Hers also was the Greek view that music and the dance should be mutually interpretative. Before her time music had been regarded primarily as an accompaniment, a time-keeper; she enunciated the theory that its function was to give the keynote of the mood of the dance. Music and the dance were to be two bodies animated by a single soul. She selected as her prime composer Gluck, a master of simple and obvious melody. But she not only interprets him, she enlarges and sublimates him. The handling of musical themes in this way is of course a dangerous matter, and might give rise to discussion which would be out of place in this book. It may be maintained that a consummate composition, a symphonic movement by Beethoven, is complete in itself. The best music is its own interpreter and needs no elucidation. Music, moreover, is large and broad in its emotional expression; it transcends words, and how therefore should it not transcend gesture? It is as likely as not that a choregraphic commentary may limit rather than enhance the musical conception. It is possible that the movements of a dancer might not at all correspond with the mood that a Chopin nocturne, for instance, awakes in us. To these misgivings I do not propose to reply. The only adequate answer is to be found in Miss Duncan’s dancing. On this debatable ground her tread is sure. In each of her interpretations of music there is a self-evident rightness which silences censure.
Miss Duncan at first suffered the lot of most reformers. Novelty is usually found to be amusing; the public laughed because it failed to understand. When she appeared some twelve years ago in New York, she had already struggled long and hard to perfect
ISADORA DUNCAN
Photograph: Dover Street Studios, Ltd.
her art and she sorely needed the invaluable stimulus of recognition and appreciation. She performed a dance which was suggested by “The Rubáiyát” of Omar Khayyám. The newspaper humorists made merry over her work. One summed up the general verdict in the phrase: “Our public will probably prefer Omar’s lines to Miss Duncan’s.”
When she came to Europe, however, Miss Duncan’s art met with speedy recognition. In rapid succession she captured Berlin, Paris, St Petersburg and London. London perhaps found the new gospel somewhat hard to accept, but the educational authorities both in Germany and France were anxious to obtain her services in the instruction of children. In Paris she has trained a troupe of young children whose delightful dancing charmed London audiences a year or two ago.
In the power of expressing the depth and subtlety of spiritual moods Isadora Duncan is supreme. She is a poet no less than a dancer. Her dancing is so deeply rooted in the soul that it ignores the superficial and often coquettish graces of the popular dancer. And yet she is feminine in her dancing, but feminine in the simple, calm, womanly grandeur of the three fates of the Parthenon marbles. Hers is the essential and eternal type of womanhood, the type of the Madonna, of the peasant woman, breathing of the warm earth and the open air, of Ceres rather than of Circe. Her dance has perhaps the beauty of full summer rather than of spring. Its lines are flowing, but full of dignity and restraint. There is perhaps still a suggestion of the frieze in it. A new technique necessarily at first inclines towards rigidity.
There is no surer proof of the true greatness of her art than the fact that it can produce in the spectator that sense of shock which only work of an elemental character can give, a shock which sends the mind surging forward down vistas opening up an undiscovered prospect not merely of art but of life. This sensation has been well described by Mr W. R. Titterton in a glowing pæan of praise. “I remember when I first saw her, at the Theater des Westens in Berlin. My friends had led me to expect something fine, and then the Duncan came and struck me like a thunderclap. Will you believe me? I shuddered with awe. Once in a century, in ten centuries, comes a New Idea, and here was I the spectator of the latest born. In this idea—this free, simple, happy, expressive rhythmic movement—was focused all I and a hundred others had been dreaming. This was our symbol—the symbol of a new art, a new literature, a new national polity, a new life. I saw crowds of happy children, of happy men and women, dancing that dance on village greens, in the green forest, on the green hill-tops. Pedants at their books, pedants at their figures, pedants on their platforms vanished in smoke before the exultant dances of this glorious woman. As the walls of Jericho before the trump of Joshua, so before her the factory walls fell down, the festering slums and ugly places of London crumbled to dust, and away to Arcady we danced to the sound of her Shepherd’s piping.”