Sri Aurobindo-As A Literary Critic

Sri Aurobindo was not a literary critic in the professional sense of the term. Nor in any other ordinary sense, for that matter. But never did he cease criticising literature, or interpreting life itself, during his years on the earth. He was essentially a poet. If the greatest of his poetry was “supra-mental”, the greatest of his criticism was creative as well as cerebral. It was not only an exercise of the intellect, but an expression of the “over-mind”. His criticism, no less than his poetry, bore the transforming touch of his Yoga.

In one’s response to the criticism or poetry of Aurobindo, two or three factors press forward for one’s attention. One is that he was a classical scholar steeped in the literary heritage of Greece and Rome. English was virtually his mother-tongue and few could be more thorough in their acquaintance with the master-minds of the language, like Shakespeare and Marlowe, Milton and Dryden, Blake and Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley and Browning and Meredith. Besides, he had a good knowledge of French, German, Italian and Spanish among the modern European languages. Though coming late to the Indian languages, of which he learned Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi and Hindi, besides Sanskrit, he was steeped in the Indian tradition. He was anxious that no one in this country should lose sight of Indian values in life and literature.

As Professor of English at the Baroda College, he must necessarily have had to indulge in literary criticism of some kind. But that was at a different level, though Sri Aurobindo was incapable of doing the smallest thing, without a sense of complete involvement in it. Nor is he known to have left anything, be it of the spoken or the written word, which does not bear a trace of his depth of thought and integrity of imagination, intellectual and emotional. The more mature of his essays in criticism were provoked by the books of others, or written in reply to the request of literary-minded seekers at the Ashram, or recorded as an illustration of his ownmethod of study and translation of the Indian classics.

That his intellectual range was of the widest and his approach global in comprehension is readily admitted by those who study him, whether they agree with him or not. He has also well-defined views on the world’s masters of literature, including a comparative estimate of their worth. He chooses eleven of the world’s great poets for the first class (in his letters on Poetry and Literature as mentioned by Mr. K. D. Sethna). Of these, he places four in the very first row on an equal basis of essential excellence: Valmiki, Vyasa, Homer and Shakespeare. The six who come in the second row are: Dante, Kalidasa, Aeschoylus, Sophocles, Virgil and Milton, more or less in that order of merit. Goethe alone stands in the third row, in a sort of isolated grandeur. The French Racine, the Spanish Cervantes, and a few others might form a supplementary list for the third and last row!

Valmiki represents, for him, the supreme poet and seer–the Vatesof the Greeks. All the poets of the topmost class have the elemental creativity as of a demiurge. They might differ from one another in someparticular aspect of their art but not in the force of their creative element. Vyasa might be the more intellectual in his approach, more masculine in his style, more austere in his art, more philosophical in his characterisation than Valmiki, but no less creative and, on that account, no less a poet. By the same token, Homer might have more of the Bard in him and the playwright might be more prominent in Shakespeare, but they are both poets of the highest class, all the same, in the alchemy of their imagination.

In comparing Shakespeare and Kalidasa, Sri Aurobindo does not fall a prey to the dictates of national chauvinism, as many Indian patriots tend to do, in judging of matters, cultural and literary. He finds Kalidasa perfect in form, polished in language, but as for the themes of his creation more limited in his range. He agrees, by implication, that Shakespeare is a “myriad-minded” poet. The latter’s variety of characterisation was indeed unparalleled. Sri Aurobindo does not quote the actual words of his idol, Bankim, in support of his argument in this context. It is, however, worth recalling that Bankim compared Kalidasa to a pretty, formal garden neat and well-trimmed, Shakespeare to a huge forest–vast, unweildy, all-inclusive; the one to a beautiful and placid lake, the other to the mighty ocean, deep, surging and unruly. Sri Aurobindo finds both of them natural and convincing in depicting the paternal rather than the maternal instinct in the love of children. No Kausalyas here–only Kanvas and King Lears. He admires Kalidasa’s prose and Shakespeare’s blank verse toan equal degree, finding parallels in verbal euphony and felicity of expression. He makes no secret of his feeling about whose psyche is the more dynamic.

Nor does Sri Aurobindo let any one go away with the notion that he is merely indulging his personal whim or making value judgments in his classification of the world poets. He has good reasons of his own for it, which are sustainable at the level of reason, with argument and illustration. Not only does he distinguish between the various levels of poetic creativity but between different poetic styles, which might sometimes occur in one and the same poet. The first is the “adequate” style, which just manages to cover the immediate impact of a thing in a language proper to it. The second is the “effective” or “dynamic” style, which responds to the subject in a more complex, vibrant manner. It is illustrated in the lines from the well-known soliloquy of Hamlet:

To die, to sleep;
To sleep; perchance to dream; ay, There’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause ... ...

