Philosophers, Intellectuals, Novelists

and Musicians

Western Notions of the History of Philosophy

It is very strange that in books on philosophy by European writers, even in standard textbooks like Alfred Weber's History of Philosophy,¹ there is no mention of any of the Indian philosophies. To the Western writer philosophy means only European philosophy ―they begin with the Greek Thales and Anaximander, as if human thinking began with them.

That is the old style European mind. It used to be the same in Art and other matters. Now Chinese and Japanese art is recognised and to a less degree the art of India, Persia and the former Indian colonies in the Far-East, but in philosophy the old ideas still reign. "From Thales to Bergson" is their idea of the History of Philosophy.

2 May 1936

Plato

Plato says [according to Weber, p. 86]: "The world of sense is the copy of the world of Ideas, and conversely, the world of ideas resembles its image; it forms a hierarchy. . . . In our visible world there is a gradation of beings. . . . The same holds true of the intelligible realm or the pattern of the world; the Ideas are joined together by means of other Ideas of a higher order; . . . the Ideas constantly increase in generality and force, until we reach the top, the last, the highest, the most powerful Idea or the Good, which comprehends, contains or summarizes the entire system." I think he is nearly on the verge of a mental understanding of the Overmind.

He was trying to express in a mental way the One containing the

1 Alfred Weber, History of Philosophy (London: Longmans, Green, 1904).  

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multiplicity which is brought out (created) from the One ―that is the Overmind realisation. Plato had these ideas not as realisations but as intuitions which he expressed in his own mental form.

There are many such thoughts in Plato's philosophy. Did he get them from Indian books?

Not from Indian books ―something of the philosophy of India got through by means of Pythagoras and others. But I think Plato got most of these things from intuition.

8 October 1933

*

Paul Brunton in his book A Search in Secret Egypt repeatedly speaks of Atlantis. I always thought that belief in Atlantis was only an imagination of the Theosophists. Is there any truth in the belief?

Atlantis is not an imagination. Plato heard of this submerged continent from Egyptian sources and geologists are also agreed that such a submersion was one of the great facts of earth history.

22 June 1936

*

In his book Plato, Taylor says that "the standing Academic definition of `man' " is "Soul using a body" and that "the soul is the man".² But it is not clear whether the soul is the mental being or something which uses the mind also.

The European mind, for the most part, has never been able to go beyond the formula of soul + body ―usually including mind in soul and everything except body in mind. Some occultists make a distinction between spirit, soul and body. At the same time there must be some vague feeling that soul and mind are not quite the same thing, for there is the phrase "this man has no soul", or "he is a soul" meaning he has something in him beyond

2 A.E. Taylor, Plato, The Man and His Work (London: Methuen, 1926), p. 27. Taylor bases his discussion on passages from Plato's Alcibiades I and Euthydemus. ―Ed.  

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a mere mind and body. But all that is very vague. There is no clear distinction between mind and soul and none between mind and vital and often the vital is taken for the soul.

30 June 1936

*

Taylor [Plato, p. 27] writes: "The first condition of enjoying real good and making a real success of life is that a man's soul should be in a good or healthy state", that is, his soul should have the wisdom or knowledge "which ensures that a man shall make the right use of his body and of everything else which is his". This clearly indicates that by "soul" he means the vital and the mental being. Otherwise how can the soul be not "in good or healthy state"? Can we even say that the mental Purusha is or is not "in good or healthy state"?

Of course not. It is obvious that they are thinking of the mental and vital Prakriti or that part of the being which is involved in Prakriti, not of the Purusha.

The idea that the soul has to get "knowledge" at all would seem to us to be without meaning unless we take it in the sense that one has to develop the intuition as an instrumental faculty.

Yes, all these phrases are loose. At most one could say that the soul must bring out or develop the inner knowledge ―that which is already there within or that the lower nature must receive the higher knowledge, ―but not that the soul must get knowledge. I believe Plato himself held that all knowledge already was there within, ―so even from that point of view this expression would be inaccurate.

2 July 1936

*

Plato's book The Banquet is said to be about Love and Beauty. Is it a kind of philosophy?

Not much philosophy there, more poetry.

Shelley has translated The Banquet into English. Could I read it?  

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If you want to read it as a piece of literature, it is all right.

2 January 1937

*

I did not find so much poetry in the book. Perhaps you have read it in the original Greek?

Even in a good translation the poetry ought to come out to some extent. Plato was a great writer as well as a philosopher ―no more perfect prose has been written by any man. In some of his books his prose carries in it the qualities of poetry and his thought has poetic vision. That is what I meant when I said it was poetry.

3 January 1937

*

How do you find Plato's ideas about philosophy, about Nature, existence of the soul, etc.?

I don't know what are his ideas about philosophy or Nature. He believes in the soul and immortality and that is of course true.

4 January 1937

Aristotle

I tried to read Aristotle but found him dry and abstract.

I always found him exceedingly dry. It is a purely mental philosophy, unlike Plato's.

9 October 1933

Plotinus

I find Plotinus very interesting.

Yes. Plotinus was not a mere philosopher, ―his philosophy was founded on yogic experience and realisation.

11 October 1933

*

Plotinus says [according to Weber, p. 171]: "Intelligence is the first divine emanation. . . . Creation is a fall, a progressive degeneration of the divine. In the intelligence, the absolute  

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unity of God splits up into intelligence proper . . . and the intelligible world." Does he mean the separation that begins to take place at Overmind or the Para and Apara Prakriti?

He was speaking of the cosmic mind, I suppose. In these philosophies there is no distinction made between different grades of mind or between intellect and the consciousness beyond the intellectual.

