denying gravity, is wrong. The Greeks usually danced without shoes; bare went the feet of Miss Duncan.

Let it not be supposed that her ideal contemplated an imitation of natural actions, or had any relation to realism. Natural qualities, not actions, she proposed to interpret, not imitate, by means of natural movements. That is at least the inference pointed by the essay referred to, confirmed by her work. “Natural movements” would be defined, if the same process of inference may be followed, as movements whose execution are possible by a normal body without special training. From this it does not follow that uncultivated movements would be acceptable by the terms of the proposition. To raise an arm is a natural movement, hence acceptable to this code. To learn to raise it gracefully, a Duncanite would need to put in just as much time and thought as a ballet student, standards of grace being equal. It does, however, follow that any gravity-defying step would be unacceptable by the terms of the proposition. Without special training it cannot be executed, badly, or at all; which, from the Duncan point of view, would throw it into the class of unnatural movements.

To fix the meaning of the idea of interpreting natural qualities, nothing better can be done than to quote a paragraph of Miss Duncan’s own words: “These flowers before me contain the dream of a dance; it could be named: ‘The light falling on white flowers.’ A dance that would be a subtle translation of the light and the whiteness—so pure, so strong, that people would say, ‘It is a soul we see moving, a soul that has reached the light and found the whiteness. We are glad it should move so.’ Through its human medium we have a satisfying sense of the movement of light and glad things. Through this human medium, the movement of all nature runs also through us, is transmitted to us from the dancer. We feel the movement of light intermingled with the thought of whiteness. It is a prayer, this dance, each movement reaches in long undulations to the heavens and becomes a part of the eternal rhythm of the spheres.”

Fifteen years ago a creed of interpreting qualities in the manner above indicated, by means of dancing, was quite as alien to the United States as was the Greek costume that left the legs uncovered and the feet unshod. The costume probably was as surprising on the stage then as it would be in a ballroom now. And right there comes in the complete artist. Miss Duncan knew she was right, and she went ahead. Perhaps she anticipated the snickers with which a new idea is usually greeted; more likely she was sublimely heedless of immediate effects.

It was in 1899, or thereabout, that she gave a recital in the little theatre of a dramatic school in Chicago, before an audience principally of dramatic students, painters and sculptors. After the performance, which took place in the morning, the painters and sculptors unconsciously grouped themselves into informal committees to exchange verdicts. The general conclusion—arrived at after hours of acrimonious argument, in most cases—was that the young woman had an idea, but that clairvoyancy was required to understand it. At that time, it should be added, Miss Duncan was far from mature in grace, surety or any other of the technical qualities; and her art, naïve though it be, has its technical requirements just as surely as any other art.

It is now necessary to transfer attention to certain people whose path and Miss Duncan’s were beginning to converge.

In Russia the ballet is as definitely a ward of the government as the army is. No more carefully are candidates for a national military academy selected than are applicants for admission to the Imperial Ballet Academy.

Those admitted are cared for as though each were an heir to the throne, given an all-round art education that could not be duplicated anywhere else in the world, and rigourously drilled in dancing six days a week for seven or eight years. As they qualify for it, they appear on occasion in the corps de ballet of the Imperial Opera, dear to the hearts of nobility and a theatre-going public. By the terms of agreement with the government, they are assured employment at specified pay for a specified number of years in the ballet, after which they retire on a pension. The pay is not high, but with it is an assured career and an honourable one, and a likelihood of considerable emolument through instruction, imperial gifts and government favours. Withal a thing not lightly to be thrown away.

Like their contemporaries in Paris and Vienna, the people of St. Petersburg and Moscow (homes of the two Imperial Opera Houses and of the two arms of the Academy) were dissatisfied with their ballet. Beyond the vague charge of lack of interest they could not analyse their complaint. They were puzzled. Training more careful than that given in their Academy could not be. Nor was any school of the dance superior to the composite French-Italian on which the Russian ballet was based. Each detailed objection was answered; yet a decided majority agreed that something was wrong.

Miss Duncan, rightly believing that Europe was more attentive than America to a new idea, had left her native land after a period of neither success nor failure in any pronounced degree. She had interested Paris, startled Berlin, and set Vienna into a turmoil of wrangling. St. Petersburg waited, with interest aroused by echoes from Vienna.

