[10]. E. Hovelaque, La Chine (Paris, 1920), p. 47.
[11]. This point has not escaped the more acute students of Chinese civilisation. Thus Dr. John Steele, in his edition of the I-Li, remarks that “ceremonial was far from being a series of observances, empty and unprofitable, such as it degenerated into in later time. It was meant to inculcate that habit of self-control and ordered action which was the expression of a mind fully instructed in the inner meaning of things, and sensitive to every impression.” Still more clearly, Reginald Farrer wrote, in On the Eaves of the World, that “the philosophic calm that the Chinese deliberately cultivate is their necessary armour to protect the excessive susceptibility to emotion. The Chinese would be for ever the victims of their nerves had they not for four thousand years pursued reason and self-control with self-protective enthusiasm.”
[12]. It is even possible that, in earlier than human times, dancing and architecture may have been the result of the same impulse. The nest of birds is the chief early form of building, and Edmund Selous has suggested (Zoölogist, December, 1901) that the nest may first have arisen as an accidental result of the ecstatic sexual dance of birds.
[13]. “Not the epic song, but the dance,” Wundt says (Völkerpsychologie, 3d ed. 1911, Bd. 1, Teil 1, p. 277), “accompanied by a monotonous and often meaningless song, constitutes everywhere the most primitive, and, in spite of that primitiveness, the most highly developed art. Whether as a ritual dance, or as a pure emotional expression of the joy in rhythmic bodily movement, it rules the life of primitive men to such a degree that all other forms of art are subordinate to it.”
[14]. See an interesting essay in The Dance of Siva: Fourteen Indian Essays, by Ananda Coomaraswamy. New York, 1918.
[15]. This view was clearly put forward, long ago, by W. W. Newell at the International Congress of Anthropology at Chicago in 1893. It has become almost a commonplace since.
[16]. See a charming paper by Marcella Azra Hincks, “The Art of Dancing in Japan,” Fortnightly Review, July, 1906. Pantomimic dancing, which has played a highly important part in Japan, was introduced into religion from China, it is said, in the earliest time, and was not adapted to secular purposes until the sixteenth century.
[17]. I owe some of these facts to an interesting article by G. R. Mead, “The Sacred Dance of Jesus,” The Quest, October, 1910.
[18]. The dance of the Seises in Seville Cathedral is evidently of great antiquity, though it was so much a matter of course that we do not hear of it until 1690, when the Archbishop of the day, in opposition to the Chapter, wished to suppress it. A decree of the King was finally obtained permitting it, provided it was performed only by men, so that evidently, before that date, girls as well as boys took part in it. Rev. John Morris, “Dancing in Churches,” The Month, December, 1892; also a valuable article on the Seises by J. B. Trend, in Music and Letters, January, 1921.
[19]. See, for references, Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. III; Analysis of the Sexual Impulse, pp. 29, etc.; and Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, vol. I, chap. XIII, p. 470.