striking imitation of beautiful
nature?

The proofs shown of the perfection of dancing at Athens, and
under the reign of Augustus, being incontestable, it is plain
that what now passes for the art of dancing, is as yet only in
its infancy. To display the arms gracefully, to preserve the
equilibrium in the positions, to form steps with a lightness of
air; to unfold all the springs of the body in harmony to the
music, all these points, sufficient to what may be called
private, or to assembly-dancing, are little more than the
alphabet of the theatrical dances, or of pantomime execution.
The steps and figures are but the letters and words of this art.
A writing-master is one who teaches the mechanical part of
forming letters. A mere dancing-master is an artist who teaches
to form steps. But the first is not more different from what we
call a man of letters, or a _writer_, than the second is from
what may deserve on the theatre, the name of principal dancer.

Besides the necessity of learning his art elementally, a dancer,
like a writer, should have a stile of his own, an original
stile: more or less valuable, according as he can exhibit,
express, and paint with elegance a greater or lesser quantity of
things admirable, agreeable, and useful.

Speech is scarce more expressive, than the gestual language. The
art of painting, which places before our eyes the most pathetic,
or the most gay images of human life, composes them of nothing
but of attitudes, of positions of the arms, expressions of the
countenance, and of all these parts dancing is composed, as well
as painting.

But, as I have before observed, painting can express no more
than an instant of action. Theatrical dancing can exhibit all
the successive instants it chuses to paint. Its march proceeds
from picture to picture, to which, motion gives life. In
painting, life is only imitated; in dancing, it is always the
reality itself.

Dancing is, evidently, in its nature, an action upon the
theatres; nothing is wanting to it but meaning: it moves to the
right, to the left; it retrogrades, it advances, it forms steps,
it delineates figures. There is only wanting to all this an
arrangement of the motions, to furnish to the eye a theatrical
action upon any subject whatever.

The history of the art proves that the dancers of genius, had no
other means or assistance in the world but this to express all
the human passions, and the possibilities of it are in all
time