ertile than that
which nature has absorbed, comes to fill out an infinity of ideal forms.
The joy condemned by practical exigencies to scintillate for a moment
uncommunicated, and then, as it were, to be buried alive, may now find
an abstract art to embody it and bring it before the public, formed into
a rich and constant object called a musical composition. So art succeeds
in vindicating the forgotten regions of spirit: a new spontaneous
creation shows how little authority or finality the given creation has.

[Sidenote: Instability the soul of matter.]

What is true of joy is no less true of sorrow, which, though it arises
from failure in some natural ideal, carries with it a sentimental ideal
of its own. Even confusion can find in music an expression and a
catharsis. That death or change should grieve does not follow from the
material nature of these phenomena. To change or to disappear might be
as normal a tendency as to move; and it actually happens, when nothing
ideal has been attained, that _not to be thus_ is the whole law of
being. There is then a nameless satisfaction in passing on; which is the
virtual ideal of pain and mere willing. Death and change acquire a
tragic character when they invade a mind which is not ready for them in
all its parts, so that those elements in it which are still vigorous,
and would maintain somewhat longer their ideal identity, suffer violence
at the hands of the others, already mastered by decay and willing to be
self-destructive. Thus a man whose physiological complexion involves
more poignant emotion than his ideas can absorb--one who is
sentimental--will yearn for new objects that may explain, embody, and
focus his dumb feelings; and these objects, if art can produce them,
will relieve and glorify those feelings in the act of expressing them.
Catharsis is nothing more.

[Sidenote: Peace the triumph of spirit.]

There would be no pleasure in expressing pain, if pain were not
dominated through its expression. To know how just a cause we have for
grieving is already a consolation, for it is already a shift from
feeling to understanding. By such consideration of a passion, the
intellectual powers turn it into subject-matter to operate upon. All
utterance is a feat, all apprehension a discovery; and this intellectual
victory, sounding in the midst of emotional struggles, hushes some part
of their brute importunity. It is at once sublime and beneficent, like a
god stilling a tempe