about to take the steps
that follow that our ankle feels the drag of old habit. For even those
of us who are richest in good resolutions are the creatures of habit
just as the baldly virtuous are. The only difference is that we are
the slaves of old habits, while they are the masters of new ones....
On the whole, then, we cannot do better as the New Year approaches
than resolve to go out once more in quest of the white flower which
has already been allowed to fade too long, where Tennyson placed it,
in the late Prince Consort's buttonhole.

III

THE SIN OF DANCING

It is a pleasure to see a modern clergyman expressing his horror of
the dancing of the moment as Canon Newbolt did in St Paul's. One had
begun to fear lately that the clergy were trying to run a race of
tolerance with the dramatic critics and the nuts. On the whole I
prefer clergymen in the denouncing mood. They are there to remind us
that the soul does not pour out its riches in rag-time songs, that
Peter is not to be bribed with trinkets, and that the gates of Heaven
will not--so far as is known--open to the bark of a toy-dog. They are
there, in a sentence, as the shaven critics of a saltatory world. The
history of civilisation might be interpreted with some reason as a
prolonged conflict between the preachers and the dancers. The preacher
and the dancer may both be necessary to us, like east and west in a
map; but we feel that, like east and west, they should keep their
distance from each other in censorious irreconcilement. I know, of
course, that the modern anthropologist is inclined to insist upon the
kinship between dancing and religion. We are told that the Church was
born not, it may be, under a dancing star, but at any rate under a
dancing savage. The theory is that man originally expressed his
deepest emotions about food, love, and war in dances. In the course of
time the leaping groups felt the need of a leader, and gradually the
leader of the dance evolved into a hero, or representative of the
group soul, and from that he afterwards swelled into a god. This, we
are asked to believe, is the lineage of Zeus. The theory strikes me as
being too simple to be true. It is like an attempt to spell a long
word with a single letter. At the same time, it gains colour from the
fact that the heads of the Church have continually shown a tendency to
dancing since the days of King David. We have it on good authority
that in the Latin Church the Bisho