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.