It is from this rhythmic movement that the symphony gets its quality of action, and the precursors of the symphony in this respect were the old folk-songs and dance-tunes the melodies of which are full of rhythmic diversity. The line from these early naïve compositions down to symphonic music was never broken, and there is hardly a symphony in existence that does not pay direct tribute to them.
I dwell on this point at some length because here lies a large part of the energy of music. The rhythmic figures to which I have already referred contain within themselves a primal force. They are capable of throwing off parts of themselves, and these, caught in the primary orbit, live as separate identities, until the too powerful attraction of the greater mass absorbs them again. As rhythm, then, a symphonic movement is like sublimated physical energy. As the first oscillations of its impulse strike our consciousness we are caught up into a world of movement which has the inevitability of star courses. We ourselves are all rhythm--rhythm imprisoned and awaiting release. In music we become one with all that ceaseless movement or vibration without which there would be no physical or spiritual world at all. I say, then, that rhythm is the very heart of music; that while we are all susceptible to it (though comparatively few people can move their hands or feet or bodies in perfect rhythm--they would be much better off if they could!) we do not altogether see what significance it has as an æsthetic property of music. When the heart of music stops beating (as in one of Beethoven’s scherzi) we are surprised, or perhaps disturbed, not answering to the marvelous silence; when two or even three rhythms are acting simultaneously we are confused and helpless before the most fascinating of æsthetic phenomena.
Let me next dwell briefly on that element in the evolution of symphonic music which consists in the use of several themes simultaneously. Should we trace this back to its original we should find ourselves in the ninth century. Now, while I know that this is not the place for a dissertation on any abstruse musical terms, I shall venture this much, not only because this method of writing is used in nearly all really fine music, but because a large part of the pleasure to be derived from listening to a symphony depends on our capacity to follow the varied strands of melody that constitute it. Is it not so, also, with the novel? The chief theme of Meredith’s “The Egoist” has numberless counter-themes running through and around it. It is not by any means to be found in Sir Willoughby alone, for you understand it through Vernon’s good sense, through Clara’s dart-like intuitions, through Mr. Middleton’s patient surprise at having such a daughter, through Letitia, and Crossjay, and Horace De Cray--all these are continually explaining and illuminating the theme for you. It is true that music asks you to listen to several melodies at once, but what does the episode of Crossjay’s unwitting listening to Sir Willoughby’s belated declaration to Letitia ask you to do? Is it enough merely to record the scene as it is unfolded to you? Or do you remember Crossjay’s father stumping up the avenue in his ill-fitting clothes? Clara’s intercessions for Crossjay? Vernon’s attempts to adjust himself to Sir Willoughby’s overbearing grandiloquence? And do you not have to remember, especially, that Crossjay had been locked out of his room by Sir Willoughby and had sought the ottoman as a refuge? These are all strands of the chief melody in that remarkable composition. (Not all the strands are there, for satire never tells the whole truth. “Tony” in Ethel Sidgwick’s “Promise” and “Succession” is also an egoist.) A novel, then, in this sense, is not successive, but _simultaneous_. All that has been and all that is to be exist in every moment of life, for that is all what we call “the present” means. The chief difference between such play of character around an idea and the movement of many musical themes around a central one lies in the detached and spiritualized quality of sound.