The nearly oldest authentic human records now decipherable are the
cuneiform inscriptions from the archives of Assurbanipal, translated by
the late George Smith, of the British Museum, and in them we find
abundant reference to the dance, but must content ourselves with a
single one.
The kings of Arabia who against my agreement, sinned, whom in the
midst of battle alive I had captured in hand, to make that
Bitrichiti. Heavy burdens I caused them to carry and I caused them
to take . . . building its brick work . . . with dancing and music;
. . . with joy and shouting from the foundation to its roof, I built
. . .
A Mesopotamian king, who had the genius to conceive the dazzling idea of
communicating with the readers of this distant generation by taking
impressions of carpet tacks on cubes of unbaked clay is surely entitled
to a certain veneration, and when he associates dancing with such
commendable actions as making porters of his royal captives it is not
becoming in us meaner mortals to set up a contrary opinion. Indeed
nothing can be more certain than that the art of dancing was not
regarded by the ancients generally in the light of a frivolous
accomplishment, nor its practice a thing wherewith to shoo away a
tedious hour. In their minds it evidently had a certain dignity and
elevation, so much so that they associated it with their ideas
(tolerably correct ones, on the whole) of art, harmony, beauty, truth
and religion. With them, dancing bore a relation to walking and the
ordinary movements of the limbs similar to that which poetry bears to
prose, and as our own Emerson--himself something of an ancient--defines
poetry as the piety of the intellect, so Homer would doubtless have
defined dancing as the devotion of the body if he had had the
unspeakable advantage of a training in the Emerson school of epigram.
Such a view of it is natural to the unsophisticated pagan mind, and to
all minds of clean, wholesome, and simple understanding. It is only the
intellect that has been subjected to the strain of overwrought religious
enthusiasm of the more sombre sort that can discern a lurking devil in
the dance, or anything but an exhilarating and altogether delightful
outward manifestation of an inner sense of harmony, joy and well being.
Under the stress of morbid feeling, or the overstrain of religious
excitement, coarsely organized natures see or create something gross and
prurient in things intrinsically sweet and pure, and it happens that
when the dance has fallen to their shaping and direction, as in
religious rites, then it has received its most objectionable development
and perversion. But the grossness of dances devised by the secular mind
for purposes of æsthetic pleasure is all in the censorious critic, who
deserves the same kind of rebuke administered by Dr. Johnson to Boswell,
who asked the Doctor if he considered a certain nude statue immodest.
"No, sir, but your question is."
It would be an unfortunate thing, indeed, if the "prurient prudes" of
the meeting houses were permitted to make the laws by which society
should be governed. The same unhappy psychological condition which makes
the dance an unclean thing in their jaundiced eyes renders it impossible
for them to enjoy art or literature when the subject is natural, the
treatment free and joyous. The ingenuity that can discover an indelicate
provocative in the waltz will have no difficulty in snouting out all
manner of uncleanliness in Shakspeare, Chaucer, Boccacio--nay, even in
the New Testament. It would detect an unpleasant suggestiveness in the
Medicean Venus, and two in the Dancing Faun. To all such the ordinary
functions of life are impure, the natural man and woman things to blush
at, all the economies of nature full of shocking improprieties.
In the Primitive Church dancing was a religious rite, no less than it
was under the older dispensation among the Jews. On the eve of sacred
festivals, the young people were accustomed to assemble, sometimes
before the church door, sometimes in the choir or nave of the church,
and dance and sing hymns in honor of the saint whose festival it was.
Easter Sunday, especially, was so celebrated; and rituals of a
comparatively modern date contain the order in which it is appointed
that the dances are to be performed, and the words of the hymns to the
music of which the youthful devotees flung up their pious heels But I
digress.
In Plato's time the Greeks held that dancing awakened and preserved in
the soul--as I do not doubt that it does--the sentiment of harmony and
proportion; and in accordance with this idea Simonides, with a happy
knack at epigram, defined dances as "poems in dumb show."
In his _Republic_ Plato classifies the Grecian dances as domestic,
designed for relaxation and amusement, military, to promote strength and
activity in battle; and religious, to accompany the sacred songs at
pious festivals. To the last class belongs the dance which Theseus is
said to have instituted on his return from Crete, after having abated
the Minotaur nuisance. At the head of a noble band of youth, this public
spirited reformer of abuses himself executed his dance. Theseus as a
dancing-master does not much fire the imagination, it is true, but the
incident has its value and purpose in this dissertation. Theseus called
his dance _Geranos_, or the "Crane," because its figures resembled those
described by that fowl aflight; and Plutarch fancied he discovered in it
a meaning which one does not so readily discover in Plutarch's
explanation.
It is certain that, in the time of Anacreon[A], the Greeks loved the
dance. That poet, with frequent repetition, felicitates himself that age
has not deprived him of his skill in it. In Ode LIII, he declares that
in the dance he renews his youth
When I behold the festive train
Of dancing youth, I'm young again
And let me, while the wild and young
Trip the mazy dance along
Fling my heap of years away
And be as wild, as young as they
--_Moore_
[Footnote A: It may be noted here that the popular conception of this
poet as a frivolous sensualist is unsustained by evidence and repudiated
by all having knowledge of the matter. Although love and wine were his
constant themes, there is good ground for the belief that he wrote of
them with greater _abandon_ than he indulged in them--a not uncommon
practice of the poet-folk, by the way, and one to which those who sing
of deeds of arms are perhaps especially addicted. The great age which
Anacreon attained points to a temperate life; and he more than once
denounces intoxication with as great zeal as a modern reformer who has
eschewed the flagon for the trencher. According to Anacreon, drunkenness
is "the vice of barbarians;" though, for the matter of that, it is
difficult to say what achievable vice is not. In Ode LXII, he sings:
Fill me, boy, as deep a draught
As e'er was filled, as e'er was quaffed;
But let the water amply flow
To cool the grape's intemperate glow.
