Part 4

These two facts, the natural beat of the foot and the bodily exhilaration of walking, account for a good many of the ordinary walking songs, the cheerful melodies of simple rhythm, which recall a flagging company to courage and unison. Chief of these is the famous ‘John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in his grave.’ Tradition dictates that this must be sung on the principle of cumulative omission--the first verse in full, the second without the word ‘grave,’ the third without ‘his grave’ and so on, the blanks being filled by beats of the foot. Thus in the last verse but one, the first three lines consists only of the word ‘John’ and seven foot-beats, thrice repeated; while in the last verse of all there are twenty-three beats in complete silence, until the whole company comes in on the words, ‘But his soul goes marching on.’ It is a point of honour to count these beats and the pause preceding them exactly right, so as to get a unanimous attack with no false starts. For reviving the attention and good feeling of a tired company, there is nothing like John Brown; and, it may be mentioned, it will carry them over 576 paces if ‘a-mouldering’ is reckoned one word, or 640 if it is reckoned two, as the more orthodox hold.

Walkers may be thought perverse in making a fetish of a song like ‘John Brown’--which is in origin, I suppose, a threnody on the death of an eminent man--when there lies ready to hand such a store of specifically walking tunes. I allude, of course, to that ancient and well-established form of music, the March. There is no age of man which has not had its marches, whether it called them anapaests or war-songs or what not. Further, the feelings which marches express are wide in range and highly impressive in character. Military glory, religious pomp, state ceremonial, weddings and funerals--all these have their appropriate setting in the march rhythm. Or, in other words, when man celebrates his greatest achievements or his highest aspirations, when he makes the big adventure of his life or the greater adventure of his death, the most natural and human expression of feeling is to walk to the strains of music. Marching, in short, is the epic form of walking, and march tunes are the epics of music--the formal embodiments of communal feeling on the great occasions of life.

But communal feeling is not the whole of life, and marching is not the 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.