{"id":1306,"date":"2013-07-13T01:33:59","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1306"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:33:59","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:59","slug":"16-the-movement-of-modern-literature-2-vol-09-the-future-poetry-volume-09","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/09-the-future-poetry-volume-09\/16-the-movement-of-modern-literature-2-vol-09-the-future-poetry-volume-09","title":{"rendered":"-16_The Movement of Modern Literature \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 2.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n

\nC<\/font>HAPTER<\/font>\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>XV<\/font><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n <\/font>     The Movement of Modern
\nLiterature \u2013 2<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font><\/span>O<\/font>UT of the period of dominant
\nobjective realism what emerges with the strongest force is a movement to quite
\nan opposite principle creation, a literature of pronounced and conscious
\nsubjectivity. There is throughout the nineteenth century and apparent
\ncontradiction between its professed literary aim and theory and the fundamental
\nunavoidable character of much of its inspiration. In aim throughout, -though
\nthere are notable exceptions, – It professes a strong objectivity. The temper
\nof the age has been an earnest critical and scientific curiosity, a desire to
\nse, know and understand the world as it is: that requires a strong and clear
\neye\u00a0 <\/span>turned on the object and it would
\nseem to require also as far as possible an elimination of one\u2019s own
\npersonality; a strongly personal view of things would appear to be the very
\ncontrary of an accurate observation, for the first constructs and colours the
\nobject from within, the second would allow it to impress its own colour and
\nshape on the mind, -we have to suppose, of course, that, as the modern
\nintellect has generally held, objects exist inn themselves and not in our own
\nconsciousness of them. Goethe definitely framed this theory of literary
\ncreation when he laid it down that the ideal of art and poetry was to be
\nbeautifully objective. With the exception of some of the first initiators and
\nuntil yesterday, modern creation has followed more or less this line: it has
\ntried to give either a striking, moving and exciting or an aesthetically sound
\nor a realistically powerful presentation, -all three method often intermingling
\nor coalescing, -rather than a subjective interpretation; thought, feeling,
\naesthetic treatment of the object are supposed to intervene upon and arise from
\na clear or strong objective observation. <\/p>\n

But, on the other hand, an equally strong
\ncharacteristic of the modern mind is its growing subjectivity, an intense
\nconsciousness <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 103<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

of
\nthe I, the soul or the self, not in any mystic withdrawal within or inward
\nmeditation, or not in that pre-eminently, but in relation to the whole of life
\nand Nature. This characteristic distinguishes modern subjectivism from the
\nnatural subjectivity of former times, which either tended towards an intense
\nsolitary inwardness or was superficial and confined to a few common though
\noften strongly emphasized notes. Ancient or mediaeval individuality might
\nreturn more self-assertive or violent responses to life, but the modern kind is
\nmore subtly and pervasively self-conscious and the stronger in thought and
\nfeeling to throw its own image on things, because it is more precluded from
\nthrowing itself out freely in action and living. This turn was in fact an
\ninevitable result of an increasing force of intellectualism; for great intensity
\nof thought, when it does not isolate itself from emotion, reactive sensation
\nand aesthetic response, as in science and in certain kinds of philosophy, must
\nbe attended by a quickening and intensity of these other parts of our
\nmentality. In science and critical thought, where this isolation is possible,
\nthe objective turn prevailed, -though much that we call critical thought is
\nafter all a personal construction, a use of the reason and the observation of
\nthings for a view of what is around us which, far from being really
\ndisinterested and impersonal, is a creation of our own temperament and a
\nsatisfaction of our intellectualized individuality. But in artistic creation
\nwhere the isolation is not possible, we find quite an opposite phenomenon, the
\nsubjective personality of the poet asserting itself to a far greater extent
\nthan in former ages of humanity. <\/p>\n

