ART
BUT otherwise, apart from this division, all
activities of knowledge that seek after or express Truth are in themselves rightful
material for a complete offering; none ought necessarily to be excluded from
the wide framework of the divine life. The mental and physical sciences which
examine into the laws and forms and processes of things, those which concern
the life of men and animals, the social, political, linguistic,
historical and those which seek to know and control the labours and activities
by which man subdues and utiIises his world and environment, and the noble and
beautiful Arts which are at once work and knowledge,-for every well-made and
significant poem, picture, statue, or building is an act of creative knowledge,
a living discovery of the consciousness, a figure of Truth, a dynamic form of
mental and
vital self-expression or world-expression,-all that
seeks, all that finds, all that voices or figures is a realization of something
of the play of the Infinite and to that extent can be made a means of God
realization or of divine formation. But the Yogin has to see that it is no
longer done as a part of an ignorant mental life; it can be accepted by him
only if by the feeling, the remembrance, the dedication within it, it is turned
into a movement of the spiritual consciousness and becomes a part of its vast
grasp of comprehensive illuminating knowledge.
For all must be done as a sacrifice, all activities
must have the One Divine for their object and the heart of their meaning. The
Yogin's aim in the sciences that make for knowledge should be to discover and
understand the workings of the Divine Consciousness-Puissance in man and
creatures and things and forces, her creative significances, her execution of
the mysteries, the symbols in which she arranges the manifestation. The Yogin's
aim in the practical sciences, whether physical or occult and psychic, should be
to enter into the ways of the Divine and his processes, to know the materials
and means for the work given to us so that we may use that knowledge for a conscious and faultless
expression of the spirit's mastery, joy and self-fulfilment. The Yogin's aim in
the Arts should not be a mere aesthetic, mental or vital gratification, but,
seeing the Divine everywhere, worshipping it with a revelation of the meaning
of its works, to express that One
Divine in Gods and men and creatures and objects. The theory that sees an
intimate connection between religious aspiration and the truest and greatest
Art is in essence right; but we must substitute for the mixed and doubtful
religious motive a spiritual aspiration, vision, interpreting experience. For
the wider and more comprehensive the seeing, the more it contains in itself the
sense of the hidden Divine in humanity and in all things and rises beyond a
superficial religiosity into the spiritual life, the more luminous, flexible,
deep and powerful will the Art be that springs from that high motive.1
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 of beauty, just as the spirit of romantic art and poetry is to
bring out what is striking and what is individual and this it often does so
powerfully or with so vidid 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 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, the common or morbid and puts that forward as
the whole truth of life. The 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
inlferiority 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
salvery to form and imagining that when a certain form has been followed,
certain canons of construction satisfied, certain rhetorical rules of technical
principles obeyed, all has been achieved. It ceases to be art and becomes a
cold and mechanical workmanship.2
1
The Synthesis of Yoga, Revised Edition, 1948,
pp. 113-14.
2
The Human Cycle,
"The Suprarational Beauty", Chapter XIV.
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