arduous course of training which forms the solid groundwork of her art. She was instructed by her uncle, Alexander Genée. She also profited greatly by the strict supervision of her aunt, who, it is interesting to note, was a Hungarian. If, indeed, there be any natural magic in the dancing of the natives of Eastern Europe, it must have passed into Genée’s style long before the Russian dancers were heard of in this country. Her aunt was her most vigorous and helpful critic; when she pleased her audiences she was glad, but when she pleased this exacting connoisseur she was content. Madame Genée made her first appearance at the Opera House at Copenhagen; at the age of sixteen she was dancing at the Royal Theatre in Berlin, from whence she proceeded to Munich. It was there that she received that telegram which may be said to have determined her subsequent career—the invitation to take the position of première danseuse for six weeks at the Empire Theatre, London.

She made her début in England in Monte Cristo, in November 1897. She has remained the popular favourite of the English public ever since, and perhaps not of the English public only, but of the American also. Amid the crowd of dancers of all nationalities she has maintained her pride of place. In Vineland her dancing first seemed to attain its full brilliance. Then followed the Milliner Duchess and High Jinks, the latter notable for the famous hunting scene in which the verve and spirit of her dancing won all hearts. Finally came Delibes’ Coppelia, an example of the classic ballet at its best. Coppelia was to Genée what La Sylphide was to Taglioni, Giselle to Grisi, and Eoline to Lucille Grahn. Naturally it is, as she told me, her favourite ballet. But perhaps her triumph in the Dryad was even greater. It gave her an opportunity for displaying not only her marvellous technique, but also a perhaps half-unsuspected power of raising and expressing emotion. It afforded scope for the range of her feeling and revealed the actress beneath the dancer. In the first scene she comes out of the tree trunk in which the jealousy of Aphrodite has imprisoned her. Once a year she is allowed to roam abroad and delight in the sunlight and the flowers and the breeze. Her heart is on fire with joy at all the sights and sounds about her; but a still greater joy is in store for her—she meets a shepherd who falls in love with her. She relates her story to him in gestures which are as explicit as speech, and tells him he must go away and return at the end of ten years—she delightfully counts out the tale of years on the flowers she has gathered. If throughout the ten years he is faithful to her she will be released. The ten years pass, and on an autumn evening she comes out of her tree prison once again. Will he come? She is sure of it and dances for joy. Will he come? She searches for him eagerly through the meadows and down the glades. Will he come? Troubling doubts assail her, and her eyes begin to fill with despair. Will he come? Of course he will. She is still rippling and glowing with joy. She hears his voice. He is singing the old familiar love song. He is there, and on his arm is a human shepherdess to whom he is singing the song that once was only hers. The faithless lover and his new-found love pass through the meadow and down the glade, and then the Dryad, forsaken and forlorn, turns to the sheltering trunk in which she can hide herself and her despair.

The fable is slender as a fairy tale, yet it gave Genée the chance of showing that she could pass from one emotion to another with the same rapidity, ease and expressiveness that mark her steps. She was by turns elfish, tender, sad, merry, passionate or despairing. In the first moments after escaping from the imprisoning tree, her dancing was full of that quality which so often inspires it—the spirit of the eternal child.

But the first and foremost quality of Madame Genée’s dancing is its technical perfection. If there is such a thing as a physical genius for the dance, independent of the qualities of the spirit, that genius is hers. She reveals it in the mere act of walking across the room. There is a brilliance in her movement, a resiliency in her tread, that distinguishes her from all other women. If the ancients were right in attributing four elements to the composition of the body, one would say that hers was compounded solely of air and fire. But whereas many dancers might have relied almost entirely on this natural genius, which is hers by right of birth, Genée has added to it a training which in severity, conscientiousness

and thoroughness perhaps few dancers have equalled. For years she has spent four hours a day in front of her huge mirror practising her steps, usually under the careful supervision of her uncle. “I have given my life and myself to my dancing,” she says, and the words are true in a very special and literal sense. She has served her art with almost the rigour of asceticism. She avoids wine. She eats sparely. She shuns a supper-party. When her work is over her day is done, and she drives from the theatre home to bed. She has fulfilled to the letter Ruskin’s affirmation that an artist must submit to a law which it was painful to obey, in order that she may bestow a delight which it is gracious to bestow.

