in fine art and is accustomed to seek for it everywhere, will be kept from going to the theatre in our modern cities by the very fact of the ugliness of everything. From the actresses with eyelids so blackened that to a keen eye or to an opera glass their faces are as it were deformed or diseased, through the whole paraphernalia of badly worn and ill-understood costume, half assimilated and half hanging like "a shirt on a handspike," as the old sailor phrase used to be, to the hideous lighting from below, so hideous that when it is fairly well represented in a Punch caricature or is seen in a snap-shot photograph, it at once becomes ludicrous, all is done, insensibly and unconsciously, but still done, to make the stage repulsive to a person whose eye for beauty is keen and sensitive. It is the penalty of highly developed taste that it cannot, unless under strong inducement, bear violent shocks to its sense of right; and, as has been said in the discussion of Costume, so in the matter of the stage, if, in the chase after close imitation of nature, the dignity and beauty of the drama is lost, whether in external appearance or in the delivery of verse, the value of the stage disappears and with it all use for the theatre beyond that which may be thought to inhere in any amusement accessible to the public.

SECT. IV. Posturing and the Dance. These are practically one art. In fact it has been said, half

POSTURING AND THE DANCE

in jest but also half in earnest, that in the Far East and in the Pacific Islands the dancer moves the upper part of the body and the arms, and may even be seated; that in the Levant the dancer moves the whole body and the arms but does not lift the feet in her most important displays of skill; that in Europe only is dancing done with the legs. In fact posturing and the dance are one and the same, and the main distinction to make is that between the dancing which one does one's self for the sake of vigorous exercise and the sense of rapid motion, mingled with the enjoyment of the combined rhythm of the music and the dancing feet, and which is not a fine art at all, and the dancing which is done by skilled performers for the benefit of the spectator, which is a fine art capable of very high and very subtile refinements indeed. The slow and stately dancing of more courtly times than these, the minuet, the pavane, and the seguidilla, must have had much of that spectacular charm which we now find only on the stage. No one would find much artistic pleasure in looking at a number of couples dancing a modern" square dance" of any sort, from the old fashioned "cotillon" to the quadrille, or in looking at a room full of couples enjoying the mazurka or the schottische of half a century ago, or the waltz of to-day. With some sympathy you look at these young people heartily enjoying their athletic exercise; a romping " contra

dance" would come still nearer to your heart ; but there is nothing in the movement or the momentary postures of the dancers to attract the eye seeking for beauty. A well made young person of either sex can hardly be altogether unpleasing, whether quiet or in active motion; but everything which the teaching of the dance can do has been done to bring about that result, if it were possible.

On the other hand it is to be confessed that few European students of art have ever seen the dance in its artistic developments. That which we are told, and that which we can infer about the dances of the Far East, or again, of the nearer Mohammedan East, is in the highest degree attractive to the seeker after beauty highly developed, and harmony delicately managed. Our business, of course, is not with the tours de force described by residents in the Levant - the rippling muscles, the imitations of the action of a person chasing an insect, or the like; our business is merely with the beauty of pose as of living sculpture which the more sedate dancer of the East, of Java, Japan, Samoa, or Ceylon presents to the spectator. It is a deliberate and traditional art wrought up through centuries of development, and as little admitting of sudden or voluntary change, as the European art of sculpture. The photograph must be generally powerless to render this charm. No one but a most skilful taker

EASTERN DANCING LITTLE KNOWN TO US

We

of instantaneous pictures, so favored by circumstances that his presence would be unknown to the dancer, could secure photographs which would be not rather misleading than instructive. are compelled to take the verbal descriptions of those few travellers who have seen and have known how to see, and the graphic representations of those few artists who have seen and who have also known how to see; and with that our knowledge of this subtile and dignified art unhappily stops.

T

Chapter Thirty

CONCLUSIONS

HE arts of handicraft which are treated in Part III of this work are sometimes decorative, sometimes representative. Of course there are many works of art which serve both purposes which represent something, as a landscape, and which yet decorate, as when that landscape is painted upon a wall. And yet without much difficulty we separate decorative manual art from representative manual art, dividing each class from the other by reference to their obvious intention. Thus, although there has been throughout this work constant insistence upon the fact that the artist, in producing any work of art whatsoever, thinks almost exclusively of its artistical character, hardly conscious of its possible moral or intellectual or religious significance, yet very often it is his obvious intention to represent (not to imitate) a group of external objects. Blaise Desgoffe or Vollon, in painting a table covered with baskets of fruit, dishes of porcelain, and gleaming decanters, is trying to make the most attractive composition possible in color and in form, or