[20]. At an earlier period, however, the dance of Salome was understood much more freely and often more accurately. As Enlart has pointed out, on a capital in the twelfth-century cloister of Moissac, Salome holds a kind of castanets in her raised hands as she dances; on one of the western portals of Rouen Cathedral, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, she is dancing on her hands; while at Hemelverdeghem she is really executing the morisco, the “danse du ventre.”
[21]. For an excellent account of dancing in India, now being degraded by modern civilisation, see Otto Rothfeld, Women of India, chap. VII, “The Dancing Girl,” 1922.
[22]. I may hazard the suggestion that the gypsies may possibly have acquired their rather unaccountable name of Egyptians, not so much because they had passed through Egypt, the reason which is generally suggested,—for they must have passed through many countries,—but because of their proficiency in dances of the recognised Egyptian type.
[23]. It is interesting to observe that Egypt still retains, almost unchanged through fifty centuries, its traditions, technique, and skill in dancing, while, as in ancient Egyptian dancing, the garment forms an almost or quite negligible element in the art. Loret remarks that a charming Egyptian dancer of the Eighteenth Dynasty, whose picture in her transparent gauze he reproduces, is an exact portrait of a charming Almeh of to-day whom he has seen dancing in Thebes with the same figure, the same dressing of the hair, the same jewels. I hear from a physician, a gynæcologist now practising in Egypt, that a dancing-girl can lie on her back, and with a full glass of water standing on one side of her abdomen and an empty glass on the other, can by the contraction of the muscles on the side supporting the full glass, project the water from it, so as to fill the empty glass. This, of course, is not strictly dancing, but it is part of the technique which underlies classic dancing and it witnesses to the thoroughness with which the technical side of Egyptian dancing is still cultivated.
[24]. “We must learn to regard the form of the Greek drama as a dance form,” says G. Warre Cornish in an interesting article on “Greek Drama and the Dance” (Fortnightly Review, February, 1913), “a musical symphonic dance-vision, through which the history of Greece and the soul of man are portrayed.”
[25]. It should perhaps be remarked that in recent times it has been denied that the old ballads were built up on dance songs. Miss Pound, for instance, in a book on the subject, argues that they were of aristocratic and not communal origin, which may well be, though the absence of the dance element does not seem to follow.
[26]. It would not appear that the pioneers of the Mathematical Renaissance of the twentieth century are inclined to imitate Descartes in this matter. Einstein would certainly not, and many apostles of physical science to-day (see, e.g., Professor Smithells, From a Modern University: Some Aims and Aspirations of Science) insist on the æsthetic, imaginative, and other “art” qualities of science.
[27]. C. Singer. “What is Science?” British Medical Journal, 25th June, 1921. Singer refuses the name of “science” in the strict sense to fields of completely organised knowledge which have ceased growing, like human anatomy (though, of course, the anatomist still remains a man of science by working outwards into adjoining related fields), preferring to term any such field of completed knowledge a discipline. This seems convenient and I should like to regard it as sound. It is not, however, compatible with the old doctrine of Mill and Colvin and Ray Lankester, for it excludes from the field of science exactly what they regarded as most typically science, and some one might possibly ask whether in other departments, like Hellenic sculpture or Sung pottery, a completed art ceases to be art.
[28]. It has often been pointed out that the imaginative application of science—artistic ideas like that of the steam locomotive, the flying-machine heavier than air, the telegraph, the telephone, and many others—were even at the moment of their being achieved, elaborately shown to be “impossible” by men who had been too hastily hoisted up to positions of “scientific” eminence.
[29]. J. B. Baillie, Studies in Human Nature (1921), p. 221. This point has become familiar ever since F. A. Lange published his almost epoch-marking work, The History of Materialism, which has made so deep an impress on many modern thinkers from Nietzsche to Vaihinger; it is indeed a book which can never be forgotten (I speak from experience) by any one who read it in youth.