words. Except he could see them with Occidental eyes, he would see nothing about them to explain.
Europe has seen the Arabic work, and enjoyed it for its ocular beauty. Gérome, Constant, Bargue and others have painted its sinuous elegance with admirable results. But no insight into its motives has become general, nor has any key to its meaning heretofore been printed, so far as can be ascertained, in any European language.
America still further than Europe has been excluded from satisfactory acquaintance with the Oriental, because it has been so rarely presented here except in a manner to defame it. At the World’s Fair in Chicago, where we saw it first, its sinuous body-movement caused a shock. Along that line opportunist managers saw profit. Sex—an institution whose existence is frankly admitted by every civilisation except our own—was, under managerial inspiration, insisted upon to the exclusion of every other motive of the dance; and insisted upon in such a manner as to make it repulsive. Ruth St. Denis has gone far in removing the resulting stigma from the art of India and Egypt. That the prejudice is not going to persist in the face of a national common-sense and love of beauty is further indicated in the reception met by the work of Fatma a couple of seasons ago in The Garden of Allah; a Moroccan woman, doing work unreservedly typical of her country, always received with delight by the audience, and never regarded from the wrong point of view.
The mission of calling Western attention to that which lies below the surface of Arabic dancing, however, appears to have remained for Zourna, the Tunisian. To her it is possible, by virtue of a point of view resulting from a dual education, Mohammedan and European.
Zourna is the daughter of an Arab father and a French mother, who lived in Tunis. In childhood she was taught the Arab girl’s accomplishments, dancing included; but an occasional visit to France enabled her at all times to see her African way of living somewhat as it would appear to the European. In the natural course of events she married; destined, however, to a short time of enjoyment of the dreamy dancing of the sheltered harem. The death of her husband and loss of fortune drove her to dance in cafés. That genus of work she had time to learn well before Fate again intervened. A chain of circumstances brought her an opportunity to study ballet in the French Academy. It was not her medium of expression, but it gave her a clear measure of the difference between the Oriental and Occidental philosophies of the dance.