Before the end of the St. Petersburg performance, M. Mikail Fokine, a director in the Academy, had not only declared Miss Duncan a goddess, as he had a perfect right to; he, with others, had invited her to give a special performance in the Academy, and that was against the rules.

The special performance was given; the Romantic Rebellion dates from that hour. In no time at all the secessionists were a body including some of the ablest of both masters and pupils.

With Miss Duncan’s technical limitations or virtuosity they were not concerned. What she brought

them was the vision of the ballet now known to the world as Russian. To lost pensions and the certain displeasure of a firm-handed government they gave no heed. They were complete idealists, bent on a big purpose. Of the stories of that secession that we have had from various participants, not one shows the faintest reflection that any of the band thought of the possible sacrifice of his career. They were not estimating material prospects. They simply saw the vision of something that looked better to them than the art they had known; into the path indicated by that vision they turned without vacillation, and without emotion save enthusiasm.

With the fact that they were the advance guard of a movement that was about to assume a significance equal to that of the Barbizon School in painting and of Victor Hugo in literature, these Russians—boys and girls in age, most of them—were as supremely unconcerned as were Adam and Eve with the destiny of the race of which they were founders. To a group of incomplete artists the epic romance of the thing would have appealed, and there would have resulted columns and reams of print to tell about the inspiration, and all the rest of it. In the consciousness of these Russians—and make no mistake, most of them are alert, intellectually vigourous people—there was no concern about their own value as figures in a romance. They were filled with the excitement accompanying the possibility of radically improving their work.

Spontaneously the pieces of the new structure came together. To M. Fokine the group looked as head. In him they had a choreographer of the highest order, with the imagination of an epic poet. Nijinski and Bolm were prominent men of the group; heading the list of women were Miles. Pavlowa, Lopoukowa, and Karsavina. As a matter of exact history, Mr. Joseph Mandelkern points out to us that the enlistment of Mordkin, Volinine and other important recruits occurred somewhat later; being in the Moscow arm of the school, their first receipt of the romantic impulse was connected with Miss Duncan’s appearance in Moscow, which occurred after the St. Petersburg engagement. The secession at Moscow was largely a repetition of the occurrences at St. Petersburg.

The new cause gained, without delay, the alliance of the musical composers, Glazounov, Rimski-Korsakov. Tcherepnin, and others of stature little less.

Among the forces most important in contribution to the new-born art, moreover, was Léon Bakst, the decorator. M. Bakst, for a number of years, had enjoyed a high and steadily improving position in his craft; he had been variously honoured, he had executed responsible commissions to the satisfaction of every one—with the possible exception of himself. In a comparatively recent interview he is quoted as saying—in effect—that he believed that the function of a painter was to express emotion rather than to record fact. Taking as an instance an architectural sketch before him, he said that if a change of certain classic architectural proportions would add impressiveness, he would not hesitate to make the necessary changes. In other words, he regarded fact as material and not as an object to be recorded for its own sake. So it may be inferred that his success in rather conservative decoration, notwithstanding that it did not lack the note of individuality, was not satisfying to him.

For material for new compositions in which the new creed could be exploited, ballet-master, musician and painter turned unanimously to the legendary lore of Russia and Persia, the intervening land of the Caucasus, and the near-by realm of Egypt. Strange new plots they found; plots of savagery, passion, and mystery. While dancers translated lofty motives into choral and solo steps, musicians worked with mad zeal to render them into tone and tempo. New music was composed, old was seized with avid hand and pounded into its appointed place in the new romantic structure. Bakst—and other painters allied with him—revelled, now in a deep and ominous palette that should spell mystery, again in ardent and seemingly impossible harmonies that sang wild opulence.

In short, the secessionists had attained to a point that marked nothing less, and something more, than a re-creation of the mimetic drama of the best days of Athens. They had achieved that at which the early patrons of opera had consciously but unsuccessfully aimed. The Russian achievement is not to be measured except by a glance back into history.

