knowledge of dancing, are capable of relating their observations to choreographic geography and history. Madame Pavlowa, of the world; Mr. Anderson, now of America; and Miss Nellie Chaplin of London, have committed themselves definitely as to future probabilities; and with their opinion authorities generally are in full agreement. To the effect that:
The dances of the seventeenth-century courts are the objective toward which present-day steps are moving directly. They are a part of the curriculum of Miss Chaplin’s famous London school. A Gavotte Directoire presented by Madame Pavlowa, one of her most popular numbers, seems the very spirit of modernism. She expresses the belief that the Russian Gavotte, in which is preserved the courtly spirit, is destined to wide acceptance. Mr. Anderson demonstrates points of step and style that link together most convincingly the old and the new. Familiarity with the court dances is the dominant influence in his treatment of the dances of to-day; and the significant part of it is that the essential modernism of his manner, in steps rapid or slow, lies in a poise which, until yesterday, was supposed to be old-fashioned.
CHAPTER XIV
A LAYMAN’S ESTIMATE OF CONDITIONS
THAT great dancing is a useful and desirable addition to human happiness needs no argument. Its power to delight the vision and expand the imagination; its value as an example and incentive to an exercise unsurpassed as an ally of health—these and other virtues are obvious. More completely, perhaps, than any of its tributary arts, dancing has the power to impart that indefinable mental well-being that great art aims to give its auditor or spectator. As music is refreshment for one, pictures for another, so the contemplation of dancing is the means of ordering and energising the mind of a third. We of the United States are a beauty-loving people in the main, and almost unanimously attuned to the message of action—so long as we understand its meaning. Once really established among such a people, dancing would take a position of importance second to no other source of national inspiration. In the meantime, there are unorganised cohorts of us to whom good dancing, like good reading, is something of a necessity; and we should like to know what we have a right to expect from the near future.
“The public gets what it wants,” is the sophisticated comment almost invariably drawn forth by any discussion along these lines. Which comment exposes its own superficiality; the suggestion of the existence of any one public, in relation to the arts, is absurd. Patronising dancing there appear, at the very first glance, two publics as widely separated as inhabitants of different planets; each public possessed of appreciations inconceivable to the other, and even contemptible. These are the public that applauds the buxom laziness which substitutes for dancing in the so-called “amusement” known as burlesque, as distinguished from the public that responds to the pure beauty of opera ballet or well-performed ballet pantomime.