35
Of dancing then, in the strict sense of the word, I have said enough. To enlarge further upon its history would be pedantic. And now I come to the pantomime. What must be his qualifications? what his previous training? what his studies? what his subsidiary accomplishments? You will find that his is no easy profession, nor lightly to be undertaken; requiring as it does the highest standard of culture in all its branches, and involving a knowledge not of music only, but of rhythm and metre, and above all of your beloved philosophy, both natural and moral, the subtleties of dialectic alone being rejected as serving no useful purpose. Rhetoric, too, in so far as that art is concerned with the exposition of human character and human passions, claims a share of its attention, Nor can it dispense with the painter’s and the sculptor’s arts; in its close observance of the harmonious proportions that these teach, it is the equal of an Apelles or a Phidias.
36
But above all Mnemosyne, and her daughter Polyhymnia, must be propitiated by an art that would remember all things, Like Calchas in Homer, the pantomime must know all ‘that is, that was, that shall be’; nothing must escape his ever ready memory. Faithfully to represent his subject, adequately to express his own conceptions, to make plain all that might be obscure;—these are the first essentials for the pantomime, to whom no higher compliment could be paid than Thucydides’s tribute to Pericles, who, he says, ‘could not only conceive a wise policy, but render it intelligible to his hearers’; the intelligibility, in the present case, depending on clearness of gesticulation.
