Chapter CXC

DANCING PROSCRIBED BY THE METHODISTS. ADAM CLARKE. BURCHELL'S REMARKS ON THE UNIVERSALITY OF THIS PRACTICE. HOW IT IS REGARDED IN THE COLUMBIAN PHILOSOPHY.

_Non vi par adunque che habbiamo ragionato a bastanza di questo? A bastanza parmi, rispose il Signor Gasparo; pur desidero io d'intendere qualche particolarità anchor._

IL CORTEGIANO.

The Methodist Preachers in the first Conference (that is Convocation or Yearly Meeting) after Mr. Wesley's death, past a law for the public over which their authority extends, or in their own language made a rule, that “schoolmasters and schoolmistresses who received dancing-masters into their schools, and parents also who employed dancing-masters for their children, should be no longer members of the Methodist Society.” Many arguments were urged against this rule, and therefore it was defended in the Magazine which is the authorized organ of the Conference, by the most learned and the most judicious of their members, Adam Clarke. There was however a sad want of judgement in some of the arguments which he employed. He quoted the injunction of St. Paul, “whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him,” and he applied the text thus. Can any person, can any Christian _dance_ in the name of the Lord Jesus? Or, through him, give thanks to God the Father for such an employment?

Another text also appeared to him decisive against dancing and its inseparable concomitants; “woe unto them who chaunt unto the sound of the viol, and invent unto themselves instruments of music, as did David.” The original word which we translate _chaunt_, signifies according to him, _to quaver, to divide, to articulate,_ and may, he says, as well be applied to the management of the feet, as to the modulations of the voice. This interpretation is supported by the Septuagint, and by the Arabic version; but suppose it be disputed, he says, “yet this much will not be denied, that the text is pointedly enough against that without which dancing cannot well be carried on, I mean, instrumental music.” He might have read in Burton that “nothing was so familiar in France as for citizens wives, and maids to dance a round in the streets, and often too for want of better instruments to make good music of their own voices and dance after it.” Ben Jonson says truly “that measure is the soul of a dance, and Tune the tickle-foot thereof,” but in case of need, the mouth can supply its own music.

It is true the Scripture says “there is a time to dance;” but this he explains as simply meaning “that human life is a variegated scene.” Simple readers must they be who can simply understand it thus, to the exclusion of the literal sense. Adam Clarke has not remembered here that the Psalms enjoin us to praise the Lord with tabret and harp and lute, the strings and the pipe, and the trumpet and the loud cymbals, and to praise his name in the dance, and that David danced before the Ark. And though he might argue that Jewish observances are no longer binding, and that some things which were _permitted_ under the Jewish dispensation are no longer lawful, he certainly would not have maintained that any thing which was _enjoined_ among its religious solemnities, can now in itself be sinful.

I grant, he says, “that a number of motions and steps, circumscribed by a certain given space, and changed in certain quantities of time, may be destitute of physical and moral evil. But it is not against these things abstractedly that I speak. It is against their concomitant and consequent circumstances; the undue, the improper mixture of the sexes; the occasions and opportunities afforded of bringing forth those fruits of death which destroy their own souls, and bring the hoary heads of their too indulgent parents with sorrow to the grave.”

So good a man as Adam Clarke is not to be suspected of acting like an Advocate here, and adducing arguments which he knew to be fallacious, in support of a cause not tenable by fair reasoning. And how so wise a man could have reasoned so weakly, is explained by a passage in his most interesting and most valuable autobiography. “_Malâ ave_, when about twelve or thirteen years of age, I learned to _dance_. I long resisted all solicitations to this employment, but at last I suffered myself to be overcome; and learnt, and profited beyond most of my fellows. I grew passionately fond of it, would scarcely walk but in _measured time_, and was continually _tripping_, moving and _shuffling_, in all times and places. I began now to value myself, which, as far as I can recollect, I had never thought of before; I grew impatient of control, was fond of company, wished to mingle more than I had ever done with young people; I got also a passion for _better clothing_, than that which fell to my lot in life, was discontented when I found a neighbour's son _dressed better_ than myself. I lost the spirit of _subordination_, and did not _love work_, imbibed a spirit of _idleness_, and in short, drunk in all the brain-sickening effluvia of _pleasure_; dancing and company took the place of _reading_ and _study_; and the authority of my parents was feared indeed, but not respected; and few serious impressions could prevail in a mind imbued now with frivolity, and the love of pleasure; yet I entered into no disreputable assembly, and in no one case, ever kept any improper company; I formed no illegal connection, nor associated with any whose characters were either tarnished or suspicious. Nevertheless _dancing_ was to me a _perverting influence_, an _unmixed moral evil_; for although by the mercy of God, it led me not to depravity of manners, it greatly weakened the _moral principle_, drowned the voice of a well instructed conscience, and was the first cause of impelling me _to seek my happiness in this life_. Every thing yielded to the disposition it had produced, and every thing was absorbed by it. I have it justly in abhorrence for the moral injury it did me; and I can testify, (as far as my own observations have extended, and they have had a pretty wide range,) I have known it to produce the same evil in others that it produced in me. I consider it therefore as a branch of that _worldly education_, which leads from heaven to earth, from things spiritual to things sensual, and from God to Satan. Let them plead for it who will; I know it to be _evil_, and that _only_. They who bring up their children in this way, or send them to these schools where _dancing_ is taught, are consecrating them to the service of Moloch, and cultivating the passions, so as to cause them to bring forth the weeds of a fallen nature, with an additional rankness, deep rooted inveteracy, and inexhaustible fertility. _Nemo sobrius saltat_, ‘no man in his senses will dance,’ said Cicero, a heathen; shame on those Christians who advocate a cause by which many _sons_ have become profligate, and many _daughters_ have been ruined.” Such was the experience of Adam Clarke in _dancing_, and such was his opinion of the practice.[1]

[Footnote 1: It is old Fuller's observation, that “people over strait-laced in one part will hardly fail to grow awry in another.” Over against the observations of Adam Clarke may be set the following, from the life of that excellent man—Sir William Jones. “Nor was he so indifferent to slighter accomplishments as not to avail himself of the instructions of a celebrated dancing master at Aix-la-Chapelle. He had before taken lessons from Gallini in that trifling art.”—Carey's Lives of English Poets. Sir William Jones, p. 359.]

