It is curious to recall the fact that a taste for dancing has always been a characteristic of the Londoners, who have supported really artistic ballet as often as they have had an opportunity.

The Elizabethan masques; the ballet dancers imported by Rich in the reign of Anne; and by Garrick, later; by Lumley at Her Majesty’s in the ’forties; the native productions of Ballet at the Empire and Alhambra for over a quarter of a century; and, since, the importation of Russian ballet, first at various “vaudeville” theatres and then at Covent Garden and at Drury Lane, have all met with enthusiastic support, and the support has been as catholic as it has been cordial.

Dancers, of various schools, whether of the traditional ballet “school,” or otherwise, have quickly found their way into popular favour. Looking back over theatrical memories of the past twenty years or so, dance lovers will recall with pleasure seeing at the Palace Theatre that statuesque and extremely graceful dancer, Miss Mimi St. Cyr, in a delightful little miniature ballet, “La Baigneuse,” a dance-scena invented by Mr. George R. Sims, in which she lured to life the fountain-statue of a piping faun. Some will recall also a dancer of very different school, Miss Lottie Collins, whose “Tarrara-boom-de-ay” was a sensation in its way. Then, too, who that saw her could ever forget that electric dancer hailing from Australia, Mlle. Saharet, who entered as on the wings of a whirlwind and, seeming all compact of

“Passion and power and pride incarnate in laughter,” held us all spellbound and breathless with sympathetic joy in her abounding vitality, stimulating and tonic as champagne.

In more recent times the sensational success of Miss Maud Allan—who presented us with the somewhat mystical definition of dancing as “the spontaneous expression of a spiritual state”; and, subsequently, of Mme. Pavlova and M. Mordkin; is too recent to need recalling, and too evident to call for specific praise from me when so many and abler pens have already exhausted their ink in regretting they could not write in fire. Admirers, particularly feminine devotees, flocked in hundreds to see Miss Maud Allan dance in a manner which many doubtless thought wholly new to London, though some might have recalled that it was somewhat of the same school—though temperamentally very different—as that of Miss Isadora Duncan, who had given us dances of a rather similar order some ten years before, and that they were akin to the mimetic dances of ancient days.

Miss Allan achieved a remarkable flexibility of movement that was seen to advantage in her dances to the music of Chopin and other classic masters. Her interpretation of the “Spring Song” of Mendelssohn was not wholly new to those who had seen Miss Isadora Duncan’s exposition of the same music some ten years before. Her “Salome,” a melodrama in dancing, created a sensation, though somewhat morbid in effect, and hardly of the same artistic interest as some of her other achievements. Of her popularity there was no doubt, and a photograph of one of the queues which awaited any one of her performances, especially the matinées, would—if one exist—always be valuable to future historians of our time as a mute but eloquent record.

Mme. Pavlova, who also first appeared at the Palace Theatre, is an extremely accomplished danseuse who probably has not troubled, and certainly has not needed to trouble herself, about definitions of the dance, for she belongs to a “school,” the basis of which was defined a century or more ago, and she herself is one of its most recent and perfect blossomings. Mons. Mordkin, nurtured by the same school, is superb, and it was no wonder that the first appearance of these two artistes in their wonderful pas de deux, “L’Automne Bacchanale,” should have fired some of our finest dramatic critics to expressions of almost frenzied admiration and doubtless driven shoals of lesser men to the neighbourhood of Hanwell in despair at the impossibility of finding suitable adjectives for the new wonder that had come amongst us. One can only deplore the fact that the harmony which made possible the pas de deux of the first season should have been, even temporarily, broken, and permitted us only to enjoy the work of both dancers subsequently in pas seuls, or in pas de deux—with other partners.

