so
,.RANK KERMODE
pends upon the assumption that mind and body, form and mat–
ter, image and discourse have undergone a process of dissocia–
tion, which it is the business of art momentarily to mend. Con–
sequently dancing is credited with a sacred priority over the
other arts, as by Havelock Ellis (whose essay is valuable as a
summary of the theoretical development I am now discussing)
and, with less rhapsody and more philosophy, by Mrs. Langer
in the twelfth chapter of
Feeling and Form
and (more flatly)
in the opening essay of
Problems of Art.
In view of this primi–
tivizing, it is worth remembering that the increase of prestige was
contemporaneous with a major effort by anthropologists, litur–
giologists, .and folklorists to discover the roots of the dance in
ritual of all kinds, and also with the development of a certain
medical interest in dancing. The generation of Valery and that
of Eliot took a keen interest in these matters; and from Eliot, at
the time when he was busy with Jane Harrison .and Frazer, we
can get some notion of how they struck the literary imagination.
Here, for instance, is a passage from an uncollected
Criterion
re–
view of two books on dancing:
Anyone who would contribute to our imagination of what the ballet
may perform in future .. . should begin by a close study of dancing
among primitive peoples. . . . He should also have studied the
evolution of Christian and other liturgy. For is not the High Mass–
as performed, for instance, at the Madeleine in Paris--one of the
highest developments of dancing? And finally, he should track
down the secrets of rhythm in the still undeveloped science of
neurology.
Mr. Eliot also found the Noh plays exciting and praised
Massine for providing in the ignorant modern theater that rhy–
thm regarded as essential by Aristotle.
It is now common ground, I suppose, that Mr. Eliot's criti–
cism, even in this famous early period, is not particularly original
in substance, and what he says here had often been said before.
