Not long ago a prospectus was issued by some more or less aesthetic
ladies and gentlemen who, deeming modern life not so cheerful as it
should be, had laid their cheerless heads together and decided that
they would meet once every month and dance old-fashioned dances in a
hall hired for the purpose. Thus would they achieve a renascence--I am
sure they called it a renascence--of 'Merrie England.' I know not
whether subscriptions came pouring in. I know not even whether the
society ever met. If it ever did meet, I conceive that its meetings
must have been singularly dismal. If you are depressed by modern life,
you are unlikely to find an anodyne in the self-appointed task of
cutting certain capers which your ancestors used to cut because they,
in their day, were happy. If you think modern life so pleasant a thing
that you involuntarily prance, rather than walk, down the street, I
dare say your prancing will intensify your joy. Though I happen never
to have met him out-of-doors, I am sure my friend Mr. Gilbert
Chesterton always prances thus--prances in some wild way symbolical of
joy in modern life. His steps, and the movements of his arms and body,
may seem to you crude, casual, and disconnected at first sight; but
that is merely because they are spontaneous. If you studied them
carefully, you would begin to discern a certain rhythm, a certain
harmony. You would at length be able to compose from them a specific
dance--a dance not quite like any other--a dance formally expressive of
new English optimism. If you are not optimistic, don't hope to become
so by practising the steps. But practise them assiduously if you are;
and get your fellow-optimists to practise them with you. You will grow
all the happier through ceremonious expression of a light heart. And
your children and your children's children will dance 'The Chesterton'
when you are no more. May be, a few of them will still be dancing it
now and then, on this or that devious green, even when optimism shall
have withered for ever from the land. Nor will any man mock at the
survival. The dance will have lost nothing of its old grace, and will
have gathered that quality of pathos which makes even unlovely relics
dear to us--that piteousness which Time gives ever to things robbed of
their meaning and their use. Spectators will love it for its melancholy
not less than for its beauty. And I hope no mere spectator will be so
foolish as to say, 'Let us do it' with a view to reviving cheerfulness
at large. I hope it will be held sacred to those in whom it will be a
tradition--a familiar thing handed down from father to son. None but
they will be worthy of it. Others would ruin it. Be sure I trod no
measure with the Morris-dancers whom I saw last May-day.
It was in the wide street of a tiny village near Oxford that I saw
them. Fantastic--high-fantastical--figures they did cut in their
finery. But in demeanour they were quite simple, quite serious, these
eight English peasants. They had trudged hither from the neighbouring
village that was their home. And they danced quite simply, quite
seriously. One of them, I learned, was a cobbler, another a baker, and
the rest were farm-labourers. And their fathers and their fathers'
fathers had danced here before them, even so, every May-day morning.
They were as deeply rooted in antiquity as the elm outside the inn.
They were here always in their season as surely as the elm put forth
its buds. And the elm, knowing them, approving them, let its
green-flecked branches dance in unison with them.
The first dance was in full swing when I approached. Only six of the
men were dancers. Of the others, one was the 'minstrel,' the other the
'dysard.' The minstrel was playing a flute; and the dysard I knew by
the wand and leathern bladder which he brandished as he walked around,
keeping a space for the dancers, and chasing and buffeting merrily any
man or child who ventured too near. He, like the others, wore a white
smock decked with sundry ribands, and a top-hat that must have belonged
to his grandfather. Its antiquity of form and texture contrasted
strangely with the freshness of the garland of paper roses that
wreathed it. I was told that the wife or sweetheart of every
Morris-dancer takes special pains to deck her man out more gaily than
his fellows. But this pious endeavour had defeated its own end. So
bewildering was the amount of brand-new bunting attached to all these
eight men that no matron or maiden could for the life of her have
determined which was the most splendid of them all. Besides his
adventitious finery, every dancer, of course, had in his hands the
scarves which are as necessary to his performance of the Morris as are
the bells strapped about the calves of his legs. Waving these scarves
and jangling these bells with a stolid rhythm, the six peasants danced
facing one another, three on either side, while the minstrel fluted and
the dysard strutted around. That minstrel's tune runs in my head even
now--a queer little stolid tune that recalls vividly to me the aspect
of the dance. It is the sort of tune Bottom the Weaver must often have
danced to in his youth. I wish I could hum it for you on paper. I wish
I could set down for you on paper the sight that it conjures up. But
what writer that ever lived has been able to write adequately about a
dance? Even a slow, simple dance, such as these peasants were
performing, is a thing that not the cunningest writer could fix in
words. Did not Flaubert say that if he could describe a valse he would
die happy? I am sure he would have said this if it had occurred to him.
