“Ancestors of Emotion”

The Reader may have noticed that several Answerers have evaded that difficult and paradoxical question of how the emotion of music stands to the human emotion with which it is occasionally “streaked, veined, complicated or entangled,” by referring to a plane of existence, a “calm and serene” region, in which, as eloquently expressed by Lucien “La tumulte des passions ne gronde que pour y trouver l’apaisement.” ¹ I hope to show that this alleged “higher plane” and its purification of human feelings are genuine and intelligible psychological facts, and indeed among the most important ones of all aesthetics. But before proceeding to that, we must deal with another, but obscurer and odder reality of our mental life. For, after all, is it not an odd, an unexpected and wellnigh inexplicable fact that human passions should have found their way into anything so remote and different from them as “Tunes.” as “Notes and the relations between Notes”? And this is none the easier to understand if we bear in mind the conviction of certain “Listeners” that what exists in the realm of music is not really human emotion, but only, as Barbara called it, a “counterpart thereof.”