THE ART OF DANCING
I
DANCING and building are the two primary and essential arts. The art of
dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves
first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the
beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end
they unite. Music, acting, poetry proceed in the one mighty stream;
sculpture, painting, all the arts of design, in the other. There is no
primary art outside these two arts, for their origin is far earlier than
man himself; and dancing came first.[12]
That is one reason why dancing, however it may at times be scorned by
passing fashions, has a profound and eternal attraction even for those
one might suppose farthest from its influence. The joyous beat of the
feet of children, the cosmic play of philosophers’ thoughts rise and
fall according to the same laws of rhythm. If we are indifferent to the
art of dancing, we have failed to understand, not merely the supreme
manifestation of physical life, but also the supreme symbol of spiritual
life.
The significance of dancing, in the wide sense, thus lies in the fact
that it is simply an intimate concrete appeal of a general rhythm, that
general rhythm which marks, not life only, but the universe, if one may
still be allowed so to name the sum of the cosmic influences that reach
us. We need not, indeed, go so far as the planets or the stars and
outline their ethereal dances. We have but to stand on the seashore and
watch the waves that beat at our feet, to observe that at nearly regular
intervals this seemingly monotonous rhythm is accentuated for several
beats, so that the waves are really dancing the measure of a tune. It
need surprise us not at all that rhythm, ever tending to be moulded into
a tune, should mark all the physical and spiritual manifestations of
life. Dancing is the primitive expression alike of religion and of
love—of religion from the earliest human times we know of and of love
from a period long anterior to the coming of man. The art of dancing,
moreover, is intimately entwined with all human tradition of war, of
labour, of pleasure, of education, while some of the wisest philosophers
and the most ancient civilisations have regarded the dance as the
pattern in accordance with which the moral life of men must be woven. To
realise, therefore, what dancing means for mankind—the poignancy and the
many-sidedness of its appeal—we must survey the whole sweep of human
life, both at its highest and at its deepest moments.
II
“WHAT do you dance?” When a man belonging to one branch of the great
Bantu division of mankind met a member of another, said Livingstone,
that was the question he asked. What a man danced, that was his tribe,
his social customs, his religion; for, as an anthropologist has put it,
“a savage does not preach his religion, he dances it.”
There are peoples in the world who have no secular dances, only
religious dances; and some investigators believe with Gerland that every
dance was of religious origin. That view may seem too extreme, even if
we admit that some even of our modern dances, like the waltz, may have
been originally religious. Even still (as Skene has shown among the
Arabs and Swahili of Africa) so various are dances and their functions
among some peoples that they cover the larger part of life. Yet we have
to remember that for primitive man there is no such thing as religion
apart from life, for religion covers everything. Dancing is a magical
operation for the attainment of real and important ends of every kind.
It was clearly of immense benefit to the individual and to society, by
imparting strength and adding organised harmony. It seemed reasonable to
suppose that it attained other beneficial ends, that were incalculable,
for calling down blessings or warding off misfortunes. We may conclude,
with Wundt, that the dance was, in the beginning, the expression of the
whole man, for the whole man was religious.[13]
Thus, among primitive peoples, religion being so large a part of life,
the dance inevitably becomes of supreme religious importance. To dance
was at once both to worship and to pray. Just as we still find in our
Prayer Books that there are divine services for all the great
fundamental acts of life,—for birth, for marriage, for death,—as well as
for the cosmic procession of the world as marked by ecclesiastical
festivals, and for the great catastrophes of nature, such as droughts,
so also it has ever been among primitive peoples. For all the solemn
occasions of life, for bridals and for funerals, for seed-time and for
harvest, for war and for peace, for all these things there were fitting
dances. To-day we find religious people who in church pray for rain or
for the restoration of their friends to health. Their forefathers also
desired these things, but, instead of praying for them, they danced for
them the fitting dance which tradition had handed down, and which the
chief or the medicine-man solemnly conducted. The gods themselves
danced, as the stars dance in the sky—so at least the Mexicans, and we
may be sure many other peoples, have held; and to dance is therefore to
imitate the gods, to work with them, perhaps to persuade them to work in
the direction of our own desires. “Work for us!” is the song-refrain,
expressed or implied, of every religious dance. In the worship of solar
deities in various countries, it was customary to dance round the altar,
as the stars dance round the sun. Even in Europe the popular belief that
the sun dances on Easter Sunday has perhaps scarcely yet died out. To
dance is to take part in the cosmic control of the world. Every sacred
Dionysian dance is an imitation of the divine dance.
All religions, and not merely those of primitive character, have been at
the outset, and sometimes throughout, in some measure saltatory. That
was recognised even in the ancient world by acute observers, like
Lucian, who remarks in his essay on dancing that “you cannot find a
single ancient mystery in which there is no dancing; in fact most people
say of the devotees of the Mysteries that ‘they dance them out.’” This
is so all over the world. It is not more pronounced in early
Christianity, and among the ancient Hebrews who danced before the ark,
than among the Australian aborigines whose great corroborees are
religious dances conducted by the medicine-men with their sacred staves
in their hands. Every American Indian tribe seems to have had its own
religious dances, varied and elaborate, often with a richness of meaning
which the patient study of modern investigators has but slowly revealed.
