more heavily from the Democratic vote, and give the advantage to Coolidge. He might, on this basis, win for himself, besides Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming, which are at present rather conceded, the States of Iowa, Colorado, Idaho, and Nebraska, with 31 votes, giving him a total of 73. He might, on the same basis, cut from the Republican vote enough to throw to Davis the States of Iowa, Illinois, California, Ohio, and Washington, with 86 electoral votes. This would elect Davis. But he might also, by the same means, throw to Coolidge Colorado, Idaho, Kentucky, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, and Oklahoma, with 110 electoral votes. This would elect Coolidge overwhelmingly, and utterly wreck La Follette's whole purposes in the campaign. All these possibilities carry very big "ifs" with them; it is not suggested for a moment that more than a small part of them will happen. Certainly they cannot all happen, but any of them might, and they are listed as an indication of the complications and unexpectednesses which the campaign at this early stage contains. In addition, La Follette has one serious weakness he is running "in the air," without the support of State, Congressional, and local candidates all along the line. It is really the local candidates he needs most, for they are the ones who construct the working parts of the party machinery, get the vote to the polls, and in general see that the top of the ticket has a fair chance. La Follette is without this great asset, and has no means of supplying or offsetting it. the Klan operates La Follette will also be a factor; the two will be opposed, they may offset each other or may not. In some States there are still other factors, such as the Farmer-Labor Party, which will subtract from La Follette's strength in the Northwest. And the problem in each State will be different. Let me try to state it in figures for a typical State. Iowa is normally Republican by about 150,000. Brookhart carried the recent primaries by 30,000. To figure the probable net vote in the State, take the 150,000 Republican margin, subtract the votes which will follow Brookhart to the La Follette camp, then add the Democratic Klansmen who will vote Republican if asked, and the other Democrats who will reduce Davis's total by voting for La Follette or Foster; discount the whole by the probable price of wheat late in November and the size of the wheat crop, and make allowance for how well General Dawes can convince the farmers that the G. O. P. is their friend, or Governor Bryan can convince them that it isn't; figure in the condition of the weather on election day and the size of the three campaign funds and the efficiency of the two big machines in getting out the vote; finally, allow a margin of error for anything of political importance that may happen between now and then; when you have done all these things correctly, you have the answer! There is one final complication which, though it does not involve his immediate campaign, vitally affects his plans. If he does throw the election into the House, what will he do with it? The House can only choose between the three leading candidates: there is no chance that either party would agree on La Follette himself, and between Davis and Coolidge, how can La Follette choose and be true to the principles he avows? It seems almost that his campaign, whatever its strength, has lost its purpose before it starts, and that all it can possibly accomplish will be to confuse and perhaps wreck the campaigns of the two big parties. Of course it will "voice a protest," but that has small political value. With the Ku Klux Klan the situation quite different, but no less confusing. As between the two candidates it is approximately neutral so far. It has no particular reason for supporting either candidate. It is in a position to handle the campaign on the basis of what it can get out of it; to determine its support by The Possibility of an Unintended the amount of protection, recognition, and indorsement of Klan policies which the candidates will promise. It seems safe to say that neither candidate has yet promised anything. The Weaknesses of the Minorities is OME clever politicians deny that La Follette can carry anything but Wisconsin. It is doubtful, for example, whether the labor vote, which is counted upon to form so large a part of his strength, can actually be delivered. It has been promised to other candidates in previous campaigns, but has never appeared at the polls. This may be the exception. Just as likely, he may find the labor vote as great a delusion as have other men who depended on it. There is an even greater question in regard to the farmer vote, and this hinges on the problem, never answered, whether the farmer is Progressive because he believes in the platform La Follette puts out, or merely because he is dissatisfied. It is my own belief that "Progressivism" to him is chiefly not a principle but a protest. While there are many farmers who are convinced of the value of the various La Follette planks, I believe that the majority are conservative, and will vote that way if they become convinced that they will have a fair deal and be treated as equals by the Republican leaders. This, however, is merely an opinion. It will take the election to give a complete answer. It is to be noted, though, that most politicians believe that the fact that wheat is rising in price will seriously handicap the La Follette campaign, since it will decrease the discontent among the farmers and their desire to protest. But the Klan's policy is complicated