FROM WALTZ TO TANGO

Some Reflections Concerning the Centennial of a Prejudice

Franklin James

COMPLETE century has just finished its revolving course since Byron, in 1813, published his clumsy little satire, "The Waltz, an Apostrophic Hymn." Here are a few couplets from the opening stanza:

Muse of the many-twinkling feet! whose charms Are now extended up from legs to arms;

Thy breast — if bare enough — requires no shield;

Dance forth — sans armour thou shalt take the field And own — impregnable to most assaults,

Thy not too lawfully begotten "Waltz."

His latest and best editor, Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, gathers together in his little introduction to this poem a number of passages from other writers which indicate the uproar caused at the time by this new dance. They are so exquisitely attuned to the present uproar a century later that the impulse to requote them is irresistible (with thanks to this scholarly editor for saving one some literary labor). As early .as 1799 Thomas Coleridge writes of some country dancing in Germany: "The dances were reels and the waltzes, but chiefly the latter; this dance is in the higher circles sufficiently voluptuous, but here the motions of it were far more faithful interpreters of the passions." In 1800 H. C. Robinson writes from Frankfort: "The dancing is unlike anything you ever saw. You must have heard of it under the name of waltzing, that is rolling and turning, though the rolling is not horizontal but perpendicular. Yet Werther, after describing his first waltz with Charlotte, says, and I say so too, ' I felt that if I were married my wife should waltz (or roll) with no one but myself."

AND a last quotation, from Thomas Raikes's " Personal Reminiscences," might, with the slightest verbal changes, have been written to-day concerning the "turkey-trot" or the "tango." "No event ever produced so great a sensation in English society as the introduction of the German waltz. . . . Old and young returned to school, and the mornings were now absorbed at home in practising the figures of a French quadrille or whirling a chair round the room to learn the step and measure of the German waltz. The anti-waltzing party took the alarm, cried it down; mothers forbad it, and every ball-room became a scene of feud and contention. The foreigners were not idle in forming their élèves; Baron Tripp [auspicious name], Neumann, St. Aldegonde, etc., persevered in spite of all prejudices which were marshalled against them. It was not, however, till Byron's 'malicious publication' had been issued and forgotten that the new dance received full recognition." Incidentally, the appearance of Byron, like Saul, among the Prophets must have been peculiarly edifying.

However, after "full recognition," whatever that may mean, had been finally attained, everybody of any social pretensions took to this wanton "perpendicular rolling," a whole century has waltzed itself off the waxed floor of time into Eternity — and now the waltz seems dying of "innocuous desuetude." But a large class of people would deny that it ever received full recognition. Great religious sects having once pronounced it anathema have continued, perhaps of late halfheartedly, so to hold it; and now that this new and exactly analogous Terpsichorean frenzy has burst forth, many pious throats are being cleared preparatory to uttering anathemas in richer, fuller tones. The Emperor William has forbidden all officers of his army and navy, while in uniform, to dance these new abominations. His American compeer, the Honorable "Honey" Fitzgerald, of Boston, perhaps our most sensitive custodian of public morals, recently tried to forbid public expositions of these dances in licensed gathering places.

IT IS hard to be flippant on so grave a subject, but Mr. James Montgomery Flagg (and a long life to him!) has suceeded better than any one else in a jingle he wrote some years ago in Life, beneath one of his most deliriously gay pictures — a young sport and his best girl (such a pompadour!) careening wildly on a polished floor, to the dismay of a horrified parson. I have to quote from memory, unfortunately:

Said the Reverend Jabez McCotton,

"The waltz by the Devil's begotten!'

Said young Smith to Miss Bly,

"Never mind the old guy,

To the pure almost everything's rotten."

As the old lady said when she fell into the well, "There's much more to this than appears on the surface." In other words, there is a large class of professionally "pure" people (like the Honorable Honey and others) and it is this same admirable and useful class of people who are now again having the time of their lives inveighing against the trot and the tango. "Noli me tangere," they gasp with a shudder, and I for one will respect their delicacy and pass on to the deeper philosophy of the subject.

Much has been written of late on current dancing, but it has all been hopelessly superficial; no one has approached the theme with a philosophical bent of mind like mine. The path to any profound philosophic discovery is a tedious one: phenomena must be studied from every angle and their relative significance weighed, correlation must be resorted to, follows deductive reasoning, a theory slowly emerges to be tested, is tested — and the philosopher is at first regarded as either a mild or a dangerous lunatic according to the predilections of sciolistic critics. I am prepared for this form of contumely, and despite it shall offer to the public my discovery, merely omitting in so brief a paper a detailed account of the endless laboratory experiments by which I have tested it and found it sound.