In proficiency in the strict, classical school of ballet-dancing, it is possible that Madame Genée has never been surpassed and perhaps not even equalled. Within these limits her work is faultless. Every detail is sedulously studied, and is executed with accuracy and ease. The position of the fingers, the lines of the arabesque, the resumption of the exact attitude at the end of no matter how many and how rapid pirouettes—everything is as exact as if it had been drawn by an artist with infinite leisure for correction, instead of executed in the heat of the moment without an instant’s pause between one movement and the next. Every step has its name; every gesture belongs to its code; there is one way and no other of executing them rightly, and that way is Madame Genée’s. But the dance is too rapid and too flowing to be dissected into its constituent parts. The connoisseur recognises them and knows that the apparent spontaneity is obtained only by the mastery of a science as strict as mathematics; the spectator uneducated in the dance remarks the general effect of beauty, and is instinctively aware that the performance has something of the qualities of a masterpiece of art. But this extreme physical sureness and dexterity is not without its dangers. The dancer is tempted to exhibit mere tours de force which a less proficient performer would be saved by her very incompetence from attempting, and the temptation is the greater through the knowledge that these are the accomplishments which call forth the most tempestuous applause from a public that cares less for the beautiful than for the marvellous. In a recent divertissement, A Dream of Butterflies and Roses, no movement, not even the magnificent circles made backwards with wide flying steps, excited the audience to such a pitch of enthusiasm as one particularly trying piece of gymnastic—a slow rising from the ground on one pointed toe. But Genée’s mastery of technique is so complete that the least hint of strain is eliminated and even this somewhat acrobatic feat was almost transformed into a delightful flow of grace. The ease with which she overcomes technical difficulties creates a delight of its own, cheating one’s fears, and compelling an admission of beauty where one had dreaded to see only athletic prowess.

To this technical perfection Genée adds certain spiritual qualities which are all her own. As I have said, the Dryad revealed a dramatic ability which had been perhaps overlooked in the admiration of her pure dancing. This capacity for pantomime would probably have been earlier appreciated if the ballets at the Empire had allowed it more scope. But the peculiar note of her spirit is an abounding gaiety, as clear and elemental as that of a child, affecting the heart like vital and exhilarating laughter. There is a kind of arch-merriment in her dancing which seems to flow out of the pure exultation of movement, at times almost threatening to break through the restraints of technique and convert the dance into a romp. But the elasticity of the dance is always great enough to meet the freest ebullience of spirits; there is, as it were, no leakage of vitality; every atom of force is spent in steps and movements that never lose their precision and exactitude. Genée’s dancing refutes those detractors who assert that the academic style of the ballet is a fatal limitation to the artist’s freedom of expression. She shows that, when it is brought to the perfection to which she has developed it, it is fluent and elastic enough to express the extremes of, at any rate, the more volatile emotions. The hunting dance in High Jinks carries the dance as far in the direction of high spirits, of exhilaration unmixed with passion, of sheer delight in the physical fact of life, as it can possibly go. The spirited little horsewoman in the black riding-habit, that clings closely to the lines of her gay and lithe

figure, has an air at once of fragility and vigour; she is borne through the air on her dashing leaps, she curvets, she caracoles, the slender steely limbs make nothing of the weighty burden of the skirt and boots—and yet it is all done with such a whirl and wind of enthusiasm that the motive force appears to be not muscular activity but merely a fever of the blood. All the jollity, all the glorious high spirits, all the high-heartedness, all the intoxication of delight, in all the hunting mornings that ever were, are concentrated in that swaying, swirling, leaping, laughing figure.

There is something essentially of the North in Genée’s dancing, a freshness and energy like that of the north wind, a hint of the athlete in the vigorous clean-limbed movements, an absence of passion, a purity, shall we say a coldness? Her spirit seems to belong to the heights rather than to the depths. It is bright rather than subtle. It is full of high lights but lacking in half-tones.

