Fountains dance down to the river,
Rivers to the ocean
Summer leaflets dance and quiver
To the breeze's motion
Nothing in the world is single--
All things by a simple rule
Nods and steps and graces mingle
As at dancing school
See the shadows on the mountain
Pirouette with one another
See the leaf upon the fountain
Dances with its leaflet brother
See the moonlight on the earth
Flecking forest gleam and glance!
What are all these dancings worth
If I may not dance?
_--After Shelley_
Dance? Why not? The dance is natural, it is innocent, wholesome,
enjoyable. It has the sanction of religion, philosophy, science. It is
approved by the sacred writings of all ages and nations--of Judaism,
Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, of Zoroaster and Confucius. Not an altar,
from Jupiter to Jesus, around which the votaries have not danced with
religious zeal and indubitable profit to mind and body. Fire worshipers
of Persia and Peru danced about the visible sign and manifestation to
their deity. Dervishes dance in frenzy, and the Shakers jump up and come
down hard through excess of the Spirit. All the gods have danced with
all the goddesses--round dances, too. The lively divinities created by
the Greeks in their own image danced divinely, as became them. Old Thor
stormed and thundered down the icy halls of the Scandinavian mythology
to the music of runic rhymes, and the souls of slain heroes in Valhalla
take to their toes in celebration of their valorous deeds done in the
body upon the bodies of their enemies. Angels dance before the Great
White Throne to harps attuned by angel hands, and the Master of the
Revels--who arranges the music of the spheres--looks approvingly on.
Dancing is of divine institution.
The elves and fairies "dance delicate measures" in the light of the moon
and stars. The troll dances his gruesome jig on lonely hills: the gnome
executes his little pigeon wing in the obscure subterrene by the glimmer
of a diamond. Nature's untaught children dance in wood and glade,
stimulated of leg by the sunshine with which they are soaken top
full--the same quickening emanation that inspires the growing tree and
upheaves the hill. And, if I err not, there is sound Scripture for the
belief that these self same eminences have capacity to skip for joy. The
peasant dances--a trifle clumsily--at harvest feast when the grain is
garnered. The stars in heaven dance visibly, the firefly dances in
emulation of the stars. The sunshine dances on the waters. The humming
bird and the bee dance about the flowers which dance to the breeze. The
innocent lamb, type of the White Christ, dances on the green, and the
matronly cow perpetrates an occasional stiff enormity when she fancies
herself unobserved. All the sportive rollickings of all the animals,
from the agile fawn to the unwieldly behemoth are dances taught them by
nature.
I am not here making an argument for dancing, I only assert its
goodness, confessing its abuse. We do not argue the wholesomeness of
sunshine and cold water, we assert it, admitting that sunstroke is
mischievous and that copious potations of freezing water will founder a
superheated horse, and urge the hot blood to the head of an imprudent
man similarly prepared, killing him, as is right. We do not build
syllogisms to prove that grains and fruits of the earth are of God's
best bounty to man; we allow that bad whisky may--with difficulty--be
distilled from rye to spoil the toper's nose, and that hydrocyanic acid
can be got out of the bloomy peach. It were folly to prove that Science
and Invention are our very good friends, yet the sapper who has had the
misfortune to be blown to rags by the mine he was preparing for his
enemy will not deny that gunpowder has aptitudes of mischief; and from
the point of view of a nigger ordered upon the safety-valve of a racing
steamboat, the vapor of water is a thing accurst. Shall we condemn music
because the lute makes "lascivious pleasing?" Or poetry because some
amorous bard tells in warm rhyme the story of the passions, and
Swinburne has had the goodness to make vice offensive with his hymns in
its praise? Or sculpture because from the guiltless marble may be
wrought a drunken Silenus or a lechering satyr?--painting because the
untamed fancies of a painter sometimes break tether and run riot on his
canvas? Because the orator may provoke the wild passions of the mob,
shall there be no more public speaking?--no further acting because the
actor may be pleased to saw the air, or the actress display her ultimate
inch of leg? Shall we upset the pulpit because poor dear Mr. Tilton had
a prettier wife than poor, dear Mr. Beecher? The bench had its Jeffrey,
yet it is necessary that we have the deliveries of judgment between
ourselves and the litigious. The medical profession has nursed poisoners
enough to have baned all the rats of christendom; but the resolute
patient must still have his prescription--if he die for it. Shall we
disband our armies because in the hand of an ambitious madman a
field-marshal's baton may brain a helpless State?--our navies because in
ships pirates have "sailed the seas over?" Let us not commit the
vulgarity of condemning the dance because of its possibilities of
perversion by the vicious and the profligate. Let us not utter us in hot
bosh and baking nonsense, but cleave to reason and the sweet sense of
things.