* * * * *
For though the bowl's the grave of sadness
Ne'er let it be the birth of madness
No! banish from our board to night
The revelries of rude delight
To Scythians leave these wild excesses
Ours be the joy that soothes and blesses!
And while the temperate bowl we wreathe
In concert let our voices breathe
Beguiling every hour along
With harmony of soul and song
Maximus of Tyre speaking of Polycrates the Tyrant (tyrant, be it
remembered, meant only usurper, not oppressor) considered the happiness
of that potentate secure because he had a powerful navy and such a
friend as Anacreon--the word navy naturally suggesting cold water, and
cold water, Anacreon.]
And so in Ode LIX, which seems to be a vintage hymn.
When he whose verging years decline
As deep into the vale as mine
When he inhales the vintage cup
His feet new winged from earth spring up
And as he dances the fresh air
Plays whispering through his silvery hair
--_Id_
In Ode XLVII, he boasts that age has not impaired his relish for, nor
his power of indulgence in, the feast and dance.
Tis true my fading years decline
Yet I can quaff the brimming wine
As deep as any stripling fair
Whose cheeks the flush of morning wear,
And if amidst the wanton crew
I'm called to wind the dance's clew
Then shalt thou see this vigorous hand
Not faltering on the Bacchant's wand
For though my fading years decay--
Though manhood's prime hath passed away,
Like old Silenus sire divine
With blushes borrowed from the wine
I'll wanton mid the dancing tram
And live my follies o'er again
--_Id_
Cornelius Nepos, I think, mentions among the admirable qualities of the
great Epaminondas that he had an extraordinary talent for music and
dancing. Epaminondas accomplishing his jig must be accepted as a
pleasing and instructive figure in the history of the dance.
Lucian says that a dancer must have some skill as an actor, and some
acquaintance with mythology--the reason being that the dances at the
festivals of the gods partook of the character of pantomime, and
represented the most picturesque events and passages in the popular
religion. Religious knowledge is happily no longer regarded as a
necessary qualification for the dance, and, in point of fact no thing is
commonly more foreign to the minds of those who excel in it.
It is related of Aristides the Just that he danced at an entertainment
given by Dionysius the Tyrant, and Plato, who was also a guest, probably
confronted him in the set.
The "dance of the wine press," described by Longinus, was originally
modest and proper, but seems to have become in the process of time--and
probably by the stealthy participation of disguised prudes--a kind of
_can can_.
In the high noon of human civilization--in the time of Pericles at
Athens--dancing seems to have been regarded as a civilizing and refining
amusement in which the gravest dignitaries and most renowned worthies
joined with indubitable alacrity, if problematic advantage. Socrates
himself--at an advanced age, too--was persuaded by the virtuous Aspasia
to cut his caper with the rest of them.
Horace (Ode IX, Book I,) exhorts the youth not to despise the dance:
Nec dulcis amores
Sperne puer, neque tu choreas.
Which may be freely translated thus:
Boy, in Love's game don't miss a trick,
Nor be in the dance a walking stick.
In Ode IV, Book I, he says:
Jam Cytherea choros ducit, inminente Luna
Junctæque Nymphis Gratiæ decentes
Alterno terram quatiunt pede, etc.
At moonrise, Venus and her joyous band
Of Nymphs and Graces leg it o'er the land
In Ode XXXVI, Book I (supposed to have been written when Numida returned
from the war in Spain, with Augustus, and referring to which an old
commentator says "We may judge with how much tenderness Horace loved his
friends, when he celebrates their return with sacrifices, songs, and
dances") Horace writes
Cressa ne careat pulchra dies nota
Neu promtæ modus amphoræ
Neu morem in Salium sit requies pedum etc.
Let not the day forego its mark
Nor lack the wine jug's honest bark
Like Salian priests we'll toss our toes--
Choose partners for the dance--here goes!
It has been hastily inferred that, in the time of Cicero, dancing was
not held in good repute among the Romans, but I prefer to consider his
ungracious dictum (in _De Amicitia_, I think,) "_Nemo sobrius
saltat_"--no sober man dances--as merely the spiteful and envious fling
of a man who could not himself dance, and am disposed to congratulate
the golden youth of the Eternal City on the absence of the solemn
consequential and egotistic orator from their festivals and merry
makings whence his shining talents would have been so many several
justifications for his forcible extrusion. No doubt his eminence
procured him many invitations to balls of the period, and some of these
he probably felt constrained to accept, but it is highly unlikely that
he was often solicited to dance, he probably wiled away the tedious
hours of inaction by instructing the fibrous virgins and gouty bucks in
the principles of jurisprudence. Cicero as a wall flower is an
interesting object, and, turning to another branch of our subject, in
this picturesque attitude we leave him. Left talking.