In the Society's Chambers   Professor — Let me assure you, my friends, that the method of inquiry is alone responsible for all the error in the world. Mankind is in a hurry to know and prefers to catch at half-truths rather than wait for the full truth to dawn on him. Now a half-truth is a few degrees more mischievous than absolute error. It is the devil himself in the disguise of an angel. The Practical Man —But surely, Professor, half-truths are the preparation for whole truths. And mankind must have something to go by. We are not all College Professors who can wait comfortably in our studies for Truth to call on us

Art   All Art is interpretation. Creation is a misnomer; nothing in this world is created, all is manifested. All exists previously in the mind of the Knower. Art may interpret that which is already manifest or was manifest at one time, or it may interpret what will be manifest hereafter. It may even be used as one of the agencies in the manifestation. A particular type of face and figure may be manifested in the work of a popular artist and in a single generation the existing type of face and figure in the country may change and mould itself to the new conception. These things are there in the type in the causal world with which our superconscious selves

IV   Simultaneous and Successive Teaching   A VERY remarkable feature of modern training which has been subjected in India to a reductio ad absurdum is the practice of teaching by snippets. A subject is taught a little at a time, in conjunction with a host of others, with the result that what might be well learnt in a single year is badly learned in seven and the boy goes out ill-equipped, served with imperfect parcels of knowledge, master of none of the great departments of human knowledge. The system of education adopted by the National Council, an amphibious and twy-natured creation, attempts to heighten

IV   Shivaji, Jaysingh   JAYSINGH Neither of us has prevailed. A third force has entered into the land and taken the fruits of your work, and as for mine, it is broken; the ideal I cherished has gone down into the dust.   SHIVAJI For the fruit I did not work and by the failure I am not amazed nor discouraged.   JAYSINGH Neither did I work for a reward, but to uphold the ideal of the Rajput. Unflinching courage in honourable warfare, chivalry to friend and foe, a noble loyalty to the sovereign of my choice, this seemed t

The Harmony of Virtue    Book One   Keshav Ganesh — Broome Wilson   Keshav — My dear Broome, how opportune is your arrival! You will save me from the malady of work, it may be, from the dangerous opium of solitude. How is it I have not seen you for the last fortnight? Wilson ——— Surely, Keshav, you can understand the exigencies of the Tripos? Keshav —— Ah, you are a happy man. You can do what you are told. But put off your academical aspirations until tomorrow and we will talk. The cigarettes are on the mantelpiece — pardon my indolence! — and the lucifers are probably sto

The Age of Kalidasa   VALMIKI, Vyasa and Kalidasa are the essence of the history of ancient India; if all else were lost, they would still be its sole and sufficient cultural history. Their poems are types and exponents of three periods in the development of the human soul, types and exponents also of the three great powers which dispute and clash in the imperfect and half-formed temperament and harmonise in the formed and perfect. At the same time their works are pictures at once minute and grandiose of three moods of our Aryan civilisation, of which the first was predominatingly moral, the second predominatingly intellectual, the third predominatingly material

An Answer to a Critic   ONE HAD thought that the Ravi Varma superstition in India had received its quietus. Unsupported by a single competent voice, universally condemned by critics of eminence Asiatic and European, replaced by a style of Art national, noble and suggestive, it is as hopeless to revive this grand debaser of Indian taste and artistic culture as to restore life to the slain. But even causes hopelessly lost and deserving to be lost will find their defenders and unworthy altars do not lack incense. A belated lance is lifted in the August number of the Modern Review for the fallen idol. Neither writing nor s

Characteristics of Augustan Poetry   Relation of Gray to the poetry of his times   The poetry of Gray marks the transition from the eighteenth century or Augustan style of poetry to the nineteenth-century style; i.e. to say almost all the tendencies of poetry between the death of Pope and the production of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798are to be found in Gray's writings. Of the other poets of the time, Johnson & Goldsmith mark the last development of the Augustan style, while Collins, Blake, Cowper, Burns, Chatterton each embody in their poetry the beginnings of one or more tendencies which afterwards found their full expression in the nineteen

Stray Thoughts   Flowers and trees are the poetry of Nature; the gardener is a romantic poet who has added richness, complexity of effect and symmetry to a language otherwise distinguished merely by facility, by directness and by simplicity of colour and charm.   Sound is more essential to poetry than sense. Swinburne who often conveys no meaning to the intellect, yet fills his verse with lovely & suggestive melodies, can put more poetry into one such line than Pope into a hundred couplets of accurate sense and barren music. A noble thought framed in a well-rounded sentence, will always charm by virtue of its satisfying completeness, but will never convey t

Note on the Texts   EARLY CULTURAL WRITINGS consists of essays on literature, education and art, as well as dialogues, biographical and historical sketches, and other short prose pieces. Most were written between 1890 and 1910, a few between 1910 and 1920. A little more than half the pieces (comprising about three-fifths of the bulk) were published during Sri Aurobindo's lifetime; the rest of the pieces have been transcribed from his manuscripts. The contents of the volume are arranged by topic in nine parts. Two appendixes, consisting mostly of material not written for publication, come at the end.   PART ONE: THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE (CAMBRIDGE 1890