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SUPPLEMENT TO VOLUME 9
THE FUTURE POETRY
This letter addressed by Sri Aurobindo to
his poet-brother
Purānamityeva
na sādhu sarvam, Santah pariksyānyatarad bhajante: Mūdah parapratyayaneyabuddhi.
Kalidasa Not
everything that is old is good, Good
critics examine and prefer: Page-147
To
My Brother
ONLY a
short while ago I had a letter from you - I cannot lay my hands on the passage,
but I remember it contained an unreserved condemnation of Hindu legend as
trivial and insipid, a mass of crude and monstrous conceptions, a
lumber-room of Hindu banalities. The main point of your indictment
was that it had nothing in it simple, natural, passionate and human, that the
characters were lifeless patterns of moral excellence.
exceeds
them, as monstrous and unbeautiful. It rejects that flexible sympathy based on
curiosity of temperament, which attempts to project itself into differing types
as it meets them and so pass on through ever-widening artistic experiences to
its destined perfection. And it rejects it because such catholicity would break
the fine mould into which its own temperament is cast. This is well; yet is
there room in art and criticism for that other, less fine but more many-sided,
which makes possible new elements and strong departures. Often as the romantic
temperament stumbles and creates broken and unsure work, sometimes it scores one
of those signal triumphs which subject new art forms to the service of poetry or
open up new horizons to poetical experience. What judgment would such a
temperament, seeking its good where it can find it, but not grossly
indiscriminating, not ignobly
satisfied, pronounce on the Hindu legends? Page-149 of
themselves, and to eliminate the bizarre in them - bizarre to European notion,
for to us they seem striking ,and natural- would be to emasculate them of the
most characteristic part of their strength. Let us leave this type aside then as
beyond the field of fruitful discussion. But you are right. The Hindu myth has not the warm passionate life of the Greek. The Hindu mind was too austere and idealistic to be sufficiently sensitive to the rich poetical colouring inherent in crime and sin and overpowering passion; an Oedipus or an Agamemnon stands therefore outside the line of its creative faculty. Yet it had in revenge a power which you will perhaps think no compensation at all, but which to a certain class of minds, of whom I confess myself one, seems of a very real and distinct value. Inferior in warmth and colour and quick life and the Page-150 savour of earth to the Greek, they had a superior spiritual loveliness and exaltation; not clothing the surface of the earth with imperishable beauty, they search deeper into the white-hot core of things and in their cyclic orbit of thought curve downward round the most hidden foundations of existence and upward over the highest, almost invisible arches of ideal possibility. Let me touch the subject a little more precisely. The difference between the Greek and Hindu temperaments was that one was vital, the other supra-vital; the one physical, the other metaphysical; the one sentient of sunlight as its natural atmosphere and the bound of its joyous activity, the other regarding it as a golden veil which hid from it beautiful and wonderful things for which it panted. (O fostering Sun, who hast hidden the face of Truth with thy golden shield, displace that splendid veil from the vision of the righteous man, O Sun. O fosterer, O solitary traveller, O Sun, OMaster of Death, O child of God, dissipate thy beams, gather inward thy light; so shall I behold that splendour, thy goodliest form of all. For the Spirit who is there and there, He am I.) The Greek aimed at limit and finite perfection, because he felt vividly all our bounded existence; the Hindu mind, ranging into the infinite tended to the enormous and moved habitually in the sublime. This is poetically a dangerous tendency; finite beauty, symmetry and form are always lovely, and Greek legend, even when touched by inferior poets, must always keep something of its light and bloom and human grace or of its tragic human force. But the infinite is not for all hands to meddle with; it submits only to the compulsion of the mighty, and at the touch of an inferior mind recoils over the boundary of the sublime into the grotesque. Hence the enormous difference of level between different legends or the same legend in different hands, - the sublimity or tenderness of the best, the banality of the worst, with a little that is mediocre and intermediate shading the contrast away. To take with a reverent hand the old myths and cleanse them of soiling accretions, till they shine with some of the antique strength, simplicity and solemn depth of beautiful meaning, is an ambition which Hindu poets of today may and do worthily cherish. To accomplish a similar duty in a foreign tongue is a more perilous endeavour. , I have attempted in the following narrative to bring one of
Page-151 our old legends
before the English public in a more attractive garb than could be cast over them
by mere translation or by the too obvious handling of writers like Sir Edwin
Arnold; -
preserving its inner spirit and Hindu
features, yet rejecting no device
that might smooth away the sense
of roughness and the bizarre
which always haunts what is unfamiliar, and win for it the suffrage of a culture
to which our mythological conventions are unknown and our canons of taste
unacceptable. The attempt is necessarily beset with difficulties and pitfalls.
