only, nor indeed the best, form of walking. Marching presupposes a
disciplined company and a hard road; it reduces all to the measure of
the least, resulting in that cramped and debased form of motion known as
the military ‘stride’; rhythmically, it over-emphasises the beat of the
foot and neglects the other elements in the walking motion. In the same
way, marching tunes seem often to win their popularity at the expense of
their quality, and to border on dulness, if not triviality. To say that
marches express the great moments of life is perhaps inaccurate;
strictly they deal not with the feelings of the hero or king or priest
or corpse or bridegroom, but with the feelings of the bystanders about
these feelings. Now it is a regrettable fact that ordinary men on
ceremonial occasions tend to take a slightly superficial view of the
proceedings. I doubt if the _Cives Romani_ assembled at a triumph
thought about the imperial greatness of Rome so much as the fit of the
proconsul’s cloak, the personal appearance of the chained captives, or
the chances of a stampede among the elephants. Similarly at a wedding,
the linked destinies of two young lives, the eternal vows flung out by
the unquenchable courage of man across the unsubstantial hazard of
futurity, are not, as a rule, the first and only preoccupation of the
guests. Hence it comes that the most popular march tunes have often a
suggestion of artificiality or even insincerity. The orthodox Wedding
March is deliberately artificial; it was written to represent--and does
most exquisitely represent--the wedding of six semi-mythical lovers seen
through the glamour of the fairy-haunted forest of midsummer: it is
somewhat out of place at a decorous union of citizens. Similarly, of the
three popular Funeral Marches, one is tinged with decorative pomposity,
and one with Little Nell; only one casts over the hearer the very shadow
of death.
However this may be, in actual fact the walker on the hills, alone or
with a few companions, has little to do with marches. His rhythm is not
a bare ‘one, two, one, two’; it is a long swing from the hips to which
the whole body sways, a complex of stresses in which the foot-beats only
mark the periods. And his feeling is not that of a crowd at a show: it
is something deeper, more contemplative, more individual, a function of
many variables, of himself, what he is, what he does, of last week, last
month, to-day, the face of the country, the influence of sun and wind.
And the music which he craves as his counterpart--nay, the music which
he actually hums or sings or whistles--is rarely the music of the march.
What it is may be disputed. At one time or another I have heard nearly
every kind of tune sounding to the steps of a walker. Wagner and
Purcell, Sullivan and Anon, symphony and opera, tone-poem and
folk-song--nothing (with one exception) seems to come amiss to a walking
company. And from this very large and variegated body of music one most
remarkable fact emerges--namely, that nearly every kind of rhythm can,
at some time or other, be accommodated to the walking stride. Regarding
man as a biped, naturally inclined to ‘lead’ with one foot rather than
the other (generally the left), you would say that even rhythms with
two or four beats to the bar would suit him best; and perhaps (in the
lowest sense of ‘nature’ as the starting point and not the finishing
post) the natural rhythm of walking is the ‘one, two, one, two.’ But man
is more than a biped; and if he likes a tune with three or five beats to
the bar (or seven or eleven for that matter), he is quite capable of
stepping accordingly, and of either ‘leading’ with each foot
alternately, or of overlooking altogether the difference between the
natural stresses of his feet. Further, as regards the three-time
rhythms, many of them go quick, so that only one foot-beat is needed in
each bar; and there is the incomparable six-eight, of which more will be
said in the sequel.
At this point the scandalised mathematician inquires, What becomes of
the tempo? Is not the effect of walking on music purely Procrustean? A
walker (let us say) takes two strides to a second; in order to suit his
steps, a tune in even time must go at a particular rate, selected from
the following schedule, to wit, (_a_) two bars to a second, with one
foot-beat in each bar; (_b_) one bar to a second, with two beats in each
bar; (_c_) one bar to two seconds, with four beats to each bar; for
practical purposes we need not go beyond this point. For the
three-times, there is an even more sharply divided scale, viz. (_a_) two
bars to a second, one beat to each bar; (_b_) one bar to a second and a
half, three beats to each bar; (_c_) one bar to three seconds, six beats
to each bar. What, asks the mathematician, happens to the tunes whose
proper pace falls, let us say, between (_a_) and (_b_): must they either
be drawn out languorously to fit (_b_), or feverishly accelerated to fit
(_a_)?
