distinctly
different, is the erotic character of the dance. Lovemaking is the
most central, underlying motive of all the mimic dances all over the
globe. Among many primitive peoples the dance is a real pantomimic
presentation of the whole story from the first tender awaking of a
sweet desire through the warmer and warmer courtship to the raptures
of sensual delight. Civilized society has more or less covered the
naked passion, but from the graceful play of the minuet to the
graceless movements of the turkey trot the sensual, not to say the
sexual, element can easily be recognized by the sociologist. Here
again cause and effect move in a circle. Love excitement expresses
itself in dance, and the dance heightens the love excitement. This
erotic appeal to the senses is the chief reason why the church has
generally taken a hostile attitude. For a long while the dance was
denounced as irreligious and sinful on account of Salome's blasphemous
dancing. Certainly the rigid guardians of morality always look askance
on the contact of the sexes in the ballroom. To be sure, the standards
are relative. What appeared to one period the climax of immorality may
be considered quite natural and harmless in another. In earlier
centuries it was quite usual in the best society for the young man to
invite the girl to a dance by a kiss, and in some times it was the
polite thing for the gentleman after the dance to sit in the lap of
the girl. The shifting of opinion comes to most striking expression,
if we compare our present day acquiescence to the waltz with the moral
indignation of our great-grandmothers. No accusers of the tango to-day
can find more heated words against this Argentine importation than the
conservatives of a hundred years ago chose in their hatred of the
waltz. Good society had confined its dancing to those forms of contact
in which only the hands touched each other, leaving to the peasants
the crude, rustic forms, and now suddenly every mother has to see her
daughter clasped about the waist by any strange man. Even the dancing
masters cried out against the intruder and claimed that it was
illogical for a man to be allowed to press a girl to his bosom at the
sound of music, while no one would dare to do it between the dances.

Thus the immorality of our most recent dances may be hardly worse than
the dancing surprises of earlier fashions, but who will doubt that
these sensual elements of the new social gayeties are to-day