Goethe himself, in spite of his theory,
\ncould not escape from this tendency; his work, as he himself recognized, is always
\nan act of reflection of the subjective changes of his personality, a history of
\nthe development of his own soul in the guise of objective creation. From, the
\nwork of a poet like Leconte de Lisle\u00a0 <\/span>who
\nattempted with the most deliberate conscientiousness a perfect fidelity to the
\nideal of an impersonal artistic objectiveness, there disengages itself in the
\nmass an almost poignant impression of the strong subjective personality shaping
\neverything into a mask-reflection of its own characteristic moods; the attempt
\nto live in the thoughts and feelings of other men, other civilizations <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 104<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

betrays
\nitself as only the multiple imaginative and sympathetic extension of the poet\u2019s
\nown psychology. This peculiarity of the age is noticeable even in many creators
\nwhose aim is deliberately realistic or their method founded upon a minute
\npsychological observation, Ibsen or Tolstoi and the Russian novelists. The self
\nof the creator very visibly overshadows the work, is seen everywhere like the
\nconscious self of Vedanta both containing and inhabiting all his creations.
\nShakespeare succeeds, as far as a poet can, in veiling himself behind his
\ncreatures; he gives us at least the illusion of mirroring the world around him,
\na world universally represented rather than personally and individually thought
\nand imaged, an at any rate the Life-spirit sees and creates in him through a
\nfaithful reflecting instrument, quite sufficiently universal and impersonal for
\nits dramatic purpose even in his personality. Browning, the English poet who
\nbest represented the spirit of the age in its temperament of curious
\nobservation and its aim at a certain force of large and yet minute reality, who
\nwas eminently a poet of life observed and understood and of thought playing
\naround the observation, as Shakespeare was the poet of life seen through an
\nidentity of feeling with it and of thought arising up out of the surge of life,
\n– Browning, though he seems to have considered this self-concealment especially
\nadmirable and the essence of the Shakespearian method of creation, fails
\nhimself to achieve it in anything like the same measure. The self-conscious
\nthinking of the modern mind which brings into prominent relief the rest of the
\nmental personality and stamps the whole work with it, gets into his way;
\neverywhere we feel the presence of the creator bringing forward his living
\npuppets, analyzing, commenting, thinking about them or else about life through
\na variation of many voices so that they become as much his masks as his
\ncreations.<\/p>\n

Thus both the subjective personality of the
\nman and the artistic personality of the creator tend to count for much more in
\nmodern work that at any previous time; the poet is a much greater part of his
\nwork. It is doubtful whether we have not altogether lost the old faculty of
\nimpersonal self-effacement in the creation which was so common in the ancient
\nand mediaeval ages when many men working in one spirit could build great
\nuniversal <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 105<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

works
\nof combined architecture, painting and sculpture or in literature the epic or
\nromantic cycles or lyric cycles like the Vedic Mandalas of the mass of
\nVaishnava poetry. Even when there are definite schools marked by a common
\nmethod, we do not find, as in the old French romance writers or the Elizabethan
\ndramatists or the poets of the eighteenth century, a spiritual resemblance
\nwhich overshadows individual differences; in the moderns the technical method
\nmay have in all similar motives, but difference of subjective treatment so
\nstresses its values as to prevent all spiritual unity. There is here a gain
\nwhich more than compensates any loss; but we have to note the cause, a growth
\nof subjectivism, an enhanced force, enrichment and insistence of the inner
\npersonality. <\/p>\n

This trend, though for some time held back
\nfrom its full development by the aim at the objective method, betrays itself in
\nthat love of close and minute psychological observation which pervades the work
\nof the time. There, too, the modern mind has left far behind all the preceding
\nages. Although most prominent in fiction and drama, the characteristic has laid
\nsome hold too on poetry. Compared with its work all previous creation seems
\npsychologically poor both in richness of material and in subtlety and the depth
\nof its vision; half the work of Shakespeare in spite of its larger and greater
\ntreatment hardly contains as much on this side as a single volume of Browning.
\nRealism has carried\u00a0 <\/span>this new trend to
\nthe farthest limit possible to a professedly objective method, stressing minute
\ndistinctions, forcing the emphasis of extreme notes, but in so doing it has
\nopened to the creative mind of the age a door of escape from realism. For, in
\nthe first place, while in the representation of outward objects, of action, of
\ncharacter and temperament thrown out in self-expressive movement we may with
\nsuccess affect the method of purely objective observation, from the moment we
\nbegin to psychologise deeply, we are at once preparing to go back into
\nourselves. For it is only through our own psychology, through its power of
\nresponse to and of identification with the mind and soul in others that we know
\ntheir inner psychology; for the most part our psychological account of others
\nis only an account of the psychological impressions of them they produce in our <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 106<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

