ven though they be purely conventional (that is agreed upon, as we
have agreed that a nod of the head shall convey assent, a shake of the
head dissent, and a shrug of the shoulders doubt or indifference), the
composers have built up a voluminous vocabulary of idioms which need
only to be helped out by a suggestion to the mind to be eloquently
illustrative. "Sometimes hearing a melody or harmony arouses an
emotion like that aroused by the contemplation of a thing. Minor
harmonies, slow movements, dark tonal colorings, combine directly to
put a musically susceptible person in a mood congenial to thoughts of
sorrow and death; and, inversely, the experience of sorrow, or the
contemplation of death, creates affinity for minor harmonies, slow
movements, and dark tonal colorings. Or we recognize attributes in
music possessed also by things, and we consort the music and the
things, external attributes bringing descriptive music into play,
which excites the fancy, internal attributes calling for an exercise
of the loftier faculty, imagination, to discern their meaning."[B] The
latter kind is delineative music of the higher order, the kind that I
have called idealized programme music, for it is the imagination
which, as Ruskin has said, "sees the heart and inner nature and makes
them felt, but is often obscure, mysterious, and interrupted in its
giving out of outer detail," which is "a seer in the prophetic sense,
calling the things that are not as though they were, and forever
delighting to dwell on that which is not tangibly present." In this
kind of music, harmony, the real seat of emotionality in music, is an
eloquent factor, and, indeed, there is no greater mystery in the art,
which is full of mystery, than the fact that the lowering of the
second tone in the chord, which is the starting-point of harmony,
should change an expression of satisfaction, energetic action, or
jubilation into an accent of pain or sorrow. The major mode is "to
do," the minor, "to suffer:"

[Sidenote: _Major and minor._]

[Music illustration: Hur-rah! A-las!]

[Sidenote: _Music and movement._]

How near a large number of suggestions, which are based wholly upon
experience or association of ideas, lie to the popular fancy, might be
illustrated by scores of examples. Thoughts of religious functions
arise in us the moment we hear the trombones intone a solemn phrase in
full harmony; an oboe melody in sixth-eighth time over a drone bass
brings up a