BY R. K. NARAYAN SWAMI

The Classical writer (I use the term broadly) took only the essence of humanity's experience and observation, and transmuting it by the alchemy of his art, presented us in the end with something that was vast and gorgeous, and with figures in it moving in and out, that in their magnificence bordered on the divine.

But there was one serious flaw in the scheme. It gave us an unreal perspective of life. It was not false, but unreal; not the falseness of a lie, but the unreality of a dream. It, no doubt, did nothing to lessen our interest in life (life that is ‘next to our skin’) neither did it do anything to increase it. It trained our minds to think of life, not in terms of humanity and its innate mystery, but in terms of demi-gods and their doings. It galvanized our imagination, and awed and thrilled us with its sweep and power. But at the same time, it tended to make us forget our feet and the little brown patch of earth that we plant them on.

In its decadence Classicism was marked by an excessive rigour that had replaced the perfection and polish of form of the ancient masters. There was still a certain remoteness from life, but it was without the spiritual stature that the ancients gave to what they transformed.

The wave of Romanticism that swept over the artistic and imaginative world in the later Eighteenth Century completely submerged all the old standards and methods. It was a revolt against all artificiality that tended to remove literature farther and farther from life. The movement stood for the ideal of spontaneity and naturalness in art. The artist no longer had to peer out of his tabernacle but he tried "to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday. . . by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.

It is, however, only in our times that this spirit has found a fuller expression. This is the age of Realism. Today, the artist has a new conception of life and his mission. Through its seeming instability and jerkiness, he perceives a balance and rhythm in life, and through its clumsiness an intricate order. His soul is more attuned, and his perceptions are finer than ours. He sees a sensitive beauty and hears a delicate rhythm where others see only the drab commonplace. He does not pick out life in fragments of essentials and then trim and enlarge them into magnificent patterns. He merely dips his hand into life, brings out a slice of it, and holds it aloft in the light of his own genius. Here there is an implication that life is great enough as it is. Life is no longer a raw material for the artist. It is a finished product, if he can look at it aright. Even as it is, life is staggering in its beauty, strangeness and irony. "The purpose of art and literature," says a writer (in ‘Tradition and Experiment in Present-day Literature), "is not to educate us into a state where . . . . our servants must do our living for us. It is, rather, to give us a more passionate sense of life and power for living."

"It must be admitted at the same time that a fanatical devotion to Realism has given rise to countless freaks in modern literature. Such things are perhaps inevitable in any attempt to reach out for new values. At best they are blind frantic gropings for truth, and at worst abnormalities. But they will pass away soon, if they have not already.

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