The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 70, August, 1863

Yet I must confess I wish men would not dance. It is the most unbecoming exercise which they can adopt. In women you have the sweep and wave of drapery, gentle undulations, summer-cloud floatings, soft, sinuous movements, the fluency of pliant forms, the willowy bend and rebound of lithe and lovely suppleness. It is grace generic,—the sublime, the evanescent mysticism of motion, without use, without aim, except its own overflowing and all-sufficing fascination. But when a man dances, it reminds me of that amusing French book called "Le Diable Boiteux," which has been or may be free-thinkingly translated, "The Devil on Two Sticks." In saying this, I design to cast no slur on the moral character of masculine dancers. It is unquestionably above reproach; but let an angel put on the black coat and trousers which constitute the "full-dress" of a modern gentleman, and therein antic through the "Lancers," and he would simply be ridiculous,—which is all I allege against Thomas, Richard, and Henry, Esq. A woman's dancing is gliding, swaying, serpentine. A man's is jerks, hops, convulsions, and acute angles. The woman is light, airy, indistinctly defined: airy movements are in keeping. The man is sombre in hue, grave in tone, distinctly outlined; and nothing is more incongruous, to my thinking, than this dancing, well portrayed in the contraband melody of

"Old Joe," etc.

The feminine drapery conceals processes and gives results. The masculine absence of drapery reveals processes and thereby destroys results.

Once upon a time, long before the Flood, the clergyman of a country-village, possessed with such a zeal as Paul bore record of concerning Israel, conceived it his duty to "make a note" of sundry young members of his flock who had met for a drive and a supper, with a dance fringed upon the outskirts. The fame thereof being noised abroad, a sturdy old farmer, with a good deal of shrewd sense and mother-wit in his brains, and a fine, indirect way of hitting the nail on the head with a side-stroke, was questioned in a neighboring village as to the facts of the case. "Yes," he said, surlily, "the young folks had a party, and got up a dance, and the minister was mad,—and I don't blame him,—he thinks nobody has any business to dance, unless he knows how better than they did!" It was a rather different casus belli from that which the worthy clergyman would have preferred before a council; but it "meets my views" precisely as to the validity of the objections urged against dancing. I would have women dance, because it is the most beautiful thing in the world. I would have men dance, if it is necessary, in order to "set off" women, and to keep themselves out of mischief; but in point of grace, or elegance, or attractiveness, I should beg men to hold their peace—and their pumps.

From my window overlooking the green, I was led away into some one or other of the several halls to see the "round dances"; and it was like going from Paradise to Pandemonium. From the pure and healthy lawn, all the purer for the pure and peaceful people pleasantly walking up and down in the sunshine and shade, or grouped in the numerous windows, like bouquets of rare tropical flowers,—from the green, rainbowed in vivid splendor, and alive with soft, tranquil motion, fair forms, and the flutter of beautiful and brilliant colors,—from the green, sanctified already by the pale faces of sick and wounded and maimed soldiers who had gone out from the shadows of those sheltering trees to draw the sword for country, and returned white wraiths of their vigorous youth, the sad vanguard of that great army of blessed martyrs who shall keep forever in the mind of this generation how costly and precious a thing is liberty, who shall lift our worldly age out of the plough of its material prosperity into the sublimity of suffering and sacrifice,—from suggestions and fancies and dreamy musing and "phantasms sweet," into the hall, where, for flower-scented summer air were thick clouds of fine, penetrating dust, and for lightly trooping fairies a jam of heated human beings, so that you shall hardly come nigh the dancers for the press; and when you have, with difficulty and many contortions and much apologizing, threaded the solid mass, piercing through the forest of fans,—what? An inclosure, but no more illusion.

