The story of the dance is the history of human civilization, of its progress and regress. To be sure, as the human mind remains ultimately the same, mankind has often unintentionally returned again to the old forms. The pirouette, which the artists of the ballet invented a hundred years ago, and which was applauded as the wonder of its time, as we now know, was danced by old Egyptians. Not seldom the same outer forms referred to very different mental motives. We learn that many people danced half naked as an expression of humility. Who would claim that the lack of costume in the ballet of to-day is a symbol of humility, too? Moreover, the right perspective can hardly be gained as long as we take the narrow view and think only of those few forms of dance which we saw yesterday in the ballroom and the day before yesterday on the stage of the theatre. The dance has not meant to mankind only social pleasure and artistic spectacle, it originally accompanied the social life and surrounded the individual in every important function.

Dancing certainly began as a religious cult. It was the form in which every increase of emotion expressed itself, grief as well as joy, awe as much as enthusiasm. The primitive peoples danced and in many places still dance when the seasons change or when the fields are to be cultivated, when they start on the hunt or go to war, when health is asked for the sick, and when the gods are to be called upon. The Iroquois Indians have thirty-two chief types of dances, and even among civilized nations, for instance the Bohemians, a hundred and thirty-six dances may be discriminated. Moreover, at first, the dance is really one with the song; music and dancing were only slowly torn asunder. And if we look over the whole world of dance, it almost appears as if what is left to us is after all merely a poor remnant. Yet in these very days much seems to suggest that the dance is to come to its own again. At least, he who observes the life along Broadway may indeed suspect that dancing is now to be intertwined again with every business of life, and surely with every meal of life. No longer can any hostelry in New York be found without dancing, and wider still than the dance sweeps the discussion about it. The dance seems once more the centre of public interest; it is cultivated from luncheon to breakfast; it is debated in every newspaper and every pulpit.

But is not all this merely a new demonstration that the story of the dance is the story of civilization? Can we deny that this recent craze which, like a dancing mania, has whirled over the country, is a significant expression of deep cultural changes which have come to America? Only ten years ago such a dancing fever would have been impossible. People danced, but they did not take it seriously. It was set off from life and not allowed to penetrate it. It had still essentially the rÔle which belonged to it in a puritanic, hardworking society. But the last decade has rapidly swept away that New England temper which was so averse to the sensuous enjoyment of life, and which long kept an invisible control over the spirit of the whole nation. Symptoms of the change abound: how it came about is another question. Certainly the increase and the wide distribution of wealth with its comforts and luxuries were responsible, as well as the practical completion of the pioneer days of the people, the rich blossoming of science and art, and above all the tremendous influx of warm-blooded, sensual peoples who came in millions from southern and eastern Europe, and who altered the tendencies of the cool-blooded, Teutonic races in the land. They have changed the old American Sunday, they have revolutionized the inner life, they have brought the operas to every large city, and the kinometograph to every village, and have at last played the music to a nation-wide dance. Yet the problem which faces every one is not how this dancing craze arose, but rather where it may lead, how far it is healthy and how far unsound, how far we ought to yield to it or further it, and how far we ought to resist. To answer this question, it is not enough to watch the outside spectacle, but we must inquire into the mental motives and mental consequences. Exactly this is our true problem.

Let us first examine the psychological debit account. No one can doubt that true dangers are near wherever the dancing habit is prominent. The 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 reËnforces 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 distinctly different, is the erotic character of the dance. Lovemaking is the most central, underlying motive of all the mimic dances all over the globe. Among many primitive peoples the dance is a real pantomimic presentation of the whole story from the first tender awaking of a sweet desire through the warmer and warmer courtship to the raptures of sensual delight. Civilized society has more or less covered the naked passion, but from the graceful play of the minuet to the graceless movements of the turkey trot the sensual, not to say the sexual, element can easily be recognized by the sociologist. Here again cause and effect move in a circle. Love excitement expresses itself in dance, and the dance heightens the love excitement. This erotic appeal to the senses is the chief reason why the church has generally taken a hostile attitude. For a long while the dance was denounced as irreligious and sinful on account of Salome's blasphemous dancing. Certainly the rigid guardians of morality always look askance on the contact of the sexes in the ballroom. To be sure, the standards are relative. What appeared to one period the climax of immorality may be considered quite natural and harmless in another. In earlier centuries it was quite usual in the best society for the young man to invite the girl to a dance by a kiss, and in some times it was the polite thing for the gentleman after the dance to sit in the lap of the girl. The shifting of opinion comes to most striking expression, if we compare our present day acquiescence to the waltz with the moral indignation of our great-grandmothers. No accusers of the tango to-day can find more heated words against this Argentine importation than the conservatives of a hundred years ago chose in their hatred of the waltz. Good society had confined its dancing to those forms of contact in which only the hands touched each other, leaving to the peasants the crude, rustic forms, and now suddenly every mother has to see her daughter clasped about the waist by any strange man. Even the dancing masters cried out against the intruder and claimed that it was illogical for a man to be allowed to press a girl to his bosom at the sound of music, while no one would dare to do it between the dances.

