instance, is less brutal, more playful in the matter of love and courtship, and more responsive to all manner of secondary stimuli. Feelings are less unshaded by individual differences and less instinctively social, and are organized into sentiments; motives are more complex. Practical needs as they shift and relax their pressure, at this point or that, allow the release of energy for play. Man turns aside to the contemplative and decorative uses of life; and a detached aesthetic consciousness emerges. This process of aesthetic indirection implies (1) the changing of work into play, (2) the viewing of leisure as a chance for amusement, (3) a new, subtle response to life in terms of the serious playfulness of a creative art impulse. Even at low cultural levels there is not much work that is so grinding and so eagerly pointed at results as not to allow an occasional interest in processes, an occasional enjoyment of muscle tensions, of sweeping movements, of surging or receding emotions. To the man to whom canoeing and hunting are serious business the rhythmic flash and dipping of the paddle and the gliding of the body through grass in stalking game may be a source of pleasure. Other things to be considered are the seasonal character of agricultural work; a bantering rivalry that leads to the playful trying out of muscles; changes in the nature of the needed work, allowing sportive survivals such as our camping or hunting and many of our outdoor games. Again, man becomes more acutely aware of his leisure time as something to be filled with individualized enjoyment. What he seeks is "a good time,” which means getting as far away from work as possible and striking out for himself in his search for pleasure. The bulk of our dancing is of this sort; we often enjoy our art as we eat our bonbons. But this individualized enjoying oneself that has shaken itself free from work is only a first step; if art is to emerge, interest must be shifted from self

and its stimulation to an object or projected activity which is the summing up of the artist's power and the rallying point for the sense and the imagination of the onlooker or listener. That means a double indirection: a work of art is set over against an actual practical world and over against a hungry and self-conscious self. Ritual dances become art to the dancers only when delight in their formal patterns obscures interest in what the magic of the ritual is to gain.1 A love experience becomes art for the lover only when it is set over against himself, as a flashing circle of images and feelings which are and are not himself.2

1 Cf. Miss Harrison, Art and Ritual.

2 This is the secret of lyric poetry. The practice and the theory of some expressionists seem to run counter to this second detachment. They push what they call Ichgefühl to the limit of egomania. Here are samples from Gottfried Benn's Synthese;

But even in such

count as images.

Ich wälze Welt. Ich röchle Raub.

poetry the projection is felt as projection and the images Kurt Heynicke's Mensch is a good illustration:

THE DANCE AS A WORK OF ART

Each type of the dance has its own technique, and its own peculiar resources, problems, and sets of meanings. The more highly specialized the dancing is—as in the clog dance, the acrobatic dance, and the toe dance-the more difficult it is to set its special significance within a general aesthetic theory of the dance. This is a problem which confronts the aesthetician in every field of art. How much of what is peculiar to a sonnet, a roundelay, or a ballad can be carried over to a theory of poetry? How much of low relief into that of sculpture? How much of a pastel into that of painting? It amounts to a struggle between the desire for unity and a delicate responding to differences. The best thing to do in this predicament is (1) to attempt to mark the aesthetic meaning of the dance-making reservations where they are needed; (2) to characterize the different types of the dance; (3) to break up the total effect of the dance into its component elements-rhythm, pose, gesture, costume and setting—and their varying relations; (4) to recapture and restate in intellectual terms the life and spirit of a dance, and the idea-symbolical or otherwise— of which it is the living expression.

THE AESTHETIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DANCE

FUSION OF SPACE AND TIME IMPRESSIONS: Imagine an oblong box, tilted up and with the lid taken off, and let it represent the enclosed and bounded space of the stage. For the simpler effects it is lined with black or edged with silver and cloth of gold; for the more complex all the illusionist devices of stage-craft are used. Cutting across this space, from side to side, from front to rear, diagonally and vertically, the dance swings its varying pattern. With a pause in the music, the dancers come to a momentary rest,

the whirl of impressions settles to a clarified picture of blotches of color and an angled criss-cross of bodies, arms, and legs. This decorative ensemble every new onset of music shatters to bits. There is no other art which combines so directly and effectively the visual and the motor appeal. It is not a matter of alternating rest and motion, for the pause with all its decorative poses is felt to be the resolution of a movement and an urge toward new rhythmic developments; and every motion in turn utilizes to the full the sensuous beauty-in mobile form-of color, of light, of bodily lines.

THE VISUALIZING AND IMAGINATIVE ORDERING OF IMPULSES AND EMOTIONS: Responding to the manifold character and tempo of the music and adding a spirit and gesture of its own, the dance moves up and down, back and forth between the slack and the tensional, the impulse to relax and the impulse to fling oneself about, to whirl and leap, yielding and fighting, calm and anger, stinting and lavishing, lust and playful courting, elation and depression, pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow. In ordinary life impulses are felt by us in their direct, outgoing pressure, emotions are more or less formless, and both feed on feelings of self or are worked up into purposes. It is we who have the impulse to jump, higher and higher, to the point of exhaustion; it is we who are angry and are carried along in a gathering flood of anger; it is we who give anger an object and shape it toward a definite scheme of revenge. In art much of this formlessness, purposiveness, and self-relation is lost; impulses and feelings are cut loose from self, set over against us, and projected into a visual and imaginative world, and in this world are reduced from chaos to order or from an organization in terms of practical stresses and purposes to an organization of line, color, sound, rhythm. In the dance, of all the arts, this change is most marked, for there impulses and feelings are presented in their transitional

developments-something that sculpture and painting cannot do take sensuous form-an impossibility in musicand are shown-as they are not in poetry-in the closest relation to the motor life of the body.

A CONSTANTLY RENEWED INTERCHANGE OF FREEDOM AND ORDER: The traditional ballet of the early operatic stage shows an almost complete schematization of dress, pose, and movement. The dancer is put in tights and a short gauze skirt, is schooled in the difficult technique of toedancing, is drilled in the rond de jambe, pirouette, cabriole, entrechat, glissade,3 and taught to dance in an ensemble in which everything is reduced to rule.1 How effectively this destroys the spontaneity and individuality of the body and its movements may be seen by watching a toe-dancer take a few walking steps. It is only a great dancer-a Genée or a Pavlowa-that can get fine artistic effects from such a system; it is only a great organizer that can gain from it decorative and pantomimic effects such as are to be found in Les Sylphides, in L'Oiseau de Feu, and in Rimsky-Korsakov's Snégourotchka.

In other freer forms of the dance at least a large part of the aesthetic pleasure may be traced to our being conscious that the dancers are creatively active with their bodies and to our witnessing free individual energy taking rhythmic form

3 Many of these steps and movements occur in folk dances-the pirouette in the Gypsy Flamenco, the arabesque in the Tarantella, the rond de jambe in the Slavonic Obertass, the battement and pirouette in the Scotch Reel. Emmanuel, in La Danse Grecque, has traced them in the old Greek dances. He has, however, made the mistake of interpreting too much in the spirit of the ballet master of the French Classical School, and hence slighting the freedom that governs their use here as well as in folk dancing.

The musical comedy stage has escaped the mechanical in dress, but still shows a deadly misunderstanding of art in its stereotyped deploying of masses of girls, its marching and counter-marching, and grouping. Its patterned dances suggest the process of painting kitchen borders through perforated paper. The "perfect stepping" of the London Palace Girls is an example of complete mechanization.