{"id":1724,"date":"2013-07-13T01:36:45","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T08:36:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1724"},"modified":"2013-11-28T15:11:14","modified_gmt":"2013-11-28T23:11:14","slug":"15-the-movement-of-modern-literature-2-vol-26-the-future-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/26-the-future-poetry\/15-the-movement-of-modern-literature-2-vol-26-the-future-poetry","title":{"rendered":"-15_The Movement of Modern-\u00a0Literature – 2.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tChapter XV<\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t The Movement of Modern<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t Literature \u00ad 2<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\tO<\/font>UT OF<\/b> the period
\n\t\t\tof dominant objective realism what emerges with the strongest force
\n\t\t\tis a movement to quite an opposite principle of creation, a
\n\t\t\tliterature of pronounced and conscious subjectivity. There is
\n\t\t\tthroughout the nineteenth century an apparent contradiction between
\n\t\t\tits professed literary aim and theory and the fundamental
\n\t\t\tunavoidable character of much of its inspiration. In aim throughout,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 though there are notable exceptions, \u2014 it professes a strong
\n\t\t\tobjectivity. The temper of the age has been an earnest critical and
\n\t\t\tscientific curiosity, a desire to see, know and understand the world
\n\t\t\tas it is: that requires a strong and clear eye turned on the object
\n\t\t\tand it would seem to require also as far as possible an elimination
\n\t\t\tof one’s own personality; a strongly personal view of things would
\n\t\t\tappear to be the very contrary of an accurate observation, for the
\n\t\t\tfirst constructs and colours the object from within, the second
\n\t\t\twould allow it to impress its own colour and shape on the mind, \u2014 we
\n\t\t\thave to suppose, of course, that, as the modern intellect has
\n\t\t\tgenerally held, objects exist in themselves and not in our own
\n\t\t\tconsciousness of them. Goethe definitely framed this theory of
\n\t\t\tliterary creation when he laid it down that the ideal of art and
\n\t\t\tpoetry was to be beautifully objective. With the exception of some
\n\t\t\tof the first initiators and until yesterday, modern creation has
\n\t\t\tfollowed more or less this line: it has tried to give either a
\n\t\t\tstriking, moving and exciting or an aesthetically sound or a
\n\t\t\trealistically powerful presentation, \u2014 all three methods often
\n\t\t\tintermingling or coalescing, \u2014 rather than a subjective
\n\t\t\tinterpretation; thought, feeling, aesthetic treatment of the object
\n\t\t\tare supposed to intervene upon and arise from a clear or strong
\n\t\t\tobjective observation.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>116<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tBut on the other hand an equally strong characteristic of the modern
\n\t\t\tmind is its growing subjectivity, an intense consciousness of the I,
\n\t\t\tthe soul or the self, not in any mystic withdrawal within or inward
\n\t\t\tmeditation, or not in that preeminently, but in relation to the
\n\t\t\twhole of life and Nature. This characteristic distinguishes modern
\n\t\t\tsubjectivism from the natural subjectivity of former times, which
\n\t\t\teither tended towards an intense solitary inwardness or was
\n\t\t\tsuperficial and confined to a few common though often strongly
\n\t\t\temphasised notes. Ancient or mediaeval individuality might return
\n\t\t\tmore self-assertive or violent responses to life, but the modern
\n\t\t\tkind is more subtly and pervasively self-conscious and the stronger
\n\t\t\tin thought and feeling to throw its own image on things, because it
\n\t\t\tis more precluded from throwing itself out freely in action and
\n\t\t\tliving. This turn was in fact an inevitable result of an increasing
\n\t\t\tforce of intellectualism; for great intensity of thought, when it
\n\t\t\tdoes not isolate itself from emotion, reactive sensation and
\n\t\t\taesthetic response, as in science and in certain kinds of
\n\t\t\tphilosophy, must be attended by a quickening and intensity of these
\n\t\t\tother parts of our mentality. In science and critical thought, where
\n\t\t\tthis isolation is possible, the objective turn prevailed, \u2014 though
\n\t\t\tmuch that we call critical thought is after all a personal
\n\t\t\tconstruction, a use of the reason and the observation of things for
\n\t\t\ta view of what is around us which, far from being really
\n\t\t\tdisinterested and impersonal, is a creation of our own temperament
\n\t\t\tand a satisfaction of our intellectualised individuality. But in
\n\t\t\tartistic creation where the isolation is not possible, we find quite
\n\t\t\tan opposite phenomenon, the subjective personality of the poet
\n\t\t\tasserting itself to a far greater extent than in former ages of
