In this predicament what was to be done? Happily when nature fails us we can still have recourse to a counsellor of almost equal authority and wisdom--the art of the antique world. And whereas for some of the modern arts--for painting and music, for example--classical art is but a taciturn guide, for the dance it is full of instruction. Their interests are one and the same--the body and bodily movement. Greek sculpture has caught innumerable moments of freely flowing action, at a time when action was probably most pure, removed equally far from the rudeness of the savage and the inexpressiveness of the modern. All its salient gestures of sport and war and of the emotional states are as clear to us as if we had been the contemporaries of Pericles and Pheidias. The Greek frieze has been described as a kind of incomplete cinematographic film of the Greek dance. And the so-called Tanagra figures represent a whole alphabet of the silent plastic speech of everyday life. To recall the dance to nature by the way of Greek art was the work of an American woman, perhaps the greatest personality who has ever devoted herself to developing the art of the dance, Isadora Duncan. Her interests ranged over a wide field of activities. There was a time when she wished to initiate a reform of human life in its least details of costume, of hygiene, of morals. But gradually she came to concentrate her interest upon the dance. For her the dance is not merely the art which permits the spirit to express itself in movement; it is the base of a whole conception of life, a life flexible, harmonious, natural. In the development of the dance she found herself confronted by the dilemma which has just been alluded to. On the one hand was the limited technique of the ballet, on the other the unnatural contortions of the eccentric school. To return to the unconscious gesture of the people--that is to say, the crude, stereotyped gestures of the street--offered no way of escape. She found the solution in a return to the natural gesture of human life as represented in Greek art. In order to get at her point of view it is best to let her speak in her own words--although, as she would say, one speaks better about the dance in dancing than in commentaries and explanations.