Man's
seeking after beauty reaches its most intense and
satisfying expression in the great creative arts, poetry, painting,
sculpture, architecture, but in its full extension there is no activity of
his nature or his life from which it[p.136] need or
ought to be excluded,—provided we understand beauty both in its widest and its
truest sense. A complete and universal appreciation of beauty and the making
entirely beautiful our whole life and being must surely be a
necessary character of the perfect individual and the
perfect society. But in its origin this seeking for beauty is not rational; it
springs from the roots of our life, it is an instinct and an impulse, an
instinct of aesthetic satisfaction and an impulse of aesthetic creation
and enjoyment. Starting from the infrarational parts of our being, this
instinct and impulse begin with much imperfection and impurity and with great
crudities both in creation and in appreciation. It is here that the reason
comes in to distinguish, to enlighten, to correct, to point out the
deficiencies and the crudities, to lay down laws of aesthetics and to
purify our appreciation and our creation by improved taste and right knowledge.
While we are thus striving to learn and correct ourselves, it may seem to be
the true law-giver both for the artist and the admirer and, though not the
creator of our aesthetic instinct and impulse, yet the creator in us of an
aesthetic conscience and its vigilant judge and guide. That
which was an obscure and erratic activity, it makes self-conscious and
rationally discriminative in its work and enjoyment.
But again
this is true only in restricted bounds or, if anywhere entirely true, then only
on a middle plane of our aesthetic seeking and activity. Where the greatest and
most powerful creation of beauty is accomplished and its appreciation and
enjoyment rise to the highest pitch, the rational is always surpassed and left
behind. The creation of beauty in poetry and art does not fall within
the sovereignty or even within the sphere of the reason.
The intellect is not the poet, the artist, the creator within us;
creation comes by a suprarational influx of light and power which must work
always, if it is to do its best, by vision and inspiration. It may use the
intellect for certain of its operations, but in proportion as it subjects
itself to the intellect, it loses in power and force of vision and
diminishes the splendour and truth of the beauty it creates. The intellect may
take hold of the influx, moderate and repress the divine enthusiasm of
creation[p.137] and force it to obey the prudence of its dictates, but in
doing so it brings down the work to its own inferior level, and the lowering is
in proportion to the intellectual interference. For by itself
the intelligence can only achieve talent, though it may be a high and
even, if sufficiently helped from above, a surpassing talent. Genius, the
true creator, is always suprarational in its nature and its instrumentation
even when it seems to be doing the work of the reason; it is most itself, most
exalted in its work, most sustained in the power, depth, height and beauty of
its achievement when it is least touched by, least mixed with any control of
the mere intellectuality and least often drops from its heights of
vision and inspiration into reliance upon the always mechanical process of
intellectual construction. Art-creation which accepts the canons of the reason
and works within the limits laid down by it, may be great, beautiful and
powerful; for genius can preserve its power even when it labours in shackles
and refuses to put forth all its resources: but when it proceeds by means of
the intellect, it constructs, but does not create. It may construct well and
with a good and faultless workmanship, but its success is formal and not of the
spirit, a success of technique and not the embodiment of the imperishable
truth of beauty seized in its inner reality, its divine delight, its
appeal to a supreme source of ecstasy, Ananda.
reason
There have been periods of artistic creation, ages of reason, in which the
rational and intellectual tendency has prevailed in poetry and art; there have
even been nations which in their great formative periods of art
and literature have set up reason and a meticulous taste as the
sovereign powers of their aesthetic activity. At their best these periods have
achieved work of a certain greatness, but predominantly of an intellectual
greatness and perfection of technique rather than achievements of a supreme
inspired and revealing beauty; indeed their very aim has been not the discovery
of the deeper truth of beauty, but truth of ideas and truth of, a critical
rather than a true creative aim. Their leading object has been an
intellectual criticism of life and nature elevated by a consummate
poetical rhythm and diction rather than a revelation of God and man
and life and[p.138] nature in inspired forms of artistic beauty.
