Page:Shortessaysdeliv00temp.djvu/15



all, life—our life—the sense in ourselves of being and doing, is the most interesting subject we can talk of at any time. Everything that relates to it, that tends to help or harm it, has its corresponding value, and deserves accordingly our attention. Now, music may help our life very much in many ways, and we should therefore try to think how it does so.

But we all possess a double life: first, the life of the body, of the physical frame, all of which you can touch and see, or could handle if you were medical students and given to dissection; and, second, there is the life of the soul or spirit, which we cannot touch or see, but of which we feel the existence in our consciousness and our thoughts.

Please remember once and for all that in speaking of the soul I do not speak copying, as it were, ecclesiastical commonplaces, but either from a more abstract point of view, into which I cannot enter, or from a quite practical work-a-day position, such as concerns your every-day life.

Music affects these two lives, the life of the body and the life of the soul, yet principally the soul through the body. Later we may consider now music is related to the life around us, to social life.

And first, then, I must explain how music affects the body. In your ears is an exquisite instrument called the tympanum. I may liken it to a drum or to a most delicate piece of skin and nerve parchment tightly stretched behind each ear. This drum-like surface or membrane is divided into innumerable and invisible threads arranged as the strings of a harp or as on the keyboard of a piano, which render it the more responsive to sounds reaching the ear's