k rest for
her muscles after the day of labour, but craves to go on contrasting
them in the rhythmic movements of the dance. So it has been at all
times. The hardest worked part of the community has usually been the
most devoted to the gayety of popular dances. The refined society has
in many periods of civilization declined to indulge in dancing,
because it was too widely spread among the lowest working classes in
towns and in the country. The dance through thousands of years has
been the bearer of harmless happiness: who would refuse a welcome to
such a benefactor? And with the joyfulness comes the sociability. The
dance brings people near together. It is unfair to claim that the
dance is aristocratic, because it presupposes leisure and luxury. On
the contrary, throughout the history of civilization the dance has
been above all, democratic, and has reenforced the feeling of good
fellowship, of community, of intimacy, of unity. Like the popular
games which melt all social groups together by a common joyful
interest, and like humour which breaks all social barriers, the love
for dancing removes mutual distrust and harmonizes the masses.

This social effect has manifold relation to another aspect of the
dance, which is psychologically perhaps the deepest: the dance is an
art, and as such, of deep aesthetic influence on the whole mental life.
Whenever the joy in dancing comes into the foreground, this art is
developed to high artificiality. No step and no movement is left to
the chance inspiration of the moment; everything is prescribed, and to
learn the dances not seldom means an almost scientific study. In the
great dancing periods of the rococo time the mastery of the exact
rules appeared one of the most difficult parts of higher education,
and as a real test of the truly cultivated gentleman and gentlewoman;
scholarly books analysed every detail of the necessary forms, and the
society dances in the castles of the eighteenth century were more
elaborate than the best prepared ballets on the stage of to-day. But
the popular dances of the really dancing nations are no less bound by
traditions, and we know that even the dances of the savages are moving
on in strictly inherited forms. Far from the license of haphazard
movements, the self-expression of the dancer is thus regulated and
bound by rules which are taken by him as prescriptions of beauty. To
dance thus means a steady adjustment to artistic requirements; it is
an