n of the
entire system of social ethics.

In several musical authors of the first decade of the last century we
find the remark that the fashionable taste in music had at that time
suddenly veered around; a short time before, the greatest effects had
been produced with the fastest possible tempo, the most animated rhythm
and figures; now slow, solemn music was the order of the day. In the
seventeenth century the twelve-eighths time was mainly employed for
dance music and, in general, for quick movements; in the beginning of
the eighteenth century, on the contrary, this species of time conveyed
to people's ears something quite different; it then became the
conventional measure for the soft, yearning _adagio_. Haendel, in his
lively _gigs_ and in his lingering pastoral love arias, gives us side by
side both conceptions of twelve-eighths time. In the second half of the
century this species of time, so much in vogue formerly, disappears
almost entirely. Generally speaking, in the period of Haydn the sense of
rhythm undergoes a simplifying process, and many species of time are
done away with altogether. There is, in this particular, no greater
contrast than Haydn and Sebastian Bach. Haydn generalizes the rhythms in
order to attain the most telling and universally comprehensible effect
possible; Bach individualizes them in order to get the most subtle
result possible. Haydn and his age were satisfied, in the main, with the
four-fourths and two-fourths, three-fourths and six-eighths rhythm; he
simplified all conceivable rhythmic forms in such a manner that it was
possible to express them in one of these four rhythms. Bach employs at
least three times as many species of time and is so hair-splitting in
his selections that it is more often a question of a refinement of
designation, of professional coquetting with the master secrets of
technique, than of any real difference in the matter. Only it must be
said that this, with him, springs from a feeling for the most delicate
shades of rhythm, such as has never existed since. The ear of the whole
Bach age had a much keener appreciation than ours, of the subtleties of
rhythm. At that time, in order to distinguish in the ball-room whether a
_courante_ or a minuet, whether a _gavotte_ or a _bourree_, were being
played, a keenness of rhythmic instinct was necessary, of which in truth
very little has survived in our young dancing people of today, who often
have to bethink themselves whe