Preface, Fasting and Divinity, The master artist on drama, from Sri Aurobindo
“The day when we get back to the ancient worship of delight and beauty will be the day of our salvation. The ancient Indian critics dignified the essence of poetry as Rasa and by that word they meant a concentrated taste, a spiritual essence of emotion, an essential aesthetic, the soul’s pleasure in the pure and perfect sources of feeling. The essential and decisive step of the future art of poetry will perhaps be to discover that it is not the form which either fixes or reveals the spirit, but the spirit which makes out of itself the form and the word. The spirit creates perfectly because it creates directly out of self and is spontaneously, supra-intellectually all-conscious.
A spiritual change must equally come over the intention and form of the drama when the age has determined its tendencies. The drama of the future will differ from the romantic play and tragedy because the thing, that which dramatic speech will represent, will be something more internal than the life-soul and its brilliant pageant of passion and character. The external web of events and action, whether sparing or abundant, strongly marked or slight in incidence, will only be outward threads and indices and the movement that will throughout occupy the mind will be the procession of the soul phases or the turns of soul action. The personage of the play will be the spirit in man diversified or multitudinous in many human beings, whose inner spiritual, much more than external, life relations will determine the development, and the culminations will be steps of solution of those spiritual problems of our existence which after all are the root of and include and inform all the others. It will not be limited either by any old or new convention, but transmute the old moulds and invent others and arrange according to the truth of its vision, its acts and the evolution of its dramatic process or the refrain of its lyrical or the march of its epic motive. This clue at least is the largest and the most suggestive for a new and living future creation in the form of drama.”
