In an old Sanskrit book there is a verse which describes the essential elements of a picture. The first in order is ‘rupa-bheda’, separateness of forms. Forms are many, forms are different, each of them having its limits. But if this were absolute, if all forms remained obstinately separate, then there would be a fearful loneliness of multitude. But the varied forms, in their very separateness, must carry something which indicates the paradox of their ultimate unity; otherwise there would be no creation.
So in the same verse, after the enumeration of separateness, comes that of pramanani proportions. Proportions indicate relationship, the principle of mutual accommodation. A leg dismembered from the body has the fullest license to make a caricature of itself. But as a member of the body it has its responsibility to the living unity which rules the body; it must behave properly, it must keep its proportions. If by some monstrous chance of physiological profiteering it could outgrow by yards its fellow stalker, then we know what a picture it would once be to a spectator and what embarrassment to the body itself. Any attempt to overcome the law of proportion altogether and to assert absolute separateness is rebellion; it means either running the gauntlet of the rest or remaining segregated.
The same Sanskrit word ‘pramanani’ which in a book of logic means the proofs by which the truth of a proposition is ascertained. All proofs of truth are credentials of relationship. Individual facts have to produce such passports to show that they are not excommunicated, that they are not a break in the unity of the whole. The logical relationship in an intellectual proposition, and the aesthetic relationship indicated in the proportions of a work of art, both agree in one thing. They affirm that truth consists not in facts, but in harmony of facts. About this fundamental note of reality the poet has said, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’
Proportions which prove relativity form the outward language of creative ideals. A crowd of men is desultory, but in a march of soldiers every man keeps his proportion of time and space, and relative movement, which makes him one with the whole vast army. But this is not all. The creation of an army has for its inner principle one single idea of the general. According to the nature of that ruling idea, a production is either a work of art or a mere organisation. All the materials and regulations of a joint stock company have the unity of an inner motive. But the expression of this unity itself is not the end; it ever indicates an ulterior purpose. On the other hand, the revelation of a work of art is fulfilment in itself.
The consciousness of personality, which is the consciousness of unity in ourselves, becomes prominently distinct when coloured by joy or sorrow, or some other emotion. It is like the sky, which is visible because it is blue which takes different aspects with the change of colours. Therefore for creation of art the energy of an emotional ideal is necessary; for its unity is not like that of a crystal, passive and inert, but actively expressive.
Take for example the following verse -
“Oh, fly not, Pleasure, pleasant-hearted Pleasure,
Fold me thy wings, I prithee, yet and stay.
……To buy a garland for my love today.”
“And thou too, Sorrow, tender-hearted Sorrow,
Thou grey-eyed mourner, fly not yet away,
For I fain would borrow
Thy sad weeds to-morrow,
To make a mourning of love’s yesterday.”
The words in this quotation, merely showing its metre, would have no appeal to us; with all its perfection and its proportion, rhyme and cadence, it would only be a construction. But when it is the outer body of an inner idea it assumes a personality. The idea follows through the rhythm, permeates the words and throbs in their rise and fall. On the other hand, the mere idea of the above quoted poem, stated in unrhythmic prose, would represent only a fact, inertly static, which would not bear repetition. But the emotional idea, incarnated in a rhythmic form, acquires the dynamic quality for those things which take part in the world’s eternal pageantry.
Take the following doggerel :-
“Thirty days hath September,
April, June and November.”
The metre is there; therefore it stimulates the movement of life. But it finds no synchronous response in the metre of our heart-beats; it has not in its centre the living idea which creates for itself an indivisible unity. It is like a bag which is convenient, and not like a body which is inevitable.
This truth, implicit in our own work of art, gives us the clue to the mystery of creation. We find that the endless rhythms of the world are not merely constructive; they strike our own heart-strings and produce music.
Therefore it is we, who feel that this world is a creation; that in its centre it has a living idea which reveals itself in an eternal symphony, played on innumerable instruments all keeping perfect time. We know that this great world-verse that runs from sky to sky is not made for the mere enumeration of facts; it is not ‘Thirty days hath September;’ - it has its direct revelation in our delight. That delight gives us the key to the truth of existence; it is personality acting upon personalities through incessant manifestations, but the bridegroom does to his bride. And when our soul is stirred by the song, we know it claims no fees from us, but brings the tribute of love and a call from the bridegroom.
It may be said that in pictorial and other arts there are some designs that are purely decorative and apparently have no living and inner ideal to express. But this cannot be true. These decorations carry the emotional motive of the artist, which says: ‘I find joy in my creation, it is good.’ All the language of joy is beauty. It is necessary to note here, that joy is not pleasure and beauty is no mere prettiness. Joy is the outcome of the detachment from self, freedom of spirit. Beauty is that profound expression of reality which satisfies our hearts without any other allurements, but its own ultimate value. When in some pure moments of ecstasy we realise this in the world around us, we see this world, not as merely existing, but as decorated in its forms of sounds, colours, lines; we feel in our hearts that there is one, who through all things proclaim: ‘I have joy in my creation.’
