Some writers and critics seem to think that the great importance of Dalcroze’s system lies in his Neo-Hellenism, in that it is so close to the ancient Greek ideas. This view is particularly widespread in Germany, the country of classic adoration. But Greek spirit and ideals cannot help but only mislead a modern man. We have our problems, so many thousand years of evolution after the Greek civilization, that differ fundamentally from those of the bygone centuries. It is not in looking backward, but in looking forward that we have to find the great cosmic ideal of beauty. Dalcroze is by no means an imitator of the Greeks, but a man of to-day. He maintains emphatically that his method of eurhythmics is meant to be a general educational subject in all the schools--an elementary rhythmic training for life. It is to be hoped that the Dalcroze system of training dancers will be employed as the elementary step in all the dancing schools, for only then we may hope to see the rise of a new art of dancing. Without learning the alphabet thoroughly or without knowing the most elementary rules of a science nothing could be obtained by a pupil in his later studies. Here is the elementary system in all its primitive simplicity and truth. All we need is to adapt it to the higher schools of choreography. What the Dalcroze schooling of to-day gives is insufficient for a stage art. But it is by far a more thorough elementary training than any ballet, naturalistic or individual school can give, as it makes a student feel the music in his body and soul before he expresses it in his plastic forms. Then again, there is a strict system, a method of gradual development of those essentials which lie at the bottom of every art dance. In spite of the many shortcomings the Jacques-Dalcroze school can be considered as the first move towards a new stage art. It means the beginning of a new school of dancing altogether. However, it needs another reformer to begin where Dalcroze ended. Can we expect this of Fokine, Volkhonsky or some one else? Dance in its highest sense is symbolic. The symbols that it expresses should not be others than those of music. We know only that they should form images of the symmetric and rhythmic elements, but their exact nature remains either for an individual artist or a future school to determine. CHAPTER XIX PLASTOMIMIC CHOREOGRAPHY The defects of the new Russian and other modern schools; the new ideals; Prince Volkhonsky’s theories--Lada and choreographic symbolism--The question of appropriate music. I