trary, the high tension, the rigid routine, the gray
monotony of modern life insistently call for moments of organic relief,
though the precise form that that orgiastic relief takes must necessarily
change with other social changes. As Wilhelm von Humboldt said, "just as
men need suffering in order to become strong so they need joy in order to
become good." Charles Wagner, insisting more recently (in his _Jeunesse_)
on the same need of joy in our modern life, regrets that dancing in the
old, free, and natural manner has gone out of fashion or become
unwholesome. Dancing is indeed the most fundamental and primitive form of
the orgy, and that which most completely and healthfully fulfils its
object. For while it is undoubtedly, as we see even among animals, a
process by which sexual tumescence is accomplished,[115] it by no means
necessarily becomes focused in sexual detumescence but it may itself
become a detumescent discharge of accumulated energy. It was on this
account that, at all events in former days, the clergy in Spain, on moral
grounds, openly encouraged the national passion for dancing. Among
cultured people in modern times, the orgy tends to take on a purely
cerebral form, which is less wholesome because it fails to lead to
harmonious discharge along motor channels. In these comparatively passive
forms, however, the orgy tends to become more and more pronounced under
the conditions of civilization. Aristotle's famous statement concerning
the function of tragedy as "purgation" seems to be a recognition of the
beneficial effects of the orgy.[116] Wagner's music-dramas appeal
powerfully to this need; the theatre, now as ever, fulfils a great
function of the same kind, inherited from the ancient days when it was the
ordered expression of a sexual festival.[117] The theatre, indeed, tends
at the present time to assume a larger importance and to approximate to
the more serious dramatic performances of classic days by being
transferred to the day-time and the open-air. France has especially taken
the initiative in these performances, analogous to the Dionysiac festivals
of antiquity and the Mysteries and Moralities of the Middle Ages. The
movement began some years ago at Orange. In 1907 there were, in France, as
many as thirty open-air theatres ("Theatres de la Nature," "Theatres du
Soleil," etc.,) while it is in Marseilles that the first formal open-air
theatre has been erected since classic days.[118] In England, like