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Letters from Abroad
IV
Dear Biren, The idea that the Europeans have organised enjoyment just as the Hindus have organised asceticism, is a very common superstition which I am not bound to endorse merely because it is common. Say rather that the Europeans have systematised feverishness and the Hindus universalised inertia and mendicancy. The appearances of things are not the things themselves, nor is a shadow always the proof of a substance... I admit that the Europeans have tried hard to organise enjoyment. Power, pleasure, riches, amusement are their gods and the whirl of a splendid & active life their heaven. But have they succeeded? I think that nowhere is life less truly enjoyable than in brilliant and arrogant Europe. The naked African seems to me to be happier and more genuinely luxurious than the cultured son of Japhet. 1It is this very trying hard that spoils the endeavour. What a grotesque conception indeed is this of trying hard to be joyous! Delight, joyousness, ananda either are by nature or they do not exist; to be natural, to be in harmony with the truth of things is the very secret of bliss. The garden of Eden is man's natural abode and it is only because he wilfully chose to know evil that he was driven out of his paradise.
1 Another version of this opening: It is not for the first time that it has been brought home to me how much more confusing are the resemblances between opposites than the subtle distinctions between close kindred. You have heard that the Europeans have organised enjoyment, you know that my religion is to enjoy God without bondage in the manifest world no less than in Himself and you wonder at my condemnation of their culture. Page – 554 V
Dear Biren, I suspect that it is a malady of your intellect to demand figs from thistles and cry fie upon the thistle if it merely produces thorns. After all, would it not be a monotonous world that consisted only of roses and sweetmeats, virtue and success? Thorns have their necessity, grief has its mission, and without a part of sin, suffering and struggle heaven might not be so heavenly to the blest. I am not prepared even to deny a kind of beneficence to evil; I have sufficient faith in God's Love & Wisdom to believe that if evil [were] merely evil, it could not continue to exist. I will tell you all the evil, -since we must use these inadequate terms, -that I think about Europe and then I will tell you what a great work I see it beating out with difficulty for man's ultimate good. That there should be much that is wrong and perverse, that there should even be an infinite corruption, in Europe and Asia at this moment, was, if you consider it, inevitable. It is the Age of Iron, not even thinly coated with gold, only splashed here and there with a counterfeit of the nobler metal. Kali at the lowest depth of one of his plumb descents, his eyes sealed, his ears deaf, his heart of bronze, his hunger insatiable, but his nerve relaxed and impotent, stumbles on through a self-created darkness with the marsh-light and the corpse-light for his guides, straining out of those blind orbs after an image of Power that he cannot seize. Time was when he dreamed of love and prated of humanity, but though he still mouths the words, he has forgotten the things. He groped too after wisdom; he has grasped only Science. By that Science he has multiplied comforts till comfort itself has grown uncomfortable; he has added machinery to machinery, convenience to convenience, till life is cumbered and hampered with appliances; and to this discomfortable luxury and encumbered efficiency he has given the name of civilisation. At present he hungers only after force and strength, but when he thinks he has laid his hands on them, it is Death instead that puts his sign on the seeker and impotence and sterility mock at Page – 555 him under the mask of a material power. For my part I see failure written large over all the splendid and ostentatious achievements of Europe. Her costliest experiments, her greatest expenditure of intellectual and moral force have led to the swiftest exhaustion of creative activity, the completest bankruptcy of moral elevation and of man's once infinite hope. When one considers how many and swift her bankruptcies have been, the imagination is appalled by the discouraging swiftness of this motor ride to ruin. The bankruptcy of the ideas of the French Revolution, the bankruptcy of Utilitarian Liberalism, the bankruptcy of national altruism, the bankruptcy of humanitarianism, the bankruptcy of religious faith, the bankruptcy of political sincerity, the bankruptcy of true commercial honesty, the bankruptcy of the personal sense of honour, how swiftly they have all followed on each other or raced with each other for precedence and kept at least admirable pace. Only her manysided science with its great critical and analytical power and all the contrivances that come of analysis, is still living and keeps her erect. There remains that last bankruptcy yet to come, and when that is once over, what will be left? Already I see a dry rot begun in this its most sapful and energetic part. The firm materialism which was its life and protection, is beginning also to go bankrupt, and one sees nothing but craze and fantasy ready to take its place.
No, it is not in the stress of an intolerant patriotism that I turn an eye of disparagement upon Europe. The immediate past of these Western peoples I can admire more than I admire the immediate past of our Indian nations. It is their present that shocks my aspirations for humanity. Europe is full of the noise and the apparel of life, of its luxurious trappings, of a myriad-footed material clang and tread, but of that which supports life she is growing more and more empty. When they had less information, her people had wiser and stronger souls. They had a literature, a creative intellectual force, a belief, a religion good or bad, a light that led onwards, a fixed path. Now they have only hungers, imaginations, sentiments & passions. The hungers are made to Page – 556 look decent; they even disguise themselves & parade about as ideals and rights. The sentiments are deftly intellectualised, -some even care to moralise them superficially, but that is growing out of fashion. The imaginations are tricked out to look like reason and carefully placarded on the forehead, with the names of rationalism, science and enlightenment, though they are only a whirl of ephemeral theories when all is said and done. The passions are most decorously masked, well-furnished & lodged, sumptuously clothed. But a dress does not change truth and God is not deceived.
