What apparently proves to be the elementary step in building up a new school of choreography--perhaps that which some of the younger dancers have chosen either by accident or by roundabout ways--are the Jacques-Dalcroze Rhythmic Gymnastics or ‘Eurhythmics’ on the order of the ancient Greeks. Thus far this style of dancing is merely in its preliminary form. Therefore it is now as difficult to draw any definite conclusion, as it was about 1905, when the Swiss composer Dalcroze, who had been since 1892 a professor of harmony at the Geneva Conservatoire, first launched the movement. However, the systematic work of instruction by Dalcroze began in 1910, when the brothers Wolf and Harald Dohrn invited him to come to Dresden, where, in the suburb of Hellerau, they built for him a College of Rhythmic Gymnastics. From this time on the inventor of the new method began a systematic training of young men and women. Ethel Ingham writes of the life at the college at Hellerau: ‘The day commences with the sounding of a gong at seven o’clock; the house is immediately alive, and some are off to the College for a Swedish gymnastic lesson before breakfast, others breakfast at half-past seven and have their lesson later. There is always a half hour of ordinary gymnastics to begin with. Then there will be a lesson in _Solfège_, one in Rhythmic Gymnastics, and one in Improvisation, each lasting for fifty minutes, with an interval of ten minutes between lessons.’ ‘One of the most marked tendencies of the modern æsthetic theory is to break down the barriers that convention has created between the various arts,’ writes Michael T. H. Sadler of the value of Jacques-Dalcroze’s eurhythmics to art. ‘The truth is coming to be realized that the essential factor of poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture and music is really of the same quality, and that one art does not differ from another in anything but the method of its expression and the conditions connected with that method. ‘The common basis to the arts is more easily admitted than defined, but one important element in it--perhaps the only element that can be given a name--is rhythm. Rhythm of bodily movement, the dance, is the earliest form of artistic expression known. It is accompanied in nearly every case with rude music, the object being to emphasize the beat and rhythmic movement with sound. The quickness with which children respond to simple repetition of beat, translating the rhythm of the music into movement, is merely the recurrence of historical development. ‘To speak of the rhythm of painting may seem fanciful, but I think that is only lack of familiarity. The expression is used here with no intention of metaphor. Great pictures have a very marked and real rhythm, of color, of line, of feeling. The best prose-writing has equally a distinct rhythm.