ce,
fashioned and controlled by an overruling intellectual power.

[Footnote 5: _La musique, ses lois, son evolution_, by Jules
Combarieu.]

We can now foresee, though at first dimly, what is to be our line of
approach to this mystery. One of the peculiar characteristics of music
is that it is both the most natural and least artificial of the arts,
and as well the most complicated and subtle. On the one hand it is the
most natural and direct, because the materials of which it is
constituted--that is, sound and rhythm--make an instinctive appeal to
every normally equipped human being.[6] Every one likes to listen to
beautiful sounds merely for their sensuous effect, just as everyone
likes to look at the blue sky, the green grass and the changing hues
of a sunset; so the rhythm of music, akin to the human heart-beat and
to the ceaseless change and motion, which is the basic fact in all
life, appeals at once to our own physical vitality. This fact may be
observed at a symphony concert where so many people are wagging their
heads, beating time with their hands or even tapping on the floor with
their feet; a habit which shows a rudimentary love of music but which
for obvious reasons is not to be commended. On the other hand, music
is the most complicated of all the arts from the nature of its
constituent parts--intangible, evanescent sounds and rhythms--and from
the subtle grammar and structure by which these factors are used as
means of personal communication. This grammar of music, _i.e._, its
methods of structure and of presentation, has been worked out through
centuries of free experimentation on the part of some of the best
minds in the world, and thus any great musical composition is an
intellectual achievement of high rank. Behind the sensuous factors,
sound and rhythm, lies always the personal message of the composer,
and if we are to grasp this and to make it our own, we must go with
him hand in hand so that the music actually lives again in our minds
and imaginations. The practical inference from this dual nature of the
art we are considering is clear; everyone can derive a large amount of
genuine pleasure and even spiritual exaltation, can feel himself under
the influence of a strong tonic force, merely by putting himself in
contact with music, by opening his ears and drinking in the sounds and
rhythms in their marvellous variety. The all-sufficient reason for the
lack of a complete appreciation of music is that