Dancing, then, is indelicate where the women are depraved, and to this it must be added that the women are depraved where the men are indolent.  We need not trouble ourselves to consider too curiously as to cause and effect.  Whether in countries where man is too lazy to be manly, woman practices deferential adjustment of her virtues to the loose exactions of his tolerance, or whether for ladies of indifferent modesty their lords will not make exertion—­these are questions for the ethnologer.  It concerns our purpose only to note that the male who sits cross-legged on a rug and permits his female to do the dancing for both gets a quality distinctly inferior to that enjoyed by his more energetic brother, willing himself to take a leg at the game.  Doubtless the lazy fellow prefers the loose gamboling of nude girls to the decent grace and moderation of a better art, but this, I submit, is an error of taste resulting from imperfect instruction.

And here we are confronted with the ever recurrent question.  Is dancing immoral?  The reader who has done me the honor attentively to consider the brief descriptions of certain dances, hereinbefore presented will, it is believed, be now prepared to answer that some sorts of dancing indubitably are—­a bright and shining example of the type being the exploit wherein women alone perform and men alone admire.  But one of the arguments by which it is sought to prove dancing immoral in itself—­namely that it provokes evil passions—­we are now able to analyze with the necessary discrimination, assigning to it its just weight, and tracing its real bearing on the question.  Dances like those described (with, I hope a certain delicacy and reticence) are undoubtedly disturbing to the spectator.  They have in that circumstance their raison d’etre.  As to that, then, there can be no two opinions.  But observe the male oriental voluptuary does not himself dance.  Why?  Partly no doubt, because of his immortal indolence, but mainly, I venture to think, because he wishes to enjoy his reprehensible emotion, and this can not coexist with muscular activity If the reader—­through either immunity from improper emotion or unfamiliarity with muscular activity—­entertains a doubt of this, his family physician will be happy to remove it.  Nothing is more certain than that the dancing girls of oriental countries themselves feel nothing of what they have the skill to simulate, and the ballet dancer of our own stage is icily unconcerned while kicking together the smouldering embers in the heart of the wigged and corseted old beau below her, and playing the duse’s delight with the disobedient imagination of the he Prude posted in the nooks and shadows thoughtfully provided for him.  Stendahl frankly informs us, “I have had much experience with the danseuses of the ——­ Theatre at Valence.  I am convinced that they are, for the most part, very chaste.  It is because their occupation is too fatiguing.”