Elie Faure

 Elie Faure (1873 Sainte-Foy-la-Grande - 1937 Paris), French historian, essayist and art critic.

"Yes, we wept when we saw her.

  It was no longer to our eyes, nor to our ears; it was no longer to our nerves that she spoke. From deep within us, when she danced, there arose a flood that swept away from the corners of our soul all the filth which had been piled up there by those who for twenty centuries had bequeathed to us their critique, their ethics, and their judgments...

   When we eagerly watched her we rediscovered that primitive purity which, every two or three thousand years, reappears from the depth of the abyss of our worn-out conscience to restore a holy animality to us again...

  Isadora! you have given us the certitude that the day is near when we shall once more come in fecund contact with instinctive life. 

  You are the first flower of a tree still close to the earth and hidden among the old stripped trunks of a dying forest; but that tree will grow fiercely and scatter its seeds to make the forest thick and green again..."