nction than
merely to be, is the ideal relevance, the practical and mutually
representative character, which they sometimes acquire. All experience
is pathological if we consider its ground; but a part of it is also
rational if we consider its import. The words I am now writing have a
meaning not because at this moment they are fused together in my animal
soul as a dream might fuse them, however incongruous the situation they
depict might be in waking life; they are significant only if this
moment's product can meet and conspire with some other thought speaking
of what elsewhere exists, and uttering an intuition that from time to
time may be actually recovered. The art of distributing interest among
the occasions and vistas of life so as to lend them a constant worth,
and at the same time to give feeling an ideal object, is at bottom the
sole business of education; but the undertaking is long, and much
feeling remains unemployed and unaccounted for. This objectless emotion
chokes the heart with its dull importunity; now it impedes right action,
now it feeds and fattens illusion. Much of it radiates from primary
functions which, though their operation is half known, have only base or
pitiful associations in human life; so that they trouble us with deep
and subtle cravings, the unclaimed _Hinterland_ of life. When music,
either by verbal indications or by sensuous affinities, or by both at
once, succeeds in tapping this fund of suppressed feeling, it
accordingly supplies a great need. It makes the dumb speak, and plucks
from the animal heart potentialities of expression which might render
it, perhaps, even more than human.

[Sidenote: Music lends elementary feelings an intellectual communicable
form.]

By its emotional range music is appropriate to all intense occasions: we
dance, pray, and mourn to music, and the more inadequate words or
external acts are to the situation, the more grateful music is. As the
only bond between music and life is emotion, music is out of place only
where emotion itself is absent. If it breaks in upon us in the midst of
study or business it becomes an interruption or alternative to our
activity, rather than an expression of it; we must either remain
inattentive or pass altogether into the realm of sound (which may be
unemotional enough) and become musicians for the nonce. Music brings its
sympathetic ministry only to emotional moments; there it merges with
common existence, and is a welcome