They criticise everything subtly rather than well, but can create nothing -except machines. They have organised society with astonishing success and found the very best way to spread comfort and kill their souls. Their system of government is a perpetual flux. Its past looks back to a yet corrupter aristocracy, its future sinks to anarchic dissolution, or at best rests in a tyrannical materialistic socialism which seeks to level all that is yet high to the grade of the artisan instead of making the artisan himself worthy of a throne. A thousand newspapers vulgarise knowledge, debase aesthetical appreciation, democratise success and make impossible all that was once unusual & noble. The man of letters has become a panderer to the intellectual appetites of a mob or stands aloof in the narrowness of a coterie. There is plenty of brilliance everywhere, but one searches in vain for a firm foundation, the power or the solidity of knowledge.2 The select seek paradox in order to distinguish themselves from the herd; a perpetual reiteration of some startling novelty can alone please the crowd. Each favourite is like an actor from whom the audience expect from day to day the usual passion or the usual
2 The following passage was written on a loose sheet found separately from the note book in which Letters from Abroad was written. It is probable that Sri Aurobindo wrote this passage with the intention of working it in here:But in this brilliance there is no permanence, in this curiosity there is no depth. Cleverness has replaced wisdom and men are more concerned to be original in minutiae than to secure their hold upon large & permanent truths. New theories chase each other across a confused & distracted field resonant with the clash of hustling & disjected details and the mind is not allowed to rest calmly upon long investigation or confirm & purify an emerging truth. Everybody is in a hurry to generalise, to build immense conclusions upon meagre indications. No man but thinks he can perform the miracle of constructing the whole animal out of a single stray bone. But the result is more often a trick of intellectual legerdemain than any miracle of constructive knowledge. We in India think it better to rest calmly in our uncertainty than to clutch at premature conclusions -but the West is progressive & will no longer suffer so austere an eclipse of its brilliancy. No such rein shall be put on the galloping Pegasus of its scholastic & scientific fancy. Page – 557 farce. Paradox & novelty therefore thrive; but the select have an easily jaded appetite, the multitude are fickle and novelties have their hour. Therefore even the favourite palls. But these people have a great tamasic persistence of habit and a certain loyalty to established names; much that they read is from habit rather than enjoyment. Otherwise there would be no stability in this chaos of striking worthlessness and this meteor-dance of ephemeral brilliance. The very churches & chapels are now only the theatres of a habitual stage performance of portentous & unnecessary dullness. With the exception of a small minority full of a grotesque, superficial but genuine passion, nobody believes, nobody feels; opinion, convention, preference and habit are alive and call themselves religion, but the heart that loves God is not to be found. Only a few of the undeveloped are really religious, the cast-backs and atavists of this European evolution. For more than half a century the whole of Europe has not been able to produce a single poet of even secondary magnificence. One no longer looks for Shakespeare or Dante to return, but even Wordsworth or Racine have also become impossible. Hugo's flawed opulence, Whitman's formless plenty, Tennyson's sugared emptiness seem to have been the last poetic speech of modern Europe. If poetical genius appears, it is at once taken prisoner by the applauding coterie or the expectant multitude and, where it began, there it ends, enslaved in ignoble fetters, pirouetting perpetually for their pleasure round a single accomplishment. Of all literary forms the novel only has still some genius and even that is perishing of the modern curse of overproduction. Learning and scholarship are unendingly active over the dead corpse of creative power as in Alexandria and with the Page – 558 later Romans before the great darkness. Eccentricity and the hunting after novelty & paradox play in it over an ostentatious precision and accuracy. Yesterday's opinion is today exploded & discarded, new fireworks of theory, generalisation and speculation take the place of the old, and to this pyrotechnic rushing in a circle they give the name of progress. The possibility of a calm insight & wisdom seems to have departed from this brilliant mob of pushing, overactive intellects. Force there is, but force doomed to a rapid dissolution, of which the signs are already not wanting. The moral nerve is equally relaxed. Immorality which does not know how to enjoy, impotence and dullness of the capacity for enjoyment masquerading as virtue, decorum & prudery covering a cesspool, the coarseness, appetite and rapid satiety of the imperial Romans combining in various proportions or associating on various terms with the euprepeia & looseness of the Greeks. But the Pagan virility whether united to Roman coarseness or Greek brilliance is only to be seen in a few extraordinary individuals. Society is cast in the biune mould of monogamy & prostitution. You will find such a Parisian who keeps his wife and mistress & frequents his State-licensed harlots as well, shocked & pained at the idea of polygamous Indians enjoying the same rights as the virtuous sons of Europe. Some are even afraid that the resurgence of Asia may end in the lowering of Western morals. There can then be a descent from as well as to Avernus! In a word, the whole of Europe is now a magnified Alexandria, brilliant forms with a perishing soul, feverish activity in imitation of the forms of health with no capital but the energy of the sickbed. One has to concede however that it is not altogether sterile, for all Europe & America pullulate with ever multiplying machinery. __________
