The facts about the articles in the Indu prakash
were these. They were begun at the instance of KG Deshpande, Sri Aurobindo's Cambridge friend who was
editor of the paper, but the first two articles made a sensation and frightened
Ranade and other Congress leaders. Ranade warned the proprietor of the paper
that, if this went on, he would surely be prosecuted for sedition. Accordingly
the original plan of the series had to be dropped at the proprietor's instance.
Deshpande requested Sri Aurobindo to continue in a modified tone and he
reluctantly consented, but felt no farther interest and the articles were
published at long intervals and finally dropped of themselves altogether.
The title refers to Congress politics. It is not used in the sense of the
Aladdin story, but was intended to imply the offering of new lights to replace
the old and faint reformist lights of the Congress.
From Notes and Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Here is the sixth of the series published in Indu Prakash, 13 November
1893
That this intimate organic treatment ofwhich I speak is really indispensable, will be clearly established by the
annals of ancient Rome.
The Romans were a nation quite unique in the composition and general style of
their character; along with a predilection for practical energy, a purely
material habit of mind, and an indifference to orderly and logical methods
which suggest a strong affinity to the Anglo-Saxon temperament, they possessed
a robust and clear perception, and a strong practical contempt for methods
pronounced by hard experience to be ineffectual, which are entirely un-English
and allied rather to the clarity and impatience of the Gaul, Moreover their
whole character was moulded in a grand style, such as has not been witnessed by
any prior or succeeding age—so much so that the striking description by which
the Greek ambassador expressed the temper of the Roman Senate, might with equal
justice be transferred to the entire people. They were a nation of Kings: that
is to say, they possessed the gift of handling the high things of life in a
grand and imposing style, and with a success, an astonishing sureness of touch,
only possible to a natural tact in government and a just, I may say a royal
instinct for affairs. Yet this grand, imperial nation, even while it was most
felicitous abroad in the manner and spirit in which it dealt with foreign
peoples, was at home convulsed to a surprising extent by the worst forms of
internal disorder:—and all for the want of that clear, sane ideal which has so
highly promoted the domestic happiness of France and Athens. At first, indeed,
the Romans inexpert in political methods, were inclined to repose an implicit
trust in machinery, just as the English have been inclined from the primary
stages of their development, and just as we are led to do by the contagious
influence of the Anglomaniac disease. They hoped by the sole and mechanic
action of certain highly lauded institutions to remove the disorders with which
the Roman body politic was ailing. And though at Rome no less than among ourselves, the social
condition of the poor filled up the reform posters and a consequent
amelioration was loudly trumpeted by the popular leaders, yet the genuine force
of the movement was disposed, as is the genuine force of the present Congress
movement, to the minimising of purely political inequality. But when the
coveted institutions were in full swing, a sense gradually dawned on the people
that the middle class had the sole enjoyment of any profit accruing from the
change, as indeed it is always to the middle class alone that any profit
accrues from the elimination of merely political inequality; but the great Roman
populace untouched by the change for which they had sacrificed their ease and
expended their best and highest energies, felt themselves pushed from misery to
misery and broke out again in a wild storm of rebellion. But to maintain a
stark persistence in unreason, to repose an unmoved confidence in the bounded
potency of a mechanic formula, proved ineffectual by the cogent logic of hard
experience; they had no thought, or if they had the thought, they being a
genuinely practical race, and not like the English straining after
practicality, had not the disposition. Hence that mighty struggle was fought
out with perplexed watchwords, amid wild alarms and rumours of battle and in a
confused medley of blood, terror and unspeakable desolation. In that horror of
great darkness, the Roman world crashed on from ruin to ruin, until the strong
hand of Caesar stayed its descent to poise it on the stable foundation of a
sane and vigilant policy rigorously enforced by the fixed will of a single
despotic ruler. But the grand secret of his success and the success of those
puissant autocrats who inherited his genius and his ideals, was the clear
perception attained to by them that only by social equality and the healing
action of a firm despotism, could the disorders of Rome be permanently eradicated. Maligned as
they have been by those who suffered from their astuteness and calm strength of
will, the final verdict of posterity will laud in them that terrible intensity
of purpose and even that iron indifference to personal suffering, which they
evinced in forcing the Caesarian policy to its bitter but salutary end. The
main lesson for us however is the pregnant conclusion that the Romans, to whom
we cannot deny the supreme rank in the sphere of practical success, by
attempting a cure through external and mechanic appliances entailed on
themselves untold misery, untold disorder, and only by a thorough organic
treatment restored the sanity, peace, settled government and calm felicity of
an entire world.
But perhaps Mr Mehta will tell me "What have we to do with the ancient
Romans, we who have an entirely modern environment and suffer from disorders
peculiar to ourselves?" Well, the connection is not perhaps so remote as
Mr Mehta imagines: I will not however press that point, but rather appeal to
the instance of two great European nations, who also have an entirely modern
environment and suffer or have suffered from very similar maladies—and so end
my long excursion into the domain of abstract ideas.