Plotinus says [according to Weber, p. 173]: "The intelligence, too, is creative. . . . Its emanation or radiation is the soul. . . . The soul is not, like the intellect, endowed with immediate and complete intuition: it is restricted to the discursive thought, or analysis. . . .

"It is subordinate to the intellect. . . . There is, at the bottom of all individual souls, but one single soul manifesting itself infinitely in different forms: the soul of the world." What does Plotinus mean by soul and intelligence in this passage?

I think simply Plotinus in speaking of soul has made a jumble of vital (prāna), manas and soul ( ) ―while by intelligence he means buddhi (cosmic), but endows the buddhi with the qualities proper to the Intuition and Overmind.

12 October 1933

Shankaracharya on the Bhagavad Gita

On this shloka in the second chapter of the Gita:

एषा ब्राह्मी स्थितिः पार्थ नैनां प्राप्य विमुह्यति |

स्थिवाऽस्यामन्तकालेऽपि ब्रह्मनिर्वाणमृच्छति ||

Shankara says:

सैषा ज्ञाननिष्ठा स्तूयते | यथोक्ता ... ब्राह्मी स्थितिः सर्वं कर्म संन्यस्य ब्रह्मरूपेणैवावस्थानमिति ...

Where is there even in the preceding shlokas the idea of सर्वं कर्म संन्यस्य?

But the final stroke comes here: ... ... ...  

अन्ते वयस्यपि ...मोक्षमृच्छति ...किमु वक्तव्यं ब्रह्मचर्यादेव संन्यस्य यावज्जीवं ...ब्रह्मण्येवावतिष्ठे स ब्रह्मनिर्वाणमृच्छति ||

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This is pure insinuation. Nowhere in the whole of the Gita can there be found the idea of ब्रह्मचर्यादेव संन्यस्य !

How can a commentator do without insinuation? He has to make the Gita (or the Upanishads) mean what he teaches; if it doesn't actually say what he teaches, he has to explain that it meant that all the same. If the Gita doesn't teach what he teaches, it would be teaching something that is not the Truth, and how can the Gita teach untruth?

In Krishna's time were there any Sannyasis at all? Rishis there were, but few, and not the sort to promote ब्रह्मचर्यादेव संन्यस्य.

Perhaps at the time of Krishna there were no Sannyasis; but the Gita speaks of Sannyasa and Sannyasis, it even speaks of कर्म सन्न्यस्य but it says मयि कर्माणि सन्न्यस्य and declares फलत्याग to be the true Sannyasa. Arjuna is supposed to remain in the ब्रह्मी स्थिति and fight, so that would be hardly consistent with the other kind of Sannyasa ―not to speak of enjoying राज्य समृध्धम्  also.

25 March 1936

*

In Shankara's Bhashya on the Gita it seems he takes any opportunity to thrust in the ideas of  कर्मसन्यास and ज्ञाननिष्टा. For example, in the famous shloka  कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते , the Bhashya speaks of ज्ञाननिष्टा though it seems quite irrelevant.

Of course. There is nothing about ज्ञाननिष्टा in the text, only in Shankara's thrust.

Shankara considers all karma useful only as preparation for jñāna. According to him even the object of the Gita is परं निःश्रेयस संसारस्य अत्यन्तोपरमलक्षणम्.

The object of the Gita was to make Arjuna act, i.e. fight and it is only when he consented to do so that Krishna stopped the discourse. If it had been as Shankara says he would not have stopped until he had got Arjuna well-started for a cave in the  

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Himalayas far away from the noise of the battle.

26 March 1936

Intellectual Capacity of Mystics

A great scientist has written that mystics and spiritual men the world over have in general always been men of very average intelligence, a handful of rare instances excepted.

As for your great scientist I wonder who he had in mind as spiritual men ―so far as I know history both in the East and the West there have been any number of spiritual men and mystics who have had a great or fine intellectual capacity or were endowed with a great administrative and organising ability implying a keen knowledge of men and much expenditure of brain-power. With a little looking up of the records of the past I think one could collect some hundreds of names ―which would not include of course the still greater number not recorded in history or the transmitted memory of the past.

Augustus Caesar and Leonardo da Vinci

Augustus Caesar organised the life of the Roman Empire and it was this that made the framework of the first transmission of the Graeco-Roman civilisation to Europe ―he came for that work and the writings of Virgil and Horace and others helped greatly towards the success of his mission. After the interlude of the Middle Ages, this civilisation was reborn in a new mould in what is called the Renaissance, not in its life-aspects but in its intellectual aspects. It was therefore a supreme intellectual, Leonardo da Vinci, who took up again the work and summarised in himself the seeds of modern Europe.

29 July 1937

Leonardo and Einstein

I do not know if by chance Einstein's theory of relativity may also be found in one of the yet undeciphered books of Leonardo.  

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Not likely. The age of art and science which Leonardo set in motion was that which closed with the nineteenth century. Relativity belongs to a new movement of knowledge.

11 December 1935

Rene Descartes

I have three letters of yours before me and all three require some elucidation. I think and think but can't get anywhere. Perhaps you will say, "Make the mind silent"! But Descartes says, "Je pense, donc je suis."

Descartes was talking nonsense. There are plenty of things that don't think but still are ―from the stone to the Yogi in samadhi. If he had simply meant that the fact of his thinking showed that he wasn't dead, that of course would have been quite right and scientific.

9 September 1935

William James

James' book [on psychology] is certainly a very interesting one. I read it a long time ago and do not remember it very well except that it was very interesting and not at all an ordinary book in its kind, but full of valuable suggestions.

1 July 1933

Henri Bergson

Bergson writes that the progress of Life is marked by tensions succeeded by flowerings. What do you think of that, since the great philosopher too agrees with our way of marching to Beatitude through struggles and sufferings?

