THE CRITIC AS ARTIST
By
M. SIVAKAMAYVA, M.A.
Sri
Kasturi Venkateswara Rao is well known in the Telugu world of Letters as a poet
of the first order, especially as one of the joint anthors of Soundaranandam
whose place among the Telugu classics is assured. His poetry is
distinguished alike for its rare richness of substance and exquisite
workmanship. It is a pity therefore and a misfortune that his muse should have
remained silent, almost mute, for such a long time.
Listeners
of All India Radio (Vijayawada) were therefore agreeably surprised when they
heard the other day, in the course of a symposium, in Telugu, of artists,
poets, critics, journalists, etc., a talk from him on “The critic’s experience
of aesthetic delight”. It was an
illuminating discourse, delivered in an exceedingly entertaining style,
and incidentally dealt with the claims of the critic to the status of a
creative artist. In the humble opinion of the writer of this note, the
poet-critic’s exposition of the nature of creative criticism is peculiarly
interesting and deserves wider publicity. A brief English rendering of it is
therefore presented to the readers of Triveni.
“The
sensible world consisting of nature and the life of human beings in society
constitutes the basic material of every kind of artistic creation. This world
is a blend of truth and falsehood, virtue and wickedness, happiness and misery.
But the artist gives it beautiful form and significance. He eschews the
undesirable parts, modifies the disagreeable features, fuses the material
chosen in the fire of his imagination and invests it with a novel shape. Every
work of art is thus necessarily an act of interpretation of the world, a
criticism of life. There is no creation out of ‘nothing’.
“If the artist interprets the world, the critic interprets the work of art. But then what is the value of this interpretation of an interpretation, this criticism of a criticism? How can it become creative in its turn?
“Experience
of life and contemplation of the world give the artist delight and happiness.
That which gives him the joy, that which he observes and contemplates, has
form; but his joy has no form. But he endeavours to detach it from himself to
contemplate it in his imagination and express it again
objectively. Unfortunately the medium which he employs for this purpose of
‘expressing’ his ‘delight’ in ‘form’ so that it might be ‘communicated’ to
others and shared by them–line, colour, sound, or word,–has only a limited
capacity for the purpose. The artist has to work under the limitations fixed by
the nature of his medium, however perfect his mastery of it. Hence the
difficulty, the struggle, which the creation of a work of art necessarily
involves.
“Ultimately
the work of art is only a suggestive symbol and not a complete representation
of the delight experienced by the artist. Every work of art provides only the
means for aesthetic experience and not aesthetic experience direct. Through the
limited form, it suggests the limitless and formless. It provides the doors and
windows through which the formless and boundless can be glimpsed and aesthetic
delight experienced.
“The activity of the critic thus begins just where
the activity of the artist ends. Through the doors and windows provided by the
work of art, the critic enters the region (boundless) of aesthetic delight and
there the range of his flight is determined only by his capacity and equipment.
By his previous experience, the contemplation of many excellent works of art,
he acquires the ability to recognise at once and easily the significant lines
and forms, thoughts and emotions, sounds and suggestions. An instinctive
awareness of beauty is always awake and alert in him. Through the work of art
he enters the heart of the artist and the centre of aesthetic delight. There are
no limits to the flight of his spirit in that boundless kingdom.
There,
his freedom is absolute and his flight is determined by the strength of his
wing and the aspiration of his soul. Once he enters the domain of aesthetic
delight, he leaves behind the work of art and the artist–the
ladder by which he has climbed and the friend who provided the ladder for him.
His aesthetic experience may be different from and richer than that of the
artist who set the wings of his imagination in motion.
“If
he then attempts to give expression (form) to his aesthetic delight and
succeeds in his endeavour, the result is another work of art. It is a criticism
of the work of art which has occasioned it, but at the same time, in its
own right, it is as much a work of art. It is creative criticism.”
To
this supreme category of criticism belongs much of the critical literature of
the famous English critics of the period of the Romantic Revival, of Coleridge
and Hazlitt, of Lamb and Carlyle, and later of Pater and Swinburne. It
constitutes one of the most irresistible attractions of English
literature to Indian students. Lovers of Sanskrit literature and the
literatures of the modern languages of India feel hurt when they come across
any suggestion that most of our critical literature is concerned with the
Philosophy of aesthetics, the enumeration and classification of literary
methods, devices, ornaments, and judicial criticism to some extent, but
apparently of very little of creative criticism. If this is a wrong impression and
an unfair description, they will be doing a great service to literature and
literary criticism and contributing to raise the level of literary appreciation
and culture among the people, if they bring out and give wide publicity to the
existing body of creative criticism in our languages and if they enrich it by
fresh additions.
As
for Sri Venkateswara Rao who has so ably justified the claims of criticism to
the status of a creative art and so clearly explained the nature of creative
criticism, the Andhra public will feel grateful for more creative activity on
his part, either in the field of poetry or in the field of creative criticism.