Creative Unity | Page 4

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.