Although “finish” in a technical sense is the peculiar characteristic of Genée’s art, it is not marked by those almost indefinable nuances which give the dance, no less than the painting or the poem, a quality with which not even the finest workmanship can endow it. These refinements belong to the region not of the intelligence but of the spirit, and cannot be laid hold of by analysis. They depend upon a very delicate perception, upon a subtle responsiveness to the rhythm of life. Underlying the precision of her work is a kind of crudity. There is no mood of creative beauty. The outline is firm rather than tender. The emotional qualities of the dance are explicit, simple and wholesome, but they are never subtle, nor do they appear to be nourished by a great depth of spirit. We miss the suggestion of those moods that are elemental and incalculable. There is a gladness that cannot show itself in frolicsomeness, and there is an ecstasy too near to tears to have any likeness to high spirits. Perfect within its own domain, we feel that beyond the frontiers of her art lie tracts of the spirit unexplored.

To Adeline Genée England in particular owes a debt greater than to any other dancer. It was she who continued, or rather restored, the tradition of the great dancing of the earlier half of the last century. She aroused enthusiasm for the ballet in an age when that enthusiasm had grown cold. She helped to put an end to a perverted form of dancing. Her example shone out with a clear light in that thick darkness just before the dawn, and for more than a decade she remained true to her ideals through good report and ill. It is safe to say that when the devotees of many other deities of the dance have ceased to kindle their tapers, her own shrine will always be brightly illuminated.

Mr Max Beerbohm has paid her a notable tribute, which has all the more value seeing that he confesses that for him the ballet has no meaning. “No monstrous automaton is that young lady,” he said, writing of her performance in Coppelia in 1906. “Perfect though she be in the ‘haute école,’ she has by some miracle preserved her own self. She was born a comedian and a comedian she remains, light and liberal as foam. A mermaid were not a more surprising creature than she—she of whom one half is as that of an authentic ballerina, whilst the other is that of a most intelligent, most delightfully human actress. A mermaid were, indeed, less marvellous in our eyes. She would not be able to diffuse any semblance of humanity into her tail. Madame Genée’s intelligence seems to vibrate in her very toes. Her dancing, strictliest classical though it is, is a part of her acting. And her acting, moreover, is of so fine a quality that she makes the old ineloquent conventions of gesture tell their meanings to me, and tell them so exquisitely that I quite forget my craving for words.... Taglioni in Les Arabesques? I suspect, in my heart of hearts, she was no better than a doll. Grisi in Giselle? She may, or may not, have been passable. Genée! It is a name our grandchildren will cherish, even as we cherish now the names of those bygone dancers. And alas! our grandchildren will never believe, will never be able to imagine, what Genée was.”

Is there a young English dancer of promise who will one day vindicate the honour of England and succeed to the place which Genée now triumphantly holds in the popular favour? Miss Phyllis Bedells is a possible candidate for fame. She has recently taken the principal rôle in Sylvia at the Empire in the absence of Madame

Kyasht, but she danced more happily in her original subordinate part. Her dancing has a charm which in some measure is enhanced by its very faultiness. It is the charm of immaturity, the suggestion of the delightful gambolling of a young animal at play. Her training, so far as it goes, has been painstaking, but what chiefly distinguishes her performance from the routine work of the average English dancer is an unaffected zest, almost a vividness of delight, which the obvious troublesomeness of the technique is unable to depress. The main difference between the would-be dancer and the born dancer is that the dance of the former is always the repetition of a lesson, whereas every dance of the latter is like a new creation. So far as it is already possible to judge, Miss Bedells belongs to the latter class.

If the English ballet has yet produced no native ballerina worthy to rank with the great Continental dancers, the absence of a male dancer of any distinction is still more remarkable. An exception can scarcely be made in favour of Mr Fred Farren, who fills the dual rôle of premier danseur and maître de ballet at the Empire. Neither as a composer of dances nor as an executant has he created anything that calls for special notice. His most successful achievement has been an adaptation of the French Apache dance. La Valse Chaloupée was originated, or rather popularised, by Max Dearly and Mademoiselle Mistinguette, a dancer who has brought into the dance all the nervous excitement of modernity. In introducing the Apache dance into A Day in Paris at the Empire, Mr Farren modified its more outré characteristics and at the same time gave it a more deeply passionate and dramatic significance. His able partner, Miss Beatrice Collier, imported into it a note of human tragedy that was more moving than the mere devilry of Mistinguette.

