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’s Personality and Place in Literature [2]

I do not agree that Wells and others are more serious than Shaw — if by seriousness is meant earnestness of belief in one’s ideals and sincerity in the intelligence. These can exist very well behind a triple breast-plate of satire and humour. Shaw’s merits are surely greater than you seem disposed to admit in your letter. The tide is turning against him after being strongly for him — under compulsion from his own power and will, but nothing can alter the fact that he was one of the keenest and most powerful minds of the age with an originality in his way of looking at things which no one else could equal. If what was original in him has become the common stock of contemporary thought, it was his power and forcefulness that made it so — it is no more to be counted against him than the deplorable fact that Hamlet is only “a string of quotations” is damaging to Shakespeare! I do not share your exasperation against Shavianism — I find in it a delightful note and am thankful to Shaw for being so refreshingly different from other men that to read even an ordinary interview with him in a newspaper is always an intellectual pleasure. As for his being one of the most orginal personalities of the age, there can be no doubt of that. All that I deny to him is a constructive and creative mind — but his critical force, in certain fields at least, as a critic of man and life was very great and in that field he can in a sense be called creative — in the sense that he created a singularly effective and living form for his criticism of life. It is not great tragic or comic drama, but it is something original and strong and altogether of its own kind — so, up to that limit, I qualify my statement that Shaw was no creator.

As to the other writers about whom you ask for my judgment, I do not feel inclined to be drawn at present; I would have to say too much, if I started saying anything at all. Galsworthy I have not read — all I can say of the rest is that I do not share the contemporary idea about them — so far as I have read their work. Contemporary fame, contemporary opinion are creations of the hour and can die with the hour. I fail to see in many of these much-praised writers of the time either the power of style or the power of critical mind or creative imagination that ensures survival. There is plenty of effective writing or skilful workmanship, but that is not enough to make literary immortals.

8 September 1932