Waltzing is a profane and vicious dance. Always. When it is prosecuted in the centre of a great crowd, in a dusty hall, on a warm midsummer day, it is also a disgusting dance. Night is its only appropriate time. The blinding, dazzling gas-light throws a grateful glare over the salient points of its indecency, and blends the whole into a wild whirl that dizzies and dazes one; but the uncompromising afternoon, pouring in through manifold windows, tears away every illusion, and reveals the whole coarseness and commonness and all the repulsive details of this most alien and unmaidenly revel. The very pose of the dance is profanity. Attitudes which are the instinctive expression of intimate emotions, glowing rosy-red in the auroral time of tenderness, and justified in unabashed freedom only by a long and faithful habitude of unselfish devotion, are here openly, deliberately, and carelessly assumed by people who have but a casual and partial society-acquaintance. This I reckon profanity. This is levity the most culpable. This is a guilty and wanton waste of delicacy.

That it is practised by good girls and tolerated by good mothers does not prove that it is good. Custom blunts the edge of many perceptions. A good thing soiled may be redeemed by good people; but waltz as many as you may, spotless maidens, you will only smut yourselves, and not cleanse the waltz. It is of itself unclean.

There were, besides, peculiar désagréments on this occasion. How can people,—I could not help saying to myself,—how can people endure such proximity in such a sweltering heat? For, as I said, there was no illusion,—not a particle. It was no Vale of Tempe, with Nymphs and Apollos. The boys were boys, appallingly young, full of healthful promise, but too much in the husk for exhibition, and not entirely at ease in their situation,—indeed, very much not at ease,—unmistakably warm, nervous, and uncomfortable. The girls were pretty enough girls, I dare say, under ordinary circumstances,—one was really lovely, with soft cheeks, long eyelashes, eyes deep and liquid, and Tasso's gold in her hair, though of a bad figure, ill set off by a bad dress,—but Venus herself could not have been seen to advantage in such evil plight as they, panting, perspiring, ruffled, frowsy,—puff-balls revolving through an atmosphere of dust,—a maze of steaming, reeking human couples, inhumanly heated and simmering together with a more than Spartan fortitude.

It was remarkable, and at the same time amusing, to observe the difference in the demeanor of the two sexes. The lions and the fawns seemed to have changed hearts,—perhaps they had. It was the boys that were nervous. The girls were unquailing. The boys were, however, heroic. They tried bravely to hide the fox and his gnawings; but traces were visible. They made desperate feint of being at the height of enjoyment and unconscious of spectators; but they had much modesty, for all that. The girls threw themselves into it pugnis et calcibus,—unshrinking, indefatigable.

There is another thing which girls and their mothers do not seem to consider. The present mode of dress renders waltzing almost as objectionable in a large room as the boldest feats of a French ballet-dancer. Not to put too fine a point on it, I mean that these girls' gyrations in the centre of their gyrating and centrifugal hoops make a most operatic drapery-display. I saw scores and scores of public waltzing-girls last summer, and among them all I saw but one who understood the art, or, at any rate, who practised the art, of avoiding an indecent exposure. In the glare and glamour of gas-light it is only flash and clouds and indistinctness. In the broad and honest daylight, it is not. Do I shock ears polite? I trust so. If the saying of shocking things might prevent the doing of shocking things, I should be well content. And is it an unpardonable sin for me to sit alone in my own room and write about what you go into a great hall, before hundreds of strange men and women, and do?

I do not speak thus about waltzing because I like to say it; but ye have compelled me. If one member suffers, all the members suffer with it. I respect and revere woman, and I cannot see her destroying or debasing the impalpable fragrance and delicacy of her nature without feeling the shame and shudder in my own heart. Great is my boldness of speech towards you, because great is my glorying of you. Though I speak as a fool, yet as a fool receive me. My opinions may be rustic. They are at least honest; and may it not be that the first fresh impressions of an unprejudiced and uninfluenced observer are as likely to be natural and correct views as those which are the result of many afterthoughts, long use, and an experience of multifold fascinations, combined with the original producing cause? My opinions may be wrong, but they will do no harm; the penalty will rest alone on me: while, if they are right, they may serve as a nail or two to be fastened by the masters of assemblies.

