But the dancing of the East, or rather of India in particular, has found a very skilled translator in a dancer of American origin, Miss Ruth St Denis. I believe it is true that Miss St Denis has never actually been in India, but she has mixed freely with Indians; she has studied their art, their religions, their character, she has penetrated into the spirit of the people as far as it is possible for a Westerner to do so. She has, in fact, caught the gesture of the East. Her dancing has for the most part a religious and symbolic character--for it should be remembered that, besides the dances founded upon the passions, the East has evolved a whole range of dances illustrative of philosophical ideas. Buddhism has carried the symbolism of the body to an extraordinary degree of refinement. The locking and unfolding of the feet, the uplifting of the arms and the hands, even the very curves of the fingers, have all their esoteric meaning. The system of symbolism has so penetrated the actions of the dance that not infrequently the sequence and shades of the dancer’s movements are unintelligible to an uninstructed eye. Thus the slow dance movements which Hindus contemplate with delight for hours, though they may appear drearily monotonous to the European, are full of instruction to the initiated. The ritual of the dance is almost as intimately connected with Buddhism as the simpler ritual of the altar with Catholicism. The wealthier temples possess trained bands of dancers, a sort of vestal virgins, known as Devadassis, the slaves of the god. They have the happy and pious custom of dancing twice daily before the images of the gods, once in propitiation of their own sins, once in intercession for the sins of the world. It is the posturing of the Devadassi, rather than the dancing of the more voluptuous Bayadère, that Miss Ruth Denis has sought to reproduce. In her physical qualities, Miss St Denis is well fitted to represent the type of the East. While her beauty has much of the allure of sex, it has also that childish character which seems peculiar to the women of the East. Her figure is exquisitely slender and her arms are as supple, her hands as refined, as those of a Hindu. The way was prepared for her to a certain extent by the success which Miss Isadora Duncan had already achieved, and when she gave a series of fashionable matinées in New York in 1906, previous to her descent upon Europe, her recognition was immediate. When she appeared at the Scala Theatre in London in 1908, Miss Ruth St Denis was accompanied by half-a-dozen natives, who supplied a note of human colour to the pictures of the street, the palace and the temple, which formed the background of her dances. In most of the scenes, the mystic atmosphere was assisted by the subdued light, the odour of incense and the native melodies embodied in the striking music of Herr Walter Meyrowitz. Her performances took the form of brief acts, illustrative of native life.