The Shamans in the remote steppes of Northern Siberia have their
ecstatic religious dances, and in modern Europe the Turkish
dervishes—perhaps of related stock—still dance in their cloisters
similar ecstatic dances, combined with song and prayer, as a regular
part of devotional service.
These religious dances, it may be observed, are sometimes ecstatic,
sometimes pantomimic. It is natural that this should be so. By each road
it is possible to penetrate towards the divine mystery of the world. The
auto-intoxication of rapturous movement brings the devotees, for a while
at least, into that self-forgetful union with the not-self which the
mystic ever seeks. The ecstatic Hindu dance in honour of the pre-Aryan
hill god, afterwards Siva, became in time a great symbol, “the clearest
image of the _activity_ of God,” it has been called, “which any art or
religion can boast of.”[14] Pantomimic dances, on the other hand, with
their effort to heighten natural expression and to imitate natural
process, bring the dancers into the divine sphere of creation and enable
them to assist vicariously in the energy of the gods. The dance thus
becomes the presentation of a divine drama, the vital reënactment of a
sacred history, in which the worshipper is enabled to play a real
part.[15] In this way ritual arises.
It is in this sphere—highly primitive as it is—of pantomimic dancing
crystallised in ritual, rather than in the sphere of ecstatic dancing,
that we may to-day in civilisation witness the survivals of the dance in
religion. The divine services of the American Indian, said Lewis Morgan,
took the form of “set dances, each with its own name, songs, steps, and
costume.” At this point the early Christian, worshipping the Divine
Body, was able to join in spiritual communion with the ancient Egyptian
or the later Japanese[16] or the modern American Indian. They are all
alike privileged to enter, each in his own way, a sacred mystery, and to
participate in the sacrifice of a heavenly Mass.
What by some is considered to be the earliest known Christian ritual—the
“Hymn of Jesus” assigned to the second century—is nothing but a sacred
dance. Eusebius in the third century stated that Philo’s description of
the worship of the Therapeuts agreed at all points with Christian
custom, and that meant the prominence of dancing, to which indeed
Eusebius often refers in connection with Christian worship. It has been
supposed by some that the Christian Church was originally a theatre, the
choir being the raised stage, even the word “choir,” it is argued,
meaning an enclosed space for dancing. It is certain that at the
Eucharist the faithful gesticulated with their hands, danced with their
feet, flung their bodies about. Chrysostom, who referred to this
behaviour round the Holy Table at Antioch, only objected to drunken
excesses in connection with it; the custom itself he evidently regarded
as traditional and right.
While the central function of Christian worship is a sacred drama, a
divine pantomime, the associations of Christianity and dancing are by no
means confined to the ritual of the Mass and its later more attenuated
transformations. The very idea of dancing had a sacred and mystic
meaning to the early Christians, who had meditated profoundly on the
text, “We have piped unto you and ye have not danced.” Origen prayed
that above all things there may be made operative in us the mystery “of
the stars dancing in Heaven for the salvation of the Universe.” So that
the monks of the Cistercian Order, who in a later age worked for the
world more especially by praying for it (“orare est laborare”), were
engaged in the same task on earth as the stars in Heaven; dancing and
praying are the same thing. St. Basil, who was so enamoured of natural
things, described the angels dancing in Heaven, and later the author of
the “Dieta Salutis” (said to have been St. Bonaventura), which is
supposed to have influenced Dante in assigning so large a place to
dancing in the “Paradiso,” described dancing as the occupation of the
inmates of Heaven, and Christ as the leader of the dance. Even in more
modern times an ancient Cornish carol sang of the life of Jesus as a
dance, and represented him as declaring that he died in order that man
“may come unto the general dance.”[17]
This attitude could not fail to be reflected in practice. Genuine
dancing, not merely formalised and unrecognisable dancing, such as the
traditionalised Mass, must have been frequently introduced into
Christian worship in early times. Until a few centuries ago it remained
not uncommon, and it even still persists in remote corners of the
Christian world. In English cathedrals dancing went on until the
fourteenth century. At Paris, Limoges, and elsewhere in France, the
priests danced in the choir at Easter up to the seventeenth century, in
Roussillon up to the eighteenth century. Roussillon is a Catalan
province with Spanish traditions, and it is in Spain, where dancing is a
deeper and more passionate impulse than elsewhere in Europe, that
religious dancing took firmest root and flourished longest. In the
cathedrals of Seville, Toledo, Valencia, and Jeres there was formerly
dancing, though it now only survives at a few special festivals in the
first.[18] At Alaro in Mallorca, also at the present day, a dancing
company called Els Cosiers, on the festival of St. Roch, the patron
saint of the place, dance in the church in fanciful costumes with
tambourines, up to the steps of the high altar, immediately after Mass,
and then dance out of the church. In another part of the Christian
world, in the Abyssinian Church—an offshoot of the Eastern
Church—dancing is also said still to form part of the worship.