One could hardly close a reference to the popular Palace—a reference necessarily brief, as must be any concerning the various “vaudeville” houses in a review covering so wide a field—without a passing word of grateful praise to that bevy of bright young dancers, the “Palace Girls.” As people of catholic enough taste to enjoy all dancing that is good in itself—from the vigorous cellar-flap of the street urchin to the aerial pas of a Pavlova—we may agree that, in a sense, the Palace has been all the more attractive for the “Palace Girls.” Somehow the modern comedic spirit appears to express itself best in short skirts, shapely legs and a jolly smile; and in their insouciante charm, their neatness, agility, precision and enfantine gaiety, the “Palace Girls” always seemed to focalise the requirements of “vaudeville,” and symbolise the attractions of music-hall modernity.

Then, at the London Hippodrome, in many a Christmas entertainment, ingeniously arranged and gorgeously staged, half pantomime, half ballet, we have seen regular feasts of dancing and always with enjoyment. But apart from the spectacular productions for which the Hippodrome early became famous, many a delightful solo dancer and dance-scena have been viewed there. To have seen those exquisitely dainty artists, the Wiesenthal Sisters, is to have ineffaceable memories of a stage-art that seems strangely enough to link up the classic simplicity of ancient Greece with the Watteauesque artifice of the eighteenth century, and yet again the clear-seeing artistry, the supreme and joyous colour-sense of latter day decorative art. The tone and hue of their chosen background, the simple yet daring colour-scheme of their dress, the thoughtful, almost dreamy, grace of their every pose and movement, the purely picture-like effect of their whole performance, summed up the modern spirit in art that is striving—perhaps as yet half-consciously—for a revolt from old methods and stereotyped traditions and for something simpler, clearer, more direct and, be it said, more beautiful and vital than we have yet had; the art, in fact, of the men to come rather than the men who have been, albeit it has drawn inspiration from the eternal past. The Wiesenthal Sisters were not mere “performers”; they were poems.

Elsewhere, at various houses, what other dancers have we seen of individual distinction? Long remembered must be the sensation caused by Miss Loie Fuller on her first appearance in London some years ago, as the introducer of a curious form of dance in which the stage effects she achieved were the paramount attraction. And what effects they were—kaleidoscopic, magic, wonderful! Just a woman, with a brain and shapely form, a mass of filmy draperies floated here and there, on which were shed the splendour of changing coloured lights, so that she seemed now some wondrous butterfly, now like a mass of cloud suffused with the gold of dawn, now like a fountain of living flame! Yes, Loie Fuller should have been an artist! Should have? Is an artist, who has not painted pictures but has lived them.

Then there was Miss Ruth St. Denis at the Scala—a vision of all the poetry and the mystery of the East. Ruth St. Denis in an Indian market-place representing a snake-dance, making cobras of her flexible arms and hands! Ruth St. Denis as a Buddhist acolyte in the jungle! Ruth St. Denis in a “Dance of the Senses,” so significantly poetic and full of strange allure. Always the glamour of the East, but without its menace and without its vice; the East exalted and austere. Moreau himself might have envied her those dreams of form and colour she made manifest, and all who saw her surely must have realised that Ruth St. Denis danced her lovely pictures as an artist born.

Yet another artist of marked individuality and intellectual distinction, Miss Isadora Duncan, was really the first to appear in London who showed any marked ability to break away from the traditional schools of ballet and step-dancing, and, casting back to the days of ancient Greece, began deliberately to use posture and movement as a means of expressing poetic ideas. I first saw her at her London début, when she appeared in a performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” one of a series of Shakespearian revivals which Mr. F. R. Benson was giving—on February 22nd, 1900—at the old Lyceum.

She had but lately arrived from America, and was fired with an enthusiasm for the graceful dance of classic days, an enthusiasm which found ample expression in her dance as a wood-nymph in a Shakespearian production which I still remember as one of the most beautiful I have seen. Shortly after Miss Duncan gave a special matinée at the old St. George’s Hall entitled, “The Happier Age of Gold,” at which idylls of Theocritus, poems by Swinburne and other poets of classic inspiration, were recited to music and were either accompanied or followed by an appropriate dance designed and performed by Miss Duncan, who also set herself the task of interpreting well-known musical morceaux by means of a dance.

