Anna Pavlova is not merely a great executive, but a creative artist. She is more than a dancer, she is a lyric poet. One feels that she might equally well have chosen any other of the media of art for the expression of her emotion, but she has chosen her body--or perhaps rather her body has chosen her. This beautiful instrument she has refined to the most delicate sensibility and instructed in a perfect precision. As a piece of mechanism--if indeed mechanism be not too harsh a term for what in grace is wholly flower-like--it has been rendered as supple, just and exquisitely responsive as infinite pains could make it. It is perfectly equipped with swiftness, strength, delicacy. Only in the very greatest dancers does the body become the utter slave of the spirit, serving it with a scrupulous and joyful fidelity. But in Pavlova’s dancing we are no longer aware of the conscious and painful obedience of the body to the dictates of a governing mind. It is as though the spirit itself had left its central citadel and, by some unwonted alchemy becoming dissolved in the blood and fibres of her being, had penetrated to the extremities of the limbs. Soul from body is no longer distinguishable, and which is servant to the other none can tell. It goes without saying that her long and careful apprenticeship in the art of dancing has given Madame Pavlova perfect [Illustration: ANNA PAVLOVA FROM A PAINTING BY J. LAVERY] proficiency in that technique of the ballet which is variously known as traditional, academic, or Italian. But although all dancing that is not grounded upon this technique is apt to become to a certain extent wavering and nerveless, it seems certain that this technique alone does not suffice for a dancer who dances with soul as well as body. After she had passed through her years of probation, Pavlova’s individuality naturally began to assert itself, and she demanded a wider scope for the full expression of her emotions. This liberty she found in those gestures and poses, more naturally human than those of the conventional ballet, which had been discovered, or rather rediscovered, by Isadora Duncan, for they are native to the world of Greek art. The characteristic of her dancing, therefore, is the combination of the older traditional method with the freedom that is demanded for the expression of emotional ideas. Other dancers have sought to find this freedom by casting aside, or rather by never troubling to learn, the traditional technique. Pavlova knows well that the freedom of art is not to be attained by a wilful lawlessness, but only by a glad and strict submission to law. Thus she has carried the dance of the ballet a stage further along the lines of its natural evolution, not despising the heritage of the past, but enlarging it to meet the deeper needs of the present.