has undergone a training as elaborate as any _prima ballerina_. From her childhood upwards she has devoted twenty years to the study of the dance. She had to invent, or rather discover, her own technique. Taking for her models the poses of Greek art, she endeavoured to reconstruct from a single attitude the whole continuous flowing movement, of which the statuesque pose is of course but an arrested moment. She had to fill in the gaps, as it were, in the interrupted cinematographic film, to pass rhythmically from one gesture to the next. She found at first that her body failed to respond. It suffered from the unpliability, the general wrongness of movement, which is the outcome of modern conditions of life and the loss of tradition. She found that she had to begin with the elements of motion, to learn to walk, to run, to leap rhythmically before she could dance rhythmically. She started therefore to learn to govern her body, to recover a lost art of balance and flexibility, to make each slightest movement a harmonious expressive gesture. For she demands none but the finest gestures for the dance. Everything common and contemptible she would exclude by a severe test. “Every movement that can be danced by the side of the sea without being in harmony with the rhythm of the waves, every movement that can be danced in the midst of a forest without being in harmony with the swaying of the foliage, every movement that can be danced, naked, in the broad sunlight of the open field, without being in harmony with the vibration and solitude of the landscape--all these movements are false movements in that they are discords in the harmony of the great natural lines. That is why the dancer must choose above all the movements which express the strength, the health, the grace, the nobility, the languor or the gravity of living things.” The steps of the dance, therefore, have to be studied with a care which makes even the elaboration of the technique of the ballet appear simple. But the steps are not the end; they are only a means. The end at which in Miss Duncan’s view the dance aims is “to express the noblest and most profound sentiments of the human soul, those which come from Apollo, from Pan, from Bacchus and from Aphrodite. To see in it no more than a frivolous or agreeable diversion is to offer an insult to the dance.” She is in thorough accord with the Greek view that the dance reacts upon the moral mood. “The attitudes which we take have an influence upon our soul. A simple throwing back of the head, done passionately, causes us a sudden tremor of joy, of heroism or of desire. All gestures have a moral resonance, and thus can directly express every possible moral state.”