Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/383

Rh spirit. In the nature of things it implies that overplus of energy which goes along with elated feeling, and does not serve to express the awe, the submission, the penitence, which form large parts of religious worship in advanced times.

Naturally then dancing, though it did not in the middle ages wholly disappear from religious worship, practically fell into disuse. One part only of the original observance survived—the procession. Alike in the triumphal reception of a returning conqueror and in the celebration of a god's achievements, the saltatory actions were the joyous accompaniments in a moving stream of people. But while the saltatory actions have ceased the moving stream has continued. Moreover there have survived, even down to our own day, its two original forms. We have religious processions, now along the aisles of cathedrals and now through the streets; and besides other secular processions more or less triumphal, we have those in which either the ruler or the representative of the ruler is escorted into the city he is approaching by troops of officials and by the populace: the going out to meet the judges, who are the king's deputies, shows us that the old form minus the dance is still extant.

A further fact is to be noted. While dancing has become secularized it has in part assumed a professional character. Though, even in the earliest stages, it had other forms and purposes than those above described (as shown in the mimetic representations of success in the chase, and in primitive amatory dances), and though from these, secular dancing has been in part derived; yet if we bear in mind the transition from the dancing in triumphal processions before the king, to dancing before him as a court-observance by trained dancers, and from that to dancing on the stage, we may infer that even the forms of secular dancing now familiar are not without a trace of that origin we have been following out.

Returning from this parenthesis and passing from the evidence furnished by ancient civilizations to that furnished by the pagan and semi-civilized peoples of Europe, we may first note the statement of Strabo concerning the Celts.

There "are generally three divisions of men especially reverenced, the Bards, the Vates, and the Druids. The Bards composed and chanted hymns; the Vates occupied themselves with the sacrifices and the study of nature; while the Druids joined to the study of nature that of moral philosophy."

And the assertion is that these bards recited the exploits of their chiefs to the accompaniment of the harp. The survival of pagan observances into Christian times probably gave origin to the class