The funny part of Class-Day comes last,—not so very funny to tell, but amazingly funny to see,—only a wreath of bouquets fastened around the trunk of an old tree, perhaps eight or ten feet from the ground, and then the four classes range themselves around it in four circles with their hands fast locked together, the Freshman Class on the outside, the Senior Class within, grotesquely tricked out in vile old coats and "shocking bad hats." Then the two alternate classes go one way around the tree and the two others the opposite, pell-mell, harum-scarum, pushing and pulling, down and up again, only keeping fast hold of hands, singing, shouting, cheering ad libitum, ad throatum, (theirs,) ad earsum, (ours,) and going all the time in that din and yell and crowd and crash dear to the hearts of boys. At a given signal there is a pause, and the Senior Class make sudden charge upon the bouquets, huddling and hustling and crowding and jumping at the foot of the old tree; bubbling up on each other's shoulders into momentary prominence and prospect of success, and immediately disappearing ignominiously; making frantic grasps and clutches with a hundred long arms and eager outstretched hands, and finally succeeding, by shoulders and fists, in bringing the wreath away piecemeal; and then they give themselves up to mutual embraces, groans, laments, and all the enginery of pathetic affection in the last gasping throes of separation,—to the doleful tearing of hair and the rending of their fantastic garments. It is the personification of legalized rowdyism; and if young men would but confine themselves to such rowdyism as may be looked at and laughed at by their mothers and sisters, they would find life just as amusing and a thousand times more pure and profitable.

It occurs to me here that there is one subject on which I desire to "give my views," though it is quite unconnected with Class-Day. But it is probable that in the whole course of my natural life it will never again happen to me to be writing about colleges, so I desire to say in this paper everything I have to say on the subject. I refer to the practice of "hazing," which is an abomination. If we should find it among hinds, a remnant of the barbarisms of the Dark Ages, blindly handed down by such slow-growing people as go to mill with their meal on one side of the saddle and a stone on the other to balance, as their fathers did, because it never occurred to their loggerheads to divide the meal into two parcels and make it balance itself, we should not be surprised; but hazing occurs among boys who have been accustomed to the circulation of ideas, boys old enough and intelligent enough to understand the difference between brutality and frolic, old enough to know what honor and courage mean, and therefore I cannot conceive how they should countenance a practice which entirely ignores and defies honor, and whose brutality has not a single redeeming feature. It has neither wisdom nor wit, no spirit, no genius, no impulsiveness, scarcely the mirth of boyish frolic. A narrow range of stale practical jokes, lighted up by no gleam of originality, is transmitted from year to year with as much fidelity as the Hebrew Bible, and not half the latitude allowed to clergymen of the English Established Church. But besides its platitude, its one overpowering and fatal characteristic is its intense and essential cowardice. Cowardice is its head and front and bones and blood. One boy does not single out another boy of his own weight, and take his chances in a fair stand-up fight. But a party of Sophomores club together in such numbers as to render opposition useless, and pounce upon their victim unawares, as Brooks and his minions pounced upon Sumner, and as the Southern chivalry is given to doing. For sweet pity's sake, let this mode of warfare be monopolized by the Southern chivalry.

The lame excuse is offered, that it does the Freshmen good,—takes the conceit out of them. But if there is any class in college so divested of conceit as to be justified in throwing stones, it is surely not the Sophomore Class. Moreover, whatever good it may do the sufferers, it does harm, and only harm, to the perpetrators; and neither the law nor the gospel requires a man to improve other people's characters at the expense of his own. Nobody can do a wrong without injuring himself; and no young man can do a mean, cowardly wrong like this without suffering severest injury. It is the very spirit of the slaveholder, a dastardly and detestable, a tyrannical and cruel spirit. If young men are so blinded by custom and habit that a meanness is not to them a meanness because it has been practised for years, so much the worse for the young men, and so much the worse for our country, whose sweat of blood attests the bale and blast which this evil spirit has wrought. If uprightness, if courage, if humanity and rectitude and the mind conscious to itself of right, are anything more than a name. Let the young men who mean to make time minister to life scorn and scotch and kill this debasing and stupid practice.