The answer to the mathematician’s question is that in practice no
difficulty arises. In the first place, a walker’s rate of stride varies
to some extent according as he is going uphill or downhill, on grass,
rock, or road. Secondly, a little licence may surely be claimed by a
walker in varying the orthodox tempo. After all, even conductors do this
sometimes; and if one tune has to go a little quicker than an orchestra
takes it, another will have to go a little slower, which is (I
understand) only a slight extension of what the musicians call ‘rubato.’
Thirdly, and as a minor point, we may set against any possible
disadvantages the peculiarly fine effects which the walker obtains in
augmentation, when he whistles a tune with one step to a bar and repeats
it with two steps to a bar. Finally, it is only in the three-times,
between (_a_) and (_b_), that the matter becomes at all serious, (_b_)
being one-third of the rate of (_a_). Now, it is a curious fact, that
all the good three-time tunes (to speak broadly) fall quite easily under
either (_a_) or (_b_). Cheerful songs and jigs and scherzos and most
six-eight tunes go naturally with one step to each group of three notes,
the swing of the body marking the weak stresses; more solemn themes,
funereal folk-songs, the Unfinished Symphony, the last movement of the
‘Pathétique,’ and the Tristan prelude go naturally with three steps to a
group of three notes; the Pilgrims’ March takes six, with complicated
cross-accents when the ‘pulse of life’ begins. The intermediate class of
three-times, between (_a_) and (_b_), taking about one second or two
strides to a bar, and therefore cutting across the walking rhythm, are
generally waltz tunes, which no one in his senses wants to sing on a
walk.
If the mathematician still persists, we can silence him by remarking
that in any case the tempo is not the most vital point in walking tunes.
If all that we desired were a measure to suit our steps, ‘John Brown’s
body’ and the ‘Dead March’ would be enough. The real thing which matters
is not the tempo but the character of a tune. Nothing proves the stuff
of a tune so surely as to sing it on a walk; music which can stand this
test must have some real substance in it. The walker need go through no
conscious process of judging, accepting, refusing; let him merely walk,
with his mind ranging at large and a tune sounding on his lips or
working unuttered in the inward ear, which is the joy of solitude;
without his knowing it the assize will be held and judgment pronounced.
The shoddy sentimental phrase, which sounded so alluring at 11.30 p.m.
yesterday among the potted palms in the conservatory, turns thin and
sour by day on the ruminant palate of the walker. The theme which
sounded hard and obscure takes on a new meaning as it pulsates to the
rhythm of the stride: obscurity reveals hidden purposes and
possibilities of melody; hardness becomes strength; and the whole sinks
gradually into the inner parts of the walker’s consciousness where music
abides beside the springs of thought and action.
Songs and marches are good, no doubt, and ‘John Brown’s body’ is a
strong staff in moments of fatigue; but better than these, and nearer to
the spirit of walking, are the great themes, the structural tunes which
uphold the fabric of symphony or opera. For the mood of a man as he
walks is thematic; there are certain main currents of thought in his
head, clear and distinct at first, which have to be developed and
interwoven and combined and contrasted and turned upside down before
they can be restated with all the added volume of meaning they have
acquired in the process, or finally summarised and emphasised in the
coda (after tea). His thoughts are not homogeneous, self-contained
wholes like those of ordinary life which issue in words and actions;
they are shifting and variable, moving continuously, and continuously
changing; they dwell in a region apart from the world of action and
experience, though related to it and coloured by it. Hence the music to
which they naturally adapt themselves is not the definite tune with a
beginning, a middle, and an end; it is rather the theme, which has no
fixed form, but develops and germinates and changes its colour and
shape, and reveals itself only through varied manifestations. So a man
may whistle a theme when he starts in the morning, forget all about it
as he sinks into the contemplation of walking, and yet find at evening
that all the day it has been working in the fabric of his thought; and
when next he hears it on an orchestra it will come to him with an added
richness of meaning, with a suggestion of the wind in his ears, the
shower on his face, and a large contemplation enwrapping him.
