sociations are the more
powerful that, while they are rudimentary, familiar like our own
being, perhaps even racial, the musical structure into which they
enter is complete, individual, _new_: 'tis comparing the efficacy of,
say, Mozart Op. So-and-so, with the efficacy of somebody sobbing or
dancing in our presence.

So far for the associational power of music in awakening emotions. But
music has another source of such power over us. Existing as it does in
a sequence, it is able to give sensations which the arts dealing with
space, and not with time, could not allow themselves, since for them a
disagreeable effect could never prelude an agreeable one, but merely
co-exist with it; whereas for music a disagreeable effect is
effaceable by an agreeable one, and will even considerably heighten
the latter by being made to precede it. Now we not merely associate
fatigue or pain with any difficult perception, we actually feel it; we
are aware of real discomfort whenever our senses and attention are
kept too long on the stretch, or are stimulated too sharply by
something unexpected. In these cases we are conscious of something
which is exhausting, overpowering, unendurable if it lasted:
experiences which are but too familiar in matters not musical, and,
therefore, evoke the remembrance of such non-musical discomfort, which
reacts to increase the discomfort produced by the music; the reverse
taking place, a sense of freedom, of efficiency, of strength arising
in us whenever the object of perception can be easily, though
energetically, perceived. Hence intervals which the ear has difficulty
in following, dissonances to which it is unaccustomed, and phrases too
long or too slack for convenient scansion, produce a degree of
sensuous and intellectual distress, which can be measured by the
immense relief--relief as an acute satisfaction--of return to easier
intervals, of consonance, and of phrases of normal rhythm and length.

Thus does it come to pass that music can convey emotional suggestions
such as painting and sculpture, for all their imitations of reality,
can never match in efficacy; since music conveys the suggestions not
of mere objects which may have awakened emotion, but of emotion
itself, of the expression thereof in our bodily feelings and
movements. And hence also the curious paradox that musical emotion is
strong almost in proportion as it is vague. A visible object may, and
probably will, possess a dozen different e