well as how rhythm eases work and also makes it social. Most of the old work-
canticles are lost, and machines have made work more serial, while rhythms are
obscured or imposed from without so as to limit the freedom they used to
express. Now all basal, central, or strength movements tend to be oscillatory,
automatically repetitive, or rhythmic like savage music, as if the waves of the
primeval sea whence we came still beat in them, just as all fine peripheral and
late movements tend to be serial, special, vastly complex, end diversified. It is
thus natural that during the period of greatest strength increment in muscular
development, the rhythmic function of nearly all fundamental movements should
be strongly accentuated. At the dawn of this age boys love marching; and, as our
returns show, there is a very remarkable rise in the passion for beating time,
jigging, double shuffling, rhythmic clapping, etc. The more prominent the factor
of repetition the more automatic and the less strenuous is the hard and new effort
of constant psychic adjustment and attention. College yells, cheers, rowing,
marching, processions, bicycling, running, tug-of-war, calisthenics and class
gymnastics with counting, and especially with music, horseback riding, etc., are
rhythmic; tennis, baseball and football, basketball, golf, polo, etc., are less
rhythmic, but are concerted and intense. These latter emphasise the conflict
factor, best brought out in fencing, boxing, and wrestling, and lay more stress on
the psychic elements of attention and skill. The effect of musical
accompaniment, which the Swedish system wrongly rejects, is to make the
exercises more fundamental and automatic, and to proportionately diminish the
conscious effort and relieve the neuro-muscular mechanism involved in fine
movements.
Adolescence is the golden period of nascency for rhythm. Before this change
many children have a very imperfect sense of it, and even those who march,
sing, play, or read poetry with correct and overemphasised time marking,
experience a great broadening of the horizon of consciousness, and a marked,
and, for mental power and scope, all-conditioning increase in the carrying power
of attention and the sentence-sense. The soul now feels the beauty of cadences,
good ascension, and the symmetry of well-developed periods—and all, as I am
convinced, because this is the springtime of the strength movements which are
predominantly rhythmic. Not only does music start in time marking, the drum
being the oldest instrument, but quantity long took precedence of sense and form
of content, both melody and words coming later. Even rhythmic tapping or
beating of the foot (whence the poetic feet of prosody and meter thus later
imposed monotonous prose to make poetry) exhilarates, makes glad the soul and
inspires it to attack, gives compulsion and a sense of unity. The psychology of