and at three the energetic people begin practising. The afternoons are
usually free, except twice a week, when there are lessons in "Plastic"
and dancing from four till six, before which tea is served, or there may
be extra lessons in rhythmic gymnastics for small groups of pupils who
need further help, and students may obtain the use of a room for private
practice together. In the afternoons, too, there is time and opportunity
for any other extra study or lessons which are not included in the
ordinary course, such as violin, solo singing, drawing or painting. Most
of the students soon acquire wide interests, if they do not have them
when they first come. Free afternoons may be spent in visiting the
galleries and shops of Dresden. Whenever there is anything especially
good in the way of a concert, or an opera or a classical play, there is
always a party of enthusiasts going into town for it. The opera in
Dresden, as in other parts of Germany, fortunately begins and ends
early. Late hours are not encouraged at the Hostel--indeed, everybody is
glad to retire early, for the work is absorbing and demands plenty of
energy, especially if the full teachers' course be taken, with the hope
of a diploma at the end of two years.
[Illustration: The Hostel.]
Supper is served at a quarter-past seven, and on two evenings a week
those who wish to join the orchestral or choral societies have the
pleasure of meeting together and practising under the direction of
Monsieur Jaques-Dalcroze.
An atmosphere of enthusiasm and good-will permeates the social life. No
community of the kind could have a more delightful spirit of unity than
that which pervades the Jaques-Dalcroze School. All students are keen
and anxious to live as full a life as possible, every one will willingly
and unselfishly take time and trouble to help others who know less than
themselves. The College has a unity born of kindred interests, and
every one glows with admiration and esteem for the genius at the head,
and for his wonderful method, whilst he himself simply radiates
good-will and enthusiasm, and works harder than any one else in the
place. He makes a point of knowing each one of his pupils personally,
and remarkably quick he is in summing up the various temperaments and
characters of those with whom he comes into contact.
The moral and mental tone of the College is pure and beautiful, indeed
it could not well be otherwise, for the work in itself is an
inspiration. A change is often observable in pupils after they have been
but a few weeks in residence, a change which tells of more alertness of
mind, of more animated purpose, and even of higher ideals and aims in
life.
[Illustration: Dresden from Hellerau.]
There are opportunities for the practice of many languages, for it is a
cosmopolitan centre. Nearly all European nationalities are represented,
but as yet the number of English people is not large. This, however,
will not long remain so, for the Jaques-Dalcroze method needs only to be
known in order to be as widely appreciated in Great Britain and the
United States as it is on the Continent.
The lessons are given in German, though occasionally French is used to
make clear anything that is not quite understood in the former tongue.
English people who do not know either of these languages need not look
upon this as an obstacle, for one quickly arrives at understanding
sufficiently well to gain the benefit from the lessons, and there is
always some one in the classes who will interpret when necessary.
The College itself is a fine example of the value of simplicity and
space in architecture. Both without and within, the block of buildings
is impressive, this effect being gained by an extreme simplicity of
decoration. The most modern methods of heating and ventilating are
provided, and there are large sun and air baths.
Completed in the spring of this year, and with accommodation for five
hundred students, the settlement stands on high ground about four miles
from Dresden, in an open, bracing, healthy spot, with charming walks in
all directions. The views are extensive; to the south lie the
Erzgebirge, to the south-east Saxon Switzerland, and, in a dip of the
nearer hills, Dresden.
ETHEL INGHAM.
THE VALUE OF EURHYTHMICS TO ART
One of the most marked tendencies of modern aesthetic theory is to break
down the barriers that convention has erected between the various arts.
The truth is coming to be realized that the essential factor of poetry,
painting, sculpture, architecture and music is really of the same
quality, and that one art does not differ from another in anything but
the method of its expression and the conditions connected with that
method.
This common basis to the arts is more easily admitted than defined, but
one important element in it--perhaps the only element that can be given
a name--is rhythm. Rhythm of bodily movement, the dance, is the earliest
form of artistic expression known. It is accompanied in nearly every
case with rude music, the object being to emphasize the beat and
rhythmic movement with sound. The quickness with which children respond
to simple repetition of beat, translating the rhythm 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 stage-effects,
will come to thank M. Dalcroze for the greatest contribution to their
art that any age can show. He has recreated the human body as a
decorative unit. He has shown how men, women and children can group
themselves and can be grouped in designs as lovely as any painted
design, with the added charm of movement. He has taught individuals
their own power of gracious motion and attitude. Musically and
physically the results are equally wonderful. But the training is more
than a mere musical education; it is also emphatically more than
gymnastics.
Perhaps in the stress laid on individuality may be seen most easily the
possibilities of the system. Personal effort is looked for in every
pupil. Just as the learner of music must have the "opportunity of
expressing his own musical impressions with the technical means which
are taught him,"[1] so the pupil at Hellerau must come to improvise from
the rhythmic sense innate in him, rhythms of his own.[2]
[1] Cf. supra, p. 28.
[2] A good example of the fertility and variety of the
individual effort obtained at Hellerau was seen at the
Aufführung given on December 11, 1911. Two pupils
undertook to realize a Prelude of Chopin, their choice
falling by chance on the same Prelude. But hardly a
movement of the two interpretations was the same. The
first girl lay on the ground the whole time, her head
on her arm, expressing in gentle movements of head,
hands and feet, her idea of the music. At one point
near the end, with the rising passion of the music, she
raised herself on to her knees; then sank down again to
her full length.
The second performer stood upright until the very end.
At the most intense moment her arms were stretched
above her head; at the close of the music she was bowed
to the ground, in an attitude expressive of the utmost
grief. In such widely different ways did the same piece
of music speak to the individualities of these two
girls.
To take a joy in the beauty of the body, to train his mind to move
graciously and harmoniously both in itself and in relation to those
around him, finally, to make his whole life rhythmic--such an ideal is
not only possible but almost inevitable to the pupil at Hellerau. The
keenness which possesses the whole College, the delight of every one in
their work, their comradeship, their lack of self-consciousness, their
clean sense of the 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--_Über 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] _Über das Geistige in der Kunst._ Piper Verlag,
München, 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.]