Unable to make you see the Morris, how can I make you feel as I felt in
seeing it? I cannot explain even to myself the effect it had on me. My
critics have often complained of me that I lack 'heart'--presumably the
sort of heart that is pronounced with a rolling of the r; and I suppose
they are right. I remember having read the death of Little Nell on more
than one occasion without floods of tears. How can I explain to myself
the tears that came into my eyes at sight of the Morris? They are not
within the rubric of the tears drawn by mere contemplation of visual
beauty. The Morris, as I saw it, was curious, antique, racy, what you
will: not beautiful. Nor was there any obvious pathos in it. Often, in
London, passing through some slum where a tune was being ground from an
organ, I have paused to watch the little girls dancing. In the swaying
dances of these wan, dishevelled, dim little girls I have discerned
authentic beauty, and have wondered where they had learned the grace of
their movements, and where the certainty with which they did such
strange and complicated steps. Surely, I have thought, this is no trick
of to-day or yesterday: here, surely, is the remainder of some old
tradition; here, may be, is Merrie England, run to seed. There is an
obvious pathos in the dances of these children of the gutter--an
obvious symbolism of sadness, of a wistful longing for freedom and
fearlessness, for wind and sunshine. No wonder that at sight of it even
so heartless a person as the present writer is a little touched. But
why at sight of those rubicund, full-grown, eupeptic Morris-dancers on
the vernal highroad? No obvious pathos was diffusing itself from them.
They were Merrie England in full flower. In part, I suppose, my tears
were tears of joy for the very joyousness of these men; in part, of
envy for their fine simplicity; in part, of sorrow in the thought that
they were a survival of the past, not types of the present, and that
their knell would soon be tolled, and the old elm see their like no
more.
After they had drunk some ale, they formed up for the second dance--a
circular dance. And anon, above the notes of the flute and the jangling
of the bells and the stamping of the boots, I seemed to hear the knell
actually tolling, Hoot! Hoot! Hoot! A motor came fussing and fuming in
its cloud of dust. Hoot! Hoot! The dysard ran to meet it, brandishing
his wand of office. He had to stand aside. Hoot! The dancers had just
time to get out of the way. The scowling motorists vanished. Dancers
and dysard, presently visible through the subsiding dust, looked rather
foolish and crestfallen. And all the branches of the conservative old
elm above them seemed to be quivering with indignation.
In a sense this elm was a mere parvenu as compared with its beloved
dancers. True, it had been no mere sapling in the reign of the seventh
Henry, and so could remember distinctly the first Morris danced here.
But the first Morris danced on English soil was not, by a long chalk,
the first Morris. Scarves such as these were waved, and bells such as
these were jangled, and some such measure as this was trodden, in the
mists of a very remote antiquity. Spanish buccaneers, long before the
dawn of the fifteenth century, had seen the Moors dancing somewhat thus
to the glory of Allah. Home-coming, they had imitated that strange and
savage dance, expressive, for them, of the joy of being on firm native
land again. The 'Morisco' they called it; and it was much admired; and
the fashion of it spread throughout Spain--scaled the very Pyrenees,
and invaded France. To the 'Maurisce' succumbed 'tout Paris' as quickly
as in recent years it succumbed to the cake-walk. A troupe of French
dancers braved the terrors of the sea, and, with their scarves and
their bells, danced for the delectation of the English court. 'The
Kynge,' it seems, 'was pleased by the bels and sweet dauncing.' Certain
of his courtiers 'did presentlie daunce so in open playces.' No one
with any knowledge of the English nature will be surprised to hear that
the cits soon copied the courtiers. But 'the Morrice was not for longe
practysed in the cittie. It went to countrie playces.' London,
apparently, even in those days, did not breed joy in life. The Morris
sought and found its proper home in the fields and by the wayside.
Happy carles danced it to the glory of God, even as it had erst been
danced to the glory of Allah.
It was no longer, of course, an explicitly religious dance. But neither
can its origin have been explicitly religious. Every dance, however
formal it become later, begins as a mere ebullition of high spirits.
The Dionysiac dances began in the same way as 'the Chesterton.' Some
Thessalian vintner, say, suddenly danced for sheer joy that the earth
was so bounteous; and his fellow vintners, sharing his joy, danced with
him; and ere their breath was spent they remembered who it was that had
given them such cause for merry-making, and they caught leaves from the
vine and twined them in their hair, and from the fig-tree and the
fir-tree they snatched branches, and waved them this way and that, as
they danced, in honour of him who was lord of these trees and of this
wondrous vine. Thereafter this dance of joy became a custom, ever to be
observed at certain periods of the year. It took on, beneath its
joyousness, a formal solemnity. It was danced slowly around an altar of
stone, whereon wood and salt were burning--burning with little flames
that were pale in the sunlight. Formal hymns were chanted around this
altar. And some youth, clad in leopard's skin and wreathed with ivy,
masqueraded as the god himself, and spoke words appropriate to that
august character. It was from these beginnings that sprang the art-form
of drama. The Greeks never hid the origin of this their plaything.
