book, while P.M. is practically nobody and nowhere; and second, his belief that all this Yoga-business which is so unmodernly unwestern is at bottom "bunk" and that hagiography is so very eastern and rubbishy and that no Indian can write admirable stuff in an admirable manner in the English language which has so many awe-inspiring names of English writers - these two strains instigate the overemphatic sneering at the book under review for not only treating its subject in a certain way but also for choosing this particular subject.

Sri Aurobindo is a persona ingrata with P.M. P.M. does not like him as a literary figure and he does not like him as a Yogi: he considers his English imitative and stone-stiff -lifelessly ersatz - and his spiritual experience a kind of many-sided muddle scarcely deserving the hagiographical approach that seems to be Prof. Iyengar's. If P.M. did not suffer from an inferiority complex "which when it is sought to be suppressed causes always the cocky and destructive temper, he would be able to state his own lack of sympathy with the method of Sri Aurobindo's philosophical writing - on the one

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hand, an acute dividing, defining, discriminating and on the other a massive building up with a multiform vision and a stately style - and yet recognise the power that is at the service of that method. Also, he would be able to observe the hagiographical basis of Prof. Iyengar's book and still appreciate the effort Prof. Iyengar has made to raise on this basis a biographical superstructure of several wings with the aid of various views of the subject supplied by references, reminiscences, revelations by people in touch with the subject or by the subject himself. Considering the non-detailed somewhat scantily historical material at Iyengar's disposal, he has not done a bad job: much charm and some versatility and plenty of stamina are there. Faults and gaps are present which even the level at which he writes does not excuse or justify - but his work provides on the whole an excellent popular introduction. Anybody can see this, hagiography or no. But P.M. is blind in both eyes, and the self-assertive parade he makes of his blindness does not so much shock me as draws contempt. A pretty small mind is here, in which its own smallness is rubbed in smartingly by its jealousy of what is big and which tries to impose on itself and on others an illusion of its own bigness.

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Two Packets of Poetry and a Prose Cutting

Two slim packets of poetry have been put in my hands by a friend - one in typescript, the other in print - both re-comended with warm admiration; while a prose cutting from The Times Literary Supplement has been given me with disgust and disapproval.

The printed booklet is entitled "Magnificat" and its writer is S.I.M., a woman. It makes pleasant reading. The general poetic atmosphere is good - the sentiment in which the verse lives and moves is touched with the mystery of life's birth and growth and of the one Force variously creative everywhere. I think it is this general atmosphere, this prevailing sentiment that stirred my friend so much. But I must warn him against taking these things as themselves poetry. There are certain ideas towards which an imaginative man always feels a good deal of warmth; when, however, we appreciate poetry we must not transfer that warmth which is our own to the stuff of words we are considering and cover this stuff with a sort of enchanting haze. Even if the author has felt the same warmth and his ideas have stirred him deeply, it does not follow that all he writes is high poetry. Poetry is, in the last analysis, expression - not what is felt or seen or thought. Of course sincerity and intensity of mind are essential - still, they are not per se poetry: one must consider the measure of beauty in the utterance of these essentials.

"Magnificat" has some fairly good passages, some rather fine lines, but I fail to discover any sustained effect. Its general tone is sufficiently lyrical: the fault lies in insufficient crystallisation of the lyrical impulse. I notice in its "thoughtful" parts a too facile turn - in its "emotional" parts an excitement which is born more of pseudo-mystic fancy than profound and soul-lit imagination. My remarks apply to the poem regarded as a whole: I admit that on several pages there is the throb of true poetry, though that throb does not fill any complete page except perhaps the first which pro-

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mises much and the fourteenth where the expression is not as intense as elsewhere yet is charged with enough felicity throughout.

Let me illustrate my comments with some quotations. Perhaps the lines most beautifully moving and suggestive are —

O womanhood whose principle is one

With the great planets, that adoring wheel

Around the central sun,

and

She who has looked on her Beloved's face

Irradiated into precious line,

and

Mary, the Mother of Jesus, when the Unborn

enlarged her,

Made her Magnificat, singing of Love, and an Order new.

In the last quotation it is the phrase "when the Unborn enlarged her" that is the transfiguring touch: the rest is good but gets its meaning and depth of emotion from this hint at the same time of the outer physical phenomenon of pregnancy and the inner psychological experience of mystical wideness - a hint which also renders apt the accumulation of so many syllables in each line. In all the three instances I have cited, the thought plunges below the surface or lifts above it: one or two others equally brief can be added where also the poetic consciousness is quickened to a like beauty. A more frequent type of poetry, however, in the book is a simple lyricism seeing things vividly without seeing far into them -

Here in the grass at my feet

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Tiny lives fuse and meet

Working Love's will

or,

The springtime lark

Shrills out my secret melodied.

(O hark! O hark!

She tells how sweet and strange

Is the love-change.)

But when there is an attempt to express what the author considers to be a great thought, a flash of grand philosophic or mystic insight, she fails because her intellect has not the needed energy or penetrativeness, and no amount of capitals can give her expression weight of significance or luminous amplitude. The warning I uttered at the beginning applies to all this ambitious "grandeur" which is wanting in true power, genuine sweep of passion, revealing light of imagination. I do not say there is no touch at all of vibrant vision; I just say that it is not kept shining clean of exclamatory rhetoric and misty sentimentalism... S.I.M. has, I am certain, the stuff of inspiration in her, but the babe of beauty is not fully born yet.

