dance is a bodily movement which aims at no practical purpose and
is thus not bound by outer necessities. It is simply self-expression:
and this gives to the dancing impulse the liberty which easily becomes
licentiousness. Two mental conditions help in that direction; the mere
movement as such produces increased excitement, and the excitement
reenforces the movement, and so the dance has in itself the tendency
to become quicker and wilder and more and more unrestrained. When gay
Vienna began its waltzing craze in the last century, it waltzed to the
charming melodies of Lanner in a rhythm which did not demand more than
about one hundred and sixty movements in a minute; but soon came
Johann Strauss the father, and the average waltzing rhythm was two
hundred and thirty a minute, and finally the king of the waltz, Johann
Strauss the younger, and Vienna danced at the rhythm of three hundred
movements. But another mental effect is still more significant than
the impulse to increase rapidity. The uniformity of the movements, and
especially of the revolving movement, produces a state of half
dizziness and half numbness with ecstatic elements. We know the almost
hypnotic state of the whirling dervishes and the raptures in the
savage war dances; all this in milder form is involved in every
passionate dance. But nothing is more characteristic of such
half-hypnotic states than that the individual loses control of his
will. He behaves like a drunken man who becomes the slave of his
excitement and of every suggestion from without. No doubt many seek
the dancing excitement as a kind of substitute for the alcoholic
exaltation.

The social injury which must be feared if the social community
indulges in such habits of undisciplined, passionate expression needs
no explaining. The mind is a unit: it cannot be without self-control
in one department and under the desirable self-discipline of the will
in another. A period in which the mad rush of dancing stirs social
life must be unfavourable to the development of thorough training and
earnest endeavour. The fate of imperial Rome ought to be the eternal
warning to imperial Manhattan. Italy, like America, took its art and
science from over the sea, but gave to them abundant wealth. Instead
of true art, it cultivated the virtuosi, and in Rome, which paid three
thousand dancers, the dance was its glory until it began ingloriously
to sink.

Not without inner relation to the inebriety, and yet