Dancing, we may see throughout the world, has been so essential, so
fundamental, a part of all vital and undegenerate religion, that,
whenever a new religion appears, a religion of the spirit and not merely
an anæmic religion of the intellect, we should still have to ask of it
the question of the Bantu: “What do you dance?”
III
Dancing is not only intimately associated with religion, it has an
equally intimate association with love. Here, indeed, the relationship
is even more primitive, for it is far older than man. Dancing, said
Lucian, is as old as love. Among insects and among birds it may be said
that dancing is often an essential part of love. In courtship the male
dances, sometimes in rivalry with other males, in order to charm the
female; then, after a short or long interval, the female is aroused to
share his ardour and join in the dance; the final climax of the dance is
the union of the lovers. Among the mammals most nearly related to man,
indeed, dancing is but little developed: their energies are more
variously diffused, though a close observer of the apes, Dr. Louis
Robinson, has pointed out that the “spasmodic jerking of the
chimpanzee’s feeble legs,” pounding the partition of his cage, is the
crude motion out of which “the heavenly alchemy of evolution has created
the divine movements of Pavlova”; but it must be remembered that the
anthropoid apes are offshoots only from the stock that produced Man, his
cousins and not his ancestors. It is the more primitive love-dance of
insects and birds that seems to reappear among human savages in various
parts of the world, notably in Africa, and in a conventionalised and
symbolised form it is still danced in civilisation to-day. Indeed, it is
in this aspect that dancing has so often aroused reprobation, from the
days of early Christianity until the present, among those for whom the
dance has merely been, in the words of a seventeenth-century writer, a
series of “immodest and dissolute movements by which the cupidity of the
flesh is aroused.”
But in nature and among primitive peoples it has its value precisely on
this account. It is a process of courtship and, even more than that, it
is a novitiate for love, and a novitiate which was found to be an
admirable training for love. Among some peoples, indeed, as the Omahas,
the same word meant both to dance and to love. By his beauty, his
energy, his skill, the male must win the female, so impressing the image
of himself on her imagination that finally her desire is aroused to
overcome her reticence. That is the task of the male throughout nature,
and in innumerable species besides Man it has been found that the school
in which the task may best be learnt is the dancing-school. Those who
have not the skill and the strength to learn are left behind, and, as
they are probably the least capable members of the race, it may be in
this way that a kind of sexual selection has been embodied in
unconscious eugenics, and aided the higher development of the race. The
moths and the butterflies, the African ostrich and the Sumatran argus
pheasant, with their fellows innumerable, have been the precursors of
man in the strenuous school of erotic dancing, fitting themselves for
selection by the females of their choice as the most splendid
progenitors of the future race.[19]
From this point of view, it is clear, the dance performed a double
function. On the one hand, the tendency to dance, arising under the
obscure stress of this impulse, brought out the best possibilities the
individual held the promise of; on the other hand, at the moment of
courtship, the display of the activities thus acquired developed on the
sensory side all the latent possibilities of beauty which at last became
conscious in man. That this came about we cannot easily escape
concluding. How it came about, how it happens that some of the least
intelligent of creatures thus developed a beauty and a grace that are
enchanting even to our human eyes, is a miracle, even if not affected by
the mystery of sex, which we cannot yet comprehend.
When we survey the human world, the erotic dance of the animal world is
seen not to have lost, but rather to have gained, influence. It is no
longer the males alone who are thus competing for the love of the
females. It comes about by a modification in the earlier method of
selection that often not only the men dance for the women, but the women
for the men, each striving in a storm of rivalry to arouse and attract
the desire of the other. In innumerable parts of the world the season of
love is a time which the nubile of each sex devote to dancing in each
other’s presence, sometimes one sex, sometimes the other, sometimes
both, in the frantic effort to display all the force and energy, the
skill and endurance, the beauty and grace, which at this moment are
yearning within them to be poured into the stream of the race’s life.
