brought its potent vitality; to the dance, melody added its soft
charm and lulling rhyme. The intellectual in music, namely,
rhythm and declamation, thus joined forces, as did the purely
sensuous elements, melody and metre (dance). At the first glance
it would seem as if the dance with its rhythms contradicted the
theory of rhythm as being one of the two vital factors in music;
but when we consider the fact that dance-rhythms are merely
regular pulsations (once commenced they pulsate regularly to
the end, without break or change), and when we consider that
just this unbroken regularity is the very antithesis of what
we mean by rhythm, the purely sensuous nature of the dance is
manifest. Strauss was the first to recognize this defect in
the waltz, and he remedied it, so far as it lay within human
skill, by a marvellous use of counter-rhythms, thus infusing
into the dance a simulation of intellectuality.

The weaving together of these elements into one art-fabric has
been the ideal of all poets from Homer to Wagner. The Greeks
idealized their dances; that is to say, they made their dances
fit their declamation. In the last two centuries, and especially
in the middle of the nineteenth, we have danced our highest
flights of impassioned speech. For what is the symphony, sonata,
etc., but a remnant of the dance form? The choric dances of
Stesichorus and Pindar came strangely near our modern forms,
but it was because the form fitted the poem. In our modern
days, we too often, Procrustes-like, make our ideas to fit the
forms. We put our guest, the poetic thought, that comes to us
like a homing bird from out the mystery of the blue sky--we
put this confiding stranger straightway into that iron bed,
the "sonata form," or perhaps even the third rondo form,