comes,
So much the better!

As to the questions why music does not give feeling immortality through
sound, and why it should be so ephemeral in its appeal, there are
various things to be said. It is just possible that it may soon come to
be recognized that the psychic growth of humanity is more perfectly
reflected in music than any where else. Ephemeralness may be predicated
of culture-music more certainly than of folk-music, why? Because
culture-music often has occupied itself more with the technique than
with the content, while folk-music, being the spontaneous expression of
feeling must have content. Folk-music, it is true, is simple, but if it
be genuine in its feeling I doubt whether it ever loses its power to
move. Therefore, in folk-music is possibly made permanent simple states
of feeling. Now in culture-music, the development has constantly been
in the direction of the expression of the ultimate spiritual reality of
emotions. Music is now actually trying to accomplish what Browning
demands of it:

"Dredging deeper yet,
Drag into day,--by sound, thy master-net,--
The abysmal bottom-growth, ambiguous thing
Unbroken of a branch, palpitating
With limbs' play and life's semblance! There it lies,
Marvel and mystery, of mysteries
And marvels, most to love and laud thee for!
Save it from chance and change we most abhor."

This is true no matter what the emotion may be. Hate may have its
"eidolon" as well as love. Above all arts, music has the power of
raising evil into a region of the artistically beautiful. Doubt,
despair, passion, become blossoms plucked by the hand of God when
transmuted in the alembic of the brain of genius--which is not saying
that he need experience any of these passions himself. In fact, it is
his power of perceiving the eidolon of beauty in modes of passion or
emotion not his own that makes him the great genius.

It is doubtless true that whenever in culture-music there has really
been content aroused by feeling, no matter what the stage of technique
reached, _that_ music retains its power to move. It is also highly
probably that in the earlier objective phases of music, even the
contemporary audiences were not moved in the sense that we should be
moved to-day. The audiences were objective also and their enthusiasm may
have been aroused by merely the imitative aspects of music as Avison
called them. It is certainly a fact that