3i6 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 



long-past states of happiness and misery; it is the 

 feeling that all these events and passions have left 

 in the mind, even after the actual facts, the cause 

 of the associations, have been forgotten. The feeling 

 creates the expression, and as every individual life 

 differs in its emotional experiences and the subse- 

 quent associations from every other life, the expression 

 which each one of us finds in music, and in whatever 

 he sees and hears, is his own and differs from that 

 of others. 



To return to my own experiences. In time, when 

 I had more and a fuller experience of music, vocal 

 and instrumental, in concert halls and operas, the 

 agitation grew less and less until after years I could 

 listen and take my pleasure without any painful 

 after effects. Something of the original disturbing 

 power in music remains, when, for instance, I have 

 listened to a great symphony or a great opera and 

 am haunted for days by a persistent recurrence of 

 certain passages; but it is no longer a pain. Or, if 

 a pain, it is a pain one would not willingly forgo. 



In conclusion of this chapter I am concerned to 

 think that the musical reader may have misunder- 

 stood the words used at the outset, when, after 

 confessing to my ignorance of music, I stated that 

 the subject would be instrumental music as it exists. 

 The chapter itself will serve to show that it was never 

 my intention to deal with music as an art and a science, 

 but to regard it solely from the evolutionary point 

 of view as an outcome of life, as natural as singing — 

 to treat of its development, of the qualities which 



