Rhythm suggests bodily activity. Its essential function is to represent the expression of feelings by motions of the body, arms, legs, or any part that can move freely. This is verified by the fact that rhythmic music impels people to join in with hands and feet, and this is also the underlying basis of dance music; for the object of dance music is to inspire people to rhythmic activity, and its connection with expression is verified by the fact that so much dance music, even in the earliest times, has been mimetic. The position of rhythm in artistic music is strange, for it is undeniable that the preponderant impulse of serious composers is to hide it away in sophistications. Indeed, for many centuries it was, possibly unconsciously, kept at bay. Pure unsophisticated rhythm belongs to the primitives. It is not the form of expression congenial to self-respecting and developed races when they are taking anything serious in hand. This is partly because it does, as above remarked, represent physical expression, which is not the type to which intellectual people are prone. Developed minds want to convince by argument; primitive people by force. Moreover, rhythm is not progressive. In its direct forms it is probably much as it was with the cave dwellers. Its limitations are obvious; and its simple forms are indicative of a primitive state in those that use it. As a matter of fact, it seems to be the ingrained impulse of composers whose feeling for their art is highly developed to disguise it, as though the frank use of it was commonplace and cheap. What appears to be progress in rhythm is indeed not in rhythm itself, but in that very sophistication. It is like the sophistication of metre in the blank verse of Shakespeare or Milton, or even in the lyric poetry of Shelley and Keats and later poets, which makes English lyrics so difficult for inefficient and unliterary composers to set. The parallel in poetry and verse is complete. For the jog-trot of those indifferent poets who make an appeal to the undeveloped minds of the herd is poetry of a low order, just as is the rhythmic commonplace of cheap-minded composers.