I was
speaking
to some one of the joy we have in our personality.
Tagore - Creative Unity
Produced by Michael Ciesielski, Irma Spehar and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www. pgdp. net
CREATIVE UNITY
BY
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
MACMILLAN AND CO. , LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1922
MACMILLAN AND CO. , LIMITED
LONDON ? BOMBAY ? CALCUTTA ? MADRAS
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK ? BOSTON ? CHICAGO
DALLAS ? SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
COPYRIGHT
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
TO
DR. EDWIN H. LEWIS
INTRODUCTION
It costs me nothing to feel that I am; it is no burden to me. And yet
if the mental, physical, chemical, and other innumerable facts
concerning all branches of knowledge which have united in myself could
be broken up, they would prove endless. It is some untold mystery of
unity in me, that has the simplicity of the infinite and reduces the
immense mass of multitude to a single point.
This One in me knows the universe of the many. But, in whatever it
knows, it knows the One in different aspects. It knows this room only
because this room is One to it, in spite of the seeming contradiction
of the endless facts contained in the single fact of the room. Its
knowledge of a tree is the knowledge of a unity, which appears in the
aspect of a tree.
This One in me is creative. Its creations are a pastime, through which
it gives expression to an ideal of unity in its endless show of
variety. Such are its pictures, poems, music, in which it finds joy
only because they reveal the perfect forms of an inherent unity.
This One in me not only seeks unity in knowledge for its understanding
and creates images of unity for its delight; it also seeks union in
love for its fulfilment. It seeks itself in others. This is a fact,
which would be absurd had there been no great medium of truth to give
it reality. In love we find a joy which is ultimate because it is the
ultimate truth. Therefore it is said in the Upanishads that the
_advaitam_ is _anantam_,--"the One is Infinite"; that the _advaitam_
is _anandam_,--"the One is Love. "
To give perfect expression to the One, the Infinite, through the
harmony of the many; to the One, the Love, through the sacrifice of
self, is the object alike of our individual life and our society.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION v
THE POET'S RELIGION 3
THE CREATIVE IDEAL 31
THE RELIGION OF THE FOREST 45
AN INDIAN FOLK RELIGION 69
EAST AND WEST 93
THE MODERN AGE 115
THE SPIRIT OF FREEDOM 133
THE NATION 143
WOMAN AND HOME 157
AN EASTERN UNIVERSITY 169
THE POET'S RELIGION
I
Civility is beauty of behaviour. It requires for its perfection
patience, self-control, and an environment of leisure. For genuine
courtesy is a creation, like pictures, like music. It is a harmonious
blending of voice, gesture and movement, words and action, in which
generosity of conduct is expressed. It reveals the man himself and has
no ulterior purpose.
Our needs are always in a hurry. They rush and hustle, they are rude
and unceremonious; they have no surplus of leisure, no patience for
anything else but fulfilment of purpose. We frequently see in our
country at the present day men utilising empty kerosene cans for
carrying water. These cans are emblems of discourtesy; they are curt
and abrupt, they have not the least shame for their unmannerliness,
they do not care to be ever so slightly more than useful.
The instruments of our necessity assert that we must have food,
shelter, clothes, comforts and convenience. And yet men spend an
immense amount of their time and resources in contradicting this
assertion, to prove that they are not a mere living catalogue of
endless wants; that there is in them an ideal of perfection, a sense
of unity, which is a harmony between parts and a harmony with
surroundings.
The quality of the infinite is not the magnitude of extension, it is
in the _Advaitam_, the mystery of Unity. Facts occupy endless time and
space; but the truth comprehending them all has no dimension; it is
One. Wherever our heart touches the One, in the small or the big, it
finds the touch of the infinite.
I was speaking to some one of the joy we have in our personality. I
said it was because we were made conscious by it of a spirit of unity
within ourselves. He answered that he had no such feeling of joy about
himself, but I was sure he exaggerated. In all probability he had been
suffering from some break of harmony between his surroundings and the
spirit of unity within him, proving all the more strongly its truth.
The meaning of health comes home to us with painful force when disease
disturbs it; since health expresses the unity of the vital functions
and is accordingly joyful. Life's tragedies occur, not to demonstrate
their own reality, but to reveal that eternal principle of joy in
life, to which they gave a rude shaking. It is the object of this
Oneness in us to realise its infinity by perfect union of love with
others. All obstacles to this union create misery, giving rise to the
baser passions that are expressions of finitude, of that separateness
which is negative and therefore _maya_.
The joy of unity within ourselves, seeking expression, becomes
creative; whereas our desire for the fulfilment of our needs is
constructive. The water vessel, taken as a vessel only, raises the
question, "Why does it exist at all? " Through its fitness of
construction, it offers the apology for its existence. But where it is
a work of beauty it has no question to answer; it has nothing to do,
but to be. It reveals in its form a unity to which all that seems
various in it is so related that, in a mysterious manner, it strikes
sympathetic chords to the music of unity in our own being.
