DYING OUT.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume XXIII, 23 May 1922, Page 4

DYING OUT.

THE PASSING OF TWE OANCII CRAZE. (By Cicely Hamilton). Dancing men, we are tola, ar e so frequent and willing as they if not yet as scarce as ifi pre-war <]/ . already they are sought for valued. "fl ' The complaint of the “wallflower" J heard in the land, and there are 6V J rumors that women devotees of J public ballroom have been forced J the dearth of dancing volunteers’ J lure their partners and reward tC with notes of the realm 1 Be that as i t may, i t is certain tj the masculine craze for the fox-tw and bunny-hug. is pass i ng . men d dance madly in 1922 as they did in tb year of the armistice. What was the meaning of the danc. mg mama—of that passion for sten. ping and whirling to music which n» Mssed a world that had newly ai(l down its arms? ... * w

1 Clearly R was not a method of m. lowing over victory-since the German I Wil<Uy as the conqueror i la. d 4 t3ken P oBB ® BB * oll of bis Rhine. . land. Nor was it an excuse for th e comjng together of the sexes whom war had divided; the absence of women was no bar to the joys of the ballroom and men capered contentedly with then arms round each other’s leather belts 1 remember looking down on a regi. ment of Highlanders as they waltzed and two-stepped in the guildhall of a ittle German town; the piano jangling, the kilts swinging round—men by the hundred, not a woman among them, men who were dancing for nothing but the pleasure of the dance. Where soldier paired with soldier sittmg-out had no joys, and flirtation was blankly impossible; there were no ballroom toilets to admire or discuss since everyone was clad like his neighbor. The sole attraction— intense and irresistible—was the danoe itself, the pleasure of movement to music. We know curiously little <rf ourselves and our instinctive emotions—the common emotions and sudden herd-ini-pulses whose effects are writ, large in the bloodiest pages of history. The passing of the dancing craze ma y seem a small matter to the casual reader of a newspaper; but we might guard the better against future outbreaks <>f wholesale savagery—might control more wisely our sudden herd-

impulses—if we understood the precise connection between the shedding of blood and the pleasure of capering to music. . . . For there i s a connection, fundamental and eternal, which the savage m his war-dance, has aJwavs been aware of, but which civilised (or socalled civilised) man had forgotten till the blood-fever swept over Europe and America. With the fever in his veins the white man danced— like the savage arrayed in his war-pamt; the only essential difference being that the white man jazzed instinctively, because he could not help it—while the savage, knowing that the impulse to dance is allied to blood-lust, used his dance scientifically, to rouse his courage and incite himself to deeds of daring. On the whole, thew-thotfgh experts m jazz may repine— the world in general should be well content that man is ceasing to take his chief pleasure in the dance. A scarcity of partners may be a very misfortune to the flapper; but against that misfortune to a limited -lass must, be set a great gain to the race as a, whole—the passing of a violent and. fevered state of mind, the dying down of hatred and return to a civilised mentality.