India in the English Novel-Spiritual Values*

By Dr. T. RAMA RAO, M.A., Ph.D.

(Principal, V.R.S. College, Chirala)

With the close of the nineteenth century the age of “cheerful yesterdays and confident tomorrows” draws to a close, and the Western world enters upon a period of unmitigated confusion and disintegration. It is characterised by a breakdown in stable behaviour and a loss of form in many arts, with a corresponding emphasis on the accidental and trivial. The spirit of the age reflects, in short, a crisis based upon an “internal schism of the soul”, as Prof. Toynbee calls it.

Meanwhile Science continues to march on, splitting atoms and unleashing tremendous forces. But unfortunately every gain in power over the natural forces has not been accompanied by corresponding gains self-mastery and self-understanding. The rise of the machine and the fall of man are the two parts of the same tragic process, which has laid all the emphasis on the means of life and forgotten altogether its consummations.

There is therefore a real fear that this grand fabric of the machine-age will end in an inevitable smash-up, and that this Faustian civilization, as Spengler forecasts in his ‘Man and Technics’, one day may lie in fragments, forgotten; our railways and steamships as dead as the Roman Roads and the Chinese Wall; our great cities and skyscrapers in ruins like old Memphis and Babylon.

This spirit of disillusionment and doubt, this sense of futility strongly colours the literature of our time. It may be seen in the work of James Joyce, one of the clearest and most incisive voices of our generation, who brings his uncompromising intellect to bear upon the dislocations of society and the diseases of the soul. The moral failure of modern civilization and the decadence of the 20th century world is no less the theme of Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust, who, together with Joyce, make the three major representative novelists of our time.

This new mood perhaps is nowhere so clearly apparent as in the Utopian efforts that belong to this period. The Utopian form in literature is as old as Plato and as recent as Aldous Huxley and Philip Orwell, author of that frightening satire entitled ‘1984’. In between, we have a number of writers of undisputed talent, like Sir Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Samuel Butler, William Morris, Edward Bellamy, and H.G. Wells. It is not our present purpose to trace the slow evolution of the Utopian tradition, but the reader’s attention is invited to one striking contrast between the Utopias, old and new. In the older Utopias there is generally a note of optimism and faith in the renewal and regeneration of mankind, white in the latter, there is an unmistakable note of despair, which sometimes becomes a shriek of agony. Writing in 1887, Bellamy could still confidently assert that “fifty years of Europe were better than a cycle of Cathay”. But writing in the inter-war period Huxley, in his ‘Brave New World’ of 1932, bitterly satirises the idea of a scientific Utopia, in which we find everything thoroughly planned, bottled and frightful, and from which all emotion, poetry and beauty are sterilised and eliminated. Then with the Second World War the pendulum swings even more violently from calm confidence or bitter satire to sudden panic, as may be seen from Huxley’s ‘Ape and Essence’, or Orwell’s ‘1984’, in which he envisages the British civilization as it might be 35 years hence, under the dictatorship of Big Brother, who, with his Thought-Police and Child-Spies, establishes a totalitarian State in which there is complete regimentation of thought and action.

All this represents a sorry state of affairs, a state of moral vacuum in which humanity cannot continue long. It must struggle its way back and out into fresh air, where the primal duties shine like stars above, and the charities that soothe and comfort and bless lie about the feet of man like flowers. Sooner or late man was sure to turn from the knowledge of the material world, vast and various as it might be, to a knowledge of the Spirit, which alone could lend an ultimate meaning even to the facts of the material universe.

This reaction was inherent in the nature of things and conforms to what Hegel terms the ‘dialectical Process’. If the older preoccupations in the realm of the Spirit and the age-old religious affirmations form the ‘thesis’, then Science with its emphasis on the material universe may be taken to form the ‘anti-thesis’ in the Hegelian sense. The human mind is so constituted, however, that it does not stop with contradictions, but strives to effect a synthesis, which includes both, but on a higher level. And so the human mind moves forward toward new values.

The first step toward this higher synthesis must naturally be of the nature of a rediscovery of those values which the advancing tide of scientific knowledge had submerged. Thus we find an earnest quest for spiritual reality, side by side with scientific researches, for spiritual reality alone could answer to the deepest longings and the highest aspirations of man. Shaw is one of the notable adventurers engaged in this quest, and his contribution is the discovery of the significance of the Life Force and Life’s incessant aspiration to higher organization, wider, deeper and intenser self-consciousness and clearer self-understanding. This belief in what he terms the ‘evolutionary appetite’, which is a kind of divine aspiration towards perfection, is the philosophic basis of most of his plays. It inspires ‘Major Barbara’, ‘The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet’, ‘Man and Superman’, ‘Back to Methuselah’, to mention only a few of the more striking illustrations of this idea. Wells is another pioneer who has carried on vigorous researches into the realm of reality. He does not, of course, discover the spiritual idea in the traditional sense, but his studies lead to deep insight into the social values inherent in Science and History, of which a convincing and lucid statement may be found in his ‘Outline of History’, ‘The Science of Life’, and ‘Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind’. These are his works on a grand scale, and they reveal him as an instinctive believer in the Biblical dictum that Knowledge delivers. It is this faith that inspires his idea of the ‘open conspiracy’ for a better world:

When we turn to Conrad, we find that to him fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. And it is significant that the failure and suffering that come to his central characters, like Almayer, Lord Jim, Captain Anthony and Razumov, are in almost every case due to some breach of the great human agreement of fidelity, that sense of loyalty of man to man and of all men to the traditions of their kind.