It is on the mood which walking induces, rather than on the rhythmical
character itself, that the affinity between walking and music mainly
rests. There are other bodily activities besides walking which have a
rhythm, some a much more marked and interesting rhythm; and yet these
are not usually accompanied by music, and do not seem to feel the need
of it. Eminent among these are the two very noble rhythms of a hurdler
and of a racing crew. In an actual hurdle race there are possibly
difficulties in the way of musical accompaniment: the competitors
generally move at different speeds (or it would not be a race); and the
tune in any case would have to be a short one, lasting about sixteen
seconds. But a rowing crew has necessarily a uniform and well-marked
rhythm, and can continue its activity for a considerable time: _prima
facie_, it would form a fine subject for a descriptive tone-poem in the
modern style, the orchestra including rattles, a pistol, a bell, and a
bass tuba (the coach), the roar of the crowd and the swish of the
aeroplanes forming ‘colour,’ with the steady rowing rhythm proceeding
underneath. And yet, as far as I know, this tone-poem has not been
written. The nearest approach that has yet been made to the rowing
rhythm is the ’cello theme in the Unfinished Symphony; but the rest of
the movement is hardly in keeping. The Eton Boating Song, whatever its
other merits, is a complete failure as a picture of rowing; it suggests
much more forcibly what happens after the race. The fact is, that the
rower’s mood is not, like the walker’s, a musical one: it is too
practical, too mechanical, too much bound down by time and space; it
lacks the large speculative outlook which calls for music as its natural
counterpart.
* * * * *
The same criticism applies even more strongly to another form of bodily
motion, namely dancing. _Prima facie_, it would appear that in relation
to music, dancing is first of the bodily activities and the rest
nowhere. Dancing is, in theory, the pure embodiment of music in motion;
walking is an activity primarily directed to other ends, and only
accidentally associated with music. However much the walker may
appreciate music, however thematic the structure of his mood, he has to
be getting along; whereas the dancer has no such locomotive
limitations,[1] but can stop or stand on one leg, or go round in
circles, or do anything else which appears suitable to the character of
the music which inspires him. Further, the dancer has his band, or at
least his piano or harmonium, tangible and within earshot; the walker
nearly always has to produce or imagine his music for himself. Any
appreciation, therefore, of music which the walker can achieve by
suiting his steps to it, would seem but a pale shadow of the dancer’s
rapture, as he flings himself, unhampered by any other thought, into the
intoxicating whirl of the waltz.
But this by no means exhausts the superiorities of dancing, considered
as a purely artistic form of motion. Dancing contains or admits of
artistic elements of which walking knows little or nothing. One of these
is figure; whereas the walker is bound to move along a more or less
straight line, the dancer can move in circles or squares or ellipses and
can thus employ all the resources of decorative art. Second, and more
important, is the fact that dancing can be concerted; the individual
dancers can move in correlative or supplementary motions forming one
rhythmic system. The best rhythmic unity which walkers can hope for is a
mere unison of stride and step. But the unity of dancers’ movements can
be organic--a harmony, a unity of differing elements, a type of the
perfect man or the perfect state. A concrete presentation of the ideal,
aided by all the resources of bodily grace, music, and decorative
art--such, in short, is the essential character of dancing; and beside
it walking cuts a very poor figure.
Imagination boggles at the ultimate possibilities of dancing. Far back
in the dim and unenlightened past, the dance on the shield of Achilles
seems wonderful enough--the wreathed maidens of costly wooing and the
youths in well-woven doublets, their hands on each other’s wrists,
speeding in lines and circles, while a divine minstrel (who, I regret
to observe from the brackets, is textually under suspicion) made music
on his lyre. And this is only Homeric dancing, and the centuries that
have elapsed since the lamented death of the author have seen one
continual process of development in all the elements involved in
dancing, most of all in music. Youths and maidens could dance nowadays
in figures subtler than the line and circle, to music other than the
simple melody of the lyre. We might have--indeed to some extent we
have--recital-dances by a single performer. We might have chamber-music
dances--four or five trained and expert athletes mingling and
intertwining in figures growing more complicated and with motions less
classical as the music grows later in date. We might have
concerto-dances with a single supreme performer whose motions are
accompanied and enforced by others. We might have symphony-dances--a
systematised performance in elaborate figures, with a definite motion by
a group of dancers to represent each theme, modified in the development
section, repeated in the recapitulation, returning emphasised and
strengthened in the coda. Lastly, we might have an intoxicated riot on
no particular plan and call it a dream-phantasy. Before such conceptions
the walker can only call attention humbly to the rhythmic elements in
his own craft, and pass on with bowed and reverent head.
