o be appreciated and
remembered. The eye too has a field in which clear distinctions and
relations appear, and for that reason is an organ favourable to
intelligence; but what gives music its superior emotional power is its
rhythmic advance. Time is a medium which appeals more than space to
emotion. Since life is itself a flux, and thought an operation, there is
naturally something immediate and breathless about whatever flows and
expands. The visible world offers itself to our regard with a certain
lazy indifference. "Peruse me," it seems to say, "if you will. I am
here; and even if you pass me by now and later find it to your advantage
to resurvey me, I may still be here." The world of sound speaks a more
urgent language. It insinuates itself into our very substance, and it is
not so much the music that moves us as we that move with it. Its rhythms
seize upon our bodily life, to accelerate or to deepen it; and we must
either become inattentive altogether or remain enslaved.

[Sidenote: Its physical affinities.]

This imperious function in music has lent it functions which are far
from aesthetic. Song can be used to keep in unison many men's efforts, as
when sailors sing as they heave; it can make persuasive and obvious
sentiments which, if not set to music, might seem absurd, as often in
love songs and in psalmody. It may indeed serve to prepare the mind for
any impression whatever, and render the same more intense when it comes.
Music was long used before it was loved or people took pains to refine
it. It would have seemed as strange in primitive times to turn utterance
into a fine art as now to make aesthetic paces out of mourning or
child-birth. Primitive music is indeed a wail and a parturition; magical
and suggestive as it may be, for long ages it never bethinks itself to
be beautiful. It is content to furnish a contagious melancholy
employment to souls without a language and with little interest in the
real world. Barbaric musicians, singing and playing together more or
less at random, are too much carried away by their performance to
conceive its effect; they cry far too loud and too unceasingly to
listen. A contagious tradition carries them along and controls them, in
a way, as they improvise; the assembly is hardly an audience; all are
performers, and the crowd is only a stimulus that keeps every one
dancing and howling in emulation. This unconsidered flow of early art
remains present, more or less, to the e