The Hive

THE NEW DANCING

I have found true North Americans. A woman of twenty-seven, a mother (with a mysterious man somewhere) and a girl-child with the calm and power of Joan come again.... I needed a change, was tired of my house and my voice—close to the end of all human interest that morning as I set out for a walk up the edge of the Lake. On and on walking, until I came to the little girl on the shore. She was making a frowning man in clay. She asked me if I were the Crusader, but answered herself while I was hoping to fit the dimension of that fascinating title. She had decided that I wasn't.

North Americans—I think of them so again and again—something great and calm and deep and beautiful, something arrived, at last, from all the fusion—en rapport with nature, children of the light, living and abiding constantly in the essences of sunlight—with the humour and certainty of Mother Earth about their ways—the cleanliness of earth and the sweetness of golden light in their house and mind....

Mind you, I had walked forth as one would wade out to sea in the path of the moon—actually yearning for a better land than this.... There on the shore, after hours, was the child—her eyes turned to mine, putting me into the enchantment of the wise—stilling hate and ennui. We had words together, the great awe of life stealing over me again after many days. Her hand stretched forth to take me to her mother (this day called the Lonely Queen, for they live in an enchanted story-book). A climb to the top of the bluff and into the most fragrant and godly lane, a low house in the distance in the shelter of beeches—solitary and isolate beeches sheltering a human house, built for sunshine long ago. Many pages would not tell of the lane and the house, the lawn and the hives.... I want to touch the core of this inimitable pair that took me in—poor but dining upon the perfect foods, so poor that they make and dye the lovely things they wear—a kind of holy handiwork everywhere—perfume of summer in the house and in the heart of it a deepdelved peace where broods a sort of lustrous dream.

The child is but seven—that is, her body and brain are but seven. Her talk with her mother is the talk of a pair of immortals.... Wheat bread and butter for supper, peaches of the mother's canning—a last jar, she said, with comb-honey for sweetening and golden cream on top. It was a repast for the mountain-top where demi-gods stray—all miracles about us, Apollo just putting his steeds away, Vulcan smoking sombre and wrathful in the distance.

Can you see me sitting down to supper in a true handmade house, at the head of a God-made portal to the lake (the lane is nothing less) in a grove of white beeches—lingering gold on the vines at the window, the murmur of hives in the air, and these two mystic presences subduing their radiance to sit with me?... There's a little can of tea that is opened the last thing after the table is spread; the brass kettle begins to sing, and the mother hovers over—a kind of sacred rite, all this—then the dancing water is poured over the leaves and the room softly fills with the air of far archipelagoes. Roses of Ireland and France are in the room. Tearoses—some daughter of poetry must have named them.

... Still I am telling you about things—not about them. I thought I should write you what they are, yet the longer I sit here, the more testaments of their adorable lives appear, but their spirits draw farther apart.... There is never a drone of talk where they are ... sentences and silences, the myriad voices of evening stealing into the hushes between.... I must get down to earth again. I must begin with the grass and the shore and the magic which began when the child turned up to me from the frowning clay....

I should like to report them moment by moment—to make you see, but there is a fixed purpose in this chapter. Sitting apart from them that first night, I contemplated the North America of the future—a kind of dream that nestles within a dream—the Great Companions, superb men and women, the vastness of leisure, the structural verity of joy, a new dimension in the human mind, a new colour and redolence in the light that plays upon the teeming world. Not for years had I been so near to the dithyrambic.... I went out into the dusk and smoked a machine-made cigarette—not for worlds would I desecrate that room. I returned drowsy—opened the casement windows wide to the stars. As I put out the lights, the sense came to me that the little room was as fragrant and sweet as a new-woven basket.

... I awoke to low singing. The room was grey and seemed to lift with me, and the walls to widen. It was as if I had caught the old house just waking from a sleep of its own. The phenomenon of the singing lived in my mind. I don't know the song—a rapid bird-like improvisation possibly—two voices hushed, but a vibration of clear liquid joy. I went to the window. The earth was still asleep—a pearl-grey world of dripping trees in a kind of listening ecstasy—two beings below on the lawn—a lawn that was grey with dew. It was like looking down upon a cloud from the Matterhorn. These two beings—one in a veil of rose, one in a veil of gold—were dancing upon the cloud, dancing bare-armed and limbed, their voices interpreting some soft harmony that seemed to come from the break of day upon the sphere.