But great art is not satisfied with representing the intellectual truth of
things, which is always their superficial or exterior truth; it seeks for a
deeper and original truth which escapes the eye of the mere sense or the mere reason,
the soul in them, the unseen reality which is not that of their form and
process but of their spirit. This it seizes and expresses by form and idea, but
a significant form, which is not merely a faithful and just or a harmonious
reproduction of outward Nature, and a revelatory idea, not the idea which is
merely correct, elegantly right or fully satisfying to the reason and taste.
Always the truth it seeks is first and foremost the truth of beauty,—not,
again, the formal beauty alone or the beauty of proportion and right process
which is what the sense and the reason seek, but the soul of beauty which is
hidden from the ordinary eye and the ordinary mind and revealed in
its fullness only to the unsealed vision of the poet and artist in man who can
seize the secret significances of the universal poet and artist, the divine
creator who dwells as their soul and spirit in the forms he has created.
The
art-creation which lays a supreme stress on reason and taste and on perfection
and purity of a technique constructed in obedience to the canons of
reason and taste, claimed for itself the name of classical art; but the claim,
like the too trenchant distinction on which it rests, is of doubtful validity.
The spirit of the real, the great classical art and poetry is to bring out what
is universal and subordinate individual expression to universal truth and
beauty, just as the spirit of romantic art and poetry is to bring out what is
striking and individual and this it often does so powerfully or with so vivid
an emphasis as to throw into the background of its creation the universal, on
which yet all true art romantic or classical builds and fills in its forms. In
truth, all great art has carried in it both a classical and a romantic as well
as a realistic element,—understanding realism in the sense of the prominent
bringing out of the external truth of things, not the perverse inverted
romanticism of the "real" which brings into exaggerated prominence
the ugly, common or morbid and puts that forward as the whole truth of life.
The[p.139] type of art to which a great creative work belongs is
determined by the prominence it gives to one element and the subdual of the
others into subordination to its reigning spirit. But classical art also works
by a large vision and inspiration, not by the process of the intellect. The
lower kind of classical art and literature,—if classical it be and not rather,
as it often is, pseudo-classical, intellectually imitative of the external form
and process of the classical,—may achieve work of considerable, though a much
lesser power, but of an essentially inferior scope and nature; for to that
inferiority it is self-condemned by its principle of intellectual construction.
Almost always it speedily degenerates into the formal or academic, empty of
real beauty, void of life and power, imprisoned in its slavery to form and
imagining that when a certain form has been followed, certain canons of
construction satisfied, certain rhetorical rules or technical principles
obeyed, all has been achieved. It ceases to be art and becomes a cold and
mechanical workmanship.
This
predominance given to reason and taste first and foremost, sometimes even
almost alone, in the creation and appreciation of beauty arises from a temper
of mind which is critical rather than creative; and in regard to creation its
theory falls into a capital error. All artistic work in order to be
perfect must indeed have in the very act of creation the guidance of
an inner power of discrimination constantly selecting and rejecting
in accordance with a principle of truth and beauty which remains always
faithful to a harmony, a proportion, an intimate relation of the form to
the idea; there is at the same time an exact fidelity of the idea to the
spirit, nature and inner body of the thing of beauty which has been
revealed to the soul and the mind, its svarūpa and svabhāva. Therefore this discriminating
inner sense rejects all that is foreign, superfluous, otiose, all that is a
mere diversion distractive and deformative, excessive or defective, while it
selects and finds sovereignly all that can bring out the full truth, the utter
beauty, the inmost power. But this discrimination is not that of
the critical intellect, nor is the harmony, proportion, relation it
observes that which can be fixed by any set law of the critical reason; it
exists in the[p.140] very nature and truth of the thing itself, the
creation itself, in its secret inner law of beauty and harmony which can be
seized by vision, not by intellectual analysis. The discrimination which works
in the creator is therefore not an intellectual self-criticism or an obedience
to rules imposed on him from outside by any intellectual canons, but itself
creative, intuitive, a part of the vision, involved in and inseparable from the
act of creation. It comes as part of that influx of power and light from above
which by its divine enthusiasm lifts the faculties into their intense
suprarational working. When it fails, when it is betrayed by the lower
executive instruments rational or infrarational,—and this happens when these
cease to be passive and insist on obtruding their own demands or vagaries,—the
work is flawed and a subsequent act of self-criticism becomes necessary. But in
correcting his work the artist who attempts to do it by rule and intellectual
process, uses a false or at any rate an inferior method and cannot do his best.
