beauty of natural form, promises a new and more
harmonious race, almost a realization of Rousseau's ideal, and with it
an era of truly rhythmic artistic production.

That the soil is ready for the new seed may be shown by a moment's
consideration of what I consider to be a parallel development in
painting. There is in Munich a group of artists who call themselves Der
Blaue Reiter. They are led by a Russian, Wassily Kandinsky, and a
German, Franz Marc, and it is of Kandinsky's art that I propose to
speak. Kandinsky is that rare combination, an artist who can express
himself in both words and paint. His book--_Ueber das Geistige in der
Kunst_[1]--is an interesting and subtle piece of aesthetic philosophy.
His painting is a realization of the attempt to paint music. He has
isolated the emotion caused by line and colour from the external
association of idea. All form in the ordinary representative sense is
eliminated. But form there is in the deeper sense, the shapes and
rhythms of the _innerer Notwendigkeit_, and with it, haunting,
harmonious colour. To revert to a former metaphor, painting has been
brought into the centre of the scale. As Kandinsky says in his book:
"Shades of colour, like shades of sound, are of a much subtler nature,
cause much subtler vibrations of the spirit than can ever be given by
words." It is to achieve this finer utterance, to establish a surer and
more expressive connexion between spirit and spirit, that Kandinsky is
striving. His pictures are visions, beautiful abstractions of colour and
line which he has lived himself, deep down in his inmost soul. He is
intensely individual, as are all true mystics; at the same time the
spirit of his work is universal.

[1] _Ueber das Geistige in der Kunst._ Piper Verlag,
Muenchen, 3 Marks. See also vol. i. of _der Blaue
Reiter_. Piper Verlag, 10 Marks.

In this, then, as in so much else, Kandinsky and Dalcroze are advancing
side by side. They are leading the way to the truest art, and ultimately
to the truest life of all, which is a synthesis of the collective arts
and emotions of all nations, which is, at the same time, based on
individuality, because it represents the inner being of each one of its
devotees.

MICHAEL T. H. SADLER.

_Printed by_ BUTLER & TANNER, _Frome and London_.

[Illustration: A Plastic Exercise.]

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze, by
Emile Jaques-Dalcroze