Probably most will think that the function here assigned to music is one of very little moment.  But further reflection may lead them to a contrary conviction.  In its bearings upon human happiness, we believe that this emotional language which musical culture develops and refines is only second in importance to the language of the intellect; perhaps not even second to it.  For these modifications of voice produced by feelings are the means of exciting like feelings in others.  Joined with gestures and expressions of face, they give life to the otherwise dead words in which the intellect utters its ideas; and so enable the hearer not only to understand the state of mind they accompany, but to partake of that state.  In short, they are the chief media of sympathy.  And if we consider how much both our general welfare and our immediate pleasures depend upon sympathy, we shall recognise the importance of whatever makes this sympathy greater.  If we bear in mind that by their fellow-feeling men are led to behave justly, kindly, and considerately to each other—­that the difference between the cruelty of the barbarous and the humanity of the civilised, results from the increase of fellow-feeling; if we bear in mind that this faculty which makes us sharers in the joys and sorrows of others, is the basis of all the higher affections—­that in friendship, love, and all domestic pleasures, it is an essential element; if we bear in mind how much our direct gratifications are intensified by sympathy,—­how, at the theatre, the concert, the picture gallery, we lose half our enjoyment if we have no one to enjoy with us; if, in short, we bear in mind that for all happiness beyond what the unfriended recluse can have, we are indebted to this same sympathy;—­we shall see that the agencies which communicate it can scarcely be overrated in value.

The tendency of civilisation is more and more to repress the antagonistic elements of our characters and to develop the social ones—­to curb our purely selfish desires and exercise our unselfish ones—­to replace private gratifications by gratifications resulting from, or involving, the happiness of others.  And while, by this adaptation to the social state, the sympathetic side of our nature is being unfolded, there is simultaneously growing up a language of sympathetic intercourse—­a language through which we communicate to others the happiness we feel, and are made sharers in their happiness.

This double process, of which the effects are already sufficiently appreciable, must go on to an extent of which we can as yet have no adequate conception.  The habitual concealment of our feelings diminishing, as it must, in proportion as our feelings become such as do not demand concealment, we may conclude that the exhibition of them will become much more vivid than we now dare allow it to be; and this implies a more expressive emotional language.  At the same time, feelings of a higher and more complex kind,