What is the truth of this world? It is not in the masses of substance,
not in the number of things, but in their relatedness, which neither
can be counted, nor measured, nor abstracted. It is not in the
materials which are many, but in the expression which is one. All our
knowledge of things is knowing them in their relation to the Universe,
in that relation which is truth. A drop of water is not a particular
assortment of elements; it is the miracle of a harmonious mutuality,
in which the two reveal the One. No amount of analysis can reveal to
us this mystery of unity. Matter is an abstraction; we shall never be
able to realise what it is, for our world of reality does not
acknowledge it. Even the giant forces of the world, centripetal and
centrifugal, are kept out of our recognition. They are the
day-labourers not admitted into the audience-hall of creation. But
light and sound come to us in their gay dresses as troubadours singing
serenades before the windows of the senses. What is constantly before
us, claiming our attention, is not the kitchen, but the feast; not the
anatomy of the world, but its countenance. There is the dancing ring
of seasons; the elusive play of lights and shadows, of wind and water;
the many-coloured wings of erratic life flitting between birth and
death. The importance of these does not lie in their existence as mere
facts, but in their language of harmony, the mother-tongue of our own
soul, through which they are communicated to us.
We grow out of touch with this great truth, we forget to accept its
invitation and its hospitality, when in quest of external success our
works become unspiritual and unexpressive. This is what Wordsworth
complained of when he said:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
Little we see in Nature that is ours.
But it is not because the world has grown too familiar to us; on the
contrary, it is because we do not see it in its aspect of unity,
because we are driven to distraction by our pursuit of the
fragmentary.
Materials as materials are savage; they are solitary; they are ready
to hurt one another. They are like our individual impulses seeking the
unlimited freedom of wilfulness. Left to themselves they are
destructive. But directly an ideal of unity raises its banner in their
centre, it brings these rebellious forces under its sway and creation
is revealed--the creation which is peace, which is the unity of
perfect relationship. Our greed for eating is in itself ugly and
selfish, it has no sense of decorum; but when brought under the ideal
of social fellowship, it is regulated and made ornamental; it is
changed into a daily festivity of life. In human nature sexual passion
is fiercely individual and destructive, but dominated by the ideal of
love, it has been made to flower into a perfection of beauty, becoming
in its best expression symbolical of the spiritual truth in man which
is his kinship of love with the Infinite. Thus we find it is the One
which expresses itself in creation; and the Many, by giving up
opposition, make the revelation of unity perfect.
II
I remember, when I was a child, that a row of cocoanut trees by our
garden wall, with their branches beckoning the rising sun on the
horizon, gave me a companionship as living as I was myself. I know it
was my imagination which transmuted the world around me into my own
world--the imagination which seeks unity, which deals with it. But we
have to consider that this companionship was true; that the universe
in which I was born had in it an element profoundly akin to my own
imaginative mind, one which wakens in all children's natures the
Creator, whose pleasure is in interweaving the web of creation with
His own patterns of many-coloured strands. It is something akin to us,
and therefore harmonious to our imagination. When we find some strings
vibrating in unison with others, we know that this sympathy carries in
it an eternal reality. The fact that the world stirs our imagination
in sympathy tells us that this creative imagination is a common truth
both in us and in the heart of existence. Wordsworth says:
I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
In this passage the poet says we are less forlorn in a world which we
meet with our imagination. That can only be possible if through our
imagination is revealed, behind all appearances, the reality which
gives the touch of companionship, that is to say, something which has
an affinity to us. An immense amount of our activity is engaged in
making images, not for serving any useful purpose or formulating
rational propositions, but for giving varied responses to the varied
touches of this reality. In this image-making the child creates his
own world in answer to the world in which he finds himself. The child
in us finds glimpses of his eternal playmate from behind the veil of
things, as Proteus rising from the sea, or Triton blowing his wreathed
horn. And the playmate is the Reality, that makes it possible for the
child to find delight in activities which do not inform or bring
assistance but merely express. There is an image-making joy in the
infinite, which inspires in us our joy in imagining. The rhythm of
cosmic motion produces in our mind the emotion which is creative.
A poet has said about his destiny as a dreamer, about the
worthlessness of his dreams and yet their permanence:
I hang 'mid men my heedless head,
And my fruit is dreams, as theirs is bread:
The goodly men and the sun-hazed sleeper,
Time shall reap; but after the reaper
The world shall glean to me, me the sleeper.
The dream persists; it is more real than even bread which has
substance and use. The painted canvas is durable and substantial; it
has for its production and transport to market a whole array of
machines and factories. But the picture which no factory can produce
is a dream, a _maya_, and yet it, not the canvas, has the meaning of
ultimate reality.
A poet describes Autumn:
I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like Silence, listening
To silence, for no lonely bird would sing
Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn.
Of April another poet sings:
April, April,
Laugh thy girlish laughter;
Then the moment after
Weep thy girlish tears!
April, that mine ears
Like a lover greetest,
If I tell thee, sweetest,
All my hopes and fears.
April, April,
Laugh thy golden laughter.
But the moment after
Weep thy golden tears!
This Autumn, this April,--are they nothing but phantasy?