Probably the real reason why England has failed to produce a great school of ballet is principally owing to the absence of a maître de ballet of genius. The late Madame Katti Lanner and Madame Cavalazzi both possessed a thorough knowledge of technique, and were capable of designing dances that were suited to the capacities of their pupils; but their ideas were limited and their imagination feeble. There is no reason in the nature of things why English dancers should not rise to the same level of excellence as those of St Petersburg or Moscow. Probably the material is there, but the artist who can mould it into a design of the highest plastic beauty is lacking.

The dancer, after all, is very much in the position of a pawn in the game. She can provide an individual note of fine quality and tone, but it requires the genius of a master to provide the orchestration. The ballet is perhaps more responsive to the attitude of the public than any other branch of art, and the absence of a public seriously and critically interested in the dance has doubtless been responsible for the fact that the ballet has failed to attract the energies of men of talent. The priority of Russia in the art of the ballet is due above all else to that atmosphere which England lacks, an atmosphere of keen and enlightened criticism, of understanding sympathy and serious interest, among the public at large no less than among the artists themselves. That this is a condition absolutely essential to the success of the ballet is clearly shown in an instructive passage by the writer whom I have quoted at the beginning of this chapter.

Speaking of the excellence of the Russians he says:

“This sort of perfection in an art is the result of a long process. The artists are not only trained to it; they are born to it. The same names occur again and again in the history of the ballet; sons and daughters follow the calling of their parents, and find themselves wives and husbands among their fellow-dancers. Their limbs exist only for grace and suppleness, and are never stiffened by any other use. All their lives are devoted to dancing; and it is the constant occupation of their minds. A ballet-master is not an accident or sport of nature, but one who is acknowledged by his comrades to excel them in the sort of imagination in which they all share. A certain Russian, living in St Petersburg, was frequently puzzled by the strange behaviour of the guests in a flat across the street. An aged lady lived there, and once or twice a week she held receptions, and the strangest leapings and gyrations could be dimly seen through the curtains. In the end the aged lady

proved to be Mademoiselle P., the once famous dancer and daughter of another famous dancer, and these were her friends from the Corps de Ballet who came to take tea with her; they were merely talking ‘shop,’ and incidentally illustrating their ideas by showing each other various steps. Monsieur K., the ballet-master, composes ballets as he walks, and is watched by suspicious policemen swaying and waving his arms, while he goes absent-mindedly along the streets. When the Russian ballet was in Vienna, the guests in a certain hotel were roused more than once in the middle of the night by a heavy bumping and clatter from the room above. ‘It is all right,’ one of the dancers explained to a nervous stranger, ‘it is evidently K. composing a ballet.’ An idea had occurred to him in bed; and as Strauss, the waltz-maker, in those circumstances used to jump out to note a tune on his tablets, so Monsieur K. had to jump out and dance it. Undistracted by other things, a ballet-master goes about the world gathering all the scattered beautiful gestures, the nice correlations of innumerable details (and how the tilt of the chin or the pathos of a smile just crowns the perfection of an attitude of Pavlova’s or Karsavina’s!), and keeps them ready to issue, in organic order, from his mind at the inspiration of the appropriate musical phrase.”

It is to be feared that the English ballet-dancer does not take herself sufficiently seriously. It may even be that she is a little ashamed of herself. One has the uneasy feeling that she regards dancing as merely a stepping-stone to higher things—to musical comedy for instance! It is her profession, not her art. Not until English dancers begin to realise the significance of the dance as art and to create that choregraphic atmosphere which at present appears to exist only in Russia, shall we have a true renaissance of the Ballet in England.

CHAPTER XIII

ORIENTAL AND SPANISH DANCING

IT does not require a very minute observation to discover that peoples are distinguished not only by their speech, but by their habitual movements and attitudes. Every country has its special unspoken idiom of gesture, which sometimes differs in different parts of the same country as perceptibly as the spoken dialect. This characteristic gesture is the foundation of every national dance, which does but elaborate and adorn it.

The composers of the Russian ballets have achieved novel and interesting effects by using this racial attitude as the basis for the scheme of some of their dances. In Cléopâtre they have adopted the attitude of the ancient Egyptians, or rather those attitudes which are depicted on the pottery and frescoes of the old Egyptian civilisation. Whether these attitudes were ever really typical of the attitudes of the people is at least questionable. It is quite as likely that they were an artistic convention of the time, due to the naïve conceptions of the draughtsman. But there can be no doubt that ancient Egypt had a characteristic alphabet of gesture, as individual as that of ancient Greece, although probably it has been exaggerated in the designs on the figured monuments by the faultiness of the perspective. This circumstance, however, does not render it any the less serviceable as an element of design in the dance. In Scheherazade, again, Nijinsky’s dance is based upon the abrupt, angular, almost apish movements of the negro.

