Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra
In the field of fiction, Evelry Waugh’s novels have progressed from the delightful slapstick of Decline and Fall to the haunting depth of Brides head Revisited—a story in which Roman Catholicism shapes the lives of all the characters, but written with so sure a touch that it never slips into didacticism. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge faithfully mirrors the current interest in Oriental mysticism. The religious and ‘spiritual interests of that remarkable novelist Graham Greene are an important part of his just published The Heart of the Matter. Other religious best sellers of recent years (though not of equality) have been Franz Werfel’s The Song of Bernadette, Lloyd Douglas’ The Robe, Bruce Marshall’s The World, the Flesh and Father Smith and Sholem Asch’s The Apostle.
Finally, Thomas Sugrue’s spiritual autobiography, Stranger on the Earth, has achieved critical acclaim if not the accolade of the best-seller list. A complex, strangely beautiful book, its chances of publication ten years ago would have been slight.
Meanwhile there have been the conversions and reconversions. Aldous Huxley, after mordantly ripping society to shreds in such novels as Antic Hay presented the ideal of the well-balanced so-called “Hellenic” man in a number of essays, then did a complete about-face in his novel, Eyeless in Gaza. He now looks to the yogic orient for salvation. His last two novels, After Many a Summer and Time Must Have a Stop, are fictionized recruiting tracts for mysticism.
T. S. Eliot, poet of The Wasteland, announced as long ago as 1927 that he had been converted to Anglo-Catholicism, but the critics forgave him until his Four Quartets in 1943 made it evident that his conversion had permeated his poetry as well as his essays, W. H. Auden, who started out to synthesize Marxism and Freudianism in the Nineteen Thirties, returned to the Anglican Church and proceeded to write his unmistakably Christian nativity play, For the Time Being.
Journals and Magazines Mother India (1949-2022) February 19, 1949 New Trends in Western Thought—The Change of Mind in European Literature Mysticism both Eastern and Western
Now comes the crux of the argument. If this undeniably interesting pictorial style, which established itself in the first quarter of the twentieth century and shows no sign of disappearing in its second quarter, is the genuine expression of a new phase of human experience, how are we to describe the nature of that experience? For the 600 years prior to 1900 it was reasonable to ask: “Does the picture reveal new truths about the visual world? Today the question is no longer relevant. The validity of Picasso or Leger or their followers no longer depends on an emphatic “Yes.” What then is the relevant question?
Forgive me, please, if I indulge in a little concentrated art history. Just before the turn of the century, three revolutionaries laid the foundations of the new style. Cézanne revolted against the Impressionist Obsession with the “temporary”, the snapshot vision of Degas, the attempt of Monet to seize on the shifting light, the rippling water, the scurrying clouds. Everything in Cézanne is permanent, monumental, independent of the momentary effect. Cézanne was the analyst, not the observer.
Seurat revolted against the idea that a picture was a slice of life. He turned it into an organised esthetic whole, an engineering job, compounded of curves and verticals and horizontals and diagonals, each of which had their emotional value—diagonals for movement, horizontals for repose, verticals for energy. Seurat was the theorist, not the observer.
Van Gogh revolted against the idea that a picture was a mirror held up to nature. He turned it into an emotional explosion in which the handling of paint counted for more than the theme. He was the emotionalist, not the observer.
Here were three approaches each of which certainly had its precedent in the art of the past, but none of which had ever been pushed to its logical conclusion. To do that was the task of the early twentieth century. Cézanne’s analysis led inevitably to cubism, Seurat’s emotionalism to the extreme forms of expressionism, in which the picture is almost always more closely related to the artist’s state of mind than to the appearance of nature. The reader will: not have failed to note that these three approaches, though quite different from each other, agree in “rebelling against visual truth”. Realism, for the first time since Giotto, was obsolete.
Journals and Magazines Mother India (1949-2022) March 05, 1949 New Trends in Western Thought—Modern Art: A Revolt and a Revelation The Nature of Modern Experience
In 1882 a determined attack on the problem was formulated. In that year the Society for Psychical Research was founded to conduct a scientific investigation into all phenomena which were prima facie inexplicable by the laws known to physical science. Its earliest task was a systematic attempt to investigate the alleged transmission of thoughts from one mind to another. But the experimental conditions did not approach the standard expected for similar experiments to-day.
Nevertheless, the early experimenters reached one important conclusion—that ‘thought transference’ was too narrow a term to describe the kind of results which were obtained. This led F.W.H. Myers to suggest the word ‘telepathy’ for the communication of impressions of every kind from one mind to another independently of the recognised sensory channels, and ‘telaesthesis’ for the direct cognition of objects or conditions, i.e. by means apparently independent of the senses and under circumstances in which no other mind could be suggested as the source of the information.
Besides the early experimental efforts there were the usual cases of apparent telepathy encountered by people in their everyday lives. The Society paid a good deal of attention to these so-called ‘spontaneous’ cases, a large collection of which was published in 1886 under the title, Phantasms of The Living. Although many of the spontaneous cases exhibit a wealth of evidential detail, there is probably no ease which cannot be explained by normal means, if no limit be set to the counter-hypotheses of chance coincidence, fraud, collusion, lapse of memory, malobservation, etc., taken singly or in combination. Nevertheless the number of cases which can reasonably be classed as of fair quality is considerable, and the a priori improbability of a telephathic interpretation is perhaps somewhat decreased as a result of experimental work under rigorous conditions.
Journals and Magazines Mother India (1949-2022) March 19, 1949 New Trend in Western Thought—the Verdict of Science on Telepathy Beginnings of Modern Investigation
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