BY N. RAGHUNATHAN, M.A., B.L.

(Asst. Editor, "The Hindu")

An interesting discussion has been going on in the London weeklies for some time past, in the desultory fashion characteristic of such discussions, as to what influence, if any, the consciousness that he is addressing an audience exercises on a literary artist. It would be sheer pedantry to deny that such consciousness does exist in the case of every writer, even though he may not share Dr. Johnson's downright view that no man but a fool ever wrote except for money. No man, be he artist or journeyman, philosopher or haberdasher but craves for the approbation of his fellows and this craving within limits is undoubtedly healthy; an elementary proof of which is furnished by the fact that it is a universal sentiment. We are not concerned here with those types in whom this craving becomes an obsession. But it will be useful to investigate the psychological foundations of this satisfaction that comes from recognition and to determine whether it is in any way hostile to that integrity which is the mark of all Art.

Here a digression may help. Dr. Alexander recently expressed the opinion that great art executes before it thinks. Sir Philip Hartog sought to controvert this by suggesting that a thought-mass must exist before it could be given expression to. He pointed out that when a bi-lingual person is confronted with an idea his brain is able to translate it immediately and effortlessly into either of the two languages known to him, which suggests that a thought-mass is antecedent to expression. It seems to us that the controversialists have here accidentally stumbled upon one of those fundamental distinctions that differentiate poetry from prose. Pure poetry is the supreme type of that art which executes before it thinks. It is the spirit that moveth where it listeth; the poet is but a medium, the reed through which the wind blows producing elfin music. The perfect poem exists in essence in the depths of his sub-conscious, waiting for his liberating voice just as the Adam lay buried in the blue-veined Carrara for Michael-Angelo's liberating fingers. This is not to deny that there is conscious art in poetry–the greatest poets have also been great artists; but with them art is the handmaid of inspiration, the sculptor's chisel that chips away the redundant marble. The essential genius of prose manifests itself in a different way. Here thought not merely precedes expression; it is its very anatomy. The essential elements of prose are architectonics based on fundamental brain-work, the rainbow hues of emotion and the undertone of spirit communing with itself as in a dream. A great prose style is that which renders the murmur of the spirit as purely and faithfully as it represents the panoply in which it is set. A useful definition of style (it makes no claim to precision or accuracy) would be that it is the vesture of personality. (Does not the Upanishad say "Isavasyam Idam Sarvam"?) The style is the man in the sense that it is his natural mode of expression. One test of really good prose is that as one reads it aloud one seems to catch the continuous echo of a living voice with its individual timbre, strength and virginal integrity. But a man has many moods and his voice has many corresponding inflections to express them to a nicety; so also with his style. It is in ignoring this fact that the mistake lies of those critics who would classify and confine style into water-tight compartments, Athenian, Corinthian and so on. A man's prevailing mood, his temperament, may be such as to make one of them more germane to itself than the others; but it would be placing a restraint on the spirit of art which knows no such inhibitions, if it were to be contended that he should confine himself to one of these modes of expression.

The prose-writer clothing his nucleus in flesh and blood is called upon to do many things–to embellish, to hide, to hang a transparent veil over the face of Reality. But that nucleus itself must never be lost sight of. Now, what is the nature of this nucleus, by a sure grasp of which a writer claims attention and by an adequate rendering of which he enlarges, as we hope to show, the bounds of the human spirit? To call it the central core of his personality would seem to carry the argument but a step further. It merely begets the question: What is personality and what is its relation to art? This is an issue too big to be raised by a side-wind as it were. We must be content to indicate the answer with the brevity of a formula. Personality is expressed when a unique response is made to the significant facts of the world around us. The man in the street does not stop to analyse in his own case these responses or the nature of that personality of his which is the tuning fork from which they sound. There is aesthetic as well as philosophic truth in St. John's vision of men as trees walking. Intense awareness is the pre-requisite of all creative activity and that posits an individual stand-point, a realised self. We are such stuff as dreams are made of; but the artist in reporting his emotions and intuitions is circumstanced even as the most common of us when we seek to rationalise the a logical processes of a dream. There is the difficulty of establishing contact between different planes of experience as well as of managing the constantly shifting perspective which results from the mind, none too sure of itself trying to adjust itself to this moving shadow show.

But the dream-analogy affords some guidance here. It is a common experience that even in the most riotous dream the dreamer maintains a curious detachment; his essential self seems to stand aloof, cool, critical and comprehending; it is the witness surrounded by tumult on every side but unsoiled and incorruptible. This dream-ego has a meaning for us. Deep down in his own psyche every man can, if he so wills, discover that essential self, firm as a rock, of which this dream-image is but a faint reflection. All attempt at creative expression is but an assay by the individual mind of its universal experience on the touchstone of this real self. In poetry this happens as spontaneous combustion, in prose it comes about in conscious effort. From whffih it follows that this self is the auditor whose approval the artist must gain. Style, which as we have already suggested, is in its essence a living voice, could find fulfillment only if such an auditor were predicated. Nor is there need for any other. Indeed more than one, not to speak of a multitude, could only cause confusion, distracting the artist from his business of seeing life steadily and reporting it whole. For it is impossible for any of us to penetrate through the thick wall of personality, as Pater puts it, and hold true and direct communion with another soul, and the difficulty is repeated on a lower plane when the artist, in his effort to attune his vision to the supposed predilections of a hydra-headed audience, is forced to pose–than which there could be no greater sin against the light. We have thus come by a circuitous route to the point at which we started, with the conclusion that an artist must, if he is not to stray from the path of rectitude, visualise an audience of only one, his own self. In this sense all art is rigorously subjective.

An artist, then, creates primarily for himself. But when his work kindles in others emotions and intuitions analogous to his own, though perhaps of a less intensity, he, being a man as well as an artist, finds comfort in this confirmation of the fact that the core of his experience corresponds to something deep-seated in universal humanity. There his interest in his art as an objective entity begins and ends. As for the reader, he has gained a compass wherewith he may chart his own soul. The more he utilises it for independent investigation, the more meanings will he discover in the work of art which has sent him on this voyage of exploration. The sweetness in the mouth that great art leaves will on closer scrutiny be found to be manna distilled from his own soul.

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