The second supposition, of a people engaged at work not sufficiently exacting in finesse to satisfy their craving for skilled co-ordination, may be taken to indicate a merely healthy race whose daily tasks require no finer technique than the ordinary labour of a farm; in such category might be put the peasants of Aragon. The same relation would exist between a people less virile and a form of daily labour still less concerned with skill, as the Andalusians. Or again, it is valid in the case of a community engaged in crafts requiring fine workmanship, if that community be of people endowed with nervous energy in excess of the requirements of the day’s work; and that is the condition in those eternally youthful nations, Scotland and Ireland.
National sense of beauty is a factor in the determination of the dances of a country. The Latins have it. The Italians and Spanish have the leisure to practice its expression. The French, on the contrary, direct their energies into work of pecuniary value, and their acceptance of the doctrine of accumulation keeps their attention where it will be paid. Pierre and Laurette frolic with the neighbours on the green, in the moonlight, in what they call a dance. It gives them exercise and many a laugh. But when they would see beauty, they patronise its specialised exponent, the ballet.
“Folk-dancing” is practically synonymous with “character dancing,” or, as the word is frequently formed in literal translation of its French original, “characteristic dancing.” It means what it implies, an exposition of the characteristics of the people to whom it pertains. Energy or dreaminess, fire or coolness, and a multitude of other qualities are bound to assert themselves, automatically; to any one who can even half read their language, character dances are an open book of intimate personal revelation. The portrayal of sports or trades, which is the sort of thing with which many folk-dances are concerned, does not detract from their interest as expositors of national temperament. Though it may be noted that, in general, the more a dance occupies itself with imitation, the less its value as a dance.
Not least of the elements of interest attaching to these dances is the measure they apply to national vitality or the lack of it. Through the form and execution of its dance, the nation as yet half-barbarous reveals vital potentiality; the people that has luxuriated in centuries of power displays its lassitude of nerve; and the young political organism shows marks of senility at birth. The aboriginal savage, huge-limbed, bounds through dances fitted to the limitations of muscles that cannot be controlled by brain, and the limitations of brain that cannot invent or sustain attention; his dance exposes him as of a race not in its youthful vigour, but in the degeneracy wrought less by time than by manner of living. The Indian of North America is dying of age; the Russian is in his youth.
The list of forces that make and preserve at nation’s dances is incomplete without the addition of the sometimes powerful element of national pride. This undoubtedly enters into the high cultivation of the dances of Scotland. The industry, thrift and all-round practical nature of the Scotch need not be enlarged upon. Though they do not lack appreciation of beauty, they consider it a luxury for only limited indulgence, except as it is provided by nature. But the Sword Dance and the Fling of their warring ancestors are as though associated with the holy cause of freedom. On many a Highland battlefield they have been stepped; they have wet their scurrying feet in spilled blood.
To learn Scotch dancing takes time, precious time. But it is time spent on a decent and a fitting thing; they are Scotch! Scotch as the thistle itself! From pulpits have come, at times, objections to them; from armed camps and lairds’ halls of other days has come the answer, far but clear: that Scottish chiefs, godly men as well as brave, trod their Flings in celebration of victories dear to memory. It is enough. The cult of the dance has continued, unchecked by the inability of occasional well-meaning divines to see its significance.