The Fire Dance became popular. The stages of all the variety theatres in Paris became enveloped in flame. Legions of dancers waving burning veils, under a cross-fire from masked batteries of limelight men, took possession of the stage. The art of dancing appeared about to perish in a general conflagration. Ballets were converted into luminous symphonies. Such themes as _Les Amours du Roi des Tenèbres pour l’Aurore_ and _Arc-en-ciel_ gave marvellous scope for the display of the talents, if not of the dancers, at any rate of the electricians. The common light of day was henceforth too meagre to please; every atmospheric effect from dawn to sunset was exhausted; moonlight was turned on in floods and the night skies were ransacked for comets and meteors; the kingdom of faery was invaded and despoiled of its sheen by intrepid managers, who poured upon the stage from electric projectors the light that never was on land or sea. It is doubtful whether this invention of Loie Fuller comes within the sphere of dancing in the proper sense of the word at all. The Serpentine Dance has no steps, no gestures, no poses, none of the usual criteria by which dancing can be judged. The function of the limbs is merely to put measureless lengths of drapery in motion. The dancer juggles with stuffs and veils as others with knives and billiard balls. Loie Fuller’s chief merit was her faculty of invention. The best part of her work was done off the stage. When the dance began it was the activity of the army of operators in the wings that became the centre of interest. If we were adequately to discuss the theory of the Serpentine Dance we should have to converse of electricity and optics. It belongs to the realm of science rather than of art. It is an art of electricians and mechanics; it is they, and not the lady upon whom they operate, who should come before the footlights to take the applause and receive the floral tributes of the audience. Although Loie Fuller was an expert in the art of theatrical illumination rather than in that of dancing, that she possessed a considerable artistic talent is unquestionable. Her love of colour amounted to a real passion. She was peculiarly sensitive to its effects. Every colour had a different influence upon her; she was unable to dance the same measure in a yellow light as in a blue. There was something more than sensationalism in her wonderful Lily Dance, when she disposed the serpentine skirt in such a way that it floated across the stage like the bizarre and gigantic flower of a strange dream; in her Rose Dance, when she sank down covered with crimson petals; in her Radium Dance, one of the most beautiful effects of colour and lighting ever seen upon the stage, almost prohibitive on account of its costliness; in her Fire Dance, which was full of a kind of demoniacal splendour, the madness of a hashish-begotten delirium.