\n\t\t\thumanity.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tGoethe himself, in spite of his theory, could not escape
\n\t\t\tfrom this tendency; his work, as he himself recognised, is always an
\n\t\t\tact of reflection of the subjective changes of his personality, a
\n\t\t\thistory of the development of his own soul in the guise of objective
\n\t\t\tcreation. From the work of a poet like Leconte de Lisle who
\n\t\t\tattempted with the most deliberate conscientiousness a perfect
\n\t\t\tfidelity to the ideal of an impersonal artistic objectiveness, there
\n\t\t\tdisengages itself in the mass an almost poignant impression of   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013117<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tthe strong subjective personality shaping everything into a
\n\t\t\tmask-reflection of its own characteristic moods; the attempt to live
\n\t\t\tin the thoughts and feelings of other men, other civilisations
\n\t\t\tbetrays itself as only the multiple imaginative and sympathetic
\n\t\t\textension of the poet’s own psychology. This peculiarity of the age
\n\t\t\tis noticeable even in many creators whose aim is deliberately
\n\t\t\trealistic or their method founded upon a minute psychological
\n\t\t\tobservation, Ibsen or Tolstoy and the Russian novelists. The self of
\n\t\t\tthe creator very visibly overshadows the work, is seen everywhere
\n\t\t\tlike the conscious self of Vedanta both containing and inhabiting
\n\t\t\tall his creations. Shakespeare succeeds, as far as a poet can, in
\n\t\t\tveiling himself behind his creatures; he gives us at least the
\n\t\t\tillusion of mirroring the world around him, a world universally
\n\t\t\trepresented rather than personally and individually thought and
\n\t\t\timaged, and at any rate the Life-spirit sees and creates in him
\n\t\t\tthrough a faithful reflecting instrument, quite sufficiently
\n\t\t\tuniversal and impersonal for its dramatic purpose even in his
\n\t\t\tpersonality. Browning, the English poet who best represented the
\n\t\t\tspirit of the age in its temperament of curious observation and its
\n\t\t\taim at a certain force of large and yet minute reality, who was
\n\t\t\teminently a poet of life observed and understood and of thought
\n\t\t\tplaying around the observation, as Shakespeare was the poet of life
\n\t\t\tseen through an identity of feeling with it and of thought arising
\n\t\t\tup out of the surge of life, \u2014 Browning, though he seems to have
\n\t\t\tconsidered this self-concealment especially admirable and the
\n\t\t\tessence of the Shakespearian method of creation, fails himself to
\n\t\t\tachieve it in anything like the same measure. The self-conscious
\n\t\t\tthinking of the modern mind which brings into prominent relief the
\n\t\t\trest of the mental personality and stamps the whole work with it,
\n\t\t\tgets into his way; everywhere we feel the presence of the creator
\n\t\t\tbringing forward his living puppets, analysing, commenting, thinking
\n\t\t\tabout them or else about life through a variation of many voices so
\n\t\t\tthat they become as much his masks as his creations. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThus both the subjective personality of the man and the artistic
\n\t\t\tpersonality of the creator tend to count for much more in modern
\n\t\t\twork than at any previous time; the poet is a much<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>118<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tgreater part of his work. It is doubtful whether we have not
\naltogether lost the old faculty of impersonal self-effacement in the creation which was so common in the ancient and mediaeval
\nages when many men working in one spirit could build great universal works of combined architecture, painting and sculpture
\nor in literature the epic or romantic cycles or lyric cycles like the Vedic Mandalas or the mass of Vaishnava poetry. Even when
\nthere are definite schools marked by a common method, 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 which overshadows individual differences; in the
\nmoderns the technical method may have in all similar motives, but difference of subjective treatment so stresses its values as to
\nprevent all spiritual unity. There is here a gain which 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 personality. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis trend, though for some time held back from its full development by the aim at the objective method, betrays itself
\nin that love of close and minute psychological observation which pervades the work of the time. There too the modern mind has
\nleft far behind all the preceding ages. Although most prominent in fiction and drama, the characteristic has laid some hold too
\non poetry. Compared with its work all previous creation seems psychologically poor both in richness of material and in subtlety
\nand the depth of its vision; half the work of Shakespeare in spite of its larger and greater treatment hardly contains as much on
