Thus, in the large sense, dancing has possessed peculiar value as a method of national education. As civilisation grew self-conscious, this was realised. “One may judge of a king,” according to ancient Chinese maxim, “by the state of dancing during his reign.” So also among the Greeks; it has been said that dancing and music lay at the foundation of the whole political and military as well as religious organisation of the Dorian states.
In the narrow sense, in individual education, the great importance of dancing came to be realised, even at an early stage of human development, and still more in the ancient civilisations. “A good education,” Plato declared in the “Laws,” the final work of his old age, “consists in knowing how to sing and dance well.” And in our own day one of the keenest and most enlightened of educationists has lamented the decay of dancing; the revival of dancing, Stanley Hall declares, is imperatively needed to give poise to the nerves, schooling to the emotions, strength to the will, and to harmonise the feelings and the intellect with the body which supports them.
It can scarcely be said that these functions of dancing are yet generally realised and embodied afresh in education. For, if it is true that dancing engendered morality, it is also true that in the end, by the irony of fate, morality, grown insolent, sought to crush its own parent, and for a time succeeded only too well. Four centuries ago dancing was attacked by that spirit, in England called Puritanism, which was then spread over the greater part of Europe, just as active in Bohemia as in England, and which has, indeed, been described as a general onset of developing Urbanism against the old Ruralism. It made no distinction between good and bad, nor paused to consider what would come when dancing went. So it was that, as Remy de Gourmont remarks, the drinking-shop conquered the dance, and alcohol replaced the violin.
But when we look at the function of dancing in life from a higher and wider standpoint, this episode in its history ceases to occupy so large a place. The conquest over dancing has never proved in the end a matter for rejoicing, even to morality, while an art which has been so intimately mixed with all the finest and deepest springs of life has always asserted itself afresh. For dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself. It is the only art, as Rahel Varnhagen said, of which we ourselves are the stuff. Even if we are not ourselves dancers, but merely the spectators of the dance, we are still—according to that Lippsian doctrine of Einfühlung or “empathy” by Groos termed “the play of inner imitation”—which here, at all events, we may accept as true—feeling ourselves in the dancer who is manifesting and expressing the latent impulses of our own being.
It thus comes about that, beyond its manifold practical significance, dancing has always been felt to possess also a symbolic significance. Marcus Aurelius was accustomed to regard the art of life as like the dancer’s art, though that Imperial Stoic could not resist adding that in some respects it was more like the wrestler’s art. “I doubt not yet to make a figure in the great Dance of Life that shall amuse the spectators in the sky,” said, long after, Blake, in the same strenuous spirit. In our own time, Nietzsche, from first to last, showed himself possessed by the conception of the art of life as a dance, in which the dancer achieves the rhythmic freedom and harmony of his soul beneath the shadow of a hundred Damoclean swords. He said the same thing of his style, for to him the style and the man were one: “My style,” he wrote to his intimate friend Rohde, “is a dance.” “Every day I count wasted,” he said again, “in which there has been no dancing.” The dance lies at the beginning of art, and we find it also at the end. The first creators of civilisation were making the dance, and the philosopher of a later age, hovering over the dark abyss of insanity, with bleeding feet and muscles strained to the breaking point, still seems to himself to be weaving the maze of the dance.
CHAPTER III
THE ART OF THINKING
I
Herbert Spencer pointed out, in his early essay on “The Genesis of Science,” that science arose out of art, and that even yet the distinction is “purely conventional,” for “it is impossible to say when art ends and science begins.” Spencer was here using “art” in the fundamental sense according to which all practice is of the nature of art. Yet it is of interest to find a thinker now commonly regarded as so prosaic asserting a view which to most prosaic people seems fanciful. To the ordinary solid man, to any would-be apostle of common sense, science—and by “science” he usually means applied science—seems the exact opposite of the vagaries and virtuosities that the hard-headed homme moyen sensuel is accustomed to look upon as “art.”
Yet the distinction is modern. In classic times there was no such distinction. The “sciences”—reasonably, as we may now see, and not fancifully as was afterwards supposed—were “the arts of the mind.” In the Middle Ages the same liberal studies—grammar, logic, geometry, music, and the rest—could be spoken of either as “sciences” or as “arts,” and for Roger Bacon, who in the thirteenth century was so genuine a man of science, every branch of study or learning was a “scientia.” I am inclined to think that it was the Mathematical Renaissance of the seventeenth century which introduced the undue emphasis on the distinction between “science” and “art.” “All the sciences are so bound together,” wrote Descartes, the banner-bearer of that Renaissance, in his “Règles pour la Direction de l’Esprit,” “that it is much easier to learn them all at once than to learn one alone by detaching it from the others.” He added that we could not say the same of the arts. Yet we might perhaps say of arts and sciences that we can only understand them all together, and we may certainly say, as Descartes proceeded to say of the sciences alone, that they all emanate from the same focus, however diversely coloured by the media they pass through or the objects they encounter. At that moment, however, it was no doubt practically useful, however theoretically unsound, to overemphasise the distinction between “science,” with its new instrumental precision, and “art.”[[26]] At the same time the tradition of the old usage was not completely put aside, and a Master of “Arts” remained a master of such sciences as the directors of education succeeded in recognising until the middle of the nineteenth century. By that time the development of the sciences, and especially of the physical sciences, as “the discovery of truth,” led to a renewed emphasis on them which resulted in the practical restriction of the term “art” to what are ordinarily called the fine arts. More formally, science became the study of what were supposed to be demonstrable and systematically classifiable truths regarding the facts of the world; art was separated off as the play of human impulses in making things. Sir Sidney Colvin, in the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” after discussing the matter (which Mill had already discussed at length in his “Logic” and decided that the difference is that Science is in the Indicative Mood and Art in the Imperative Mood), concluded that science is “ordered knowledge of natural phenomena and of the relations between them,” or that “Science consists in knowing, Art consists in doing.” Men of science, like Sir E. Ray Lankester, accepted this conclusion. That was as far as it was possible to go in the nineteenth century.
But the years pass, and the progress of science itself, especially the sciences of the mind, has upset this distinction. The analysis of “knowing” showed that it was not such a merely passive and receptive method of recognising “truth” as scientists had innocently supposed. This is probably admitted now by the Realists among philosophers as well as by the Idealists. Dr. Charles Singer, perhaps our most learned historian of science, now defines science, no longer as a body of organized knowledge, but as “the process which makes knowledge,” as “knowledge in the making”; that is to say, “the growing edge between the unknown and the known.”[[27]] As soon as we thus regard it, as a making process, it becomes one with art. Even physical science is perpetually laying aside the “facts” which it thought it knew, and learning to replace them by other “facts” which it comes to know as more satisfactory in presenting an intelligible view of the world. The analysis of “knowing” shows that this is not only a legitimate but an inevitable process. Such a process is active and creative. It clearly partakes at least as much of the nature of “doing” as of “knowing.” It involves qualities which on another plane, sometimes indeed on the same plane, are essentially those involved in doing. The craftsman who moulds conceptions with his mind cannot be put in a fundamentally different class from the craftsman who moulds conceptions with his hand, any more than the poet can be put in a totally different class from the painter. It is no longer possible to deny that science is of the nature of art.