Now, please, all you people who put us down as æsthetes or shallow cultists or youth rebelling for the sake of sensation, or tiresome upholders of art “principles,” or sapless supporters of art as a “hole and corner” affair—please for a moment, just listen. If you get enraged with the censorship of the vicious Mr. Sumner every one knows it is not because you wish to flaunt your theories of good literature to the heavens for the want of something better to do. Very well. Grant me the same sincerity. And grant me also another thing: that I may possibly have something true to say. I have waited five years to see Isadora Duncan. I went to the Metropolitan expecting to see the Dionysian, “the feet of the Centaur trampling the stage,” etc. I expected inspiration in a form that you are lucky enough to experience a very few times in your life. Everybody had talked to me this way about Isadora Duncan; every poet, painter, sculptor and musician, every radical I know, had said, “She has real greatness.” Well, this is what I saw: Isadora Duncan ran and jumped and skipped and stamped and swooned about the stage, dragging with her a body that was never meant to move in rhythmic line, turning music into stories of war and religion, illustrating the stories with obvious gesticulations toward the heavens or maudlin manoeuverings towards the grave, using the same gestures for the sweetness of Schubert as for the sacraments of César Franck, moving always _inside_ the music, never dominating it, never even controlling it, never holding or pushing it to an authentic end. In all my life I have never felt such disappointment or such a weary knowledge of the public’s predilection for what is truly bad. It didn’t occur to me to conceal these ideas. I tried to explain what was wrong. I used Isadora Duncan as the best example I knew of the differentiation between the artist and the pseudo-artist. I tried to show how her conception of Art was identical with only one other conception in the world: the dream of the adolescent brain: that to feel greatly is to make Art and to put your passion and your anguish into expression is to create. Isadora felt a great deal. She shook her head and arms in such a fury of feeling that she appeared to be strangling; and when there was no way of reaching a further intensification she shook her whole body in a kind of spasm of human inability to bear the grief of the world. And every move was a futile and pitiable one because never once did her body become that mould through which a design is to shape its course and flow into its ultimate form. If the music made a wide swinging curve she made a cramped sudden curve; if it made a descending line she interpreted that, for some mysterious reason, by reverently clutching her abdomen and looking to God. “Oh,” they say, “you are talking about technique.” No, no, no! I am not talking about technique. I am almost never talking technique.