By With To & From: A Lincoln Kirstein Reader.

By With To a from: A Lincoln Kirstein Reader By Lincoln Kirstein, edited by Nicholas Jenkins. University Press of Florida, 2006. 448 pp. Illustrated. Paper, $29.95, www.upf.com.

Co-founder of New York City Ballet and an omnivorous essayist on the arts, Kirstein achieved particular elegance in his dance writings, which figure prominently in this anthology, originally published in 1991. Collected here are Kirstein's early diary entries on those months in 1933 when he met Balanchine in Europe and persuaded him to come to America ("ironclad contract necessary," cabled Chick Austin from Hartford). Kirstein's introduction to Muriel Stuart's book The Classic Ballet is familiar, but "A Ballet Master's Belief," penned the year after Balanchine's death, combines aesthetic appraisals and biographical material that only Kirstein could provide. Reprinted, too, is his first (1930) dance article (on Diaghilev), as well as an admiring but simplistic entry on Stravinsky's working method, and a charming essay on gagaku, the ancient Japanese court dance. Throughout, Kirstein remains patrician, cranky, and intoxicatingly judgmental. Yet his credo that the ballet language exerts a moral force bears consideration in an era when anything that moves is often construed as dance. To the end of his days, Kirstein kept the faith.