own
\nmentality. This we see even in the realistic writers in the strongly personal
\nand limited way in which they render the psychology of their creatures in one
\nor two always recurring main notes upon which they ring minute variations. In
\nthe end the creative mind could not fail to become conscious of this self
\nwithin which was really doing the whole work and to turn to it for a theme or
\nfor the mould of its psychological creations, to a conscious intimate
\nsubjectivism,. Again, the emphasising of extreme notes brings us to a point
\nwhere to go farther we have to go within and to make ourselves a sort of
\nlaboratory of new psychological experiment and discovery.<\/p>\n

This is the turn we get in the poetry of
\nVerlaine which is throughout a straining after an intimate and subtle experience
\nof the senses, vital sensations, emotions pushed beyond experience of the
\nsenses, vital sensations, emotions pushed beyond ordinary limits into a certain
\nvivid and revealing abnormality, in the earlier work of Maeterlinck which is
\nnot so much an action of personalities as the drama of a childlike desire-soul
\nuttering half inarticulate cries of love and longing, terror and distress and
\nemotion, in the work of Mallarm\u00e9 where there is a constant seeking for
\nsubjective symbols which will reveal to our own soul the soul of the things
\nthat we see. The rediscovery of the soul is the last stage of the round
\ndescribed by the age of the intellect and reason. It is at first mainly the
\nperceptions of a desire-soul, a soul of sense and sensation and emotion, and an
\narriving through them at a sort of psychological mysticism, a psychism which is
\nnot yet true mysticism, much less spirituality, but is still a movement of the
\nlower self in that direction. The movement could not stop here: the emergence
\nof the higher perceptions of a larger and [purer psychical and intuitive entity
\nin direct contact with the Spirit could not but come, and this greater impulse
\nis represented by the work of the Irish poets. It is the sign of the end, now
\nin sight, of a purely intellectual modernism and the coming of new age of
\ncreation, intellectualism fulfilled ceasing by a self-exceeding in a greater
\nmotive of intuitive art and poetry. <\/p>\n

Thus this wide movement of interest, so
\nmany-sided and universal, in man past and present after embracing all that
\nattracts the observing eye in his life and history and apparent <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 107<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

nature
\ncomes back to a profounder interest in the movements of his deeper self which
\nreveals itself to an extended psychological experience and an intuitive sense. But
\nan insistent interest in future man has been the most novel, the most
\nfruitfully distinguishing characteristic of the modern mind. Once limited to
\nthe far-off dream of religions or the distant speculation of isolated thinkers,
\nthe attempt to cast a seeing eye as well as a shaping will on the future is now
\nan essential side of the human outlook. Formerly the human mentality of the
\npresent lived in the great shadow thrown on it by its past, nowadays, on the
\ncontrary, it turns more to some image of coming possibility. The colour of this
\nfuturism has changed with the changes of modern intellectualism. At first it
\ncame in on the wave of a partly naturalistic, partly transcendentalist
\nidealism, a reverie of the perfected individual and the perfected society, and
\nwas commonly associated with the passion for civic or\u00a0 <\/span>the idea of a spiritual and personal liberty.
\nA more sober colouring intervened, the intellectual constructions of
\npositivism, liberalism, utilitarian thought which were soon in their turn
\nfollowed by broader democratic and socialistic utopias. Touched sometimes with
\nan aesthetic and idealistic colouring, they have grown for a time more
\nscientific, economic, practical with the advance of realism and rationalism.
\nBut the new force of subjectivism will have probably the effect of
\nrehabilitating the religious and spiritually idealistic element in our vision
\nof the future of the race. Poetry which has been less able to follow this
\nstream of thought than prose literature, will find its account in the change;
\nfor it will be the natural interpreter of this more inner and intuitive vision.
\nThe futurist\u00a0 <\/span>outlook has never been more
\npronounced than at the present day; on all sides, in thought, in life, in the
\nmotives and forms of literary and artistic creation, we are swinging violently
\naway from the past into an unprecedented adventure of new teeming
\npossibilities. Never has the past counted so little for its own sake, -its
\ntradition is still effectual only when it can be made a power or an inspiration
\nfor the future, never has the present looked so persistently and creatively
\nforward<\/p>\n