Humph! Such a method is all very well, but one has so much of it in life and in this Ashram that I rather yearn for some other unBergsonian evolution. Even if the Lord God and Bergson planned it together, I move an amendment.

11 December 1935

*

In his latest book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion,  

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Bergson says that the imagelessness or blankness of mind is a pure myth and an impossibility. As a Vedantist, I have always cherished the imagelessness of mind as the highest ideal. But I must admit that I have not made any appreciable advance in this direction, even after many years' practice.

European scientists and thinkers have no authority in the matter, as they are perfectly ignorant of even the rudiments of these things. It is certainly impossible for any man to have experience of such a condition without practice of Yoga, or alternatively, a state of Grace. But among Yogis it is a well-known state; they can attain to this state and keep it at will or if they allow any external activity, it does not touch the inner silence and they can always have the complete silence at will. You [Sri Aurobindo's secretary] can refer him to the Bases of Yoga, but also say that it is best to prepare oneself first. Usually it does not come except after a long discipline of self-purification etc. ―it can be called down, but that is not always safe, if the outer nature is not yet ready.

6 March 1938

Sigmund Freud

You had once written that things rejected from the conscious parts go down into the subconscient physical. Is Freud's theory of suppression somewhat similar to this?

Freud has observed the fact, but he has built on it a number of theories that are either unsound or exaggerated.

2 August 1933

*

It seems Freud's discovery centres round this idea: " . . . underlying the closeness of the bond between mother and child, there exists in infancy on the part of the child . . . a wish . . . for re-entrance into the comfort and security of the mother's womb", and this persists in maturity and adolescence till death.³ How does he know the wish of the child?

3 John M. Thorburn, Art and the Unconscious (London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1925), p. 50.

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God knows. It seems a wild idea. For a psychologist to talk about the child remembering his stay in the womb ―surely, it is an extravagance.

How does he know that there was comfort and security in the womb?

I have not the least idea. Perhaps it is his own "complex" from which he generalises.

Why, then, does man not seek only comfort and security in life ―why does he make much attempt for other things?

He says he does seek. The wish to get back into that wonderful womb, he says, "persists in maturity and adolescence till death". I suppose he would say that when man is attempting other things, he is really though without quite knowing it trying to get back into his mother's womb, e.g. Mussolini getting into Abyssinia, it was a straight drive for his mother's womb.

The extreme of ridiculousness is reached when Freud analyses Leonardo da Vinci to show how he was pathological, how he failed disastrously in his adaptation to life, how his artistic imagination was an aberration and a maladaptation. All poets, all imaginative people, all genuises, all religious people were to Freud the result of aberration and maladaptation.

Well, his own theory is very clearly that, the result of aberration and maladaptation.

1 June 1936

Carl Gustav Jung

Jung [according to Thorburn, pp. 58 ­ 59] accepts Freud's view, and considers religion as something to be escaped from. "The primal desire for re-entrance to the womb, never ex pressing itself nakedly, but veiling itself as Freud had supposed under all kinds of symbolism, gives us in this very symbolism what history has called religion." This is what I should call "mental aberration and encephalitis" as a result of biological psychology.

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It is part of the general "aberration" that has beset the modern world owing to the descent of the vital world into the physical ― cubist and surrealist painting, modernist poetry, Nazi politics, psycho-analysis ―the more extravagant the thing, the greater its reputation and success.

1 June 1936

*

What is it that makes the intellectual world believe without scrutinising ideas such as Freud's? Is it a force which acts as a sort of "prestidigitation" on the brains even of great men like Jung? There would be several objections to Freud's idea about the child's wish to re-enter the mother's womb, yet Jung accepts it as a premise and builds upon it his theories of religion and God and gods. According to Jung [as presented by Thorburn, p. 59] : "The idea of God . . . or of the gods, is such a bondage in so far as it is supposed that God exists or that there are gods." It would, thus, be very ignominious to believe that God or the gods exist ―much more ignominious than believing a hypothesis (and an absurdity) which has no historical or biological basis ―whereas the fact of God existing can be found in all the literature of the past and the present! It seems it is less the correctness of an idea than the novelty and extravagance that appeals to the modern mind.

At present in the European world it is novelty and extravagance in ideas that are run after.

I don't know anything first-hand about Jung but the two extracts from him you have given do not encourage me to make acquaintance.⁴ Why on earth should the idea of God or gods be a bondage? I suppose it is the Semitic idea (common in Europe) of God as a terrible gentleman upstairs, emperor, law-maker, judge and policeman who sends you to Hell at his pleasure. To the Indian mind the gods are friends and helpers.

2 June 1936

4 The correspondent did not make it clear that the extracts he quoted were from Thorburn's book and not from the works of Jung and Freud. ―Ed.  

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Lowes Dickinson

What would you say on the contrast between Lowes Dickinson's Modern Symposium (1905) and his post-war dialogue, On the Discovery of Good?

The pre-war and the post-war Dickinson are indeed a contrast. This appreciation of human life is not without the force of a half truth, but it is just the other half that he misses when he sweeps idealism out of the field. Man's utopias may be the projection of his hopes and desires, but he has to go on building them on pain of death, decline or collapse. As for the gospel of pleasure, it has been tried before and always failed ―Life and Nature after a time weary of it and reject it, as if after a surfeit of cheap sweets. Man has to rush from his pursuit of pleasure, with all its accompaniment of petrifying shallowness, cynicism, hardness, frayed nerves, ennui, dissatisfaction and fatigue, to a new idealism or else sink towards a dull or catastrophic decadence. Even if the Absolute Good were a high spiritual or ideal chimera, the pursuit of it is rooted in the very make of humanity and it is one of the main sources of the perennial life of the race. And that it is so would seem to indicate that it is not a chimera ―something still beyond man, no doubt, but into which or towards which he is called by Nature to grow.

