“She begs and prays for mercy of the stern head--alas, without response! Salome flees in despair, and though her pride, her princely rank, confront her, and she halts, it is but for a moment. The Revelation of Something far greater still breaks upon her, and stretching out her trembling arms turns her soul rejoicing towards Salvation. It is gone! Where, oh, where! A sudden wild grief overmasters her, and the fair young Princess, bereft of all her pride, her childish gaiety, and her womanly desire, falls, her hands grasping high above her for her lost redemption, a quivering huddled mass.” It was a dance of a strange and haunting fascination, deriving no little of its disquieting effect from the weird Oriental strains of Strauss’s music. There were many who found themselves unaccountably drawn to it and were compelled to return to the tragic vision night after night. Yet as a presentment of tragic emotion, finer even than the “Vision of Salomé,” or the rendering of Chopin’s “Funeral March,” was the dance of “Ase’s Death” in Grieg’s _Peer Gynt_ suite. It was a study of mournful poses, inspired by that grief which lies too deep and still to explode in tumultuous and exciting gesture. There is, however, in her ecstasies both of joy and grief just that lack of fire which makes intelligible, if it does not quite justify, the somewhat harsh words of Mr W. R. Titterton when he says of Miss Maud Allan that “she is the English Miss in art. She is an ineffectual angel beating in the limelight her luminous wings in vain. She has many pretty movements; she is light and dainty, she has an elfin prance, with bent knee and waving hands, but she has no temperament, and no presence; she is spectral; you think you can see through her. And above all, she is monotonous. She repeats and repeats and repeats. How she sickens me in the end, for example, with that, at first, so beautiful ripple of the hands.”