Always in the centre of the theatre was the altar to Dionysus; and the
chorus, circling around it, were true progeny of those old agrestic
singers; and the mimes had never been but for that masquerading youth.
It is hard to realise, yet it is true, that we owe to the worship of
Dionysus so dreary a thing as the modern British drama. Strange that
through him who gave us the juice of the grape, 'fiery, venerable,
divine,' came this gift too! Yet I dare say the chorus of a musical
comedy would not be awestruck--would, indeed, 'bridle'--if one unrolled
to them their illustrious pedigree.
The history of the Dionysiac dance has a fairly exact parallel in that
of the 'Morisco.' Each dance has travelled far, and survives, shorn of
its explicitly religious character, and in many other ways 'diablement
change' en route.' The 'Morisco,' of course, has changed the less of
the two. Besides the scarves and the bells, it seemed to me last
May-day that the very steps danced and figures formed were very like to
those of which I had read, and which I had seen illustrated in old
English and French engravings. Above all, the dancers seemed to retain,
despite their seriousness, something of the joy in which the dance
originated. They frowned as they footed it, but they were evidently
happy. Their frowns did but betoken determination to do well and
rightly a thing that they loved doing--were proud of doing. The smiles
of the chorus in a musical comedy seem but to express depreciation of a
rather tedious and ridiculous exercise. The coryphe'es are quite
evidently bored and ashamed. But these eight be-ribanded sons of the
soil were hardly less glad in dancing than was that antique Moor who,
having slain beneath the stars some long-feared and long-hated enemy,
danced wildly on the desert sand, and, to make music, tore strips of
bells from his horse's saddle and waved them in either hand while he
danced, and made so great a noise in the night air that other Moors
came riding to see what had happened, and marvelled at the sight and
sound of the dance, and, praising Allah, leapt down and tore strips of
bells from their own saddles, and danced as nearly as they could in
mimicry of that glad conqueror, to Allah's glory.
As this scene is mobled in the aforesaid mists of antiquity, I cannot
vouch for the details. Nor can I say just when the Moors found that
they could make a finer and more rhythmic jangle by attaching the bells
to their legs than by swinging them in their hands. Nor can I fix the
day when they tore strips from their turbans for their idle hands to
wave. I cannot say how long the rite's mode had been set when first the
adventurers from Spain beheld it with their keen wondering eyes and
fixed it for ever in their memories.
In Spain, and then in France, and then in London, the dance was
secular. But perhaps I ought not to have said that it was 'not
explicitly religious' in the English countryside. The cult for Robin
Hood was veritably a religion throughout the Midland Counties. Rites in
his honour were performed on certain days of the year with a not less
hearty reverence, a not less quaint elaboration, than was infused into
the rustic Greek rites for Dionysus. The English carles danced, not
indeed around an altar, but around a bunt pole crowned with such
flowers as were in season; and one of them, like the youth who in the
Dionysiac dance masqueraded as the god, was decked out duly as Robin
Hood--'with a magpye's plume to hys capp,' we are told, and sometimes
'a russat bearde compos'd of horses hair.' The most famous of the
dances for Robin Hood was the 'pageant.' Herein appeared, besides the
hero himself and various tabours and pipers, a 'dysard' or fool, and
Friar Tuck, and Maid Marian--'in a white kyrtele and her hair all
unbrayded, but with blossoms thereyn.' This 'pageant' was performed at
Whitsun, at Easter, on New-Year's day, and on May-day. The Morris, when
it had become known in the villages, was very soon incorporated in the
'pageant.' The Morris scarves and bells, the Morris steps and figures,
were all pressed into the worship of Robin Hood. In most villages the
properties for the 'pageant' had always rested in the custody of the
church-wardens. The properties for the Morris were now kept with them.
