dance in the midst of a drawing-room. Doubtless their training had been
long, laborious and wearisome; but now one could not be deceived, their
movement was full of joy. They were among friends, and it all seemed
but the play of children; how powerful it seemed, how passionate, while
an even more miraculous art, separated from us by the footlights,
appeared in the comparison laborious and professional. It is well to
be close enough to an artist to feel for him a personal liking, close
enough perhaps to feel that our liking is returned.

My play is made possible by a Japanese dancer whom I have seen dance in a
studio and in a drawing-room and on a very small stage lit by an
excellent stage-light. In the studio and in the drawing-room alone where
the lighting was the light we are most accustomed to, did I see him as
the tragic image that has stirred my imagination. There where no
studied lighting, no stage-picture made an artificial world, he was able,
as he rose from the floor, where he had been sitting crossed-legged or as
he threw out an arm, to recede from us into some more powerful life.
Because that separation was achieved by human means alone, he receded,
but to inhabit as it were the deeps of the mind. One realised anew,
at every separating strangeness, that the measure of all arts' greatness
can be but in their intimacy.


III

All imaginative art keeps at a distance and this distance once chosen
must be firmly held against a pushing world. Verse, ritual, music and
dance in association with action require that gesture, costume, facial
expression, stage arrangement must help in keeping the door. Our
unimaginative arts are content to set a piece of the world as we know it