a.
The word histrionic is derived through the Latin from an Etruscan word
which means "to leap" and was originally applied to dancers.

Historically, the matter is interesting. Drama began in dance and
developed from it, dance and drama going hand-in-hand for a long while;
then a separation came, and dance has tended more and more to become
meaningless and conventional, and, in the chief school of dancing,
purely technical. The Spanish school is still alive, reinforced by the
North African, and in the main showing some tendency, often perfectly
restrained, towards the indecent. Our own step-dancing remains popular,
and for a while the hybrid skirt-dancing triumphed, chiefly because of
the genius of Kate Vaughan and talent of her successors, one of whom,
Katie Seymour, worked out a clever individual compound of styles.

The "Classic" school, classic in quite a secondary sense, which has been
represented by what one can conveniently call the ballet, year after
year has worked towards its extinction by the over-cultivation of mere
technique, of execution rather than imagination.

The greatest artist of this school in our times is Genee; natural
grace, a piquant individuality, and a fine power of miming, have lent
charm to work the foundation of which is really acrobatic, and consists
of remarkable feats made too manifest by an abominably ugly costume.

Isadora Duncan goes back in style to the early Greek; dancing, however,
necessarily to more modern music, for the reason that we do not know how
to reproduce much of the old, and possibly would not like it if we
could. To her work one may apply the phrase of Simonides, that "dancing
is silent poetry." Preferable is the term that has been used concerning
architecture: Schelling, in his "Philosophie der Kunst," calls it
"frozen music," a term ridiculed by Madame de Stael. Peter Legh wrote a
book on the topic, published in 1831, with the title "The Music of the
Eye." The book is poor, pretentious stuff, but the title seems nicely
applicable to the dancing of Isadora Duncan. To a deaf man her work
would be entirely musical--to a Beethoven or Robert Franz, deaf after,
for a while, full enjoyment of sound, her dances would, I believe,
represent complete, delightful, musical impressions.

It may be that sometimes in her work she attempts impossible subtleties,
endeavouring to express ideas beyond the range of melody--for it is
difficult to imagine that any dancing can be more t