One of the items on her programme was Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song,” which received a thoroughly graceful and sympathetic interpretation. Miss Duncan has, of course, appeared in London frequently since then, and all dance-lovers will remember the extraordinary charm of the series of matinées which she gave at the Duke of York’s Theatre at which she introduced a number of child pupils. There has never been anything meretricious or pretentious about the work of Miss Isadora Duncan. It has always been marked by a sense of deep-rooted culture, classic dignity and poetic charm, and to her, certainly, so far as London is concerned, belongs the credit of having first introduced a form of dancing which has only too often since been parodied under the term of “classic dancing”; and even as she was the first, so, in my humble judgment, she is the best and truest exponent of a school which is justified by the beauty of its results, and which is having, and is likely yet to have, far-reaching influence.

Then again, the Coliseum, young as it is, has already created dance traditions for itself, and of the best sort. Was it not there first of all that we were enchanted with the Russian ballet? They were not the first Russian dancers seen in London, for Mlle. Kyasht and Mme. Pavlova had preceded them; but they were the first collective example of Russian ballet from the Moscow and Petrograd Opera-Houses, and it was here we first saw Mme. Karsavina, one of the most supremely finished and élégante dancers it has been London’s good fortune to see. What lightness, what purity and dignity of style, what perfect execution and perfect ease, and what poetic charm!

Her variation in the “Sylphide” was a revelation of classic art of the Taglioni school, and howsoever some may prefer one “school” to another there must always be much to be said for a training which assists the evolution of such artists, for at least it is a sure training with sure and gracious results.

There is something in tradition when all it said and done, and one has to remember that while even an iconoclastic “Futurist” cannot help creating tradition in attempting to do away with it, and while pure ballet-dancing may not be the one and only kind which can give delight, it must command the respect that is due to any art which respects its own traditions, and can produce such dancers as Mme. Karsavina and those who were first associated with her at the Coliseum.

More recently, we were to see at the same house, “Sumurun!” It was strange indeed to think that a London audience could be held by some seven scenes of a play in which not a word was spoken; it was a tour de force of the art of miming, but then also it was a revelation of the art of stage effect. The decorative scheme, with its simple lines and ample space, was unlike anything that we had had before—unless perhaps in the nobler art of Mr. Gordon Craig—and the colour schemes, mostly of a curiously dry, cool note, were a pleasant change from the traditional attempts at a stage realism that is only too often too unreal.

Since then too there was, of course, the appearance of that dainty Dresden-china dancer, Mme. Karina in a graceful little dance-scena, “The Colour of Life,” the expressive music of which was by Miss Dora Bright. Mme. Karina, another dancer who hails from Denmark, won instant appreciation for the beauty of her work, and is indeed notable for her precision, grace and distinction.

Yet again has Mlle. Adeline Génée made welcome reappearances at the Coliseum, especially in “La Danse”—first produced, I believe, at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York—which formed a series of representations of the dances and dancers of the historic past—forming practically a collection of little cameos of the dance, having a distinct educational value and presenting a veritable re-creation of all the great stars of Ballet in the past, from Prévôt to Taglioni; in all of which the world-famous dancer exhibited the same high qualities of artistry that she had ever done.

But among the many dance productions seen at this handsome house probably the two most satisfactory judged as ballet were the production of Mr. Wilhelm’s “Camargo,” with Mlle. Génée in the title-rôle; and M. Kosloff’s production of “Scheherazade,” the two forming an outstanding contrast in one’s memory. The former, with the quiet dignity, soft light and sumptuous stage embellishments of furniture and décors, and the dream-like quality assumed by the characters in this rich and harmonious setting. One found in it something of that visionary quality which gave the peculiar charm to the “Versailles” production which I spoke of in referring to the Empire. The music and the acting were so expressive that one did not miss the words, and yet half-consciously one knew they were not there just because of the dream-like atmosphere which the music itself so helped to create.

