It was in 1899, or thereabout, that she gave a recital in the little theatre of a dramatic school in Chicago, before an audience principally of dramatic students, painters and sculptors. After the performance, which took place in the morning, the painters and sculptors unconsciously grouped themselves into informal committees to exchange verdicts. The general conclusion—arrived at after hours of acrimonious argument, in most cases—was that the young woman had an idea, but that clairvoyancy was required to understand it. At that time, it should be added, Miss Duncan was far from mature in grace, surety or any other of the technical qualities; and her art, naïve though it be, has its technical requirements just as surely as any other art.
It is now necessary to transfer attention to certain people whose path and Miss Duncan’s were beginning to converge.
In Russia the ballet is as definitely a ward of the government as the army is. No more carefully are candidates for a national military academy selected than are applicants for admission to the Imperial Ballet Academy.
Those admitted are cared for as though each were an heir to the throne, given an all-round art education that could not be duplicated anywhere else in the world, and rigourously drilled in dancing six days a week for seven or eight years. As they qualify for it, they appear on occasion in the corps de ballet of the Imperial Opera, dear to the hearts of nobility and a theatre-going public. By the terms of agreement with the government, they are assured employment at specified pay for a specified number of years in the ballet, after which they retire on a pension. The pay is not high, but with it is an assured career and an honourable one, and a likelihood of considerable emolument through instruction, imperial gifts and government favours. Withal a thing not lightly to be thrown away.
Like their contemporaries in Paris and Vienna, the people of St. Petersburg and Moscow (homes of the two Imperial Opera Houses and of the two arms of the Academy) were dissatisfied with their ballet. Beyond the vague charge of lack of interest they could not analyse their complaint. They were puzzled. Training more careful than that given in their Academy could not be. Nor was any school of the dance superior to the composite French-Italian on which the Russian ballet was based. Each detailed objection was answered; yet a decided majority agreed that something was wrong.
Miss Duncan, rightly believing that Europe was more attentive than America to a new idea, had left her native land after a period of neither success nor failure in any pronounced degree. She had interested Paris, startled Berlin, and set Vienna into a turmoil of wrangling. St. Petersburg waited, with interest aroused by echoes from Vienna.