In the great spaces of the Greek outdoor theatres, actors found their voices inadequate. In consequence, we must accept as essentially true the belief that dramatic representation underwent a more or less definite division into two forms. One body, complying with the world-old demand for explanatory statement to accompany dramatic action, adopted a device to magnify the voice; that device was a small megaphone, concealed by means of a mask. To the unimaginative audience, the resulting falsification of the voice was not objectionable. That species of audience, to this day, is deaf and blind to the message of quality or to delight in it. Its interest centres on narrative and it welcomes diagrammatic aid to its understanding of that narrative. The mask, therefore, was rather satisfying than otherwise to the patrons of the drama that it typified. In labelling character, it was a boon to the intellectually toothless; to whom, moreover, its immobility of expression would not be offensive. That the spoken drama was the popular form, the mimo-drama the aristocrat, seems an unavoidable inference.

To artists and audience versed in the language of symbol, as opposed to imitation; of suggestion, as opposed to diagram; of abstraction, as opposed to material fact—to such performers and connoisseurs the vastness of stage and auditorium presented no inconvenience whatever. To both performer and auditor, the eloquence of pose, step and gesture was sufficient. Indeed, we may suppose that they regarded the spoken word as limiting, rather than amplifying, the meaning of the action it accompanied. The high-heeled cothurnus the pantomimist avoided, for the sake of perfect freedom of foot. To him was open the full resource of facial expression, posture and dance. All of these means, in whole or in part, were denied the wearer of mask and cothurnus.

Rome, consistent with its own level of artistic mentality, chose the less imaginative of the Greek forms. It follows that Greek popular drama is identical with the so-called classic Roman drama.

When the originators of opera set themselves, in the seventeenth century, to the task of recreating a classic form, it is a matter of record that they turned to Rome for their model.

Thus, in availing themselves of advances in the arts of music, scenery and costume, both opera and ballet have strayed from pure classic tradition. And there is no harm in that, per se. But a point to be most strongly emphasised is this: that the Russian ballet has re-created, in its essence, the best of classic drama.

Employment of the full eloquence of step, pose and facial expression, without the restriction that the spoken word imposes upon meaning—that is the paramount distinction of the Russian ballet’s dramatic form. Hardly second in importance is its independence of elaborate stage mechanism as a means to effects. The first opera busied itself with mechanical contrivances to an extent that was commented upon—with amusement—by writers in its time. How far its originators were justified in believing that they had re-created a great classic form needs no further comment. That the Russians, searching for the great fundamentals of art, devised a form practically coincidental with that accepted by the best intelligence of the best period of Athens, is a chapter of dramatic history whose importance is not likely to be exaggerated.

We left the secessionists, on an earlier page, in the position of having defied a strong-handed government. In this crisis, M. Sergius Diagilew enters the narrative, not as an artist, but as one of art’s indispensable allies. He it was who, some years before, had arranged the exhibitions that first acquainted western Europe and America with modern Russian painting. When the rift occurred in the Ballet Academy, M. Diagilew, by virtue of experience and sympathies, was the one man to perform certain needed diplomatic services in the interest of the rebels. Their situation lacked little of being politically serious. M. Diagilew performed the felicitous miracle of turning a fault into a virtue.

To proper government authorities he outlined a plan which in itself deserves a place in diplomatic history. “Contract-breakers these people are,” he admitted, “and on a par with deserters from the army. But instead of punishing them, I have another suggestion.

“They have created a new and great art. Their combined work represents a greater expression than any living man has seen, perhaps the finest thing of its kind that ever has existed in the world.

“Europe respects Russia for her force, not for her thought. Its common belief is that Russia is a nation of savages, because it has seen no purely Russian art that it would call great.

“My proposal is that these people be reinstated in the Opera and the Academy, that they be granted a long leave of absence, and that I be commissioned to arrange for them a season in Paris, as an exhibition of representative Russian art, sanctioned by the Russian government.”

The capital necessary for a full equipment of costumes and scenery was provided by Baron Ginsberg. And there followed the first season of le Ballet Russe at the Châtelet Théâtre, in 1905. Paris, like every other progressive city in the world, was surfeited with plays that would better have been enclosed between the covers of books on law, sociology or medicine. Its ballet, though fighting valiantly against the effect that time works on old governments, old religions, old institutions, had settled into the ways of habit, and could no longer fire the mind or the imagination. As to all that miscellany of “musical comedies” that, with their

concomitant novelties, were wallowing in a gaudy slough of despond ten years ago, Parisians had come to regard them as a highly improbable means even of amusement, leaving edification quite out of account.

