There is a close analogy between her method and that of the composer of music. Saint-Saëns, for example, in “Le Cygne,” and Pavlova in the dance which she has devised for the accompaniment of that composition, have both taken the curved and undulating grace of the swan for _motif_. Adorning, amplifying, and elaborating this initial theme, the dancer has achieved a result which in its complex beauty, yet fundamental simplicity, is an exact parallel with the composer’s. Doubtless a _maître de ballet_ might have phrases at command which would convey, to the initiate at least, the bare sequence of poses and movements, as one musician could recount to another the main features of a composition. In neither case, however, would the hearer glean more than the merest rudiments; with the dance as with music, direct contact alone is of avail. Even a literary artist would encounter limitations as severe as those which beset the painter, who can show (witness John Lavery’s “Le Mort du Cygne”) but a single moment of a single phase in a thing of prolonged and continuous beauty. In such a performance as this, Pavlova touches great heights. She is less happy when she indulges in some of those “interpretations” of music which of late years have become so fashionable. How, indeed, can the dancer’s art be expected to interpret music which was never written for the dance? It is as idle as the similar attempt so often made by the painter. One work of art may provide inspiration for another, but we cannot consider them simultaneously since they will not be in the same plane. To watch the dance, or rather series of poses, by which Pavlova “interprets,” let us say, Rubinstein’s “La Nuit,” is to delight the eye with an exhibition of rare grace. But only a very assimilative and accommodating mind will imagine that the composer’s intention has been made any clearer to him thereby--and probably it will [Illustration] imagine quite erroneously. The critical mind receives no convincing impression of unity. In the case of “Le Cygne,” Pavlova is not interpreting Saint Saëns. Musician and dancer have taken the same theme for treatment in their different ways, and the welding of their separate efforts is the legitimate art of the ballet. It may be said, perhaps, that this is the manner in which the so-called interpretations, to which objection has been made, have been evolved. But this is to ignore the distinction between so definite a theme as the graceful movements of a swan, known and accepted by all men, and such an abstraction as Night, of which the conception must be arbitrary, and for that reason probably different from the one upon which the musician, nominally interpreted, has proceeded.