The Malavas   Once in the long history of poetry the great powers who are ever working the finest energies of nature into the warp of our human evolution, met together and resolved to unite in creating a poetical intellect & imagination that, endowed with the most noble & various poetical gifts, capable in all the great forms used by creative genius, should express once & for all in a supreme manner the whole sensuous plane of our life, its heat & light, its joy, colour & sweetness. And since to all quality there must be a corresponding defect, they not only gifted this genius with rich powers and a remarkable temperament but drew round it the necessary line of limitations.

Indian Art and an Old Classic   WE HAVE before us a new edition of Krittibas's Ramayan, edited and published by that indefatigable literary and patriotic worker, Sj. Ramānanda  Chatterji. Ramānanda  Babu is well known to the Bengali public as a clear-minded, sober and fearless political speaker and writer; as editor of the Modern Review and the Prabasi he has raised the status and quality of Indian periodical literature to an extraordinary extent, and has recently been doing a yet more valuable and lasting service to his country by introducing the masterpieces of the new school of Art to his readers. His pr

VIII   The Training of the Logical Faculty   THE TRAINING of the logical reason must necessarily follow the training of the faculties which collect the material on which the logical reason must work. Not only so but the mind must have some development of the faculty of dealing with words before it can deal successfully with ideas. The question is, once this preliminary work is done, what is the best way of teaching the boy to think correctly from premises. For the logical reason cannot proceed without premises. It either infers from facts to a conclusion, or from previously formed conclusions to a fresh one, or fr

"Shama'a"   I WAS unable to greet duly the first appearance of this new magazine of art, literature and philosophy edited by Miss Mrinalini Chattopadhyay; I take the opportunity of the second number to repair the omission I had then unwillingly to make. The appearance of this quarterly is one of the signs as yet too few, but still carrying a sure promise, of a progressive reawakening of the higher thinking and aesthetic mentality in India after a temporary effacement in which the Eastern mind was attempting to assimilate in the wrong way elementary or second-rate occidental ideas. In that misguided endeavour it became on the intellectual and practical side ineffectively utilitarian

III   Mazzini, Cavour, Garibaldi   MAZZINI The state of Italy now is the proof that my teaching was needed. Machiavellianism rose again in the policy of Cavour and Italy, grasping too eagerly at the speedy fruit of her efforts, fell from the clearness of the revelation that I gave her. Therefore she suffers. We must work for the fruit, but there must not be such attachment to the fruit that to hasten it the true means is sacrificed; for that leads eventually to the sacrifice of the true end.   CAVOUR The state of Italy is the proof of the soundness of my policy

"The Feast of Youth" 1   THIS IS the first published book of a young poet whose name has recently and suddenly emerged under unusually favourable auspices. English poetry written by an Indian writer who uses the foreign medium as if it were his mother-tongue, with a spontaneous ease, power and beauty, the author a brother of the famous poetess Sarojini Naidu, one of a family which promises to be as remarkable as the Tagores by its possession of culture, talent and genius, challenging attention and sympathy by his combination of extreme youth and a high and early brilliance and already showing in his work, even though still immature, magnificent performance as well as

Historical Impressions   Napoleon   The name of Napoleon has been a battle-field for the prepossessions of all sorts of critics, and, according to their predilections, idiosyncrasies and political opinions, men have loved or hated, panegyrised or decried the Corsican. To blame Napoleon is like criticising Mont Blanc or throwing mud at Kinchinjunga. This phenomenon has to be understood and known, not blamed or praised. Admire we must, but as minds, not as moralists. It has not been sufficiently perceived by his panegyrists and critics that Bonaparte was not a man at all, he was a force. Only the nature of the force

  VOLUME 1   THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO   © Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 2003 Published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry   PRINTED IN INDIA   Early Cultural Writings Pu

II   The Bengal He Lived In   THE SOCIETY by which Bankim was formed, was the young Bengal of the fifties, the most extraordinary perhaps that India has yet seen, -a society electric with thought and loaded to the brim with passion. Bengal was at that time the theatre of a great intellectual awakening. A sort of miniature Renascence was in process. An ardent and imaginative race, long bound down in the fetters of a single tradition, had had suddenly put into its hands the key to a new world thronged with the beautiful or profound creations of Art and Learning. From this meeting of a foreign Art and civilisation with a temperament differing from the temperament which

Two Pictures   THE Modern Review and Prabasi are doing monthly a service to the country the importance of which cannot be exaggerated. The former review is at present the best conducted and the most full of valuable matter of any in India. But good as are the articles which fill the magazine from month to month, the whole sum of them is outweighed in value by the single page which gives us the reproduction of some work of art by a contemporary Indian painter. To the lover of beauty and the lover of his country every one of these delicately executed blocks is an event of importance in his life within. The reviews by brin