both by the natural leanings of its members and by the politics of local situations. In general, the Southern Klansmen are Democrats and the Northern ones Republicans. If they are left alone, they will vote normally. In some States it is probable that party ties are so strong that the Klan would be unable to swing the State-it could hardly make Texas Republican or Pennsylvania Democratic-but it is likely that the Klan could swing thirteen States to either party, as it chooses. These are California, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Tennessee. These have a total of 183 electoral votes, and would insure the election of the man who got insure the election of the man who got them all. In making this analysis each factor has been considered by itself, as if there has been considered by itself, as if there were no offset. Of course this will never happen. In almost every State where THAT Decision HAT is a fair average statement of the problem in each of the doubtful States, and, considering the Klan and La Follette as factors, there are a good twenty of them. If any man has yet formed any well-based judgment as to how all this will work out, he has kept himself hidden. The one thing that is clear is that the coming election seems likely to be decided, not by the will of the majority of the people, but by these two guerrilla minorities, opposed to each other, but each with ambitions to which they will cheerfully subordinate the National result. It is certain that each of them will do serious damage to both of the two big parties, but it is impossible, for months to come, to guess which of the many injuries they cause may be the fatal one. They assure us an interesting campaign. Incidentally, there is considerable irony in the fact that the whole situation is so complicated that either the Klan or La Follette may strike the decisive blow without either knowledge or intent, and achieve a result entirely opposite to that desired. Indian Agent in Wisconsin and Territorial Delegate from Michigan. The paintings are by Thomas Sully, the well-known portraitist, whose pictures of eminent Americans of the post-Revolutionary epoch are to be found in various American museums A By DANIEL GREGORY MASON NY one who wishes to strengthen, refine, and develop his appreciation of the varied beauties of music will naturally begin his study with folk-songs. In the sincerity and spontaneity of these songs there is something profoundly refreshing, especially to a taste jaded by luxury, as much of our musical taste is; so that we turn to them as instinctively as lovers of literary expression, for instance, have always in sophisticated periods turned to the ballads and songs of the people. And as we find ourselves drawing new strength from their musical genuineness, so we purify our taste by contact with their childlike simplicity and artlessness. Moreover, too much of our "advanced" music is professional in spirit. Preoccupied with the means of execution, brought by virtuosos and by mechanical instruments to an inhuman perfection, it forgets the end which alone justifies all these means-the expression of feeling. It is as empty as it is elaborate. The ideal of folk-song is just the opposite; it tries to express as much as possible in the simplest, easiest, and most natural way. The very fact of its communal origin-its being passed from mouth to mouth among the people, who have no professional training and only modest skill-saves it from the arteriosclerosis of professionalism from which most of our so-called "art" music dies prematurely. Again, even the limitations of folksong may prove helpful to the would-be appreciator who is approaching music without much previous experience. Fortunate is it for him that folk music is primitive, that though it pursues the same kinds of beauty and expressiveness as the opera, the sonata, the string quartette, and the symphony, it pursues them under simpler conditions and on a smaller scale. As the lover of poetry may comprehend a song of Burns before he is ready for a tragedy of Shakespeare, so the music-lover may prepare himself for Beethoven's Ninth Symphony by studying in the German folk-songs the acorns, so to speak, of which it is the oak. Folk-songs, then, are fitted to strengthen our musical feeling because they are spontaneous rather than sophisticated; to raise and universalize it because they are communal rather than 1 The substance of this article will appear later In Mr. Mason's book, "From Song to Symphony." prepared for the Study Course of the National Federation of Music Clubs and soon to be published by the Oliver Ditson Company.-The Editors. individual, amateur rather than professional; and to develop it because, since they are primitive, they afford the natural beginning for a study which can lead only gradually to the more complex types of musical art. Folk-Songs are "Spontaneous" THE fact that folk-songs arise spon taneously, as an unconscious and instinctive expression of feeling, uncomplicated by the extraneous motives which often influence individual composers, such as ambition to be talked about (leading to "queerness"), desire to exhibit skill (leading to virtuosity), intellectual curiosity (leading to elaborations of style), and the like, makes them admirable revealers of the qualities that are really fundamental in music, in contrast with the secondary characteristics that later come to overlay these.. They stick closely in their expression, for instance, to two basic, contrasting moods, which persist right through the development of music up to the Beethoven symphony and the Strauss