THE ARTS AND RELIGION 257 



into useful or pleasurable practices which are not 

 without some pretense to recognition as arts. We 

 are concerned here mainly with the meaning and 

 future of those aesthetic arts which subserve the 

 beautiful, and it will perhaps be most profitable to 

 compare dancing, music, and painting in some of 

 their more patent biological relations. 



II 



It is in dancing that the human form can be seen 

 most effectively in its appeal to the sensual aspect of 

 beauty. According to the intelligence and motive 

 of the dancer, this appeal may be on a low or on a high 

 plane, either operating as an incentive to abandon- 

 ment of personal restraint, or as the awakener of noble 

 feeling. Or the influence may be more indifferent 

 and consist of arousing delight and a pure joy in the 

 grace and elegance of varying motion. But even at 

 its best, dancing cannot be counted as vying with 

 painting or music in expressiveness or intensity of 

 appeal. The relatively unspecialized nature of the 

 machinery on which the sense of position depends is 

 incapable of subserving more than this one primitive 

 and rather generalized function, and this operates 

 against richness of content and variety of significance 

 in the dancing figure. The fact, too, that the entire 

 muscular mass of the body may be implicated in the 

 motions of dancing militates against concentration 

 of faculty and hence against the highest expressive- 



