CANCER BEFORE CIAGHILEV
53
the utter anti-sacramentalism of British philistia. Your Manichean
Protestant, and your superfine rationalist, reject the Dance as
worldly, frivolous, sensual, and so forth; and your dull, stupid Sen–
sualist sees legs, and grunts with some satisfaction: but your Sacra–
mentalist knows something worth more than both of these. He
knows what perhaps the dancer herself may be partially unconscious
of, that we live now by faith and not by sight, and that the poetry
of dance is the expression of unseen spiritual grace. 'She all her
being flings into the dance.' 'None dare interpret all her
limbs
express'. These are the words of a genuine sacramentalist....
The poet is T. Gordon Hake. Headlam knew Symons well, and
also
Yeats and many other Nineties poets and painters. He
seems, in
his
Guild and in writing of this kind, to reflect rather
accurately the liturgical, poetic, and music-hall aspects of this
renaissance of dancing. The liturgical ingredient developed
luxuriously in the border country of Anglo-Catholicism; witness
R. H. Benson's essay, "On the Dance as a Religious Exercise,"
an account of the Mass as a dramatic dance:
The Catholic . . . is not ashamed to take his place with the wor–
shippers of Isis and Cybele, with King David, and with the naked
Fijean, and to dance with all his might before the Lord.
The antiquarian interest culminated in G. R. S. Mead's
The
Sacred Dance of Jesus
(published in
The Quest
in 1910, but
long excogitated). This was Havelock Ellis's chief source, and
it
is a work of great and curious learning, written in a long tradi–
tion of attempts to explain Matt. xi. 17, "We have piped unto
you and ye have not danced." Mead was most interested in the
second-century
Hymn of Jesus,
but he deals with the Fathers
and with Medieval church-dancing, with the liturgies of the
Greek Orthodox and Armenian churches, and so forth. I doubt
if
Mead is taken very seriously by modern historians-he isn't
cited in the large bibliography of Backman's
Religious Dances
(1952)-but for a while he mattered a lot. Yeats, for example,
went to his lectures. He was by no means the only zealous dance-