symphonic poem, and in the folk music of any nation. The beautiful but infinitely sad "Volga Boat Song" (Figure I a), sung by the serfs in the old days as they wearily worked their heavily laden boats up and down the interminable river, carries in its cadences something of their utter physical fatigue and spiritual hopelessness; in that fatalistic harping on the D minor chord, over. and over again-in the painful lift to the high B flat in the fifth measure, and inevitable slow descent. Like all really expressive music, it moves us, not by telling a definite story, with all the detail that would be appropriate in literary art, but rather by setting up in us directly, by its very tones, harmonies, movement, and cadences, the appropriate state of feeling. And so with the other tune (Figure I b), where all is animation and gayety; the notes are as full of vitality as the feet of a child on a bright morning; they dance, as it were, in spite of themselves, and our thoughts dance with them. Folk-Songs are "Communal" and therefore "Primitive which we may suggest in such pairs of BUT, fundamental as are these im adjectives as "grave" and "gay," "contemplative" and "active," or "songful" and "dance-like." The pair of Russian folk-songs shown in Figure I, illustrating this contrast, could be easily paralleled pulses to expression, they do not take us very far in the explanation of what is finest in music, which, as has been well said, "is not the expression of great emotion, but the great expression FINI. Da Capo al Fine. of emotion." The difference between great and mediocre music will always be found to boil down to the matter of musical organization, crystallization, or shape. And this in turn boils down in every case to some form of rhythm: rhythm of beats in the measure, of notes in the phrase, of phrases in the melody, of melodies and of keys in the sonata or symphony. All these kinds of rhythmic organization, moreover, are exhibited in unparalleled clearness in folk-songs, because any more elaborate relations that might be introduced by some specially gifted individual simply drop out as the songs pass from mouth to mouth. We must remember that these songs always arise among unlettered people; they are not written down; and as they pass through many minds and mouths they cannot retain any complexities that transcend average powers and memories. Individual art may become, for better or worse, highly complex; communal art necessarily remains, primitive; and folksongs are thus always simple enough to illustrate much more obviously than symphonies the essential principles of shape that govern both. lighted when the spirited theme of the Vivo. Here was an arresting example of how HE analogy with poetry holds good, THE too, for longer groups than the motives. For just as in Pope's couplet the whole first line (though it contains two "motives") is perceived as one unit, and is marked off clearly from what follows by a fall or cadence of the voice (the word "cadence" coming from cado-to motives of six notes each, nevertheless of the next twelve notes, and also ending and completes its meaning. Phrases in music, then, balance as do lines in poetry, and are completed by cadences more or less like the familiar "Amen" of hymn tunes in their effect of finality, though not always so complete as that. 2 No more in music than in poetry, however, are the phrases all necessarily of the same length; indeed, there is a special charm in making them differ in length, so that their scheme of balance is not too obvious. In the "Volga Boat Song," the first two phrases correspond with the motives and are only two measures each. The third phrase, twice as long, balances the first two. Phrases 4 and 5 are of equal length, and balance each other. Phrases 6, 7, and 8 repeat 1, 2, and 3. The balancing of the phrases in this case is further emphasized by their ending, the first three on the same harmony (the chord of D minor), just as three lines in a poem might end with the same sound, or "rhyme," and the next two on another harmony (the chord of B flat major), while the last three end on D minor again. Thus phrases may not only balance in length like verses of poetry, but also "rhyme," so to speak, by ending with the same cadence. We shall not wonder at this close correspondence between phrase rhythm in music and verse rhythm in poetry if we reflect that these arts are common descendants of the ancient art of dancing, and that if tone groups and word groups please us best when they balance it is because of immemorial association with groups of gestures and steps which must balance, since they are the movements of beings who, like ourselves, have two arms and two legs. All this fascinating story of the birth of music and poetry from the dance is preserved for us in language, where so much of history is deposited. The great linguist, Max Müller, traces it in a passage of his reminiscences. "Inspired utterance," he says, "requires, nay produces, rhythmic movements not only of the voice (song and prosodia) but of the body also (dance). In Greek, chorus means dance, measured movement, and the Greek choruses were originally dances; it can be proved that these dancing movements formed really the first meters of true poetry. Hence, it was quite natural that David should have danced before the Lord with all his might. "Language itself bears witness to the 2 The term "measure" indicates the number of beats-between two consecutive bar lines. In the "Volga Boat Song" the measure contains two beats (each the value of a quarter note). 3 Auld Lang Syne. By F. Max Müller. First Series, p. 42. |