He ought rather to call to his aid the intuitive critical vision and
embody it in a fresh act of inspired creation or recreation after bringing
himself back by its means into harmony with the light and law of his original
creative initiation. The critical intellect has no direct or independent
part in the means of the inspired creator of beauty.
In the
appreciation of beauty it has a part, but it is not even there the supreme
judge or law-giver. The business of the intellect is to analyse
the elements, parts, external processes, apparent principles of that which
it studies and explain their relations and workings; in doing this it instructs
and enlightens the lower mentality which has, if left to itself, the
habit of doing things or seeing what is done and taking all for granted without
proper observation and fruitful understanding. But as with truth of
religion, so with the highest and deepest truth of beauty, the intellectual
reason cannot seize its inner sense and reality, not even the inner truth of
its apparent principles and processes, unless it is aided by a higher insight
not its own. As it cannot give a method, process or rule by which beauty can or
ought to be created, so also it cannot give to the appreciation of beauty that
deeper insight which it needs; it can only help to remove[p.141] the
dullness and vagueness of the habitual perceptions and conceptions of the lower
mind which prevent it from seeing beauty or which give it false and crude
aesthetic habits: it does this by givingto the mind an external idea
and rule of the elements of the thing it has to perceive and appreciate. What
is farther needed is the awakening of a certain vision, an insight and an
intuitive response in the soul. Reason which studies always from outside,
cannot give this inner and more intimate contact; it has to aid itself by a
more direct insight springing from the soul itself and to call at every step on
the intuitive mindto fill up the gap of its own deficiencies.
We see
this in the history of the development of literary and artistic
criticism. In its earliest stages the appreciation of beauty is instinctive,
natural, inborn, a response of the aesthetic sensitiveness of the soul which
does not attempt to give any account of itself to the thinking intelligence.
When the rational intelligence applies itself to this task, it is not satisfied
with recording faithfully the nature of the response and the thing it has felt,
but it attempts to analyse, to lay down what is necessary in order to create a
just aesthetic gratification, it prepares a grammar of technique, an artistic
law and canon of construction, a sort of mechanical rule of process for the
creation of beauty, a fixed code or Shastra. This brings in the long reign of
academic criticism superficial, technical, artificial, governed by the false
idea that technique, of which alone critical reason can give an entirely
adequate account, is the most important part of creation and that to every art
there can correspond an exhaustive science which will tell us how the thing is
done and give us the whole secret and process of its doing. A time comes when
the creator of beauty revolts and declares the charter of his own freedom,
generally in the shape of a new law or principle of creation, and this freedom
once vindicated begins to widen itself and to carry with it the critical reason
out of all its familiar bounds. A more developed appreciation emerges which
begins to seek for new principles of criticism, to search for the soul of the
work itself and explain the form in relation to the soul or to study the
creator himself or the spirit, nature and [p.142] ideas of the age he
lived in and so to arrive at a right understanding of his work. The intellect
has begun to see that its highest business is not to lay down laws for the
creator of beauty, but to help us to understand himself and his work, not only
its form and elements but the mind from which it sprang and the impressions its
effects create in the mind that receives. Here criticism is on its right road,
but on a road to a consummation in which the rational understanding is
overpassed and a higher faculty opens, suprarational in its origin and nature.
