virgin of the Nine." Many people will remember the
letter which Byron prefaced to _The Waltz_ over the signature of
Horace Hornem, supposed to be a country gentleman from the Midlands.
Describing his sensations on first seeing his wife waltzing, Mr Hornem
says:--

Judge of my surprise ... to see poor Mrs Hornem with her arms
half round the loins of a huge hussar-looking gentleman I
never set eyes on before; and his, to say truth, rather more
than half round her waist, turning round, and round, and
round, to a d----d see-saw, up-and-down sort of tune, that
reminded me of the "Black joke."

Cynics explain Byron's attitude to dancing as a matter of envy, since
he himself was too lame to waltz. At the same time, I fancy that an
anthropologist from Mars, if he visited the earth, would take the same
view of the drama of the waltz as Byron did. I do not mean to say that
the waltz cannot be danced in a sublime innocence. It can, and often
is. But the point is that sex is the arch-musician of it, and whether
you approve of waltzing or disapprove of it will depend upon whether,
like the preachers, you regard sex as Aholah and Aholibah, or, like
the poets, as April and the song of the stars. It is worth remembering
in this connection that a great preacher like Huxley took much the
same view of poetry that Byron took of dancing. Most of it, he said,
seemed to him to be little more than sensual caterwauling. Tolstoi, if
I am not mistaken, interpreted _Romeo and Juliet_ in the same spirit.
This kind of analysis, whether it is just or foolish, always shocks
the crowd, which can never admit the existence of the senses without
blushing for them. Confirmed in its sentimentalism--and therefore
given to "harping on the sensual string"--it swears that it finds the
Russian ballet more edifying than church, and would have no objection
to seeing the Merry Widow waltz introduced into a mothers' meeting.
There is nothing in which we are such hypocrites as our pleasures.
That is why some of us like the preachers. Even if they are grossly
inhuman in wanting to take our amusements away from us, they at least
insist that we shall submit them to a realistic analysis. In this they
are excellent servants of the scientific spirit.

What, then, is a reasonable attitude to adopt towards sex in dancing?
Obviously we cannot abolish sex, even if we wished to do so. And if we
try to chain it up, it will merely become crabbed