The success of the Russians was assured from the first curtain. Here was something that conveyed a message of noble beauty, executed with the skill of the craftsman possessed of all that education can give, fired with enthusiastic genius. Above all, it was a thing that released thought from earth-bound conditions and, with the persuasion of its multiple beauty, invited it to roam the unlimited domain of poetry and magic.

Full appreciation required time, naturally. Here was a creation new in freedom of movement and pantomimic vocabulary: dressed in costumes never seen before; backed by scenery in colours never dreamed of, with a species of line-composition like an alien language; and accompanied by music of a type unfamiliar, to many individuals unknown. Wagnerian music to the unaccustomed ear is confusing as well as overpowering. The Russian ballet presented its equivalent in three different forms acting simultaneously.

The Russian ballet season is now one of the institutions of the French capital. The Russian government annually grants several months’ leave of absence to the necessary number of artists, and Paris for several months crowds their performances. The annual increase in quantity and depth of thought bestowed upon them, as measured in magazine writings, indicates that public satisfaction with the organisation and its work has not yet found its limits.

The seasons of 1909-10 and 1910-11 found a small but admirable Russian ballet in the Metropolitan Opera of New York. Pavlowa, Lopoukowa, Mordkin, Volinine and Geltzer were of the number. They presented many divertissements in opera performances as well as a number of ballet pantomimes. As to their impression on the public, it is most briefly to be expressed by calling attention to the fact that the dancing enthusiasm now strongly rooted in America dates directly back to these Russian ballet seasons in the Metropolitan Opera. Naturally, the public’s lack of knowledge of the language of pantomime and choreography stood in the way of such an immediate “hit” as the same company had made in Paris. But in spite of incomplete understanding, New York was charmed from the first, and appreciation grew rapidly through the two seasons.

The contract was not renewed, nor has the Metropolitan Opera undertaken anything great in choreography since that time, in which it is probably right. Notwithstanding the popularity of the Russians, they did not increase box-office receipts commensurately with the heavy cost of salaries, transportation and incidental expenses.

It is natural, when service is needed, to turn to those whose fitness for such service has been proven. But the opera company, by its service to music, has earned exemption from added responsibilities to art. Since its organisation, the stockholders’ dividends have had the form of deficit statements every year until two years ago. Every year the stockholders wrote their checks to aggregate a quarter of a million dollars or more that opera cost in excess of its receipts. The past two years have turned the balance into the other column. If they chose to, the same set of gentlemen could, in a few years, put the ballet-drama on the same footing; but the sacrifice of money and effort is more than the public has a right to ask. Against appalling odds, the Metropolitan took up the cause of popularising opera. That the task proves other than a labour of love is due neither to skimping nor to lowering of standards, but to quite the contrary policy. The undertaking has succeeded; those connected with it are entitled to a period of enjoyment of their rewards. The American Academy of Dancing, when it is organised, is not morally their responsibility. For its own good, moreover, it had best be an independent organisation, with music definitely relegated to the secondary importance. As an auxiliary to music, the dance has not progressed as it should; only as the sole occupant of one of the pedestals to which the great arts are entitled will it receive the attentive care that it deserves and needs. But this is anticipation of the matter of another chapter.

Since the Metropolitan engagement, Russian ballets have seldom been seen in America except under misrepresentative conditions. Not through intentions to misrepresent, but through tactical errors easily understood in the light of subsequent knowledge, they have been too often advertised in such terms as to prepare their audiences for sensationalism rather than art.

A company including some of the best dancers that Russia has produced was headed by a vaudeville performer whose prominence proceeded from genius in imitations, and whose choreographic aspirations were based on two years (the programme confessed the period) of ballet study. It was believed that her name would be of service to the box-office; it was demonstrated that, by the standards of the supporting company, she was not a dancer. So she did not dance. Obviously, the function of subordinates is to be subordinate; so, perforce, they did not dance, either. People who came expecting to see great things inevitably felt that the Russian ballet was, to say the least, an overrated institution. A consequence even more unfortunate is that many managers draw, from this hapless alliance and its consequences, the deduction that Americans do not like high-class dancing.

