Let us suppose that the Man from the Moon comes to the earth and
listens to some music in a gramophone. He seeks for the origin of the
delight produced in his mind. The facts before him are a cabinet made
of wood and a revolving disc producing sound; but the one thing which
is neither seen nor can be explained is the truth of the music, which
his personality must immediately acknowledge as a personal message. It
is neither in the wood, nor in the disc, nor in the sound of the
notes. If the Man from the Moon be a poet, as can reasonably be
supposed, he will write about a fairy imprisoned in that box, who sits
spinning fabrics of songs expressing her cry for a far-away magic
casement opening on the foam of some perilous sea, in a fairyland
forlorn. It will not be literally, but essentially true. The facts of
the gramophone make us aware of the laws of sound, but the music gives
us personal companionship. The bare facts about April are alternate
sunshine and showers; but the subtle blending of shadows and lights,
of murmurs and movements, in April, gives us not mere shocks of
sensation, but unity of joy as does music. Therefore when a poet sees
the vision of a girl in April, even a downright materialist is in
sympathy with him. But we know that the same individual would be
menacingly angry if the law of heredity or a geometrical problem were
described as a girl or a rose—or even as a cat or a camel. For these
intellectual abstractions have no magical touch for our lute-strings
of imagination. They are no dreams, as are the harmony of bird-songs,
rain-washed leaves glistening in the sun, and pale clouds floating in
the blue.
The ultimate truth of our personality is that we are no mere
biologists or geometricians; "we are the dreamers of dreams, we are
the music-makers." This dreaming or music-making is not a function of
the lotus-eaters, it is the creative impulse which makes songs not
only with words and tunes, lines and colours, but with stones and
metals, with ideas and men:
With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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