Our own spirit-nature is our truest guide to the discernment of the
spirit universal. There is but one life and one spirit, though the
degrees of its manifestation are wide as the poles asunder: just as in
our own body there are specialised cells for high tasks and for lowly,
yet the same life pervades them all. There is a wild robin redbreast who
always comes when I dig my garden, to eat the grubs that the spade turns
up. He is not in the least afraid, and he often answers when I whistle
to him: he is a little cousin of mine. His life is in no essentials
different to my own life, except that I have the advantage of him in
being able to express so much more of the same spirit. Divinity and
spirit (are not the terms synonymous?) are in all, behind all, and in
ever-increasing degree before all. Our own answering to love and the
appeal of beauty is simply the echo of like to like; the spirit within
replies to the call of spirit without. For this reason Music is a
universal language, and Art can know no boundaries.
To explore the beauties of Art and Music is to add those beauties, by
expression and the power of memory, to the self. Thus we may grow more
beautiful, just as surely as by thinking ever in terms of pounds,
shillings, and pence, we grow more sordid and mercenary. It is a
perfectly commonsense process. Furthermore, the appreciation of beauty
and of artistic expression develops our power of keener appreciation.
Evolution in music cannot stop, for spirit is behind it: and the spirit
within must eventually find its way back to the universal source from
which it came, just as water must find its own level. The present status
of everything that we observe to-day is purely temporary: we are looking
at one picture of a cosmic cinema film that stretches on to infinity.
Just because we see only one static picture of a process which truly
never stops moving, so we get a view of life that contains much of
delusion. We have heard a Doctor of Music state in public his opinion
that the age of the composition of musical masterpieces was for ever
passed: so will others say that the age of inspiration and prophecy has
also departed. These good people are mistaking the outer form which is
transient, for the inner principle which is spirit and eternal. They
have lost their bearings. Music must go on from development to
development, and just as soon as it proves itself incapable of further
development and expression along certain lines, the spirit within will
rend the husk that can no longer contain it and will blossom forth in
some new and more expansive guise. As with our own bodies, the outworn
garb will be laid aside, and the spirit will find a finer form.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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