As the dancer passes the top of his flight, the second illusion begins to go into effect. Contradicting the eye’s observation of the gradual descent of the body, the long lines of the artist’s arms and legs are steadily raised to point more and more upward. Be the reason whatever it may, the spectator is much less conscious of the body’s descent than of the level—or even rising—direction of those long lines; lines which, by the time the step is half completed, have come to appear a good deal longer than they are. The dancer lowers his foot just in time to alight properly. The eye meantime has been so impressed by the sweep of horizontals that it conveys to the mind an agreeably exaggerated statement of the length of leap they represent. Also it probably has been so puzzled that its owner, unless he knows something of dancing, has failed to catch the value of the step as a thing of beauty.
Reasonable familiarity with the foregoing descriptions of steps will, it is hoped, enable the reader to look at great dancing with the added joy that comes of intelligent sympathy with the ballet’s intent as decoration, as well as insight into its technical means. The résumé of steps includes the ballet’s fundamentals. Each step has its variations, as has been suggested; some of the variations diverge far enough from the basic step to have earned a special designation. For the sake of simplicity, the special names of subvarieties of steps have been eliminated from this little discussion; but not at the sacrifice of anything that a well-informed connoisseur of the ballet need know.
It is a subject whose study is accompanied by the satisfaction that time spent on it is not being frittered away on an affair of a day. Some of the steps are coeval with the earliest graphic records of social life; Emmanuel (La Danse Grecque Antique) has made a fascinating book showing the use of many present-day ballet steps (including “toe-work”) by the figures on early Greek ceramics, carvings, etc. Various ages have added to the vocabulary of choreographic material; the national academies of France and Italy have preserved that which is contributory to their ideals of almost architectural style, and rejected that which lacks form, even though expressive. The tours and pas of which ballet eloquence is composed, therefore, represent a selection based on generations of careful and accurately recorded experiment in the interest of pure beauty. The designation “classic,” attached to French and Italian ballets, is in all ways correct and deserved. The watchful care of guardians keeps both schools aloof from passing caprices of the public, and uncorrupted by vulgar fashions. There is a present and growing movement toward naturalistic pantomime—a mode combining with popularity enough intrinsic good to occasion anxiety lest the classic ballet perish under its momentum. In reply to which let it be emphasised at this point that the old schools never have failed to incorporate the good of whatever has offered; whereas that which was not of intrinsic value always has passed away through its own lack of æsthetic soundness. The Russian academy bases its technique on the French-Italian, and insists on it rigourously as a groundwork; Madame Pavlowa’s practice is conducted
