the help of the consciousness, so that the latter may be reserved for those forms of expression which are purely intelligent. Thanks to the co-ordination of the nerve-centres, to the formation and development of the greatest possible number of motor habits, my method assures the freest possible play to subconscious expression. The creation in the organism of a rapid and easy means of communication between thought and its means of expression by movements allows the personality free play, giving it character, strength and life to an extraordinary degree.

Neurasthenia is often nothing else than intellectual confusion produced by the inability of the nervous system to obtain from the muscular system regular obedience to the order from the brain. Training the nerve centres, establishing order in the organism, is the only remedy for intellectual perversion produced by lack of will power and by the incomplete subjection of body to mind. Unable to obtain physical realization of its ideas, the brain amuses itself in forming images without hope of realizing them, drops the real for the unreal, and substitutes vain and vague speculation for the free and healthy union of mind and body.

The first result of a thorough rhythmic training is that the pupil sees clearly in himself what he really is, and obtains from his powers all the advantage possible. This result seems to me one which should attract the attention of all educationalists and assure to education by and for rhythm an important place in general culture.

But, as an artist, I wish to add, that the second result of this education ought to be to put the completely developed faculties of the individual at the service of art and to give the latter the most subtle and complete of interpreters—the human body. For the body can become a marvellous instrument of beauty and harmony when it vibrates in tune with artistic imagination and collaborates with creative thought. It is not enough that, thanks to special exercises, students of music should have corrected their faults and be no longer in danger of spoiling their musical interpretations by their lack of physical skill and harmonious movements; it is necessary in addition that the music which lives within them—artists will understand me—should obtain free and complete development, and that the rhythms which inspire their personality should enter into intimate communion with those which animate the works to be interpreted.

The education of the nervous system must be of such a nature that the suggested rhythms of a work of art induce in the individual analogous vibrations, produce a powerful reaction in him and change naturally into rhythms of expression. In simpler language, the body must become capable of responding to artistic rhythms and of realizing them quite naturally without fear of exaggeration.

This faculty of emotion, indispensable to the artist, was formerly natural to almost all beginners in music, for hardly any but pre-destined artists devoted themselves to the art; but, if this is no longer the case, it is possible at least to awaken dulled faculties, to develop and co-ordinate them, and it is the duty of every musical educationalist to deter from instrumental technique every individual who is still without musical feeling.

The experimental study of rhythm should form a part of every well-organized musical education, and this study will be useful not only to musicians, but to music itself. It is quite certain that, if since Beethoven's time harmony has developed, if each generation has created fresh groupings of sounds, it is not the same regarding rhythmic forms, which remain much as they were.

I shall be told that the means of expression are of no importance so long as the artist is able to show his meaning, that a sincere emotion can be clearly expressed even with old-fashioned rhythms, and that to try and create new rhythms is mere technical work, and to enforce such upon the composers of to-morrow is simply depriving them of their character. This is all true, and I myself have a horror of seeking new means of expression within the limits of hard and fast rules, for expression ought to be a spontaneous manifestation. But I assert that experiments in rhythm, and the complete study of movements simple and combined, ought to create a fresh mentality, that artists thus trained will find inevitably and spontaneously new rhythmic forms to express their feelings, and that in consequence their characters will be able to develop more completely and with greater strength. It is a fact that very young children taught by my method invent quite naturally physical rhythms such as would have occurred to very few professional musicians, and that my most advanced pupils find monotonous many contemporary works the rhythmic poverty of which shocks neither public nor critics.

I will terminate this short sketch of my system by pointing out the intimate relations which exist between movements in time and movements in space, between rhythms in sound and rhythm in the body, between Music and Plastic Expression.

Gestures and attitudes of the body complete, animate and enliven any rhythmic music written simply and naturally without special regard to tone, and, just as in painting there exist side by side a school of the nude and a school of landscape, so in music there may be developed, side by side, plastic music and music pure and simple. In the school of landscape painting emotion is created entirely by combinations of moving light and by the rhythms thus caused. In the school of the nude, which pictures the many shades of expression of the human body, the artist tries to show the human soul as expressed by physical forms, enlivened by the emotions of the moment, and at the same time the characteristics suitable to the individual and his race, such as they appear through momentary physical modifications.

In the same way, plastic music will picture human feelings expressed by gesture and will model its sound forms on those of rhythms derived directly from expressive movements of the human body.

To compose the music which the Greeks appear to have realized, and for which Goethe and Schiller hoped, musicians must have acquired experience of physical movements; this, however, is certainly not the case to-day, for music has become beyond all others an intellectual art. While awaiting this transformation, present generations can apply education by and for rhythm to the interpretation of plastic stage music such as Richard Wagner has imagined. At the present day this music is not interpreted at all, for dramatic singers, stage managers and conductors do not understand the relation existing between gesture and music, and the absolute ignorance regarding plastic expression which characterizes the lyric actors of our day is a real profanation of scenic musical art. Not only are singers allowed to walk and gesticulate on the stage without paying any attention to the time, but also no shade of expression, dynamic or motor, of the orchestra—crescendo, decrescendo, accelerando, rallentando—finds in their gestures adequate realization. By this I mean the kind of wholly instinctive transformation of sound movements into bodily movements such as my method teaches.

Authors, poets, musicians and painters cannot demand from the interpreters of their works knowledge of the relations between movements in time and in space, for this knowledge can only be developed by special studies. No doubt a few poets and painters have an inborn knowledge of the rhythms of space; for instance, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the stage mounter of "Electra" at the Vienna Opera, who constructed a huge staircase, on which, however, the actors, having little acquaintance with the most elementary notions of balance, moved with deplorable