Any refutation of the above cynicism as affecting Miss Duncan and Miss St. Denis is superfluous. Their work has at all times been charged with a big, romantic or mystic meaning. Imitators, basing their activities on the manager’s creed above quoted, have furnished an illuminating experiment to determine exactly what interest the public finds in the work of the two artists named. Invariable failure has accompanied their approximate nudity, despite the fact that many of them are pretty in face and figure.
Great dancers have come, been seen, but—until the coming of the Russians—have achieved few victories of lasting value. Genée is an exception; to delight in her work is to be added a real influence in favour of real art. Carmencita, Otero and Rosario Guerrero, all great artists of expression conveyed through the medium of the dances of Spain, have had good seasons in this country. Even though their influence on taste did not seem far-reaching, it must be believed that they helped prepare the way for great things that were to come.
But the real force of the coming change, the change that was to take its place among the important revolutions in the history of all art was quietly preparing itself in an American village.
CHAPTER XI
THE ROMANTIC REVOLUTION
THERE are few people who are complete in any one direction. The statesman hesitates at a measure that will wreck his political organisation, unless he is a complete statesman. The yachtsman will lose a race to pick up a man overboard, unless he is an unscrupulous or complete racing fiend. A corporation manager who disregards every consideration except his end may be a law-breaker, but before that he is a complete business man. Cromwell and Luther were complete reformers. Most people in the arts are incomplete artists, because they hesitate to depart from accepted means of expression. They cripple impulse with logic, and accommodate their course more or less to other people’s opinions. Noverre was a complete stage director. Isadora Duncan is a complete disciple of beauty.
Beauty in all its natural manifestations is her religion. Waves and clouds and running water, the nude body and its natural movements are the tokens by which it is revealed to her. Its high priests, by her creed, were the Greeks of old. And, conversely, all other priests are false. In the soul afire with a cause there is no room for adjustment of points of view; such adjustments bear the form of compromise. That which is not right is wrong—not even partly right, but hopelessly, damnably wrong. A state of mind exactly as it should be in a person with an idea, and exactly as it must be if he is going to carry the idea to fruition.
Miss Duncan is not in attunement with the ballet, and never was. She is a worshipper of nature; not as translated into abstract terms, but as nature is, as revealed in the waves and clouds and running water. If she were a leader in a logical controversy instead of one of taste, it would be in order to question how she tolerates modern music, instead of insisting on a reversion to the music of the winds in the trees; for certainly the piano is no less a man-made convention than the dancer’s position sur la pointe, and orchestration is far from the sounds of nature. But the controversy is not an affair of logic, and it follows that any question prompted by logical considerations becomes illogical, automatically. The point at issue is that Miss Duncan, complete disciple of beauty, is a complete opponent of beauty expressed otherwise than in the way revealed to her. Again, lest this analysis bear any resemblance to criticism, let it be affirmed that her attitude is exactly as it should be in relation to her destiny.
At an early age she was fascinated by the representations of dancing to be found on Greek ceramics, and in Tanagra and other figures. A work of art means many things to many people. What Miss Duncan saw in the early representations was a direct and perfect expression of nature. Among other elements, she noted in them a full acknowledgment of the law of gravity, which is an obviously natural quality. Now, Miss Duncan’s essay The Dance shows in her mind not the first stirrings of a question as to whether gravity may not be an unfortunate mortal limitation. On the contrary, it is natural, therefore right. Therefore the ballet, in