CHAPTER XII

THE RUSSIAN ACADEMY AND ITS WORKINGS

His payment for these advantages is complete renunciation of every interest apart from those of the Academy’s curriculum. To one not passionately fond of his art, the enforced devotion to work would spell loss of liberty. As a matter of fact, however, this does not often seem to be felt as a privation. The interests of the school are so varied, and the dance is possessed of such endless allurement, that life within the academic walls is generally felt to be complete in itself. In other words, the contract binding the pupil is not usually felt as a tether, notwithstanding that its operation covers the most restless years in a boy’s or girl’s life.

Seven or eight is the age for entrance, and the contract binds the pupil for nine years of training—which may be reduced to eight if proficiency warrants. At the expiration of this time the government has all rights to the dancer’s services, at a moderate salary, varying according to the rank for which he qualifies in the ballet organisation. From the graduates of the Academy are recruited the ballets of the two Imperial Opera Houses: the Marianski Theatre in St. Petersburg, and the Opera House in Moscow. In both houses, ballet pantomimes are presented twice a week, approximately.

Graduates with an aptitude for teaching are so employed. All of which must cost the government a great deal less than would the alternative of hiring corps de ballet, premiers and premières, and ballet-masters from Paris and Milan. In fact, until half a century ago, foreign talent was depended on for the important work. From its continued use, it may be inferred that the present system is the more satisfactory.

Naturally, a member of the Imperial ballet must have government consent to leave his country; departing without such consent, he automatically forfeits his pension. A few individuals have chosen the high salaries to which their work entitles them in other parts of the world, and deliberately stayed away at the expiration of a leave of absence. To the great majority, however, the pension and artistic conditions attaching to their home organisation have been the greater inducement.

Between performances and their preparation, and teaching, it will be seen that the members of the ballet never need pass an unoccupied hour. They are insured against such deterioration as might result from lack of constant work. On the other hand, they are protected against the danger of overwork. Think of the difference between such conditions and those created by competition! Between engagements, the generality of ballet people under the latter conditions study and train, if at all, at their own expense; and competent coaching costs money. During engagements, the number of supreme efforts of which they are capable each week is considered only by those in whom are combined good fortune and conscience; others arrange their work to economise strength, or else break down.

Of the curriculum of the school we have been told in some detail by Miss Lydia Lopoukowa. During the first year, which is a period of probation, pupils are allowed to visit their parents on Sundays. After that they remain in the direct charge of instructors, in the school, in the opera-houses, and in carriages going and coming; visiting with parents or others is confined to stated times, and is done in the school. If this arrangement seems severe, the answers are to be found in results: if any students of any art attain to full artistic development and perfection of artistry in an equal length of time without similar concentration, enforced either by self or by regulation, then the detachment effected by the Russian Academy is carried to an unnecessary degree.

The curriculum may, for convenience, be divided into two departments, pertaining respectively to technical and general education. The latter is the equivalent of the Continental European gymnasium, which carries the student to a point somewhat more advanced than that which he reaches in the American public high school.

On the technical side, the training begins with the breadth of a general conservatory’s course in the arts. As the pupil’s aptitude and tastes begin to crystallise, his instruction becomes increasingly specialised. The first year’s work covers, besides dancing, a beginning in music, acting, and a certain amount of drawing. The music includes theory and piano. Acting embraces the beginnings of pantomime, along with enunciation, expression and the rest of it.

The dancing tuition is based absolutely on the French-Italian ballet. The undisputed success of the romantic movement, and the prevailing sympathy with its motive, have not shaken faith in the classic as a necessary framework for the support of expression and adornment. An orthodox and unreconstructed Italian ballet-master remains in charge of this department; his influence is not modified until after the pupil has acquired the equilibrium, in short the discipline that is a tradition of the classic school alone. Parallel with this training, however, is instruction and drill in plastic gymnastics, which concerns itself with training the body in grace and expression. The separation of the two courses naturally enables the pupil to keep classic precision clear in his mind; while, having at the same time mastered the more fluid treatment of the plastic gymnastics, he is ready to unite the two understandingly when the proper time arrives, and to combine with their graces the eloquence of pantomime.