And then, as Xanthias says after Dionysus’ News from the Front, ‘I woke
up.’ We look round the actual world for this realisation of the rhythmic
ideal, and what do we find? Thirty couples waltzing, in inadequate
space, at a late hour, in a vitiated atmosphere, to the tune of the
‘Merry Widow.’[2] Where are the complex and concerted figures? Where are
the trained and exquisite movements? Where are the subtleties and
varieties of rhythm? The figure is rotatory, roughly elliptical, varied
by collisions and pauses for breath. The bulk of the dancers plainly do
not know what training is. The rhythm is as varied as that of a clock
and much less subtle than that of a motor-omnibus. The dancers are
talking instead of attending to business; the atmosphere reminds one of
the Thames Valley on a November afternoon; the thermometer is at 72°;
the tune makes one ill. Something very serious seems to have happened to
that conclusive _prima facie_ argument which we presented so faithfully
above.
The hygiene of dancing and the physical conditions of dancers are very
interesting subjects, and have, I think, a close connection with dance
music; but for the present let us pass them by and take only the
essential points. The outstanding fact is the progressive limitation of
dancing to one form and one rhythm. Evidence on such a matter is hard to
collect, for there is little in the way of printed record; but I can
speak with first-hand knowledge of a provincial culture of the late
’nineties, which is probably a fair equivalent of the metropolitan
culture of the early ’nineties. In this culture there were several forms
of dance, now completely extinct, which, although of a low grade
anthropologically, contained at least the rudiments of higher things.
There were concerted dances--with a perceptible figure--the Swedish
dance, Sir Roger de Coverley, and, relatively a masterpiece of
ingenuity, the Lancers. They were not much as dances; their figures were
still at the lowest level of geometrical art and could have been
executed with a ruler and compasses; their organisation demanded,
without overstraining, the intelligence of a normal child of eight. (The
Grand Chain in the Lancers perhaps required a little more and formed a
beautiful moral analogue, since its success depended not on the most but
on the least capable person present, with the result that it often broke
down.) Still, with all their futility, these dances contained the
elements of organisation and figure. Where are those elements now?
It was the same with rhythm; our culture was low, but had its
possibilities. There was a form of motion, somewhere on the confines of
dancing and jumping, called the Galop--a series of wild rotatory leaps
or shuffles, which would have made a cannibal war-dance appear
relatively dignified or even sophisticated, but formed no mean test of
wind and limb. There was that daring rhythmic variety, the Polka, which
even had dotted notes, with a neat anacrustic jump on the quaver
following. There was a further reach of human enterprise into triplets,
called the Pas de Quatre, with an inspiriting high kick. And there were
various barbarisms from America and elsewhere to remind us that there
are depths below depths. I have no wish to champion these relics, still
less to advocate their restoration; but over their dishonoured grave it
is only fair to remark that they were distinct varieties of rhythm, and
pointed the way to further developments. That way is now closed.
* * * * *
For what have we now? My evidence for the present century rests mainly
on hearsay, but the witnesses are unanimous. The concerted dance is
gone; the dance with a figure is gone; nearly all rhythmic varieties are
gone, except one. There are, to be sure, occasional reversions to
barbarism, which display some rhythmic variety, but these are ephemeral,
relatively rare, and depend more on posture than on rhythm for their
interest. If we view the 1902-1912 dance culture as a whole, there is no
denying that the single staple form is the waltz--a plain homogeneous
three-time rhythm, with no figure and no organisation, taken throughout
at a uniform pace which is fixed annually at something approaching a bar
to a second by the Congress of Incorporated Dance Musicians.
