Chapter CLXXXIX

THE DOCTOR'S OPINION OF LATE HOURS. DANCING. FANATICAL OBJECTION OF THE ALBIGENSES; INJURIOUS EFFECT OF THAT OPINION WHEN TRANSMITTED TO THE FRENCH PROTESTANTS. SIR JOHN DAVIES AND BURTON QUOTED TO SHOW THAT IT CAN BE NO DISPARAGEMENT TO SAY THAT ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE, WHEN ALL THE SKY'S A BALL-ROOM.

I could be pleased with any one
Who entertained my sight with such gay shows,
As men and women moving here and there,
That coursing one another in their steps
Have made their feet a tune.

DRYDEN.

The Doctor was no dancer. He had no inclination for this pastime even in what the song calls “our dancing days,” partly because his activity lay more in his head than in his heels, and partly perhaps from an apprehension of awkwardness, the consequence of his rustic breeding. In middle and later life he had strong professional objections, not to the act of dancing, but to the crowded and heated rooms wherein it was carried on, and to the late hours to which it was continued. In such rooms and at such assemblies, the Devil, as an old dramatist says, “takes delight to hang at a woman's girdle, like a rusty watch, that she cannot discern how the time passes.”[1] Bishop Hall in our friend's opinion spake wisely when drawing an ideal picture of the Christian, he said of him, “in a due season he betakes himself to his rest. He presumes not to alter the ordinance of day and night; nor dares confound, where distinctions are made by his Maker.”

[Footnote 1: WEBSTER.]

Concerning late hours indeed he was much of the same opinion as the man in the old play who thought that “if any thing was to be damned, it would be Twelve o'clock at night.”

These should be hours for necessities,
Not for delights; times to repair our nature
With comforting repose, and not for us
To waste these times.[2]

He used to say that whenever he heard of a ball carried on far into the night, or more properly speaking, far into the morning, it reminded him with too much reason of the Dance of Death.

Rise with the lark, and with the lark to bed:
The breath of night's destructive to the hue
Of ev'ry flow'r that blows. Go to the field,
And ask the humble daisy why it sleeps
Soon as the sun departs? Why close the eyes
Of blossoms infinite, long ere the moon
Her oriental veil puts off? Think why,
Nor let the sweetest blossom Nature boasts
Be thus exposed to night's unkindly damp.
Well may it droop, and all its freshness lose,
Compell'd to taste the rank and pois'nous steam
Of midnight theatre, and morning ball.
Give to repose the solemn hour she claims
And from the forehead of the morning steal
The sweet occasion. O there is a charm
Which morning has, that gives the brow of age
A smack of earth, and makes the lip of youth
Shed perfume exquisite. Expect it not,
Ye who till noon upon a down-bed lie,
Indulging feverous sleep.[3]

[Footnote 2: SHAKESPEARE.]

[Footnote 3: HURDIS' VILLAGE CURATE.]

The reader need not be told that his objections were not puritanical, but physical. The moralist who cautioned his friend to refrain from dancing, because it was owing to a dance that John the Baptist lost his head, talked, he said, like a fool. Nor would he have formed a much more favourable opinion of the Missionary in South Africa, who told the Hottentots that dancing is a work of darkness, and that a fiddle is Satan's own instrument. At such an assertion he would have exclaimed a fiddlestick![4]—Why and how that word has become an interjection of contempt, I must leave those to explain who can. The Albigenses and the Vaudois are said to have believed that a dance is the Devil's procession, in which they who dance break the promise and vow which their sponsors made for them at their baptism that they should renounce the Devil and all his works, the pomps and vanities of this wicked world,—(not to proceed further,)—this being one of his works, and undeniably one of the aforesaid vanities and pomps. They break moreover all the ten commandments, according to these fanatics; for fanatics they must be deemed who said this; and the manner in which they attempted to prove the assertion by exemplifying it through the decalogue, shows that the fermentation of their minds was in the acetous stage.

[Footnote 4: The explanation following is given in Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. FIDDLESTICK'S END. Nothing: the ends of the ancient fiddlesticks ending in a point: hence metaphorically used to express a thing terminating in nothing.]

Unfortunately for France, this opinion descended to the Huguenots; and the progress of the Reformation in that country was not so much promoted by Marot's psalms, as it was obstructed by this prejudice, a prejudice directly opposed to the temperament and habits of a mercurial people. “Dancing,” says Peter Heylyn, “is a sport to which they are so generally affected, that were it not so much enveighed against by their straight-laced Ministers, it is thought that many more of the French Catholicks had been of the Reformed Religion. For so extremely are they bent upon this disport, that neither Age nor Sickness, no nor poverty itself, can make them keep their heels still, when they hear the Music. Such as can hardly walk abroad without their Crutches, or go as if they were troubled all day with a Sciatica, and perchance have their rags hang so loose about them, that one would think a swift Galliard might shake them into their nakedness, will to the Dancing Green howsoever, and be there as eager at the sport, as if they had left their several infirmities and wants behind them. What makes their Ministers (and indeed all that follow the Genevian Discipline) enveigh so bitterly against Dancing, and punish it with such severity when they find it used? I am not able to determine, nor doth it any way belong unto this discourse. But being it is a Recreation which this people are so given unto, and such a one as cannot be followed but in a great deal of company, and before many witnesses and spectators of their carriage in it; I must needs think the Ministers of the French Church more nice than wise, if they choose rather to deter men from their Congregations, by so strict a Stoicism, than indulge any thing unto the jollity and natural gaiety of this people, in matters not offensive, but by accident only.”[5]

Sweet recreation barr'd, what doth ensue,
But moody and dull melancholy,
Kinsman to grim and comfortless despair;
And at their heels, a huge infectious troop
Of pale distemperatures and foes to life.[6]

[Footnote 5: The Rector of a Parish once complained to Fenelon of the practice of the villagers in dancing on Sunday evenings. “My good friend,” replied the prelate, “you and I should not dance, but allowance must be made to the poor people, who have only one day in the week to forget their misfortunes.”]