Music has sometimes been found to be the natural métier of students whose original intention was dancing. In other instances the embryonic dancer has revealed a genius for acting. In such cases the pupil is encouraged to follow the line of natural aptitude. The ranks of both opera and drama in Russia include women whose ultimate vocations were discovered after they had become proficient dancers. While such cases are not common, neither are they rare; which is rather illuminating as to the quality of the musical instruction.

An acquaintance with musical theory is insisted upon as a part of the dancer’s equipment, though there be no probability of his ever applying his knowledge in any of the usual ways. Music and dancing are so interwoven that the latter’s full meaning can hardly be expressed, or understood, without musical knowledge as an aid. Moreover, of every class of youngsters a certain number are destined to be choreographic composers; to these a knowledge of orchestral possibilities and limitations is indispensable. Indeed it is an asset of the utmost practical utility to any dancer; any rehearsal demonstrates its value. In respect to this department and its lifelong value to those who have had its training, graduates of other academies unite in approval of the Russian.

The course in drawing and painting seems to aim at critical appreciation of beauty, as expressed in the abstract qualities of grace in line and harmony in colour; this in distinction to the regulation art school discipline in proportion and anatomy of the figure. The practical value of such training, in sharpening the power of constructive criticism of dancing, is obvious.

To the accomplishment of all this work—and more that need not be detailed—the pupils are not driven; they are led. Everything is fun. Play is made contributory to the general purpose of training artists. As an escape from realities into that world of make-believe that children crave, pantomimes are practiced evenings after dinner; self-expression is encouraged on these occasions, criticism no more than hinted. As a playground for the girls, a large garden is provided. But the boys, to relax from the restraint of a daily two-hour lesson in French ballet, delight in class fencing lessons. The health of all is under unobtrusive but constant supervision. In each of the girls’ dormitories a nurse is on watch every night, alert for the first unfavourable symptom—and ready, too, we may be sure, with sympathy for any little attack of loneliness. Miss Lopoukowa’s remembrances are not of any rigours of work, but rather of a protecting gentleness.

Diet is studied; the children are trained into hygienic positions in sleep! Hair, teeth, skin, heart, lungs, digestion and nerves are cared for by the most capable of specialists. By no means last in importance to a dancer are his feet; the Academy has its chiropodist always in attendance not only to rectify trouble, but to prevent it.

As the academic years draw toward their close, the pupil receives instruction in supplementary branches necessary to the finished artist. Character dances are not only performed; they are studied in relation to the temperaments of their respective nations. Make-up receives its due attention; with paint and false hair young Russians practice transforming themselves into Japanese, Egyptians, Italians. When they leave the Academy, they know their trade.

Somehow such an institution seems too good to last; yet its excellence is far from being the product of any momentary enthusiasm. Its beginning was made in the first half of the eighteenth century. Ballets had been

presented before the Imperial Court as early as 1675. Peter the Great had insisted on Western dancing as one of the means to his end of bringing Russia abreast of the times. Indeed he is supposed to have learned it and taught it himself, as he did shipbuilding. In 1735 the Empress Anne engaged a Neapolitan composer and musical director and a French ballet-master, and bade them present a ballet every week. Cadets from the military academy were at first impressed into service; which may be contributory to the military exactness of the organisation of the Ballet Academy.

As ballet material, the cadets were gradually (according to Flitch) replaced by boys and girls of the poorer classes, whom the ballet-master trained free of charge. The assignment of quarters to them in the palace, the appointment of a coachman’s widow to take care of them, an appropriation of extra pay to the ballet-master for teaching, may be said to mark the beginnings of the Academy. Its existence has been uninterrupted, and, under the almost idolatrous Russian love of ballet representations, its growth has been steady. A composite French-Italian technique was adopted, as before stated, and kept unmodified until the recent romantic movement had proven its worth. Italian principal dancers were employed until, a generation ago, the need of them was ended by the Imperial Academy’s arrival at a condition of adequacy.

