Spirit and Music | Page 7

that spirit to be expressed. The grass

expresses it in its luxuriance, its colour, and its growth: the birds in
their song: and the whole of what we are pleased to term the lower
creation bespeaks this spirit in the daily activity. When this expression
ceases, the thing that was once alive is dead.
There is no special merit that all the works of the Lord should thus
praise the Lord in their expression, because below the stage of a human
being there is no option. The lower forms of life are like lamps on a
circuit which light up by reason of the current over which they
exercised no control. But a human being is like a lamp that is connected
with the main circuit and yet has its own switch. This ability to switch
on or off constitutes our measure of freewill, our power of saying yes
or no. It is a necessary accompaniment of our knowledge of good and
evil for "no choice, no progress." It betokens our progress from the
merely animal stage of consciousness to that of self-consciousness--the
phase of existence where we not only know, but we know that we know.
This ability to express well, badly, or not at all, just as we may please,
is our special prerogative: it gives man the privilege, which is denied to
all life below him, of deliberately choosing the worse and of making a
fool of himself. The animals know what is good for them because they
follow their unreasoning instincts and blindly repeat the racial course of
action implanted within them, and the mere survival of the species
proves that this particular response to the particular circumstance has
been "tried out" by ages of experience. But a man blinds and smothers
his instincts (and these at the best, it may be observed, are distinctly
mixed) or perhaps indulges them in defiance of his better judgment,
and thus his expression of his own divinity is often sadly marred.[5]
[Note 5: James Rhoades.]
"Know this, O man, sole root of sin in thee Is not to know thine own
divinity."
A man may even deny the very existence of spirit, and thus by a subtle
but efficacious species of self-suggestion prevent its manifestation in
himself. But whether he expresses this spirit well or ill, a man does in
fact join with all creation below him in manifesting this innate
spirituality without which there can be no life.

Thus everything stands for something else that is deeper, there is an
outer form and an inner soul or spirit. Spenser thus expresses it:--
"For of the soule the bodie forme doth take, For soule is forme, and
doth the bodie make."
It is only when we grasp this elementary truth that life becomes in the
least plain and intelligible, and the result of grasping it is that we cease
to be deceived by the apparent values of things, and are able to appraise
them more at their true and spiritual worth. We are then enabled to pass
from circumstances (which are results) to the realm of causes: the
balance is transferred from the seen to the unseen, and the point of view
approximates more to the eternal than the transient. A greater poise and
certainty follow as a matter of course, since the mental outlook is
centred in the true rather than the seeming.
All life then is the expression of spirit, and our varied activities are but
the modes of this expression. To this, Music is no exception. Very
naturally also, the better the machinery or the technique of expression,
the more of the spirit can get through. We can play more
sympathetically, more fluently, and with finer effect on a beautiful
"grand" than on a jangly upright instrument: the one is a better vehicle
of expression than the other. So also we can secure more fluent
expression with a fountain pen than with one that continually interrupts
the free flow of ideas by demanding to be dipped in the inkpot. We
have two typewriters of the same manufacture, but one is an early
model and the other a modern machine: there is a vast difference in the
ease of expressing thought, in the favour of the later instrument with all
its special conveniences. In general terms the object of all improvement
of technical means is the better expression of the spirit. Musically, to
practise scales and exercises with the object of getting one's fingers
loose is like eating for the sake of developing a fluent jaw action--the
vision of the end has been lost in the means. We must ever keep in
view the fact that life itself, and especially Art and Music, can only
fulfil a proper purpose when resulting in the ever-increasing and better
expression of the