A twisting scarf, caught in the wheels of the car in which she was riding, ended the earthly career of a misunderstood American genius. Was the end deliberate? I only know she longed to die, she with the passionate love for life.
A tremendous freedom-loving American, she may, I feel, be called the first American dancer, in the sense that she brought a new style and a new manner, away from the accepted form of ballet. I, for one, believe that Isadora did more than any one else I know for the dance in America, and received less gratitude and recognition for her contribution.
Now that she is dead, I feel for her exactly as I always felt. Though we do not love our friends for one particular quality but as a whole, there is usually an element which, while the friend is still with us, especially appeals to us, and the memory of which we most cherish when he or she is absent for a while or for ever. For me that element in Isadora was and is the extreme gentleness hidden in her heart of hearts. Those who knew her only as a combative spirit in the world of the dance may be astonished at that statement. Yet I hold that gentleness to have been absolutely fundamental in her character and that not a few of her troubles were attributable to continuing and exasperating outrage of it.
There was a superficial side of her that may seem to contradict that gentleness. She had exasperating eccentricities, stupid affectations. Her childishness and capriciousness, her downright wilfulness could drive me nearly to distraction. She could, and often did waste infinite hours of my time, and her own and others’ money. She lacked discipline in herself, her life, her work. She could have been less arbitrary in many things, including her condemnation of ballet. On the other hand, she had a quality of communication rare indeed in the theatre. Her faults were, as I have said, superficialities. At base she was a genuinely gentle person.
Just because she was gentle she could, her sympathy being aroused, exert herself to an extraordinary degree and after no gentle fashion on behalf of those things in which she believed, and of others, particularly artists. For the same reason, she frequently could not properly exert herself on her own behalf. She was weary (weary unto death at the last) when that spring of gentleness, in which some of her best work had its origin, failed her. Hers was an intellect, in my opinion, of wider range, of sterner mettle, of tougher integrity, of more persistent energy and of more imaginative quality than those of her detractors. I hold because of Isadora’s innate gentleness, and the fact it was so fundamental a thing in her, being exasperated both by the events of her life and by her intellect’s persistent commentary upon those events, she became towards the close so utterly weary and exhausted that any capacity for a rational synthesis was lost. Hers was a romantic nature, and a rational synthesis usually proceeds by the tenderness of the heart working upon the intellect to urge upon it some suspension of judgment, and not by the hardness of the intellect working upon the heart and bidding it, in reason’s name, to cease expecting to find things other and better than they are: the hearts of other humans more tender and their heads one whit less dense.
A few words on what has been criticized by many as her “free living.” Today an unthinking license prevails in many circles. If Isadora’s life displayed “license” in this sense, it certainly was not an unthinking “license.” Isadora strongly held theories about personal freedom of thought and behavior and dared to act according to them. Those theories may be wrong. That is a problem I have not here space to discuss. But that, believing in those theories, Isadora acted upon them and did not reserve them merely for academic discussion, I hold to her eternal credit. That Isadora did others and herself damage in the process must be admitted. But I have observed that many “conventional” persons do others and themselves a great deal of damage without displaying a tithe of Isadora’s integrity and courage, since they act crudely upon theories in which they no longer in their heart of hearts believe, or contradict their theories in captious action for lack of courage to discover new theories. Let us not forget that “few know the use of life before ’tis past.” Isadora died before she was fifty, endowed with a temperament little calculated to make easy the paths of true wisdom, paths which, I venture to suggest, often contradict the stereotyped notions of them entertained by those who are unable or unwilling too closely to consider the matter. To her personal tragedies must be added the depressing influence of the unfathomable indifference of her countrymen to art and artists and to herself.
I take it I have said enough to indicate that such “conventional” solutions as may occur to some readers were inadmissible in Isadora’s case, just as inadmissible in fact as they would be in a novel by Dostoievsky. In any event, she paid to the end for any mistakes she may have made, and it is not our duty to sit in judgment on her, whether one theoretically disapproves of her use of what sometimes has been called the “escape-road.” It is one’s duty to understand, and by understanding to forgive.
I have heard it remarked that there was a streak of cruelty in Isadora. Gentle natures of acute sensibility and strong intelligence, long exasperated by indifference and opposition to what they hold of sovereign importance in art and life, are apt to turn cruel and even vindictive at times. I never witnessed her alleged cruelty or vindictiveness to any one and I will not go on hearsay.
One of the great satisfactions of a long career in the world of dance is that I was able to be of some service to this neglected genius. I can think of no finer summation of her than the words of that strange, aloof genius of the British theatre, Gordon Craig, when he wrote:
“ .... She springs from the Great Race——
From the line of Sovereigns, who
Maintain the world and make it move,
From the Courageous Giants,
The Guardians of Beauty——
The Solver of all Riddles.”