From this point of view we may better understand the immense ardour with
which every part of the wonderful human body has been brought into the
play of the dance. The men and women of races spread all over the world
have shown a marvellous skill and patience in imparting rhythm and
measure to the most unlikely, the most rebellious regions of the body,
all wrought by desire into potent and dazzling images. To the vigorous
races of Northern Europe in their cold damp climate, dancing comes
naturally to be dancing of the legs, so naturally that the English poet,
as a matter of course, assumes that the dance of Salome was a “twinkling
of the feet.”[20] But on the opposite side of the world, in Japan and
notably in Java and Madagascar, dancing may be exclusively dancing of
the arms and hands, in some of the South Sea Islands of the hands and
fingers alone. Dancing may even be carried on in the seated posture, as
occurs at Fiji in a dance connected with the preparation of the sacred
drink, ava. In some districts of Southern Tunisia dancing, again, is
dancing of the hair, and all night long, till they perhaps fall
exhausted, the marriageable girls will move their heads to the rhythm of
a song, maintaining their hair in perpetual balance and sway. Elsewhere,
notably in Africa, but also sometimes in Polynesia, as well as in the
dances that had established themselves in ancient Rome, dancing is
dancing of the body, with vibratory or rotatory movements of breasts or
flanks. The complete dance along these lines is, however, that in which
the play of all the chief muscle-groups of the body is harmoniously
interwoven. When both sexes take part in such an exercise, developed
into an idealised yet passionate pantomime of love, we have the complete
erotic dance. In the beautiful ancient civilisation of the Pacific, it
is probable that this ideal was sometimes reached, and at Tahiti, in
1772, an old voyager crudely and summarily described the native dance as
“an endless variety of posturings and wagglings of the body, hands,
feet, eyes, lips, and tongue, in which they keep splendid time to the
measure.” In Spain the dance of this kind has sometimes attained its
noblest and most harmoniously beautiful expression. From the narratives
of travellers, it would appear that it was especially in the eighteenth
century that among all classes in Spain dancing of this kind was
popular. The Church tacitly encouraged it, an Aragonese Canon told
Baretti in 1770, in spite of its occasional indecorum, as a useful
safety-valve for the emotions. It was not less seductive to the foreign
spectator than to the people themselves. The grave traveller Peyron,
towards the end of the century, growing eloquent over the languorous and
flexible movements of the dance, the bewitching attitude, the voluptuous
curves of the arms, declares that, when one sees a beautiful Spanish
woman dance, one is inclined to fling all philosophy to the winds. And
even that highly respectable Anglican clergyman, the Reverend Joseph
Townsend, was constrained to state that he could “almost persuade
myself” that if the fandango were suddenly played in church the gravest
worshippers would start up to join in that “lascivious pantomime.” There
we have the rock against which the primitive dance of sexual selection
suffers shipwreck as civilisation advances. And that prejudice of
civilisation becomes so ingrained that it is brought to bear even on the
primitive dance. The pygmies of Africa are described by Sir H. H.
Johnston as a very decorous and highly moral people, but their dances,
he adds, are not so. Yet these dances, though to the eyes of Johnston,
blinded by European civilisation, “grossly indecent,” he honestly, and
inconsistently, adds, are “danced reverently.”
IV
From the vital function of dancing in love, and its sacred function in
religion, to dancing as an art, a profession, an amusement, may seem, at
the first glance, a sudden leap. In reality the transition is gradual,
and it began to be made at a very early period in diverse parts of the
globe. All the matters that enter into courtship tend to fall under the
sway of art; their æsthetic pleasure is a secondary reflection of their
primary vital joy. Dancing could not fail to be first in manifesting
this tendency. But even religious dancing swiftly exhibited the same
transformation; dancing, like priesthood, became a profession, and
dancers, like priests, formed a caste. This, for instance, took place in
old Hawaii. The hula dance was a religious dance; it required a special
education and an arduous training; moreover, it involved the observance
of important taboos and the exercise of sacred rites; by the very fact
of its high specialisation it came to be carried out by paid performers,
a professional caste. In India, again, the Devadasis, or sacred dancing
girls, are at once both religious and professional dancers. They are
married to gods, they are taught dancing by the Brahmins, they figure in
religious ceremonies, and their dances represent the life of the god
they are married to as well as the emotions of love they experience for
him. Yet, at the same time, they also give professional performances in
the houses of rich private persons who pay for them. It thus comes about
that to the foreigner the Devadasis scarcely seem very unlike the
Ramedjenis, the dancers of the street, who are of very different origin,
and mimic in their performances the play of merely human passions. The
Portuguese conquerors of India called both kinds of dancers
indiscriminately Balheideras (or dancers) which we have corrupted in
Bayaderes.[21]
In our modern world professional dancing as an art has become altogether
divorced from religion, and even, in any biological sense, from love; it
is scarcely even possible, so far as Western civilisation is concerned,
to trace back the tradition to either source. If we survey the
development of dancing as an art in Europe, it seems to me that we have
to recognise two streams of tradition which have sometimes merged, but
yet remain in their ideals and their tendencies essentially distinct. I
would call these traditions the Classical, which is much the more
ancient and fundamental, and may be said to be of Egyptian origin, and
the Romantic, which is of Italian origin, chiefly known to us as the
ballet. The first is, in its pure form, solo dancing—though it may be
danced in couples and many together—and is based on the rhythmic beauty
and expressiveness of the simple human personality when its energy is
concentrated in measured yet passionate movement. The second is
concerted dancing, mimetic and picturesque, wherein the individual is
subordinated to the wider and variegated rhythm of the group. It may be
easy to devise another classification, but this is simple and
instructive enough for our purpose.
There can scarcely be a doubt that Egypt has been for many thousands of
years, as indeed it still remains, a great dancing centre, the most
influential dancing-school the world has ever seen, radiating its
influence to south and east and north. We may perhaps even agree with
the historian of the dance who terms it “the mother-country of all
civilised dancing.” We are not entirely dependent on the ancient
wall-pictures of Egypt for our knowledge of Egyptian skill in the art.
