Chapter 59143–144

What is this “eternal symbol”4 which Sri Aurobindo speaks of here?

The eternal symbol is the secret soul of Nature and it is the Truth of this soul that the poet and the artist must seek and express.

7 September 1969 146 – I find in Shakespeare a far greater and more consistent universalist than the Greeks. All his creatures are universal types from Lancelot Gobbo and his dog up to Lear and Hamlet.

147 – The Greeks sought universality by omitting all finer individual touches; Shakespeare sought it more successfully by universalising the rarest individual details of character. That which Nature uses for concealing from us the Infinite, Shakespeare used for revealing the Ananta-guna in man to the eye of humanity.

148 – Shakespeare, who invented the figure of holding up the mirror to Nature, was the one poet who never con-descended to a copy, a photograph or a shadow. The reader who sees in Falstaff, Macbeth, Lear or Hamlet imitations of Nature, has either no inner eye of the soul or has been hypnotised by a formula.

149 – Where in material Nature wilt thou find Falstaff, Macbeth or Lear? Shadows and hints of them she possesses, but they themselves tower over her.

4 The translation used was based on a text which read “eternal symbol” instead of “external symbol”.