SRI AUROBINDO MANDIR ANNUAL

sculptor sees the form implicit in it, chisels away the super-
fluous masses, and lo and behold, a beautiful image results from
his exertions! It is not as if he has created the image—he has
only released it from its amorphous prison-house and allowed
it to pursue its career of beauty and breathe the air of freedom.
In like manner, stray words in the Dictionary, like so many
wayside stones, may appear prosaic and harsh and crude ; but
the magic touch of the literary artist will kindle them into a
flame of beauty, that radiates "thoughts that wander through
eternity". The words that a literary artist uses are in physical
appearance just like the words in a Dictionary; but they are not
so to be understood or apprehended; a poet's words are not
printed bundles of letters, nor are they a grouping of pleasure-
giving sounds; while poetry does appeal to the ear and although
iŁ is now-a-days preserved in print, the poetic word ever attempts
to reach the inward ear, to sink into the human soul and enrich
it; the poetic word is the least material of all media and is akin
rather to a winged squadron of the spirit that annihilates space
and time and links the human soul with infinity and eternity.

Ill

Sri Aurobindo, being a literary artist, has perforce to use
words as the medium of his expression. If his father had sent
him, not to the Loretto Convent School at Darjeeling and thence
to London and to Cambridge, but to native schools and colleges
in Calcutta, Sri Aurobindo might have early familiarized himself
with his mother tongue and become in the fulness of time
another Bankim Chandra or Rabindranath, wielding with power
and grace the most dynamic of modern Indian languages. But
that was not to be. English became for all practical purposes
Sri Aurobindo's mother tongue and he acquired in an incredibly
short time an astonishing mastery over this difficult language.
A profound knowledge of Greek and Latin and a fair acquain-
tance with French, Italian and German helped him to study the
language and the literature of the English people both in their
origins and in their present European setting. Back in Indfa
at long last, Sri Aurobindo started reading Sanskrit and Bengali,
and quickly grew proficient in both—but English remained his
mother tongue; he loved Sanskrit and Bengali and mastered
them much as a Sir William Jones loved Sanskrit and studied

88