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.