We have, moreover, here discovered the beginning of form, and have begun to group our musical tones in measures and phrases; for our second dactyl is slightly different from the first, because the right foot begins the first and the left foot the second.  We have two measures [(4. 8 4 | 4. 8 4)]
                             [(- ’ — | — ’ -)]
and one phrase, for after the second measure the right foot will again have the beat and will begin another phrase of two measures.

Carry this theory still further, and we shall make new discoveries.  If we dance in the open air, unless we would dance over the horizon, we must turn somewhere; and if we have but a small space in which to dance, the turns must come sooner and oftener.  Even if we danced in a circle we should need to reverse the motion occasionally, in order to avoid giddiness; and this would measure off our phrases into periods and sections.

Thus we see music dividing into two classes, one purely emotional, the other sensuous; the one arising from the language of heroes, the other from the swaying of the body and the patter of feet.  To both of these elements, if we may call them so, metre and melody brought their power; to declamation, metre 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, for we have quite an assortment.  Should the idea survive and grow too large for the bed, and if we have learned to love it too much to cut off its feet and thus make it fit (as did that old robber of Attica), why we run the risk of having some critic wise in his theoretical knowledge, say, as was and is said of Chopin, “He is weak in sonata form!”