Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 3. Literature, Art, Beauty and Yoga
Section 3. Beauty and Its Appreciation
General Remarks on Beauty

The Good and the Beautiful

In one of his recent essays, Rabindranath Tagore says that goodness and beauty are so intimately correlated that they are always found together. “The good is necessarily beautiful,” he says, and “Beauty is the picture of the good; goodness is the reality behind beauty.”

I can’t say that I understand these epigrammatic sentences. What is meant by good? what is meant by beauty? The divine Good is no doubt necessarily beautiful, because on a higher plane good and beauty and all else that is divine in origin meet, coalesce, harmonise. But what men call good is often ugly or drab or unattractive. Human beauty is not always the picture of the good, it is sometimes the mask of evil — the reality behind that mask is not always goodness. These things are obvious, but probably Rabindranath meant good and beauty in their higher aspects or their essence.

9 September 1937