Regarded as a fine art, and not merely as a pastime, dancing has frequently great beauty in its simple quality of the rhythmic movement of decorative form and colour. The dances depicted on Greek vases had this character, and so, with varying degree of merit, have the ballets common during the last fifty years in London and other great centres. But before this period the makers of ballets (a word originally signifying to dance, to sing, to rejoice, and representing three modern words--ballet, ball, and ballad) did not aim at a mere exhibition of living rhythmic decoration, but at the production of a theatrical performance in which a story is told only by gesture and dancing accompanied by music. The real modern founder and exponent of the ballet as thus understood was Noverre, a Frenchman (called by Garrick "the Shakespeare of the dance"), who died in 1810. He brought to a high degree of perfection the art of presenting a story by pantomime, and he never allowed dancing which was not the direct expression of a particular attitude of mind. His professed effort was to introduce the steps and poses of ancient Greek dancing shown in sculpture and painted pottery--as _the_ model for stage dancing. And he succeeded. The great dancers of the past who are known to us by tradition--Vestris, Camargo in the eighteenth, and Cerito, Grisi, and Taglioni in the earlier half of the nineteenth century--were not merely perfectly trained as dancers, but were actors, and possessed poetic imagination. Women did not appear in the ballet until the time of Louis XIV, and Mlle. Camargo was the first to wear the conventional short stiff ballet skirt. "Convention" has a great weight in such matters. But it seems to be undeniable that the conventional ballet-skirt conceals the beautiful movement of the leg on the hip joint, a disadvantage from which the male dancer does not suffer. Skirts are, in fact, out of place in really fine dancing. Flowing light drapery, or better still the Circassian jacket and full gauzy trousers fastened at the ankles, are the only possible dress for a really great _danseuse_.