d renown it has gained in its more healthful and more decorous
days, can make us sit out what we do sit out under its influence:
violations of our innermost secrets, revelations of the hidden
possibilities of our own nature and the nature of others; stripping
away of all the soul's veils; nay, so to speak, melting away of the
soul's outward forms, melting away of the soul's active structure, its
bone and muscle, till there is revealed only the shapeless primaeval
nudity of confused instincts, the soul's vague viscera.

When music does this, it reverts, I think, towards being the nuisance
which, before it had acquired the possibilities of form and beauty it
now tends to despise, it was felt to be by ancient philosophers and
law-givers. At any rate, it sells its artistic birthright. It
renounces its possibility of constituting, with the other great arts,
a sort of supplementary contemplated nature; an element wherein to
buoy up and steady those fluctuations which we express in speech; a
vast emotional serenity, an abstract universe in which our small and
fleeting emotions can be transmuted, and wherein they can lose
themselves in peacefulness and strength.

XI.

I mentioned this one day to my friend the composer. His answer is
partly what I was prepared for: this emotionally disintegrating
element ceases to exist, or continues to exist only in the very
slightest degree, for the real musician. The effect on the nerves is
overlooked, neutralised, in the activity of the intellect; much as the
emotional effect of the written word is sent into the background by
the perception of cause and effect which the logical associations of
the word produce. For the composer, even for the performer, says my
friend, music has a logic of its own, so strong and subtle as to
overpower every other consideration.

But music is not merely for musicians; the vast majority will always
receive it not actively through the intellect, but passively through
the nerves; the mood will, therefore, be induced before, so to speak,
the image, the musical structure, is really appreciated. And,
meanwhile, the soul is being made into a sop.

"For the moment," answers my composer, "perhaps; but only for the
moment. Once the nerves accustomed to those modulations and rhythms;
once the form perceived by the mind, the emotional associations will
vanish; the hearer will have become what the musician originally
was.... How do you know that, in its heyday, all