Let us suppose that the Man from the Moon comes to the earth and
listens to some music in a gramophone. He seeks for the origin of the
delight produced in his mind. The facts before him are a cabinet made
of wood and a revolving disc producing sound; but the one thing which
is neither seen nor can be explained is the truth of the music, which
his personality must immediately acknowledge as a personal message. It
is neither in the wood, nor in the disc, nor in the sound of the
notes. If the Man from the Moon be a poet, as can reasonably be
supposed, he will write about a fairy imprisoned in that box, who sits
spinning fabrics of songs expressing her cry for a far-away magic
casement opening on the foam of some perilous sea, in a fairyland
forlorn. It will not be literally, but essentially true. The facts of
the gramophone make us aware of the laws of sound, but the music gives
us personal companionship. The bare facts about April are alternate
sunshine and showers; but the subtle blending of shadows and lights,
of murmurs and movements, in April, gives us not mere shocks of
sensation, but unity of joy as does music. Therefore when a poet sees
the vision of a girl in April, even a downright materialist is in
sympathy with him. But we know that the same individual would be
menacingly angry if the law of heredity or a geometrical problem were
described as a girl or a rose--or even as a cat or a camel. For these
intellectual abstractions have no magical touch for our lute-strings
of imagination. They are no dreams, as are the harmony of bird-songs,
rain-washed leaves glistening in the sun, and pale clouds floating in
the blue.
The ultimate truth of our personality is that we are no mere
biologists or geometricians; "we are the dreamers of dreams, we are
the music-makers. " This dreaming or music-making is not a function of
the lotus-eaters, it is the creative impulse which makes songs not
only with words and tunes, lines and colours, but with stones and
metals, with ideas and men:
With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory.
I have been told by a scholar friend of mine that by constant practice
in logic he has weakened his natural instinct of faith. The reason is,
faith is the spectator in us which finds the meaning of the drama from
the unity of the performance; but logic lures us into the greenroom
where there is stagecraft but no drama at all; and then this logic
nods its head and wearily talks about disillusionment. But the
greenroom, dealing with its fragments, looks foolish when questioned,
or wears the sneering smile of Mephistopheles; for it does not have
the secret of unity, which is somewhere else. It is for faith to
answer, "Unity comes to us from the One, and the One in ourselves
opens the door and receives it with joy. " The function of poetry and
the arts is to remind us that the greenroom is the greyest of
illusions, and the reality is the drama presented before us, all its
paint and tinsel, masks and pageantry, made one in art. The ropes and
wheels perish, the stage is changed; but the dream which is drama
remains true, for there remains the eternal Dreamer.
III
Poetry and the arts cherish in them the profound faith of man in the
unity of his being with all existence, the final truth of which is the
truth of personality. It is a religion directly apprehended, and not a
system of metaphysics to be analysed and argued. We know in our
personal experience what our creations are and we instinctively know
through it what creation around us means.
When Keats said in his "Ode to a Grecian Urn":
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought,
As doth eternity,. . .
he felt the ineffable which is in all forms of perfection, the mystery
of the One, which takes us beyond all thought into the immediate
touch of the Infinite. This is the mystery which is for a poet to
realise and to reveal. It comes out in Keats' poems with struggling
gleams through consciousness of suffering and despair:
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darken'd ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.
In this there is a suggestion that truth reveals itself in beauty. For
if beauty were mere accident, a rent in the eternal fabric of things,
then it would hurt, would be defeated by the antagonism of facts.
Beauty is no phantasy, it has the everlasting meaning of reality. The
facts that cause despondence and gloom are mere mist, and when through
the mist beauty breaks out in momentary gleams, we realise that Peace
is true and not conflict, Love is true and not hatred; and Truth is
the One, not the disjointed multitude. We realise that Creation is the
perpetual harmony between the infinite ideal of perfection and the
eternal continuity of its realisation; that so long as there is no
absolute separation between the positive ideal and the material
obstacle to its attainment, we need not be afraid of suffering and
loss. This is the poet's religion.
Those who are habituated to the rigid framework of sectarian creeds
will find such a religion as this too indefinite and elastic. No doubt
it is so, but only because its ambition is not to shackle the Infinite
and tame it for domestic use; but rather to help our consciousness to
emancipate itself from materialism. It is as indefinite as the
morning, and yet as luminous; it calls our thoughts, feelings, and
actions into freedom, and feeds them with light. In the poet's
religion we find no doctrine or injunction, but rather the attitude of
our entire being towards a truth which is ever to be revealed in its
own endless creation.
In dogmatic religion all questions are definitely answered, all doubts
are finally laid to rest. But the poet's religion is fluid, like the
atmosphere round the earth where lights and shadows play
hide-and-seek, and the wind like a shepherd boy plays upon its reeds
among flocks of clouds. It never undertakes to lead anybody anywhere
to any solid conclusion; yet it reveals endless spheres of light,
because it has no walls round itself. It acknowledges the facts of
evil; it openly admits "the weariness, the fever and the fret" in the
world "where men sit and hear each other groan"; yet it remembers that
in spite of all there is the song of the nightingale, and "haply the
Queen Moon is on her throne," and there is:
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine,
Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-day's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
But all this has not the definiteness of an answer; it has only the
music that teases us out of thought as it fills our being.
