ancers seemed to tap upon their arms. The
effect was so stupendous and terrifying that I could not project
myself into that aloof state of mind necessary for a calm dissection
of its technique.

What we have been thinking of all these years in accepting the
imitation and ignoring the actuality I don't know; it has all been
down in black and white. What Richard Ford saw and wrote down in 1846
I am seeing and writing down in 1917. How these devilish Spaniards
have been able to keep it up all this time I can't imagine. Here we
have our paradox. Spain has changed so little that Ford's book is
still the best to be procured on the subject (you may spend many a
delightful half-hour with the charming irony of its pages for
company). Spanish dancing is apparently what it was a hundred years
ago; no wind from the north has disturbed it. Stranger still, it
depends for its effect on the acquirement of a brilliant technique.
Merely to play the castanets requires a severe tutelage. And yet it is
all as spontaneous, as fresh, as unstudied, as vehement in its appeal,
even to Spaniards, as it was in the beginning. Let us hope that Spain
will have no artistic reawakening.

Aristotle and Havelock Ellis and Louis Sherwin have taught us that the
theatre should be an outlet for suppressed desires. So, indeed, the
ideal theatre should. As a matter of fact, in most playhouses (I will
generously refrain from naming the one I visited yesterday) I am
continually suppressing a desire to strangle somebody or other, but
after a visit to the Spaniards I walk out into Columbus Circle
completely purged of pity and fear, love, hate, and all the rest. It
is an experience.

_November 3, 1917._

II

A Note on Mimi Aguglia

_"Art has to do only with the creation of beauty, whether it
be in words, or sounds, or colour, or outline, or rhythmical
movement; and the man who writes music is no more truly an
artist than the man who plays that music, the poet who
composes rhythms in words no more truly an artist than the
dancer who composes rhythms with the body, and the one is no
more to be preferred to the other, than the painter is to be
preferred to the sculptor, or the musician to the poet, in
those forms of art which we have agreed to recognize as of
equal value."_

Arthur Symons.

The only George Jean, "witty, wise, and cruel," and the "amaranthine"
Louis Sherwin