Do you
remember
Pater's phrase about
Leonardo da Vinci, 'curiosity and the desire of beauty'?
Leonardo da Vinci, 'curiosity and the desire of beauty'?
Sarojini Naidu - Golden Threshold
Naidu.
"Do you know
I have some very beautiful poems floating in the air," she wrote
to me in 1904; "and if the gods are kind I shall cast my soul
like a net and capture them, this year. If the gods are
kind--and grant me a little measure of health. It is all I need
to make my life perfect, for the very 'Spirit of Delight' that
Shelley wrote of dwells in my little home; it is full of the
music of birds in the garden and children in the long arched
verandah. " There are songs about the children in this book; they
are called the Lord of Battles, the Sun of Victory, the
Lotus-born, and the Jewel of Delight.
"My ancestors for thousands of years," I find written in one of
her letters, "have been lovers of the forest and mountain caves,
great dreamers, great scholars, great ascetics. My father is a
dreamer himself, a great dreamer, a great man whose life has been
a magnificent failure. I suppose in the whole of India there are
few men whose learning is greater than his, and I don't think
there are many men more beloved. He has a great white beard and
the profile of Homer, and a laugh that brings the roof down. He
has wasted all his money on two great objects: to help others,
and on alchemy. He holds huge courts every day in his garden of
all the learned men of all religions--Rajahs and beggars and
saints and downright villains all delightfully mixed up, and all
treated as one. And then his alchemy! Oh dear, night and day
the experiments are going on, and every man who brings a new
prescription is welcome as a brother. But this alchemy is, you
know, only the material counterpart of a poet's craving for
Beauty, the eternal Beauty. 'The makers of gold and the makers
of verse,' they are the twin creators that sway the world's
secret desire for mystery; and what in my father is the genius of
curiosity--the very essence of all scientific genius--in me is
the desire for beauty.
Do you remember Pater's phrase about
Leonardo da Vinci, 'curiosity and the desire of beauty'? "
It was the desire of beauty that made her a poet; her "nerves of
delight" were always quivering at the contact of beauty. To
those who knew her in England, all the life of the tiny figure
seemed to concentrate itself in the eyes; they turned towards
beauty as the sunflower turns towards the sun, opening wider and
wider until one saw nothing but the eyes.
She was dressed always in clinging dresses of Eastern silk, and
as she was so small, and her long black hair hung straight down
her back, you might have taken her for a child. She spoke
little, and in a low voice, like gentle music; and she seemed,
wherever she was, to be alone.
Through that soul I seemed to touch and take hold upon the East.
And first there was the wisdom of the East. I have never known
any one who seemed to exist on such "large draughts of intellectual
day" as this child of seventeen, to whom one could tell all one's
personal troubles and agitations, as to a wise old woman. In the
East, maturity comes early; and this child had already lived through
all a woman's life. But there was something else, something hardly
personal, something which belonged to a consciousness older than the
Christian, which I realised, wondered at, and admired, in her passionate
tranquillity of mind, before which everything mean and trivial and
temporary caught fire and burnt away in smoke. Her body was never
without suffering, or her heart without conflict; but neither the
body's weakness nor the heart's violence could disturb that fixed
contemplation, as of Buddha on his lotus-throne.
And along with this wisdom, as of age or of the age of a race,
there was what I can hardly call less than an agony of sensation.
Pain or pleasure transported her, and the whole of pain or
pleasure might be held in a flower's cup or the imagined frown of
a friend. It was never found in those things which to others
seemed things of importance. At the age of twelve she passed the
Matriculation of the Madras University, and awoke to find herself
famous throughout India. "Honestly," she said to me, "I was not
pleased; such things did not appeal to me.
I have some very beautiful poems floating in the air," she wrote
to me in 1904; "and if the gods are kind I shall cast my soul
like a net and capture them, this year. If the gods are
kind--and grant me a little measure of health. It is all I need
to make my life perfect, for the very 'Spirit of Delight' that
Shelley wrote of dwells in my little home; it is full of the
music of birds in the garden and children in the long arched
verandah. " There are songs about the children in this book; they
are called the Lord of Battles, the Sun of Victory, the
Lotus-born, and the Jewel of Delight.
"My ancestors for thousands of years," I find written in one of
her letters, "have been lovers of the forest and mountain caves,
great dreamers, great scholars, great ascetics. My father is a
dreamer himself, a great dreamer, a great man whose life has been
a magnificent failure. I suppose in the whole of India there are
few men whose learning is greater than his, and I don't think
there are many men more beloved. He has a great white beard and
the profile of Homer, and a laugh that brings the roof down. He
has wasted all his money on two great objects: to help others,
and on alchemy. He holds huge courts every day in his garden of
all the learned men of all religions--Rajahs and beggars and
saints and downright villains all delightfully mixed up, and all
treated as one. And then his alchemy! Oh dear, night and day
the experiments are going on, and every man who brings a new
prescription is welcome as a brother. But this alchemy is, you
know, only the material counterpart of a poet's craving for
Beauty, the eternal Beauty. 'The makers of gold and the makers
of verse,' they are the twin creators that sway the world's
secret desire for mystery; and what in my father is the genius of
curiosity--the very essence of all scientific genius--in me is
the desire for beauty.
Do you remember Pater's phrase about
Leonardo da Vinci, 'curiosity and the desire of beauty'? "
It was the desire of beauty that made her a poet; her "nerves of
delight" were always quivering at the contact of beauty. To
those who knew her in England, all the life of the tiny figure
seemed to concentrate itself in the eyes; they turned towards
beauty as the sunflower turns towards the sun, opening wider and
wider until one saw nothing but the eyes.
She was dressed always in clinging dresses of Eastern silk, and
as she was so small, and her long black hair hung straight down
her back, you might have taken her for a child. She spoke
little, and in a low voice, like gentle music; and she seemed,
wherever she was, to be alone.
Through that soul I seemed to touch and take hold upon the East.
And first there was the wisdom of the East. I have never known
any one who seemed to exist on such "large draughts of intellectual
day" as this child of seventeen, to whom one could tell all one's
personal troubles and agitations, as to a wise old woman. In the
East, maturity comes early; and this child had already lived through
all a woman's life. But there was something else, something hardly
personal, something which belonged to a consciousness older than the
Christian, which I realised, wondered at, and admired, in her passionate
tranquillity of mind, before which everything mean and trivial and
temporary caught fire and burnt away in smoke. Her body was never
without suffering, or her heart without conflict; but neither the
body's weakness nor the heart's violence could disturb that fixed
contemplation, as of Buddha on his lotus-throne.
And along with this wisdom, as of age or of the age of a race,
there was what I can hardly call less than an agony of sensation.
Pain or pleasure transported her, and the whole of pain or
pleasure might be held in a flower's cup or the imagined frown of
a friend. It was never found in those things which to others
seemed things of importance. At the age of twelve she passed the
Matriculation of the Madras University, and awoke to find herself
famous throughout India. "Honestly," she said to me, "I was not
pleased; such things did not appeal to me.
