[Illustration: Sadler’s Wells Ballet: Scenery and costumes start the trek for America _Acme-PA_ ] [Illustration: _Gyenes_ Antonio Spanish Ballet: Antonio] [Illustration: Antonio Spanish Ballet: _Serenada_ _Gyenes_] doing her something less than justice if I failed to call attention to a supreme quality in her work, viz., that quality of implied ease in all she does, bringing unstrained pleasure to the onlooker; coupled as it is with a spiritual quality with which her performances seem to shimmer. All these things, so far as I am concerned, add up to a _ballerina_ absolutely unique in my experience. Margot Fonteyn is, to me, the true artist, because a great dancer must be a human being before she is an artist; her art must, in the last resort, be the expression of her personal attitude to life. She is many-sided; and the wonder is that she is able to have this breadth of cultural outlook when so much of her time has had to be spent in acquiring technique, dealing with its problems and the means of expression. No amount of technique, no amount of technical brilliance or recondite knowledge will hide the paucity of emotion or intellect in an artist’s make-up. Technique, after all, is no more than the alphabet and the words of an art, and it is only the difficulty of acquiring a superlative technique that has led so many astray. But along what a fatal path they have been led! How often are we told that the true artist must devote her whole energies to her art, without the realization that art is the highest expression of mankind and has value only in so far as it is enriched with the blood of life. As for Fonteyn, the person, whom I love and admire, I have no gossip to offer, few anecdotes, no whisperings. About her there is not the slightest trace of pose, pretentiousness, or pettiness. While she is conscious she is a great _ballerina_, one of the top-ranking artists in any art in the world today, she is equally conscious she is a human being. Basically, she is shy and quite humble. Splendidly poised, immaculately and impeccably groomed, chic in an international rather than in a Parisian sense, she is definitely an elegant person. The elegance of her private appearance she carries over into her appearance as a _ballerina_. Anna Pavlova, of all other dancers I have known, had this same quality.