BY SHRIMATI SOPHIA WADIA

At the close of his very instructive, almost inspiring, essay "On the Sublime’, Longinus deals with the subject of war and literature:

One problem now remains for solution, my dear Terentianus, and knowing your love of learning I will not hesitate to append it–a problem which a certain philosopher recently put to me.

This "a certain philosopher" bemoans the absence of freedom which has the power to foster noble minds; he complains that in the age in which they lived they are "schooled from childhood in an equitable slavery"; he adds that they never drank from "the fairest and most fertile source of literature, which is freedom"; and so on.

Longinus took him up and in a noble passage, which we must quote in full, answers him thus:

It is easy, my good friend, and it is characteristic of human nature always to find fault with things as they are at the moment. But consider. Perhaps it is not the world’s peace that corrupts great natures but much rather this endless warfare which besets our hearts, yes, and the passions that garrison our lives in these days and make utter havoc of them. It is the love of money, that insatiable sickness from which was all now suffer, and the love of pleasure that enslave us, or rather, one might say, sink our lives, soul and all, into the depths; for love of gold is a withering sickness, and love of pleasure utterly ignoble. Indeed, I cannot discover on consideration how, if we value boundless wealth, or to speak more truly, make a god of it, we can possibly keep our natures free from its evil parasites. In close company with vast and unconscionable Wealth there follows, "step for step," as they say, Extravagance: and no sooner has the one opened the gates of cities or houses, than the other comes and makes a home there too. And when they have spent some time in our lives, philosophers tell us, they build a nest there and promptly set about begetting children; these are Swagger and Conceit and Luxury, no bastards but their true-born issue. And if these off-spring of Wealth are allowed to grow to maturity, they soon breed in our hearts inexorable tyrants, Insolence and Disorder and Shamelessness. This must inevitably happen, and men no longer then look upwards nor take any further thought for their good name. And what is the end of this process? Step by step the ruin of their lives is completed, their greatness of soul wastes away from inanition and is no longer their ideal, since they value that part of them which is mortal and consumes away, and neglect the development of their immortal souls. A man who has been bribed for his verdict can no longer give an unbiased and sound judgment on what is just and fair, for the corrupt judge inevitably regards his own interest as fair and just. And seeing that the whole life of each one of us is now governed wholly by bribery and by hunting after other, people’s deaths and laying traps for legacies, and we have sold our souls for profit at any price, slaves that we are to our luxury, can we then expect in such a pestilential ruin of our lives that there is left a single free and unbribed judge of the things that are great and last to all eternity? Are we not all corrupted by our passion for gain? Nay, for such as we are, perhaps it is better to have a master than to be free. Were we given complete liberty we should behave like released prisoners, and our greed for our neighbours’ possessions would swamp the world in a deluge of evils. "In fact," I said, "what spends the spirit of the present generation is the apathy in which all but a few of us pass our lives, only exerting ourselves or showing any enterprise for the sake of getting praise or pleasure out of it, never from, the honourable and admirable motive of doing good to the world."

Leaving aside for the nonce the mass of our intelligentsia, let us apply the lesson implicit in this passage to the growing band of writers in India. Their pens may use their own native language or English, it matters little in the consideration of our subject. The truth which Longinus brings out is this: the endless warfare waged by our passions against our Soul is a corrupting force; pursuing lucre for selfish ends, we neglect the care of our immortal Souls. Choosing pleasures, now of one sense, then of another, we entangle ourselves till pure reason degenerates into sophistry, judgments become perverted and the divine in us is smothered almost to extinction. The mighty magic of Prakriti glamours us so that we value its dictates as intimations of Purusha. And as if the fight which our own weaknesses and our personal Karma provides were not sufficient to yield the essence of experience, some of our young authors fall prey to the insidious temptation of going to the gutter for the sake of gaining first-hand knowledge. This is the real cause of degradation, and art and literature suffer more from this than from the political status and social environment of the poet or the painter.

The three gates of hell mentioned in the Gita are open not only for the hoi polloi, but also for the literati. Very often does the writer pass through the gate of lust, of wrath, of greed. And what is worse –he is apt to justify his visits to the nether regions as unavoidable and even necessary experience for his creative labour. This is an entirely false position, but we need not argue that here. We go a step further and assert that passing down the gateways of kama, krodha, lobha is not only unnecessary, but further that it is highly injurious to the health of the writer’s real creative faculty. We do not deny that among the drug-addicts, drunkards and debauchees there have been some poets and novelists. But judging from the long history of literary creations, we cannot but come to the conclusion that the quality of the writing of those authors who guarded the purity of their minds and the sincerity of their hearts is superfine; mortal always and muddy often that of those who sought in hell the force to depict the glories of heaven.

