Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/200

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180
Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook

place in the minds of men. And similarly with music—a system of sounds so ruled by structural law as to be capable of transmission either by instrument, or by voice disciplined and trained to a certain code of limitations. And being thus made memorable and passed from mouth to mouth, from one place to another, and from age to age, they acquired a social significance and importance; till, seeing them thus lifted above chance, man set himself to give them new forms of beauty and adornment.

And the governing motive was, and always has been, first man's wish to leave memorable records—beyond the limits of his own generation—of what life has meant for him; and secondly (and this is the more intimate phase) the delight of the craftsman in his work, the exuberance of vital energy (secure of its structural ground-work) breaking out into play. "See," it says, "how I dance, and gambol, and triumph! This superfluity of strength proves me a victor in my struggle to live."

Nothing else does; for if (having survived the struggle) man only lives miserably—scrapes through as it were—the question in the face of so poverty-stricken a result, may still be—"Was the struggle worth it?" And so by his arts and graces, by his adornment of his streets, temples and theatres, by his huge delight in himself, so soon as the essentials of mere material existence are secured to him, man has really shown that life is good in itself,