For the
conscious appreciation of beauty reaches its height of enlightenment and
enjoyment not by analysis of the beauty enjoyed or even by a right and
intelligent understanding of it,—these things are only a preliminary clarifying
of our first unenlightened sense of the beautiful,—but by an exaltation of the
soul in which it opens itself entirely to the light and power
and joy of the creation. The soul of beauty in us identifies itself
with the soul of beauty in the thing created and feels in appreciation the same
divine intoxication and uplifting which the artist felt in creation. Criticism
reaches its highest point when it becomes the record, account, right
description of this response; it must become itself inspired, intuitive,
revealing. In other words, the action of the intuitive mind must complete the
action of the rational intelligence and it may even wholly replace it and do
more powerfully the peculiar and proper work of the intellect itself; it may
explain more intimately to us the secret of the form, the strands of the process,
the inner cause, essence, mechanism of the defects and limitations of the
work as well as of its qualities. For the intuitive intelligence when it has
been sufficiently trained and developed, can take up always the work of the
intellect and do it with a power and light and insight greater and surer than
the power and light of the intellectual judgment in its widest scope.
There is an intuitive discrimination which is more keen and precise in its
sight than the reasoning intelligence.
What has
been said of great creative art, that being the form in which normally our
highest and intensest aesthetic satisfaction is achieved, applies to all
beauty, beauty in Nature, beauty in life as well as beauty in art. We find that
in the end the place[p.143] of reason and the limits of its achievement
are precisely of the same kind in regard to beauty as in regard to religion. It
helps to enlighten and purify the aesthetic instincts and impulses, but it
cannot give them their highest satisfaction or guide them to a complete
insight. It shapes and fulfils to a certain extent the aesthetic intelligence,
but it cannot justly pretend to give the definitive law for the creation of
beauty or for the appreciation and enjoyment of beauty. It can only lead the
aesthetic instinct, impulse, intelligence towards a greatest possible conscious
satisfaction, but not to it; it has in the end to hand them over to a higher
faculty which is in direct touch with the suprarational and in its nature and
workings exceeds the intellect.
And for the
same reason, because that which we are seeking through beauty is in the end
that which we are seeking through religion, the Absolute, the Divine. The
search for beauty is only in its beginning a satisfaction in the beauty of
form, the beauty which appeals to the physical senses and the vital
impressions, impulsions, desires. It is only in the middle a satisfaction
in the beauty of the ideas seized, the emotions aroused, the
perception of perfect process and harmonious combination. Behind them the soul
of beauty in us desires the contact, the revelation, the uplifting delight of
an absolute beauty in all things which it feels to be present, but which
neither the senses and instincts by themselves can give, though they may be its
channels,—for it is suprasensuous,—nor the reason and intelligence, though they
too are a channel,—for it is suprarational, supra-intellectual,—but to which
through all these veils the soul itself seeks to arrive. When it can get the
touch of this universal, absolute beauty, this soul of beauty, this sense of
its revelation in any slightest or greatest thing, the beauty of a flower, a
form, the beauty and power of a character, an action, an event, a human life,
an idea, a stroke of the brush or the chisel or a scintillation of the mind,
the colours of a sunset or the grandeur of the tempest, it is then
that the sense of beauty in us is really, powerfully, entirely satisfied. It is
in truth seeking, as in religion, for the Divine, the All-Beautiful in man, in
nature, in life, in thought, in art; for God is Beauty and Delight hidden in
the variation of his masks and[p.144] forms. When, fulfilled in our
growing sense and knowledge of beauty and delight in beauty and our power for
beauty, we are able to identify ourselves in soul with this Absolute and Divine
in all the forms and activities of the world and shape an image of our inner
and our outer life in the highest image we can perceive and embody of the
All-Beautiful, then the aesthetic being in us who was born for this
end, has fulfilled himself and risen to his divine consummation. To find
highest beauty is to find God; to reveal, to embody, to create, as we say,
highest beauty is to bring out of our souls the living image and power of
God.[p.145]
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