Beauty to Rabindra Nath Tagore is that which gives joy without any sense of utility. It is disembodied joy. In the experience of ordinary delight there is the satisfaction of getting something, realisation of some fulfillment. But there may be some desire or want also associated with the delight of beauty. Herbet Read considers beauty as unity of formal relation among our sense-perception. It is a very fluctuating phenomenon, which finds diverse expression at different places and different times. Its consciousness conveys rhythm, unity and harmony. Spirituality, man abhors chaos, disorder and ugliness. In his heart burns a deathless desire for perfection. Thus beauty feeds the soul of man. It brings the soul in contact with a world of new dimensions-a world of Truth.
Truth is not fact. It is more generalised fact. Moulton saya, "The opposite of truth is false and that of fact is another fact. Facts are raw material which by generalisation can be manufactured into truth". Artistic truth is the emotional apprehension of fact. Ultimate truth is eternal immutable and final. It is true to all times and all ages. Realisation of truth is the perception of higher reality behind appearances, behind the changes which are outward and superficial.
Too see things in their beauty is to see things in their Truth. What the wise imagination seizes as beauty must be Truth. It means Beauty is truth arrived at through intuitive perception and intellectualised- an imagination weight weighed with- thought and judgement. The excellence of all art is its intensity capable of making all disagreeableness evaporate from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth.
For example in the poem Grecian Urn of Keats external does not constitute the main interest of the poet. The Urn suggests something deeper. The imaginative eye peers through the outer form and the poet's heart was stirred by imaginative picture of Greek Life. The poet describes a series of pictures or scenes that he imagines must have formed the basis of the life of an artist at work and then he gives us his own definition of an growing art.
The Urn is a transparent glass through which there is revealed a miniature pageant of the past merging into the present. The tiny varities of the old ages as perceived, interpreted and presented in this piece of art tickles Keats' imagination and sets in aflame. here comes the sense of discovery of truth and he sees not a moral or a religious idea but a principle of existence, a law of life and insight into the universal heart of man. Thus to Keats, Truth arrived at, through emotionalised imaginative perception, is Beauty and beauty is Truth. He said: "I can never conceive of Truth except through the clear conception, of its Beauty-Its imaginative reality.
'Satyam, Shivam Sundaram'. The greater the element of Truth the deeper the perception of Beauty. truth discovers the permanent, the eternal and the final. Thus it transcends the decadence and dissolution, and the decay and death. It helps man to transcend the limitation of time and space. It tries to touch perfection in the domain of rational investigation and reasoned approach. Beauty, on the other hand is perfection in the field of aestheticism-the desire to discover unity and harmony.
They express the man's ideal and are identical; Beauty helps to discover Truth. A man is enchanted by the beauty of a flower-pure soul of the flower. Tagore feels, holds, a commerce the soul of man that rises higher than the mundane level of his existence. In this moment of the activity of the soul, beauty takes us deeper into the reality of Eternal Spirit which lurks behind everything.
[ Part 2 ]
[ Part 2 ]
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