The royal grace and dignity of Louis-Quinze, the butterfly vivacity of Camargo herself, and the more vital and quieter actions of her young soldier friend for whose misdeeds she pleads for pardon from the King, were all but dream figures in a dream, and it was as if the veil of the past had been suddenly drawn aside and one had a glimpse of a century seen through the half light of early dawn. Once more Mlle. Génée excelled herself in doing apparently impossible things with consummate ease, and once more one was glad to welcome the sensitive, expressive and scholarly work of so accomplished a musician as Miss Dora Bright.

There was nothing of the cool and dream-like quality, however, about Mons. Kosloff’s “Scheherazade.” Exotic, bizarre, palpitant with warmth and colour, the production stormed the imagination with its extravagance of hue and tone, even as the tangled rhythms and seductive melodies of the music captured the hearing and through it subdued the mind to a sort of dazzled wonder. It was a stupendous achievement, the more so in that it was brief.

At various times and at various places we have seen in London during the past ten years or so every form of dance and ballet it would seem could possibly exist. “Sand” dances; “Buck” dances; “Hypnotic” dances; “Salome” dances; “Vampire” dances; “Apache,” “Classic,” “Viennese,” Turkish, Egyptian, Russian, “Inspirational” dancers, and even English ballet-dancers in an all-British ballet once at the handsome Palladium; and also at the Court and Savoy, where Stedman staged some delightful ballets performed, under the direction of Miss Lilian Leoffeler and Mr. Marshall Moore, by English dancers. Not only at the regular vaudeville houses and theatres, however, is to be found genuine appreciation of the British dance and dancer. Elsewhere an English school of dance has been founded, and that in a form for which the English nation was famous in Shakespeare’s time.

Henley made his plea for “Gigues, Gavottes and Minuets,” but there are many other lovely, or lovelier, examples of old-world dance to old-world music, which scholarship has revived and good taste has been eagerly accepting wherever they were seen—Pavane, Chaconne, Coranto, Galliard, Bourrée, Rigaudon, Passepied, and Sarabande. These, and other ancient dances, were, as we know, the delight of the Courts of Queen Elizabeth, of Charles II, of Anne, of Louis-Quatorze—le Grand Monarque, of Louis-Seize and Marie Antoinette. Many have been revived and performed to the music of the harpsichord, violin, viola, viole-d’amour, and ’cello; and the curious thing—or, rather, interesting thing, for it really is not strange—is that both to scholars and to those unlearned in their history, to cultured townsman or woman, and to country lad and lass, to bored frequenters of the West End drawing-room, and to those who find only in their dreams relief from the sordidness of an East End environment, this old-world dance and music make an instant appeal.

I saw this put to the test once when, at a hall in the somewhat dingy neighbourhood of Bethnal Green, a performance of the “Ancient Music and Dances,” arranged by Miss Nellie Chaplin, was received by an audience of East End work-people with such whole-hearted enthusiasm that practically every item in a programme often performed in West End drawing-rooms and at Queen’s and Albert Halls, as well as at Liverpool and Manchester, Guildford, Oxford and elsewhere, was encored, and several were doubly and trebly so.

A Galliard of the seventeenth century, an Allemande by an English composer, Robert Johnson (1540-1626), Handel’s Oboe Concerto (1734), a Sarabande by Destouches (1672), “Lady Elizabeth Spencer’s Minuet” performed at Blenheim in 1788—all these and other historically interesting items were encored by the audience, not because of their historic interest, but simply because of their joyousness and charm; while a bourrée by Mouret (1742), and the fascinating Old English dance, “Once I loved a maiden fair” (one of a group including “Althea,” “Lord of Carnarvon’s Jig,” and Stanes’ Morris-dance) had to be given three times. This was all complimentary, of course, to the beautiful way in which the dances and music were performed; but it was an interesting revelation of the eternal appeal to humanity, whatsoever the degree of caste or wealth, of the really good thing in art, and certainly the centuries are bridged with ease by the charm and joyousness of these old-time dances to their appropriate music, seen and heard more recently and to such advantage amid congenial environment in “Shakespeare’s England” at Earl’s Court.

