By an intellectual dancing, nothing is meant which is heavy or pedantic. There will undoubtedly be solemn dances; but so there will be fanciful ones,—the Mother Goose and fairy-tale for the very young, the innocent love-tale of later youth, enriched by the imagination, till the ballet is commensurate with the opera. Whatever can be expressed in music may be heightened in effect by an accompanying dance; and Sophocles and Æschylus have taught us (for they trained their own choruses, and Sophocles led his in person), that the highest and gravest genius may employ itself in idealizing the motions of the body.
But mere good-will cannot bring this art to high degrees of perfection. A peculiar genius, which must be born, and cannot be made, is needed here, not less than to compose for the harp or organ. The dancing of Christian Europe is still Pagan, and even the Dorian dances are mostly forgotten. Yet out of that Pagan material might be raised an art of dancing not unworthy of the name of Christian.
Dancing is an admirable initiation of the young into the love and practice of music; because the beauty of measure, first appreciated by measured motion, disciplines the mind to measure time. It is not necessary so elaborately to defend the introduction of music into general education, as of dancing; for only one small sect of Christendom has undertaken to exclude music absolutely from human expression.[1] The largest sect of Christendom, the Roman Catholic church, has developed it so completely, that, on the wings of harmonies which essay to penetrate and reveal the heart of mysteries too generally hidden by "words without counsel which darken knowledge," the world did for a long period, and, in some degree, does in all time, rise above the narrowing influences of that creed which condemns to everlasting woe all who are out of the pale of the church, and even excludes from heaven those who, in involuntary unconsciousness of its existence, fail to pass under its baptizing waters.[2]