It was not for me—yet I could not draw back from the vines. I brought only thankfulness to it—sharing the joy in the dim of a room, in the dim of a mere man's heart. Yet all I could contain came to me from the mother and child. They knelt in the grass, the song more hushed, bringing up to their faces and shoulders hands that dripped with the holy distillations of the night—a wash in dew and day, their song a prayer, their dance a sacred rite.... I should have thought it the gift of dreams, but there was a starry track of deep green across the lawn, where their bare feet had broken the sheen of dew.

... I dwelt with souls—that was the truth. I sat at breakfast with souls, dew-washed, speaking to each other and to me from that long road of life which we lose for a squalid by-way when we put on the garments of the world.... They talked again about what the birds hear in the morning. They said that what the birds sing is their interpretation of the great song of daybreak—that the earth does not meet her Lord Sun in silence.... And then I knew that the song I heard was their interpretation—think of it—a child of seven eating buttered toast.

And I knew that power is a song—that the singing of the kettle is the song of steam, that the inimitable t'sing of an electric burner when the current first charges through, is the awakening song of steel and carbon to their native capacity and direction. The same is in the heart of a boy when he finds his task—the same is in the order of a master and in the making of his poem.... These two hear it—the song of Mother Earth as the floods of light pour out and over her from the East.

Here was a mother who knew how to play. She had launched somehow into a sphere of her own making—doubtless having found life of the world insupportable. I had thought much about bringing up children, about unfolding the child, and here it was being worked out with brimming joy.... It was all too natural to be called education. It was nature—it was liberation, rather—a new and higher meaning of naturalness.

I was almost afraid to speak. The life here seemed so delicate and delightful that comments would bruise the fine form of it.... They played together—that was the point. Play is a liberation of force—great play is ecstasy. In it one rises to the stillness of production, wherein one bathes in mystery and potency and all commonness is cleansed away. Those who reach this stillness are the great beings of the world.

When we finally open ourselves to any subject, we find intimations of it everywhere. I found presently that all the voices of the New Age had designated the magic of the dance. It seems almost dull to declare that I do not refer now to the dance as it is taught and used and exploited as a social accomplishment, but that in which the personality is subdued and quiescent, quite as absolutely as it is in all great moments of production. One must give oneself. Music carries the sensitive soul into its own mystic region. A rhythm within answers to the external rhythm—the two meet and mate—the fusion is bewildering beauty.

As in all creativeness, the first law is spontaneity.

The great dancers of the future will hear their own music—possibly give voice to it as they give their body to the rhythm. There shall be no exact interpretation of song or sonata—at least, not until absolute genius interprets the exact figure of each tone-set. This is impossible in a world of mutation. Accordingly, one who establishes a series of movements to accompany a certain harmony, misses the meaning of the divine improvisations which is the essential beauty of the New Age dances. One should dance as freely as one called upon to speak. And one will neither speak nor dance greatly by prearrangement or following any arbitrary form.

The very tone of the voice is different and deeper when one is caught in the spirit of spontaneity. The prime object of the new education, which includes dancing, is to set the soul free. Music is one of the master-lures to call forth the sleeping giant.

One night a stranger[11] came to Stonestudy. She said she was called by the way we were doing things, and that she hoped she had something to bring to us.... The next morning at daybreak, down on the shore, I saw stars and circles of young women and girls folding and bending together in exquisite tones of colour and song. Her gift was the new dancing. Over night she had captured the young people, bringing them a new joy in the world. For two or three months she remained with us and has since established classes east and west—life given to the message of beauty. With us her expression and magic has endured.

There is no way more swift to merge in the universal, than by the response to music through movement. Not dancing, which is a response to time in music more than to rhythm, but the actual blotting out of self, a spiritual exaltation which many religionists have sought and few attained.

