{"id":73,"date":"2013-07-13T01:25:41","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:25:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=73"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:25:41","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:25:41","slug":"11-his-versatility-vol-03-the-harmony-of-virtue-volume-03","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/03-the-harmony-of-virtue-volume-03\/11-his-versatility-vol-03-the-harmony-of-virtue-volume-03","title":{"rendered":"-11_His Versatility.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n

\n
\nFOUR<\/b><\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nHis Versatility<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

 
\n                    W<\/b><\/font>HENEVER
\n<\/b><\/font><\/p>\n

a literary man gives proof of a high
\ncapacity in action people always talk about it as if a miracle had happened. The vulgar theory is that worldly abilities
\nare inconsistent with the poetic genius. Like most vulgar theories it is a conclusion made at a jump from a few superficial
\nappearances. The inference to be drawn from a sympathetic
\nstudy of the lives of great thinkers and great writers is that except
\nin certain rare cases versatility is one condition of genius. Indeed
\nthe literary ability may be said to contain all the others, and the
\nmore so when it takes the form of criticism or of any art, such as
\nthe novelist’s, which proceeds principally from criticism. Goethe
\nin Germany, Shakespeare, Fielding and Matthew Arnold in
\nEngland are notable instances. Even where practical abilities
\nseem wanting, a close study will often reveal their existence
\nrusting in a lumber-room of the man’s mind. The poet and the
\nthinker are helpless in the affairs of the world, because they
\nchoose to be helpless: they sacrifice the practical impulse in their
\nnature, that they may give full expression to the imaginative or
\nspeculative impulse; they choose to burn the candle at one end
\nand not at the other, but for all that the candle has two ends
\nand not one. Bankim, the greatest of novelists, had the versatility developed to its highest expression. Scholar, poet, essayist,
\nnovelist, philosopher, lawyer, critic, official, philologian and religious innovator, \u2014 the whole world seemed to be shut up in his
\nsingle brain. At first sight he looks like a bundle of contradictions. He had a genius for language and a gift for law; he could
\nwrite good official papers and he could write a matchless prose;<\/font> 
\nhe could pass examinations and he could root out an organised
\ntyranny; he could concern himself with the largest problems of
\nmetaphysics and with the smallest details of word-formation: he
\nhad a feeling for the sensuous facts of life and a feeling for the<\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

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\ndelicate spiritualities of religion: he could learn grammar and
\nhe could write poetry.<\/font><\/p>\n

\nWhat shall we say in the presence of this
\nremarkable versatility ? Overborne by the pomp of it and the show, shall we set it
\ndown as an adjunct of intellectual kingliness ? Yes, to have it is an
\nadjunct of intellectual kingliness, but to give expression to it is
\nan intellectual mistake. To give impartial expression to all your
\ngifts is to miss your vocation. Bankim was never so far led astray
\nas that. His province was literature, prose literature, and he
\nknew it. His lyrics are enchanting, but few; metaphysics he
\nfollowed at the end of his life and law at the beginning; and he
\nused scholarship and philology simply as other great writers
\nhave used them, to give subtlety of suggestion and richness of
\nword-colour to his literary style. Even in the province of prose
\nliterature, where he might have worked out his versatility
\nto advantage, he preferred to specialise. He never stepped
\nunpardonably out of his province, but he was occasionally
\nled astray by this or that lure to allow small drains on his
\nfund of energy; and so far as he did so, he sinned against his
\nown soul. The one great and continuous drain was the tax put
\nupon him by official drudgery. Under the morbid and wasteful
\nconditions of middle-class life in India genius, when not born in
\nthe purple, has put before it, like the fair Rosamund of
\nNorman romance, a choice between two methods of suicide,
\nthe Services and the Law. It must either take the poisoned
\nbowl or the dagger. And in this limited circle of professions the
\nEducational Service with its system of respites and remissions,
\nand the Executive Service with its indirect rather than direct tax on the pure
\nintellect, present, it may be, the points of least repulsion. But they are none the less a fearful drain because they
\nare, under existing circumstances, necessary.<\/font><\/p>\n

\nIn this versatility Bankim was only a type of the intellectual
\nHindu. This gift, at once a blessing and a curse, is the most
\nsingular characteristic of those two Hindu races which have the
\ndestinies of the country in their keeping. It is the evidence of  our high blood, our patent of nobility among the nations; for it
\ncomes of the varied mental experience of our forefathers, of the
\nnation’s three thousand years of intellectual life. But it is at the<\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

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\n

\nsame time a rock ahead, of which the Hindu genius has yet to
\npilot itself clear. To find your vocation and keep to it, that is not
\nindeed a showy, but it is a simple and solid rule of life. We however prefer to give an impartial expression to all our gifts, forgetting that the mind is as mortal and as much subject to wear and
\ntear as any perishable thing, forgetting that specialism is one
\ncondition of the highest accomplishment, forgetting that our
\nstock of energy is limited and that what we expend in one direction, we lose in another. We insist on burning the candle at both
\nends. This spirit appears in our system of public instruction, the
\nmost ingeniously complete machine for murder that human
\nstupidity ever invented, and murder not only of a man’s body
\nbut of a man’s soul, of that sacred fire of individuality in him
\nwhich is far holier and more precious than this mere mortal
\nbreath. It appeared too with melancholy effects in the literary
\nfate of Kashinath Telang. It was one reason why he, a man of
\nsuch large abilities, the most considerable genius a highly intellectual people has produced, yet left nothing to which the world
\nwill return with unfailing delight. Telang, it is true, worked mainly
\nin English, a language he had learned; and in a language you
\nhave learned, you may write graciously, correctly, pleasingly,
\nbut you will never attain to the full stature of your genius. But
\nit was a yet more radical mistake that he, whose power was pre-eminently literary, as any eye trained to these things can see that
\nit was, yet allowed it to run in every direction except the very
\none that nature had marked out for it. Bankim was more
\nfortunate. He wrote in his own beautiful mother tongue,
\nhis best work was literary and his immense originality would
\nin any case have forced its way out. But one cannot think
\nwithout a pang of the many delightful masterpieces he might
\nhave brought into his garner, if he had had leisure to work
\nsingle-heartedly in the field of his richest harvests. The body of
\nwork he gave us in nearly forty years of intellectual activity
\namounts to ten novels, two critical works on religion and some
\nscattered literature. Small in quantity, it is pure gold in quality.
\nAnd it may be that in no case would he have written much.
\nNature gives us quartz profusely and mixed alloy in abundance,
\nbut pure gold only in rare parcels and infinitesimal portions.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

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

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