Modern dancing and dancers

expressive of the individuality of the dancer and of the race. It was as easy and as eloquent as Spanish speech. It was in fact the dancer’s manner of conversing with the spectator, and it had all the daring, the wit, the provocativeness and at times the real poetry of her couplets.

It is little wonder that all the essential fire of the Spanish dance is quenched when it is performed upon the foreign stage. The atmosphere of Andalusia cannot be created in London or New York even by dancers of greater genius than Otero, Guerrero and Tortajada; and it should not be forgotten that Mr Royall Tyler, whose word upon the inner life of Spain must be taken as final, has remarked that “neither of those three ladies dances well enough to earn her living by the art in Spain. Their dances are intended for exportation into foreign countries where they are more appreciated.”

CHAPTER XIV

THE REVIVAL OF THE MORRIS DANCE

NO view of the modern renaissance of dancing would be complete which did not take account of the revival of the Morris Dance.

Perhaps it has been too lightly assumed that England being a nation of shopkeepers has never been a nation of dancers. But shopkeeping is merely a habit, the product of circumstance, and in its nature a temporary makeshift. Dancing is a need of the spirit, a daughter of the high moods, and if, as Lucian said, it is as old as love, it is surely also as everlasting. The shopkeeping spirit may be, and probably is, antagonistic to dancing; but by the shopkeeping spirit I do not mean the modern spirit, for that is an incalculable, energetic and mobile thing, which is going to bear I know not what strange fruit in life and art. I mean that austere, unsmiling, level and practical temper which began to overshadow Western Europe some time in the sixteenth century; which set its face against ecstasy, and art which is the expression of ecstasy; which regarded poverty and vagabondage and unrestrained laughter as disreputable; which worshipped respectability, common-sense, such success as could be expressed in terms of cash, and all things that were materially substantial and enduring; which created Puritanism, the eighteenth century and the industrial revolution. To this temper, which found a secure lodgment in the Anglo-Saxon mind, dancing was naturally unsympathetic. But though it long held Britain, and America too, in its grip, it was not strong enough to strangle the free and joyous spirit which had created “Merrie England.”

That spirit found its typical expression in the dance, and particularly in the Morris Dance. Not until the improbable event of the antiquarians arriving at unanimity will it be determined whether or no the Morris was originally danced by the Moors or “Moriscos” of Spain and imported by John of Gaunt into England in the fourteenth century; but if so, it was “diablement changé en route.” It mixed with the native dances and was incorporated with a mass of Catholic and even pre-Christian tradition. In some English villages there are memories of a dance on the 21st of June, the longest day of the year, of a slaughtered ox, a procession in which one of the dancers carried a sword and a large wooden cup. To surmise what dim forgotten rites of a pagan sun-worship linger in this ritual would take us far into the labyrinth of archæology. But whatever its origin the Morris gathered unto itself the joy and holiday spirit of the countryside. It had its roots deep in the soil. It was inspired by the rhythm of an ancient, simple and full-blooded life, if not by the very rhythm of the woods and rivers themselves.

In spite of direct attempts at suppression, the inevitable desuetude of ancient custom, and the changed conditions of the life of the people, this dancing has come down from Catholic England to our own day. The Puritan preachers denounced it as “lewde” and “ungodlie”; but it survived even the tyranny of Cromwell’s major-generals and flourished gaily under the Merry Monarch. In the eighteenth century it had already become demoded. In a journal of the period we read of an account of a soirée, in which the writer said of a certain lady, with more candour than courtesy, that she “looked as silly and gaudy, I do vow, as one of the old Morris Dancers.” In many villages, particularly in the west and south-west of England, there still exist “sides” of morris-dancers to whom the tunes and music have been handed down through an unbroken tradition. The fidelity of this tradition is in many cases surprising. Mr Cecil Sharp, to whom is chiefly due the rediscovery of the ancient dances, relates how he took down a tune from the fiddler of the Bidford morris-men which was identical, note for note, with one that he had found in a version printed in 1550. But during the last twenty or thirty years many of the old morris-sides have been disbanded. The revival has come at the eleventh hour. Already dances have been collected representing probably every variety of the morris-step; but in another generation the memory of the Morris Dance would have almost vanished from the countryside.