Sacred mysteries, it is known, were danced in the temples, and queens
and princesses took part in the orchestras that accompanied them. It is
significant that the musical instruments still peculiarly associated
with the dance were originated or developed in Egypt; the guitar is an
Egyptian instrument and its name was a hieroglyph already used when the
Pyramids were being built; the cymbal, the tambourine, triangles,
castanets, in one form or another, were all familiar to the ancient
Egyptians, and with the Egyptian art of dancing they must have spread
all round the shores of the Mediterranean, the great focus of our
civilisation, at a very early date.[22] Even beyond the Mediterranean,
at Cadiz, dancing that was essentially Egyptian in character was
established, and Cadiz became the dancing-school of Spain. The Nile and
Cadiz were thus the two great centres of ancient dancing, and Martial
mentions them both together, for each supplied its dancers to Rome. This
dancing, alike whether Egyptian or Gaditanian, was the expression of the
individual dancer’s body and art; the garments played but a small part
in it, they were frequently transparent, and sometimes discarded
altogether. It was, and it remains, simple, personal, passionate
dancing, classic, therefore, in the same sense as, on the side of
literature, the poetry of Catullus is classic.[23]
Ancient Greek dancing was essentially classic dancing, as here
understood. On the Greek vases, as reproduced in Emmanuel’s attractive
book on Greek dancing and elsewhere, we find the same play of the arms,
the same sideward turn, the same extreme backward extension of the body,
which had long before been represented in Egyptian monuments. Many
supposedly modern movements in dancing were certainly already common
both to Egyptian and Greek dancing, as well as the clapping of hands to
keep time which is still an accompaniment of Spanish dancing. It seems
clear, however, that, on this general classic and Mediterranean basis,
Greek dancing had a development so refined and so special—though in
technical elaboration of steps, it seems likely, inferior to modern
dancing—that it exercised no influence outside Greece. Dancing became,
indeed, the most characteristic and the most generally cultivated of
Greek arts. Pindar, in a splendid Oxyrhynchine fragment, described
Hellas, in what seemed to him supreme praise, as “the land of lovely
dancing,” and Athenæus pointed out that he calls Apollo the Dancer. It
may well be that the Greek drama arose out of dance and song, and that
the dance throughout was an essential and plastic element in it. Even if
we reject the statement of Aristotle that tragedy arose out of the
Dionysian dithyramb, the alternative suppositions (such as Ridgeway’s
theory of dancing round the tombs of the dead) equally involve the same
elements. It has often been pointed out that poetry in Greece demanded a
practical knowledge of all that could be included under “dancing.”
Æschylus is said to have developed the technique of dancing and
Sophocles danced in his own dramas. In these developments, no doubt,
Greek dancing tended to overpass the fundamental limits of classic
dancing and foreshadowed the ballet.[24]
The real germ of the ballet, however, is to be found in Rome, where the
pantomime with its concerted and picturesque method of expressive action
was developed, and Italy is the home of Romantic dancing. The same
impulse which produced the pantomime produced, more than a thousand
years later in the same Italian region, the modern ballet. In both
cases, one is inclined to think, we may trace the influence of the same
Etruscan and Tuscan race which so long has had its seat there, a race
with a genius for expressive, dramatic, picturesque art. We see it on
the walls of Etruscan tombs and again in pictures of Botticelli and his
fellow Tuscans. The modern ballet, it is generally believed, had its
origin in the spectacular pageants at the marriage of Galeazzo Visconti,
Duke of Milan, in 1489. The fashion for such performances spread to the
other Italian courts, including Florence, and Catherine de’ Medici, when
she became Queen of France, brought the Italian ballet to Paris. Here it
speedily became fashionable. Kings and queens were its admirers and even
took part in it; great statesmen were its patrons. Before long, and
especially in the great age of Louis XIV, it became an established
institution, still an adjunct of opera but with a vital life and growth
of its own, maintained by distinguished musicians, artists, and dancers.
Romantic dancing, to a much greater extent than what I have called
Classic dancing, which depends so largely on simple personal qualities,
tends to be vitalised by transplantation and the absorption of new
influences, provided that the essential basis of technique and tradition
is preserved in the new development. Lulli in the seventeenth century
brought women into the ballet; Camargo discarded the complicated
costumes and shortened the skirt, so rendering possible not only her own
lively and vigorous method, but all the freedom and airy grace of later
dancing. It was Noverre who by his ideas worked out at Stuttgart, and
soon brought to Paris by Gaetan Vestris, made the ballet a new and
complete art form; this Swiss-French genius not only elaborated plot
revealed by gesture and dance alone, but, just as another and greater
Swiss-French genius about the same time brought sentiment and emotion
into the novel, he brought it into the ballet. In the French ballet of
the eighteenth century a very high degree of perfection seems thus to
have been reached, while in Italy, where the ballet had originated, it
decayed, and Milan, which had been its source, became the nursery of a
tradition of devitalised technique carried to the finest point of
delicate perfection. The influence of the French school was maintained
as a living force into the nineteenth century,—when it was renovated
afresh by the new spirit of the age and Taglioni became the most
ethereal embodiment of the spirit of the Romantic movement in a form
that was genuinely classic,—overspreading the world by the genius of a
few individual dancers. When they had gone, the ballet slowly and
steadily declined. As it declined as an art, so also it declined in
credit and in popularity; it became scarcely respectable even to admire
dancing. Thirty or forty years ago, those of us who still appreciated
dancing as an art—and how few they were!—had to seek for it painfully
and sometimes in strange surroundings. A recent historian of dancing, in
a book published so lately as 1906, declared that “the ballet is now a
thing of the past, and, with the modern change of ideas, a thing that is
never likely to be resuscitated.” That historian never mentioned Russian
ballet, yet his book was scarcely published before the Russian ballet
arrived to scatter ridicule over his rash prophecy by raising the ballet
to a pitch of perfection it can rarely have surpassed, as an expressive,
emotional, even passionate form of living art.
