She then describes how when the patient phonograph is giving forth Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song” she accompanies the music with a story related in motion and gesture. “I first point to an imaginary tree, run lightly to it, stretch up and pull down a bough, take it in my arms, then gaily throw it aside. This I do three times in different corners of the room. Suddenly I am attracted by the upspringing grass and trip lightly over it lest I crush it. Then I see flowers on the grass, sit down and gather an imaginary bouquet, then toss it over my head. This I do three times, and perhaps you may think it easy to sit down with one leg thrust forward and then break your pose gracefully in getting up. My mood changes. I hear a bird singing and bend forward to listen with one hand to my ear and my eye following its flight. Then I hear a bird in another direction and follow it. Three times these movements are repeated. The pose is now entirely different, the arms outspread as if in flight. I am by this time fairly enchanted with the spring and give myself up to the abandon of the moment, until my mood is exhausted and I calm down with music into final repose.” At the conclusion of these exercises she remarks: “At this moment I feel as if every part of my body was enjoying an independent existence, but would, if I wished it, take a subordinate position for the common good. That is exercise as it should be.”
The husband, we may suppose, is now thoroughly out of humour with his get-strong-quick methods. But where is his place in this new system by which the flexibility of the body and the exhilaration of the mind are sought in the movements of the dance? The dance, in any other sense than that of a ball-room accomplishment, is generally regarded as unsuited to the masculine character. How often has not one heard the remark that it is unpleasing to see a man dancer. And a man himself would as a rule rather be caught in the act of stealing than of dancing alone or with his fellows. The prejudice is new. It is perhaps characteristic of an artificial society for whose small conventions the liberal code of nature is too broad. In all simple and virile societies men have
MIKAIL MORDKIN
IN The Cymbal Dance
Photograph: Campbell Gray
been dancers—unless some cramping moral code imposed its arbitrary prohibition—only in more decadent ages have they been content to be passive spectators. The men who fought at Agincourt, the men who fell in the Pass of Thermopylæ, were dancers. Greek manhood would not have been what it was without the dance. The Greek youths danced as simply and unconsciously as the Greek maidens, and they danced among themselves, singly and in groups. Nietsche said a wise word to this generation when he proclaimed his ideal: “Every man fit for warfare, every woman fit for children, both fit for dancing with head and legs.”
America is seeking to discover a dance fit for men. It has found it in a translation of the movements proper to athletics, in an expression in dance form of all the masculine sports, a dance which women could not perform if they tried. A spectator who has seen an exhibition of this new method, which is clearly a revival of the old Greek method, has recorded that “the postures were those of wrestlers or swimmers, or runners or discus and javelin throwers, always preceded by the vigorous dance steps. And none of it was in the least feminine. It was dancing, but it was essentially masculine from start to finish. There was not a suggestion of airy grace; there was more than a suggestion of strength and rhythm and of iron muscles under excellent control.... Then,” he continues, “I began to see the place of dancing in the world, its place as a wholesome natural recreation and as a form of physical training, more effective perhaps than any other, since a vigorous athletic dance brings into play nearly every muscle in the body. I saw that a normal enjoyment of dancing meant a healthy mind in a healthy body. There is no more sane and natural form of exercise than the rhythmic buoyant movements of the dance, performed with the vigour which men throw into it.”
This form of dancing corresponds almost exactly with the Greek gumnāzo, which was the simpler and more exclusively physical of the two divisions of the dance, the groundwork for the orchēsis, the intellectual and emotional expression of bodily movement. The former provided the technique, which was to be mastered not for its own sake, but as a means of furnishing the body with that eloquence by which it could utter the moods of the spirit. Without this training in the dance, the Greek men and women could never have acquired that exquisite harmony, that easy grace of carriage, such as we see in ancient art. It may even be said to have made Greek art possible, for as J. A. Symonds remarked in his “Studies of the Greek Poets”: “The whole race lived out its sculpture and painting, rehearsed, as it were, the great masterpieces of Phidias and Polygnotus in physical exercise before it learnt to express itself in marble and colour.”