There is rhythm throughout Nature. Man often moves less gracefully than the higher mammals. He has opposed his will to the law of the universe, for centuries abusing his ancient right, but through music he may realise again the harmony of all. The dancer is radiant with the splendour of the infinite and there comes an ecstasy into the spirit, of those who witness the transfiguration—the hush that one feels only before the highest art and purest religion.
It is reasonable to suppose that those who dance must bring back with them into every-day living something of the beauty of those exalted moments when they touch "the white radiance of eternity." Here is natural education, natural religion—a practical mysticism, the merging of self in the Infinite with a consequent fitness for daily living.
So the dancing of the New Age is but a different form of contemplation and production, by which the Soul becomes the creature—for the period achieving that blessedness which is above time and space, and dwelling in that dimension, where goodness, beauty and truth are one.
The new dancing is "in the air." Like vers libre and all New Age realisations and creations, its first essential is freedom. This is the meaning of the word Democracy—equality, liberation. The very spirit of all that is new demands freedom. The deeper one penetrates, the lovelier the folds of this marvellous conception. There is no title for friend or comrade, for child or lover—comparable to the assumption of equality.
Equality—its power sings. It dances. When the last is said and done, we all want the same thing, if we really knew,—goodness, beauty and truth, one at the top. There is joy in the fine new conception appearing now in all the arts—freedom first and last, even to lawlessness at first, but that will right itself more swiftly than smugness, which has had its age-long and hideous trial.... To me, the house in the beeches slowly unfolds it all—the mystery of the cosmic peasantry of the future—that fastidious poverty, that delicate plenty which is perfection. These two, mother and child, mean the new dancing to me, and the New Race beside. I have not dared to go again, because I build incorrigible dreams, and this one especially is dear.... Yet I often recall their loveliness together.
The mother's beauty had turned to loveliness. It had more than the mystic chiselling of sorrow—it had passion, it had humour.... I feel the need of telling you from time to time that I am not rhapsodising, the need of reminding you, how weathered and drab my mind was, when I went up the shore that day. She made me think of grapes and olives and laurel-boughs; she seemed the sister to the child. All about the two were subtle, pervasive, ever-changing tests of the power of the soul. The country people around did not think her extraordinary, much less beautiful. How much is revealed in that? Loveliness requires certain vision, an interpretative spirit, and thus it is protected from the vulgar gaze. These good country people carry upon their faces and hands and persons picture-writing of secret sins and dreamless stolidity, and yet they are scandalised by this woman. You cannot imagine how sweetly it came to me that she had utterly lost the sense that she was outcast.
A lamp burns at her door every evening. I don't suppose it is seen three times a month—yet the lamp burns.... There's a big wooden Cross in the room where they sleep—the child led me to it—a mat of grass before it, kusa grass, who knows?... A great Cross, a much-worshipped Cross, with spike-holes, the broken edges worn smooth.... The child whispered to me that she had been brought (when she was too small to know) and placed on the mat at the foot of the Cross for her mother to find; also that she came when the white clover bloomed.
... It is only this way, bit by bit, that I can make the picture. I have never before been so disturbed by the sense of inadequacy. The light about their heads is all diffused like morning upon a cloud.