The difference between the romantic ballet and the classic could not be described in an infinity of words, but it can be summarised in a few, and its character suggested in a few sketches. Briefly, the difference consists in liberty to depart from classic restriction of pose and movement, wherever such emancipation will contribute to expression. This freedom inevitably clashes with ballet tenets that have been unquestioned for a hundred and fifty years. The classic keeps the shoulders down; the romantic does not hesitate to raise them, one or both, to portray fear, disdain, or what-not. In the eyes of the classicists, straightness of body (its detractors call it rigidity) is of absolute importance; romanticists, in their Oriental representations, for instance, do not hesitate to exploit the body’s sinuosity to the utmost. Yet, in their apparent disregard of choreographic law, they have preserved rigourously the underlying truth of choreographic structure. Than their brilliant steps those of no dancer are cleaner or more perfect; in equilibrium, in exactness, in all that makes for style and finish, they have no superiors. Nevertheless some of the classic ballet people, especially the Milan element, still protest that the romantic idea, with all its appurtenances, is a heresy. M. Legatt, of the St. Petersburg Academy, is said to group all the new elements into one category: Duncanism!

As the painter Bakst (and with him may be mentioned Boris Anisfeldt and others of the same artistic creed), while preserving recognisable national character in his scenes and costumes, does not scruple to subordinate historical facts to his motives, so does the romantic ballet-master disregard the natural limitations of folk-dances that he may choose to employ in his composition. If it suited the dramatic intention of M. Fokine to bring an Arabian dancer on to the point, or to introduce into her work a pure pirouette, it is fairly safe to assume that he would do so, despite the fact that Arabic dancing itself knows no such devices. It is to be added that although he should make such amendment to an

Arabic dance as known to its own people, his product would express as forcibly the quality of Orientalism as would any dance to be found in Bagdad. The essential difference would be that the composition of M. Fokine would serve the immediate intention of grief, rage, or whatever might be the desired emotion, as well as emphasising Oriental quality.

It will be seen that the means of expression above indicated relieves the ballet pantomime of any limits of scope. The classic, generally speaking, is by its nature confined to fairy fantasies, the play of elves and spirits, Pierrot and Columbine. All that is dainty it renders to perfection. The new school, on the contrary, can treat with complete dramatic impressiveness all the mystic, epic and sometimes terrible imaginings of the Tartar mind. To its advantage it has among its disciples a full supply of dancing men; lack of them has crippled the classic expressions for many years. The woman doing a boy’s part becomes ridiculous as soon as dramatic action departs from the lyrical mood. For this reason, perhaps, both opera ballets and academies of Europe outside of Russia have long lost the custom of staging pantomimes of greater consequence than operatic divertissement. Whereas the Marianski Theatre and the Moscow Opera dedicate two nights a week to ballet pantomimes exclusively, and have done so for many years.

The mimetic dramas that have sprung into life with and as part of the new school draw material from legends dark and savage, lyrical and dreamlike. Cleopâtre is a story of love and a cruel caprice of an idle queen of fabled Egypt. Prince Igor presents a background of the ever-threatening Mongol, a myriad savage horde encamped outside the eastern gate of Europe.

Scheherazade is tropic passion marching undeviatingly into tragedy. In contrast to these are such ethereal creations as Le Spectre de la Rose, Le Carnaval, Les Sylphides, Le Lac des Cygnes, and Le Pavillon d’Armide. Le Spectre de la Rose, composed to the melting music of Weber’s Invitation à la Valse, is a fantasy of a girl who falls asleep in her chair after returning from a ball. In her hand she holds a rose which, in her dreams, turns into a spirit that dances with her, kisses her, and departs. Le Carnaval brings to life and unites in a slight plot a group of such fabled personages as Pierrot, Harlequin, Columbine, Pantalone and Papillon, animated by Schumann music with Russian orchestration. Armide is a figure on a tapestry, who, by magic spell, comes forth in courtly dance with her companion figures and enchants a traveller sleeping in the apartment. Le Lac des Cygnes and Les Sylphides are practically plotless reveries in the field of pure beauty; of tissue as unsubstantial as the rainbow.

Still a third division is exemplified in L’Oiseau de Feu and Le Dieu Bleu. As though to test to the utmost the romantic ballet’s range of expression, these last deal with occult Eastern religion, calling for a treatment purely mystic.

