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<b><font size="4">Art and
Katharsis</font></b></p>
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<BR>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">ART, we all know, is concerned with the Beautiful; it is
no less intimately connected with the True; the Good too is in like
manner part and parcel of the &aelig;esthetic movement. For, Art not
only delights or illumines, it uplifts also to the same degree. Only
it must be noted that the uplifting aimed at or effected is not a
mere moral or ethical edification – even as the Truth which Art
experiences or expresses is not primarily the truth of external facts
and figures in the scientific manner, nor the Beauty it envisages or
creates the merely pleasant and the pretty.</span></P>
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&nbsp;</P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">There is a didactic Art that looks openly and crudely to
moral hygiene. And because of this, there arose, as a protest and in
opposition, a free-lance art that sought to pursue art for art's sake
and truth for truth's sake – even if that truth and that art were
unpleasant and repellent to the morality-ridden sophisticated
consciousness. Or perhaps it may have been the other way round:
because of the degeneracy of Art from its high and serious and epic
nobility and sublimity to lesser levels of &aelig;sthetic hedonism
and dilettantism that the didactic took its rise and sought to yoke
art to duty, to moral welfare and social service. Not that there is
an inherent impossibility of moralising art becoming good art in its
own way; but great art is essen&shy;tially a-moral – not in the
sense of being infra-moral, but in the sense of being supra-moral.</span></P>
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&nbsp;</P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Art does not tend towards the Good in the manner of the
moralist. It does not teach or preach that virtue is to be pursued
and vice to be shunned, that a good deed is rewarded and a wrong one
punished. Poetic justice, of the direct and crude style, is a moral
code or dogma, and, if imposed upon the &aelig;esthetic movement,
serves only to fetter and curb and 
</span></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
181</span></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><span style="font-size:12pt;">twist
it. Art opens the vision to a higher good than what the conventions
of moral idealism can frame. Great art does not follow the lines laid
down by the ethical mentality, not only because this mentality cannot
embody the true truth, but also because it does not give us the Good
which art should aim at, that is to say, the purest and the highest
good.</span></P>
			<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">&nbsp;</P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Aristotle speaks of the purifying function of the tragic
art. How is the purification effected? By the evocation of the
feel&shy;ings of pity and terror. For such feelings widen the
sympathies, pull us out of our small egoistic personal ephemeral
pleasures and put us in contact with what is to be shared and enjoyed
in wide commonalty. Tragedy, in this way, initiates the spectator
into the enjoyment that is born not of desire and gain but of
detachment and freedom.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">The uplifting power of Art is inherent in its nature,
for Art itself is the outcome of an uplifted nature. Art is the
expression of a heightened consciousness. The ordinary consciousness
in which man lives and moves is narrow, limited, obscure, falter&shy;ing,
unhappy – it is the abode of all that is evil and ugly; it is
inartistic. The poetic zeal, enthusiasm or frenzy, when it seizes the
consciousness, at once lifts it high into a state that is
characterised by wideness and depth and a new and fresh exhilarating
intensity of perception and experience. We seem to arrive at the very
fountain-head, where things take birth and are full of an unspoilt
life and power and beauty and light and harmony. A line burdened with
the whole tragedy of earthly existence such as Shakespeare's:</span></P>
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&nbsp;</P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain...</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">or the Virgilian syllables ringing, as it were, with the
crash of destiny and the doom of the world:</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;"><BR>
</span></P>
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<I><span style="font-size:12pt;">feror ingenti eireumdata noete</span></I></P>
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<I><span style="font-size:12pt;">Invalidasque tibi tendens, heu! non, tua palmas. . .</span></I></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">even if they make us sad do not depress the soul; it is
a divine sadness fraught with a profound calm and a strange poignant
sweetness of secret delight. The rhythm and the sound and the
suggestions so insinuate themselves into our nerve and blood 
</span></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
182</span></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><span style="font-size:12pt;">that
these seem to be sublimated – as if by a process of oxygenation –
to a finer substance, a purer and more limpid and vibrant valency. A
consciousness opens in our very flesh and marrow that enables us to
pierce the veil of things and pass beyond and understand – see and
experience – the why and the how and the whither of it all. It is a
consciousness cosmic in its purview and disposition, which even like
the Creator could contem&shy;plate all and declare it all as </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">good.
</span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">Indeed, this is the Good which Art at its highest seeks to
envisage and embody – the </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">summum bonum </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">that accompanies a
summit consciousness. It is idle to say that all or most poets have
this revelatory vision of the Seer – Rishi – but a poet is a poet
in so far as he is capable of this vision; otherwise he remains more
or less either a moralist or a mere &aelig;sthete.</span></P>
			<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">&nbsp;</P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Whatever is ugly and gross, all the ills and evils 
of life – that is to say, what appears as such to our external mind and senses – 
when they have passed through the crucible of the poet&#39;s consciousness undergoes 
a sea-change and puts on an otherworldly beauty and value. We know of the 
alchemy of poetic transformation that was so characteristic of Wordsworth's manner and
to which the poet was never tired of referring, how the physical and
brute nature – even a most insignificant and meaningless and
unshapely object in it attains a spiritual sense and beauty when the
poet takes it up and treasures it in his tranquil and luminous and
in-gathered consciousness, his &quot;inward eye&quot;. A crude
feeling, a raw passion, a tumult of the senses, in the same way,
sifted through the poetic perception, becomes something that opens
magic casements, glimpses the silence of the farthest Hebrides, wafts
us into the bliss of the invisible and the beyond. 
</span></P>
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&nbsp;</P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">The voice of Art is sweetly persuasive – </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">kantasmmita,</span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">
as the Sanskrit rhetoricians say-it is the voice of the beloved, not
that of the school-master. The education of Poetry is like the
education of Nature: the poet said of the child that “grew in sun
and showerâ€ – 
</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">And beauty born of murmuring sound</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Shall pass into her face.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">
Even so the beauty of poetic creation, when we
contemplate it</span></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
183</span></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><span style="font-size:12pt;">and
live in it, automatically and inevitably steals into our
consciousness, works a subtle change in our nature and by elevating
and refining it makes us, for the moment at least, less crude and
obscure and earthy things that we usually are.</span></P>
<P ALIGN="center" style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
184</span></FONT></P>
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