Bertrand Russell

About Russell ―I have never disputed his abilities or his character, ―I am concerned only with his opinions and there too only with those opinions which touch upon my own province ―that of spiritual Truth. In all religions, the most narrow and stupid even, and in all non-religions also there are great minds, great men, fine characters. I know little about Russell, but I never dreamed of disputing the greatness of Lenin, for instance, merely because he was an atheist ―nobody would unless he was an imbecile. But the greatness of Lenin does not debar me from refusing assent to the credal dogmas of Bolshevism, and the beauty of character of an atheist does not prove that spirituality  

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is a lie of the imagination and that there is no Divine. I may add that if you can find the utterances of famous Yogis childish when they talk about marriage or on other mental matters, I cannot be blamed for finding the ideas of Russell about spiritual experience, of which he knows nothing, very much wanting in light and substance. You have not named the Yogis in question, and till you do, I am afraid I shall cherish a suspicion about either the height or the breadth of their spiritual experience.

1932

*

I have not yet found a moment's time to go through Russell's book [Why I Am Not a Christian]; as soon as I can do so I will let you know if I have anything to say about him. I have already said that I have no objection to anybody admiring Russell or Lowes Dickinson or any other atheist. Genius or fine qualities are always admirable in whomever they are found; all that has nothing to do with the turn of a man's opinions or the truth or untruth of atheism or of spiritual experience. Neither for that matter is the fact that there are people who believe out of fear or desire a valid argument against the existence of the Divine. I will read the book as soon as I can, but I do not expect to find anything very much in it, as I am perfectly familiar with European atheism and it is for the most part a shallow and rather childish reaction against a shallow and childish religionism ―that of orthodox exoteric Christianity as it was believed and practised in Europe. Not much food on either side of the controversy either for the intellect or the spirit!

18 October 1932

*

I seized a few moments to run through Russell [Why I Am Not a Christian]; a few moments were enough. It is just as I expected it to be. I have no doubt that Russell is a competent philosophic thinker, but this might have been written by an ordinary tract-writer of the Rationalists Publications Society (I don't remember the proper name any longer). The arguments of  

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the ordinary Christian apologists to prove the existence of God are futile drivel and Russell in answering them has descended to their level. He was appealing to the mass mind, I suppose, but that is enough to deprive the book of any real thought-value. And yet the questions raised are interesting enough if treated with true philosophic insight or from the standpoint of true spiritual experience. It is queer that the European mind, capable enough in other directions, should sink to so much puerility when it begins to deal with religion and spiritual experience. All the same I shall see if there is anything that can be said in the matter.

1932

Russell, Eddington, Jeans

I don't understand why Amal expects me to bow to the criticism of Bertrand Russell.⁵

(1.) Russell's opinions are as much determined by his up bringing, temperament etc. as those of Jeans or Eddington. He was born in the heyday of the most uncompromising materialism; he is unwilling to change the ideas which have got embedded in his nature. It is this that determines his view of the result of the recent developments of science, it is not a clear infallible logic; logic can serve any turn proposed to it by the mind's preferences. Nor is it a dispassionate impersonal view of facts dictated by unbiassed reason as opposed to Eddington's personal outlook, imaginative fancies and idealistic prejudices. This idea of pure mental impersonality in the human reason is an exploded superstition of the rationalist mind; psychology in its recent inquiries has shown that this supposed impersonal observation of pure objective facts and impartial conclusion from them, an automatic writing of truth on the blank paper of the pure mind is a myth; it has shown that the personal factor is inevitable; we think according to what we are.

(2.) Russell is not, I believe, a great scientist or preeminent in any field of science. Eddington is, I am told, one of the finest

5 This is an incomplete draft of a letter that was never sent. ―Ed.  

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authorities in astrophysics. Jeans and Eddington, though not great discoverers, are otherwise in the front rank. Russell ranks as a great mathematician, but there too Eddington has one superiority over him; he is supposed to be the only one, so say some, one of the only five, say others, who have a complete understanding of Einstein's mathematical formulation; Russell is not counted among them and that perhaps disables him from understanding the full consequences of Relativity. Russell, however, is an eminent philosopher, though not one of the great ones. I would count him rather as a strong and acute thinker on philosophy and science. Here he has an advantage, for Jeans and Eddington are only amateur philosophers with a few general ideas for their stock in trade.

(3.) As for their general intellectual standing Russell is a clear and strong materialistic intellect with a wide and general play of its own kind and range; the others are strong in their own field, trained in scientific knowledge and judgment, outside that they do not count: Eddington's mind is more intuitive and original in its limits but often shooting beyond the mark. Russell, when he goes outside his limits, can flounder and blunder. Well, then where is there any foundation for exalting the authority of Russell at the expense of the other two? I disagree with the conclusions of all three; I am neither a mentalist nor a vitalist nor a materialist. Why then throw Russell at me? I am not likely to change my decision in the matter in deference to his materialistic bias. And to what does his judgment or his argument amount to? He admits as against Amal that there has been a "revolution" in science; he admits that the old materialistic philosophy has no longer even half a rotten leg to stand upon; its dogmatic theory of Matter has been kicked out God knows where. But still, says Russell, Matter is there and everything in this world obeys the laws of physical science. This is merely a personal opinion on a now very doubtful matter: he is fighting a rearguard action against what he feels to be the advanced forces of the future; his gallant but tremulous asseveration is a defensive parade not an aggressive blow; it lacks altogether the old assured self-confidence.  