Let me read a translation from an Eastern poet to show how this idea
comes out in a poem in Bengali:
In the morning I awoke at the flutter of thy boat-sails,
Lady of my Voyage, and I left the shore to follow the beckoning waves.
I asked thee, "Does the dream-harvest ripen in the
island beyond the blue? "
The silence of thy smile fell on my question like
the silence of sunlight on waves.
The day passed on through storm and through calm,
The perplexed winds changed their course, time after time,
and the sea moaned.
I asked thee, "Does thy sleep-tower stand somewhere beyond the
dying embers of the day's funeral pyre? "
No answer came from thee, only thine eyes smiled like
the edge of a sunset cloud.
It is night. Thy figure grows dim in the dark.
Thy wind-blown hair flits on my cheek and thrills my
sadness with its scent.
My hands grope to touch the hem of thy robe, and
I ask thee--"Is there thy garden of death beyond the stars,
Lady of my Voyage, where thy silence blossoms into songs? "
Thy smile shines in the heart of the hush like the
star-mist of midnight.
IV
In Shelley we clearly see the growth of his religion through periods
of vagueness and doubt, struggle and searching. But he did at length
come to a positive utterance of his faith, though he died young. Its
final expression is in his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. " By the title
of the poem the poet evidently means a beauty that is not merely a
passive quality of particular things, but a spirit that manifests
itself through the apparent antagonism of the unintellectual life.
This hymn rang out of his heart when he came to the end of his
pilgrimage and stood face to face with the Divinity, glimpses of which
had already filled his soul with restlessness. All his experiences of
beauty had ever teased him with the question as to what was its truth.
Somewhere he sings of a nosegay which he makes of violets, daisies,
tender bluebells and--
That tall flower that wets,
Like a child, half in tenderness and mirth,
Its mother's face with heaven-collected tears.
He ends by saying:
And then, elate and gay,
I hastened to the spot whence I had come,
That I might there present it! --Oh! to whom?
This question, even though not answered, carries a significance. A
creation of beauty suggests a fulfilment, which is the fulfilment of
love. We have heard some poets scoff at it in bitterness and despair;
but it is like a sick child beating its own mother--it is a sickness
of faith, which hurts truth, but proves it by its very pain and anger.
And the faith itself is this, that beauty is the self-offering of the
One to the other One.
In the first part of his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" Shelley dwells
on the inconstancy and evanescence of the manifestation of beauty,
which imparts to it an appearance of frailty and unreality:
Like hues and harmonies of evening,
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,
Like memory of music fled.
This, he says, rouses in our mind the question:
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom,--why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?
The poet's own answer to this question is:
Man were immortal, and omnipotent,
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.
This very elusiveness of beauty suggests the vision of immortality and
of omnipotence, and stimulates the effort in man to realise it in some
idea of permanence. The highest reality has actively to be achieved.
The gain of truth is not in the end; it reveals itself through the
endless length of achievement. But what is there to guide us in our
voyage of realisation? Men have ever been struggling for direction:
Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven
Remain the records of their vain endeavour,
Frail spells,--whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,
From all we hear and all we see,
Doubt, chance and mutability.
The prevalent rites and practices of piety, according to this poet,
are like magic spells--they only prove men's desperate endeavour and
not their success. He knows that the end we seek has its own direct
call to us, its own light to guide us to itself. And truth's call is
the call of beauty. Of this he says:
Thy light alone,--like mist o'er mountain driven,
Or music by the night wind sent,
Thro' strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.
About this revelation of truth which calls us on, and yet which is
everywhere, a village singer of Bengal sings:
My master's flute sounds in everything,
drawing me out of my house to everywhere.
While I listen to it I know that every step I take
is in my master's house.
For he is the sea, he is the river that leads to the sea,
and he is the landing place.
Religion, in Shelley, grew with his life; it was not given to him in
fixed and ready-made doctrines; he rebelled against them. He had the
creative mind which could only approach Truth through its joy in
creative effort. For true creation is realisation of truth through the
translation of it into our own symbols.
V
For man, the best opportunity for such a realisation has been in men's
Society. It is a collective creation of his, through which his social
being tries to find itself in its truth and beauty. Had that Society
merely manifested its usefulness, it would be inarticulate like a dark
star. But, unless it degenerates, it ever suggests in its concerted
movements a living truth as its soul, which has personality. In this
large life of social communion man feels the mystery of Unity, as he
does in music. From the sense of that Unity, men came to the sense of
their God.
I was speaking to some one of the joy we have in our personality. I
said it was because we were made conscious by it of a spirit of unity
within ourselves. He answered that he had no such feeling of joy about
himself, but I was sure he exaggerated. In all probability he had been
suffering from some break of harmony between his surroundings and the
spirit of unity within him, proving all the more strongly its truth.
The meaning of health comes home to us with painful force when disease
disturbs it; since health expresses the unity of the vital functions
and is accordingly joyful. Life's tragedies occur, not to demonstrate
their own reality, but to reveal that eternal principle of joy in
life, to which they gave a rude shaking. It is the object of this
Oneness in us to realise its infinity by perfect union of love with
others. All obstacles to this union create misery, giving rise to the
baser passions that are expressions of finitude, of that separateness
which is negative and therefore _maya_.
