Page:Dawn of the Day.pdf/179

Rh watch the play of features in feminine faces, how they quiver with animation, through the constant imitation and reflection of all that is being experienced round them. But by music more than anything else are we shown what great masters we are in the quick and subtle divination of feelings and in sympathy; for though music be a mere copy of copied feelings, it yet, despite this distance and vagneuess, pretty frequently makes us share in these very feelings, so that we grow sad without the slightest occasion for sadness, perfect fools as we are, only because we hear sounds and rhythms which, in some way or other, remind us of the tone and the movement, or only the habits of sorrowful people. There is a tradition of a Danish king who, listening to a singer, was wrought up to such a pitch of warlike enthusiasm by the music that he started up to his sect and killed five persons of his assembled household: there was no war, no enemy; in fact, the very opposite prevailed; yet the force which refers from the feeling to the cause was so strong in the king as to overpower his observation and reason. But such is nearly always the effect of music (provided that it really produces an effect), and we have no need of such very paradoxical cases to become aware of this: the state of feeling into which music throws us, is nearly always contradictory to the appearance of our real state and of reason, which recognises this real state and its causes, If we ask how it has come about that the