332 "UNEMOTIONAL MUSIC" 



(in frogs and other creatures as well as man) and 

 its evolution till it has risen to be an art; and as it 

 is the outcome and beautified expression of emotion, 

 "unemotional music" sounds like a contradiction in 

 terms, and one asks for a better term which is not 

 merely a negative to describe it by. For "unemotional 

 music" simply means demusicalised or castrated 

 music. The average or ordinary person for whom 

 I write, being myself one of his kind, cannot go into 

 these higher developments of the art. Thus, music to 

 me means just what music meant to my great-grand- 

 father and mother, and to all men, before and after 

 them. Like Sir Thomas Browne, I am so sensitive 

 to it that I may be moved to tears by even the 

 common and tavern sort of music. It is so with many 

 of us, only we don't say so : but Sir Thomas Browne 

 could afford to give himself away freely, simply 

 because he could do it in words of such charm, and 

 with so godlike a gesture, that the sophisticated and 

 the simple both feared to laugh at him lest their 

 laugh should be taken for that of fools. 



What the effect of music was in my early years 

 I have told. It was the same with the other arts, 

 and I will give just one instance — the effect of a 

 painting when I was a big boy, when I first saw 

 a big landscape. It was exhibited as the work of a 

 young Anglo-Argentine artist who had gone to 

 Europe to study art, and on his return had painted 

 this large landscape, a scene in the wide open pampas, 

 with a pool and reeds and rushes, and a group of wild 

 horses on its edge in the foreground. This expression 