And why is not some legitimate and wholesome safety-valve provided by authority to let off superabundant vitality, that boys may not, by the mere occasions of their own natures, be driven into wickedness? Class-Day is very well, but it comes only once a year, and what is needed is an opportunity for daily ebullition, so that each night may square its own account and forestall explosion. Why should there not be, for instance, a military department to every college, as well as a mathematical department? Why might not every college be a military normal school? The exuberance and riot of animal spirits, the young, adventurous strength and joy in being, would not only be kept from striking out as now in illegitimate, unworthy, and hurtful directions, but it would become the very basis and groundwork of useful purposes. Such exercise would be so promotive of health and discipline, it would so train and harmonize and limber the physical powers, that the superior quality of study would, I doubt not, more than atone for whatever deficiency in quantity might result. And even suppose a little less attention should be given to Euclid and Homer, which is of the greater importance nowadays, an ear that can detect a false quantity in a Greek verse, or an eye that can sight a Rebel nine hundred yards off, and a hand that can pull a trigger and shoot him? Knowledge is power; but knowledge must sharpen its edges and polish its points, if it would be greatliest available in days like these. The knowledge that can plant batteries and plan campaigns, that is fertile in expedients and wise to baffle the foe, is just now the strongest power. Diagrams and first-aorists are good, and they who have fed on such meat have grown great, and done the State service in their generation; but these times demand new measures and new men. It is conceded that we shall probably be for many years a military nation. At least a generation of vigilance shall be the price of our liberty. And even of peace we can have no stronger assurance than a wise and wieldy readiness for war. Now the education of our unwarlike days is not adequate to the emergencies of this martial hour. We must be seasoned with something stronger than Attic salt, or we shall be cast out and trodden under foot of men. True, all education is worthy. Everything that exercises the mind fits it for its work; but professional education is indispensable to professional men. And the profession, par excellence, of every man of this generation is war. Country overrides all personal considerations. Lawyer, minister, what not, a man's first duty is the salvation of his country. When she calls, he must go; and before she calls, let him, if possible, prepare himself to serve her in the best manner. As things are now, college-boys are scarcely better than cow-boys for the army. Their costly education runs greatly to waste. It gives them no direct advantage over the clod who stumbles against a trisyllable. So far as it makes them better men, of course they are better soldiers; but for all of military education which their college gives them, they are fit only for privates, whose sole duty is to obey. They know nothing of military drill or tactics or strategy. The State cannot afford this waste. She cannot afford to lose the fruits of mental toil and discipline. She needs trained mind even more than trained muscle. It is harder to find brains than to find hands. The average mental endowment may be no higher in college than out; but granting it to be as high, the culture which it receives gives it immense advantage. The fruits of that culture, readiness, resources, comprehensiveness, should all be held in the service of the State. Military knowledge and practice should be imparted and enforced to utilize ability, and make it the instrument, not only of personal, but of national welfare. That education which gives men the advantage over others in the race of life should be so directed as to convey that advantage to country, when she stands in need. Every college might and should be made a nursery of athletes in mind and body, clear-eyed, stout-hearted, strong-limbed, cool-brained,—a nursery of soldiers, quick, self-possessed, brave and cautious and wary, ready in invention, skilful to command men and evolve from a mob an army,—a nursery of gentlemen, reminiscent of no lawless revels, midnight orgies, brutal outrages, launching out already attainted into an attainting world, but with many a memory of adventure, wild, it may be, and not over-wise, yet pure as a breeze from the hills,—banded and sworn

"To serve as model for the mighty world,To break the heathen and uphold the Christ,To ride abroad redressing human wrongs,To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it,To lead sweet lives in purest chastity,Not only to keep down the base in man,But teach high thought, and amiable words.And courtliness, and the desire of fame,And love of truth, and all that makes a man."

LOVE'S CHALLENGE

I picked this trifle from the floor,Unknowing from whose tender handIt fell,—but now would fain restoreA thing which hath my heart unmanned.I say unmanned, for 't is not nowA manly mood to dream of Love,When each bold champion knits his brow,And for War's gauntlet doffs his glove.But we're exempt, and have no heartOf wreak within us for the fray;And therefore teach our souls the artWith life and life's concerns to play.Yet, lady, trust me, 't is not allIn play that I proclaim intent,When next thou lett'st thy gauntlet fall,To take it as a challenge meant.