Soon after the Morris Dance took root in England it became incorporated with the old mummers’ plays, which embodied the cult of Robin Hood. The traditional characters of Friar Tuck, Little John and Maid Marian accompanied the dancers. The hobby-horse and the fool, sometimes known as the dysard, provided the necessary comic relief. But the main interest, and a very serious interest it was, centred in the dancing. At one time almost every village possessed its troupe, and among the various villages there was a rivalry of dancing as keen as the rivalry of football to-day. Occasionally the contest became so hot that the victory was only determined by a vigorous bout of cudgelling with the staves, which served as an accessory in the dance. The Morris Dance was no hoydenish revel in which any unskilled yokel could take part. It developed an intricate technique which not unnaturally lent itself to the introduction of a kind of “star” system among the dancers.

Of these professional performers perhaps the most illustrious was a certain William Kemp, who achieved fame in Elizabeth’s reign by dancing the Morris all the way from London to Norwich. He wrote an account of this feat in a pamphlet called “Kemp’s Nine Daies’ Wonder, performed in a daunce from London to Norwich: Containing the pleasures, paines and kind entertainment of William Kemp betweene London and that Citty, in his late Morrice.” In his droll and vivid manner he tells how at Sudbury “there came a lusty tall fellow, a butcher by his profession, that would in a Morice keepe me company to Bury. I gave him thankes, and forward wee did set; but ere ever wee had measur’d half a mile of our way, he gave me over in the plain field, protesting he would not hold out with me; for, indeed, my pace in dauncing is not ordinary. As he and I were parting, a lusty country lasse being among the people, cal’d him faint-hearted lout, saying, ‘If I had begun to daunce, I would have held out one myle, though it had cost my life.’ At which words many laughed. ‘Nay,’ saith she, ‘if the dauncer will lend me a leash of his bells, I’le venter to tread one myle with him myself.’ I lookt upon her, saw mirth in her eyes, heard boldness in her words, and beheld her ready to tucke up her russat petticoate; and I fitted her with bels, which she merrily taking garnisht her thicke short legs, and with a smooth brow bad the tabur begin. The drum strucke: forward marcht I with my merry Mayde Marian, who shook her stout sides, and footed it merrily to Melford, being a long myle. There parting with her (besides her skinfulle of drinke), and English crowne to buy more drinke; for, good wench, she was in a pittious heate; my kindness she requited by dropping a dozen good courtsies, and bidding God bless the dauncer. I bade her adieu; and, to give her her due, she had a good eare, daunst truly, and wee parted friends.”

The Morris was sometimes danced, as William Kemp and his amateur roadside companion performed it, as a solo dance; but its most common characteristic was that it was danced by “sides” or sets of six. Women but rarely figured as performers. The dress of the men has become traditional, but it appears originally to have been merely the holiday dress of the period. It was marked by that “gaudiness” to which the captious critic of the eighteenth century took exception. The dancer was plentifully adorned with ribbons and rosettes, and latterly he wore the tall beaver hat which has become an essential part of the costume. The outfit was completed by the indispensable bells, which were stitched upon thongs and tied to the shins. Sometimes both treble and tenor bells were worn. In some of the dances the performers carried a white handkerchief and in others a short wooden staff.

In early times the dance was accompanied by a pipe and tabor, otherwise known as whittle and dub. The pipe was a kind of flageolet, which the minstrel played with the left hand; from his left thumb was suspended the tabor or miniature drum. These primitive instruments were superseded by the fiddle, which in its turn is giving place to the concertina.

The dance of the people is necessarily different from the dance of art. All national dances are characterised by vigour rather than

by grace. There is lurking in them a certain note of savagery and battles long ago. The old fighting England as well as Merrie England still lives in the Morris. It is not surprising that King Charles’s men should have danced it on the eve of Naseby fight. It is essentially a dance for men, and a dance for the open air. It does not sway or glide; its movement is spirited and abrupt. The foot is lifted as in walking and then vigorously straightened to a kick; the heels come solidly to earth. The object of the dancer is to make the bells ring fortissimo, and to do this he must kick, and kick hard. The Morris does not exhibit the graceful postures and fawn-like agility of the Spanish country dances, nor the fiery energy of the Hungarian and the Russian. In its solid merriment, its even rhythm, its vigorous but restrained movements, it is essentially British.