An opinion not less unfavourable is expressed in homely old verse by the translator of the Ship of Fools, Alexander Barclay.

Than it in the earth no game is more damnable;
It seemeth no peace, but battle openly,
They that it use of minds seem unstable,
As mad folk running with clamour, shout and cry
What place is void of this furious folly?
None; so that I doubt within a while
These fools the holy Church shall defile.

Of people what sort or order may we find,
Rich or poor, high or low of name
But by their foolishness and wanton mind,
Of each sort some are given unto the same.
The priests and clerks to dance have no shame.
The friar or monk, in his frock and cowl,
Must dance in his dortour, leaping to play the fool.

To it comes children, maids, and wives,
And flattering young men to see to have their prey;
The hand-in-hand great falsehood oft contrives.
The old quean also this madness will assay;
And the old dotard, though he scantly may
For age and lameness stir either foot or hand,
Yet playeth he the fool, with others in the band.

Then leap they about as folk past their mind,
With madness amazed running in compace;
He most is commended that can most lewdness find,
Or can most quickly run about the place,
There are all manners used that lack grace,
Moving their bodies in signs full of shame,
Which doth their hearts to sin right sore inflame.

Do away your dances, ye people much unwise!
Desist your foolish pleasure of travayle!
It is methinks an unwise use and guise
To take such labour and pain without avayle.
And who that suspecteth his maid or wives tayle,
Let him not suffer them in the dance to be;
For in that game though size or cinque them fayle
The dice oft runneth upon the chance of three.

The principle upon which such reasoning rests is one against which the Doctor expressed a strong opinion, whenever he heard it introduced. Nothing, he thought, could be more unreasonable than that the use of what is no ways hurtful or unlawful in itself, should be prohibited because it was liable to abuse. If that principle be once admitted, where is it to stop? There was a Persian tyrant, who having committed some horrible atrocity in one of his fits of drunkenness, ordered all the wine in his dominions to be spilt as soon as he became sober, and was conscious of what he had done; and in this he acted rightly, under a sense of duty as well as remorse, for it was enjoining obedience to a law of his religion, and enforcing it in a manner the most effectual. But a Christian government which because drunkenness is a common sin shall prohibit all spirituous liquors, would by so doing subject the far greater and better part of the community to an unjust and hurtful privation, thus punishing the sober, the inoffensive and the industrious, for the sake of the idle, the worthless and the profligate.

Jones of Nayland regarded these things with no puritanical feeling. “In joy, and thanksgiving,” says that good and true minister of the Church of England, “the tongue is not content with speaking, it must evoke and utter a song, while the feet are also disposed to dance to the measures of music, as was the custom in sacred celebrities of old among the people of God, before the World and its vanities had engrossed to themselves all the expressions of mirth and festivity. They have now left nothing of that kind to religion; which must sit by in gloomy solemnity, and see the World with the Flesh and the Devil assume to themselves the sole power of distributing social happiness.”

“Dancing,” says Mr. Burchell, “appears to have been in all ages of the world, and perhaps in all nations, a custom so natural, so pleasing, and even useful, that we may readily conclude it will continue to exist as long as mankind shall continue to people the earth. We see it practised as much by the savage as by the civilized, as much by the lowest, as by the highest classes of society; and as it is a recreation purely corporeal, and perfectly independent of mental qualification, or refinement, all are equally fitted for enjoying it: it is this probably which has occasioned it to become universal. All attempts therefore at rendering any exertion of the mind necessary to its performance, are an unnatural distortion of its proper and original features. Grace and ease of motion are the extent of its perfection; because these are the natural perfections of the human body. Every circumstance and object by which man is surrounded may be viewed in a philosophical light; and thus viewed, dancing appears to be a recreative mode of exercising the body and keeping it in health, the means of shaking off spleen, and of expanding one of the best characters of the heart,—the social feeling. When it does not affect this, the fault is not in the dance, but in the dancer; a perverse mind makes all things like itself. Dancing and music, which appears to be of equal antiquity, and equally general among mankind, are connected together only by a community of purpose: what one is for the body, the other is for the mind.”

The Doctor had come to a conclusion not unlike this traveller's concerning dancing,—he believed it to be a manifestation of that instinct by which the young are excited to wholesome exercise, and by which in riper years harmless employment is afforded for superfluous strength and restless activity. The delight which girls as well as boys take in riotous sports were proof enough, he said, that Nature had not given so universal an inclination without some wise purpose. An infant of six months will ply its arms and legs in the cradle, with all its might and main, for joy,—this being the mode of dancing at that stage of life. Nay, he said, he could produce grave authorities on which casuists would pronounce that a probable belief might be sustained, to prove that it is an innate propensity and of all propensities the one which has been developed in the earliest part of mortal existence; for it is recorded of certain Saints, that on certain holidays, dedicated either to the mystery, or to the heavenly patron under whose particular patronage they were placed, they danced before they were born, a sure token or presage of their future holiness and canonization, and a not less certain proof that the love of dancing is an innate principle.

Lovest thou Music?
Oh, 'tis sweet!
What's dancing?
E'en the mirth of feet.[2]

[Footnote 2: From a Masque quoted by D'ISRAELI.]