REPLY.

SIR CARPET-KNIGHT, who canst not fight,Thy gallantries are not for me;The man whom I with love requiteMust sing in a more martial key.I have two brothers on the field,And one beneath it,—none knows where;And I shall keep my spirit steeledTo any save a soldier's prayer.If thou have music in thy soul,Yet hast no sinew for the strife,Go teach thyself the war-drum's roll,And woo me better with a fife!

POLITICAL PROBLEMS, AND CONDITIONS OF PEACE

The relations existing between the Federal Government and the several States, and the reciprocal rights and powers of each, have never been settled, except in part. Upon matters of taxation and commerce, and the diversified questions that arise in times of peace, the decisions of the Supreme Court have marked the boundary-lines of State and Federal power with considerable clearness and precision. But all these questions are superficial and trivial, when compared with those which are coming up for decision out of the great struggle in which we are now engaged. The Southern Rebellion, greater than any recorded in history since the world began, must necessarily call for the exercise of all the powers with which the Government is clothed. And we need not be surprised, if, in resorting to the new measures which the great exigency of the new condition seems to require, it shall be found, after the storm has ceased and the clouds have rolled away, that in some things the Government has transcended its legitimate powers, while in others it has suffered, because fearing to use those which it really possesses. It is dependent in many things upon the States; and yet it is supreme over them all. There can be no Senate, as a branch either of the executive or of the legislative department, without the action of the States; and yet the Government emanates directly from the people. In defending itself against an armed rebellion of nearly half the States themselves, struggling for self-preservation, it may rightfully, as in other wars, grasp all the means within its reach. War makes its own methods, for all of which necessity is a sufficient plea. But when the defence shall have been made, when the attack is repelled, and the Rebellion shall have been fully suppressed, then will come the questions, What are the best means of restoration? and, How shall a recurrence of the evil be prevented?

Though the Federal Government is one of limited powers, the people possess all governmental powers; and these are spoken of as powers delegated and powers reserved. So far as these are reserved to the people, they may be exercised either through the Federal Government or the State. And the Federal Government, though limited in its powers, is restricted in the subjects upon which it can act, rather than in the quantum of power it can exercise over those matters within its jurisdiction. Over those interests which are committed to its care it has all the powers incident to any other government in the world,—powers necessary by implication to accomplish the purpose intended. The construction of the grant in the Constitution is not to be critical and stringent, as if the people, by its adoption, were selling power to a stranger,—but liberal, considering that they were enabling their own agents to achieve a noble work for them.

We have been accustomed to extol the wisdom of our fathers, in framing and establishing such a form of government; but our highest praises have been too small. We have hitherto had but a partial conception of their wisdom. We knew not the terrible test to which their work was to be exposed. After the long discipline of the Revolutionary War, and the experience of the weakness and impending anarchy of the Confederation, they understood, far better than we, the dangers to which every government is liable, from within and from without. And we are just now beginning to see, that, in the Constitution they adopted, they not only provided for the interests of peace, but for the dangers and emergencies of war. Brief sentences, hardly noticed before, now throw open their doors like a magazine of arms, ready for use in the hour of peril. And while we shall come out of this struggle, and the political contest that will follow it, without impairing any of the rights of the States, the Federal Government restored will stand before the world in a majesty of strength of which we have before had no conception.

The questions evolved by the war are already attracting public attention. It is well that they should do so. The peace and prosperity of the country in future years depend upon their solution. They are so interwoven that a mistake in regard to one may involve us in other errors. The power of the Government so to remove the cause of the present rebellion as to prevent its recurrence, if it have any such power, is one which it is imperatively bound to exercise,—else all the treasure and blood expended in quelling it will be wasted. Has it any such power? Can Slavery be exterminated? And can the Rebel States be held as conquests, and be restored only upon condition of being forever free? It is proposed briefly to discuss these questions.