It would be an unfortunate thing, indeed, if the “prurient prudes” of the meeting houses were permitted to make the laws by which society should be governed.  The same unhappy psychological condition which makes the dance an unclean thing in their jaundiced eyes renders it impossible for them to enjoy art or literature when the subject is natural, the treatment free and joyous.  The ingenuity that can discover an indelicate provocative in the waltz will have no difficulty in snouting out all manner of uncleanliness in Shakspeare, Chaucer, Boccacio—­nay, even in the New Testament.  It would detect an unpleasant suggestiveness in the Medicean Venus, and two in the Dancing Faun.  To all such the ordinary functions of life are impure, the natural man and woman things to blush at, all the economies of nature full of shocking improprieties.

In the Primitive Church dancing was a religious rite, no less than it was under the older dispensation among the Jews.  On the eve of sacred festivals, the young people were accustomed to assemble, sometimes before the church door, sometimes in the choir or nave of the church, and dance and sing hymns in honor of the saint whose festival it was.  Easter Sunday, especially, was so celebrated; and rituals of a comparatively modern date contain the order in which it is appointed that the dances are to be performed, and the words of the hymns to the music of which the youthful devotees flung up their pious heels But I digress.

In Plato’s time the Greeks held that dancing awakened and preserved in the soul—­as I do not doubt that it does—­the sentiment of harmony and proportion; and in accordance with this idea Simonides, with a happy knack at epigram, defined dances as “poems in dumb show.”

In his Republic Plato classifies the Grecian dances as domestic, designed for relaxation and amusement, military, to promote strength and activity in battle; and religious, to accompany the sacred songs at pious festivals.  To the last class belongs the dance which Theseus is said to have instituted on his return from Crete, after having abated the Minotaur nuisance.  At the head of a noble band of youth, this public spirited reformer of abuses himself executed his dance.  Theseus as a dancing-master does not much fire the imagination, it is true, but the incident has its value and purpose in this dissertation.  Theseus called his dance Geranos, or the “Crane,” because its figures resembled those described by that fowl aflight; and Plutarch fancied he discovered in it a meaning which one does not so readily discover in Plutarch’s explanation.

It is certain that, in the time of Anacreon[A], the Greeks loved the dance.  That poet, with frequent repetition, felicitates himself that age has not deprived him of his skill in it.  In Ode LIII, he declares that in the dance he renews his youth

When I behold the festive train
Of dancing youth, I’m young again