“This sort of perfection in an art is the result of a long process. The artists are not only trained to it; they are born to it. The same names occur again and again in the history of the ballet; sons and daughters follow the calling of their parents, and find themselves wives and husbands among their fellow-dancers. Their limbs exist only for grace and suppleness, and are never stiffened by any other use. All their lives are devoted to dancing; and it is the constant occupation of their minds. A ballet-master is not an accident or sport of nature, but one who is acknowledged by his comrades to excel them in the sort of imagination in which they all share. A certain Russian, living in St Petersburg, was frequently puzzled by the strange behaviour of the guests in a flat across the street. An aged lady lived there, and once or twice a week she held receptions, and the strangest leapings and gyrations could be dimly seen through the curtains. In the end the aged lady [Illustration: PHYLLIS BEDELLS IN _Sylvia_ _Photograph: Ellis & Walery_] proved to be Mademoiselle P., the once famous dancer and daughter of another famous dancer, and these were her friends from the Corps de Ballet who came to take tea with her; they were merely talking ‘shop,’ and incidentally illustrating their ideas by showing each other various steps. Monsieur K., the ballet-master, composes ballets as he walks, and is watched by suspicious policemen swaying and waving his arms, while he goes absent-mindedly along the streets. When the Russian ballet was in Vienna, the guests in a certain hotel were roused more than once in the middle of the night by a heavy bumping and clatter from the room above. ‘It is all right,’ one of the dancers explained to a nervous stranger, ‘it is evidently K. composing a ballet.’ An idea had occurred to him in bed; and as Strauss, the waltz-maker, in those circumstances used to jump out to note a tune on his tablets, so Monsieur K. had to jump out and dance it. Undistracted by other things, a ballet-master goes about the world gathering all the scattered beautiful gestures, the nice correlations of innumerable details (and how the tilt of the chin or the pathos of a smile just crowns the perfection of an attitude of Pavlova’s or Karsavina’s!), and keeps them ready to issue, in organic order, from his mind at the inspiration of the appropriate musical phrase.” It is to be feared that the English ballet-dancer does not take herself sufficiently seriously. It may even be that she is a little ashamed of herself. One has the uneasy feeling that she regards dancing as merely a stepping-stone to higher things--to musical comedy for instance! It is her profession, not her art. Not until English dancers begin to realise the significance of the dance as art and to create that choregraphic atmosphere which at present appears to exist only in Russia, shall we have a true renaissance of the Ballet in England.