A literary essay: The immortal evolutions and revolutions of Art

The immortal evolutions and revolutions of Art
By Mayborn Lyngdoh R

Man has been obsessed with the idea of perfection from time immemorial – Narcissistic, self-centred and selfish. As off-guard as one may seem, these traits dwelled in him from when he was just a babe, pure, holy and clean; corrupt free. There was not enough of anything. Feelings were measured on the pendulum of words, sometimes inarticulately deficient in weight. Words gave rise to another set of words and those to another. We have different words with the same meaning, one trying to better the other. Take for example: ‘Peace’ and ‘harmony’. Further, Peace alone is now insufficient to stand on its own. Poets write about ‘perfect peace’ as if peace alone fails to signify the very meaning it carries. It becomes a grammatical mistake. What’s even more intriguing is the potential of perfection to truly define the passenger it carries. We find words like True-perfection, True-Peace, True-love, and true-hero in contrast to Perfect-peace, Perfect-love, Perfect-hero, and Perfect-harmony. We are left baffled with a question as to which one truly describes the meaning it claims to signify. Which one is true or truly true, if any really carrying the load of the signified and if one of the myriad tug of witty wars, baffled which one would sustain? Which one carries an alarming effect or which one carries a higher meaning?

Artists are obsessed with sublimity. From the early Greek masters to the modern day philosophers and writers, we are being constantly fed with a myriad prescriptions aiming not at the cure but as an experimentation to know more. We cannot blame anyone. Curiosity is in our very blood. The weight of the world has been hung to the feeble, curious, selfish, incapable hands of Adam, destined to eat the fruit from the middle of the garden. He wanted to be like God. Headed by Chaucer, concentrating on the Periods of English literature, we chronologically went from one Age to another, each trying to outdo the predecessor in style, diction, content, theme, and genre. Eminent critics and scholars have been very careful in examining and distinguishing one from the other. They, however, fail to extract the very component that umbrella all of them under the one roof; Art. Initially, we had ‘consumption’; now we have tuberculosis. Intriguingly, we also have a heart attack, while the more detailed surgeons call it a cardiac arrest. We have only moved ahead in time and description and prescription, but the disease remains the same. Art is like water that is available in all the different form,s each with the same purpose which is, sustaining life; while with art, its sustaining the very purpose of life.

The curfew tolls the knell of parting days (From the poem, Elegy writtten in a Country Churchyard)
Let us begin and carry up this corpse,
Singing together. (From the poem, A Grammarian Funeral)

As simple as it can be carved, how meaningful a perfect oscillating liaison painted for a perfect mating to any age. Time and time again – a masterpiece is first felt only later crafted by a force to produce. Emotion is not forced, rather overwhelming.

Wordsworth has rightly said that poetry is the perfect overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity. We also find impressions of the living nature of the poet which awakens in every single individual that suggests a delightful characteristic of Wordsworth’s poetry which seems to awaken rather than create an impression; he stirs our memory deeply, so that in reading him we live once more in the vague, beautiful wonderland of our own childhood as-

children run to lisp their sire’s return.
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

There is a constant back-and-forth oscillation of focus from Nature to Human Nature and back. A constant attempt of penis-fencing by one age over the other in particular – the Neo-classicals. There is a constant attempt to create and recreate. Blind ostracism – a parallel sublime pedestal as the mightiest of the Classical writers. Meticulously, a reconstruction was erected by Pope and Dryden. The poetry of the first half of the century as typified in the work of Pope, is polished and witty enough but artificial; it lacks fire, fine feeling enthusiasm, the glow of the Elizabethan Age, and the moral earnestness of Puritanism. So much were shouldered to the feeble shoulders of heroic couplets, rhyme, metre and a higher scholarly polished traditional imperatives of the classical culture which in a word interests us in a study of farcical life rather than delights or inspires us by its appeal to the imagination.

In such an Age Thomas Gray, whose verse anticipated much of what became the characteristic features of English Romantic poetry, was an important transition from Neo-classicism to Romanticism. Gray’s writings foreshadowed many of the possibilities of the use of imagination in English poetry, yet he was very much rooted in the actual circumstances of his time. He provided an extension to poetry to what Johnson did in Drama and Prose. The author of the greatest Elegy is the most scholarly and well-balanced of all the Early Romantic poets. Like his anonymous master John Milton whom moved by his best friend’s death went on to record the most beautiful pastoral poem to- ever be written in the English language whereas Gray on the other hand found a good friend in Horace Walpole who took him abroad for a three year tour of the continent, helped shape his creative art to finesse his imaginative introspective observation to produce the most beautiful and complete poem in the Human language. The sense of social purpose that is evident in his verse stemmed from an orientation that drew on the traditional imperatives of English Culture.

If we are to follow sequentially, we can clearly find an elongated string that has followed from the Father of English Literature; Chaucer in The Friar

There was a Friar, a wanton one and merry
A limiter, a very festive fellow
Which clearly echoes in Pope’s Epistle to Miss Blount
In these gay thoughts the Loves and graces shine . . .
His art may happy nature seem.

in between we have Sidney’s Nightingale given flight only in John Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale when Sidney writes:

O Philomela fair, O take some gladness,
That here is a juster cause of painful sadness
Thine earth now springs, mine fadeth;
Thy thorn without, my thorn my heart invadeth.

