The movement is at present still in its trial stage. If it becomes indeed a national revival of dancing it must result in a development of the dance. It cannot remain content with merely perpetuating an ancient formula. Every form of art which has the seeds of life in it must needs change and grow. The Morris, as has been said, was originally a men’s dance, and already its performance by girls is changing something of its character. The introduction of the feminine element necessarily robs it of its sturdiness and at the same time lends it an added gaiety and grace. But the change will probably go deeper than this. The old Morris was the expression of a mode of life that has passed away; out of it must be developed some newer variation more fitted to express the spirit of a broader and fuller life. In a suggestive passage, Mr Holbrook Jackson indicates the direction of the development: “The old English folk-dances are limited in range; they are a combination of acrobatic leaps and hoydenish frisks. They are, indeed, the expression of a non-reflective and rather boorish peasantry. To-day conditions have changed. The peasantry are no more, and we have become introspective and reflective. The bumpkin and his kind have been replaced by the clerk, with a new set of needs and different nuances of desire; so that we have to consider not so much the question of reviving the dances of the past, because, as such, these can never be anything but curiosities, antiques, but how to pick up the lapsed tradition of the dance at the point in history when it expressed the emotions of the people, and to give that tradition a chance of new life in our own day; not a chance of imitating the past in form, but a chance of imitating the past in spirit, a chance of doing for to-day what it once did for yesterday.”
The Morris cannot properly be called a dance of art; it is a dance of the people. It can never be a substitute for the dance of the theatre. But the popular revival of the old dances is important, not only in providing a new means of emotional expression, but in arousing a new interest in the art of the dance itself. Dancing is a sensitive plant which can only thrive in a congenial atmosphere. In some degree all the arts appear to live by the breath of popular favour. Their activity is stimulated, their expression perfected, by interest, criticism and understanding. The art of dancing has always risen to its highest level when it has been most esteemed; decadence has always succeeded to neglect. “Dancing is an art, let the public remember,” a lover and critic of the dance has said, “which depends on their support for its very existence. The poet, the painter, the sculptor can work for posterity; but the dancer’s art is fugitive, not permanent. If the contemporaries of any dancer fail through ignorance, or dulness, or bigotry, to appreciate her, no one else can.”
If England becomes once more a nation of dancers, bigotry and dulness and ignorance will never again be obstacles to the flowering of the art of the Dance.
CHAPTER XV
THE FUTURE OF THE DANCE
“MEN are so unimaginative! My husband has all sorts of appliances for getting strong quick. He gets up in the morning and pulls at straps, twirls objects and kicks furiously at nothing. Such antics you never saw. Doubtless they have some underlying advantage or he wouldn’t perform them, for he is a practical man. But they are so ridiculous. I always think of Don Quixote fighting the windmill when I see him threatening the air and striking absurd attitudes so seriously.”
It is an American woman who speaks, and she speaks as the mouthpiece of a new idea—the attempt to recreate the lost rhythms of the human body by the means of dance movements. Not the least important of the results of the modern renaissance of dancing has been the rediscovery of the grace of bodily movement by the modern man and woman. The sight of the beauty of human motion on the stage has naturally suggested the idea of the introduction of this beauty into daily life. The dancing of Isadora Duncan, of Maud Allan, of Pavlova and Mordkin, has in fact awakened the ancestral voices of the blood; the spectator can no longer remain passive, but demands to be allowed to take his or her part in the cosmic measure. The speaker continues: “Now, when I get up and feel headachy or as if my body was stuffed with sawdust, I too have my exercise. But, oh, the difference! I start the ‘Marche Militaire’ on my patient phonograph, and the strains are so inspiring that I go through my paces so buoyantly that my husband stops his seesawing to enjoy my dance. Now the difference lies in this, that while I am unlimbering my muscles and starting my blood gaily through my veins, my heart and my mind are also uplifted with the rhythm of music and pose.”