It would be impossible to describe the spirit of the Morris Dance better than in the admirable words of Mr Cecil Sharp, who is not only learned in the history of the dance, but has sought it out wherever the tradition lingers on the greensward and under the ancient oaks of an England that is passing away. “It is, in spirit,” he says, “the organised, traditional expression of virility, sound health and animal spirits. It smacks of cudgel-play, of quarter-staff, of wrestling, of honest fisticuffs. There is nothing sinuous in it, nothing dreamy; nothing whatever is left to the imagination. It is a formula based upon and arising out of the life of man, as it is lived by men who hold much speculation upon the mystery of our whence and whither to be unprofitable; by men of meagre fancy, but of great kindness to the weak; by men who fight their quarrels on the spot with naked hands, drink together when the fight is done, and forget it, or, if they remember, then the memory is a friendly one. It is the dance of folk who are slow to anger, but of great obstinacy—forthright of act and speech: to watch it in its thumping sturdiness is to hold such things as poniards and stilettos, the swordsman with the domino, the man who stabs in the back—as unimaginable things. The Morris Dance, in short, is a perfect expression in rhythm and movement of the English character.”

The modern revival of morris-dancing in England is of very recent origin, but of astonishingly rapid growth. The story of its rise reads like a romance. This movement, which is already national in its scope, which promises to renew the heart of England, which is swelling out into wider circles that will probably be felt throughout the Empire and America, was born in a girls’ club in a poor quarter of the north-west of London. The object of the Espérance Girls’ Club in Cumberland Market was to bring something of the joyous and serene atmosphere of a younger and fresher world into the grim and hurried life of the city dwellers. For some time one of the features of the club had been the encouragement of music, dancing and play-acting. During some winters Scotch reels and strathspeys, Irish jigs and folk-songs, had been practised one night a week. A meeting between Mr H. C. MacIlwaine, the musical director of the club, and Mr Cecil Sharp, the leading authority on folk-music, led to the introduction of the English folk-song. From the folk-song to the folk-dance was only a step. Mr Sharp seven years before had collected a set of morris-tunes from some dancers in Oxfordshire, in whose family the Morris had been handed down from father to son for five generations. The idea suggested itself that as the girls had learnt to sing the old songs they might also learn to dance the old dances.

In October 1905 Miss Mary Neal, the secretary of the club, who has throughout been the directing spirit of the movement, went down to Oxfordshire and brought two of the morris-men up to London, and set them to teach the members of the club. The success of the experiment was immediate and astonishing. The girls were as unfamiliar with the steps and the music as with the speech and dances of ancient Greece; but perhaps a kind of ancestral memory awoke within them. The rhythms of the Morris had sprung from the rhythms of the old English life, and the Londoners, who are said to be never more than three generations from the soil, responded to a summons of the blood. Within half-an-hour of the coming of the Oxfordshire dancers the Morris, with its stamping of feet and clashing of staves, its maze of intricate movements, was in full swing upon a London floor. Thus was begun the revival of morris-dancing which to-day is a part of the national life.

The next step was the giving of a public concert to make known to the larger world the rediscovery of the ancient dances. This took place at the Small Queen’s Hall in the following April. The public interest was immediately aroused. As one of the newspapers remarked with prophetic insight, it was “a little entertainment which may indeed light such a candle in England as will not immediately be put out.”

From that time the movement progressed by leaps and bounds. Inquiries began to pour in as to how the traditional dancing could be brought back into the lives of the English people, to those in the towns who had lost it altogether as well as to those in the country for whom it was only a vague memory. Miss Neal’s answer to this demand was to send out the best dancers among the members of her club to act as teachers. They have danced the Morris throughout the length and breadth of England. There is not a county to-day where the merry jangle of the bells and the clatter of the staves is not heard. In course of time the Board of Education took cognisance of the movement and introduced the Morris and other country dances into the curriculum of the elementary schools. In the spring of 1911 Miss Neal visited America, and by lectures and demonstration showed to the people of the new continent the old dances which their Puritan forefathers had omitted to bring with them. In response to numberless appeals for instruction she left behind one of the teachers of the Espérance Club, and the movement in the States is spreading with the same astonishing enthusiasm and rapidity as in England.

The most significant and hopeful feature of this movement is that it is in every sense a popular one. The inveterate cavillers may argue that it is artificially imposed upon the younger generation by a few cultured and enthusiastic pedants, and they will certainly repeat the well-worn shibboleth concerning the impossibility of putting back the clock. But the artificiality has been in the enforced imposition of a Puritan code that abolished dancing from the village green. To all healthy children it is as natural to dance as to laugh and sing. The tradition has been abruptly broken; now it is being restored to them and they respond to it with every fibre of their being. They are far from regarding it as yet another troublesome item in a bewildering system of education; they do not have to be driven to it as to a new species of drill. They revel in it as in a delightful game, for it satisfies all the child’s inborn love of music and pantomime and emphatic rhythm. When once the initial impetus has been given from above, the movement goes on with its own momentum. Its motive force is not authority but the old indomitable impulse of the blood.

