Sri Aurobindo
Early Cultural Writings
(1890 — 1910)
Part Seven. Epistles / Letters From Abroad
Letters from Abroad [5.3]
They criticise everything subtly rather than well, but can create nothing — except machines.
They have organised society with astonishing success and found the very best way to spread comfort and kill their souls.
Their system of government is a perpetual flux.
Its past looks back to a yet corrupter aristocracy, its future sinks to anarchic dissolution, or at best rests in a tyrannical materialistic socialism which seeks to level all that is yet high to the grade of the artisan instead of making the artisan himself worthy of a throne.
A thousand newspapers vulgarise knowledge, debase aesthetical appreciation, democratise success and make impossible all that was once unusual and noble.
The man of letters has become a panderer to the intellectual appetites of a mob or stands aloof in the narrowness of a coterie.
There is plenty of brilliance everywhere, but one searches in vain for a firm foundation, the power or the solidity of knowledge.1
The select seek paradox in order to distinguish themselves from the herd; a perpetual reiteration of some startling novelty can alone please the crowd.
Each favourite is like an actor from whom the audience expect from day to day the usual passion or the usual 
farce.
Paradox and novelty therefore thrive; but the select have an easily jaded appetite, the multitude are fickle and novelties have their hour.
Therefore even the favourite palls.
But these people have a great tamasic persistence of habit and a certain loyalty to established names; much that they read is from habit rather than enjoyment.
Otherwise there would be no stability in this chaos of striking worthlessness and this meteor-dance of ephemeral brilliance.
The1 very churches and chapels are now only the theatres of a habitual stage performance of portentous and unnecessary dullness.
With the exception of a small minority full of a grotesque, superficial but genuine passion, nobody believes, nobody feels; opinion, convention, preference and habit are alive and call themselves religion, but the heart that loves God is not to be found.
Only a few of the undeveloped are really religious, the castbacks and atavists of this European evolution.
For2 more than half a century the whole of Europe has not been able to produce a single poet of even secondary magnificence.
One no longer looks for Shakespeare or Dante to return, but even Wordsworth or Racine have also become impossible.
Hugo’s flawed opulence, Whitman’s formless plenty, Tennyson’s sugared emptiness seem to have been the last poetic speech of modern Europe.
If poetical genius appears, it is at once taken prisoner by the applauding coterie or the expectant multitude and, where it began, there it ends, enslaved in ignoble fetters, pirouetting perpetually for their pleasure round a single accomplishment.
Of all literary forms the novel only has still some genius and even that is perishing of the modern curse of overproduction.
Learning and scholarship are unendingly active over the dead corpse of creative power as in Alexandria and with the 
later Romans before the great darkness.
Eccentricity and the hunting after novelty and paradox play in it over an ostentatious precision and accuracy.
Yesterday’s opinion is today exploded and discarded, new fireworks of theory, generalisation and speculation take the place of the old, and to this pyrotechnic rushing in a circle they give the name of progress.
The possibility of a calm insight and wisdom seems to have departed from this brilliant mob of pushing, overactive intellects.
Force there is, but force doomed to a rapid dissolution, of which the signs are already not wanting.
The moral nerve is equally relaxed.
Immorality which does not know how to enjoy, impotence and dullness of the capacity for enjoyment masquerading as virtue, decorum and prudery covering a cesspool, the coarseness, appetite and rapid satiety of the imperial Romans combining in various proportions or associating on various terms with the euprepeia and looseness of the Greeks.
But the Pagan virility whether united to Roman coarseness or Greek brilliance is only to be seen in a few extraordinary individuals.
Society is cast in the biune mould of monogamy and prostitution.
You will find such a Parisian who keeps his wife and mistress and frequents his State-licenced3 harlots as well, shocked and pained at the idea of polygamous Indians enjoying the same rights as the virtuous sons of Europe.
Some are even afraid that the resurgence of Asia may end in the lowering of Western morals.
There can then be a descent from as well as to Avernus!
In a word, the whole of Europe is now a magnified Alexandria, brilliant forms with a perishing soul, feverish activity in imitation of the forms of health4 with no capital but the energy of the sickbed.
One has to concede however that it is not altogether sterile, for all Europe and America pullulate with ever multiplying machinery.