Creative Unity | Page 6

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.
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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