THE POETRY OF MOTION, 1909
The "Borston"
He: "Very interesting, these Morris-dances. Have you ever seen any before?"
She: "No. I don't even know who Morris was."
Tango-mania
The mention of Anna—the famous Pavlova—was at any rate topical, for the cult of the Russian Ballet was now at its height, and in his Almanack for 1913 Punch exhibited the political and other public celebrities of the hour engaged in appropriate evolutions à la Russe. The "Bunny-hug" was very properly gibbeted in a scathing cartoon, and in his hints to social climbers Punch suggests various styles of vulgar and inane dancing as a passport to notoriety. With laudable fairness he admits, in parallel illustrations, that the Tango of fact was a much less lurid thing than the Tango as painted by the fancy of Puritans; but the revival of afternoon dances and the fashion of "Tango teas" met with no approval, and in the cartoon "Exit Tango," early in 1914, Punch, rather prematurely perhaps, congratulated the "Spirit of Dancing" on the passing of "the tyranny of the dullest of nightmares."
In one of the last of the references to the dancing craze in this period—February, 1914, to be precise—Punch notes, as one of the reasons why the Tango was already démodé, the fact that matrons had taken to it with the utmost fury, after a preliminary stage of acute disapproval. In the words of one of the younger generation:—
Now we may watch our mothers, smiling and flushed and gay,
Doing it, doing it, doing it—tangoing night and day.
Stamping a Texas Tommy, wreathing a Grapevine Swirl,