substitute for descriptive ideas,
since it co-operates with us and helps to deliver us from dumb
subjection to influences which we should not know how to meet otherwise.
There is often in what moves us a certain ruthless persistence, together
with a certain poverty of form; the power felt is out of proportion to
the interest awakened, and attention is kept, as in pain, at once
strained and idle. At such a moment music is a blessed resource. Without
attempting to remove a mood that is perhaps inevitable, it gives it a
congruous filling. Thus the mood is justified by an illustration or
expression which seems to offer some objective and ideal ground for its
existence; and the mood is at the same time relieved by absorption in
that impersonal object. So entertained, the feeling settles. The passion
to which at first we succumbed is now tamed and appropriated. We have
digested the foreign substance in giving it a rational form: its
energies are merged in that strength by which we freely operate.

In this way the most abstract of arts serves the dumbest emotions.
Matter which cannot enter the moulds of ordinary perception, capacities
which a ruling instinct usually keeps under, flow suddenly into this
new channel. Music is like those branches which some trees put forth
close to the ground, far below the point where the other boughs
separate; almost a tree by itself, it has nothing but the root in common
with its parent. Somewhat in this fashion music diverts into an abstract
sphere a part of those forces which abound beneath the point at which
human understanding grows articulate. It nourishes on saps which other
branches of ideation are too narrow or rigid to take up. Those
elementary substances the musician can spiritualise by his special
methods, taking away their reproach and redeeming them from blind
intensity.

[Sidenote: All essences are in themselves good, even the passions.]

There is consequently in music a sort of Christian piety, in that it
comes not to call the just but sinners to repentance, and understands
the spiritual possibilities in outcasts from the respectable world. If
we look at things absolutely enough, and from their own point of view,
there can be no doubt that each has its own ideal and does not question
its own justification. Lust and frenzy, revery or despair, fatal as they
may be to a creature that has general ulterior interests, are not
perverse in themselves: each searches for its own affini