CHAPTER VI
SPANISH DANCING
SINCE earliest Occidental history, the dances of Spain have been famous. To-day their richness, variety and fundamental nobility give them a position in advance of any other group of national dances of the Occidental type. Whether certain of the Oriental expressions are superior to the Spanish is wholly a matter of point of view on dancing. But dancers and dance-lovers, of all beliefs and prejudices, unite in conceding to Spain the highest development of “characteristic” or national dancing. More even: though the French and Italian ballets in general hold their schools to be the very fountainhead of the choreographic art, not a few disciples of the academies of Milan or Paris concede to Spanish dancing superiority over all, in that aspect of beauty that is concerned with majesty of line and posture.
It is as though Terpsichore herself had chosen the dwellers of Iberia to guard her gifts to mankind. Gadir, the city now called Cadiz, was a little Paris in the day of the Carthaginian, with dancing as its most highly developed art and notable among its diversions. When the Romans took the city they were delighted with the dancers they found there; for centuries after, Spanish dancers remained a fashionable adjunct of great entertainment in the capital, and Cadiz the inexhaustible source of their supply.
When Rome, too infirm to resist, left Spain to be overrun by the Visigoth, she left the arts of the peninsula to the mercy of a destroying barbarian. Architecture and statuary he demolished, books he burned. Dancing eluded his clumsy hand; in places of retirement children were taught the steps and gestures that had crossed the sea from Egypt in the days of the Phœnicians.
In the eighth century came the Moor: slayer, organiser, builder; fanatic, dreamer, poet; lover and creator of beauty in all its manifestations. His verses were epigrams of agreeable and unexpected sounds, formed into phrases of eloquent metaphor. His architecture and its ornament, too, were epigrams; combinations of graceful and simple lines and forms into harmonious symbols more eloquent than description. To him the dance was verse and decoration united, with music added; entertainment and stimulus to contemplation. Under his guardianship and tuition the Spanish dance strengthened its hold on the people, and increased in scope. A certain class of it retains to-day a distinctly Moorish flavour.
The “Century of Gold” that followed the expulsion of the Moors and the discovery of America found the dance surrounded by conditions than which none could have been more favourable. Gold looted from the new continent was lavished on masques and fiestas that emulated those of neighbouring monarchies; courtiers were so preoccupied with the diversion that a memoir of the period contains a complaint that “sleep in any part of the palace has become impossible, since persons of all degrees have taken to continuous strumming of the music of the zarabanda.” The less exalted had in the dance
