The dance of life / Havelock Ellis.

  • Havelock Ellis
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The dance of life / Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    53/364 page 33
    CHAPTER II THE ART OF DANCING I Dancing and building are the two primary and essential arts. The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person ; and in the end they unite. Music, acting, poetry proceed in the one mighty stream ; sculpture, painting, all the arts of design, in the other. There is no primary art outside these two arts, for their origin is far earlier than man himself; and dancing came first.1 That is one reason why dancing, however it may at times be scorned by passing fashions, has a profound and eternal attraction even for those one might suppose farthest from its influence. The joyous beat of the feet of children, the cosmic play of philosophers’ thoughts, rise and fall according to the same laws of rhythm. If we are 1 It is even possible that, in earlier than human times, dancing and architecture may have been the result of the same impulse. The nest of birds is the chief early form of building, and Edmund Selous has suggested (Zoologist, Dec. 1901) that the nest may first have arisen as an accidental result of the ecstatic sexual dance of birds.
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