With Italians gesticulation so inevitably accompanies speech that it is not surprising that the ballet should have been originated and perfected, at all events so far as its pantomime is concerned, in Italy. Of course, as a people becomes more intellectual, and learns to express all the nuances of thought by means of language alone, it relies less upon the elucidation of gesture. Anglo-Saxons are naturally schooled in reserve and seek to avoid any betrayal of the emotions by physical expression. The national gesture nevertheless exists and finds its embodiment in the national dance, the Morris. America can scarcely be said to have any national dance, unless it be the cake walk, which is plainly stamped with all the ungainliness of negro movement. But American vaudeville artists—I am thinking of some who have danced this year in London—seem almost unconsciously to have seized upon the American gesture and realised it in their dances. Naturally they have distorted it; they have given it the immoderate energy of American life, the exaggeration of American wit, and the sensationalism of American advertisement. Who knows but that they will end by giving America its national dance!

The lines of bodily movement in the West are radically different from those of the East. The quality of action in the West is energy and abruptness; it tends to express itself in angles rather than in curves. The gesture of the East moves with the lethargy, the subtlety, interrupted by sudden bursts of violence, that are characteristic of the Eastern temper. Nothing could be less suitable to the tranquillity and torpor of the East than the swift and intricate dances of more bracing climes. It may be affirmed as a rough generalisation that Western dancing gives the greater importance to the feet, Eastern dancing to the body. In many of the most characteristic Oriental dances, the body revolves around its own axis, as it were, while the legs remain stationary. Equally with the motions of the body, the Eastern dance has made extraordinary use of the motions of the hands and arms. It has found an invaluable auxiliary in the extreme refinement of the Eastern woman’s hands, which always seem so infinitely more expressive than the passive oval mask of her face. For me the eternal, the essential gesture of the East is symbolised in the movement of a woman’s hand that I saw through the iron grating of a koubba on the edge of the Sahara—for where the Arab is, there is the East. The woman herself I did not see, for she was

crouching upon the floor against the tomb. But her whole body could not have expressed her character more revealingly than her hand, with its fingers stained at the tips with henna to a bright orange colour and as astonishingly slender as those of a Madonna in a primitive Italian painting. I think I should scarcely be believed if I tried to tell how much there was of resignation, how much of a refined voluptuousness, in its delicate gesture.

Eastern dances, performed by really skilled Eastern dancers, have not yet been seen upon the European stage. Of course the Ouled-Nails and the hired almées of the Algerian cafés introduced the danse du ventre to Paris at the time of the first Exhibition. It would be easy to dismiss this dance with contempt if one had not seen it danced with a certain barbaric sincerity, far away from the atmosphere of cigarettes and liqueurs of the cafés of Biskra and Tunis. After all, a dance is very much like the Spanish inn of the olden days—you find in it principally what you bring to it. And so acute an observer as Lady Duff Gordon found in the danse du ventre an intensity that gave it a kind of dignity. “I could not call it voluptuous,” she says, “any more than Racine’s Phèdre; it is Venus ‘tout entière à sa proie attachée,’ and to me it seemed tragic. It is far more realistic than the fandango and far less coquettish, because the thing represented is au grand sérieux, not travestied, gazé, or played with.”