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.”

The Morris cannot properly be called a dance of art; it is a dance of the people. It can never be a substitute for the dance of the theatre. But the popular revival of the old dances is important, not only in providing a new means of emotional expression, but in arousing a new interest in the art of the dance itself. Dancing is a sensitive plant which can only thrive in a congenial atmosphere. In some degree all the arts appear to live by the breath of popular favour. Their activity is stimulated, their expression perfected, by interest, criticism and understanding. The art of dancing has always risen to its highest level when it has been most esteemed; decadence has always succeeded to neglect. “Dancing is an art, let the public remember,” a lover and critic of the dance has said, “which depends on their support for its very existence. The poet, the painter, the sculptor can work for posterity; but the dancer’s art is fugitive, not permanent. If the contemporaries of any dancer fail through ignorance, or dulness, or bigotry, to appreciate her, no one else can.”

If England becomes once more a nation of dancers, bigotry and dulness and ignorance will never again be obstacles to the flowering of the art of the Dance.

CHAPTER XV

THE FUTURE OF THE DANCE

“MEN are so unimaginative! My husband has all sorts of appliances for getting strong quick. He gets up in the morning and pulls at straps, twirls objects and kicks furiously at nothing. Such antics you never saw. Doubtless they have some underlying advantage or he wouldn’t perform them, for he is a practical man. But they are so ridiculous. I always think of Don Quixote fighting the windmill when I see him threatening the air and striking absurd attitudes so seriously.”

It is an American woman who speaks, and she speaks as the mouthpiece of a new idea—the attempt to recreate the lost rhythms of the human body by the means of dance movements. Not the least important of the results of the modern renaissance of dancing has been the rediscovery of the grace of bodily movement by the modern man and woman. The sight of the beauty of human motion on the stage has naturally suggested the idea of the introduction of this beauty into daily life. The dancing of Isadora Duncan, of Maud Allan, of Pavlova and Mordkin, has in fact awakened the ancestral voices of the blood; the spectator can no longer remain passive, but demands to be allowed to take his or her part in the cosmic measure. The speaker continues: “Now, when I get up and feel headachy or as if my body was stuffed with sawdust, I too have my exercise. But, oh, the difference! I start the ‘Marche Militaire’ on my patient phonograph, and the strains are so inspiring that I go through my paces so buoyantly that my husband stops his seesawing to enjoy my dance. Now the difference lies in this, that while I am unlimbering my muscles and starting my blood gaily through my veins, my heart and my mind are also uplifted with the rhythm of music and pose.”

She then describes how when the patient phonograph is giving forth Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song” she accompanies the music with a story related in motion and gesture. “I first point to an imaginary tree, run lightly to it, stretch up and pull down a bough, take it in my arms, then gaily throw it aside. This I do three times in different corners of the room. Suddenly I am attracted by the upspringing grass and trip lightly over it lest I crush it. Then I see flowers on the grass, sit down and gather an imaginary bouquet, then toss it over my head. This I do three times, and perhaps you may think it easy to sit down with one leg thrust forward and then break your pose gracefully in getting up. My mood changes. I hear a bird singing and bend forward to listen with one hand to my ear and my eye following its flight. Then I hear a bird in another direction and follow it. Three times these movements are repeated. The pose is now entirely different, the arms outspread as if in flight. I am by this time fairly enchanted with the spring and give myself up to the abandon of the moment, until my mood is exhausted and I calm down with music into final repose.” At the conclusion of these exercises she remarks: “At this moment I feel as if every part of my body was enjoying an independent existence, but would, if I wished it, take a subordinate position for the common good. That is exercise as it should be.”