The Russian ballet was an offshoot from the French ballet and
illustrates once more the vivifying effect of transplantation on the art
of Romantic dancing. The Empress Anna introduced it in 1735 and
appointed a French ballet-master and a Neapolitan composer to carry it
on; it reached a high degree of technical perfection during the
following hundred years, on the traditional lines, and the principal
dancers were all imported from Italy. It was not until recent years that
this firm discipline and these ancient traditions were vitalised into an
art form of exquisite and vivid beauty by the influence of the soil in
which they had slowly taken root. This contact, when at last it was
effected, mainly by the genius of Fokine and the enterprise of
Diaghilev, involved a kind of revolution, for its outcome, while genuine
ballet, has yet all the effect of delicious novelty. The tradition by
itself was in Russia an exotic without real life, and had nothing to
give to the world; on the other hand, a Russian ballet apart from that
tradition, if we can conceive such a thing, would have been formless,
extravagant, bizarre, not subdued to any fine æsthetic ends. What we see
here, in the Russian ballet as we know it to-day, is a splendid and
arduous technical tradition, brought at last—by the combined skill of
designers, composers, and dancers—into real fusion with an environment
from which during more than a century it had been held apart; Russian
genius for music, Russian feeling for rhythm, Russian skill in the use
of bright colour, and, not least, the Russian orgiastic temperament, the
Russian spirit of tender poetic melancholy, and the general Slav passion
for folk-dancing, shown in other branches of the race also, Polish,
Bohemian, Bulgarian, and Servian. At almost the same time what I have
termed Classic dancing was independently revived in America by Isadora
Duncan, bringing back what seemed to be the free naturalism of the Greek
dance, and Ruth St. Denis, seeking to discover and revitalise the
secrets of the old Indian and Egyptian traditions. Whenever now we find
any restored art of theatrical dancing, as in the Swedish ballet, it has
been inspired more or less, by an eclectic blending of these two revived
forms, the Romantic from Russia, the Classic from America. The result
has been that our age sees one of the most splendid movements in the
whole history of the ballet.
V
Dancing as an art, we may be sure, cannot die out, but will always be
undergoing a rebirth. Not merely as an art, but also as a social custom,
it perpetually emerges afresh from the soul of the people. Less than a
century ago the polka thus arose, extemporised by the Bohemian servant
girl Anna Slezakova out of her own head for the joy of her own heart,
and only rendered a permanent form, apt for world-wide popularity, by
the accident that it was observed and noted down by an artist. Dancing
has for ever been in existence as a spontaneous custom, a social
discipline. Thus it is, finally, that dancing meets us, not only as
love, as religion, as art, but also as morals.
All human work, under natural conditions, is a kind of dance. In a large
and learned book, supported by an immense amount of evidence, Karl
Bücher has argued that work differs from the dance, not in kind, but
only in degree, since they are both essentially rhythmic. There is a
good reason why work should be rhythmic, for all great combined efforts,
the efforts by which alone great constructions such as those of
megalithic days could be carried out, must be harmonised. It has even
been argued that this necessity is the source of human speech, and we
have the so-called Yo-heave-ho theory of languages. In the memory of
those who have ever lived on a sailing ship—that loveliest of human
creations now disappearing from the world—there will always linger the
echo of the chanties which sailors sang as they hoisted the topsail yard
or wound the capstan or worked the pumps. That is the type of primitive
combined work, and it is indeed difficult to see how such work can be
effectively accomplished without such a device for regulating the
rhythmic energy of the muscles. The dance rhythm of work has thus acted
socialisingly in a parallel line with the dance rhythms of the arts, and
indeed in part as their inspirer. The Greeks, it has been too fancifully
suggested, by insight or by intuition understood this when they fabled
that Orpheus, whom they regarded as the earliest poet, was specially
concerned with moving stones and trees. Bücher has pointed out that even
poetic metre may be conceived as arising out of work; metre is the
rhythmic stamping of feet, as in the technique of verse it is still
metaphorically called; iambics and trochees, spondees and anapæsts and
dactyls, may still be heard among blacksmiths smiting the anvil or
navvies wielding their hammers in the streets. In so far as they arose
out of work, music and singing and dancing are naturally a single art. A
poet must always write to a tune, said Swinburne. Herein the ancient
ballad of Europe is a significant type. It is, as the name indicates, a
dance as much as a song, performed by a singer who sang the story and a
chorus who danced and shouted the apparently meaningless refrain; it is
absolutely the chanty of the sailors and is equally apt for the purposes
of concerted work.[25] Yet our most complicated musical forms are
evolved from similar dances. The symphony is but a development of a
dance suite, in the first place folk-dances, such as Bach and Handel
composed. Indeed a dance still lingers always at the heart of music and
even the heart of the composer. Mozart, who was himself an accomplished
dancer, used often to say, so his wife stated, that it was dancing, not
music, that he really cared for. Wagner believed that Beethoven’s
Seventh Symphony—to some of us the most fascinating of them and the most
purely musical—was an apotheosis of the dance, and, even if that belief
throws no light on the intention of Beethoven, it is at least a
revelation of Wagner’s own feeling for the dance.
