emotions, are not expressible by
intervals and cadences natural to these, but by combinations of such
intervals and cadences: whence arise more involved musical phrases,
conveying more complex, subtle, and unusual feelings. And thus we may in
some measure understand how it happens that music not only so strongly
excites our more familiar feelings, but also produces feelings we never
had before--arouses dormant sentiments of which we had not conceived the
possibility and do not know the meaning; or, as Richter says--tells us
of things we have not seen and shall not see.

* * * * *

Indirect evidences of several kinds remain to be briefly pointed out.
One of them is the difficulty, not to say impossibility, of otherwise
accounting for the expressiveness of music. Whence comes it that
special combinations of notes should have special effects upon our
emotions?--that one should give us a feeling of exhilaration, another of
melancholy, another of affection, another of reverence? Is it that these
special combinations have intrinsic meanings apart from the human
constitution?--that a certain number of aerial waves per second,
followed by a certain other number, in the nature of things signify
grief, while in the reverse order they signify joy; and similarly with
all other intervals, phrases, and cadences? Few will be so irrational as
to think this. Is it, then, that the meanings of these special
combinations are conventional only?--that we learn their implications,
as we do those of words, by observing how others understand them? This
is an hypothesis not only devoid of evidence, but directly opposed to
the experience of every one. How, then, are musical effects to be
explained? If the theory above set forth be accepted, the difficulty
disappears. If music, taking for its raw material the various
modifications of voice which are the physiological results of excited
feelings, intensifies, combines, and complicates them--if it exaggerates
the loudness, the resonance, the pitch, the intervals, and the
variability, which, in virtue of an organic law, are the characteristics
of passionate speech--if, by carrying out these further, more
consistently, more unitedly, and more sustainedly, it produces an
idealised language of emotion; then its power over us becomes
comprehensible. But in the absence of this theory, the expressiveness of
music appears to be inexplicable.

Again, the preference we feel f