The dance, I believe, is still only in its infancy. Is it rash to imagine that the evolution of dancing will be the special achievement of art in this century, as the evolution of music was in the last? There is a whole world of gesture waiting for the dance to take possession of. The rediscovery of the gesture of the ancient world is perhaps the least important part of the undertaking. There lies a broad field for exploration in the innumerable racial and national gestures, each with its separate beauty, and its separate expressiveness. And beyond this stretches the yet more inexhaustible domain of nature, its multitudinous minor rhythms, each various and distinguishable, merging into a grand rhythm of the whole, the eternal rhythm of life itself. Fragments of attitude, phrases of motion, are scattered prodigally up and down the world, awaiting the seeing eye and the understanding mind that can pluck these happy accidents, store them in the memory, and at the proper time build up out of them a new pattern of the dance. When the choregrapher of genius arrives, he will think in gestures, as the musician thinks in sound, and the painter in mass and colour. And when he has realised the lavish abundance of his material, he will pour into it like a molten flood all that there is in the brimming life of our day to fire, to madden, to delight and to rive the heart. Then it will be the turn of the other arts to look wonderingly upon this figure of the Dance, no longer straying timidly into their company, but coming upon divine feet, with an assured mien and a mature grace, and each will borrow something from her ancient and untiring ecstasy. INDEX A Académie Royale de Musique et de Danse, 29 Adam, Adolphe, 51 _Aida_, 130 Albert, 34 Alexis, Tsar, 124 Alhambra Theatre, 62, 64, 170, 176 Allan, Maud, 110-118 Anne, Empress of Russia, 124 Apache Dance, 183 _Arabesques, Les_, 182 _Arc-en-ciel_, 86 Areja, Francisco, 124 Arensky, 128 _Arrow Dance_, 168 Astafieva, Seraphima, 146, 158 _Automne Bacchanale, L’_, 164, 168 B _Babil and Bijou_, 61 Bakst, Léon, 132, 133, 134, 140, 145, 146 Balashova, Alexandra, 170, 176 Bathyllus, 46 Bauer, Henri, 36 _Bayadères, Les_, 40, 42 Bedells, Phyllis, 176, 182 Beerbohm, Mr Max, 18, 174 Beethoven, 111 Benois, M., 130, 138, 142, 154 Bensusan, Mr S. L., 65 Bergholz, 124 Berlioz, 59, 142 Bernhardt, Sarah, 110 Bertrand, 62 Blasis, Carlo, 127, 161 _Blue Danube_, 162 Borodin, 128, 142 Botticelli, 111, 113 Brahms, 166 Buddhism, 191 Burne-Jones, 73 _Butterflies_, 147 C Cachucha, 49 Camargo, Mlle de, 30, 32 Cancan, 92, 95, 96 Candelon, 61 _Caprice_, 82 Carmenciat, La, 195, 196 _Carnaval, Le_, 133, 137, 139-141 _Carnaval de Venise, Le_, 40 _Casse-Noisette_, 128 Castor and Pollux, 29 Catherine the Second, 124 Cavallazzi, Madame, 67, 183 Cecchetti, M., 155 Cerali, 62 Cerito, Fanny, 52-54, 57 Chahut, 76 Chopin, 112, 115, 118, 144, 157, 162, 163, 166 Chorley, Mr, 42, 46