Veritably we seem to have seen every known form of dance and type of dancer in London during the past twenty years or so, and latterly we have had at the Royal Opera-House, and, since, at Drury Lane, such a festival of ballet as has not been seen in England since the ’forties of last century, for here we have seen a galaxy of dancers from the two great opera-houses of Russia, that of the Mariensky at Petrograd, and that of the great theatre in Moscow, where the traditional training for ballet has been kept up and infused with a new artistic spirit such as is hardly to be found in any other continental opera-house.

Early in last century Carlo Blasis brought the Milan school to perfection, and thence went teachers to Paris, Vienna, Dresden, Moscow, Petrograd, wherever they went carrying something of the artistic spirit and culture of their master, one of the most versatile maîtres de ballet there has ever been, for there seems to have been scarcely an art of which he did not know something, and of which he could not say something worth hearing.

But since those days probably nowhere quite as in Russia has the ballet moved with the times and been so imbued with the new artistic spirit which has been at work within the past generation.

Painter, musician, poet, dramatist, and maître de ballet, are called upon to produce the homogeneous and individual spectacle which we call the Russian ballet.

One has to recall but a few examples from the Russian répertoire to note with what serious artistic purpose the art of Ballet is studied by the representatives of the best school. Glazounov’s “Cleopatra,” a “mimodrame” in one act; “Les Sylphides,” a rêverie romantique, the music by Chopin; Schumann’s exquisitely whimsical “Le Carnaval,” made into a pantomime-ballet in one act; “Le Dieu Bleu,” by that curiously interesting and rêveur composer Reynaldo Hahn. These are among the productions which, ranging over classic, poetic and romantic subjects, would veritably have appealed to such artists of the Ballet as Rameau, Noverre, Gardel and Blasis, not to mention other maîtres of more recent times. And what dancers to interpret them! M. Nijinsky, perhaps the best male dancer of our time, so good that one’s usual objection to the male dancer melted into admiration: Mme. Karsavina, Mlles. Sophie Fedorova and Ludmilla Schollar were among the danseuses who had been seen in London previously, and were each in their degree remarkable not only as dancers but as brilliant mimes. There was not one among the extensive and interesting cast who was not of Russia’s best, the best that is that can come from the school where the traditional art of Ballet is understood not to be the result of a mere few lessons in “dancing,” but the result of a study also of all that is best in the traditions of art and music and literature, from all of which the art of Ballet draws its inspiration.

Yet again, one must pay tribute to the Russian artists on their masterly sense of stage effect, and for that supreme sense of what the ballet should be, namely, a harmony of the arts. One has but to contrast three such productions as “Les Sylphides,” “Cleopatra,” and Schumann’s “Carnaval,” to see a revelation of stage artistry which put to shame the conventionality which, save in rare instances—and in English ballet—had characterised the London stage so long.

In “Les Sylphides” we had the very essence of that spirit of romanticism in which cultured Europe was revelling during the ’twenties and the ’thirties of last century, a spirit which found expression in depicting the wildness and grandeur of mountain scenery, in the cloud-like fantasies of Shelley, in the poignant intensity of Byronic passion, and the romantic glamour of Spanish and German legend.

In “Cleopatra” we had a glimpse of the pride and passion of an imperious Queen, ruling over a nation whose own passions were but subdued by tyranny, in a land where earth itself seemed satiated with the fructifying influence of water and a burning sun. From the first moment to the last the stage was in a glow, and a red thread of tragedy deepened to a climax of despair.

