A French Savant on Dancing.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 839, 30 March 1888, Page 5

A French Savant on Dancing.

M. Bohne, in his history of German dancing and its future, observes, ‘Man only, knows dancing’—the bear does not count, because it has no ‘psychic impulsion.’ Why do we dance ? he demands ; ninety per cent do so for amusement, nine to secure a substitute for a vapor bath, and one, for the love of aesthetics. But dancing is also a marriage broker, a sort of matrimonial agency. However, the dance is also a civilising agent. With our ancestors, Nature meant only music and dances, which too were attributed to the gods. The author states, the old Germans were a dancing people; modern Germans are not, and that you can travel two months in Germany without perceiving a waltzer ; whereas, voyage bat eight days in Spain, fandangos will be visible everywhere. The demon of dance seizes the Spaniards in the streets, on the public places, under the porches of houses. The first musician who arrives, and that can touch a guitar, will compel the servant to throw away her broom, the water-carriers to lay down their pitchers, the muleteers will abandon their mules, and the innkeeper will quit his dinner —to dance all with soul and body. The Spaniards have always a foot in the air ready to spring ; so had once the old Germans, and so much so that their bishops had the greatest difficulty to prevent their flocks dancing in the churches, thus imitating the early Christians. However, sacred dancing was only a form for expressing great joy. Kenan maintains dancing never figured in the Christian liturgy, and M. de Presaense agrees, for once, with Renan. Indeed, the Church had much difficulty to suppress the old pagan danoes. Bishops and princes thundered against them, but the votaries up to the twelfth century held their dances at night in the cemeteries, where they had the stimuli of mystery, the fearof being surprised, and the feeling that they were doing wrong. In the sixteenth century, Germany had a singular * Death Dance ’ executed at wedding parties. Lots were drawn to find the individual who was to die ; the doomed one then stood in the centre of the room, the others danced round, and the individual after a while staggered, fell—became dead. All stopped ; then the dancers chanted a pretty dirge—a funeral hymn. If the departed was a man, each girl came one by one and kissed him on the forehead, and vice versa if a woman ; with the last death-kiss he rose, the music played a gay air, and the triumphal ronde surrounded the resurrectionist.

The real creators of that queen of dances, the waltz, were the Viennese ; they monopolise it stilL It is thus that Musset wrote : * I would like a French duchess to be able to dance as well as a German cattle drover.’ M. Bohne believes dancing is dying, if not dead. The workmen are debilitated by faotory life and soured by Socialism. The sons of the rich are worn out by excess, by hot-bed lessons and examinations—educational pressure perhaps. Piety, too, has departed, for true piety made no person sad ; wine and beer are adulterated ; people do not now get intoxicated, but poisoned. In fact, the moral health of moderns is less good than that of their ancestors, who were most patient under suffering, more brave in the struggle of life, beoause less egotistical. We are devoted only to ourselves.