Thus the immorality of our most recent dances may be hardly worse than the dancing surprises of earlier fashions, but who will doubt that these sensual elements of the new social gayeties are to-day especially dangerous? The whole American atmosphere is filled with erotic thought to a degree which has been unknown throughout the history of the republic. The newspapers are filled with intra- and extra-matrimonial scandals, the playhouses commercialize the sexual instinct in lurid melodramas, sex problems are the centre of public discussion, all the old barriers which the traditional policy of silence had erected are being broken down, the whole nation is gossiping about erotics. In such inflammable surroundings where the sparks of the dance are recklessly kindled, the danger is imminent. If a nation focuses its attention on sensuality, its virile energy must naturally suffer. There is a well-known antagonism between sex and sport. Perhaps the very best which may be said about sport is that it keeps boyhood away from the swamps of sexuality. The dance keeps boyhood away from the martial field of athletics.

The dance has still another psychological effect which must not be disregarded from a social point of view. It awakes to an unusual degree the impulse to imitation. The seeing of rhythmic movements starts similar motor impulses in the mind of the onlooker. It is well known that from the eleventh to the sixteenth century Europe suffered from dancing epidemics. They started from pathological cases of St. Vitus' dance and released in the excitable crowds cramplike impulses to imitative movements. But we hear the same story of instinctive imitations on occasions of less tragic character. It is reported that in the eighteenth century papal Rome was indignant over the passionate Spanish fandango. It was decided solemnly to put this wild dance under the ban. The lights of the church were assembled for the formal judgment, when it was proposed to call a pair of Spanish dancers in order that every one of the priests might form his own idea of the unholy dance. But history tells that the effect was an unexpected one. After a short time of fandango demonstration the high clerics began involuntarily to imitate the movements, and the more passionately the Spaniards indulged in their native whirl, the more the whole court was transformed into one great dancing party. Even the Italian tarantella probably began as a disease with nervous dancing movements, and then spread over the land through mere imitation which led to an ecstatic turning around and around. Whoever studies the adventures of American dancing during the last season from New York to San Francisco must be impressed by this contagious character of our dancing habits. But this means that the movement carries in itself the energy to spread farther and farther, and to fill the daily life with increased longing for the ragtime. We are already accustomed to the dance at the afternoon tea; how long will it take before we are threatened by the dance at the breakfast coffee?

We have spoken of three mental effects: the license, the eroticism, and the imitativeness which are stirred up by the dancing movements. But in the perspective of history we ought not to overlook another significant trait: the overemphasis on dancing has usually characterized a period of political reaction, of indifference to public life, of social stagnation and carelessness. When the volcanoes were rumbling, the masses were always dancing. At all times when tyrants wanted to divert the attention of the crowd, they gave the dances to their people. A nation which dances cannot think, but lives from hour to hour. The less political maturity, the more happiness does a national community show in its dancing pleasures. The Spaniards and the Polish, the Hungarians and the Bohemians, have always been the great dancers—the Gypsies dance. There is no fear that the New Yorkers will suddenly stop reading their newspapers and voting at the primaries; they will not become Spaniards. But an element of this psychological effect of carelessness and recklessness and stagnation may influence them after all, and may shade the papers which they read, and even the primaries at which they do vote.

