“A crackling flame is kindled. It turns and twists and glows. Smoke, heavy as an incense, rises and mingles in the darkness where embers glow. In the midst of the tumult, licked by torrents of foaming fire, a mask, also a strange flame, is outlined in the reddish air. The flames die into a single flame, which grows to immensity. You might think that human thought were rending itself in the darkness. And we await with anxious hearts the beauty that passes.
“Soul of the flowers, soul of the sky, soul of flame, Loie Fuller has given them to us. Words and phrases avail nothing. She has created the soul of the dance, for until Loie Fuller came the dance was without soul!
“It had no soul in Greece when among fair wheat heads on days flooded with sunshine beautiful children danced gaily, brandishing their golden sickles. Rigid, majestic, and somewhat too formal, it had no soul under the Grand Monarch. It had no soul when it might have had one. The eighteenth century dances, the minuet in a whirl of powder; the waltz is only an embrace, the woman cult revived.
“The soul of the dance was destined to be born in this sad and feverish age. Loie Fuller modelled form out of a dream. Our foolish desires, our dread of mere nothing, these she expressed in her dance of fire. To satisfy our thirst for oblivion she humanised the flowers. Happier than her brothers, the lords of creation, she caused her silent deeds to live and in the darkness, this setting of grandeur, no human defect marred her beauty. Providence shows itself kindly toward her. In its great secret Loie shares.
“Amorous of the resplendent beauty in nature she asks it questions out of her clear eyes. To seize the unknown her hand becomes coaxing. Her firm, precise glance penetrates the soul of things even when they have none. The inanimate becomes animate, and thinks under her magical desire, and the ‘dream pantomime’ is evolved.
“Charmingly womanly she has chosen the sweetest and finest among sleeping lives. She is the butterfly, she is the fire, she is light, heaven, the stars. Frail, under floating material, flowery with pale gold, with calcedony and beryl, Salome passed in her power. Afterwards humanity went by feverishly. To calm our frayed souls and our childish nightmares a fragile figure dances in a celestial robe.”
And now, fifteen years after, Gab still tells me, when we speak of the impression I made on her at the time she wrote these pages full of ingenuous emotion,
“I never see you exactly as you are,” she says, “but as you seemed to me on that day.”
I wonder if her friendship, so well founded and positive, is not intimately mingled with the love of form, of colour and of light, which I interpreted synthetically before her eyes when I appeared before her for the first time.