Nature takes a childish delight in tireless repetition. The days repeat
themselves, the tides ebb and flow, the tree sways forth and back. This
world is intent upon recurrences. Not the pendulum of a clock is more
persistent of iteration than are all existing things; periodicity is the
ultimate law and largest explanation of the universe--to do it over
again the one insatiable ambition of all that is. Everything vibrates;
through vibration alone do the senses discern it. We are not provided
with means of cognizance of what is absolutely at rest; impressions come
in waves. Recurrence, recurrence, and again recurrence--that is the sole
phenomenon. With what fealty we submit us to the law which compels the
rhythm and regularity to our movement--that makes us divide up passing
time into brief equal intervals, marking them off by some method of
physical notation, so that our senses may apprehend them! In all we do
we unconsciously mark time like a clock, the leader of an orchestra with
his _bâton_ only more perfectly than the smith with his hammer, or the
woman with her needle, because his hand is better assisted by his ear,
less embarrassed with _impedimenta_. The pedestrian impelling his legs
and the idler twiddling his thumbs are endeavoring, each in his
unconscious way, to beat time to some inaudible music; and the graceless
lout, sitting cross-legged in a horse-car, manages the affair with his
toe.
The more intently we labor, the more intensely do we become absorbed in
labor's dumb song, until with body and mind engaged in the ecstacy of
repetition, we resent an interruption of our work as we do a false note
in music, and are mightily enamored of ourselves afterward for the power
of application which was simply inability to desist. In this rhythm of
toil is to be found the charm of industry. Toil has in itself no spell
to conjure with, but its recurrences of molecular action, cerebral and
muscular, are as delightful as rhyme.
Such of our pleasures as require movements equally rhythmic with those
entailed by labor are almost equally agreeable, with the added advantage
of being useless. Dancing, which is not only rhythmic movement, pure and
simple, undebased with any element of utility, but is capable of
performance under conditions positively baneful, is for these reasons
the most engaging of them all; and if it were but one-half as wicked as
the prudes have endeavored by method of naughty suggestion to make it
would lack of absolute bliss nothing but the other half.
This ever active and unabatable something within us which compels us
always to be marking time we may call, for want of a better name, the
instinct of rhythm. It is the æsthetic principle of our nature.
Translated into words it has given us poetry; into sound, music; into
motion, dancing. Perhaps even painting may be referred to it, space
being the correlative of time, and color the correlative of tone. We are
fond of arranging our minute intervals of time into groups. We find
certain of these groups highly agreeable, while others are no end
unpleasant. In the former there is a singular regularity to be observed,
which led hard-headed old Leibnitz to the theory that our delight in
music arises from an inherent affection for mathematics. Yet musicians
have hitherto obtained but indifferent recognition for feats of
calculation, nor have the singing and playing of renowned mathematicians
been unanimously commended by good judges.
Music so intensifies and excites the instinct of rhythm that a strong
volition is required to repress its physical expression. The
universality of this is well illustrated by the legend, found in some
shape in many countries and languages, of the boy with the fiddle who
compels king, cook, peasant, clown, and all that kind of people, to
follow him through the land; and in the myth of the Pied Piper of
Hamelin we discern abundant reason to think the instinct of rhythm an
attribute of rats. Soldiers march so much livelier with music than
without that it has been found a tolerably good substitute for the hope
of plunder. When the foot-falls are audible, as on the deck of a
steamer, walking has an added pleasure, and even the pirate, with gentle
consideration for the universal instinct, suffers his vanquished foeman
to walk the plank.
Dancing is simply marking time with the body, as an accompaniment to
music, though the same--without the music--is done with only the head
and forefinger in a New England meeting-house at psalm time. (The
peculiar dance named in honor of St. Vitus is executed with or without
music, at the option of the musician.) But the body is a clumsy piece of
machinery, requiring some attention and observation to keep it
accurately in time to the fiddling. The smallest diversion of the
thought, the briefest relaxing of the mind, is fatal to the performance.
'Tis as easy to fix attention on a sonnet of Shakspeare while working at
whist as gloat upon your partner while waltzing. It can not be
intelligently, appreciatively, and adequately accomplished--_crede
expertum_.
On the subject of poetry, Emerson says: "Metre begins with pulse-beat,
and the length of lines in songs and poems is determined by the
inhalation and exhalation of the lungs," and this really goes near to
the root of the matter; albeit we might derive therefrom the unsupported
inference that a poet "fat and scant of breath" would write in lines of
a foot each, while the more able-bodied bard, with the capacious lungs
of a pearl-diver, would deliver himself all across his page, with "the
spacious volubility of a drumming decasyllabon."
While the heart, working with alternate contraction and dilatation,
sends the blood intermittently through the brain, and the outer world
apprises us of its existence only by successive impulses, it must result
that our sense of things will be rhythmic. The brain being alternately
stimulated and relaxed we must think--as we feel--in waves, apprehending
nothing continuously, and incapable of a consciousness that is not
divisible into units of perception of which we make mental record and
physical sign. That is why we dance. That is why we can, may, must,
will, and shall dance, and the gates of Philistia shall not prevail
against us.
La valse légère, la valse légère,
The free, the bright, the debonair,
That stirs the strong, and fires the fair
With joy like wine of vintage rare--
That lends the swiftly circling pair
A short surcease of killing care,
With music in the dreaming air,
With elegance and grace to spare.
Vive! vive la valse, la valse légère!
--_George Jessop_.