Yet how one-sided would it be, if we gave attention only to the dangers which the dance may bring to a nation's mind. The credit account of the social dance is certainly not insignificant, and perhaps momentous just for the Americans of to-day. The dance is a wonderful discharge of stirred up energy; its rhythmic form relieves the tension of the motor apparatus and produces a feeling of personal comfort. The power to do this is a valuable asset, when so much emotional poverty is around us. The dance makes life smooth in the midst of hardship and drudgery. For the dancer the cup is always overflowing, even though it may be small. There is an element of relaxation and of joyfulness in the rhythm of the music and the twinkling of the feet, which comes as a blessing into the dulness and monotony of life. The overworked factory girl does not seek rest for her muscles after the day of labour, but craves to go on contrasting them in the rhythmic movements of the dance. So it has been at all times. The hardest worked part of the community has usually been the most devoted to the gayety of popular dances. The refined society has in many periods of civilization declined to indulge in dancing, because it was too widely spread among the lowest working classes in towns and in the country. The dance through thousands of years has been the bearer of harmless happiness: who would refuse a welcome to such a benefactor? And with the joyfulness comes the sociability. The dance brings people near together. It is unfair to claim that the dance is aristocratic, because it presupposes leisure and luxury. On the contrary, throughout the history of civilization the dance has been above all, democratic, and has reËnforced the feeling of good fellowship, of community, of intimacy, of unity. Like the popular games which melt all social groups together by a common joyful interest, and like humour which breaks all social barriers, the love for dancing removes mutual distrust and harmonizes the masses.

This social effect has manifold relation to another aspect of the dance, which is psychologically perhaps the deepest: the dance is an art, and as such, of deep Æsthetic influence on the whole mental life. Whenever the joy in dancing comes into the foreground, this art is developed to high artificiality. No step and no movement is left to the chance inspiration of the moment; everything is prescribed, and to learn the dances not seldom means an almost scientific study. In the great dancing periods of the rococo time the mastery of the exact rules appeared one of the most difficult parts of higher education, and as a real test of the truly cultivated gentleman and gentlewoman; scholarly books analysed every detail of the necessary forms, and the society dances in the castles of the eighteenth century were more elaborate than the best prepared ballets on the stage of to-day. But the popular dances of the really dancing nations are no less bound by traditions, and we know that even the dances of the savages are moving on in strictly inherited forms. Far from the license of haphazard movements, the self-expression of the dancer is thus regulated and bound by rules which are taken by him as prescriptions of beauty. To dance thus means a steady adjustment to artistic requirements; it is an Æsthetic education by which the whole system of human impulses becomes harmonized and unified. The chance movements are blended into a beautiful whole, and this reflects on the entire inner setting. Educators have for a long time been aware that calisthenics, with its subtly tuned movements of the body, develops refinement in the interplay of mental life. The personality who understands how to live in gentle, beautiful motions through that trains his mind to beauty. In Europe, for instance in Hellerau near Dresden, they have recently begun to establish schools for young men and women in which the main, higher education is to be moulded by the Æsthetics of bodily expression, and the culture of the symbolic dance.

This Æsthetic character of the dance, however, leads still further. It is not only the training in beautiful expression; it is the development of an attitude which is detached from practical effects and from the practical life of outer success. The dance is an action by which nothing is produced and nothing in the surroundings changed. It is an oasis in the desert of our materialistic behaviour. From morning till night we are striving to do things, to manufacture something in the mill of the nation: but he who dances is satisfied in expressing himself. He becomes detached from the cares of the hour, he acquires a new habit of disinterested attitude toward life. Who can underestimate the value of such detachment in our American life? The Americans have always been eagerly at work, but have never quite learned to enjoy themselves and to take the Æsthetic attitude which creates the wonders of beauty and the true harmonies of life. To forget drudgery and to sink into the rhythms of the dance may bring to millions that inner completeness which is possible only when practical and Æsthetic attitude are blending in a personality. The one means restless change; the other means repose, perfection, eternity. This hardworking, pioneer nation needs the noisy teachings of efficiency and scientific management less than the melodious teaching of song and dance and beauty. In short, the dance may bring both treacherous perils and wonderful gifts to our community. It depends upon us whether we reËnforce the dangerous elements of the dance, or the beneficial ones. It will depend on ourselves whether the dance will debase the nation, as it has so often done in the history of civilization, or whether it will help to lead it to new heights of beauty and harmony, as it has not seldom done before. Our social conscience must be wide awake; it will not be a blind fate which will decide when the door of the future opens whether we shall meet the lady or the tiger.