That was why the Sanskrit verse gave us for the essential of a picture, not only the manifoldness of the forms and the unity of their proportions, but also bhavah, the emotional idea.
It is needless to say that upon a mere expression of emotion, -- even the best expression of it, -- can rest no criterion of art. The following poem is described by the poet as ‘An earnest suit to his unkind mistress: -
And wilt thou leave me thus?
Say nay, say nay, for shame!
To save thee from the blame
Of all my grief and grame.
And wilt thou leave me thus?
Say nay! Say nay!’
I am sure the poet would not be offended if I expressed my doubts about the earnestness of his appeal or the truth of his avowed necessity. He is responsible for the lyric and not for the sentiment which is a mere material. The fire assumes different colours according to the fuel used; but we do not discuss the fuel, only the flames. A lyric is indefinably more than the sentiment expressed in it, as a rose is more than its substance. Let us take a poem in which the earnestness of sentiment is truer and deeper than the one I quoted above:-
‘The sun
Closing his benediction,
Sinks, and the darkening air
Thrills with the sense of the triumphing
Night, -
Night with her train of stars
And her great gift of sleep.
So be my passing!
My task accomplished and the long day
done,
My wages taken, and in my heart.
Some late lark singing,
Let me be gathered to the quiet West,
The sundown splendid and serene,
Death’
The sentiment expressed in this poem is a subject for a psychologist. But for a poem, the subject is completely merged in its poetry like carbon in a living plant which the lover of plants ignores, leaving it for a charcoal-burner to seek.
This is why, when some storm of feeling sweeps across the country, art is under a disadvantage. For in such an atmosphere the boisterous passion breaks through the cordon of harmony and thrusts itself forward as the subject, which with its bulk and pressure dethrones the unity of creation. For a similar reason most of the hymns used in churches suffer from lack of poetry. For in them the deliberate subject, assuming the first importance, benumbs or kills the poem. Most patriotic poems have the same deficiency, ---they are like hill streams born of sudden showers, which are more proud of their rocky beds than of their water currents; in them the athletic and arrogant subject takes it for granted that the poem is there to give it occasion to display its muscles. The subject is the material wealth for the sake of which poetry should never be tempted to barter her soul, though the temptation should come in the name and shape of public good or some usefulness. Between the artist and his art must be that perfect detachment which is the pure medium of love. He must never make use of this love except for its own perfect expression.
In every-day life our personality moves in a narrow circle of immediate self-interest. And therefore our feelings and events with in that short range become our constant subjects on ourselves. In their vehement self-assertion they ignore their unity with the all.
They rise up like obstructions, and obscure their own backgrounds. But art gives our personality the disinterested freedom of the eternal, there to find it in its rue perspective. To see our own home in flames is not to see fire in its verity. But the fire in the stars is the fire in the heart of the infinite; there it is the script of creation.
Matthew Arnold, in his poem addressed to a nightingale, sings:-
‘Hark! Ah, the nightingale!
The tawn-throated,
Hark! from that moon-lit cedar what a burst!
What triumph! hark, - what pain!’
But pain when met within the boundaries of limited reality repels and hurts; it is discordant with the narrow scope of life. But the pain of some great martyrdom has the detachment of eternity. It appears in all its majesty, harmonious in the context of everlasting life, like the thunder-flash in the stormy sky, not on the laboratory wire. Pain on that scale has its harmony in great love; for by hurting love it reveals the infinity of love in all its truth and beauty. On the other hand, the pain involved in business insolvency is discordant: it kills and consumes till nothing remains but ashes.
The poet sings:-
‘How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves!
Eternal Passion!
Eternal Pain!’
And the truth of pain in eternity has been sung by those very Vedic poets who had said, ‘From joy has come forth all creation.’
They say:-
‘Sa tapas tapatva sarvam asrajata Yadidam kincha.’
‘God from the heat of his pain created all that there is.’
The sacrifice, which is in the heart of creation, is both joy and pain at the same moment. Of this sings a village mystic in Bengal: -
‘My eyes drown in the darkness of joy,
My heart, like a lotus, closes its petals in the rapture of the dark night.’
That speaks of joy, which is deep like the blue sea, endless like the blue sky; which has the magnificence of the night and its limitless darkness enfolds the radiant worlds in the awfulness of peace; it is the unfathomed joy in which all sufferings are made one with it.
A poet of medieval India tells us about his source of inspiration in a poem containing a question and answer: -
‘Where were your songs, my bird, when you
spent your nights in the nest?
Was not all your pleasure stored therein?
What makes you lose your heart to the sky, the
sky that is limitless?’
The bird answers: -
‘I had my pleasure while I rested within bounds
When I soared into the limitless, I found my
Songs!’
To detach the individual idea from its confinement of every-day facts and give to its soaring wings the freedom of the universal is the function of poetry. The ambition of Macbeth, the jealousy of Othello, would be at best sensational in police court proceedings, but in Shakespeare’s dramas they are carried among the flaming constellations, where creation throbs with Eternal Passion, Eternal Pain.