is sometimes called English dancing cannot be taken seriously. Of course one cannot blame the English dancers altogether: it is of very little use to prepare a delicate dish for the delectation of the sturdy animal whose favourite food is thistles; and [Illustration: DANSEUSES EN SCÈNE FROM A PAINTING BY DÉGAS] while the public remain content with a pretty face, a pleasing figure, a dainty dress, and an air for which barrel-organs cry aloud, English girls may regard it as a labour lost to give them anything better. And yet the successes in years past of dancers like Katti Lanner and Malvina Cavallazzi, and the triumph that has fallen to Adeline Genée to-day, must prove that there is an English audience for better things. Perhaps, if we had more dancers who could and would take their work seriously, the tone of what so many people are generously pleased to call their taste might cease to be contemptible.” CHAPTER V THE SKIRT DANCE The discovery of a new medium has not infrequently infused a new vitality into a declining art. Certainly the nature of the medium has been almost as important a factor in determining style as the nature of the artist. One of the media through which the dance expresses itself is costume. It has been pointed out how the evolution of the _caleçon_ revolutionised the technique of the ballet. The rediscovery of the flowing skirt brought about a revolution in modern dancing. The flowing skirt appears to us to be a natural appurtenance of the dance. But it must be remembered that the infinitesimal skirt of the ballet-dancer had become a cherished convention, and such is the tyranny of convention that it makes whatever is contrary to it appear to be unnatural. The development of the ballet had been largely due to the abandonment of the fulsome skirt of the early eighteenth century; it was felt that to adopt it once again would be to involve the dance in the swaddling-clothes of its infancy. The introduction of the long skirt, however, provided an outlet from the impasse into which dancing had been driven. On the one hand was the classical school of the ballet, now in an unfortunate condition of decadence. It lacked all those elements which make of the ballet a living art. The public was sick and tired of it. On the other hand a more or less vulgar type of dancing, which had no relation to art, enjoyed a certain popularity on the music-hall stage. It consisted chiefly of the Clog Dance, believed originally to have come from the cotton mills of Lancashire, and various kinds of acrobatic dancing. In the race for popularity the ugly but energetic Step Dance was first, the classical ballet nowhere. Between the two there was no happy medium.