ive artist ever had so many?) have purloined her
costumes, her gestures, her steps; they have put the music of
Beethoven and Schubert to new uses as she had done before them; they
have unbound their hair and freed their feet; but the essence of her
art, the _spirit_, they have left in her keeping; they could not well
do otherwise.

Inspired perhaps by Greek phrases, by the superb collection of Greek
vases in the old Pinakotheck in Munich, Isadora cast the knowledge she
had gleaned of the dancer's training from her. At least she forced it
to be subservient to her new wishes. She flung aside her memory of the
entrechat and the pirouette, the studied technique of the ballet; but
in so doing she unveiled her own soul. She called her art the
renaissance of the Greek ideal but there was something modern about
it, pagan though it might be in quality. Always it was pure and
sexless ... always abstract emotion has guided her interpretations.

In the beginning she danced to the piano music of Chopin and Schubert.
Eleven years ago I saw her in Munich in a program of Schubert
_impromptus_ and Chopin _preludes_ and _mazurkas_. A year or two later
she was dancing in Paris to the accompaniment of the Colonne
Orchestra, a good deal of the music of Gluck's _Orfeo_ and the very
lovely dances from _Iphigenie en Aulide_. In these she remained
faithful to her original ideal, the beauty of abstract movement, the
rhythm of exquisite gesture. This was not sense echoing sound but
rather a very delightful confusion of her own mood with that of the
music.

So a new grace, a new freedom were added to the dance; in her later
representations she has added a third quality, strength. Too, her
immediate interpretations often suggest concrete images.... A
passionate patriotism for one of her adopted countries is at the root
of her fiery miming of the _Marseillaise_, a patriotism apparently as
deep-rooted, certainly as inflaming, as that which inspired Rachel in
her recitation of this hymn during the Paris revolution of 1848. In
times of civil or international conflagration the dancer, the actress
often play important roles in world politics. Malvina Cavalazzi, the
Italian _ballerina_ who appeared at the Academy of Music during the
Eighties and who married Charles Mapleson, son of the impressario,
once told me of a part she had played in the making of United Italy.
During the Austrian invasion the Italian flag was _verboten_. One
night, however, duri