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As for Russell's logic, a dry and strong or even austere logic is not a key to Truth; an enthusiastic vision often reaches it more quickly. The business of logic is to give order to a thinker's ideas, to establish firm relations between them and firm distinctions from other people's ideas, but when that is done, we are no nearer to indisputable truth than we were before. It is vision that sees Truth, not logic ―the outer vision that sees facts but not their inner sense, the inner vision that sees inner facts and can see the inner sense of them, the total vision (not belonging to mind) that sees the whole. A strong and clear and powerful intellect, Russell, but nothing more ―not certainly an infallible authority whether in science or anything else. Jeans and Eddington have their own logical reasoning; I do not accept it any more than I accept Russell's.⁶

Let us, however, leave the flinging of authorities, often the same authority for opposing conclusions, Russell quoted against Russell and Darwin against Darwin, and let us come to the point [incomplete]

Shaw

I do not think Harris' attack on Shaw as you describe it can be taken very seriously any more than can Wells' jest about his pronunciation of English being the sole astonishing thing about him. Wells, Chesterton, Shaw and others joust at each other like the kabiwālās of old Calcutta, though with more refined weapons, and you cannot take their humorous sparrings as considered appreciations; if you do, you turn exquisite jests into solemn nonsense. Mark that their method in these sparrings, the turn of phrase, the style of their wit is borrowed from Shaw himself with personal modifications; for this kind of humour, light as air and sharp as a razor-blade, epigrammatic, paradoxical, often flavoured with burlesque seriousness and urbane hyperbole, good-humoured and cutting at once, is not English in origin; it was brought in by two Irishmen, Shaw and Wilde. Harris'

6 This paragraph was written separately. It has been inserted here by the editors.  

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stroke about the Rodin bust and Wells' sally are entirely in the Shavian turn and manner; they are showing their cleverness by spiking their guru in swordsmanship with his own rapier. Harris' attack on Shaw's literary reputation may have been serious, there was a sombre and violent brutality about him which makes it possible; but his main motive was to prolong his own notoriety by a clever and vigorous assault on the mammoth of the hour. Shaw himself supplied materials for his critic, knowing well what he would write, and edited this damaging assault on his own fame,⁷ a typical Irish act at once of chivalry, shrewd calculation of effect and whimsical humour. I should not think Harris had much understanding of Shaw the man as apart from the writer; the Anglo-Saxon is not usually capable of understanding either Irish character or Irish humour, it is so different from his own. And Shaw was Irish through and through; there was nothing English about him except the language he wrote and even that he changed into the Irish ease, flow, edge and clarity ―though not bringing into it, as Wilde did, Irish poetry and colour.

Shaw's seriousness and his humour, real seriousness and mock seriousness, run into each other in a baffling inextricable mélange, thoroughly Irish in its character ―for it is the native Irish turn to speak lightly when in deadly earnest and to utter the most extravagant jests with a profound air of seriousness, ―and it so puzzled the British public that they could not for a long time make up their mind how to take him. At first they took him for a jester dancing with cap and bells, then for a new kind of mocking Hebrew prophet or Puritan reformer! Needless to say, both judgments were entirely out of focus. The Irishman is, on ´ one side of him, the vital side, a passioné, imaginative and romantic, intensely emotional, violently impulsive, easily impelled to poetry or rhetoric, moved by indignation and suffering to a mixture of aggressive militancy, wistful dreaming and sardonic extravagant humour: on another side he is keen in intellect, positive, downright, hating all loose foggy sentimentalism and

7 Harris's biography of Shaw, edited and published by Shaw himself after Harris's death. ―Ed.   536

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solemn pretence and prone, in order to avoid the appearance of them in himself, to cover himself with a jest at every step; it is at once his mask and his defence. At bottom he has the possibility in him of a modern Curtius leaping into the yawning pit for a cause, an Utopist or a Don Quixote, ―according to occasion a fighter for dreams, an idealistic pugilist, a knight errant, a pugnacious rebel or a brilliant sharp-minded realist or a reckless but often shrewd and successful adventurer. Shaw has all that in him, but with it is a cool intellectual clearness, also Irish, which dominates it all and tones it down, subdues it into measure and balance, gives an even harmonising colour. There is as a result a brilliant tempered edge of flame, lam bent, lighting up what it attacks and destroys, and destroying it by the light it throws upon it, not fiercely but trenchantly ― though with a trenchant playfulness ―aggressive and corrosive. An ostentation of humour and parade covers up the attack and puts the opponent off his defence. That is why the English mind never understood Shaw and yet allowed itself to be captured by him, and its old established ideas, "moral" positions, impenetrable armour of commercialised Puritanism and self-righteous Victorian assurance to be ravaged and burned out of existence by Shaw and his allies. Anyone who knew Victorian England and sees the difference now cannot but be struck by it and Shaw's part in it, at least in preparing and making it possible, is undeniable. That is why I call him devastating, ―not in any ostentatiously catastrophic sense, for there is a quietly trenchant type of devastatingness, ―because he has helped to lay low all these things with his scythe of sarcastic mockery and lightly, humorously penetrating seriousness ―effective, as you call it, but too deadly in its effects to be called merely effective.

That is Shaw as I have seen him and I don't believe there is anything seriously wrong in my estimate. I don't think we can complain of his seriousness about pacifism, Socialism and the rest of it; it was simply the form in which he put his dream, the dream he needed to fight for, needed by his Irish nature. Shaw's bugbear was unreason and disorder, his dream was a humanity delivered from vital illusions and deceptions, organising the life 

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force in obedience to reason, casting out waste and folly as much as possible. It is not likely to happen in the way he hoped; the reason has its own illusions and, though he strove against imprisonment in his own rationalistic ideals, trying to escape from them by the issue of his mocking critical humour, he could not help being their prisoner. As for his pose of self-praise, ―no doubt he valued himself, ―the public fighter like the man of action needs to do so in order to act or to fight. Most, though not all, try to veil it under an affectation of modesty; Shaw on the contrary took the course of raising it to a humorous pitch of burlesque and extravagance. It was at once part of his strategy in commanding attention and a means of mocking at himself ―I was not speaking of analytical self-mockery, but of the whimsical Irish kind ―so as to keep himself straight and at the same time mocking his audience. It is a peculiarly Irish kind of humour to say extravagant things with a calm convinced tone as if announcing a perfectly serious proposition ―the Irish exaggeration of the humour called by the French pince-sans-rire; his hyperboles of self-praise actually reek with this humorous savour. If his extravagant comparison of himself with Shakespeare had to be taken in dull earnest without any smile in it, he would be either a witless ass or a giant of humourless arrogance, ―and Bernard Shaw could be neither.