CHAPTER XIII

SOCIAL DANCING OF TO-DAY

Then came the Russian ballet. It showed that dancing, more completely perhaps than any other action within mortal scope, is a means of expression of every emotion humanity may feel. It showed, too, how inconceivably beautiful may be the human body when it is made to conform to the laws of beauty—which are identical with the laws of choreography. And so perfect was the artistry of these demigods from out of the North that “difficulty” became a forgotten word. Every man thought that he felt within himself at least a portion of the essence that animated Volinine, Mordkin, Nijinski; every woman knew she had latent some of the magic of Pavlowa, Lopoukowa, or Karsavina. And they were right. Every normal human is in greater or less degree an artist.

Sudden reactions are usually attended by more violence than discrimination. The appetite for sheer quantity is satisfied before the need of restraint is felt. So with the new dancing that gratified hundreds of thousands of feet suddenly freed from conventional weights on their movements. The Turkey Trot (name to delight posterity) raced eastward from San Francisco in a form to which the word “dancing” could be applied only by exercise of courtesy. Literally, caricaturists could not caricature it; it made caricatures of its devotees. But they were not concerned with that. They were in the exaltation of rediscovery; they were happily, beneficially mad with varied rhythm, marked by free movements of their own bodies. The “trot” was easily learned; the problem became one of finding space in which to dance it, so quickly did its performers fill every floor within hearing-distance of a piano.

The cynical inference that morals or their lack bore any relation to the phenomenon of this dance’s rapid spread, is beside the point. Of the original “trot” nothing remains but the basic step. The elements that drew denunciation upon it have gone from the abiding-places of politeness; yet its gains in popularity continue unchecked. As though to emphasise its superiority to former mannerisms, it is just now urbanely changing its name: it prefers to be known as the One-Step. And in the desire for a new appellation it is justified, since no history ever so vividly recalled the fable of the ugly duckling. The hypothetical turkey whose trot it once portrayed proves, as it matures, to be a creature closely resembling a peacock. The peacock it was whose designation (Spanish pavo) furnished the name of the old Pavane; and the One-Step, moved by some force more potent than coincidence, is now tending strongly toward the form of that favourite of seventeenth-century courts.

With the Turkey Trot came out of the West the Bunny Hug, the Grizzly Bear, and perchance the bearers of other names reminiscent of the zoo. They treated Europe to a mixture of amusement and irritation, but were not destined to long life on either side of the Atlantic.

While North America turkey-trotted, the Argentine Tango was delighting and scandalising Paris. A dance of curious history, the Tango. Certain details of its execution justify the assignment of its remote origin to the Gipsies of Spain. Argentina is an attractive market for Spanish dancing; undoubtedly the original Tango, composed of Gipsy steps and movements, was shown in Argentina soon after its first exploitation in Spain, some forty years ago. To change it from a solo for a woman into a dance for couples needed only rearrangement, plus modification of movements that might not be considered respectable. The latter being a purely relative term, disagreements followed the dance’s appearance in Paris—Argentinian synonym for Paradise. It is to Paris that the prosperous Argentinos go for refreshment; and there they introduced their form of the Tango. Robert, a popular Parisian teacher of social dancing, arranged a version of it to conform to conservative standards, and its spread followed.

The Boston Waltz (the latter word is generally omitted), born in the period when Sousa’s marches and two-steps were omnipresent, existed as little more than a theory until, with the advent of the new dances, it was found to be in tune with the times. With the Tango and One-Step it has come into a family relationship, now borrowing from them for its own embellishment, again lending them a step for the good of their variety. Add to these the Brazilian Maxixe and the Hesitation Waltz, and we complete the list of dances which, at the moment of writing, animate social gatherings on both sides of the Atlantic; inspire restaurant-keepers to provide dancing floors, hotel managers to give thés dansants, with periodical competitions, and instruction if desired; the dances that are successfully demanding for themselves a new and unobjectionable species of dance-hall, and causing grave scientists to debate over them as symptoms—with profound allusions to the so-called “dancing mania” of an earlier century. The extent of the vogue needs neither record nor comment in this place. That which has not been duly noted in the periodical press is the fact that a fashion of rhythmic exercise is proving to be a well-spring of good spirits and a fountain of youth for millions of men and women. Every one benefits by it. None discontinue it. The only people not seeking new steps for their repertoire are those who have not yet found time to make a beginning, or who have been dismayed by the forbidding number of