SRI
AUROBINDO-AS A LITERARY CRITIC
Sri Aurobindo was not a
literary critic in the professional sense of the term. Nor in
any other ordinary sense, for that matter. But never did he cease criticising literature, or interpreting life itself, during
his years on the earth. He was essentially a poet. If the greatest of his
poetry was “supra-mental”, the greatest of his criticism was creative as well
as cerebral. It was not only an exercise of the intellect, but an expression of
the “over-mind”. His criticism, no less than his poetry, bore the transforming
touch of his Yoga.
In one’s response to the
criticism or poetry of Aurobindo, two or three factors press forward for one’s
attention. One is that he was a classical scholar steeped in the literary
heritage of
As Professor of English
at the
That
his intellectual range was of the widest and his approach global in
comprehension is readily admitted by those who study him, whether they agree
with him or not.
He has also well-defined views on the world’s masters of literature, including
a comparative estimate of their worth. He chooses eleven of the world’s great
poets for the first class (in his letters on Poetry and Literature as
mentioned by Mr. K. D. Sethna). Of these, he places
four in the very first row on an equal basis of essential excellence: Valmiki, Vyasa, Homer and
Shakespeare. The six who come in the second row are: Dante, Kalidasa, Aeschoylus, Sophocles, Virgil and Milton, more or less in
that order of merit. Goethe alone stands in the third row, in a sort of
isolated grandeur. The French Racine, the Spanish Cervantes, and a few others
might form a supplementary list for the third and last row!
Valmiki represents, for him,
the supreme poet and seer–the Vates of
the Greeks. All the poets of the topmost class have the elemental creativity as
of a demiurge. They might differ from one another in some particular
aspect of their art but not in the force of their creative element. Vyasa might be the more intellectual in his approach, more
masculine in his style, more austere in his art, more philosophical in his characterisation than Valmiki,
but no less creative and, on that account, no less a poet. By the same token,
Homer might have more of the Bard in him and the playwright might be more
prominent in Shakespeare, but they are both poets of the highest class, all the
same, in the alchemy of their imagination.
In comparing Shakespeare
and Kalidasa, Sri Aurobindo does not fall a prey to the dictates of national
chauvinism, as many Indian patriots tend to do, in judging of matters, cultural
and literary. He finds Kalidasa perfect in form, polished in language, but as
for the themes of his creation more limited in his range. He agrees, by
implication, that Shakespeare is a “myriad-minded” poet. The latter’s variety
of characterisation was indeed unparalleled. Sri
Aurobindo does not quote the actual words of his idol, Bankim,
in support of his argument in this context. It is, however, worth recalling
that Bankim compared Kalidasa
to a pretty, formal garden neat and well-trimmed, Shakespeare to a huge
forest–vast, unweildy, all-inclusive; the one to a
beautiful and placid lake, the other to the mighty ocean, deep, surging and
unruly. Sri Aurobindo finds both of them natural and
convincing in depicting the paternal rather than the maternal instinct in the
love of children. No Kausalyas here–only Kanvas and King Lears. He admires
Kalidasa’s prose and Shakespeare’s blank verse to an
equal degree, finding parallels in verbal euphony and felicity of expression.
He makes no secret of his feeling about whose psyche is the more dynamic.
Nor does Sri Aurobindo
let any one go away with the notion that he is merely indulging his personal
whim or making value judgments in his classification of the world poets. He has
good reasons of his own for it, which are sustainable
at the level of reason, with argument and illustration. Not only does he
distinguish between the various levels of poetic creativity but between
different poetic styles, which might sometimes occur in one and the same poet.
The first is the “adequate” style, which just manages to cover the
immediate impact of a thing in a language proper to it. The second is the
“effective” or “dynamic” style, which responds to the subject in a more
complex, vibrant manner. It is illustrated in the lines from the well-known
soliloquy of Hamlet:
To die, to sleep;
To sleep; perchance to
dream; ay, There’s the rub;
For in that sleep of
death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled
off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause ... ...