The joy of unity within ourselves, seeking expression, becomes
creative; whereas our desire for the fulfilment of our needs is
constructive. The water vessel, taken as a vessel only, raises the
question, "Why does it exist at all? " Through its fitness of
construction, it offers the apology for its existence. But where it is
a work of beauty it has no question to answer; it has nothing to do,
but to be. It reveals in its form a unity to which all that seems
various in it is so related that, in a mysterious manner, it strikes
sympathetic chords to the music of unity in our own being.
What is the truth of this world? It is not in the masses of substance,
not in the number of things, but in their relatedness, which neither
can be counted, nor measured, nor abstracted. It is not in the
materials which are many, but in the expression which is one. All our
knowledge of things is knowing them in their relation to the Universe,
in that relation which is truth. A drop of water is not a particular
assortment of elements; it is the miracle of a harmonious mutuality,
in which the two reveal the One. No amount of analysis can reveal to
us this mystery of unity. Matter is an abstraction; we shall never be
able to realise what it is, for our world of reality does not
acknowledge it. Even the giant forces of the world, centripetal and
centrifugal, are kept out of our recognition. They are the
day-labourers not admitted into the audience-hall of creation. But
light and sound come to us in their gay dresses as troubadours singing
serenades before the windows of the senses. What is constantly before
us, claiming our attention, is not the kitchen, but the feast; not the
anatomy of the world, but its countenance. There is the dancing ring
of seasons; the elusive play of lights and shadows, of wind and water;
the many-coloured wings of erratic life flitting between birth and
death. The importance of these does not lie in their existence as mere
facts, but in their language of harmony, the mother-tongue of our own
soul, through which they are communicated to us.
We grow out of touch with this great truth, we forget to accept its
invitation and its hospitality, when in quest of external success our
works become unspiritual and unexpressive. This is what Wordsworth
complained of when he said:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
Little we see in Nature that is ours.
But it is not because the world has grown too familiar to us; on the
contrary, it is because we do not see it in its aspect of unity,
because we are driven to distraction by our pursuit of the
fragmentary.
Materials as materials are savage; they are solitary; they are ready
to hurt one another. They are like our individual impulses seeking the
unlimited freedom of wilfulness. Left to themselves they are
destructive. But directly an ideal of unity raises its banner in their
centre, it brings these rebellious forces under its sway and creation
is revealed--the creation which is peace, which is the unity of
perfect relationship. Our greed for eating is in itself ugly and
selfish, it has no sense of decorum; but when brought under the ideal
of social fellowship, it is regulated and made ornamental; it is
changed into a daily festivity of life. In human nature sexual passion
is fiercely individual and destructive, but dominated by the ideal of
love, it has been made to flower into a perfection of beauty, becoming
in its best expression symbolical of the spiritual truth in man which
is his kinship of love with the Infinite. Thus we find it is the One
which expresses itself in creation; and the Many, by giving up
opposition, make the revelation of unity perfect.
II
I remember, when I was a child, that a row of cocoanut trees by our
garden wall, with their branches beckoning the rising sun on the
horizon, gave me a companionship as living as I was myself. I know it
was my imagination which transmuted the world around me into my own
world--the imagination which seeks unity, which deals with it. But we
have to consider that this companionship was true; that the universe
in which I was born had in it an element profoundly akin to my own
imaginative mind, one which wakens in all children's natures the
Creator, whose pleasure is in interweaving the web of creation with
His own patterns of many-coloured strands. It is something akin to us,
and therefore harmonious to our imagination. When we find some strings
vibrating in unison with others, we know that this sympathy carries in
it an eternal reality. The fact that the world stirs our imagination
in sympathy tells us that this creative imagination is a common truth
both in us and in the heart of existence. Wordsworth says:
I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
In this passage the poet says we are less forlorn in a world which we
meet with our imagination. That can only be possible if through our
imagination is revealed, behind all appearances, the reality which
gives the touch of companionship, that is to say, something which has
an affinity to us. An immense amount of our activity is engaged in
making images, not for serving any useful purpose or formulating
rational propositions, but for giving varied responses to the varied
touches of this reality. In this image-making the child creates his
own world in answer to the world in which he finds himself. The child
in us finds glimpses of his eternal playmate from behind the veil of
things, as Proteus rising from the sea, or Triton blowing his wreathed
horn. And the playmate is the Reality, that makes it possible for the
child to find delight in activities which do not inform or bring
assistance but merely express. There is an image-making joy in the
infinite, which inspires in us our joy in imagining. The rhythm of
cosmic motion produces in our mind the emotion which is creative.
A poet has said about his destiny as a dreamer, about the
worthlessness of his dreams and yet their permanence:
I hang 'mid men my heedless head,
And my fruit is dreams, as theirs is bread:
The goodly men and the sun-hazed sleeper,
Time shall reap; but after the reaper
The world shall glean to me, me the sleeper.