If you think I have even in part succeeded, I shall be indeed gratified; if
otherwise, I shall at least have the consolation of having failed where failure
was more probable than success. Page-152 Their joy of union was not yet old when Priyumvada perished, like Eurydice by the fangs of a snake. Ruaru inconsolable for her loss wandered miserable among the forests that had been the shelter and witnesses of their love consuming the universe with his grief until the Gods took pity on him and promised him his wife back, if he sacrificed for her half his life. To this Ruaru gladly assented and the price paid was reunited with his love.
Such is the story divested of the subsequent puerile developments by
which it is linked on to the Mahabharata. If we compare it with the kindred tale
of Eurydice, the distinction I have sought to draw between the Hindu and Greek
mythopoetic faculty justifies itself with great force and clearness. The
incidents of Orpheus` descent into Hades, his conquering Death and Hell by his
music and harping his love back to the sunlight and the tragic loss of her at
the moment of success through a too natural and beautiful human weakness has
infinite fancy pathos, trembling human emotion. The Hindu tale, barren of this
subtlety and variety is bare of incident and wanting in tragedy. It is merely a
bare idea for a tale. Yet what an idea it supplies! How deep and searching is
that thought of half the living man's life demanded as the inexorable price for
the restoration of his dead! How it seems to knock at the very doors of human
destiny, and give us a gust of air from worlds beyond our own suggesting
illimitable and unfathomable thoughts of our potentialities and limitations. Page-153 impulses which they express but cannot consciously guide. It is perhaps the Olympian ideal in life struggling with the Titanic ideal, and then we have a Ramaian. Or it may be the imperial ideal in government and society marshalling the forces of order, self-subjection, self-effacement, justice, equality, against the aristocratic ideal, with self-will, violence, independence, self- assertion, feudal loyalty, the sway of the sword and the right of the stronger at its back; this is the key of the Mahabharata. Or it is again, as in the tale of Savitrie, the passion of a single woman in its dreadful silence and strength pitted against Death, the divorcer of souls. Even in a purely domestic tale like the Romance of Nul, the central idea is that of the spirit of Degeneracy, the genius of the Iron age, - overpowered by a steadfast conjugal love. Similarly, in this story of Ruaru and Priyumvada the great spirits who preside over Love and Death, Cama and Yama, are the real actors and give its name to the poem. The second essential feature of the Hindu epic model is one which you have selected for especial condemnation and yet I have chosen to adhere to it in its entirety. The characters of Hindu legend are, you say, lifeless patterns of moral excellence. Let me again distinguish. The greater figures of our epics are ideals, but ideals of wickedness as well as virtue and also of mixed characters which are not precisely either vicious or virtuous. They are, that is to say, ideal presentments of character-types. This also arises from the tendency of the Hindu creative mind to look behind the actors at tendencies, inspirations, ideals. Yet are these great figures; are Rama, Sita, Savitrie, merely patterns of moral excellence? I who have read their tale in the swift and mighty language of Valmekie and Vyasa and thrilled with their joys and their sorrows, cannot persuade myself that it is so. Surely Savitrie that strong silent heart, with her powerful and subtly-indicated personality, has both life and charm; surely Rama puts too much divine fire into all he does to be a dead thing, - Sita is too gracious and sweet, too full of human lovingness and lovableness of womanly weakness and womanly strength! Ruaru and Priyumvada are also types and ideals; love in them, such is the idea, finds not only its crowning exaltation but that perfect idea of itself of which every exis- Page-154 ting
love is a partial and not quite successful manifestation. Ideal love is a triune
energy, neither a mere sensual impulse, nor mere emotional nor mere spiritual.