The third isthe ‘illumined’ style, whichhas a richer imagination, bringing out the lights and shadows not obvious in the situation but brought out from an “in-look” at its psychology. The fourth is described as an “inspired” style in a special sense, with an “intone” as well as an “in-look.” It isexemplified in the subtle and poignant lines from ‘Macbeth’:

“… … … Duncan is in his grave;
After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well … …”

The fifth and last style, which is the finest, is, according to Sri Aurobindo, marked by “an absolute, intensely inspired inevitability”. Examples of this are drawn from Homer, Virgil, Wordsworth and Keats. The most familiar of them (as quoted by Mr. K. D. Sethna) are from Keats (Grecian Urn):

“magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in fairy landsforlorn,”

and from Shakespeare (Macbeth):

“Still it cried. “Sleep no more” to all the house:
‘Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Gawdor
Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more!”

The criteria of literary criticism adopted by Sri Aurobindo were well-defined and his artistic models were from the highest level of human achievement. But he was eclectic in his taste, within limits. His approach was far from being rigid. It was, in fact, surprisingly flexible, willing to consider anything of real poetic value from Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman, AE and Yeats to Arjava, Harin Chatto and the more poetic among his own disciples. He would welcome sonnets and Alexandrines and heroic couplets as also blank verse and free verse or any other form, provided there was true merit in the writing. He was not against the use of the colloquial and the slang, provided it served a poetic purpose, and not resorted to merely for a modish effect. It would be too fastidious on the part of anyone to find fault with him for his sympathy and understanding towards the efforts of some Indian disciples who tried their hand at English verse.

On the subject of Indian writing in English, in general, which has never been quite free from controversy, Sri Aurobindo took a point of view that would appeal to reason and common sense. Writing in 1943, in reply to a friend, he said something refreshingly free from dogma and jingo:

“It is not true in all cases that one can’t write first-class things in a learned language. Both in French and English, people to whom the language was not native have done remarkable work, although that is rare. What about Jawaharlal’s autobiography? Many English critics think it, first-class in its own kind; ... If first-class excludes everything inferior to Shakespeare and Milton, that is another matter. I think, as time goes on, people will become more and wore polyglot and these mental barriers will disappear.”

Earlier, he made an observation, the undeniable truth of which is not realised in the myopia of snobbery, made worse by the dustfilm of prejudice. “Many Indians”, he said, “write better English than many educated Englishmen.” Truer now than ever before!

Himself having done his writing almost entirely in English, Sri Aurobindo never had occasion to feel self-conscious about it. He felt at home in this medium as he felt at home in this country.

He envisaged a vital role for English as a medium of creative expression, at a certain level, by Indians. He was both pragmatic and precise in the manner in which he outlined it:

“If Our aim is not success and personal fame but to arrive at the expression of spiritual truth and experience of all kinds in poetry, the English tongue is the most widespread and is capable of profound turns of mystic expression which make it admirably fitted for the purpose; if it could be used for the highest spiritual expression, that is worth trying.”

There was no reason why the experiment should not be made by Indians. There was every reason that they should do it. (There were indeed some results that they alone could achieve.) Sri Aurobindo puts forward at least four reasons for it:

1. The expression of spirituality in the English tongue is needed and no one can give the real stuff like Easterners and especially Indians;
2. We are entering an age when the stiff barriers of insular and national mentality are breaking down (Hitler notwithstanding), the nations are being drawn into a common universality with whatever differences, and in the new age there is no reason why the English should not admit the expression of other minds than the English in their tongue;
3. For ordinary minds it may be difficult to get over the barrier of a foreign tongue, but extraordinary minds, Conrad, etc., can do it;
4. In this case, the experiment is to see whether what extraordinary minds can do cannot be done by Yoga.”

In the case of Sri Aurobindo, it was both an extraordinary mind at work and the influence of Yoga in operation to illumine the dark corners of the unconscious and subconscious.

In his approach to the Indian tradition, it was lucky for us that Sri Aurobindo came with a literary ground and intellectual training very different from that of the average oriental scholar. He was thereby spared the banalities of “Ramodanta” and the verbal mechanics of “Amarakosha”, not to speak of the grammatical arithmetic of ‘Kaumudi’; all of which are likely to deaden the finer sensibilities of a potential ‘Rasika’. It was, therefore, with a pleasant shock of recognition that the wealth of Vyasa, Valmiki and Kalidasa came to a scholar-poet whose sights were set on Homer, Dante and Shakespeare. It enabled him to tell the artificial from the artistic and separate the dazzling glitter of decadence from the subdued glow of cultural maturity. While he could see the merit of Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti, for what it was he could never go into raptures over the complex artifices of Magha, the elaborate rhetorics of Bana Bhatta, or the breath-taking acrobatics of the lesser poets of Sanskrit. The distance from which he proceeded to the subject not only lent enchantment to the view but provided the correct perspective, denied to the conventional scholar of Sanskrit, who would take many things for granted.

