Sri Aurobindo
The Mother
to Prithwi Singh
Correspondence (1933-1967)
24 March 1934
Sri Aurobindo
(It is but fair to the Reader to show the other side of the picture. We give below a letter of Sri Aurobindo's about Rabindranath Tagore, written on 24 March 1934 — five years before the start of World War II, and seven years before Tagore's
death.1
It is queer the intellectuals go on talking of creation while all they stand for is collapsing into the Néant2 without their being able to raise a finger to save it. What are you going to create and from what material? Besides, what use is it if a Hitler with his cudgel or a Mussolini with his castor-oil can come at any moment and wash it out or beat it into dust?
But I don't think Tagore's passing into the opposite camp is a certitude. He is sensitive and perhaps a little affected by the positive, robustious, slogan-fed practicality of the day. For I don't see how he can turn his back on all the ideas of a life-time. After all he has been a wayfarer 
towards the same goal as ours in his own way — that is the main thing, the exact stage of advance and putting of the steps are minor matters. So I hope there will be no attack or harsh criticism. Besides, he has had a long and brilliant day creating on a very high level — I should like him to have as peaceful and undisturbed a sunset as may be. You ask what may be the verdict of posterity.3 The immediate verdict after his departure or soon after it may very well be a rough one, — for this is a generation that seems to take a delight in trampling with an almost Nazi rudeness on the bodies of the ancestors, specially the immediate ancestors. I have read with an interested surprise that Napoleon was only a bustling and self-important nincompoop all whose great achievements were done by others, that Shakespeare was “no great things”, and that most other great men were by no means so great as the stupid respect and reverence of past ignorant ages made them out to be! What chance has then Tagore? But these injustices of the moment do not endure — in the end a wise and fair estimate is formed and survives the changes of Time.
As for your question, Tagore, of course, belonged to an age which had faith in its ideas and whose very denials were creative affirmations. That makes an immense difference.4 His later development, too, was the note of the day and it expressed a tangible hope of fusion into something new and true — therefore it could create. Now all that idealism has been smashed to pieces by the immense adverse Event and everybody is busy exposing its weaknesses — but nobody knows what to put in its place. A mixture of scepticism and slogans, “Heil-Hitler” and the Fascist salute and Five-Year Plan and the beating of everybody into one 
amorphous shape, a disabused denial of all ideals on one side and on the other a blind “shut-my-eyes and shut-everybody's-eyes” plunge into the bog in the hope of finding some firm foundation there, will not carry us very far. And what else is there? Until new spiritual values are discovered, no great enduring creation is possible.