The gravity of the discussion of the morality of dancing is exceedingly
amusing. The dancing of young people is as natural and instinctive as
their laughing and singing, and the old Easy Chairs about the wall might
as wisely quarrel with the song of the bobolink in the fields as with
the dance upon the floor. But the grave censors who condemn it must be
heard. There is reason in the way in which they often put their
objections. Excitement, late hours, exposure of health, all these are
bad. But, on the other hand, exercise, cheerfulness, friendly
conversation, all these are good. The zealous censors confound uses and
abuses. The Easy Chair has seen a worthy temperance apostle ingulfing
cups of coffee in the pauses of an exhortation to abstinence, until it
marvelled at the capacity of the apostolic stomach. Could there be no
intemperance in coffee-drinking? But was coffee not to be drunk? The
Easy Chair has seen such frantic gobbling at a railway eating-room that
it could only gaze in wonder at the sottish and, so to speak, drunken
eating. But is food not to be eaten? The Easy Chair has seen little
children, extravagantly dressed and decorated, dancing in great hotel
parlors on hot summer nights at an hour when they should all have been
sound asleep in their beds, while their parents should have been soundly
chastised for not putting them there. But is the dancing of young
persons therefore wrong?
This is probably to the censorial mind nothing but the base compromise
and sophistry of "moderate drinking." But nevertheless most of the evils
of this kind are perversions of good things. There are a great many
young and ignorant parents who become impatient with the incessant
activity and restlessness of their children. They condemn them to sit
still in a chair and make no noise. Dear madame, it is nature's
intention that the child shall be restless, to develop his limbs. You
apply to him rules that are fit and easy for us who are old, and whom
nature equally admonishes to sit still in chairs. Our little Procrustean
beds are merely furniture that tortures. The desire of youth for
enjoyment is as worthy as its desire for knowledge, for truth, for
excellence. And it is the spirit, not the method, of enjoyments which
are not obviously wrong, that is chiefly to be regarded. A good man asks
whether he could go from dancing to console a dying bed. But could he go
from skating, or reading _Pickwick_, or from heartily laughing, to
console a dying friend? Would it not, even in his own view, depend
wholly upon the mood in which he was doing it?
Let him select an act which he would approve. Let him be reading a
serious book, or thinking in his study, or going upon a visit of charity
when he is summoned, and he would say that he could go with perfect
composure and the utmost propriety. But how if he were peevish as he
read the serious book, or if he were thinking angrily in his study, or
if he were mentally reproaching the duty that drew him from his
comfortable room to pay a visit of charity, could he then more properly
hasten to console the dying than if he had been cheerfully dancing, his
mind full of pleasant thoughts and the delight of the music and the
measured movement? It is not the thing that he is doing, but the spirit
in which he is doing it, that should be considered.
How different a view of the pleasant recreation of dancing may be taken
by an intellectual man, from that of one who thinks the waltz a device
of Satan, is shown by a passage of De Quincey, the beginning of which
the Easy Chair will quote, and which will find an echo in many a memory:
"And in itself, of all the scenes which this world offers, none is to me
so profoundly interesting, none (I say deliberately) so affecting, as
the spectacle of men and women floating through the mazes of a dance;
under these conditions, however, that the music shall be rich and
festal, the execution of the dancers perfect, and the dance itself of a
character to admit of free, fluent, and continuous action. And whenever
the music happens not to be of a light, trivial character, but charged
with the spirit of festal pleasure, and the performers in the dance so
far skilful as to betray no awkwardness verging on the ludicrous, I
believe that many persons feel as I feel in such circumstances, viz.,
derive from the spectacle the very grandest form of passionate sadness
which can belong to any spectacle whatsoever."