definable
sense possessed by all,--the ideal.

Literature is always objective: it speaks to the understanding, and
determines in us impressions in keeping with the determined sense which
it expresses. Music, on the contrary, may be, in turn, objective and
subjective, according to the disposition in which we find ourselves at
the moment of hearing it. It is objective when, affected only by the
purely physical sensation of sound, we listen to it passively, and it
suggests to us impressions. A march, a waltz, a flute imitating the
nightingale, the chromatic scale imitating the murmuring of the wind in
the "Pastoral Symphony," may be taken as examples.

It is subjective when, under the empire of a latent impression, we
discover in its general character an accordance with our psychological
state, and we assimilate it to ourselves; it is then like a mirror in
which we see reflected the movements which agitate us, with a fidelity
all the more exact from the fact that, without being conscious of it, we
ourselves are the painters of the picture which unrolls itself before
our imagination.

Let me explain. Play a melancholy air to a proscript thinking of his
distant home; to a deserted lover; to a mother mourning the loss of a
child; to a vanquished warrior;--and be assured they will all
appropriate to themselves the plaintive harmonies, and fancy they detect
in them the accents of their own grief.

The fact of music is still a mystery. We know that it is composed of
three principles,--air, vibration, and rhythmic symmetry. Strike an
object in an exhausted receiver, and it produces no sound, because no
air is there; touch a ringing glass, and the sound stops, because there
is no vibration; take away the rhythm of the simplest air by changing
the duration of the notes that compose it, and you render it obscure and
unrecognizable, because you have destroyed its symmetry.

But why, then, do not several hammers striking in cadence produce music?
They certainly comply with the three conditions of air, vibration, and
rhythm. Why is the accord of a third so pleasing to the ear? Why is the
minor mode so suggestive of sadness? There is the mystery,--there the
unexplained phenomenon.

We restrict ourselves to saying that music, which, like speech, is
perceived through the medium of the ear, does not, like speech, call
upon the brain for an explanation of the sensation produced by the
vibration on the nerves; it addresses itself to a