[Footnote 6: SHAKESPEARE.]

It is a good natured Roman Catholic who says, “that the obliging vices of some people are better than the sour and austere virtues of others.” The fallacy is more in his language than in his morality; for virtue is never sour, and in proportion as it is austere we may be sure that it is adulterated. Before a certain monk of St. Gal, Iso by name, was born, his mother dreamt that she was delivered of a hedge-hog; her dream was fulfilled in the character which he lived to obtain of being bristled with virtues like one. Methinks no one would like to come in contact with a person of this description. Yet among the qualities which pass with a part of the world for virtues, there are some of a soft and greasy kind, from which I should shrink with the same instinctive dislike. I remember to have met somewhere with this eulogium past upon one dissenting minister by another, that he was a lump of piety! I prefer the hedge-hog.

A dance, according to that teacher of the Albigenses whose diatribe has been preserved, is the service of the Devil, and the fiddler, whom Ben Jonson calls Tom Ticklefoot, is the Devil's minister. If he had known what Plato had said he would have referred to it in confirmation of this opinion, for Plato says that the Gods compassionating the laborious life to which mankind were doomed, sent Apollo, Bacchus and the Muses to teach them to sing, to drink, and to dance. And the old Puritan would to his own entire satisfaction have identified Apollo with Apollyon.

“But shall we make the welkin dance indeed?”[7]

[Footnote 7: SHAKSPEARE.]

Sir John Davies, who holds an honourable and permanent station among English statesmen and poets deduces Dancing, in a youthful poem of extraordinary merit, from the Creation, saying that it

then began to be
When the first seeds whereof the world did spring,
The fire, air, earth, and water did agree,
By Love's persuasion, Nature's mighty king,
To leave their first disordered combating;
And in a dance such measure to observe,
As all the world their motion should preserve.

He says that it with the world

in point of time begun;
Yea Time itself, (whose birth Jove never knew,
And which indeed is elder than the Sun)
Had not one moment of his age outrun,
When out leapt Dancing from the heap of things
And lightly rode upon his nimble wings.

For that brave Sun, the father of the day,
Doth love this Earth, the mother of the Night,
And like a reveller in rich array,
Doth dance his galliard in his leman's sight.

* * * * *

Who doth not see the measures of the Moon,
Which thirteen times she danceth every year?
And ends her pavin thirteen times as soon
As doth her brother, of whose golden hair
She borroweth part, and proudly doth it wear;
Then doth she coyly turn her face aside,
That half her cheek is scarce sometimes descried.

And lo the Sea that fleets about the land
And like a girdle clips her solid waist,
Music and measure both doth understand.
For his great crystal eye is always cast
Up to the Moon, and on her fixed fast;
And as she danceth in her pallid sphere,
So danceth he about the centre here.

This is lofty poetry, and one cannot but regret that the poet should have put it in the mouth of so unworthy a person as one of Penelope's suitors, though the best of them has been chosen. The moral application which he makes to matrimony conveys a wholesome lesson:

If they whom sacred love hath link'd in one,
Do, as they dance, in all their course of life;
Never shall burning grief, nor bitter moan,
Nor factious difference, nor unkind strife,
Arise betwixt the husband and the wife;
For whether forth, or back, or round he go,
As the man doth, so must the woman do.

What if, by often interchange of place
Sometimes the woman gets the upper hand?
That is but done for more delightful grace;
For on that part she doth not ever stand;
But as the measure's law doth her command,
She wheels about, and ere the dance doth end,
Into her former place she doth transcend.[8]

[Footnote 8: It is remarkable that Sir John Davies should have written this Poem, which he entitled the Orchestra, and that very remarkable and beautiful one on the Immortality of the Soul.]

This poem of Sir John Davies's could not have been unknown to Burton, for Burton read every thing; but it must have escaped his memory, otherwise he who delighted in quotations and quoted so well, would have introduced some of his stanzas, when he himself was treating of the same subject and illustrated it with some of the same similitudes. “The Sun and Moon, some say,” (says he) “dance about the earth; the three upper planets about the Sun as their centre, now stationary, now direct, now retrograde, now _in apogæo_, then in _perigæo_, now swift, then slow; occidental, oriental, they turn round, jump and trace [symbol for venus] and [symbol for mercury] about the Sun, with those thirty-three _Maculæ_ or Burbonian planets, _circa Solem saltantes cytharedum_, saith Fromundus. Four Medicean stars dance about Jupiter, two Austrian about Saturn, &c. and all belike to the music of the spheres.”

Sir Thomas Browne had probably this passage in his mind, when he said “acquaint thyself with the _choragium_ of the stars.”

“The whole matter of the Universe and all the parts thereof,” says Henry More, “are ever upon motion, and in such a dance as whose traces backwards and forwards take a vast compass; and what seems to have made the longest stand, must again move, according to the modulations and accents of that Music, that is indeed out of the hearing of the acutest ears, but yet perceptible by the purest minds, and the sharpest wits. The truth whereof none would dare to oppose, if the breath of the gainsayer could but tell its own story, and declare through how many Stars and Vortices it has been strained, before the particles thereof met, to be abused to the framing of so rash a contradiction.”