Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Philosophers, Intellectuals, Novelists and Musicians

Shaw [2]

I would be obliged if you would tell me your opinion of the apostrophe of Caesar to the Sphinx in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. I find it very fine, but Dilip says he is not thrilled by it.

I am not thrilled by the speech either; it is a creation of the intellect, eloquent and on the surface. I do not see how you are going to manufacture a mystic out of Shaw with these scanty materials: he has a very clear and incisive intelligence, independent and unconventional rather than original and creative, but beyond the intellect he does not go. The speculative imaginations of which you speak and the feelings in the aesthetic vital which accompany them sometimes are common enough in men with some reach of mind, but they do not constitute either a mystic feeling or a mystic experience.

6 May 1932