like a dog. On the
other hand, there is all the difference in the world between putting a
dog on a chain and encouraging it to go mad and bite half the parish.
There is nearly as wide a distance separating the courtly dances of
the eighteenth century from the cake-walk, and the apache dance from
the Irish reel. Priests, I know, in whom the gift of preaching has
turned sour, have been as severe on innocent as on furious dances. But
this is merely an exaggeration of the prevailing sense of mankind that
sex is a wild animal and most difficult to tame into a fireside pet.
It is upon the civilisation of this animal, none the less, though not
upon the butchering of it, that the decencies of the world depend. And
this is exercise for a hero, for the animal in question has a
desperate tendency to revert to type. One noticed how its eye bulged
with the memory of African forests when the cake-walk affronted the
sun a few years ago. The cake-walk, I admit, seemed a right and
rapturous thing enough when it was danced by those in whose veins was
the recent blood of Africa. But when young gentlemen began to
introduce it as a figure in the lancers in suburban back-parlours one
resented it, not merely as an emasculated parody, but as an act of
dishonest innocence. But everywhere it has been the tendency of
dancing in recent years to become more noisily sexual. I am not
thinking of the dancing in undress which for a time captured the
music-halls. That is almost the least sexual dancing we have had. The
dancing of Isidora Duncan was of as good report as a painting by old
Sir Joshua. We may pass over the Russian ballet, too, because of the
art which often raised it to beauty, though it is interesting to
speculate what St Bernard would have thought of Nijinsky. But, as for
rag-time, it is a silly madness, a business for Maenads of both sexes;
and all those gesticulations of the human frame known as bunny-hugs,
turkey-trots, and the rest of it are condemned by their very names as
tolerable only in the menagerie. On the other hand, because the bunny
in man and the turkey in woman have revived themselves with such
impudence, are we to get out our guns against all dancing? Far from
it. One is not going to sacrifice the flowery grace of Genee, or
Pavlova with her genius of the butterflies, because of the multitude
of fools. All we can do is to insist upon the recognition of the fact
that dancing may be good or bad, as eggs are good or bad, and t