Mlle Magdeleine interpreted music ranging in character as widely as Handel’s “Largo,” a valse of Chopin’s, and “The Marseillaise.” Her rendering of the latter was the very embodiment of human passion and blood-lust. Her power of dramatic expression is indeed terrifying. In her gestures there is at times something tremendous and heroic; at other times they are distinctly faulty and fall into the conventional and the commonplace. It is said that her trance tends to become mixed with the recollections of her waking consciousness, and that when the two states ultimately coincide she will lose her distinctive quality, her absolute rightness of gesture. In any case her dancing is a unique phenomenon; she cannot found a school or perpetuate a method. But she points the way for the art of that great tragic dancer of whom the dance is expectant--an art which was only partially realised in the dancing of Miss Maud Allan. Of the three Ladies of Sorrow of whom De Quincey speaks it was perhaps possible for the dancer of the “Vision of Salomé” to represent our Lady of Tears, “who goes abroad upon the winds when she hears the sobbing of litanies or the thundering of organs,” or even of Our Lady of Sighs, “whose eyes are filled with perishing dreams, and with wrecks of forgotten deliriums”; but it was reserved for the Magdeleine to portray that third and most terrible sister, Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness, the defier of God, the mother of lunacies and the suggestress of suicides, who “moves with incalculable motions, bounding and with tiger’s leaps,” who “wears the fierce light of a blazing misery that rests not for matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon of night, for ebbing or for flowing tide.” The dances of delight and gaiety come almost instinctively to those of a happy temperament; but the dances of grief, of fear, of madness, of despair, these are they which put the dancer to the severest test, which strip her of the acquired graces of the schools, and leave her dependent only on the quality of her own soul. [Illustration: MAUD ALLAN IN CHOPIN’S FUNERAL MARCH _Photograph: Foulsham & Banfield, Ltd._] Of the uninspired imitators who have followed in the steps of the great dancers of the classical school, there is happily no need to speak at length. Mme Knipper-Rabeneck of the Artistic Theatre of Moscow trained a group of dancers, who performed in London last year. Their interpretation of the music which they accompanied with their dancing was not very subtle, but if they failed to catch the finest shades of Schumann, Brahms and Chopin, they nevertheless gave a pleasing exhibition of youthful liveliness. The sisters Wiesenthal have added to the classical method a “pretty fluttering, tottering marionette manner of their own.” And Lady Constance Stuart Richardson was the first of the aristocratic amateurs who, when any new style of dancing becomes the vogue, are always ready to rush in where professionals sometimes fear to tread.