The dream persists; it is more real than even bread which has
substance and use. The painted canvas is durable and substantial; it
has for its production and transport to market a whole array of
machines and factories. But the picture which no factory can produce
is a dream, a _maya_, and yet it, not the canvas, has the meaning of
ultimate reality.
A poet describes Autumn:
I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like Silence, listening
To silence, for no lonely bird would sing
Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn.
Of April another poet sings:
April, April,
Laugh thy girlish laughter;
Then the moment after
Weep thy girlish tears!
April, that mine ears
Like a lover greetest,
If I tell thee, sweetest,
All my hopes and fears.
April, April,
Laugh thy golden laughter.
But the moment after
Weep thy golden tears!
This Autumn, this April,--are they nothing but phantasy?
Let us suppose that the Man from the Moon comes to the earth and
listens to some music in a gramophone. He seeks for the origin of the
delight produced in his mind. The facts before him are a cabinet made
of wood and a revolving disc producing sound; but the one thing which
is neither seen nor can be explained is the truth of the music, which
his personality must immediately acknowledge as a personal message. It
is neither in the wood, nor in the disc, nor in the sound of the
notes. If the Man from the Moon be a poet, as can reasonably be
supposed, he will write about a fairy imprisoned in that box, who sits
spinning fabrics of songs expressing her cry for a far-away magic
casement opening on the foam of some perilous sea, in a fairyland
forlorn. It will not be literally, but essentially true. The facts of
the gramophone make us aware of the laws of sound, but the music gives
us personal companionship. The bare facts about April are alternate
sunshine and showers; but the subtle blending of shadows and lights,
of murmurs and movements, in April, gives us not mere shocks of
sensation, but unity of joy as does music. Therefore when a poet sees
the vision of a girl in April, even a downright materialist is in
sympathy with him. But we know that the same individual would be
menacingly angry if the law of heredity or a geometrical problem were
described as a girl or a rose--or even as a cat or a camel. For these
intellectual abstractions have no magical touch for our lute-strings
of imagination. They are no dreams, as are the harmony of bird-songs,
rain-washed leaves glistening in the sun, and pale clouds floating in
the blue.
The ultimate truth of our personality is that we are no mere
biologists or geometricians; "we are the dreamers of dreams, we are
the music-makers. " This dreaming or music-making is not a function of
the lotus-eaters, it is the creative impulse which makes songs not
only with words and tunes, lines and colours, but with stones and
metals, with ideas and men:
With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory.
I have been told by a scholar friend of mine that by constant practice
in logic he has weakened his natural instinct of faith. The reason is,
faith is the spectator in us which finds the meaning of the drama from
the unity of the performance; but logic lures us into the greenroom
where there is stagecraft but no drama at all; and then this logic
nods its head and wearily talks about disillusionment. But the
greenroom, dealing with its fragments, looks foolish when questioned,
or wears the sneering smile of Mephistopheles; for it does not have
the secret of unity, which is somewhere else. It is for faith to
answer, "Unity comes to us from the One, and the One in ourselves
opens the door and receives it with joy. " The function of poetry and
the arts is to remind us that the greenroom is the greyest of
illusions, and the reality is the drama presented before us, all its
paint and tinsel, masks and pageantry, made one in art. The ropes and
wheels perish, the stage is changed; but the dream which is drama
remains true, for there remains the eternal Dreamer.
III
Poetry and the arts cherish in them the profound faith of man in the
unity of his being with all existence, the final truth of which is the
truth of personality. It is a religion directly apprehended, and not a
system of metaphysics to be analysed and argued. We know in our
personal experience what our creations are and we instinctively know
through it what creation around us means.
When Keats said in his "Ode to a Grecian Urn":
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought,
As doth eternity,. . .
he felt the ineffable which is in all forms of perfection, the mystery
of the One, which takes us beyond all thought into the immediate
touch of the Infinite. This is the mystery which is for a poet to
realise and to reveal. It comes out in Keats' poems with struggling
gleams through consciousness of suffering and despair:
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darken'd ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.
In this there is a suggestion that truth reveals itself in beauty. For
if beauty were mere accident, a rent in the eternal fabric of things,
then it would hurt, would be defeated by the antagonism of facts.
Beauty is no phantasy, it has the everlasting meaning of reality. The
facts that cause despondence and gloom are mere mist, and when through
the mist beauty breaks out in momentary gleams, we realise that Peace
is true and not conflict, Love is true and not hatred; and Truth is
the One, not the disjointed multitude. We realise that Creation is the
perpetual harmony between the infinite ideal of perfection and the
eternal continuity of its realisation; that so long as there is no
absolute separation between the positive ideal and the material
obstacle to its attainment, we need not be afraid of suffering and
loss. This is the poet's religion.
Those who are habituated to the rigid framework of sectarian creeds
will find such a religion as this too indefinite and elastic. No doubt
it is so, but only because its ambition is not to shackle the Infinite
and tame it for domestic use; but rather to help our consciousness to
emancipate itself from materialism. It is as indefinite as the
morning, and yet as luminous; it calls our thoughts, feelings, and
actions into freedom, and feeds them with light. In the poet's
religion we find no doctrine or injunction, but rather the attitude of
our entire being towards a truth which is ever to be revealed in its
own endless creation.