\nthis side as a single volume of Browning. Realism has carried this new trend to the farthest limit possible to a professedly
\nobjective method, stressing minute distinctions, forcing the emphasis of extreme notes, but in so doing it has opened to the
\ncreative mind of the age a door of escape from realism. For, in the first place, while in the representation of outward objects,
\nof action, of character and temperament thrown out in self-expressive movement we may with success affect the method of
\na purely objective observation, from the moment we begin to psychologise deeply, we are at once preparing to go back into
\n   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>119<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nourselves. For it is only through our own psychology, through its power of response to and of identification with the mind
\nand soul in others that we can know their inner psychology; for the most part our psychological account of others is only an
\naccount of the psychological impressions of them they produce in our own mentality. This we see even in the realistic writers
\nin the strongly personal and limited way in which they render the psychology of their creatures in one or two always recurring
\nmain notes upon which they ring minute variations. In the 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 for the mould of its psychological creations,
\nto a conscious intimate subjectivism. Again, the emphasising of extreme notes brings us to a point where to go farther we have
\nto go within and to make ourselves a sort of laboratory of new psychological experiment and discovery. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis is the turn we get in the poetry of Verlaine which is throughout a straining after an intimate and subtle experience
\nof the senses, vital sensations, emotions pushed beyond ordinary limits into a certain vivid and revealing abnormality, in
\nthe earlier work of Maeterlinck which is not so much an action of personalities as the drama of a childlike desire-soul uttering
\nhalf inarticulate cries of love and longing, terror and distress
\nand emotion, in the work of Mallarme where there is a constant seeking for subjective symbols which will reveal to our own soul
\nthe soul of the things that we see. The rediscovery of the soul is the last stage of the round described by this age of the intellect
\nand reason. It is at first mainly the perceptions of a desire-soul, a soul of sense and sensation and emotion, and an arriving
\nthrough them at a sort of psychological mysticism, a psychism which is not yet true mysticism, much less spirituality, but is still
\na movement of the lower self in that direction. The movement could not stop here: the emergence of the higher perceptions of
\na larger and purer psychical and intuitive entity in direct contact with the Spirit could not but come, and this greater impulse is
\nrepresented by the work of the Irish poets. It is the sign of the end, now in sight, of a purely intellectual modernism and the<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>120<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\ncoming of a new age of creation, intellectualism fulfilled ceasing by a self-exceeding in a greater motive of intuitive art and poetry. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThus this wide movement of interests, so many-sided and universal, in man past and present after embracing all that attracts the observing eye in his life and history and apparent nature comes back to a profounder interest in the movements of
\nhis deeper self which reveals itself to an extended psychological experience and an intuitive sense. But an insistent interest in
\nfuture man has been the most novel, the most fruitfully distinguishing characteristic of the modern mind. Once limited to the
\nfar-off dream of religions or the distant speculation of isolated thinkers, the attempt to cast a seeing eye as well as a shaping
\nwill on the future is now an essential side of the human outlook. Formerly the human mentality of the present lived in the great
\nshadow thrown on it by its past, nowadays on the contrary it turns more to some image of coming possibility. The colour of
\nthis futurism has changed with the changes of modern intellectualism. At first it came in on the wave of a partly naturalistic,
\npartly transcendentalist idealism, a reverie of the perfected individual and the perfected society, and was commonly associated
\nwith the passion for civic or the idea of a spiritual and personal liberty. A more sober colouring intervened, the intellectual constructions of positivism, liberalism, utilitarian thought which were soon in their turn followed by broader democratic and
\nsocialistic utopias. Touched sometimes with an aesthetic and idealistic colouring, they have grown for a time more scientific,
\neconomic, practical with the advance of realism and rationalism. But the new force of subjectivism will have probably the effect
