ictly intellectual concomitants, poetry, even
while rousing emotion, brings into play what is most different to
emotion, emotion's sifter and chastener, the great force which reduces
all things to abstraction, to the eternal and typical: reason. You
cannot express in words, even the most purely instinctive,
half-conscious feeling, without placing that dumb and blind emotion in
the lucid, balanced relations which thought has given to words;
indeed, words rarely, if ever, reproduce emotion as it is, but
instead, emotion as it is instinctively conceived, in its setting of
cause and effect. Hence there is in all poetry a certain reasonable
element which, even in the heyday of passion, makes us superior to
passion by explaining its why and wherefore; and even when the poet
succeeds in putting us in the place of him who feels, we enter only
into one-half of his personality, the half which contemplates while
the other suffers: we _know_ the feeling, rather than _feel_ it.

Now, it is different with music. Its relations to our nerves are such
that it can reproduce emotion, or, at all events, emotional moods,
directly and without any intellectual manipulation. We weep, but know
not why. Its specifically artistic emotion, the power it shares with
all other arts of raising our state of consciousness to something more
complete, more vast, and more permanent--the specific musical emotion
of music can become subservient to the mere awakening of our latent
emotional possibilities, to the stimulating of emotions often
undesirable in themselves, and always unable, at the moment, to find
their legitimate channel, whence enervation and perhaps degradation of
the soul. There are kinds of music which add the immense charm, the
subduing, victorious quality of art, to the power of mere emotion as
such; and in these cases we are pushed, by the delightfulness of
beauty and wonder, by the fascination of what is finer than ourselves,
into deeper consciousness of our innermost, primaeval, chaotic self:
the stuff in which soul has not yet dawned. We are made to enjoy what
we should otherwise dread; and the dignity of beauty, and beauty's
frankness and fearlessness, are lent to things such as we regard,
under other circumstances, as too intimate, too fleeting, too obscure,
too unconscious, to be treated, in ourselves and our neighbours,
otherwise than with decorous reserve.

It is astonishing, when one realises it, that the charm of music, the
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