gracefulness—the vehemence of our feeling will be abated. Thus it is possible that although rhythm powerfully reinforces musical or dramatic excitement, it may at the same time exercise a restraining influence on hypernormal feeling. And its effects in music and dance show us, in the simplest and most comprehensive of all examples, the importance of artistic form. The musical katharsis or relief to sensation always involves stimulation, but it may nevertheless affect us as a sedative. The more the form-element and attention to form gain in prominence, the more effectual also is the relieving influence of art. Where the stimulative element is predominant in a work of art, there the relief is less complete. This contrast, which can be observed at all stages of artistic development, is eminently conspicuous in ancient art, where high and low forms are often to be found in close juxtaposition. The superiority of Greek music over Phrygian music was a favourite topic of the old writers on art, and the legend of the contest between Apollo and Marsyas served as a mythological variation on the same theme. Lyre and flute stood as symbols for two different classes of art, of which one was violent, orgiastic, and barbarous, while the other was calm in its Olympian serenity.[143] But the contrast expressed in these parables by the ancient authors and some of their modern followers is not so sharp in reality. Even the lively notes of a flute may, to use the old metaphor, by their bound time exercise a kind of restraining influence on the passions. And on the other hand the sedative power of soft music is by no means so great as has often been contended. While acting hygienically as a cure for excess of passion or sorrow it cannot produce any moral result properly so called. As M. Combarieu has pointed out in his acute criticism of Cardinal Perraud’s _Eurythmie et Harmonie_, it is an incontestable fact, which has only too often been overlooked by Platonising philosophers, that even the most immoral feelings may be expressed in perfect melody.[144] The musical, and still more the merely rhythmical, form cannot change the quality of these feelings; it can only deprive them of their dangerous intensity. The mental state thereby gains in pure and unmingled pleasure; it becomes ennobled as enjoyment, but it is by no means moralised, at least not according to modern views. It is only from the standpoint of a purely hedonic system of ethics that music, or any other art, can be said to exercise an immediate moral influence. * * * * *