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.