IN THE first place, two facts, or series of facts, are incontestable: at the beginning of the nineteenth century a new form of dancing appeared so much "freer" than that which had hitherto been countenanced, that the conservative wing of society promptly went into convulsions, presently recovered, and eventually joined the progressives in their Terpsichorean revolution. At the beginning of the twentieth century the same situation has arisen, a corresponding upheaval has taken place. (That most people to-day regard this upheaval with terror because of its "novelty" is beside the point, most people to-day having no historical sense whatever.) Begins now the search for Causeand-Effect. Is there any political reason for these two outbreaks? No, neither waltz nor tango was resorted to, like the carmagnole, to celebrate the death of petty tyrants; both George IV and Charles F. Murphy will go down in history as fairly popular with their subjects. Can a religious impulse be found, like that which moved the prophetess Miriam, Jump-to-Glory-Jane, or our savage American snakedancers? No, both periods have been times of a somewhat Erastian religious depression. Not to be tedious, I can assure you that after sifting every possibility, from climatic to eugenic, I have come down to what I believe should be the first principle of all sociological investigation — cherchez la femme.

A CONSIDERATION of the great truth that, since her expulsion from Eden, the most (superficially) interesting, and I might say symptomatic, feature of woman is her clothes, gave me my first clue of importance. The notorious fact (so patent as to have escaped, hitherto, that serious analysis essential to true philosophy) that dancing and legs are vitally correlated, taken in conjunction with my first clue blazed the way clearly to discovery. I can give only the results — not the processes — of my researches, historical and otherwise, in the subject of feminine costume with special reference to the legs. It is well known that there have been long periods when, so far as the naked eye and polite discourse are concerned, ladies — except the Fairy Queen in the play — have had no legs (Amazon choruses, of course, never counted as ladies): farthingales, hoops, petticoats, bustles, skirts, overskirts — steel, horsehair, muslin, what you will, have so swathed them that both they and the word for them have, theoretically, faded from the social consciousness. Indeed, so true is this that the grave Spaniards even still have a respectful proverb: "The Queen of Spain has no legs." But there are two periods within hailing distance of memory when these sartorial and linguistic swathings have been, happily or unhappily, removed. After the elaborately upholstered skirt of the Louis XVI period came the flimsy, negligible draperies of the Directorate and the First Empire. Then what happened? Any selfrespecting goat-herd will tell you that after you first release a reasonably young Nanny from the ropes with which she has been cobbled for hours, she will promptly cavort a bit in celebration of her new liberty. Now no biological fact should be too humble for the purposes of philosophy. So with the ladies of the First Empire — this novel freedom simply had to find expression— the waltz was seized upon as an adequate medium, and a new era was begun. Byron dimly understood something of this, as may be seen from his lines:

Such was the time, nor ever yet was such —

Hoops are no more, and petticoats not much.

But as man is an artificial animal in his social activities, what at first had a justification as the expression of a biological necessity quickly crystalized into a social habit. Thus although more draperies gradually accrued to the female legs during the next century, the habit of waltzing once formed continued, till its original significance and expressiveness were dulled. What has become habitual can never express a sudden and, subjectively, novel joy. So when, after the endless and various reswathing, starchings, compressions, and expansions of the nineteenth century nether inhibitions were suddenly removed, the feminine leg by the systole and diastole of a century's throb was again uncobbled, the waltz, now inadequate through long, dull use, gave way to the trot and the tango. That the next cycle will witness again the same phenomena, who can doubt? That our great-grandchildren will in turn celebrate these age old lustral rites, will signalize a momentary vehicularfreedom with newer and more striking devotions to Saint Vitus, who shall gainsay? Surely not the philosopher. And since the subject is one of sufficient gravity to have moved M. Jean Richepin to address the Institute with the Tango as his theme, I, for one, am unwilling that American scholarship should be silent.

MEANWHILE, such public guardians as the Emperor William, Mr. Fitzgerald, and the Reverend Jabez McCotton should realize that the only way to guide this momentary ebullience into safe channels is to encourage it so strongly that trotting and tangoing will soon become a dull social habit rather than a lustral rite. Remembering the example of the Bishop of Rum-ti-Foo in the Bab Ballads they may even take part in it themselves:

"This style of dancing would delight

A simple Rum-ti-FoozIeite.

I'll learn it if 1 can,"

thegood Bishopexclaimed,hoping, wise prelate, to make it a means of grace rather than an engine of destruction. There is, of course, another remedy, though 1 fear it's too late: and that is to bribe Messieurs Paquin, Callot, and others hurriedly to introduce some thickly quilted, steel ribbed garment that again will banish the female nether limb to its former visual and linguistic non-existence.