The Arts: Education for the Soul

Between them music, art and poetry are a perfect education for the soul; they make and keep its movements purified, selfcontrolled, deep and harmonious.   Poetry raises the emotions and gives each its separate delight. Art stills the emotions and teaches them the delight of a restrained and limited satisfaction. Music deepens the emotions and harmonises them with each other. These, therefore, are agents which cannot profitably be neglected by humanity on its onward march or degraded to the mere satisfaction of sensuous pleasure which will disintegrate rather than build the character.  They are, when properly used, great educating, edifying and civilising forces.         [From The Hour of God] Art, poetry music are not yoga, not in themselves things spiritual any more than philosophy is a thing spiritual or Science.  But one has to add that all can be turned into a first means towards the realisation to the Divine.   As one offers a flower, a prayer, an act to the Divine, one can offer too a created form of beauty, a song, a poem, an image, a strain of music, and gain through it a contact, a response or an experience.  And when that divine consciousness has been entered or when it grows within, then too its expression in life through these things is not excluded from yoga Art, poetry, music, as they are in their ordinary functioning, create mental and vital, not spiritual values; but they can be turned to a higher end, and then, like all things that are capable of linking our consciousness to the Divine, they are transmuted and become spiritual and can be admitted as part of a life of yoga.         [From Letters on Yoga] Music, no doubt, goes nearest to the infinite and to the essence of things becasue it relies wholly on the ethereal vehicle, sabda; but painting and sculpture have their revenge by liberating visible form into ecstasy, while poetry though it canntot do with sound what music does, yet can make a many-stringed harmony, a sound revelation winging the creation by the word and setting afloat vivid suggestions of form and colour. Who shall decide between such claims or be a  judge between these godheads?         [From The Future Poetry]