As to his position in literature, I have given my opinion; but, more precisely, I imagine that he will take some place but not a very large place, once the drums have ceased beating and the fighting is over. He has given too much to the battles of the hour, perhaps, to claim a large share of the future. I suppose some of his plays will survive for their wit and humour and cleverness more than for any higher dramatic quality, like those of three other Irishmen, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Wilde. His prefaces may be saved by their style and force, but it is not sure. At any rate, as a personality he is not likely to be forgotten, even if his writings fade. To compare him with [Anatole] France is futile ―they were minds too different and moving in too different domains for comparison to be possible.

3 February 1932

*

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I would be obliged if you would tell me your opinion of the apostrophe of Caesar to the Sphinx in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. I find it very fine, but Dilip says he is not thrilled by it.

I am not thrilled by the speech either; it is a creation of the intellect, eloquent and on the surface. I do not see how you are going to manufacture a mystic out of Shaw with these scanty materials: he has a very clear and incisive intelligence, independent and unconventional rather than original and creative, but beyond the intellect he does not go. The speculative imaginations of which you speak and the feelings in the aesthetic vital which accompany them sometimes are common enough in men with some reach of mind, but they do not constitute either a mystic feeling or a mystic experience.

6 May 1932

Was Shaw a Mystic?

It is, of course, difficult to manufacture a mystic out of Shaw in the Yogic sense of the word, but in the philosophic sense I think it can be said that his conception of the universal life-force and his vision of man's future are prompted by a keen sense of the infinite, divine potencies of the human consciousness and of the secret urge towards godhead which is the motive power behind all evolution. . . . What Shaw claims to be is an artist-philosopher ―that is to say, a man with a constructive as well as critical vision of life, who is able to express that vision in a spirited and cogently attractive form by means of his literary gift. So the real question is whether his vision is great enough, inspired enough, and he brings a sufficient power of interpretation to render his insight compellingly intelligible and valuable.

Your reasoning seems to proceed by abolishing the necessary distinctions and running different things into each other.

1st equation. Philosopher (artist kind) = a man with a constructive as well as a critical vision of life = Shaw. I may add = all poets, if Matthew Arnold's equation about poetry and criticism of life is correct. Hundreds of others also can at this rate be called philosophers.

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2nd equation. Mystic = mystic philosopher = philosopher who has notions about supraphysical entities or forces, e.g. Life Force = Shaw. But a mystic is currently supposed to be one who has mystic experience, and a mystic philosopher is one who has such experience and has formed a view of life in harmony with his experience. Merely to have metaphysical notions about the Infinite and Godhead and underlying or overshadowing forces does not make a man a mystic. One would never think of applying such a term to Spinoza, Kant or Hegel: even Plato does not fit into the term though Pythagoras has a good claim to it. Hegel and other transcendental or idealistic philosophers were great intellects, not mystics. Shaw is a keen and forceful intellect (I cannot call him a great thinker⁸) but his ideas about the Life-Force certainly do not make him a mystic. And do you really call that a constructive vision of life ―a vague notion about a Life-Force pushing towards an evolutionary manifestation and a brilliant jeu d'esprit about long life and people born out of eggs and certain extraordinary operations of mind and body in these semi-immortals who seem to have been very much at a loss what to do with their immortality? I do not deny that there are keen and brilliant ideas and views everywhere (that is Shaw's wealthy stock-in-trade), even an occasional profound perception; but that does not make a man either a mystic or a philosopher or a great thought-creator. Shaw has a sufficiently high place in his own kind ―why try to make him out more than he is? Shakespeare is a great poet and dramatist, but to try to make him out a great philosopher also would not increase but rather imperil his high repute.

May 1932

*

I admit that in the real, experiential sense Shaw is not a mystic, though definitely religious at the core ―in an unconventional way of his own. Nor does he belong to the company of the

8 An admirable many-sided intelligence and an acute critic discussing penetratingly or discoursing acutely or constructively on many problems or presenting with force or point many aspects of life, he is not a creator or disseminator of the great illuminating ideas that leave their mark on the centuries.  

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giant abstractionists. He is a philosopher only in as much as his outlook on basic realities is, unlike as in poets, sufficiently argued and interpreted by him in relation to general issues of philosophy and life, and a mystic philosopher only from the western view-point.

At that rate anybody is a mystic or a philosopher and these two words have no longer any value. I do not admit that Shaw has a reasoned theory about basic realities; the only realities he or his characters have argued about are the things of the surface; even his Life-Force is only a thing of the surface or, at the most, just under the surface.

The right of Plato [to be considered a mystic] is regarded as beyond question; Spinoza with his "amor intellectualis Dei" is, outside the Catholic Church, also hailed as such; and even Kant I have found looked upon in the same light. In our own day it is common, I believe, to refer to Bergson or Bradley as mystical.

