By
‘MARCUS’
Many
a weed, many a thistle there is in the garden man has cultivated. But, in all
fairness to him, there are flower beds too, colourful
and fragrant, varied and extensive. Of all his multifarious undertakings, music
and poetry, painting and sculpture stand out and acquit him honourably
on the Day of Judgement. Man has created Beauty, and, in so creating, travelled
farther from the animals and nearer to the angels. He has thus vindicated
himself.
Essentially
of animal origin, if evolution is to be believed, how has man come to create
beauty, the very
“Beauty:
the vision whereunto
In
joy, with pantings, from afar,
Through
sound and odour, form and hue,
And
mind and clay, and worm and star–
Now
touching goal, now backward hurled–
Toils
the indomitable world”?
It
looks as if Nature herself had sought his co-operation to carry on her creative
design. And he seems to have outnatured Nature
herself, for in his garden are flowers fairer than some of her own. His
pictures and poems speak more than what Nature herself has said, or could have
said, through that felicitous medium. And how has that come about?
Man
is thrown into the life stream, shall we say pitchforked
into existence? He soon makes the painful discovery that the job is not all
‘jam’, not all to his liking, though he may not swear with Housman,
“whatever brute and blackguard had made this world.” It is stale and flat,
vexatious and contentious. It is no fault of his if he asks for a happy
existence, a heaven. Having given him life, Nature, for some unaccountable and
maybe profound reasons, stayed her hand and withheld the paradise from him.
Perhaps she has left that undertaking to him. Accepting the implied challenge
he set out to create a dream world, “a world of the imagination, superior in a
number of ways to the world in which we actually live, much pleasanter if less
substantial.” Call it escapism or what you will, there we are, free and
unfettered, bringing down to the earth the music of the spheres, the poetry of
the stars, the colours of the rainbow, and the
architecture of the vaults of heaven. This hunger for heaven is but the
nostalgia of a lost soul that has strayed out of its native land. And in music
and poetry, in painting and sculpture, the paradise lost is the paradise
regained.
How
has this lost soul been able to recapture the lost glory and actualise it in the divine arts? Men have their own small
share in the two fundamental modes of existence, the passive and the
active,–what philosophers call the Being and the
Becoming. Corresponding to them we have our sleeping and waking states.
Becoming is but the externalisation of Being; it is
Being’s only authentic means of manifesting itself in the wealth of variety
about us. This process of unfolding itself, displaying its inexhaustible wealth
and the eventual withdrawal into itself, are throughout periodic and
rhythmical. In a lesser degree the cosmic rhythm is echoed in the seasonal
pulsations of Nature, the alternation of her phases of activity and repose.
Here then is the affinity between the macrocosm and the microcosm. The soul
displays the same two-fold nature “by continually passing from quiescent Being into active Becoming, and from active Becoming into
quiescent Being.” In our own pulse throbs the pulse of Nature in her
alternating moods. All existence partakes of the
primary and original pulse of oscillating phases, the lesser rhythms having
their source in the greater. Thus everywhere is discernible the balanced rhythm
of “repose and activity, ebb and flow, sleep and waking, death and life,
withdrawal and renewal.”
What
has this cosmic rhythm to do with the divine arts–music and poetry, painting
and sculpture? There is close affinity between the soul and the rhythm around.
Nature abounds in rhythm and harmony. The human body is, one,–a vast system of
interrelated rhythmical processes. Rhythm is in “the ripple which the
distribution of the spectrum so exquisitely displays.” A molecule of hydrogen
vibrates 450 million times a second. It must indeed be a wooden soul if, in
such a rhythmical universe, it is left unmoved by the rhythmical arts, “which
reproduce its (the universe’s) measures and thus play upon the corresponding
and fundamental strings of our nature.” It would be surprising if the soul, so
rocked in Nature’s cradle, were not to feel the motion of her moods, her rising
and falling tides. The cosmic rhythm speaks to us in every fibre
of our being: and the divine arts speak but in the language or the soul.
“Rhythm is the peculiar dialect of the soul, its style, its idiom.”
The
divine arts are said to be related in a rhythmical sister-hood. In a wider
sense they are all music. Is not sculpture called frozen music? Ordered and
shapely are painting and sculpture–the arts of Space. Measured and melodious
are music and poetry–the arts of Time. It has been said that what is thought
takes the spatial form, while what is felt the time form. The poet and the
composer deal with our appreciation of sequence of time, while the painter and
the sculptor with our perception of space. The measures of the arts of time are
but the measures of our inner sense of time, intensive but not dimensional
measures which, as such, belong to an order in which the three dimensions of
time–past, present and future–are fused together. In the arts of space the flux
of becoming is stayed for your contemplation, in the course of which you
unconsciously become a part of their immobility and eternal calm. “As Wilkie, the painter, stood...gazing at Titian’s picture of
the Last Supper, an aged monk said to him, ‘I have sat daily in sight of
that picture for nearly three score years...the figures in that picture have
remained unchanged. I look at them until I sometimes think that they are
realities and we are but shadows’.”
What
satisfaction do the arts provide? They provide what in truth we, deep down,
desire and are in search of. Shall we call that Felicity, which is the
product of complete reconciliation between the self and the not-self, ourselves
and the world around us? In the arts, that concord is in a manner established,
and therein lies their value. Mark the words ‘in a
manner’–for we are never aware of perfect harmony. We are aware only
that the arts contain harmonies, “rhythms with which we find ourselves intimately
in tune.” The arts lift, partly though, the veil and show us the world in a
wider perspective, where “the ear and the eye doth make us deaf and blind.” We
are admitted to the Sublime and brought face to face with it. The artist is “a
man feeling his way into reality, attempting in his own medium and manner, to fathom
the inner significance of life’s experiences, to penetrate its secret depths,
to see things in a wider perspective.” With the link between
Being and Becoming thus established, things weal a different look,–order is
imposed on disorder, discord melts into harmony, sadness rendered sweet,
heart-aches metamorphosed into melodies–all as if by some occult chemistry or
divine alchemy.
Such
a reconciliation may appear to be impossible. But look
back into history, into the past. You have that reconciliation in a measure
achieved. On the vast canvas of the past the strife, and the turmoil of life
are at one, and a great stillness reigns in “the statuesque dignity of repose.”
Perhaps the charm of all aesthetic experience consists in this concord between
life’s contending forces. The arts present the storm within the golden frame of
peace. “As time with its magic wand deals with the past, so
the divine arts with the troubles of the world.” That they are of value
to none other than ourselves shows that their
spiritual suggestiveness is rooted in the fundamental facts of the universe,
and that ourselves alone are tuned to respond to their appeal. So understood,
the mellifluence of M. S. Subbalakshmi’s song, the
uplifting overtures of Naidu’s violin, and the magic
melodies of Bismillah Khan’s pipe are
“Scarce
like sound, it tingles thro the frame
As lightning tingles.”
Or take the power of
imagery on our minds. What an occult and arresting power it has,
what entrancement of attention it includes! There is no response but absolute
surrender to this image in Browning’s ‘Colombe’s
Birthday’:
“I
will keep your honour safe;
With
mine I trust you as the sculptor trusts
Yon
marble woman with the marble rose,
Loose
in her hand, she never will let fall.”
What deeper
satisfaction does mortal man need on this terrestrial plane?