These may exist, but they are not love. By itself the sensual is only an animal
need, the emotional a passing mood, the spiritual a religious aspiration which
has lost its way. Yet all these are necessary elements of the highest passion.
Sense impulse is as necessary to it as the warm earth-matter at its root to the
tree, emotion as the air which consents with its life, spiritual aspiration as
the light and the rain from heaven which prevent it from withering. My
conception being an ideal struggle between love and death, two things are needed
to give it poetical form, an adequate picture of love and adequate image of
death. The love pictured must be on the ideal plane, and touch therefore the
farthest limit of strength in each of its three directions. The sensual must be
emphasised to give it firm root and basis, the emotional to impart to it life,
the spiritual to prolong it into infinite permanence. And if at their limits of
extension the three meet and harmonise, if they are not triple but triune, then
is that love a perfect love and the picture of it a perfect picture. Such at
least is the conception of the poem; whether I have contrived even faintly to
execute it, do you judge. Page-155 rendering
or by a little management, or, at the worst, by coining a word which, if not
precisely significant of the original, will create some kindred association in
the mind of an English reader. A slight inexactness is better than a laborious
pedantry. I have therefore striven to avoid all that would be unnecessarily
local and pedantic, even to the extent of occasionally using a Greek expression
such as Hades for the lord of the underworld. I believe such uses to be
legitimate, since they bring the poem nearer home to the imagination of the
reader. On the other hand, there are some words one is loth to part with. I have
myself' been unable or unwilling to sacrifice such Indianisms as Rishi, Naga,
for the snake-gods who inhabit the nether-world; Uswuttha, for the sacred
fig-tree; Chompuc (but this has been made familiar by Shelley's exquisite
lyric); coil or Kokil, for the Indian cuckoo; and names like Dhurma (Law,
Religion, Rule of Nature) and Critanta, the ender, for Yama, the Indian Hades.
These, I think, are not more than a fairly patient reader may bear with.
Mythological allusions, the indispensable setting of a Hindu legend, have been
introduced sparingly, and all but one or two will explain themselves to a reader
of sympathetic intelligence and some experience in poetry. Page-156 one of the sacred hymns of the people; he emerged from rapt communion with God to utter some puissant sentence, which in after ages became the germ of mighty philosophies; he conducted a sacrifice, and kings and peoples rose on its seven flaming tongues to wealth and greatness; he formulated an observant aphorism, and it was made the foundation of some future science, ethical, practical or physical; he gave a decision in a dispute and his verdict was seed of a great code or legislative theory. In Himalayan forests or by the confluence of great rivers he lived as the centre of a patriarchal family whose link was thought- interchange and not blood-relationship, bright-eyed children of sages, heroic striplings, earnest pursuers of knowledge, destined to become themselves great Rishies or renowned leaders of thought and action. He himself was the master of all learning and all arts and all sciences. The Rishies won their knowledge by mediation working through inspiration to intuition. Austere concentration of the faculties stilled the waywardness of the reason and set free for its work the inner, unerring vision which is above reason, as reason is itself above sight; this again worked by intuitive flashes, one inspired stroke of insight quivering out close upon the other, till the whole formed a logical chain; yet a logic not coldly thought out nor the logic of argument but the logic of continuous and consistent inspiration. Those who sought the Eternal through physical austerities, such as the dwelling between five fires (one fire on each side and the noonday sun overhead) or lying for days on a bed of swordpoints, or Yoga processes based on an advanced physical science, belonged to a later day. The Rishies were inspired thinkers, not working through deductive reason or any physical process of sense-subdual. The energy of their personalities was colossal; wrestling in fierce meditation with God, they had become masters of incalculable spiritual energies, so that their anger could blast peoples and even the world was in danger when they opened their lips to utter a curse. This energy was by the principle of heredity transmitted, at least in the form of a latent and educable force, to their offspring. Afterwards as the vigour of