SCIENCE AND DANCING 175 



is, in fact, " grand opera," without a voice, without words. 

 Gesture, facial expression, and movement of the limbs, 

 marvellous for its grace and directness of appeal, take 

 the place of words. In fact, dance, the appeal to the 

 eye, takes the place of verse, the appeal to the ear. And 

 it is a fact, unexpected and astonishing to those new to 

 it, that the same quality of " poetic imagination " which 

 distinguishes " word-poems " from mere doggerel or 

 commonplace verse, can also inspire the great dancer and 

 give to a wordless dance the unmistakable value of 

 poetical art, distinguishing it from purely acrobatic or 

 barbaric capering. It is a fact that poetic imagination 

 may be conveyed in one kind of art as in another, and 

 that dancing, though greatly limited in its range of 

 detailed expression, yet is closely similar in its forms to 

 music, verse, and to glyptic and pictorial art, of all of 

 vdiich it is the parent and forerunner. Its primitive 

 character is no less remarkable than the readiness with 

 which it exerts its charm and develops new importance 

 at the present day. 



Regarded as a fine art, and not merely as a pastime, 

 dancing has frequently great beauty in its simple quality 

 of the rhythmic movement of decorative form and colour. 

 The dances depicted on Greek vases had this character, 

 and so, with varying degree of merit, have the ballets 

 common during the last fifty years in London and other 

 great centres. But before this period the makers of 

 ballets (a word originally signifying to dance, to sing, to 

 rejoice, and representing three modern words — ballet, 

 ball, and ballad) did not aim at a mere exhibition of 

 living rhythmic decoration, but at the production of a 

 theatrical performance in which a story is told only by 

 gesture and dancing accompanied by music. The real 

 modern founder and exponent of the ballet as thus 



