Sri Aurobindo
Early Cultural Writings
(1890 — 1910)
Part Four. On Art
The National Value of Art [4]
We now come to the kernel of the subject, the place of art in the evolution of the race and its value in the education and actual life of a nation.
The first question is whether the sense of the beautiful has any effect on the life of a nation.
It is obvious, from what we have already written, that the manners, the social culture and the restraint in action and expression which are so large a part of national prestige and dignity and make a nation admired like the French, loved like the Irish or respected like the higher-class English, are based essentially on the sense of form and beauty, of what is correct, symmetrical, well-adjusted, fair to the eye and pleasing to the imagination.
The absence of these qualities is a source of national weakness.
The rudeness, coarseness and vulgar violence of the less cultured Englishman, the overbearing brusqueness and selfishness of the Prussian have greatly hampered those powerful nations in their dealings with foreigners, dependencies and even their own friends, allies, colonies.
We all know what a large share the manner and ordinary conduct of the average and of the vulgar Anglo-Indian has had in bringing about the revolt of the Indian, accustomed through ages1 to courtesy, dignity and the amenities of an equal intercourse, against the mastery of an obviously coarse and selfish community.
Now the sense of form and beauty, the correct, symmetrical, well-adjusted, fair and pleasing is an artistic sense and can best be fostered in a nation by artistic culture of the perceptions and sensibilities.
It is noteworthy that the two great nations who are most hampered by the defect of these qualities in action are also the least imaginative, poetic and artistic in Europe.
It is the South German who contributes the art, poetry and music of Germany, the Celt and Norman who produce great poets and a few great artists in England without altering the characteristics of the dominant 
Saxon.
Music is even more powerful in this direction than Art and by the perfect expression of harmony insensibly2 steeps the man in it.
And it is noticeable that England has hardly produced a single musician worth the name.
Plato in his Republic has dwelt with extraordinary emphasis on the importance of music in education; as is the music to which a people is accustomed, so, he says in effect, is the character of that people.
The importance of painting and sculpture is hardly less.
The mind is profoundly influenced by what it sees and, if the eye is trained from the days of childhood to the contemplation and understanding of beauty, harmony and just arrangement in line and colour, the tastes, habits and character will be insensibly trained to follow a similar law of beauty, harmony and just arrangement in the life of the adult man.
This was the great importance of the universal proficiency in the arts and crafts or the appreciation of them which was prevalent in ancient Greece, in certain European ages, in Japan and in the better days of our own history.
Art galleries cannot be brought into every home, but, if all the appointments of our life and furniture of our homes are things of taste and beauty, it is inevitable that the habits, thoughts and feelings of the people should be raised, ennobled, harmonised3, made more sweet and dignified.
A similar result is produced on the emotions by the study of beautiful or noble art.
We have spoken of the purification of the heart, the cittaśuddhi, which Aristotle assigned as the essential office of poetry, and have pointed out that it is done in poetry by the detached and disinterested enjoyment of the eight rasas or forms of emotional aestheticism which make up life, unalloyed by the disturbance of the lower self-regarding passions.
Painting and sculpture work in the same direction by different means.
Art sometimes uses the same means as poetry but cannot do it to the same extent because it has not the movement of poetry; it is fixed, still, it expresses only a given moment, a given point in space and cannot move freely through time and region.
But it is precisely this stillness, this calm, this fixity which gives its separate value to Art.
Poetry raises the emotions and gives each its separate delight.
Art stills the emotions and teaches them the 
delight of a restrained and limited satisfaction, — this indeed was the characteristic that the Greeks, a nation of artists far more artistic than poetic, tried to bring into their poetry.
Music deepens the emotions and harmonises4 them with each other.
Between them music, art and poetry are a perfect education for the soul; they make and keep its movements purified, self-controlled, deep and harmonious.
These, therefore, are agents which cannot profitably be neglected by humanity on its onward march or degraded to the mere satisfaction of sensuous pleasure which will disintegrate rather than build the character.
They are, when properly used, great educating, edifying and civilising5 forces.