As the living instances most nearly suggesting the diversity of impulse and
method, which is my present subject, I have had occasion to draw a comparison
between these two peoples, whom, by a singular caprice of antithesis, chance
has put into close physical proximity; but nature has sundered as far as the
poles in genius, temper and ideals. Whatever healthy and conservative effects
accrue from the close pursuit of either principle, whatever morbid and
deleterious effects accrue from the close pursuit of either principle, will be
seen operating to the best advantage in the social and political organism of
these two nations. The healthy effects of the one impulse we shall find among
those striking Eng1ish qualities which at once catch the eye, insatiable
enterprise, an energetic and pushing spirit, a vigorous tendency towards expansion,
a high capacity political administration, and an orderly process of government;
the morbid effects are social degradation and an entire absence of the cohesive
principle. The better qualities have no doubt grown by breathing the atmosphere
of individualism and been trained up by the habit of working under settled and
roughly convenient forms; but after all is said, the original high qualities of
the raw material enter very largely into the credit side of the account. Even
were it not so, we are not likely, tutored by English instruction, to
undervalue or to slur over the successful and imposing aspect of English
attainment. Hence it will be more profitable for us, always keeping the bright
side in view, to concentrate our attention on the unsounder aspects which we do
not care to learn, or if we have learned, are in the habit of carefully
forgetting. We may perhaps realise the nature of that unsounder aspect, if we
amplify Matthew Arnold's phrase:—an aristocracy no longer possessed of the
imposing nobility of mind, the proud sense of honour, the striking
pre-eminence of faculty, which are the saving graces—nay, which are the very
life-breath of an aristocracy; debased moreover by the pursuit through
concession to all that is gross and ignoble in the English mind, of gross and
ignoble ends:—a middle class inaccessible to the influence of high and refining
ideas, and prone to rate every thing even in the noblest departments of life,
at a commercial valuation:—and a lower class equally without any germ of high
ideas, nay, without any ideas high or low; degraded in their worst failure to
the crudest forms of vice, pauperism and crime, and in their highest attainment
restricted to a life of unintelligent work relieved by brutalising pleasures.
And indeed the most alarming symptoms are here; for it may be said of the
aristocracy that the workings of the Time-Spirit have made a genuine
aristocracy obsolete and impracticable, and of the middle class, that, however
successful and confident, it is in fact doomed; its empire is passing away from
it; but with the whole trend of humanity shaping towards democracy and
socialism, on the calibre and civilisation of the lower class depends the
future of the entire race. And we have seen what sort of lower class England,
with all her splendid success, has been able to evolve—in calibre debased, in
civilisation nil. And after seeing what England has produced by her empiricism,
her culture of a raw energy, her exaltation of a political method not founded
on reason, we must see what France has produced by her steady, logical pursuit
of a fine social ideal: it is the Paris ouvrier with his firmness of
grasp on affairs, his sanity, his height of mind, his clear, direct ways of
life and thought,—it is the French peasant with his ready tact, his power of
quiet and sensible conversation, located in an enjoyable corner of life, small
it may be, but with plenty of room for wholesome work and plenty of room for
refreshing gaiety. There we have the strong side of France, a lucid social
atmosphere, a firm executive rationally directed to insure a clearly conceived
purpose, a high level of character and refinement pervading all classes and a
scheme of society bestowing a fair chance of happiness on the low as well as
the high. But if France is
strong in the sphere of England's
weakness, she is no less weak in the sphere of England’s strength. Along with and
militating against her social happiness, we have to reckon constant political
disorder and instability, an alarming defect of expansive vigour, and entire
failure in the handling of general politics. France, unable to conceive and
work out a proper political machinery, has been reduced to copy with slight
variations the English model and import a set of machinery well suited to the
old English temper, but now unsuited even to the English and still more to the
vehement French character. Passionate, sensitive, loquacious, fond of dispute
and apt to be blown away by gusts of feeling, the Gaul is wholly unfit for that
heavy decorum, that orderly process of debate, that power of combining
anomalies, which still exist to a great extent in England, but which even there
must eventually grow impossible. Hence the vehement French nation after a brief
experience of each alien manufacture has grown intensely impatient and shipped
it back without superfluous ceremony to its original home. Here is the latent
root of that disheartening failure which has attended France in all her brief
and feverish attempts to discover a stable basis of political advance, of that
intense consequent disgust, that scornful aversion to politics which has led
thinking France to rate it as an indecent harlequin-show in which no serious
man will care to meddle. But if this were all, a superficial observer might
balance a defect and merit on one side by an answering merit and defect on the
other, and conclude that the account was clear; but social status is not the
only department of success in which England
compares unfavourably with France.
There is her fatal incoherency, her want of political cohesion, her want of
social cohesion. A Breton a Basque,a Provençal though no less alien in blood to
the mass of the French people than the lrish, the Welsh, the Scotch to the mass
of the English people, would repel with alarm and abhorrence the mere thought
of impairing the fine solidarity, the homogeneity of sentiment, which the
possession of an agreeable social life has developed in France. And we cannot
sufficiently admire the supreme virtue of that fine social development and
large diffusion of general happiness, which has conserved for France in the
midst of fearful political calamities her splendid cohesiveness as a nation and
as a community. In England
on the other hand we see the sorry spectacle of a great empire lying at the
mercy of disintegrating influences, because the component races have neither
been properly merged in the whole nor persuaded by the offer of a high level of
happiness to value the benefits of solidarity. And if France by her injudicious
choice of mechanism, her political incapacity, her refusal to put her best
blood into politics, has involved herself in fearful political calamities, no
less has England by her exclusive pursuit of machinery, her social
incompetence, her prejudice against a rational equality, her excessive
individualism, entered on an era of fearful social calamities. It is a
suggestive fact that the alienation of sympathy, the strong antipathetic
feelings of Labour towards Capital, are nowhere so marked, the quarrel between
them is nowhere so violent, sustained and ferocious as in the two countries
which are proudest of their institutions and have most systematically neglected
their social development—England and America. It is not therefore unreasonable
to conclude—and had I space and leisure, I should be tempted to show that every
circumstance tends to fortify the conclusion and convert it into a certainty—that
this social neglect is the prime cause of the fearful array of social
calamities, whose first impact has already burst on those proud and successful
countries. But enough has been said, and to discuss the matter exhaustively
would unduly defer the point of more direct importance for ourselves:—I mean
the ominous connection which these truths have with the actual conditions of
politics and society in India.