The third is the ‘illumined’
style, which has a richer imagination, bringing out the lights and
shadows not obvious in the situation but brought out from an “in-look” at
its psychology. The fourth is described as an “inspired” style in a
special sense, with an “intone” as well as an “in-look.” It is
exemplified in the subtle and poignant lines from ‘Macbeth’:
“… … …
After life’s fitful
fever he sleeps well … …”
The fifth and last style, which is the finest, is, according to Sri Aurobindo, marked by “an absolute, intensely inspired inevitability”. Examples of this are drawn from Homer, Virgil, Wordsworth and Keats. The most familiar of them (as quoted by Mr. K. D. Sethna) are from Keats (Grecian Urn):
“magic
casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in
fairy lands forlorn,”
and from Shakespeare (Macbeth):
“Still it cried. “Sleep
no more” to all the house:
‘Glamis
hath murdered sleep, and therefore Gawdor
Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more!”
The criteria of literary criticism adopted by Sri Aurobindo were well-defined and his artistic models were from the highest level of human achievement. But he was eclectic in his taste, within limits. His approach was far from being rigid. It was, in fact, surprisingly flexible, willing to consider anything of real poetic value from Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman, AE and Yeats to Arjava, Harin Chatto and the more poetic among his own disciples. He would welcome sonnets and Alexandrines and heroic couplets as also blank verse and free verse or any other form, provided there was true merit in the writing. He was not against the use of the colloquial and the slang, provided it served a poetic purpose, and not resorted to merely for a modish effect. It would be too fastidious on the part of anyone to find fault with him for his sympathy and understanding towards the efforts of some Indian disciples who tried their hand at English verse.
On the subject of Indian
writing in English, in general, which has never been quite free from
controversy, Sri Aurobindo took a point of view that would appeal to reason and
common sense. Writing in 1943, in reply to a friend, he said something
refreshingly free from dogma and jingo:
“It is not true in all
cases that one can’t write first-class things in a learned language. Both in
French and English, people to whom the language was not native have done
remarkable work, although that is rare. What about Jawaharlal’s autobiography?
Many English critics think it, first-class in its own kind; ... If first-class
excludes everything inferior to Shakespeare and Milton, that is another matter.
I think, as time goes on, people will become more and wore polyglot and these
mental barriers will disappear.”
Earlier, he made an
observation, the undeniable truth of which is not realised
in the myopia of snobbery, made worse by the dustfilm
of prejudice. “Many Indians”, he said, “write better English than many educated
Englishmen.” Truer now than ever before!
Himself having done his
writing almost entirely in English, Sri Aurobindo never had occasion to feel
self-conscious about it. He felt at home in this medium as he felt at home in
this country.
He envisaged a vital role for English as a medium of creative expression, at a certain level, by Indians. He was both pragmatic and precise in the manner in which he outlined it:
“If Our aim is not
success and personal fame but to arrive at the expression of spiritual truth
and experience of all kinds in poetry, the English tongue is the most
widespread and is capable of profound turns of mystic expression which make it
admirably fitted for the purpose; if it could be used for the highest spiritual
expression, that is worth trying.”
There was no reason why
the experiment should not be made by Indians. There was every reason that they
should do it. (There were indeed some results that they alone could achieve.)
Sri Aurobindo puts forward at least four reasons for it:
In the case of Sri Aurobindo, it was both an extraordinary mind at work and the influence of Yoga in operation to illumine the dark corners of the unconscious and subconscious.
In his approach to the
Indian tradition, it was lucky for us that Sri Aurobindo came with a literary
background and intellectual training very different from that of the average
oriental scholar. He was thereby spared the banalities of “Ramodanta”
and the verbal mechanics of “Amarakosha”,
not to speak of the grammatical arithmetic of ‘Kaumudi’;
all of which are likely to deaden the finer sensibilities of a potential ‘Rasika’. It was, therefore, with a pleasant shock of
recognition that the wealth of Vyasa, Valmiki and Kalidasa came to a
scholar-poet whose sights were set on Homer, Dante and Shakespeare. It enabled
him to tell the artificial from the artistic and separate the dazzling glitter
of decadence from the subdued glow of cultural maturity. While he could see the
merit of Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti,
for what it was he could never go into raptures over the complex artifices of Magha, the elaborate rhetorics of
Bana Bhatta, or the
breath-taking acrobatics of the lesser poets of Sanskrit. The distance from
which he proceeded to the subject not only lent enchantment to the view but
provided the correct perspective, denied to the conventional scholar of Sanskrit,
who would take many things for granted.