What a change to turn from such a production to the whimsies, romance and fantasy of such a thing as Schumann’s “Carnaval!” Here was the obverse of the romanticism of “Les Sylphides”; the undercurrent of mockery and poetic cynicism so characteristic of Schumann’s own music in its lighter moods, characteristic of Heine and of de Musset. Here again one found a masterly idea in the audacious simplicity of the stage setting. To see the great stage of Covent Garden decorated with long curtains and two sofas of the truly early-Victorian pattern—stiff, prim, unyielding, and covered with striped repp—was a thing to take one’s breath away, until, as the music began, little figure after little figure slipped, like figures in a dream, between the curtains: Pierrot, Pierrette, Harlequin—little men and women of the ’thirties mingling with these eternal characters of drama, to make a series of pictures of wooings and repulses, of meetings and partings, of provocations and denials, revealing the comedy of life, seen as it were in a glass “not darkly,” but as a dream far off and mistily; eminently unreal; yet, in some other world far, far away, in some mysterious land of dreams, one felt such things perchance might be.

“Le Sacre du Printemps” was an ambitious attempt at primitivism—if one may use the word—but while disliking its suggestion of megalomania and the formlessness of its decoration, one could not but admire so audacious an endeavour to break wholly with tradition; and it was redeemed by the virility and fantastic, mocking humour and scenic splendour of Rimsky-Korsakov and Michel Fokine’s “Le Coq d’Or,” and still more by the beauty of Leon Bakst and Tcherepinin’s “Narcisse,” and the poetic charm of “Le Spectre de la Rose.”

These, however, are but brief impressions of recent pleasures, shared by many others who may have been differently impressed. We have had many books and articles on the Russian ballet—some perhaps a little over-enthusiastic—and it is not my purpose to deal extensively with history so recent that most readers can as readily give account thereof.

When all is said, the significant fact remaining is—that at this end of the history of an art some two thousand years old we find most recently in popular favour not English ballet as it was in the sixteenth-century days of the essentially English Masque; not French as it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; not Italian, as it was in the ’forties of last century; nor English as we have seen it, at its best, at the Empire and Alhambra in the past quarter of a century; but the Russian ballet! the balance of the arts; which the Russians have only been able to do by sheer technical efficiency—quite apart from ideas or ideals expressed—in all the arts of which ballet is composed, and which has enabled them to do exactly that which they have set out to do. That, perhaps, is the one thing that Russian ballet has shown us, which is of the greatest value and significance for any lovers of the art in any capital of the world.

One may ask, however, what is the position of England in regard not only to ballet, but to the other arts? We have State, and County Council Art and Craft schools; we have the Royal Academy of Music, the Royal College, the Guildhall School, and numerous private schools and “academies” where music and the dramatic arts are taught; all admirable as far as they go. We have, as yet, no State-aided theatre and no State-aided opera-house, to which, as on the Continent, an academy for the study of the dance and ballet is attached. Is it not strange that the richest city in the world should be deficient in these things?

It may be that there is greater vitality in the arts when they are pursued only under the conditions of competitive, private enterprise; but it is curious that in practically every other country the dramatic arts have been fostered by the State, and that we in this country seem ever to show a greater welcome to foreign singers and dancers than we do to our own.

There is, of course, always a great danger that an institution, secure in the support it receives from the State, may become conventional; the spirit of its art may grow arid and unprofitable, but at least it ensures a standard of technical efficiency, and, if there be a vital spirit in the nation, that spirit will show itself in the work of such an institution. Russia has proved all this.

Given a National Opera-House, to which were attached a Royal Academy of Dancing, what might the future of Ballet be in this country?

The answer depends mainly, one feels, on the extent of the possibilities to which the art of Ballet could be realised by those who lead in the artistic expression of the national spirit. The poet, the artist, the musician, the Master of Dance, and the dancers—men and women—realising the possibilities of the composite art of Ballet, might foreshadow possibilities greater than any we have seen. Yet greater possibilities might be foreshadowed of one who was all these things; and could combine (as Mr. Gordon Craig would have the master of the Art of the Theatre combine) all the arts of the theatre.