The husband, we may suppose, is now thoroughly out of humour with his get-strong-quick methods. But where is his place in this new system by which the flexibility of the body and the exhilaration of the mind are sought in the movements of the dance? The dance, in any other sense than that of a ball-room accomplishment, is generally regarded as unsuited to the masculine character. How often has not one heard the remark that it is unpleasing to see a man dancer. And a man himself would as a rule rather be caught in the act of stealing than of dancing alone or with his fellows. The prejudice is new. It is perhaps characteristic of an artificial society for whose small conventions the liberal code of nature is too broad. In all simple and virile societies men have

been dancers—unless some cramping moral code imposed its arbitrary prohibition—only in more decadent ages have they been content to be passive spectators. The men who fought at Agincourt, the men who fell in the Pass of Thermopylæ, were dancers. Greek manhood would not have been what it was without the dance. The Greek youths danced as simply and unconsciously as the Greek maidens, and they danced among themselves, singly and in groups. Nietsche said a wise word to this generation when he proclaimed his ideal: “Every man fit for warfare, every woman fit for children, both fit for dancing with head and legs.”

America is seeking to discover a dance fit for men. It has found it in a translation of the movements proper to athletics, in an expression in dance form of all the masculine sports, a dance which women could not perform if they tried. A spectator who has seen an exhibition of this new method, which is clearly a revival of the old Greek method, has recorded that “the postures were those of wrestlers or swimmers, or runners or discus and javelin throwers, always preceded by the vigorous dance steps. And none of it was in the least feminine. It was dancing, but it was essentially masculine from start to finish. There was not a suggestion of airy grace; there was more than a suggestion of strength and rhythm and of iron muscles under excellent control.... Then,” he continues, “I began to see the place of dancing in the world, its place as a wholesome natural recreation and as a form of physical training, more effective perhaps than any other, since a vigorous athletic dance brings into play nearly every muscle in the body. I saw that a normal enjoyment of dancing meant a healthy mind in a healthy body. There is no more sane and natural form of exercise than the rhythmic buoyant movements of the dance, performed with the vigour which men throw into it.”

This form of dancing corresponds almost exactly with the Greek gumnāzo, which was the simpler and more exclusively physical of the two divisions of the dance, the groundwork for the orchēsis, the intellectual and emotional expression of bodily movement. The former provided the technique, which was to be mastered not for its own sake, but as a means of furnishing the body with that eloquence by which it could utter the moods of the spirit. Without this training in the dance, the Greek men and women could never have acquired that exquisite harmony, that easy grace of carriage, such as we see in ancient art. It may even be said to have made Greek art possible, for as J. A. Symonds remarked in his “Studies of the Greek Poets”: “The whole race lived out its sculpture and painting, rehearsed, as it were, the great masterpieces of Phidias and Polygnotus in physical exercise before it learnt to express itself in marble and colour.”

The modern revival of the dance will not do the same for the art of our own time until the dance becomes the common property of the people. For the ordinary man and woman dancing provides the simplest, the most natural, the most satisfying means of expression. Self-expression is a faculty the loss of which the modern age is just beginning to be aware of. An earlier age realised it in the arts of the folk—in folk-dance, in folk-song, in folk-lore and in the popular pageants of the Church. For its loss Puritanism is primarily responsible with its vulgar shamefacedness; it was further weakened by the Industrial Revolution, which broke up the old rhythms of social life; and it finally perished when our artistic pleasures became specialised and we chose to become passive, inexpressive spectators of professional artists rather than attempt any artistic expression of our own. Whereas a former age lived out its spirit in a popular music, a popular ballad literature and national dances, the present generation prefers to listen to the wheedling airs of the gramophone, to read a professional journalism and to watch a paid dancer in the music-halls. The tendency everywhere is for a passive enjoyment to usurp the place of an active participation in the arts. But the desire for self-expression is instinctive and irrepressible. In the dance it will find a means of satisfaction—complete, elemental, and one which has the saving quality of beauty.

By no means do I wish to imply that the dance of the theatre will ever be merged in that of the people, still less that it is desirable that it should. The dance of art demands the entire surrender of the artist’s life. It is more than a pastime or a recreation. And as we demand that it shall become more and more expressive, so the study of the dancer must needs become more searching and minute. What new forms the dance is going to take, what new spirit is going to inspire it, only the future can show, but without pressing too far into the region of conjecture, it is possible to suggest the probable direction of its development.