But the dancing of the East, or rather of India in particular, has found a very skilled translator in a dancer of American origin, Miss Ruth St Denis. I believe it is true that Miss St Denis has never actually been in India, but she has mixed freely with Indians; she has studied their art, their religions, their character, she has penetrated into the spirit of the people as far as it is possible for a Westerner to do so. She has, in fact, caught the gesture of the East. Her dancing has for the most part a religious and symbolic character—for it should be remembered that, besides the dances founded upon the passions, the East has evolved a whole range of dances illustrative of philosophical ideas. Buddhism has carried the symbolism of the body to an extraordinary degree of refinement. The locking and unfolding of the feet, the uplifting of the arms and the hands, even the very curves of the fingers, have all their esoteric meaning. The system of symbolism has so penetrated the actions of the dance that not infrequently the sequence and shades of the dancer’s movements are unintelligible to an uninstructed eye. Thus the slow dance movements which Hindus contemplate with delight for hours, though they may appear drearily monotonous to the European, are full of instruction to the initiated. The ritual of the dance is almost as intimately connected with Buddhism as the simpler ritual of the altar with Catholicism. The wealthier temples possess trained bands of dancers, a sort of vestal virgins, known as Devadassis, the slaves of the god. They have the happy and pious custom of dancing twice daily before the images of the gods, once in propitiation of their own sins, once in intercession for the sins of the world. It is the posturing of the Devadassi, rather than the dancing of the more voluptuous Bayadère, that Miss Ruth Denis has sought to reproduce.

In her physical qualities, Miss St Denis is well fitted to represent the type of the East. While her beauty has much of the allure of sex, it has also that childish character which seems peculiar to the women of the East. Her figure is exquisitely slender and her arms are as supple, her hands as refined, as those of a Hindu. The way was prepared for her to a certain extent by the success which Miss Isadora Duncan had already achieved, and when she gave a series of fashionable matinées in New York in 1906, previous to her descent upon Europe, her recognition was immediate.

When she appeared at the Scala Theatre in London in 1908, Miss Ruth St Denis was accompanied by half-a-dozen natives, who supplied a note of human colour to the pictures of the street, the palace and the temple, which formed the background of her dances. In most of the scenes, the mystic atmosphere was assisted by the subdued light, the odour of incense and the native melodies embodied in the striking music of Herr Walter Meyrowitz. Her performances took the form of brief acts, illustrative of native life.

The Cobra Dance was, strictly speaking, not a dance at all, for it was performed in sitting, crouching or kneeling postures. The dancer appeared in the rôle of a snake-charmer, and throwing off

her mantle revealed her arms clasped over either shoulder, like two coiling snakes. On the first and fourth fingers of each hand two enormous emeralds gleamed like serpents’ eyes. The arms slowly unwound and with a curiously sinuous motion began to writhe about her body. They twined, coiled, fought and darted with lightning flashes in all directions, simulating the movements of the reptile with astonishing fidelity. It was a marvellous exercise in the flexibility of the arms.

The Dance of the Spirit of Incense was set in a scene representing the women’s quarter of an Indian house. The dancer entered bearing aloft a bowl of smoking incense. With solemn, hierophantic gestures she kindled the two censers that were placed on either side of the stage, and, as the smoke curled upwards, she danced gravely and slowly, all the motions of her body subtly responding to the rhythm of the wreathing smoke and flowing so imperceptibly one into another that they seemed less a sequence of separate movements than a single continuous thrill passing from the feet to the finger-tips.

But it was in the Nautch and the Temple Dances that Miss St Denis really established her claim to rank as a dancer of the first order. Clad in a dress of vivid green spangled with gold, her wrists and ankles encased in chattering silver bands, surrounded by the swirling curves of a gauze veil, the dancer passed from the first slow languorous movements into a vertiginous whirl of passionate delirium. Alluring in every gesture, for once she threw asceticism to the winds, and yet she succeeded in maintaining throughout that difficult distinction between the voluptuous and the lascivious. The mystic Dance of the Five Senses was a more artificial performance and only in one passage kindled into the passion of the Nautch. As the goddess Radha, she is dimly seen seated cross-legged behind the fretted doors of her shrine. The priests of the temple beat gongs before the idol and lay their offerings at her feet. Then the doors open, and Radha descends from her pedestal to suffer the temptation of the five senses. The fascination of each sense, suggested by a concrete object, is shown forth in the series of dances. Jewels represent the desire of the sight, of the hearing the music of bells, of the smell the scent of flowers, of the taste wine, and the sense of touch is fired by a kiss. Her dancing was inspired by that intensity of sensuous delight which is refined to its furthest limit probably only in the women of the East. She rightly chose to illustrate the delicacy of the perceptions not by abandon but by restraint. The dance of touch, in which every bend of the arms and of the body described the yearning for the unattainable, was more freely imaginative in treatment. And in the dance of taste there was one triumphant passage, when, having drained the wine-cup to the dregs, she burst into a dionysiac nautch, which raged ever more wildly until she fell prostrate under the maddening influence of the god of wine. Then by the expression of limbs and features showing that the gratification of the senses leads to remorse and despair, and that only in renunciation can the soul realise the attainment of peace, she returns to her shrine and the doors close upon the seated image, resigned and motionless. So she affirmed in choice and explicit gesture the creed of the Buddha.

