(Many of us are too modest to display our singing talents in public, preferring to save our performances to times when there is water flowing about us. But The Carpenters advised us many years ago:
“Sing, sing a song. Sing out loud. Sing out Strong. Sing of good things not bad. Sing of happy not sad….Make it simple to last your whole life long. Don’t worry that it’s not good enough for anyone else to hear. Just sing, sing a song.”
Long before the Carpenters were born, Dr. Frank Crane considered a similar sentiment—)
THE INWARD SONG
The poet speaks of those
“Who carry music in their heart
Through dusty lane and wrangling mart,
Plying their daily task with busier feet,
Because their secret souls a holier strain repeat.”
It would be interesting to have the statistics of what number, out of all the human stream that pours into the city every morning coming to their work, are singing inwardly.
How many are thinking tunefully? How many are moving rhythmically? And how many are going, as dead drays and carts, rumbling lifelessly to their tasks?
It is good that the greater part of the world is in love. For love is the Song of Songs. To the young lover Nature is transformed. Some Ithuriel* has touched the deadly commonplace; all is miraculous. The moon, the dead companion to our earth, the pale and washed-out pilgrim of the sky, has been changed into a silver-fronted fairy whose beams thrill him with a heady enchantment. Every breeze has its secret. The woods, the houses, all men and women are notes of that sweet harmony that fills him.
“Orpheus with his lute made trees,
And the mountain tops that freeze,
Bow their heads when he did sing.”
Every man is an Orpheus, so he but carry about in him an inward melody. There is for him “a new heaven and a new earth.”
This world is an insolvable puzzle to human reason. It is full of the most absurd antinomies, the most distressing cruelties, the most amazing contradictions. No wonder men’s minds take refuge in stubborn stoicism, in agnosticism, in blank unfaith.
There is no intellectual faith, no rational creed, no logical belief. FAITH COMES ONLY THROUGH MUSIC. It is when the heart sings that the mind is cleared. Then the pieces of the infinite chaos of things drop into order, confusion ceases, they march, dance, coming into radiant concord.
Marcus Aurelius, that curious anomaly of the Roman world, perfect dreamer in an age of iron, was rich in inner music. The thought in him beamed like a ray of creative harmony over the disordered crowd of men and events.
“Welcome all that comes,” he wrote, “untoward though it may seem, for it leads you to the goal, the health of the world order. Nothing will happen to me that is not in accord with nature.”
None but so noble a mind can see a noble universe, a noble humanity, a noble God.
What a drop from such a level to the place of the mad sensualists and pleasure-mongers who only know
“To seize on life’s dull joys from a strange fear,
Lest losing them all’s lost and none remains!”
What a whirl of cabaret music, what motion and forced laughter, what wild discord of hot viands, drugged drinks, and myriad-tricked lubricity it takes to galvanize us when our souls are dry and cracked and tuneless!
Have you ever had the feelings of Hazlitt? “Give me,” he said, “the clear blue 50sky over my head and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner—and then to thinking! I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy.”
Whoever does something that makes the souls of men and women sing within them does more to make this earth habitable and this life tolerable than all the army of them that widen our comforts and increase our luxuries.
*Ithuriel is one of two angels sent by the archangel Gabriel in Milton’s Paradise Lost to find Satan, who is in the Garden of Eden. He is found in the shape of a toad, speaking to a sleeping Eve in an effort to corrupt her. Ithuriel touches him with his spear, causing Satan to resume his true form, after which he is taken to Gabriel.