The means is very simple; nothing strange or peculiar. It is the dropping of the human will so that the music may flow through. One does not move to the music then; one is moved by it. The objective mind ceases to operate and through the larger consciousness absolute Beauty streams. The response to the music may be totally different with several pupils, but where the dancer is really lost to the objective world, the movement is always true and satisfying to those who watch. This is easy for those who are close to Nature and God, but it is fraught with difficulties for those who are over-mental or who have been terribly repressed. In many ways the will is man's highest asset and it requires a supreme effort of the will itself to drop the objective consciousness.

There is a technique of the dance to be sure, but it is designed only to free the body so that it may be a purer channel for the music, and to facilitate the effacement of self. Physical strength, agility, beauty as mere beauty, are never sought, but only the revelation of eternal harmony.

There is rhythm throughout Nature. Man often moves less gracefully than the higher mammals. He has opposed his will to the law of the universe, for centuries abusing his ancient right, but through music he may realise again the harmony of all. The dancer is radiant with the splendour of the infinite and there comes an ecstasy into the spirit, of those who witness the transfiguration—the hush that one feels only before the highest art and purest religion.

It is reasonable to suppose that those who dance must bring back with them into every-day living something of the beauty of those exalted moments when they touch "the white radiance of eternity." Here is natural education, natural religion—a practical mysticism, the merging of self in the Infinite with a consequent fitness for daily living.

So the dancing of the New Age is but a different form of contemplation and production, by which the Soul becomes the creature—for the period achieving that blessedness which is above time and space, and dwelling in that dimension, where goodness, beauty and truth are one.

The new dancing is "in the air." Like vers libre and all New Age realisations and creations, its first essential is freedom. This is the meaning of the word Democracy—equality, liberation. The very spirit of all that is new demands freedom. The deeper one penetrates, the lovelier the folds of this marvellous conception. There is no title for friend or comrade, for child or lover—comparable to the assumption of equality.

Equality—its power sings. It dances. When the last is said and done, we all want the same thing, if we really knew,—goodness, beauty and truth, one at the top. There is joy in the fine new conception appearing now in all the arts—freedom first and last, even to lawlessness at first, but that will right itself more swiftly than smugness, which has had its age-long and hideous trial.... To me, the house in the beeches slowly unfolds it all—the mystery of the cosmic peasantry of the future—that fastidious poverty, that delicate plenty which is perfection. These two, mother and child, mean the new dancing to me, and the New Race beside. I have not dared to go again, because I build incorrigible dreams, and this one especially is dear.... Yet I often recall their loveliness together.

The mother's beauty had turned to loveliness. It had more than the mystic chiselling of sorrow—it had passion, it had humour.... I feel the need of telling you from time to time that I am not rhapsodising, the need of reminding you, how weathered and drab my mind was, when I went up the shore that day. She made me think of grapes and olives and laurel-boughs; she seemed the sister to the child. All about the two were subtle, pervasive, ever-changing tests of the power of the soul. The country people around did not think her extraordinary, much less beautiful. How much is revealed in that? Loveliness requires certain vision, an interpretative spirit, and thus it is protected from the vulgar gaze. These good country people carry upon their faces and hands and persons picture-writing of secret sins and dreamless stolidity, and yet they are scandalised by this woman. You cannot imagine how sweetly it came to me that she had utterly lost the sense that she was outcast.

A lamp burns at her door every evening. I don't suppose it is seen three times a month—yet the lamp burns.... There's a big wooden Cross in the room where they sleep—the child led me to it—a mat of grass before it, kusa grass, who knows?... A great Cross, a much-worshipped Cross, with spike-holes, the broken edges worn smooth.... The child whispered to me that she had been brought (when she was too small to know) and placed on the mat at the foot of the Cross for her mother to find; also that she came when the white clover bloomed.

... It is only this way, bit by bit, that I can make the picture. I have never before been so disturbed by the sense of inadequacy. The light about their heads is all diffused like morning upon a cloud.

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