In the Kingston accounts for 1537-8 are enumerated 'a fryers cote of
russat, and a kyrtele weltyd with red cloth, a Mowrens cote of buckram,
and four morres daunsars cotes of white fustian spangelid, and two
gryne saten cotes, and disarddes cote of cotton, and six payre of
garters with belles.' The 'pageant' itself fell, little by little, into
disuse; the Morris, which had been affiliated to it, superseded it. Of
the 'pageant' nothing remained but the minstrel and the dysard and an
occasional Maid Marian. In the original Morris there had been no music
save that of the bells. But now there was always a flute or tabor. The
dysard, with his rod and leathern bladder, was promoted to a sort of
leadership. He did not dance, but gave the signal for the dance, and
distributed praise or blame among the performers, and had power to
degrade from the troupe any man who did not dance with enough skill or
enough heartiness. Often there were in one village two rival troupes of
dancers, and a prize was awarded to whichever acquitted itself the more
admirably. But not only the 'ensemble' was considered. A sort of 'star
system' seems to have crept in. Often a prize would be awarded to some
one dancer who had excelled his fellows. There were, I suppose, 'born'
Morris-dancers. Now and again, one of them, flushed with triumph, would
secern himself from his troupe, and would 'star' round the country for
his livelihood.
Such a one was Mr. William Kemp, who, at the age of seventeen, and in
the reign of Queen Elizabeth, danced from his native village to London,
where he educated himself and became an actor. Perhaps he was not a
good actor, for he presently reverted to the Morris. He danced all the
way from London to Norwich, and wrote a pamphlet about it--'Kemp's Nine
Dajes' Wonder, performed in a daunce from London to Norwich. Containing
the pleasures, paines, and kind entertainment of William Kemp betweene
London and that Citty, in his late Morrice.' He seems to have
encountered more pleasures than 'paines.' Gentle and simple, all the
way, were very cordial. The gentle entertained him in their mansions by
night. The simple danced with him by day. In Sudbury 'there came a
lusty tall fellow, a butcher by his profession, that would in a Morice
keepe me company to Bury. I gave him thankes, and forward wee did set;
but ere ever wee had measur'd halfe a mile of our way, he gave me over
in the plain field, protesting he would not hold out with me; for,
indeed, my pace in dauncing is not ordinary. As he and I were parting,
a lusty country lasse being among the people, cal'd him faint-hearted
lout, saying, "If I had begun to daunce, I would have held out one
myle, though it had cost my life." At which words many laughed. "Nay,"
saith she, "if the dauncer will lend me a leash of his belles, I'le
venter to treade one myle with him myself." I lookt upon her, saw mirth
in her eies, heard boldness in her words, and beheld her ready to tucke
up her russat petticoate; and I fitted her with bels, which she merrily
taking garnisht her thicke short legs, and with a smooth brow bad the
tabur begin. The drum strucke; forward marcht I with my merry Mayde
Marian, who shook her stout sides, and footed it merrily to Melford,
being a long myle. There parting with her (besides her skinfull of
drinke), and English crowne to buy more drinke; for, good wench, she
was in a pittious heate; my kindness she requited with dropping a dozen
good courtsies, and bidding God blesse the dauncer. I bade her adieu;
and, to give her her due, she had a good eare, daunst truly, and wee
parted friends.' Kemp, you perceive, wrote as well as he danced. I wish
he had danced less and written more. It seems that he never wrote
anything but this one delightful pamphlet. He died three years later,
in the thirtieth year of his age--died dancing, with his bells on his
legs, in the village of Ockley.
John Thorndrake, another professional Morris-dancer, was not so
brilliant a personage as poor Kemp; but was of tougher fibre, it would
seem. He died in his native town, Canterbury, at the age of
seventy-eight; and had danced--never less than a mile, seldom less than
five miles--every day, except Sunday, for sixty years. But even his
record pales beside the account of a Morris that was danced by eight
men, in Hereford, one May-day in the reign of James I. The united ages
of these dancers, according to a contemporary pamphleteer, exceeded
eight hundred years. The youngest of them was seventy-nine, and the
ages of the rest ranged between ninety-five and a hundred and nine.
'And they daunced right well.' Of the hold that the Morris had on
England, could there be stronger proof than in the feat of these
indomitable dotards? The Morris ceased not even during the Civil Wars.
Some of King Charles's men (according to Groby, the Puritan) danced
thus on the eve of Naseby. Not even the Protectorate could stamp the
Morris out, though we are told that Groby and other preachers
throughout the land inveighed against it as 'lewde' and 'ungodlie.' The
Restoration was in many places celebrated by special Morrises. The
perihelion of this dance seems, indeed, to have been in the reign of
Charles II. Georgian writers treated it somewhat as a survival, and
were not always even tender to it. Says a writer in Bladud's Courier,
describing a 'soire'e de beaute'' given by Lady Jersey, 'Mrs. ---- (la
belle) looked as silly and gaudy, I do vow, as one of the old Morris
Dancers.' And many other writers--from Horace Walpole to Captain
Harver--have their sneer at the Morris. Its rusticity did not appeal to
the polite Georgian mind; and its Moorishness, which would have
appealed strongly, was overlooked. Still, the Morris managed to survive
urban disdain--was still dear to the carles whose fathers had taught it
them.
And long may it linger!