Spirit and Music | Page 6

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 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