Fifty years hence the growing generation will find its dances compared in moral tone with our present much-discussed and over-abused Tango, and get the worst of the comparison.
If the Minuet should ever come back, some ultra-pious and excitable person beyond doubt will find in the graceful measures of this lovely dance a sure road to perdition.
Dancing, however, had its champions among the great intellects of the world, and always will have. Socrates, at the age of sixty, learned dancing from Aspasia. Plato, Pliny, and, later on, Molière were stanch admirers of this form of exercise. Herbert Spencer says in his Principles of Psychology:
"The feelings from time to time received along with the perception of graceful movements were mostly agreeable. The persons who exhibited such movements were usually the cultivated, and those whose behavior yielded gratification. The occasions usually have been festive ones—balls, private dances, and the like."
And Jean J. Rousseau writes: "From the first formation of society, song and dance, true children of love and leisure, became the amusement or, rather, the occupation of idle assemblies of men and women."
The old Greeks knew the value of dancing, and
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