Let us turn to Longinus for guidance on this point. He states:

It is impossible that those whose thoughts and habits all their lives long are petty and servile should flash out anything wonderful, worthy of immortal life. No, a great style is the natural outcome of weighty thoughts, and sublime sayings naturally fall to men of spirit.

To seek for "men of spirit" among literary creators in the India of today is to open an enquiry of national importance.

In our enthusiasm to encourage all those who are contributing to the literary renaissance now taking place, we are running the risk of accepting second-rate creativity as an expression of genius; we are apt to price too highly a story, a poem, an essay, fearing to under-rate its value. We may reject the weeds, but to prize as rare blooms flowers of the garden variety is to make the work of real creators very difficult.

Again, modern western influence, especially that of psychology, has weakened the fibre of literary creators, and "men of spirit" are rare among them. Young Indians imitating their Occidental Confreres very often give the go-by to the higher life, thus doing a great disservice to the mission of our Motherland–to help humanity return to the Life of Spirit.

The question which is put by many friends to whom this line of thought has been presented is–"What would you have us do, we who are not cut out for Gandhian asceticism? Our answer would be–"If you cannot be an ascetic, must you be a hedonist?" To control the mind and direct it towards the Soul is difficult, to let it run to objects of sense and turn sensualist is not difficult; but for a man of letters the game is not worth the candle. Longinus quotes Plato’s Republic:

"Those who have then no experience," he says, "of wisdom or of goodness, living always amid banquets and other such festivities, are seemingly carried downwards and there they wander all their lives. They have never yet raised their eyes to the truth, never been carried upwards, never tasted true, abiding pleasure. They are like so many cattle; stooping downwards, with their eyes always bent on the earth and on their dinner tables, they feed and fatten and breed, and so greedy are they for these enjoyments that they kick and butt with hooves and horns of iron and kill each other for insatiate desire."

And commenting upon this passage Longinus points to the path of emulation which our young literary creators can tread. Let them imitate, if not emulate, the illustrious predecessors, from Valmiki downwards. Says Longinus:

What and what manner of road is this? zealous imitation of the great historians and poets of the past. That is the aim, dear friend, and we must hold to it with all our might. For many are carried away by the inspiration of another, just as the story runs that the Pythian priestess on approaching the tripod where there is, they say, "a rift in the earth upbreathing steam divine," becomes thereby impregnated with the divine power and is at once inspired to utter oracles; so, too, from the natural genius of those old writers there flows into the hearts of their admirers as it were an emanation from the mouth of holiness. Inspired by this, even those who are not easily moved by the divine afllatus share the enthusiasm of these others grandeur.

The born genius is a rarity; but all of us are on our way to becoming geniuses–that is, if we only will to become so. H. P. Blavatsky expounds the truth about genius and geniuses in an able essay reprinted in pamphlet form (U.L.T. Pamphlet No. 13) in which she says:

Adds our philosophy–the cultivation of certain aptitudes throughout a long series of past incarnations must finally culminate in some one life, in a blooming forth as genius, in one or another direction.

In the process of Reincarnation, ever guided by the Law of Karma, every human soul must attain the state of the genius, provided he aspires ever onward, never loses sight, even when in the depths of matter, of that guiding star, the Divine soul and mind, his true Self. Though almost omniscient in its essence and nature, that Spiritual Soul still requires the aid of the brain and body transmit and give expression to the light of that real Inner Man. Explains H. P. Blavatsky:

Physical man is the musical instrument, and the Ego, the performing artist. The potentiality of perfect melody of sound is in the former–the instrument–and no skill of the latter can awaken a faultless harmony out of a broken or badly-made instrumental. This harmony depends on the fidelity of transmission, by word or act to the objective plane, of the unspoken divine thought in the very depths of man’s subjective or inner nature. Physical man may–to follow our simile–be a priceless Stradivarius, or a cheap and cracked fiddle, or again a mediocrity between the two, in the hands of the Paganini who ensouls him.

As most of us are not true geniuses, but are on the way of becoming such, it behoves us to make clean and clear our instruments so that in the progress of time we may be "moved by the divine afflatus" of which Longinus speaks. Meantime, one of the very methods of cleansing the mind is that of keeping close company of the real Geniuses (not the artificial ones) and of learning from their work. Emulation and imitation are not worthless; like the fetus which nourishes itself by osmosis in the mother’s womb, the growing genius fosters him-self surrounded by the literary creators of old. John Keats wrote to his brothers–"I do believe that works of genius are the first things in the world," and they certainly should be for the young and rising man who wants to serve the Goddess of letters and words. No less a man than Plato practised emulating Homer, so records Longinus whose essay no aspirant to literary creation should miss studying.

The young writer of today should, nay must, aspire to become a Man of Spirit. Near at hand are the ways and means to attain if he but take the first step–reject the false notion that in and through sensuality the Soul can acquire Wisdom Divine and unfold the power to pass on the Light.

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