In the poem, Sidney is impersonalising his pessimistic reality, effacing towards an optimistic endeavour enveloping to –

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the tree
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

There is a chronological fluctuation every now and then. The juxtaposition of Nature and Human-Nature; object and objectified; signifier and the signified. Eliot, throughout his career as a critic-poet, has vehemently attacked the Romantics for their excessive outpouring of emotions in their poetry. To him – poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion. He, however also added towards the end of the Essay Tradition and the Individual Talent that the emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. If scanned critically, a question tickles as how can a poet be impersonal if he is blocking his emotions. In doing so he is not being impersonal but personal as he is directly blocking Art. The above statement also leaves a huge gap of contradiction as surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done is nothing but a turning loose of emotions. It can also be read as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. The escape from emotion is nothing but a recollection in tranquillity. Eliot is in a way not trying to attack the Romantics but Art. One can only attack art with art. As a result, nothing is destroyed; only something more beautiful can come about. Beauty is truth and truth beauty (Keats). According to WB Yeats. Art is a monument(s) of its own magnificence. No matter how faithful one claims to be to their Age, one cannot escape to not be influenced either directly or accidentally by their predecessors or anonymous predecessors. We can claim to attempt to be pure. Breathe, strictly only oxygen. Naturally, it is impossible. In indulging in artificial means, we might succeed by carrying an oxygen cylinder and attaching ourselves to a hose. But even then we cannot help but respire carbondioxide and in the process again taking abit of carbondioxide everytime we breathe not to mention the difficulties in mobilising ourselves and the contortion our body would force to by its weight if we are to carry on our back. Therefore, there is and always be a mis-devotion battening from the nectar gadding here and there but extracted only from the one true source – ART. True Art cannot be categorized to any man-made age. Art has an aureole immortality which is the same yesterday, today and forever. Interestingly Eliot’s Love song of J Alfred Prufrock –

There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands,
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me.
Is but a rhetorical answer to Shakespeare’s –
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore
So do our minutes hasten to their end; . . .
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.

Being an influential writer, Eliot, as much as he has high regards for the man, he is also motivated by a passionate competitiveness in dethroning him as the Greatest English Writer “Of All Time”. Eliot is one of the most learned men in the Modern Era. He is intimidated by the fact that an anonymous rustic writer should be able to produce masterpieces standing the test of time, catapulting the likes of Dryden, Pope, John Lyly, and the likes. He, being a well-bred scholar, will attempt to brush off the legacy of this man from the throne of English Literature to cement his own legacy as the Greatest. There will be time to murder and create. Shakespeare has been living his great moments its time someone succeeds him, and by that someone, Eliot means Himself. Time for you and time for me – The love song is in itself a complete revision and re-rendition, vivifying the various epochs of literature.

There will be time, there will be time. . .
And time yet for a hundred indecision,
And a hundred visions and revisions. . .
Time to wonder, “Do I dare? And “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair-

We can also psychoanalyse the poem as the overwhelming statement made by Marvel’s To His coy Mistress–

Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime
We should sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.

The direction is praise and pseudo clear and simple, only the literal dexterity has evolved. In both cases the poets embark on some remarkable hyperbole in a pseudo-denunciation. There is urgency in both poems. The only difference being – an urgency of perception. The focus shifts from the passive, as in Coy Mistress to the personal in Prufrock. There is a constant drive. An attempt at immortality through art. Shakespeare wrote about it in his 151 sonets, Milton in his Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Spenser in his Amoretti: Sonnet no 79, Donne in Relique and the list goes on. Yeats had written, I think, if I could be given a month in antiquity and leave to spend it in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened St Sophia and closed the academy of Plato. I think I could find in some little wine shop, some philosophical worker in mosaic who could answer all my questions. . . I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, aesthetic and practical life were one. . . that architects and artificers spoke to the multitude and few alike.

Keats was a Romantic poet, full of intense passion and desire, yet shy and reserved. He was a young man with all the determination and melancholy of a teenager on a Romantic quest to be among the English poets when he died. He adds amplification to every Ode, including in an insight-out introspection and ‘extrospection’ of the innermost fantasies, in an attempt to escape reality. Is it perfume from a dress that makes me so digress? Keats escaped to an abstract fantasy while Eliot kept a reality check. Negative capability is a man capable of uncertainties and doubts, without feeling after fact or reason. We have gone from the Narrative, to the Metaphysical, Pastorals, Elegiac, Satiric, Ballads, Mock-epic, epitaph, Romantic, Prosodic, Monologues: Dramatic and Interior, and last but not the least, the Confessional. They are all nerves that carry the same blood in the body. They are nothing but different discourses. Art is an emotional response. It cannot be neglected or alienated. It is the combination of H2 + O = WATER. Art has a thick but elastic skin which can be stretched out to any direction, moulded into the symphonies of Beethoven or the Oedipus of Sophocles or the Epithalamion of Spenser or in Michelangelo’s Statue of David or in the smile of Da Vinci’s Monalisa. There is no fixed place from where an influence can orbit from. True Art can come from anywhere. There is no extra secret ingredient. Anybody can cook. You do not choose Art; Art chooses you.

The essay was written in 2016 when the writer was pursuing his Master’s from Pondicherry University.

Mayborn Lyngdoh Ryntathiang