Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Comments on Some Passages of Prose

Lawrence’s Letters [2]

The passage you have quoted certainly shows that Lawrence had an idea of the new spiritual birth. What he has written there could be a very accurate indication of the process of the change, the putting away of the old mind, vital, physical consciousness and the emergence of a new consciousness from the now invisible Within, not an illusory periphery like the present mental, vital, physical ignorance but a truth-becoming from the true being within us. He speaks of the transition as a darkness created by the rejection of the outer mental light, a darkness intervening before the true light from the Invisible can come. Certain Christian mystics have said the same thing and the Upanishad also speaks of the luminous Being beyond the darkness. But in India the rejection of the mental light, the vital stir, the physical hard narrow concreteness leads more often, not to a darkness, but to a wide emptiness and silence which begins afterwards to fill with the light of a deeper greater truer consciousness, a consciousness full of peace, harmony, joy and freedom. I think Lawrence was held back from realising because he was seeking for the new birth in the subconscient vital and taking that for the Invisible Within — he mistook Life for Spirit; whereas Life can only be an expression of the Spirit. That too perhaps was the reason for his preoccupation with a vain and baffled sexuality.

Did you like the Ajanta frescos? I loved them: the pure fulfilment — the pure simplicity — the complete, almost perfect relations between the men and the women — the most perfect things I have ever seen. Botticelli is vulgar beside them. They are the zenith of a very lovely civilisation, the crest of a very perfect wave of human development.... [pp. 299 – 300]

His appreciation of the Ajanta paintings must have been due to the same drive that made him seek for a new poetry as well as a new truth from within. He wanted to get rid of the outward forms that for him hide the Invisible and arrive at something that would express with bare simplicity and directness some reality within. It is what made people begin to prefer the primitives to the developed art of the Renaissance. That is why he depreciates Botticelli as not giving the real thing, but only an outward grace and beauty which he considers vulgar in comparison with the less formal art of old that was satisfied with bringing out the pure emotion from within and nothing else.

It is the same thing which makes him want a stark bare rocky directness for modern {{0}}poetry.[[A letter of 29 June 1936 containing Sri Aurobindo’s comments on Lawrence’s poetry is published on pages 418 – 19 above. — Ed.]]

28 June 1936