In E. M. Forster the emphasis on human personality and personal relationships becomes even more pronounced.

Thus the leaven of the spirit gradually enters the realm of life and literature, and this mood of spiritual revival naturally brings the East into focus, and Oriental wisdom is sounded by some for light and solace. We shall consider, in particular, two writers who represent the most typical reaction of the Western mind to the impact of Eastern thought.

Aldous Huxley promises to figure ultimately as the most significant novelist of the contemporary generation, being the most faithful reflector of the spirit of the age. He has the soul of the poet as well mind of the scientist, and so is best equipped to deal with an age in which intellect and emotion constantly struggle for supremacy and await a higher synthesis to establish harmony between them.

From ‘Crome Yellow’ of 1921 to ‘Time Must Have A Stop’, published in 1945, Huxley is engaged in a long pilgrimage of ideas, in which he strives to see reality with every kind of eye at once, with the biologist’s eye, the chemist’s, the physician’s, the historian’s and the religious man’s.

‘Crome Yellow’ introduces Denis, a youthful Hamlet-like character, with a temperament like Huxley’s own. It raises the issue whether “fumbling over books and thinking about God and Devil and all” is really worthwhile, while others, less sensitive and less susceptible, with faces like battering rams, are kissing the beautiful women and seem to have the best of life. On the other hand, ‘Time Must Have a Stop’, coming some 24 years later, is more precise and positive in its teaching and drives home the lesson that if there is only a million to one chance to secure our social salvation, that one chance lies in a return to God. He holds that the only basis for a better social order is a shared metaphysic, which embodies the common insight of all the great religions. The purification of Sebastian, the hero, and the character of Bruno, the mystic, who remains uniformly human and lovable in spite of his saintliness and detachment, reflect the influence of Oriental mysticism on the author.

This change of outlook is gradual and is marked by clear-cut landmarks, like ‘Eyeless in Gaza’ and ‘Ends and Means’. The latter may be deemed to be a Confession of Faith of the later Huxley. In it he ventures to wonder whether the flux of time, which we try to arrest, is not after all an illusion, and whether by force of contemplation, after the manner of Oriental mystics, we might not merge our transitory selves in the timelessness of reality.

This doctrine of detachment, which is central to the highest teaching in Hindu philosophy, thus colours the work of Huxley. It is further discussed, and at considerable length, in his ‘Perennial Philosophy’; and we see its influence steadily growing through his later novels like ‘After Many A Summer’ and ‘Grey Eminence’, until we come to ‘Time Must Have A Stop’.

Though of an elder generation, Somerset Maugham stands out no less significant among the pilgrims on the path to reality. His early training to the medical profession, the strong philosophic bent inherent in his nature, his wide travels and experience of men and things, his artistic sincerity, all lend to his work a profound and lasting value.

In his long writing career extending over half-a-century, he has produced an enormous output of some 19 novels, 24 plays, a large number of short stories, in addition to works of travel, and autobiographies. Apart from the high literary quality of his work, there is also traceable in it the slow and gradual evolution of a point of view, which is not without considerable Spiritual significance.

His early work is all in the mood of self-expression. We shall pass over his early novels and also his plays till we come to his latest novel, ‘The Razor’s Edge’, which is relevant for our immediate purpose. Though published in 1944, it is strongly influenced by his trip to India in 1938, during which he meets many Indian yogis, Swamis, and Fakirs and becomes deeply impressed by Oriental mysticism. The central character in it is a highly unusual man, Lawrence Darrell, of whose strange life Maugham feels obliged to give an account. He finds conventional values unsatisfactory and seeks a new way of life, which involves the gradual giving up of love, friends, besides seversl conventional interests. He attains to a final knowledge of reality, a sense of being at one with the Absolute through the Indian philosophical system of Vedanta.

Thus the waters of British fiction are stirred, and a new spirit is evident both in life and literature. There is an increasing awareness that the facts of human existence cannot be explained without reference to the basic truths of religion, any more than the fall of the apple without reference to the principle of gravitation.

The star rises once more in the East, and it is faithfully reflected in the minds of all sincere souls, whether of East or West.

* Based on a Radio Talk broadcast from Vijayawada.

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