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 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]
"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 underlying spirit, or as Elgar puts it—"more of Truth."
The law of spirit is Love. The drive of spirit is ever upward towards progress, aspiration, and unity. If we take a drop of quicksilver and separate it into smaller particles, as soon as ever the conditions allow, these smaller globules will amalgamate themselves with the larger body from which they have been temporarily divorced. We can almost imagine we hear them utter a fervent "thank goodness" as they reach that home of heart's desire. So are we, too, as separated and individualised sparks of the divine fire, burning till at length we reach our freedom and can merge ourselves in that Sun of spirit whence, "trailing clouds of glory," we have come.