On the true function of
poetry too, the East-West encounter in the layers of his sensibility helped Sri
Aurobindo to strike a balance between the artistic and the spiritual. It was a
kind of harmony between Oscar Wilde and Anandavardhana.
Nobody could have been more impressed by the Beardsley-Pater
theory of art for art’s sake and influenced by the Indian theory of art for the
soul’s sake. In his thesis on “The Future Poetry”, he lays stress on the
power of the spirit, when he says:
“A poetry born direct
from and full of the power of the spirit and therefore a largest and deepest
self-expression of the soul and mind of the race is that for which we are
seeking and of which the more profound tendencies of the creative mind seem to
be in travail.”
Not a mere mechanical
repetition of the traditional Indian theory but a creative restatement of the
ancient ideal could be seen in his view:
“To embellish with
beauty is only the moat outward function of art and poetry, to make life more
intimately beautiful and noble and great and full of meaning is its higher
office, but its highest comes when the poet becomes the seer and reveals to man
his eternal self and the godheads of its manifestation.”
In his grand conception
of the poetry of the future, what Sri Aurobindo looked forward to was not a
wholesale revival of the great tradition of the past, which was not possible,
but ‘a re-creation’ of it in altogether new terms:
“And whatever poetry may
make its substance or its subject, this growth of the power of the spirit must
necessarily bring into it a more intense and revealing speech, a more inward
and subtle and penetrating rhythm, a greater stress of sight, a more vibrant
and responsive sense, the eye that looks at all smallest and greatest things
for the significances that have not yet been discovered and the secrets that
are not on the surface. That will be the type of the new utterances and the
boundless field of poetic discovery left for the inspiration of the
humanity of the future.”
In the striving towards
the achievement of the “overhead” level in poetry, Sri Aurobindo lays great
store by the inspired rhythmic patterns of word music rather than the clever
fluctuations of free verse. For all his preoccupation with the spiritual values
of ancient India and the dynamics of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo has his own criteria
of literary judgment in estimating the true worth of secular poetry. For
example, he places the blank verse of a non- philosophical poet like Shakespeare
higher than the free verse of Walt Whitman, whose thoughts remind one of the Upanishadic affirmations. The occasional flashes of
spiritual insight that Shakespeare might reveal (in the speeches of Prospero
and the soliloquies of Hamlet, for instance) are due to a shrewd understanding
of human nature and the ways of Providence rather than an avowedly spiritual
bent of mind. Without transmitting any obvious spiritual message, they are
likely to attain, on the wings of rhythmic intensity, added to the intensity of
word and vision, the overhead level, according to the acknowledged authority on
Sri Aurobindo’s poetry, Mr. K. D. Sethna.
The Shakespearean leap
of the intuitive word, in fashioning sight and sound, starting at the mundane
level, is elevated and extended into a leap into the unknown in the Aurobindonian concept of future poetry. The one and only
complete example of this is Sri Aurobindo’s own epic
poem ‘Savitri’, in which the role of Inspiration is
outlined with such undreamt of effulgence:
In darkness core she dug
out wells of light,
On the undiscovered
depths imposed a form,
Lent a vibrant cry to
the unuttered vasts,
Bore earthward fragments
of revealing thought
Hewn from the silence of
the Ineffable.
Under the driving power
of this Inspiration, we could only imagine what the poets, who are also seers,
are capable of doing. But Sri Aurobindo sets out in breath-taking detail all
the things revealed unto them in the flood of intuitive knowledge:
Hearing the subtle voice
that clothes the heavens,
Carrying the splendour that has lit the suns,
They sang Infinity’s
names and deathless powers
In metres
that reflect the moving worlds,
Sight’s sound-waves
breaking from the soul’s great deeps.
The effect of poetry as mantra
is clearly indicated here by Sri Aurobindo. The remarkable feature with him
is that he represents in himself the example as well as the precept. He
provides the lakshya as well as the lakshana. What Shakespeare is known to have
achieved, in secular terms, through his poetic rhythm and revelatory word, Sri
Aurobindo set out to achieve in spiritual terms proper. From poetry as
evocation to poetry as incantation–that is where we reach in him. It is a
progress from the stage of normal poetic vision through that of the overmind to the supermind. As a
critic, Sri Aurobindo provides a sharp commentary that combines the in-sights
of the past, the self-questioning of the present and the vision of the future.