In dogmatic religion all questions are definitely answered, all doubts
are finally laid to rest. But the poet's religion is fluid, like the
atmosphere round the earth where lights and shadows play
hide-and-seek, and the wind like a shepherd boy plays upon its reeds
among flocks of clouds. It never undertakes to lead anybody anywhere
to any solid conclusion; yet it reveals endless spheres of light,
because it has no walls round itself. It acknowledges the facts of
evil; it openly admits "the weariness, the fever and the fret" in the
world "where men sit and hear each other groan"; yet it remembers that
in spite of all there is the song of the nightingale, and "haply the
Queen Moon is on her throne," and there is:
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine,
Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-day's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
But all this has not the definiteness of an answer; it has only the
music that teases us out of thought as it fills our being.
Let me read a translation from an Eastern poet to show how this idea
comes out in a poem in Bengali:
In the morning I awoke at the flutter of thy boat-sails,
Lady of my Voyage, and I left the shore to follow the beckoning waves.
I asked thee, "Does the dream-harvest ripen in the
island beyond the blue? "
The silence of thy smile fell on my question like
the silence of sunlight on waves.
The day passed on through storm and through calm,
The perplexed winds changed their course, time after time,
and the sea moaned.
I asked thee, "Does thy sleep-tower stand somewhere beyond the
dying embers of the day's funeral pyre? "
No answer came from thee, only thine eyes smiled like
the edge of a sunset cloud.
It is night. Thy figure grows dim in the dark.
Thy wind-blown hair flits on my cheek and thrills my
sadness with its scent.
My hands grope to touch the hem of thy robe, and
I ask thee--"Is there thy garden of death beyond the stars,
Lady of my Voyage, where thy silence blossoms into songs? "
Thy smile shines in the heart of the hush like the
star-mist of midnight.
IV
In Shelley we clearly see the growth of his religion through periods
of vagueness and doubt, struggle and searching. But he did at length
come to a positive utterance of his faith, though he died young. Its
final expression is in his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. " By the title
of the poem the poet evidently means a beauty that is not merely a
passive quality of particular things, but a spirit that manifests
itself through the apparent antagonism of the unintellectual life.
This hymn rang out of his heart when he came to the end of his
pilgrimage and stood face to face with the Divinity, glimpses of which
had already filled his soul with restlessness. All his experiences of
beauty had ever teased him with the question as to what was its truth.
Somewhere he sings of a nosegay which he makes of violets, daisies,
tender bluebells and--
That tall flower that wets,
Like a child, half in tenderness and mirth,
Its mother's face with heaven-collected tears.
He ends by saying:
And then, elate and gay,
I hastened to the spot whence I had come,
That I might there present it! --Oh! to whom?
This question, even though not answered, carries a significance. A
creation of beauty suggests a fulfilment, which is the fulfilment of
love. We have heard some poets scoff at it in bitterness and despair;
but it is like a sick child beating its own mother--it is a sickness
of faith, which hurts truth, but proves it by its very pain and anger.
And the faith itself is this, that beauty is the self-offering of the
One to the other One.
In the first part of his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" Shelley dwells
on the inconstancy and evanescence of the manifestation of beauty,
which imparts to it an appearance of frailty and unreality:
Like hues and harmonies of evening,
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,
Like memory of music fled.
This, he says, rouses in our mind the question:
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom,--why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?
The poet's own answer to this question is:
Man were immortal, and omnipotent,
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.
This very elusiveness of beauty suggests the vision of immortality and
of omnipotence, and stimulates the effort in man to realise it in some
idea of permanence. The highest reality has actively to be achieved.
The gain of truth is not in the end; it reveals itself through the
endless length of achievement. But what is there to guide us in our
voyage of realisation? Men have ever been struggling for direction:
Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven
Remain the records of their vain endeavour,
Frail spells,--whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,
From all we hear and all we see,
Doubt, chance and mutability.
The prevalent rites and practices of piety, according to this poet,
are like magic spells--they only prove men's desperate endeavour and
not their success. He knows that the end we seek has its own direct
call to us, its own light to guide us to itself. And truth's call is
the call of beauty. Of this he says:
Thy light alone,--like mist o'er mountain driven,
Or music by the night wind sent,
Thro' strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.
About this revelation of truth which calls us on, and yet which is
everywhere, a village singer of Bengal sings:
My master's flute sounds in everything,
drawing me out of my house to everywhere.
While I listen to it I know that every step I take
is in my master's house.
For he is the sea, he is the river that leads to the sea,
and he is the landing place.
Religion, in Shelley, grew with his life; it was not given to him in
fixed and ready-made doctrines; he rebelled against them. He had the
creative mind which could only approach Truth through its joy in
creative effort. For true creation is realisation of truth through the
translation of it into our own symbols.
V
For man, the best opportunity for such a realisation has been in men's
Society. It is a collective creation of his, through which his social
being tries to find itself in its truth and beauty. Had that Society
merely manifested its usefulness, it would be inarticulate like a dark
star. But, unless it degenerates, it ever suggests in its concerted
movements a living truth as its soul, which has personality. In this
large life of social communion man feels the mystery of Unity, as he
does in music. From the sense of that Unity, men came to the sense of
their God. And therefore every religion began with its tribal God.