The art of Miss St Denis is not free from adventitious elements. It is too much concerned with the expression of ideas to give itself up wholly to the creation of beauty. It is symbolic, but not in the large, suggestive way in which Isadora Duncan’s dancing is symbolic; the symbolism is somewhat limited, artificial and literal. Her dancing, moreover, with some exceptions, tends to be static, an affair of postures and poses, and in some cases these postures are more learned than beautiful. Miss Denis is an imitative rather than a creative artist—that is to say, she attempts to interpret the East with both fidelity to the letter and the spirit, rather than to use its gestures freely, with the bold grasp of an artist, as elements of design. Her treatment of the East is in direct opposition to that of the creators of Scheherazade, who have been reckless of accuracy of detail, who have sought only for the materials to build up a gorgeous pattern, and have passed every concrete fact through the fire of a transforming artistic imagination. If, as has been said, the art of the future lies in a West that is conscious of the East, the recognition of the East will be in the manner of Monsieur Fokine rather than in that of Miss St Denis. Nevertheless, Miss Ruth

St Denis duly ranks as one of the most cultured dancers of the time, and, in her special sphere, certainly the most learned. Her dancing is penetrated with the finest spirit of Indian art in much the same way in which Isadora Duncan’s is imbued with the art of Greece. She has explored a new tract of the vast country which Miss Duncan opened up, and by interpreting the art of the East she has perceptibly broadened the scope of dancing in the West.

Probably those who are trying to revive the Classical Dance would succeed in getting closer to its spirit if they were to add to their study of the figures on ancient vases and frescoes an observation of the living Spanish dance of to-day. The gesture of a people has a more ancient and unchanging history than its speech, and it is unquestionable that much of the gesture of the ancient world has been preserved among the Spanish people, who still retain something of the inner spirit as well as of the outward circumstances of the ancient civilisation. Many of the poses found in the Greek figurines are essentially those of Spanish women; the play of the arms and hands, the sideward movement, the extreme backward extension of the head and body, are movements common both to the Greek and the Spanish dance. The castanet, which is invariably associated with Spanish dancing, was also used in Greece. The dancing that persists in Spain is almost certainly of a kind that was once common all round the shores of the Mediterranean. It has of course been modified by an Oriental influence, but it possessed its special characteristics long before the coming of the Moors. In the early days of the Roman Empire the dancers of Cadiz created a furore in Rome comparable to that which the Russians have aroused in the Paris and London of to-day.

Spanish dancing has been made familiar to French and English audiences by several dancers of repute, of whom the best known are Carmencita, Otero, Guerrero and Tortajada. There are some kinds of dancing, however, which are untranslatable into the terms of the art of other countries. The Spanish dance is intensely national. The snapping of the castanets, the short and insolent skirt, the exciting rhythm of the music, do not alone suffice for the performance of the jota or the fandango, as some foreign artists would appear to suppose; nor even when the dancer has caught the trick of the swaying of the hips, the lightning of the eyes, the arched back and provocative gestures, has she caught the spirit of the dance. She must first transform herself into a Spaniard. The Spanish dance depends almost wholly on personality; and not on the personality of the dancer alone, for it is one of those dances which seem to require an indefinable “rapport” between the dancer and the spectator. Mr Havelock Ellis has drawn attention to this feature in an interesting passage in “The Soul of Spain.” One of the characteristics of Spanish dancing, he says, “lies in its accompaniments, and particularly in the fact that under proper conditions all the spectators are themselves performers. In flamenco dancing, among an audience of the people, every one takes a part by rhythmic clapping and stamping, and by the occasional prolonged ‘olés’ and other cries by which the dancer is encouraged or applauded. Thus the dance is not the spectacle for the amusement of a languid and passive public, as with us. It is rather the visible embodiment of an emotion in which every spectator himself takes an active and helpful part; it is, as it were, a vision evoked by the spectators themselves and upborne on the continuous waves of rhythmical sound which they generate. Thus it is that at the end of a dance an absolute silence often falls, with no sound of applause: the relation of performer and public has ceased to exist. So personal is this dancing that it may be said that an intimate association with the spectators is necessary for its full manifestation. The finest Spanish dancing is at once killed or degraded by the presence of an indifferent or unsympathetic public, and that is probably why it cannot be transplanted but remains local.”

