Yvette Guilbert has so little voice that she couldn’t sustain the singing of a single song through with beauty—as we commonly speak of beauty. Yet every time she moves her hand or turns her bird-like head or throws that voice into the creation of her design she shows herself an artist in the one real sense of the word. Is that a matter of technique? Cezanne studied light until he was able to paint objects as though they were reflected in a kind of eternal light. Is that merely technique? Harold Bauer studied sound until he has made the technique of the older pianists sound not like an end, nor even like a means to an end, but merely like a lack of full vision. What do you call that? James Joyce writes a novel in which a new kind of literary architecture is achieved not by his following of but by his departure from what has been established as the technique of good writing. What do you call that? “Well, then,” says Mr. John Cowper Powys, when we argue all this, “you are at fault. Whenever you allow any theory of art to interfere with your enjoyment you are doing a silly thing.” But why should it occur to you that I am doing that? Is it the obtrudance of an obstinate art theory that makes you acclaim the poetry of Byron quite second-rate poetry compared to that of Shelley or Keats? You would not say that your esoteric art principles interfered with your enjoyment of Mr. Kipling, but that Mr. Kipling interfered with your enjoyment of what might have been his art. Isadora herself interferes with the possibility of any æsthetic experience out of her dancing. What she does is to inspire the mob with the only kind of feeling the mob is ever inspired with. If you were much moved by what she suggested to you—“the trampling feet of the Centaur, the look in her face as though she could drink blood”—why not realize that you can feel those things, _if you feel like it_, in the performance of the cheapest amateur. Almost no expression of the arts is too decadent to give you such reactions. But that is no criterion of Art. In fact the more of those feelings you have the more you will know that what you are viewing is not Art. Because in the presence of the latter you feel almost nothing, you imagine nothing, you are like a being in vacuo, “your mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal.” So you are talking only of what Isadora made you feel, not what Isadora _made_. And the best—perhaps the only—test for Art is that your emotion is focused on the forms in the picture, not sidetracked to what those forms suggest to you or inform you of—as in descriptive painting or any other bad expression. Clive Bell has said all this and said it more than lucidly. Why should I be repeating it? You all believe it, and all your shrines are built to this one miracle.