The one question before all others that has to be answered by our
civilisations is not what they have and in what quantity, but what
they express and how. In a society, the production and circulation of
materials, the amassing and spending of money, may go on, as in the
interminable prolonging of a straight line, if its people forget to
follow some spiritual design of life which curbs them and transforms
them into an organic whole. For growth is not that enlargement which
is merely adding to the dimensions of incompleteness. Growth is the
movement of a whole towards a yet fuller wholeness. Living things
start with this wholeness from the beginning of their career. A child
has its own perfection as a child; it would be ugly if it appeared as
an unfinished man. Life is a continual process of synthesis, and not
of additions. Our activities of production and enjoyment of wealth
attain that spirit of wholeness when they are blended with a creative
ideal. Otherwise they have the insane aspect of the eternally
unfinished; they become like locomotive engines which have railway
lines but no stations; which rush on towards a collision of
uncontrolled forces or to a sudden breakdown of the overstrained
machinery.
Through creation man expresses his truth; through that expression he
gains back his truth in its fulness. Human society is for the best
expression of man, and that expression, according to its perfection,
leads him to the full realisation of the divine in humanity. When that
expression is obscure, then his faith in the Infinite that is within
him becomes weak; then his aspiration cannot go beyond the idea of
success. His faith in the Infinite is creative; his desire for success
is constructive; one is his home, and the other is his office. With
the overwhelming growth of necessity, civilisation becomes a gigantic
office to which the home is a mere appendix. The predominance of the
pursuit of success gives to society the character of what we call
_Shudra_ in India. In fighting a battle, the _Kshatriya_, the noble
knight, followed his honour for his ideal, which was greater than
victory itself; but the mercenary _Shudra_ has success for his object.
The name Shudra symbolises a man who has no margin round him beyond
his bare utility. The word denotes a classification which includes all
naked machines that have lost their completeness of humanity, be their
work manual or intellectual. They are like walking stomachs or brains,
and we feel, in pity, urged to call on God and cry, "Cover them up for
mercy's sake with some veil of beauty and life! "
When Shelley in his view of the world realised the Spirit of Beauty,
which is the vision of the Infinite, he thus uttered his faith:
Never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery;
That thou,--O awful Loveliness,--
Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express.
This was his faith in the Infinite. It led his aspiration towards the
region of freedom and perfection which was beyond the immediate and
above the successful. This faith in God, this faith in the reality of
the ideal of perfection, has built up all that is great in the human
world. To keep indefinitely walking on, along a zigzag course of
change, is negative and barren. A mere procession of notes does not
make music; it is only when we have in the heart of the march of
sounds some musical idea that it creates song. Our faith in the
infinite reality of Perfection is that musical idea, and there is that
one great creative force in our civilisation. When it wakens not, then
our faith in money, in material power, takes its place; it fights and
destroys, and in a brilliant fireworks of star-mimicry suddenly
exhausts itself and dies in ashes and smoke.
VI
Men of great faith have always called us to wake up to great
expectations, and the prudent have always laughed at them and said
that these did not belong to reality. But the poet in man knows that
reality is a creation, and human reality has to be called forth from
its obscure depth by man's faith which is creative. There was a day
when the human reality was the brutal reality. That was the only
capital we had with which to begin our career. But age after age
there has come to us the call of faith, which said against all the
evidence of fact: "You are more than you appear to be, more than your
circumstances seem to warrant. You are to attain the impossible, you
are immortal. " The unbelievers had laughed and tried to kill the
faith. But faith grew stronger with the strength of martyrdom and at
her bidding higher realities have been created over the strata of the
lower. Has not a new age come to-day, borne by thunder-clouds, ushered
in by a universal agony of suffering? Are we not waiting to-day for a
great call of faith, which will say to us: "Come out of your present
limitations. You are to attain the impossible, you are immortal"? The
nations who are not prepared to accept it, who have all their trust in
their present machines of system, and have no thought or space to
spare to welcome the sudden guest who comes as the messenger of
emancipation, are bound to court defeat whatever may be their present
wealth and power.
This great world, where it is a creation, an expression of the
infinite--where its morning sings of joy to the newly awakened life,
and its evening stars sing to the traveller, weary and worn, of the
triumph of life in a new birth across death,--has its call for us.
The call has ever roused the creator in man, and urged him to reveal
the truth, to reveal the Infinite in himself. It is ever claiming from
us, in our own creations, co-operation with God, reminding us of our
divine nature, which finds itself in freedom of spirit. Our society
exists to remind us, through its various voices, that the ultimate
truth in man is not in his intellect or his possessions; it is in his
illumination of mind, in his extension of sympathy across all barriers
of caste and colour; in his recognition of the world, not merely as a
storehouse of power, but as a habitation of man's spirit, with its
eternal music of beauty and its inner light of the divine
presence.
THE CREATIVE IDEAL
In an old Sanskrit book there is a verse which describes the essential
elements of a picture. The first in order is _Vrupa-bhedah_--"separateness
of forms.
