The goal was clear, but the way was not plain to be seen. For where was nature to be found? All dancing is merely a refinement upon unconscious bodily gesture. It is the poetic rendering of the prose of ordinary human movement. But the modern world has lost the old graceful motions natural to man in a less artificial state. The characteristic of natural movement is undulation. Waters, winds, trees, all living forms, obey a sovereign law of rhythm. Nature moves in curves and gradations rather than by leaps and bounds. And man in his happiest circumstances--when he lives close to nature, when his occupations are genial and not arduous, when the processes of his labour are even and uncomplicated, when his body is freely exercised and is not forced to conform itself to a special and restricted task--moves with the regular rhythm, the freedom, the equipoise, of nature itself. In that pleasant tract of life, midway between the savage and the civilised state, the occupations of man seem to have developed equally his vigour and his grace. The ancient world had the instinct to know how far labour might be saved without the labourer being sacrificed to the machine. The pause and ictus of the scythe, the even swing of the oar, the circular sweep of the sling, the balance of the seat upon the unbitted and barebacked horse--such were the movements that formed a breed of men capable of all the heights and depths of human grace. Civilisation--in the canting sense of the word--means specialisation of employment, and such specialisation in its turn too often means the deformation of the body. In the modern civilised world the body is usually exercised either too little or too continuously in a single occupation. The dependence upon easy means of locomotion, the resort to labour-saving appliances, the endless dull circulation through the rigid streets, the long periods of inaction interrupted by sudden spells of haste, have quenched the old buoyant and even rhythms. Human motion nowadays tends to be not flowing but angular, jerky, abrupt, disjointed, full of gestures not flowing imperceptibly one into another, but broken off midway. A return to nature means a turning away from the precedents of art to the incidents of contemporary life. The difficulty of applying this precept to the dance lay in the fact that there was no nature to return to, or rather that nature itself had become corrupt and sophisticated.