All that the revival of the old dances will do for the rising generation it is impossible to foretell. It is giving them back the power of self-expression, which the common people seem once to have possessed in the old days when music and song came naturally to birth in the life of the folk. As Miss Mary Neal has well said: “Music is the one art in which the otherwise inarticulate can express themselves, and so we have in this music the truest meeting ground for all classes. The revival and practice of our English folk-music is part of a great national revival, a going back from town to country, a reaction against all that is demoralising in city life. It is a reawakening of that part of our national consciousness which makes for wholeness, saneness, and healthy merriment.” The movement is at present still in its trial stage. If it becomes indeed a national revival of dancing it must result in a development of the dance. It cannot remain content with merely perpetuating an ancient formula. Every form of art which has the seeds of life in it must needs change and grow. The Morris, as has been said, was originally a men’s dance, and already its performance by girls is changing something of its character. The introduction of the feminine element necessarily robs it of its sturdiness and at the same time lends it an added gaiety and grace. But the change will probably go deeper than this. The old Morris was the expression of a mode of life that has passed away; out of it must be developed some newer variation more fitted to express the spirit of a broader and fuller life. In a suggestive passage, Mr Holbrook Jackson indicates the direction of the development: “The old English folk-dances are limited in range; they are a combination of acrobatic leaps and hoydenish frisks. They are, indeed, the expression of a non-reflective and rather boorish peasantry. To-day conditions have changed. The peasantry are no more, and we have become introspective and reflective. The bumpkin and his kind have been replaced by the clerk, with a new set of needs and different nuances of desire; so that we have to consider not so much the question of reviving the dances of the past, because, as such, these can never be anything but curiosities, antiques, but how to pick up the lapsed tradition of the dance at the point in history when it expressed the emotions of the people, and to give that tradition a chance of new life in our own day; not a chance of imitating the past in form, but a chance of imitating the past in spirit, a chance of doing for to-day what it once did for yesterday.”