Regarded, looked upon by whom? It was not so in my time at least in Europe. Plato was never called a mystic then; Hegel was regarded as a transcendentalist but no mystic; if you had called Kant or Spinoza mystics people would have stared. To believe in the Absolute or something metaphysical or supraphysical does ´ not make one a mystic philosopher, nor does belief in the élan vital or a dry and geometric amor intellectualis Dei. The NeoPlatonists and the Neo-Hegelians stand on the border. If all these are the Western view-point packed in one mystic box, it is a very new Western view-point, a new language of confusion in this age of confusion, I suppose. It must be like the idea of spirituality in the minds of many people in the West in which mind and spirit are the same thing and to have a fine feeling or an idealistic thought is the very height of spirituality.

I should like to know whether, in your opinion, Shaw comes off badly in comparison with Wells or Chesterton or Russell as a thinker. And do you mind expatiating on Shaw as a dramatist and a writer of prose?  

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I refuse to accept the men you name, with the exception of Russell, as serious thinkers. Wells is a super-journalist, super-pamphleteer and story-teller. I imagine that within a generation of his death his speculations will cease to be read or remembered; his stories may endure longer. Chesterton is a brilliant essayist who has written verse too of an appreciable brilliance and managed some good stories. Unlike Wells he has some gift of style and he has caught the trick of wit and constant paradox which gives a fictitious semblance of enhanced value to his ideas. These are men of contemporary fame; Shaw has more chance of lasting, but there is no certain certitude, because he has no atom of constructive power. He has constructed nothing large, but he has criticised most things. At every page he shows the dissolvent critical mind and it is a dissolvent of great power; beyond that, he has popularised the ideas of Fabian Socialism and other constructive view-points caught up by him from the surrounding atmosphere, but with temperamental qualifications and variations, for the inordinately critical character of his mind prevents him from entirely agreeing with anybody. Criticism is also a great power and there are some purely critical minds that have become immortals, Voltaire for instance; Shaw on his own level may survive ―only his thinking is more of a personal type and not classic and typical of a fundamental current of the human intellect like Voltaire. His personality may help him, as Johnson was helped by his personality to live.

Shaw is not a dramatist; I don't think he ever wrote a drama; Candida is perhaps the nearest he came to one. He is a first-class play-writer, ―a brilliant conversationalist in stage dialogue and a manufacturer of speaking intellectualised puppets made to develop and represent by their talk and carefully wire-pulled movements his ideas about men, life and things. He gives his characters minds of various quality and they are expressing their minds all the time; sometimes he paints on them some striking vital colour, but with a few exceptions they are not living beings like those of the great or even of the lesser dramatists. There are, however, a few exceptions, such as the three characters in Candida, and as a supremely clever playwright with a strong  

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intellectual force and some genius he may very well survive. He has a very striking and cogent and incisive style admirably fitted for its work, and he sometimes tries his hand at eloquence, but "heights of passionate eloquence" is a very unreal phrase. I never found that in Shaw anywhere; whatever mental ardours he may have, his mind as a whole is too cool, balanced, incisive to let itself go in that manner.

May 1932

Shaw's Personality and Place in Literature

The Shavian assertiveness is not offensive (as the Hugoesque tends to be) because it is full also of a smiling self-mockery, an irony that out of a form of deliberate self-praise cuts at itself and the world in one lump. It is curious that so many people seem to miss this character of Shaw's self-assertiveness and self-praise, its essential humour.

28 August 1932

*

I do not agree that Wells and others are more serious than Shaw ―if by seriousness is meant earnestness of belief in one's ideals and sincerity in the intelligence. These can exist very well behind a triple breast-plate of satire and humour. Shaw's merits are surely greater than you seem disposed to admit in your letter. The tide is turning against him after being strongly for him ―under compulsion from his own power and will, but nothing can alter the fact that he was one of the keenest and most powerful minds of the age with an originality in his way of looking at things which no one else could equal. If what was original in him has become the common stock of contemporary thought, it was his power and forcefulness that made it so ―it is no more to be counted against him than the deplorable fact that Hamlet is only "a string of quotations" is damaging to Shakespeare! I do not share your exasperation against Shavianism ―I find in it a delightful note and am thankful to Shaw for being so refreshingly different from other men that to read even an ordinary interview with him in a newspaper is always an intellectual pleasure. As for his being one of the most original personalities of the age, there  

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can be no doubt of that. All that I deny to him is a constructive and creative mind ―but his critical force, in certain fields at least, as a critic of man and life was very great and in that field he can in a sense be called creative ―in the sense that he created a singularly effective and living form for his criticism of life. It is not great tragic or comic drama, but it is something original and strong and altogether of its own kind ―so, up to that limit, I qualify my statement that Shaw was no creator.

As to the other writers about whom you ask for my judgment, I do not feel inclined to be drawn at present; I would have to say too much, if I started saying anything at all. Galsworthy I have not read ―all I can say of the rest is that I do not share the contemporary idea about them ―so far as I have read their work. Contemporary fame, contemporary opinion are creations of the hour and can die with the hour. I fail to see in many of these much-praised writers of the time either the power of style or the power of critical mind or creative imagination that ensures survival. There is plenty of effective writing or skilful workmanship, but that is not enough to make literary immortals.

8 September 1932

*

Why do you want Shaw to be tied to some intellectual dogma and square all his acts, views and sullies to it? He is too penetrating and sincere a mind to be a stiff partisan ―when he sees something which qualifies the "ism" ―even that on whose side he is standing ―he says so; that need not weaken the ideal behind, it is likely to make it more plastic and practicable. However, enough of Shaw; I have to answer Amal's question and that ought to finish with him. I will only add that whatever his manner, it does not appear to me that he writes merely to shock but to expose in a vivid way the stupidity of the human mind in taking established things and ideas for granted. If he does it in a striking and amusing way, why so much the livelier and the better!

9 September 1932  

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Kipling

No use of success unless it is deserved. Can't forget that Kipling for whose poetry I have a Noble contempt (his prose has value, at least the Jungle Book and some short stories) was illegitimately Nobelised by this confounded prize. Contemporary "success" of fame is a deceit and a snare.