It is, however, the dance itself, apart from the work and apart from the
other arts, which, in the opinion of many to-day, has had a decisive
influence in socialising, that is to say in moralising, the human
species. Work showed the necessity of harmonious rhythmic coöperation,
but the dance developed that rhythmic coöperation and imparted a
beneficent impetus to all human activities. It was Grosse, in his
“Beginnings of Art,” who first clearly set forth the high social
significance of the dance in the creation of human civilisation. The
participants in a dance, as all observers of savages have noted, exhibit
a wonderful unison; they are, as it were, fused into a single being
stirred by a single impulse. Social unification is thus accomplished.
Apart from war, this is the chief factor making for social solidarity in
primitive life; it was indeed the best training for war. It has been a
twofold influence; on the one hand, it aided unity of action and method
in evolution: on the other, it had the invaluable function—for man is
naturally a timid animal—of imparting courage; the universal drum, as
Louis Robinson remarks, has been an immense influence in human affairs.
Even among the Romans, with their highly developed military system,
dancing and war were definitely allied; the Salii constituted a college
of sacred military dancers; the dancing season was March, the war-god’s
month and the beginning of the war season, and all through that month
there were dances in triple measure before the temples and round the
altars, with songs so ancient that not even the priests could understand
them. We may trace a similar influence of dancing in all the coöperative
arts of life. All our most advanced civilisation, Grosse insisted, is
based on dancing. It is the dance that socialised man.
Thus, in the large sense, dancing has possessed peculiar value as a
method of national education. As civilisation grew self-conscious, this
was realised. “One may judge of a king,” according to ancient Chinese
maxim, “by the state of dancing during his reign.” So also among the
Greeks; it has been said that dancing and music lay at the foundation of
the whole political and military as well as religious organisation of
the Dorian states.
In the narrow sense, in individual education, the great importance of
dancing came to be realised, even at an early stage of human
development, and still more in the ancient civilisations. “A good
education,” Plato declared in the “Laws,” the final work of his old age,
“consists in knowing how to sing and dance well.” And in our own day one
of the keenest and most enlightened of educationists has lamented the
decay of dancing; the revival of dancing, Stanley Hall declares, is
imperatively needed to give poise to the nerves, schooling to the
emotions, strength to the will, and to harmonise the feelings and the
intellect with the body which supports them.
It can scarcely be said that these functions of dancing are yet
generally realised and embodied afresh in education. For, if it is true
that dancing engendered morality, it is also true that in the end, by
the irony of fate, morality, grown insolent, sought to crush its own
parent, and for a time succeeded only too well. Four centuries ago
dancing was attacked by that spirit, in England called Puritanism, which
was then spread over the greater part of Europe, just as active in
Bohemia as in England, and which has, indeed, been described as a
general onset of developing Urbanism against the old Ruralism. It made
no distinction between good and bad, nor paused to consider what would
come when dancing went. So it was that, as Remy de Gourmont remarks, the
drinking-shop conquered the dance, and alcohol replaced the violin.
But when we look at the function of dancing in life from a higher and
wider standpoint, this episode in its history ceases to occupy so large
a place. The conquest over dancing has never proved in the end a matter
for rejoicing, even to morality, while an art which has been so
intimately mixed with all the finest and deepest springs of life has
always asserted itself afresh. For dancing is the loftiest, the most
moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere
translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself. It is the only
art, as Rahel Varnhagen said, of which we ourselves are the stuff. Even
if we are not ourselves dancers, but merely the spectators of the dance,
we are still—according to that Lippsian doctrine of _Einfühlung_ or
“empathy” by Groos termed “the play of inner imitation”—which here, at
all events, we may accept as true—feeling ourselves in the dancer who is
manifesting and expressing the latent impulses of our own being.
It thus comes about that, beyond its manifold practical significance,
dancing has always been felt to possess also a symbolic significance.
Marcus Aurelius was accustomed to regard the art of life as like the
dancer’s art, though that Imperial Stoic could not resist adding that in
some respects it was more like the wrestler’s art. “I doubt not yet to
make a figure in the great Dance of Life that shall amuse the spectators
in the sky,” said, long after, Blake, in the same strenuous spirit. In
our own time, Nietzsche, from first to last, showed himself possessed by
the conception of the art of life as a dance, in which the dancer
achieves the rhythmic freedom and harmony of his soul beneath the shadow
of a hundred Damoclean swords. He said the same thing of his style, for
to him the style and the man were one: “My style,” he wrote to his
intimate friend Rohde, “is a dance.” “Every day I count wasted,” he said
again, “in which there has been no dancing.” The dance lies at the
beginning of art, and we find it also at the end. The first creators of
civilisation were making the dance, and the philosopher of a later age,
hovering over the dark abyss of insanity, with bleeding feet and muscles
strained to the breaking point, still seems to himself to be weaving the
maze of the dance.