Dancing never made a good girl bad, nor turned a wholesome young man to
evil ways. "Opportunity!" simpers the tedious virgin past the
wall-flower of her youth. "Opportunity!" cackles the _blasé_ beau who
has outlasted his legs and gone deaconing in a church.
Opportunity, indeed! There is opportunity in church and school-room, in
social intercourse. There is opportunity in libraries, art-galleries,
picnics, street-cars, Bible-classes and at fairs and matinées.
Opportunity--rare, delicious opportunity, not innocently to be
ignored--in moonlight rambles by still streams. Opportunity, such as it
is, behind the old gentleman's turned back, and beneath the good
mother's spectacled nose. You shall sooner draw out leviathan with a
hook, or bind Arcturus and his sons, than baffle the upthrust of
Opportunity's many heads. Opportunity is a veritable Hydra, Argus and
Briareus rolled into one. He has a hundred heads to plan his poachings,
a hundred eyes to spy the land, a hundred hands to set his snares and
springes. In the country where young girls are habitually unattended in
the street; where the function of chaperon is commonly, and, it should
be added, intelligently performed by some capable young male; where the
young women receive evening calls from young men concerning whose
presence in the parlor mamma in the nursery and papa at the
"office"--poor, overworked papa!--give themselves precious little
trouble,--this prate of ball-room opportunity is singularly and
engagingly idiotic. The worthy people who hold such language may justly
boast themselves superior to reason and impregnable to light. The only
effective reply to these creatures would be a cuffing, the well meant
objections of another class merit the refutation of distinct
characterization. It is the old talk of devotees about sin, of topers
concerning water, temperance men of gin, and albeit it is neither wise
nor witty, it is becoming in us at whom they rail to deal mercifully
with them. In some otherwise estimable souls one of these harmless brain
cracks may be a right lovable trait of character.
Issues of a social import as great as a raid against dancing have been
raised ere now. Will the coming man smoke? Will the coming man drink
wine? These tremendous and imperative problems only recently agitated
some of the "thoughtful minds" in our midst. By degrees they lost their
preeminence, they were seen to be in process of solution without social
cataclysm, they have, in a manner been referred for disposal to the
coming man himself, that is to say, they have been dropped, and are
to-day as dead as Julius Cæsar. The present hour has, in its turn,
produced its own awful problem: Will the coming woman waltz?
As a question of mere fact the answer is patent: She will. Dancing will
be good for her; she will like it; so she is going to waltz. But the
question may rather be put--to borrow phraseology current among her
critics: Had she oughter?--from a moral point of view, now. From a moral
point, then, let us seek from analogy some light on the question of
what, from its actual, practical bearings, may be dignified by the name
Conundrum.
Ought a man not to smoke?--from a moral point of view. The economical
view-point, the view-point of convenience, and all the rest of them, are
not now in question; the simple question is: Is it immoral to smoke? And
again--still from the moral point of view: Is it immoral to drink wine?
Is it immoral to play at cards?--to visit theaters? (In Boston you go to
some
harmless "Museum,"
Where folks who like plays may religiously see 'em.)
Finally, then--and always from the same elevated view-point: Is it
immoral to waltz?
The suggestions here started will not be further pursued in this place.
It is quite pertinent now to note that we do smoke because we like it;
and do drink wine because we like it; and do waltz because we like it,
and have the added consciousness that it is a duty. I am sorry for a
fellow-creature--male--who knows not the comfort of a cigar; sorry and
concerned for him who is innocent of the knowledge of good and evil that
lurk respectively in Chambertin and cheap "claret." Nor is my compassion
altogether free from a sense of superiority to the object of
it--superiority untainted, howbeit, by truculence. I perceive that life
has been bestowed upon him for purposes inscrutable to me, though dimly
hinting its own justification as a warning or awful example. So, too, of
the men and women--"beings erect, and walking upon two [uneducated]
legs"--whose unsophisticated toes have never, inspired by the rosy,
threaded the labyrinth of the mazy ere courting the kindly offices of
the balmy. It is only human to grieve for them, poor things!
But if their throbbing bunions, encased in clumsy high-lows, be obtruded
to trip us in our dance, shall we not stamp on them? Yea, verily, while
we have a heel to crunch with and a leg to grind it home.