Page – 559 VI
Dear Biren, There are moments in the career of peoples, empires, continents, orders of things when the forces of life pause between a past vitality and a rapidly advancing decay, atrophy or dissolution. You have often heard me say this of our still persistent and reluctant mediaeval system in India and you have not wondered, but you are surprised when I give the same description of this vaunting and dominant Europe. Why? Because it is vaunting and dominant? I think so. There are two hypnotisms that work with an almost miraculous power upon men's minds, the suggestion of the habitually repeated word and the suggestion of the long-established or robustly accomplished fact. Men are almost entirely led or stayed by blind hopes or blind hopelessnesses. They are ever ready to cry "As it was yesterday, as it is now, so it shall be for ever," or to sigh "This thing is, has been, promises to be; how can I ever overcome it? In the centuries to come perhaps, but for me my limits are set and a wall has been built around me." My friend, the thing that looks so huge, mighty and impressive from without, wears a very different appearance when you look into its secret places and sound its walls and foundations. There are certain edifices, characteristic of European modernity, which lift a tremendous height and showy mass to the sky, -therefore they are called vulgarly skyscrapers, for are they not truly abhramliha? -but some houses very showily built have an ugly habit of descending suddenly in ruin without any previous warning either to their inmates or to the envious huggers of the plain in the vicinity. Then they are said to have been jerry-built. Now, modern European civilisation is just such a jerry-built skyscraper.
You have not misapprehended my meaning, though you wonder at it. These hollow worm-eaten outsides of Hinduism crumbling so sluggishly, so fatally to some sudden and astonishing dissolution, do not frighten me. Within them I find the soul of a Page – 560 civilisation alive, though sleeping. I see upon it the consoling sentence of God, "Because thou hast believed in me, therefore thou shalt live and not perish." Also, I look through the garnished outsides, gaudy, not beautiful, pretentious, not great, boastful, not secure, of this vaunting, aggressive, dominant Europe and I have seen written on the heart of its civilisation a sentence of death and mounting already from the heart to the brain an image of annihilation. O this Europe with its noise, its childish vanity, its barbarous material pomp and show, its puerile clashing of sabres and rattling of wheels, its foam and froth of a little knowledge, its mailed fist, its heart of lead, its tremulous, crying nerves, its sinews all unstrung with a luxury and debauch it is not great enough of soul to indulge itself in with the true ancient Titanism. One notes too its fear of the darkness of death, its clinging to life, its morbid terror of pain, its braggart tongue and coward action, its insincerity, dishonesty, unfaith, its romantic altruistic dreams so soon ended and changing into a selfish and cynical proclamation of interest, power and pleasure, -one sees its increasing brain, its perishing will. It is not in noble figures that she presents herself to my imagination, this sole enlightened continent, it is not fear or respect that they awaken in my mind, these civilised superior nations. I see a little girl wearing a new frock and showing herself off to Mamma and all the world, unable to conceal her pride and delight in the thought that never was a frock so new and nice or a little girl so pretty, -never was and never will be! I think of a very small boy to whom somebody has given a very big cane -one can see him brandishing it, executing now and then an exultant war-dance, tormenting, tyrannising over and plundering of their little belongings all the smaller boys he can get within his cane's reach, not displeased if they show a little fight so that he can exhibit his heroic strength of arm by punishing them. And then he adorns himself with glittering Victoria crosses and calls on all his associates to admire his gallant and daredevil courage. Sometimes [it reminds me] of an old man, a man very early old, still strong in his decrepitude, garrulous, well-informed, luxurious, arrogant, intelligent, still Page – 561 busy toddling actively from place to place, looking into this, meddling in that, laying down the law dogmatically on every point under the sun, and through it all the clutch already nearing the brain, the shaking of the palsy already foreshadowed in tremulous movement and uncertain nerve. Very true, Europe, your frock is the cleanest and newest, for the present, your stick the biggest, your war-dance a very frightening spectacle -frightening even to yourselves -with Krupp and Mauser and machine gun what else should it be, you are indeed for a while the robust, enlightened oldster you seem. But afterwards? Well, afterwards there will be a newer frock, a bigger stick, a war-dance much more terrible and a real Titan grasping at the earth for his own instead of the sham. Page – 562 |