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The primal element in music is vibration. Sound-waves in some ordered sequence—silent till they strike our ears—are formed by our ingenuity and sense of order into patterns of beauty. They exist in time, not in space. They are motion. And these vibrations are the very substance of all life; of stars in their courses, of the pulse-beats of the heart, of the mysterious communications from the nerves to the brain, of light, of heat, of color. The plastic arts are static. Painting has the power

“to give

To one blest moment snatched from fleeting time

The appropriate calm of blest eternity.”

Sculpture is motion caught in a moment of perfection. Music is motion always in perfection. This rhythm exists also in literature and the other arts. Poe would be nothing without it; Whitman uses it in long swelling undulations which are sometimes almost indistinguishable; the composition in a great painting is a rhythm; the Apollo Belvedere is all rhythm. But in music rhythm is a physical, moving property; rhythm in being, not rhythm caught in a poise. The possibilities of rhythmic play in music far exceed those in poetry, for in the latter the sense or meaning would be clouded by too much rhythmic complication. It would be impossible to do in poetry, for example, what Beethoven does at the beginning of a movement in one of his string quartettes,ssss1 where the ’cello, entirely alone, repeats one note fifteen times in two rhythmic groups; there is no melody and no harmony—merely one reiterated rhythmic sound. It is also impossible for poetry to present three or four different rhythms simultaneously, as music often does; nor can poetic rhythms carry across a complete rhythmic disruption whose whole æsthetic sense lies in its relations to a permanent rhythm which it momentarily violates, as is the case in the first movement of Beethoven’s Third Symphony. In short, rhythm in music has a diversity, a flexibility, and a physical vigor quite unparalleled in any other art.