SECTION FOUR

VALMIKI AND VYASA

The Genius of Valmiki

OUT of the infinite silence of the past, peopled only to the eye of history or the ear of the Yogin, a few voices arise which speak for it, express it and are the very utterance and soul of those unknown generations, of that vanished and now silent humanity. These are the voices of the poets. We whose souls are drying up in this hard and parched age of utilitarian and scientific thought when men value little beyond what gives them exact and useful knowledge or leads them to some outward increase of power and pleasure, we who are beginning to neglect and ignore poetry and can no longer write it greatly and well, — just as we have forgotten how to sculpture like the Greeks, paint like the mediaeval Italians or build like the Buddhists — are apt to forget this grand utility of the poets, one noble faculty among their many divine and unusual powers. The Kavi or Vates, poet and seer, is not the manīsī; he is not the logical thinker, scientific analyser or metaphysical reasoner; his knowledge is one not with his thought, but with his being; he has not arrived at it but has it in himself by virtue of his power to become one with all that is around him. By some form of spiritual, vital and emotional oneness he is what he sees; he is the hero thundering in the forefront of the battle, the mother weeping over her dead, the tree trembling violently in the storm, the flower warmly penetrated with the sunshine. And because he is these things, therefore he knows them; because he knows thus, spiritually and not rationally, he can write of them. He feels their delight and pain, he shares their virtue and sin, he enjoys their reward or bears their punishment. It is for this reason that poetry written out of the intellect is so inferior to poetry written out of the soul, is, — even as poetical thinking, — so inferior to the thought that comes formed by inscrutable means out of the soul. For this reason, too, poets of otherwise great faculty have failed to give us living men and women or really to show to our inner vision even the things of which they write eloquently or sweetly

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because they are content to write about them after having seen them with the mind only, and have not been able or have not taken care first to be the things of which they would write and then not so much write about them as let them pour out in speech that is an image of the soul. They have been too easily attracted by the materials of poetry, artha and śabda; drawn by some power and charm in the substance of speech, captivated by some melody, harmony or colour in the form of speech, arrested by some strong personal emotion which clutches at experience or gropes for expression in these externals of poetry, they have forgotten to bathe in the Muses' deepest springs.

Therefore among those ancient voices, even when the literature of the ages has been winnowed and chosen by Time, there are very few who recreate for us in poetic speech deeply and mightily the dead past, because they were that past, not so much themselves as the age and nation in which they lived and not so much even the age and nation as that universal humanity which in spite of all differences, under them and within them, even expressing its unity through them, is the same in every nation and in every age. Others give us only fragments of thought or outbursts of feeling or reveal to us scattered incidents of sight, sound and outward happening. These are complete, vast, multitudinous, infinite in a way, impersonal, many-personed in their very personality, not divine workmen merely but fine creators endowed by God with something of His divine power and offering therefore in their works some image of His creative activity.

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2

THE greatest poets are usually those who arise either out of a large, simple and puissant environment or out of a movement of mind that is grandiose, forceful and elemental. When man becomes increasingly refined in intellect, curious in aesthetic sensibility or minute and exact in intellectual reasoning, it becomes more and more difficult to write great and powerful poetry. Ages of accomplished intellectuality and scholarship or of strong scientific rationality are not favourable to the birth of great poets or if they are born, not favourable to the free and untrammelled action of their gifts. They remain great, but their greatness bends under a load: there is a lack of triumphant spontaneity and they do not draw as freely or directly from the sources of human action and character. An untameable elemental force is needed to overcome more than partially the denials of the environment. For poetry, even though it appeals in passing to the intellect and aesthetic sense, does not proceed from them but is in its nature an elemental power proceeding from the secret and elemental Power within which sees directly and creates sovereignly, and it passes at once to our vital and elemental parts. Intellect and the aesthetic faculties are necessary to the perfection of our critical enjoyment; but they are only assistants, not the agents of this divine birth.

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