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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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