On its merits as a form of motion opinions are divided. For those who
like it, the waltz is the supreme form of bodily motion, enshrining all
grace and all rhythm, opening the doors of paradise and lifting the
dancer to a rapt ecstasy of sense transcending the bounds of reason, or
words to that effect. To those who dislike it, the waltz seems a
singularly dull, monotonous and undistinguished form of rhythm, poles
asunder from the clean movement of a free man. But whether good or bad,
it is alone; there are no other dancing rhythms which need be seriously
considered. So we reach this curious result, that while rowing, which
has no relation to music, has produced at least three very interesting
rhythms (the racing-stroke, the paddle, and the picnic-party), and while
walking, which has on the physical side only a secondary relation to
music, has produced at least four rhythms (the amble, the uphill, the
downhill, the full stretch along the flat); dancing, which _is_ music in
bodily form, has shrunk to one rhythm, and that one very simple,
perfectly uniform and strictly limited in tempo.
To inquire how this has happened would carry us beyond even the liberal
limits of this discussion. It may be another instance of sheer human
perversity, or in other words, the instinct of other people to do what
we don’t like. The waltz may be a concession to human weakness, figure
and organisation and rhythmic variety having been found to overtax the
intelligence of the normal dancer. Some would say that the real point is
not so much the rhythm as the fact of dancing in couples--the romantic
interest, in short. There is no time to examine this theory: I pause
only to note its subtle suggestion of Victorian sentiment and even more
of Victorian politics. The round dance thus represents society as an
aggregation of mutually exclusive monogamic units, taking their
independent way and avoiding each other as much as possible; the art of
ball-room steering becomes the analogue of Mill on Liberty. The Homeric
dance equally typifies a society organic in all its members; but I
digress.
Whatever be the cause, the fact is clear, that for practical purposes
dancing is reduced to the waltz. If so, what seemed _prima facie_
absurd--to admit walking to a comparison with dancing on artistic
grounds--is clearly anything but unreasonable; the balance rather
inclines the other way. On the point of rhythm, walking can beat dancing
both in subtlety and variety; the other artistic elements, figure and
organisation, which might give the superiority to dancing, have been
thrown overboard. The unison of walkers is as much and as little a
harmony as the unison of waltzers; the figure of a walk is, like the
figure of a waltz, a plain line, with the difference that it is shaped
not by four walls, a dais, benches, potted plants, and the possibilities
of collision, but by the rise and fall of the ground, the accidents of
rock and vegetation, the configuration of our mother earth and her
waters. Dancing, by surrendering its other possibilities, falls to the
level of walking; by concentrating on one rhythm, it sinks below.
Even so, the waltzer will reply, is not the comparison still, in spite
of your sophistries, absurd? Does the walker with all his rhythmic
variety achieve any real sympathy with music comparable to the rapture
of waltzing? Does not the very concentration of dancing on this form
mean that it is the one artistic motion, the one bodily movement which
can really express music? The walker may be able to fit music to his
steps, but it is a mere extrinsic connection; the waltzer moves _in_
music, and his soul is one with that of the waltz composer.
The waltzer has hit the real point. It is of little use to argue in the
abstract about the merits of this or that rhythm; we must take rhythm
and music together as a whole if we are to form any judgment about them;
waltzing ultimately stands or falls by the character of the music it has
inspired. What, then, of waltz music considered as a whole? We can at
once concede this to the waltzer, that his music is something quite
distinct and apart from the rest of music, unique both in rhythm and
melody. The rhythm must, for practical reasons, be absolutely
uniform--three notes to the bar, sixty odd bars to the minute, a strong
accent on the first note of each bar marked either in the melody or the
accompaniment, dotted notes being a rare luxury and syncopations and
cross-accents even rarer. The character of the music is hard to describe
in words, but in practice unmistakable: it is smooth and melodious,
appealing strongly and at once to the senses, stimulating or
intensifying rather than dilating the imagination; it is built generally
on phrases of equal length, which should, if possible, imply or repeat
each other so that they can carry the dancer along and ‘run in the head’
(like water), even when he is distracted by the heat, the unwonted
exercise, and his partner’s conversation. In short, a waltz is ‘catchy’:
and to anybody who has ever heard one, further description is
superfluous.