Chapter 4

The home life in the Hostel is a cheerful one. The bedrooms are bright, containing just the necessary furniture, which of course includes a piano. There is a large and charmingly furnished room opening from the hall, known as the Diele, which serves as a general sitting-room for the students. The dining-room is equally delightful, and can be quickly converted into a ball-room for impromptu dances, or adapted for other entertainments. There is also a library; and throughout the whole house the same good taste is displayed. Leading from the dining-room is a large terrace, with steps down into an attractive garden.

The day commences with the sounding of a gong at seven o'clock; the house is immediately alive, and some are off to the College for a Swedish gymnastic lesson before breakfast, others breakfast at half-past seven and have their lesson later. There is always a half hour of ordinary gymnastics to begin with. Then there will be a lesson in Solfège, one in Rhythmic Gymnastics, and one in Improvisation, each lasting for fifty minutes, with an interval of ten minutes between each lesson.

Dinner, which is at a quarter-past one, is followed by an hour for rest; 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.

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.

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.

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_.