\nof rehabilitating the religious and spiritually idealistic element in our vision of the future of the race. Poetry, which has been
\nless able to follow this stream of thought than prose literature, will find its account in the change; for it will be the natural
\ninterpreter of this more inner and intuitive vision. The futurist outlook has never been more pronounced than at the present
\nday; on all sides, in thought, in life, in the motives and forms of literary and artistic creation, we are swinging violently away
\nfrom the past into an unprecedented adventure of new teeming    <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>121<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\npossibilities. Never has the past counted so little for its own sake, \u2014 its tradition is still effectual only when it can be made
\na power or an inspiration for the future; never has the present looked so persistently and creatively forward. <\/p>\n

\nBut Nature and man in his active, intellectual and emotional life and physical environment are not the whole subject of man’s
\nthought or of his creative presentment of his mind’s seeings and imaginings. He has been even more passionately occupied
\nby the idea of things beyond, other worlds and an 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 the seeking after God. On this side of the human
\nmind modern literature, though not a blank, has been during the greater part of the nineteenth century inferior in its matter
\nand in its power, because it has been an age of scepticism and of denial or else of a doubtful and tormented, a merely intellectual
\nor a conventional clinging to the residuum of past beliefs. They have not formed a real and vital part of its inner life and what
\nis not real or vital to thought, imagination and feeling cannot be powerfully creative. At first this ebb of positive faith was to
\nsome extent compensated by the ideal element of a philosophic transcendentalism, vague and indefinite but with its own large
\nlight and force of inspiration. As scepticism became more positive, this light fades, the most poetic notes of the age which deal
\nwith the foundations of life are either the poignant expression of a regretful scepticism, or a defiant atheism exulting in the revolt
\nof the great denial, the hymn of the Void, an eternal Nihil which has taken the place of God, or else the large idea of Nature as a
\nuniversal entity, the Mother of our being. To Science this Nature is only an inconscient Force; the poetic mind with its natural turn
\nfor finding a reality even behind what are to the intellect abstract conceptions, has passed through this conception to a new living
\nsense of the universal, the infinite. It has even evolved from it now and then a vivid pantheism. The difficult self-defence or
\nreaction of the old faiths against the prevalent scepticism and intellectualism has given too some minor notes; but these are
\nthe greater voices of negation and affirmation in this sphere <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>122<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nof poetic thought and creation which have added some novel and powerful strains to poetry. With the return to subjective
\nintuition and a fresh adventuring of knowledge and imagination into the beyond modern poetry, freed from the sceptical attitude,
\nis beginning in this field too to turn the balance in 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 supernatural to physical Nature; the symbols it is
\nbeginning to create and its reinterpretation of the old symbols are more adequate and more revealing; rid of the old insufficient forms and limiting creeds, it is admitting a near, direct and fearless seeing and experience of God in Nature, God in man,
\nGod in the universal and the eternal. From faith it has advanced through the valley of doubt to the heights of a more luminous
\nknowledge. These are the main movements of the modern mind constituting the turns of a psychological evolution of the most
\nrapid and remarkable kind which have dominated the literature of Europe, now more than ever before growing into a single
\nthough varied whole. We have to see how they have 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: for though it has been a side stream and not the
\ncentral current, yet in the end the highest and most significant, though not yet the strongest forces of the future poetry have
\nconverged here and given their first clearest and most distinct sounds. The continent is still overshadowed by the crepuscule
\nof the intellectual age sick unto death but unable to die. Here there are some clear morning voices, English precursors, the
\nrevived light of Celtic spirituality, not least significant the one or two accents of a more self-assured message which have broken
\nacross the mental barrier between East and West from resurgent India.
\n   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 12<\/font>3<\/font><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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