It would seem that now and then, through lack of technical efficiency in one or other of the arts which go to the making of ballet, that ballet itself has not always attained its highest possible level in England.

But without that basic technical efficiency in the living material which he manipulates, how can the creator of the ballet express himself? A standard of technique at least should exist. That given, what might not yet be done with this art, which history shows has always been so plastic in the hands of the master-artist, so responsive to the artistic or national moods of the people among whom it has been found.

It has the value and significance of painting, together with the vital and impressive effect of drama. It is not the art of depicting reality; but the art of pictorial suggestion, giving life and form to poetic ideas.

At the Royal or Ducal Courts of earlier days the compliment to monarch or to minister would be conveyed by means of a courtly ballet, the story of which dealt outwardly perhaps only with the doings of some mythic hero of the classic past. But the art of Ballet always had greater possibilities than courtly compliment, in that it is always a plastic vehicle for the expression of all ideas; and, given the standard of efficiency which makes production possible at all, it only becomes a question of what theme shall be treated by this means rather than by the arts of painting, or of music, or drama, or of literature.

On these two points—the standard of technical efficiency attained by those associated in the production of ballet, and on the choice of theme and manner of treatment by the artist-mind ultimately responsible for the production, depends the whole future of the art of Ballet. The spirit of the artist and his means of expression; there lies the future.

What shall be the technique of ballet, and to what extent shall it be influenced by that of the dance?

To-day, the forms of dancing are various, but there are three main divisions: first, all popular forms of “step,” or, to adopt an old and useful term, “toe-and-heel” dancing; secondly, the traditional “toe”-dancing of classic ballet, capable of every nuance of expression; and thirdly, the various forms of rhythmic movement and effects of poise, which seem to approach nearly to the ancient Hellenic ideal of the Dance, and of which Miss Isadora Duncan was perhaps the first exponent in England, as Mrs. Roger Watts is the latest; while yet another phase of the same ideal is seen in the Eurhythmic system of Jacques Dalcroze, which has had, and will have, great influence in many directions.

We have seen on the London stage ballets in which the dancing was almost wholly “step”-dancing, toe-and-heel—such as “On the Heath,” at the Alhambra; we have seen numberless ballets in which the traditional “toe”-dancing was paramount, from “Coppélia” to “Roberto il Diavolo,” or the later productions of the Russians; we have not yet seen a ballet composed entirely, or even mainly on the lines of the Hellenic revival, though we have had hints of it in concerted dances by pupils of Miss Duncan and others, and the complete thing may yet come, though, personally, I question the advisability. We have already had some curious, interesting, and not quite illogical attempts to suggest scenic effect by means of living people performing appropriate and rhythmic movements, as in the production of Mr. Reginald Buckley’s poetic drama “King Arthur.”

In one or other of these three divisions of the dance and the respective technical advance in each, lie the chief means of artistic expression for the master of ballet in the future, and it may be that the traditional “ballet”-dancing, with its marvellous flexibility of expression, will, so long as the present standard of technique is sustained, always maintain its supremacy over the purely popular forms of dancing, and the newer modes of rhythmic movement and gesture. It has at least stood the test of time, as a definite and logical medium of artistic expression.

As to the master-mind that is to select one or other of these forms of the Dance, and combine it with miming, music and scenic effect to achieve a ballet that shall be the medium of ideas, worthy to range as a work of art alongside the tried masterpieces of painting, music, drama or literature, it may be questioned if we shall see anything worthier than the past has given us at its best. Some new Noverre or Blasis, Wilhelm or Fokine may yet arise, of course; but until such a one come forth we may be well content with the standard which the Past has managed to achieve.

To that standard this volume is a willing tribute; a faithful record, which may have novelty for some, unaware of days before their time; while for others, whose memory of more recent—but yet receding!—events, grows dim, it may come as a friendly reminder of pleasant hours spent, by writer and by reader, in contemplating from the auditorium the varied examples seen at London theatres of the protean Art of Ballet.

THE END