Spirit and Music | Page 6

Art remain fixed. The whole world
is awakening to a new standard of values, for we have at length
discovered the impossibility of running civilisation on purely

materialistic lines. The inner side of things is becoming manifest, and a
measure of spiritual insight is being vouchsafed to us: therefore all
those things which minister to the spiritual will be increased in our
regard. Of these Music is certainly not the least. "Religion, love, and
Music, are they not the three-fold expression of the same fact, the need
of expansion under which every noble soul labours?"[4] So the Art of
the future may be expected to ally itself with religion, on the side of
spirit, for the battle royal against the forces of an outworn materialism.
The end is not by any means yet, but the issue is certain: and we
ourselves to-day may play the more valiant part in the moulding of the
years to be if we realise to the full, not only what Music is and the part
it plays in life, but also the fine possibilities that lie hidden in the
future.
[Note 4: Balzac.]
CHAPTER III
THE EXPRESSION OF LIFE
"Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life"
Beethoven
If Music be a means of expression, we must needs ask ourselves what it
expresses. It is entirely insufficient to accept music as sequence or a
combination of tones that "sound nice." It would be just as reasonable
to regard a meal as something that tastes nice, whereas of course the
meal has a meaning and a use beyond mere taste: its purpose is to
sustain life, and the question of taste is merely incidental to the larger
issue. Music therefore may sound nice, but we desire to arrive at some
explanation far transcending this.
All phases of life express something, and we shall not be very far from
the truth if we regard that something as spirit. The grass, we say, is
alive: but its life consists in its ability to express that essential
something which we here term spirit. When it is no longer able to
accomplish this, the grass is still there, but we call it dead. We might

draw an apt parallel from the electric light bulb: this is nothing but a
possible source of light, until it is connected with the main supply from
the generating station. The seeming independence of the bulb is a
fiction, it has no true existence as a lamp until it expresses itself by
giving light. Yet the light is not its own light, and when the filament
breaks and the current can no longer circulate through the bulb it ceases
to be a lamp. It is, like the grass, dead: and for exactly the same reason,
that it can no longer express life or spirit.
Furthermore, the amount of resistance that a lamp interposes to the free
circulation of the current through it has its effect upon the light it gives.
One lamp may yield a fine light, and another on the same circuit may
afford but poor illumination: the one expresses well, and the other ill.
So, too, with the grass, one patch may be free-growing and another may
be but poor stuff: one expresses well, and the other feebly. In the same
way with ourselves, if our bodies have the life force circulating freely
they express robust health: and if the force find but a constricted
channel, then our bodies express health in scanty measure and
approximate more to disease than to the normal well-being. Our bodies
are no more independent organisms than is the lamp bulb: they express
the spirit which is the essence of the self, and when that self withdraws
the body is as dead as the grass or the worn-out bulb. Yet the failure of
the bulb casts no reflection upon the generating station, for the current
is still there. We do not need to assume that the current has failed, for
in that case it would fail alike for every bulb upon the circuit. If every
form and phase of life were to expire and cease at a given moment, we
might then, and then only, be justified in assuming that spirit had
ceased to be: but in that case there would be but little need for us to
worry about the point.
We may imagine spirit as the driving force behind everything, as the
urge towards evolution, as the pent-up intelligence which ever seeks
one variation and then another. Then, when one variation appears, more
appropriate to its surroundings than others, this, because of its fitness,
survives. As human beings we are individualised fragments of the great
universal spirit. There is only the one life and the one spirit, but there
are diversities of gifts to enable