The typescript I have been handed is captioned "An Old Man's Songs". The poet is no other than that versatile personality well-known in Bengal to-day - Sir Sahed Suhrawardy. I am not sure these poems have been published, but several deserve to be. It seems they were written a long time back, for the typescript is stained with age. Their dramatic effect is considerable and in one or two places remarkable, but that is not the same thing as saying that the poetic effect is throughout satisfying. I record this impression with regret because the poetry too in some places is really remarkable and there is scarcely a poem in which a few lines of suggestive delicacy of power are not present. No greater praise in this 'genre' is possible than that one is reminded of

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the new style W.B. Yeats fashioned for himself in mid-career after wearying of Celtic wizardries and incantations; but the besetting danger of the new Yeats was either a too intellectual or on the rebound an over-colloquial cast of phrase. Again and again in "An Old Mart's Songs" the genuine poetic utterance in which a simple directness rises to inspiration or a complex beauty of passion starts glowing is interrupted by prosaic turns and weak rhythms. The sentiment is rarely at fault and I dare say it would make appealing literature if a prose form and rhythm were adopted, but in the form chosen it tends to be flat when it is not supported by that subtle keenness of word and of metrical movement which is the life and soul of poetry. Perhaps it will be argued that in speaking of trivial things a trivial tone has to be employed and poetising would mean pompousness and falsetto. But what is really wanted is the poetic vision of trivialities. Take the line,

Odol and powder before going out to friends,

with its telling mockery but not telling poetic mockery such as we find in

Lips painted to the crimson of a wound.

With these two instances from the same passage it is not hard to see what I mean by poetic vision - a quality which can find expression in various styles and not necessarily always in a highly colourful one, but in some form or other it must be present if a poem is to be through and through a success. Certain poems in the series are a success of this kind, though perhaps not the most beautiful or forcible kind of success, for the finest lines occur in pieces which are rather unequal. All the same, it has been a pleasure to come across those memorable lines: it is not every day that one chances upon gems like

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Beware, my Love, beware,

Lest in your riotous hair

There might not be a dream of mine that sighs

or,

at rest

In the crystal halo of your years

or,

I stretch torn hands to reach your piteous hands;

I seek through tattered space your ample eyes.

I come now to the cutting from The Times Literary Supplement. It is a few months old but it calls for comment, for it is concerned with one of our most gifted wielders of the pen both in prose and poetry. The part about his prose is mostly appreciative: the remarks on his poetry are really a "shock". I am in full sympathy with my friend's disgust and disapproval. Listen to this sentence - a veritable masterpiee of inept judgment: "It cannot be said that Aurobindo shows any organic adaptation to music and melody. His thought is profound, his technical devices are commendable but the music that enchants or disturbs is not there. Aurobindo is not another Tagore or Iqbal or even Sarojini Naidu." I confess the words fairly take my breath away. They deny inspiration altogether and in all its forms to Sri Aurobindo's poetry. For, evidently, music in poetry does not stand just for one particular form, a liquid leaping dancing movement or a movement of resounding richness, less light but equally swift, or a slow grave movement or the unrhymed un-stanzaed enjambed movement of blank verse. It can be anything and it is born fundamentally of kindled emotion and imagination setting language astir and aglow so that words and phrases become intense and harmonious in a vital suggestive way and fall into appropriate metrical patterns

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that ring significant changes on a recurrent base. In short, it is inspiration metrically expressing itself.

Is Sri Aurobindo wanting everywhere in that expression? Look at his blank verse. Only a deaf man with his whole aesthetic being grown numb can refuse to find "the music that enchants or disturbs" in a passage like the following from an early narrative, Love and Death, where a lover is represented as searching the underworld of departed spirits for his prematurely lost mate:

...O Miserable race of men,

With violent and passionate souls you come

Foredoomed upon the earth and live brief days

In fear and anguish, catching at stray beams

Of sunlight, little fragrances of flowers;

Then from your spacious earth in a great horror

Descend into this night, and here too soon

Must expiate your few inadequate joys.

O bargain hard! Death helps us not. He leads

Alarmed, all shivering from his chill embrace,

The naked spirit here. O my sweet flower,

Art thou too whelmed in this fierce wailing flood?

Ah me! But I will haste and deeply plunge

Into its hopeless pools and either bring

Thy old warm beauty back beneath the stars,

Or find thee out and clasp thy tortured bosom

And kiss thy sweet wrung lips and hush thy cries.

Love shall draw half thy pain into my limbs;

Then we shall triumph glad of agony.

From the point of view of the inner music - that is, the thrill of the inspired consciousness - creating the outer music that embodies it, the lines are some of the most perfect in literature, with a sustained exquisiteness of the mot juste and the outer music is of such a markedly euphonious Virgilian type as to leave no excuse whatever for overlooking it. And again and again in Love and Death the music rises to the same

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pitch and carries the same tone. Nor, whether this tone be at play or a more austere one like

Long months he travelled between grief and grief,

Reliving thoughts of her with every pace,

Measuring vast pain in his immortal mind

occur instead, is there any lack in any blank-verse narrative by Sri Aurobindo of beautiful music organically adapted to the feeling and the vision. How is it The Times Literary Supplement critic got aesthetically so obtuse? And does he not realise that blank-verse music is the hardest to produce and therefore most clinchingly proves the inspired poet? Sri Aurobindo's being very strikingly successful in it gives the lie, with quintessential force, to the charge that he is less a poet than Tagore or Iqbal or even Sarojini Naidu.

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