12 September 1938

Lawrence

I have not read anything of Lawrence, but I have recently seen indications about him from many quarters; the impression given was that of a man of gifts who failed for want of vital balance ―like so many others. The prose you have turned into verse ― very well, as usual, ―has certainly quality, though there is not enough to form a definite judgment. A seeker who missed the issue, I should imagine ―misled by the vitalistic stress to which the mind of today is a very harassed captive.

16 June 1932

*

As far as the photograph of which you speak can be taken as showing the man ―it is that of a nature of which the chief character is intensity, but in a very narrow range. There is here no wide range of ideas or feelings; a few ruling ideas, a few persistent and keenly acute feelings. The face of a man whose vital is also intense, but without strength and therefore over sensitive. There may well be a strong idealistic tendency ―but there is not likely to be much power to carry out the ideals. This is the character; as for the genius, if there is any, it will depend on other things which may not find positive expression in the outward appearance; for the external man is often the medium of a Power that is beyond him.

I shall keep the book for a few days ―if you don't need it, ―just to glance through it; it is too big to read in detail. I know nothing of Lawrence; I shall see if I can pick up something from here.

25 September 1932

*

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I must read Huxley's preface [to The Letters of D. H. Lawrence] and glance at some letters before venturing on any comments ―like the reviewers who frisk about, a page here and a page there, and then write an ample or devastating review. Anyhow it seems to me Lawrence must have been a difficult man to live with, even for him it must have been difficult to live with himself. His photograph confirms that view. But a man at war with himself can write excellent poetry ―if he is a poet; often better poetry than another, just as Shakespeare wrote his best tragedies when he was in a state of chaotic upheaval; at least so his interpreters say. But one needs a higher and more calm and poised inspiration to write poems of harmony and divine balance than any Lawrence ever had. I stick to my idea of the evil influence of theories on a man of genius. If he had been contented to write things of beauty instead of bare rockies and dry deserts, he might have done splendidly and ranked among the great poets.

3 July 1936

*

All great personalities have a strong ego of one kind or another ―for that matter it does not need to be a big personality to be ego-centred; ego-centricity is the very nature of life in the Ignorance, ―even the sattwic man, the philanthropist, the altruist live for and round their ego. Society imposes an effort to restrain and when one cannot restrain at least to disguise it. Morality's highest business is to control or widen, refine or sublimate it so that it shall be able to exceed itself or use itself in the service of things bigger than its own primary egoism. But none of these things enables one to escape from it. It is only by finding something deep within or above ourselves and making laya (dissolution) of the ego in that that it is possible. It is what Lawrence saw and it was his effort to do it that made him "other" than those who associated with him ―but he could not find out the way. It was a strange mistake to seek it in sexuality; it was also a great mistake to seek it at the wrong end of the nature.

What you say about the discovery of the defects of human nature is no doubt true. Human nature is full of defects and can  

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not be otherwise, but there are other elements and possibilities in it which, although never quite unmixed, have to be seen to get a whole view. But the discovery of the truth about human beings need not lead to cynicism; it may lead to a calm aloofness and irony which has nothing disappointed or bitter in it; or it may lead to a large psychic charity which recognises the truth but makes all allowances and is ready to love and to help in spite of all. In the spiritual consciousness one is blind to nothing, but sees also that which is within behind these coverings, the divine element not yet released, and is neither deceived nor repelled and discouraged. That inner greater thing that was in Lawrence and which he sought for is in everybody: he may not have found it and his defects of nature may have prevented its release, but it is there.

I do not know about the lovableness; what you say is partly true, but lovableness may exist in spite of ego and all kinds of defects and people may feel it.

3 July 1936

*

Lawrence had the psychic push inside towards the Unseen and Beyond at the same time as a push towards the vital life which came in its way. He was trying to find his way between the two and mixed them up together till at the end he got his mental liberation from the tangle though not yet any clear knowledge of the way ―for that I suppose he will have to be born nearer the East or in any case in surroundings which will enable him to get at the Light.

9 July 1936

Sri Aurobindo and Criticism of Fiction

It is true I read through Aldous Huxley's monster, but it took me several months to finish it. This is not because I object to "light" literature, but because I had only an occasional quarter of an hour in three or four days to glance at it. If Sarat Chatterji does not mind my treating his book to the same tortoise dharma, I will undertake to read it; but I can make no promise as to time etc. Possibly it will take less time than the Round Table  

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Conference. As to giving him a new turn, that, I fear, is beyond me; besides, in this field I was once a voracious reader, but never a critic or creator.

8 June 1931

*

As to the novel, perhaps I simply meant that I was unwilling to exercise my critic's scalpel on a living master of the art. In poetry it is different because I am there both a critic and a creator.

22 June 1931

Great Novelists

The great novelists like the great dramatists have been usually men who lived widely or intensely and brought a world out of the combination of their inner and their outer observation, vision, experience. Of course if you have a world in yourself, that is another matter.

22 September 1936

Bankim Chandra Chatterji

Depreciation of Bankim is absurd; he is and will always rank as one of the great creators and his prose stands among the ten or twelve best prose-styles in the world's literature.

December 1932

Great Prose Stylists

I stand rather aghast at your summons to stand and deliver the names of the ten or twelve best prose styles in the world's literature. I had no names in mind and I used the incautious phrase only to indicate the high place I thought Bankim held among the great masters of language. To rank the poets on different grades of the Hill of Poetry is a pastime which may be a little frivolous and unnecessary, but possible if not altogether permissible. I would not venture to try the same game with the prose-writers who are multitudinous and do not present the same marked and unmistakable differences of level and power.  

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