But Nature and man in his active,
\nintellectual and emotional life and physical environment are not the whole
\nsubject of man\u2019s
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 108<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

thought
\nor of his creative presentment of his mind\u2019s seeing and imaginings. He has been
\neven more passionately occupied by the idea of things beyond, other worlds and
\nan after life, symbols and powers of that which exceeds him or of his own
\nself-exceeding, the cult of gods of nature and supernature, the belief in or
\nthe seeking after God. On this side of the human mind modern literature, though
\nnot a blank, has been during the greater part of the nineteenth century
\ninferior in its mater and in its power, because it has been an age of
\nskepticism and of denial or else of a doubtful and tormented, a merely
\nintellectual or a conventional clinging to the residuum of past beliefs. They
\nhave not formed a real and vital part of its inner life and what is not real or
\nvital to thought, imagination and feeling cannot be powerfully\u00a0 <\/span>creative At first this ebb of positive faith
\nwas to some extent compensated for by the ideal element of a philosophic
\ntranscendentalism, vague and indefinite but with its own large light and force
\nof inspiration. As skepticism became more positive, this light fades the most
\npoetic notes of the age which deal with the foundations of life are either the
\npoignant expression of a regretful scepticism, or a defiant atheism exulting in
\nthe revolt of the great denial, the hymn of the Void, an eternal Nihil which
\nhas taken the place of God, or else the large idea of Nature as a universal
\nentity, the Mother of our being. To Science this is only an inconscient Force;
\nthe poetic mind with its natural turn for finding a reality even behind what are
\nto the intellect abstract conceptions, has passed through this conception to a
\nnew living sense of the universal, the infinite. It has even evolved from it
\nnow and then, a vivid pantheism. The difficult self-defence or reaction of the
\nold faiths against the prevalent skepticism and intellectualism has given too
\nsome minor notes; but these are the greater voices of negation and affirmation
\nin this sphere of poetic thought and creation which have added some novel and
\npowerful strains to poetry. With the return to subjective intuition and a fresh
\nadventuring of knowledge and imagination into the beyond modern poetry, freed
\nfrom the skeptical attitude, is beginning in this field too to turn the balance
\nin its favour as against the old classical and mediaeval literature. The vision
\nof the worlds beyond which it is gaining is nearer, less grossly human, more
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 109<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

supernatural
\nto physical Nature; the symbols it is beginning to create and its
\nreinterpretati9on of the old symbols are more adequate and more revealing; rid
\nof the old insufficient forms and limiting creeds, it is admitting a near,
\ndirect and fearless seeing and experience of God in Nature, God in man, God in
\nthe universal and the eternal. From faith it has advanced through the valley of
\ndoubt top the heights of a more luminous knowledge. These are the main
\nmovements of the modern mind constituting the turns of a psychological
\nevolution of the most rapid and remarkable kind which have dominated the
\nliterature of Europe, now more than ever before going into a singled though
\nvaried whole. We have to see how they have\u00a0
\n<\/span>worked themselves out in English poetry during this period. We shall
\nthen be able to form a clearer idea of the dominant possibilities of the future:
\nfor though it has been a side stream and not the central current, yet in the
\nend the highest and most significant, though not yet the strongest forces of
\nthe future poetry have converged here and given their first clearest and most
\ndistinct sounds. The continent is still overshadowed by the crepuscule of the
\nintellectual age sick unto death but unable to die. Here there are some clear
\nmorning voices, English precursors, the revived light of Celtic spirituality,
\nnot least significant the one or two accents of a more self-assured message which
\nhave broken across the mental barrier between East and West from resurgent
\nIndia.
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage – 110<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n
\nHOME<\/font><\/span><\/a><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CHAPTER\u00a0\u00a0XV       The Movement of Modern Literature \u2013 2    \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 OUT of the period of dominant objective realism what emerges with the strongest force…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-09-the-future-poetry-volume-09","wpcat-29-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}