sted
emotions that sentiment grows definite; this fusion can hardly come
about without ideas intervening, and certainly it could never be
sustained or expressed without them. Occasions define feelings; we can
convey a delicate emotion only by delicately describing the situation
which brings it on. Music, with its irrelevant medium, can never do this
for common life, and the passions, as music renders them, are always
general. But music has its own substitute for conceptual distinctness.
It makes feeling specific, nay, more delicate and precise than
association with things could make it, by uniting it with musical form.
We may say that besides suggesting abstractly all ordinary passions,
music creates a new realm of form far more subtly impassioned than is
vulgar experience. Human life is confined to a dramatic repertory which
has already become somewhat classical and worn, but music has no end of
new situations, shaded in infinite ways; it moves in all sorts of bodies
to all sorts of adventures. In life the ordinary routine of destiny
beats so emphatic a measure that it does not allow free play to feeling;
we cannot linger on anything long enough to exhaust its meaning, nor can
we wander far from the beaten path to catch new impressions. But in
music there are no mortal obligations, no imperious needs calling us
back to reality. Here nothing beautiful is extravagant, nothing
delightful unworthy. Musical refinement finds no limit but its own
instinct, so that a thousand shades of what, in our blundering words, we
must call sadness or mirth, find in music their distinct expression.
Each phrase, each composition, articulates perfectly what no human
situation could embody. These fine emotions are really new; they are
altogether musical and unexampled in practical life; they are native to
the passing cadence, absolute postures into which it throws the soul.

[Sidenote: They merge with common emotions, and express such as find no
object in nature.]

There is enough likeness, however, between musical and mundane feeling
for the first to be used in entertaining the second. Hence the singular
privilege of this art: to give form to what is naturally inarticulate
and express those depths of human nature which can speak no language
current in the world. Emotion is primarily about nothing, and much of it
remains about nothing to the end. What rescues a part of our passions
from this pathological plight, and gives them some other fu