Footnote 12:
It is even possible that, in earlier than human times, dancing and
architecture may have been the result of the same impulse. The nest of
birds is the chief early form of building, and Edmund Selous has
suggested (_Zoölogist_, December, 1901) that the nest may first have
arisen as an accidental result of the ecstatic sexual dance of birds.
Footnote 13:
“Not the epic song, but the dance,” Wundt says (_Völkerpsychologie_,
3d ed. 1911, Bd. 1, Teil 1, p. 277), “accompanied by a monotonous and
often meaningless song, constitutes everywhere the most primitive,
and, in spite of that primitiveness, the most highly developed art.
Whether as a ritual dance, or as a pure emotional expression of the
joy in rhythmic bodily movement, it rules the life of primitive men to
such a degree that all other forms of art are subordinate to it.”
Footnote 14:
See an interesting essay in _The Dance of Siva: Fourteen Indian
Essays_, by Ananda Coomaraswamy. New York, 1918.
Footnote 15:
This view was clearly put forward, long ago, by W. W. Newell at the
International Congress of Anthropology at Chicago in 1893. It has
become almost a commonplace since.
Footnote 16:
See a charming paper by Marcella Azra Hincks, “The Art of Dancing in
Japan,” _Fortnightly Review_, July, 1906. Pantomimic dancing, which
has played a highly important part in Japan, was introduced into
religion from China, it is said, in the earliest time, and was not
adapted to secular purposes until the sixteenth century.
Footnote 17:
I owe some of these facts to an interesting article by G. R. Mead,
“The Sacred Dance of Jesus,” _The Quest_, October, 1910.
Footnote 18:
The dance of the Seises in Seville Cathedral is evidently of great
antiquity, though it was so much a matter of course that we do not
hear of it until 1690, when the Archbishop of the day, in opposition
to the Chapter, wished to suppress it. A decree of the King was
finally obtained permitting it, provided it was performed only by men,
so that evidently, before that date, girls as well as boys took part
in it. Rev. John Morris, “Dancing in Churches,” _The Month_, December,
1892; also a valuable article on the Seises by J. B. Trend, in _Music
and Letters_, January, 1921.
Footnote 19:
See, for references, Havelock Ellis, _Studies in the Psychology of
Sex_, vol. III; _Analysis of the Sexual Impulse_, pp. 29, etc.; and
Westermarck, _History of Human Marriage_, vol. I, chap. XIII, p. 470.
Footnote 20:
At an earlier period, however, the dance of Salome was understood much
more freely and often more accurately. As Enlart has pointed out, on a
capital in the twelfth-century cloister of Moissac, Salome holds a
kind of castanets in her raised hands as she dances; on one of the
western portals of Rouen Cathedral, at the beginning of the sixteenth
century, she is dancing on her hands; while at Hemelverdeghem she is
really executing the _morisco_, the “_danse du ventre_.”
Footnote 21:
For an excellent account of dancing in India, now being degraded by
modern civilisation, see Otto Rothfeld, _Women of India_, chap. VII,
“The Dancing Girl,” 1922.
Footnote 22:
I may hazard the suggestion that the gypsies may possibly have
acquired their rather unaccountable name of Egyptians, not so much
because they had passed through Egypt, the reason which is generally
suggested,—for they must have passed through many countries,—but
because of their proficiency in dances of the recognised Egyptian
type.
Footnote 23:
It is interesting to observe that Egypt still retains, almost
unchanged through fifty centuries, its traditions, technique, and
skill in dancing, while, as in ancient Egyptian dancing, the garment
forms an almost or quite negligible element in the art. Loret remarks
that a charming Egyptian dancer of the Eighteenth Dynasty, whose
picture in her transparent gauze he reproduces, is an exact portrait
of a charming Almeh of to-day whom he has seen dancing in Thebes with
the same figure, the same dressing of the hair, the same jewels. I
hear from a physician, a gynæcologist now practising in Egypt, that a
dancing-girl can lie on her back, and with a full glass of water
standing on one side of her abdomen and an empty glass on the other,
can by the contraction of the muscles on the side supporting the full
glass, project the water from it, so as to fill the empty glass. This,
of course, is not strictly dancing, but it is part of the technique
which underlies classic dancing and it witnesses to the thoroughness
with which the technical side of Egyptian dancing is still cultivated.
Footnote 24:
“We must learn to regard the form of the Greek drama as a dance form,”
says G. Warre Cornish in an interesting article on “Greek Drama and
the Dance” (_Fortnightly Review_, February, 1913), “a musical
symphonic dance-vision, through which the history of Greece and the
soul of man are portrayed.”
Footnote 25:
It should perhaps be remarked that in recent times it has been denied
that the old ballads were built up on dance songs. Miss Pound, for
instance, in a book on the subject, argues that they were of
aristocratic and not communal origin, which may well be, though the
absence of the dance element does not seem to follow.