Yet we are waking up. Music already occupies an unassailable position in our daily activities, it will presently occupy a still greater place. Nothing is still, and least of all does Art remain fixed. The whole world is awakening to a new standard of values, for we have at length discovered the impossibility of running civilisation on purely materialistic lines. The inner side of things is becoming manifest, and a measure of spiritual insight is being vouchsafed to us: therefore all those things which minister to the spiritual will be increased in our regard. 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.