of the music into
movement, is merely recurrence of historical development.

Words with the music soon follow, and from these beginnings--probably
war-songs or religious chants--come song-poems and ultimately poetry as
we know it to-day. The still more modern development of prose-writing,
in the stylistic sense, is merely a step further.

The development on the other side follows a somewhat similar line. The
rhythm of the dancing figure is reproduced in rude sculpture and
bas-relief, and then in painting.

[Illustration: A Plastic Exercise.]

So we have, as it were, a scale of the arts, with music at its centre
and prose-writing and painting at its two extremes. From end to end of
the scale runs the unifying desire for rhythm.[1]

[1] For valuable help in these ideas I am indebted to
Mr. J. W. Harvey. I should like to quote verbatim one or
two remarks of his on the subject, taken from a recent
letter: "Human motion gives the convergence of time
(inner sense) and space (outer sense), the spirit and
the body. Time, which we are in our inner selves, is
more dissociable from us than space, which only our
bodies have; the one (time) can be interpreted
emotionally and directly by a time-sense; the other
(space) symbolically, by a space-sense, which is
sight."

To speak of the rhythm of painting may seem fanciful, but I think that
is only lack of familiarity. The expression is used here with no
intention of metaphor. Great pictures have a very marked and real
rhythm, of colour, of line, of feeling. The best prose-writing has
equally a distinct rhythm.

There was never an age in the history of art when rhythm played a more
important part than it does to-day. The teaching of M. Dalcroze at
Hellerau is a brilliant expression of the modern desire for rhythm in
its most fundamental form--that of bodily movement. Its nature and
origin have been described elsewhere; it is for me to try and suggest
the possibilities of its influence on every other art, and on the whole
of life.

Let it be clearly understood from the first that the rhythmic training
at Hellerau has an importance far deeper and more extended than is
contained in its immediate artistic beauty, its excellence as a purely
musical training, or its value to physical development. This is not a
denial of its importance in these three respects. The beauty of the
classes is amazing; the actor, as well as the designer of