On the true function of poetry too, the East-West encounter in the layers of his sensibility helped Sri Aurobindo to strike a balance between the artistic and the spiritual. It was a kind of harmony between Oscar Wilde and Anandavardhana. Nobody could have been more impressed by the Beardsley-Pater theory of art for art’s sake and influenced by the Indian theory of art for the soul’s sake. In his thesis on “The Future Poetry”, he lays stress on the power of the spirit, when he says:

“A poetry born direct from and full of the power of the spirit and therefore a largest and deepest self-expression of the soul and mind of the race is that for which we are seeking and of which the more profound tendencies of the creative mind seem to be in travail.”

Not a mere mechanical repetition of the traditional Indian theory but a creative restatement of the ancient ideal could be seen in his view:

“To embellish with beauty is only the moat outward function of art and poetry, to make life more intimately beautiful and noble and great and full of meaning is its higher office, but its highest comes when the poet becomes the seer and reveals to man his eternal self and the godheads of its manifestation.”

In his grand conception of the poetry of the future, what Sri Aurobindo looked forward to was not a wholesale revival of the great tradition of the past, which was not possible, but ‘a re-creation’ of it in altogether new terms:

“And whatever poetry may make its substance or its subject, this growth of the power of the spirit must necessarily bring into it a more intense and revealing speech, a more inward and subtle and penetrating rhythm, a greater stress of sight, a more vibrant and responsive sense, the eye that looks at all smallest and greatest things for the significances that have not yet been discovered and the secrets that are not on the surface. That will be the type of the new utterances and the boundless field of poetic discovery left for the inspiration ofthe humanity of the future.”

In the striving towards the achievement of the “overhead” level in poetry, Sri Aurobindo lays great store by the inspired rhythmic patterns of word music rather than the clever fluctuations of free verse. For all his preoccupation with the spiritual values of ancient India and the dynamics of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo has his own criteria of literary judgment in estimating the true worth of secular poetry. For example, he places the blank verse of a non- philosophical poet like Shakespeare higher than the free verse of Walt Whitman, whose thoughts remind one of the Upanishadic affirmations. The occasional flashes of spiritual insight that Shakespeare might reveal (in the speeches of Prospero and the soliloquies of Hamlet, for instance) are due to a shrewd understanding of human nature and the ways of Providence rather than an avowedly spiritual bent of mind. Without transmitting any obvious spiritual message, they are likely to attain, on the wings of rhythmic intensity, added to the intensity of word and vision, the overhead level, according to the acknowledged authority on Sri Aurobindo’s poetry, Mr. K. D. Sethna.

The Shakespearean leap of the intuitive word, in fashioning sight and sound, starting at the mundane level, is elevated and extended into a leap into the unknown in the Aurobindonian concept of future poetry. The one and only complete example of this is Sri Aurobindo’s own epic poem ‘Savitri’, in which the role of Inspiration is outlined with such undreamt of effulgence:

In darkness core she dug out wells of light,
On the undiscovered depths imposed a form,
Lent a vibrant cry to the unuttered vasts,

Bore earthward fragments of revealing thought
Hewn from the silence of the Ineffable.

Under the driving power of this Inspiration, we could only imagine what the poets, who are also seers, are capable of doing. But Sri Aurobindo sets out in breath-taking detail all the things revealed unto them in the flood of intuitive knowledge:

Hearing the subtle voice that clothes the heavens,
Carrying the splendour that has lit the suns,
They sang Infinity’s names and deathless powers
In metres that reflect the moving worlds,
Sight’s sound-waves breaking from the soul’s great deeps.

The effect of poetry as mantra is clearly indicated here by Sri Aurobindo. The remarkable feature with him is that he represents in himself the example as well as the precept. He provides the lakshyaas well as the lakshana. What Shakespeare is known to have achieved, in secular terms, through his poetic rhythm and revelatory word, Sri Aurobindo set out to achieve in spiritual terms proper. From poetry as evocation to poetry as incantation–that is where we reach in him. It is a progress from the stage of normal poetic vision through that of the overmind to the supermind. As a critic, Sri Aurobindo provides a sharp commentary that combines the in-sights of the past, the self-questioning of the present and the vision of the future.