the race exhausted itself, the inner fire dwindled and waned. But at first even the unborn child was divine. When Chyavan was in the womb, a Titan to whom his Page-157 mother Puloma had been betrothed before she was given to Bhrigou, attempted to carry off his lost love in the absence of the Rishi. It is told that the child in the womb felt the affront and issued from his mother burning with such a fire of inherited divinity that the Titan ravisher fell blasted by the wrath of an infant. For the Rishies were not passionless. They were prone to anger and swift to love. In their pride of life and genius they indulged their yearnings for beauty, wedding the daughters of Titans or mingling with nymphs of Paradise in the august solitudes of hills and forests. From these were born those ancient and sacred clans of a pre-historic antiquity, Barghoves, Barhaspathas, Gautamas, Kasyapas, into which the descendants of the Aryan are to this day divided. Thus has India deified the great men who gave her civilisation. On earth the Rishies, in heaven the Gods. These were great and shining beings who preserved the established cosmos against the Asuras, or Titans, spirits of disorder between whom and the Hindu Olympians there was ever warfare. Yet their hostility did not preclude occasional unions. Sachi herself, the Queen of Heaven, was a Titaness, daughter of the Asura, Puloman; Yayati, ally of the Gods, took to himself a Daitya maiden Surmishtha, child of imperial Vrishopurvan (for the Asuras or Daityas, on the terrestrial plane, signified the adversaries of Aryan civilisa- tion), and Bhrigou's wife, Puloma, was of the Titan blood. Chief of the Gods were Indra, King and Thunderer, who came down when men sacrificed and drank the Soma wine of the offering; Vaiou, the Wind; Agni, who is Hutaashon, devourer of the sacrifice, the spiritual energy of Fire; Varouna, the prince of the seas; Critanta, Death, the ender, who was called also Yama (Government) or Dhurma (Law) because from him are all order and stability, whether material or moral. And there were subtler presences; Cama, also named Modon or Monmuth, the God of desire, who rode on the parrot and carried five flowery arrows and a bow-string of linked honey-bees; his wife, Ruthie, the golden-limbed spirit of delight; Saraswatie, the Hindu Muse, who is also Vach or Word, the primal goddess, - she is the unexpressed idea of existence which by her expression takes visible form and being; for the word is prior to and more real, because Page-158 more spiritual, than the thing it expresses; she is the daughter of Brahma and has inherited the creative power of her father, the wife of Vishnou and shares the preservative energy of her husband; Vasuquie, also, and Seshanaga, the great serpent with his hosts, whose name means finiteness and who represents Time and Space; he upholds the world on his hundred colossal hoods and is the couch of the Supreme who is Existence. There were also the angels who were a little less than the Gods; Yukshas, the Faery attendants of Kuvere, lord of wealth, who protect hoards and treasures and dwell in Ullaca, the city of beauty,
the hills of mist Golden, the dwelling-place of Faery kings, And mansions by unearthly moonlight kissed:- For one dwells there whose brow with the young moon
Lightens as with a
marvellous amethyst - Page-159 tal visions? I would gladly think that there are , that I am not cheating myself with delusions when I seem to find in this yet untrodden path,
via...qua me quoque possim Tollere humo victorque virum volitare per ora. Granted, you will say, but still Quorsum haec putida tendunt? or how does it explain the dedication to me of a style of work at entire variance with my own tastes and preferences? But the value of a gift depends on the spirit of the giver rather than on its own suitability to the recipient. Will you accept this poem as part-payment of a deep intellectual debt I have been long owing to you? Unknown to yourself, you taught and encouraged me from my childhood to be a poet. From your sun my farthing rush-light was kindled, and it was in your path that I long strove to guide my uncertain and faltering footsteps. If I have now in the inevitable development of an independent temperament in independent surroundings departed from your guidance and entered into a path, perhaps thornier and more rugged, but my own, it does not lessen the obligation of that first light and example. It is my hope that in the enduring fame which your calmer and more luminous genius must one day bring you, on a distant verge of the skies and lower plane of planetary existence, some ray of my name may survive and it be thought no injury to your memory that the first considerable effort of my powers was dedicated to you. Page-160 |