Was that, consciously or subconsciously, at the back of Mr. Franklin’s mind when he put Music next to Love? Certain it is that, in that unwritten language which is greater than all speech, Music is the natural expression of Love. Why is there music in the grove and the forest? It is because love is there. The birds never sing so sweetly as during the mating season. For awhile the male bird hovers about the person of his desired bride, and pours out an incessant torrent of song in the fond hope of one day winning her; and when his purpose is achieved, he goes on singing for very joy that she is his. And afterwards he ‘gallantly perches near the little home, pouring forth his joy and pride, sweetly singing to his mate as she sits within the nest, patiently hatching her brood.’ Both in men and women it is at the approach of the love-making age that the voice suddenly develops, and it is when the deepest chords in the soul are first struck that the richest and fullest notes can be sung.
Music, then, is the natural concomitant of Love. [221] That is why most of our songs are love-songs. If a man is in love he can no more help singing than a bird can help flying. You cannot love anything without singing about it. Men love God; that is why we have hymn-books. Men love women; that is why we have ballads. Men love their country; that is why we have national anthems and patriotic airs.
But the stroke of genius in Mr. Franklin lay in the addition of the Salad. If he had contented himself with Love and Music, he would have uttered a truth, and a great truth; but it would have been a commonplace truth. As it is, he lifts the whole thing into the realm of brilliance—and reality. For, after all, of what earthly use are Love and Music unless they lead to Salad? When to Love and Music Mr. Franklin shrewdly added Salad, he put himself in line with the greatest philosophers of all time. Bishop Butler told us years ago that if we allow emotions which are designed to lead to action to become excited, and no action follows, the very excitation of that emotion without its appropriate response leaves the heart much harder than it was before. And, more recently, our brilliant Harvard Professor, Dr. William James, has warned us that it is a very damaging thing for the mind to receive an impression without giving that impression an adequate and commensurate expression. If you go to a [222] concert, he says, and hear a lovely song that deeply moves you, you ought to pay some poor person’s tram fare on the way home. It is a natural as well as a psychological law. The earth, for example, receives the impression represented by the fall of autumn leaves, the descent of sap from the bough, and the widespread decay of wintry desolation. But she hastens to give expression to this impression by all the wealth and plenitude of her glorious spring array.
The New Testament gives us a great story which exactly illustrates my point. It is a very graceful and tender record, full of Love and Music, but containing also something more than Love and Music. For when Dorcas died all the widows stood weeping in the chamber of death, showing the coats that Dorcas had made while she was yet with them. Dorcas was a Jewess. At one time she had been taught to regard the name of Jesus as a thing to be abhorred and accursed. But later on a wonderful experience befell her. Could she ever forget the day on which, amidst a whirl of spiritual bewilderment and a tempest of spiritual emotion, she had discovered, in the very Messiah whom once she had despised, her Saviour and her Lord? It was a day never to be forgotten, a day full of Love and Music. How could she produce an expression adequate to that wonderful impression? Not in words; for [223] she was not gifted with speech. Yet an expression must be found. It would have been a fatal thing for the delicate soul of Dorcas if so turgid a flood of feeling had found no apt and natural outlet. And in that crisis she thought of her needle. She expressed her love for the Lord in the occupation most familiar to her. It was a kind of storage of energy. Dorcas wove her love for her Lord into every stitch, and a tender thought into every stitch, and a fervent prayer into every stitch. And that spiritual storage escaped through warm coats and neat garments into the hearts and homes of these widows and poor folk along the coast, and they learned the depth and tenderness of the divine love from the deft finger-tips of Dorcas.
Salad is the natural and fitting outcome of Love and Music. I have already confessed that when first I came upon the triune conjunction I thought it rather an incongruous medley, a strange hotch-potch, an ill-assorted company. That is the worst of judging things in a hurry. The eye does the work of the brain, and does it badly. It is a common failing of ours. Look at the torrent of toothless jokes that have been directed at the contrast between the romance of courtship and the domestic realities that follow. The former, according to the traditional estimate, consists of billing and cooing, of fervent protestations and radiant dreams, of romantic [224] loveliness and honeyed phrases. The latter, according to the same traditional view, consists of struggle and anxiety, of drudgery and menial toil, of broken nights with tiresome children, of nerve-racking anxiety and an endless sequence of troubles. He who looks at life in this way makes precisely the same mistake that I myself made when I first saw Mr. Franklin’s Love, Music, and Salad, and thought it a higgledy-piggledy hotch-potch. It is nothing of the kind. Love naturally leads to Music; and Love and Music naturally lead to Salad. Courtship leads to the cradle and the kitchen, it is true; but both cradle and kitchen are glorified and consecrated by the courtship that has gone before. Our English homes, take them for all in all, are the loveliest things in the world.
The merry homes of England!
Around their hearths by night,
What gladsome looks of household love
Meet in the ruddy light!
There woman’s voice flows forth in song,