Cittaśuddhi, the purification of the heart, is the
appointed road by which man arrives at his higher fulfilment, and, if it can be
shown that poetry and art are powerful agents towards that end, their supreme
importance is established.
The sense of
pleasure and delight in the emotional aspects of life and action, this is the
poetry of life, just as the regulating and beautiful arrangement of character
and action is the art of life. We have seen how the latter purifies, but the
purifying force of the former is still more potent for good. Our life is
largely made up of the eight rasas. The movements of the heart in its enjoyment
of action, its own and that of others, may either be directed downwards, as is
the case with the animals and animal men, to the mere satisfaction of the ten
sense-organs and the vital desires which make instruments of the senses in the
average sensual man, or they may work for the satisfaction of the heart itself
in a predominatingly emotional enjoyment of life, or they may be directed
upwards through the medium of the intellect, rational and intuitional, to
attainment of delight through the seizing on the source of all delight, the
Spirit, the satyam, sundaram,
ānandam who is beyond and
around, the source and the basis of all this world-wide activity, evolution and
progress. When the heart works for itself, then it enjoys the poetry of life,
the delight of emotions, the wonder, pathos, beauty, enjoyableness,
lovableness, calm, serenity, clarity and also the grandeur, heroism, passion,
fury, terror and horror of life, of man, of Nature, of the phenomenal
manifestation of God. This is not the highest, but it is higher than the
animal, vital and externally aesthetic developments. The large part it plays in
life is obvious, but in life it is hampered by the demands of body and the
vital passions. Here comes in the first mighty utility, the triumphant activity
of the most energetic forms of art and poetry. They provide a field in which
these pressing claims of the animal can be excluded and the emotions, working
disinterestedly for the satisfaction of the heart and the imagination alone,
can do the work of katharsis,
emotional purification, of which Aristotle spoke. Cittaśuddhi, the purification
of the heart, is the appointed road by which man arrives at his higher
fulfilment, and, if it can be shown that poetry and art are powerful agents
towards that end, their supreme importance is established. They are that, and
more than that. It is only one of the great uses of these things which men
nowadays are inclined to regard as mere ornaments of life and therefore of
secondary importance.
We have spoken of
the purification of the heart, the cittaśuddhi,
which Aristotle assigned as the essential office of poetry, and have pointed out
that it is done in poetry by the detached and disinterested enjoyment of the
eight rasas or forms of emotional aestheticism
which make up life unalloyed by the disturbance of the lower self-regarding
passions. Painting and sculpture work in the same direction by different means.
Art sometimes uses the same means as poetry but cannot do it to the same extent
because it has not the movement of poetry; it is fixed, still, it expresses
only a given moment, a given point in space and cannot move freely through time
and region. But it is precisely this stillness, this calm, this fixity which
gives its separate value to Art. Poetry raises the emotions and gives each its
separate delight. Art stills the emotions and teaches them the delight of a
restrained and limited satisfaction,—this indeed was the characteristic that
the Greeks, a nation of artists far more artistic than poetic, tried to bring
into their poetry. Music deepens the emotions and harmonises them with each
other. Between them music, art and poetry are a perfect education for the soul;
they make and keep its movements purified, self-controlled, deep and
harmonious. These, therefore, are agents which cannot profitably be neglected
by humanity on its onward march or degraded to the mere satisfaction of
sensuous pleasure which will disintegrate rather than build the character. They
are, when properly used, great educating, edifying and civilising forces.
(SABCL, Volume 17, Sri
Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Puducherry)
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