In the power of expressing the depth and subtlety of spiritual moods Isadora Duncan is supreme. She is a poet no less than a dancer. Her dancing is so deeply rooted in the soul that it ignores the superficial and often coquettish graces of the popular dancer. And yet she is feminine in her dancing, but feminine in the simple, calm, womanly grandeur of the three fates of the Parthenon marbles. Hers is the essential and eternal type of womanhood, the type of the Madonna, of the peasant woman, breathing of the warm earth and the open air, of Ceres rather than of Circe. Her dance has perhaps the beauty of full summer rather than of spring. Its lines are flowing, but full of dignity and restraint. There is perhaps still a suggestion of the frieze in it. A new technique necessarily at first inclines towards rigidity. There is no surer proof of the true greatness of her art than the fact that it can produce in the spectator that sense of shock which only work of an elemental character can give, a shock which sends the mind surging forward down vistas opening up an undiscovered prospect not merely of art but of life. This sensation has been well described by Mr W. R. Titterton in a glowing pæan of praise. “I remember when I first saw her, at the Theater des Westens in Berlin. My friends had led me to expect something fine, and then the Duncan came and struck me like a thunderclap. Will you believe me? I shuddered with awe. Once in a century, in ten centuries, comes a New Idea, and here was I the spectator of the latest born. In this idea--this free, simple, happy, expressive rhythmic movement--was focused all I and a hundred others had been dreaming. This was our symbol--the symbol of a new art, a new literature, a new national polity, a new life. I saw crowds of happy children, of happy men and women, dancing that dance on village greens, in the green forest, on the green hill-tops. Pedants at their books, pedants at their figures, pedants on their platforms vanished in smoke before the exultant dances of this glorious woman. As the walls of Jericho before the trump of Joshua, so before her the factory walls fell down, the festering slums and ugly places of London crumbled to dust, and away to Arcady we danced to the sound of her Shepherd’s piping.” If Isadora Duncan propounded the gospel of the classical dance, Maud Allan promulgated it with the greatest popular success. She won the ear of England for the new word. Not that she was by any means a mere copyist--her talent was too original for that. Coming after her great predecessor, she nevertheless found her own inspiration in herself. With a certain assurance in the strength of her own individuality, she treated the classical dance with some freedom and boldness. She added the personal touch that gained the applause of the crowd.