In spite of the renewed vigour which the Russians have given to the ballet, it is difficult to believe that the strict, academic school of ballet-dancing has still a long term of life before it. Indeed the Russians—I am speaking exclusively of the Diaghilew company—have renewed the ballet by revolutionising it. Not only have they utterly transformed its spirit, but they have introduced a new manner and gesture. In Cléopâtre and Scheherazade how little remains of the strict technique of the classic ballet! The ballet is turning away from Milan and looking towards Greece and the East. Anna Pavlova has pointed out the way by which the academic style can find salvation. Her dancing is transitional. From the ballet technique it derives its precision and firmness of outline, but to these are added a fluency, a multitudinous play of the nuances of light and shade, a capacity for expressing an intense personal life. The fatal defect of the academic style is that it is impersonal. It is the geometry of the dance. If the personality of the dancer succeeds in disengaging itself, it is not so much expressed in the movements of the dance as violently imposed upon them. How drearily impersonal it can be, we are realising afresh now that the success of the Russian ballet has let loose a flood of indifferent ballet-dancers upon the stage. It permits a high degree of technical accomplishment divorced from the slightest emotional significance. It is the dance par excellence for the uneducated and unintelligent dancer—and it is she who must be banished from the stage. It justifies the gentle sarcasm of Pius IX. who, when asked for his consent to the presentation of a diadem to Fanny Elssler at Rome, assented, but remarked that in his priestly simplicity he had always believed that crowns were designed for the head and not for the legs. The famous Austrian dancer scarcely merited the reproach, for she above all other dancers danced with the head and the heart; but in general it is a just indictment of the ballet technique that it has disproportionately emphasised the importance of the legs and the feet. In the period of the decline of the ballet, the dancers of Paris and Milan in particular were little more than automata agitated by a pair of muscular legs, which worked with the precision and monotony of clockwork. The modern dance demands expression in every line of the body.

It is certain that the dance of the future will tend towards the fuller expression of personality. We shall not be content to watch dances that are merely dexterous, but only those that reveal a fresh and living emotion. It will follow that the dance must become infinitely more subtle, the body more responsive to the spirit, and the spirit more attentive to the delicate rhythms of life. It follows also that the day of the empty-headed, empty-hearted dancer, the simpering miss of the pink shoes and fixed smile, will be over. We will listen for what the artist has to say to us, and if she remains inarticulate, if she is unable to utter a syllable of poetry or of passion or of wit, we will politely ask her to trouble us no more.

In the future the content of the dance will be immeasurably enlarged. We shall learn that, like the ancient Greek dance, “it deals with every subject, grave and gay, religious and profane, decorous and indecorous; nothing in nature is too high or too low to be outside its scope; it embraces the whole scale of human passions.” When it is grown to its full stature, the dance will probably combine with drama to create a new language for the imagination. Sumurûn, the production of Professor Max Reinhardt, is a type of a new art-form, neither ballet nor pantomime in the accepted sense of the words, of which the future is bound to see a further development. Its medium is gesture, but it is a gesture which, unlike the gesture of the old pantomime, is never merely a transcript of words. The twilight procession of figures to the palace of the Sheikh, moving with the rhythm of a frieze against the blank white wall, was no less than an event in the evolution of the dance-drama, pregnant with suggestive ideas. It presented movements and gestures utterly untranslatable into words, into painting or sculpture—untranslatable even, I think, into music. They were movements which had been caught up out of life itself, and fused by the imagination into pure symbols of beauty and delight, of pride and passion and wit.

The dance, I believe, is still only in its infancy. Is it rash to imagine that the evolution of dancing will be the special achievement of art in this century, as the evolution of music was in the last? There is a whole world of gesture waiting for the dance to take possession of. The rediscovery of the gesture of the ancient world is perhaps the least important part of the undertaking. There lies a broad field for exploration in the innumerable racial and national gestures, each with its separate beauty, and its separate expressiveness. And beyond this stretches the yet more inexhaustible domain of nature, its multitudinous minor rhythms, each various and distinguishable, merging into a grand rhythm of the whole, the eternal rhythm of life itself. Fragments of attitude, phrases of motion, are scattered prodigally up and down the world, awaiting the seeing eye and the understanding mind that can pluck these happy accidents, store them in the memory, and at the proper time build up out of them a new pattern of the dance. When the choregrapher of genius arrives, he will think in gestures, as the musician thinks in sound, and the painter in mass and colour. And when he has realised the lavish abundance of his material, he will pour into it like a molten flood all that there is in the brimming life of our day to fire, to madden, to delight and to rive the heart.

Then it will be the turn of the other arts to look wonderingly upon this figure of the Dance, no longer straying timidly into their company, but coming upon divine feet, with an assured mien and a mature grace, and each will borrow something from her ancient and untiring ecstasy.

INDEX

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, V, W, Y, Z