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Obviously the proper pace of a piece of music is determined by the particular character of the rendering it requires; the question, therefore, comes to this: does the sustained tone, the vocal element, the cantilena predominate, or the rhythmical movement? The conductor should lead accordingly.
He listened to the rhythmical chorus of that witches' cauldron in the heart of the defile, and watched the gray light slowly etching a path through the trees, until it touched the fast-running water with a shimmer of silver. Neither of them knew how long they remained there; at last, a straining and creaking of the boat warned them that the water level was rising and the ropes needed readjusting.
"Ain't he a little clinker?" said Monkey Brand in hushed voice. "They say Mr. Silver refused £600 for him at Hurlingham. And he took champion at the Poly Pony Show." The girl's hand travelled down the pony's neck with firm, strong, rhythmical stroke. "Heart of Oak!" she purred affectionately. Ragamuffin, the old roan pony in the next stall, began to move, restless and irritable.
But at the close there was a procession which is worth considerable description. Six men with censers of silver lined up before the high altar, and stood there, slowly swinging the fragrant bowls at the end of their long chains. The music died down. One could hear the rhythmical, faint clangour of the metal.
The verse does not seem to have been shaped; it might have grown: it takes no apparent heed of externals, but flows on like a brook, irregular, rhythmical, and always fluid and real.
The Sanskrit scholar will at the same time perceive in several of them an analogy to the rhythmical arrangement, terminating with a nasal, which distinguishes the alphabet of that ancient language whose influence is known to have been extensive in this quarter.
Originally trained in the later Mughal style, he was able to render appearances with exquisite delicacy but was also acutely aware of rhythmical elegance. And it is this which constantly characterized his work, his greatest achievement being the creation of a local manner for portraying Radha and Krishna.
It was dark as a wolf's mouth; for the moon was well advanced in her last quarter which is as good as saying that there was no moon at all and the thickness overhead not only obliterated the stars but also rendered it impossible for any of their light to reach us; one consequence of which was that when standing at the break of the poop it taxed one's eyesight to the utmost to see as far as the bows of the ship; the wind was freshening, with frequent rain squalls that, combined with the intense darkness, circumscribed the visible horizon to a radius of about half a cable's length on either hand; and through this all but opaque blackness the ship was thrashing along at a speed of fully ten knots, with a continuous crying and storming of wind aloft through the rigging and in the hollows of the straining canvas, and a deep hissing and sobbing sound of water along the bends, to which was added the rhythmical thunderous roaring of the bow wave, and a frequent grape-shot pattering of spray on the fore deck as the fabric plunged with irresistible momentum into the hollows of the short, snappy Channel seas.
Again the problem is a rhythmical one, and again the composer demonstrates his exhaustless invention and his power of evoking a single mood, viewing all its lovely contours and letting it melt away like dream magic. Full of gentle sprightliness and lingering sweetness is this study. Chopin has the hypnotic quality more than any composer of the century, Richard Wagner excepted.
But besides these variations of level due to the variable quantities of water discharged into them by their affluents, many lakes of moderate dimensions are liable to rhythmical oscillations of level of short duration, which are, obviously, but produced by fluctuations in the supply of water. It is to this kind of species of variation of level that our attention will be directed in the sequel.
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