The success of La Carmencita was primarily due to this free play of personality which the Spanish dance permits. Mr John Sargent’s picture, by which she will always be known to posterity, admirably displays the bold carriage, the somewhat defiant attitude, the suggestion of suppressed fire, which are characteristic of her type. As a dancer pure and simple, she was surpassed by many who never attained her wide reputation. She had gone through

no inexorable training. She never pretended to any brilliancy of execution that was beyond her powers. Her manner was simple and unaffected. Without making any very strenuous efforts she glided through a few simple movements that showed off to perfection her supple and well-proportioned figure. She achieved fame less by the technique of her dancing than by her character, her allure, the distinction of her intriguing and exotic personality.

La Tortajada is a figure well known both in London and in America. Her style is not representative of the purest type of Spanish dancing, as it is apt to be infected with the atmosphere of the music-hall. Her personality, moreover, is far less interesting than that of La Carmencita. She was born in Granada, and her aim is to bring the warmth and colour of the sun of meridional Spain into her dancing—to dance, in fact, as she expressed it, “la danse ensoleillée.”

“America,” she says in a naïve account of her career, “has fêted me and showered dollars on me by the handful. Millionaires in particular have given me a great ‘réclame,’ among them Pierpont Morgan, Astor and Vanderbilt. The latter gave me a thousand dollars to dance one Christmas Day. Another American, Mr Taft, the future President, made a bet that I was taller than another woman well known to the public. He was at the pains of coming himself to measure me, and having won the five thousand dollars, he at once purchased a magnificent piece of jewellery with them which he offered to me. If the millionaires fêted me, so also did the poorest citizens of the Republic, the humble Sioux, who are still to be found in some of the wilder regions. While making a motor tour in the district of the immense pine forests for the benefit of my health, I fell in with some of these fine fellows and the idea suddenly occurred to me that I would dance specially for them. My husband and I improvised a stage and thereupon I danced my most voluptuous flamenca, which at first terrified but soon afterwards delighted them. I was royally rewarded, for the chief made me a present of some gold dust and a purse fashioned out of serpent’s skin.... But the most curious spectators that I have known were three thousand Zulus whom I came across when motoring back from Johannesburg. Unlike the Sioux, they did not look on at my dance in silent admiration. No sooner had I begun to dance than the Zulus commenced to caper about all round me. Nothing could have been more picturesque, and at the same time more ludicrous, than the sight of a white woman in a mantilla appearing as mistress of the revels in a negro orgy!”

Guerrero is perhaps a more impassioned dancer than La Tortajada, but she has strayed even further from the purity of the Spanish dance. At the Marigny Theatre in Paris, she has this summer been dancing a new and startling dance called the Tango. It is a curious mixture of composure and frenzy, and at first acquaintance seems full of complications. Her rendering of it is said to take away the breath of the English and American tourists who fill the popular music-hall among the chestnuts of the Champs Elysée.

But the performances of these exponents of Spanish dancing only serve to show how swiftly it degenerates as soon as it leaves its native atmosphere. Even in the peninsula itself the dance seems to lose its essential character when it is performed in one of those palatial cosmopolitan music-halls, by the erection of which Spain is endeavouring to convince the world of its ability to keep abreast of the march of progress. To see the real classic dancing of an elder Spain, it is necessary to search among the shabby streets of the poorer quarters of Seville or Barcelona. There you may perchance discover some stifling, exuberant little café or theatre of the people, in which, if fortune favours you, you may find a dancer of talent, even of genius. I remember such an one in a little café chantant in Barcelona, no bigger and scarcely less unfurnished than a railway station waiting-room. The dancer appeared to be on the most intimate terms with the occupants of the stalls, and could at request lampoon the particular foibles of each habitué in copletas that were barbed with the cruellest Iberian irony. But her dancing had a brilliance, a fire, an abandon, and even a technical excellence, which I have never seen equalled in the displays of those artists whose names are known throughout Europe. It was at once