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 aesthetic 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.