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Title: Modern dancing and dancers
Author: Flitch, J. E. Crawford (John Ernest Crawford)
Language: English
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MODERN DANCING AND DANCERS
[Illustration: CARMENCITA
AFTER A PAINTING BY JOHN S. SARGENT]
MODERN DANCING
AND DANCERS
BY
J. E. CRAWFORD FLITCH, M.A.
AUTHOR OF “MEDITERRANEAN MOODS”
[Illustration: colophon]
WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR AND MANY
IN BLACK AND WHITE
LONDON
GRANT RICHARDS LTD.
PHILADELPHIA: J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
MDCCCCXII
PRINTED BY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LTD.
BEAVERHALL ROAD, EDINBURGH
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 9
CHAPTER
I. THE ANCIENT AND MODERN ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE DANCE 15
II. THE RISE OF THE BALLET 27
III. THE HEYDAY OF THE BALLET 39
IV. THE DECLINE OF THE BALLET 57
V. THE SKIRT DANCE 71
VI. THE SERPENTINE DANCE 81
VII. THE HIGH KICKERS 91
VIII. THE REVIVAL OF CLASSICAL DANCING 103
IX. THE IMPERIAL RUSSIAN BALLET 123
X. THE REPERTORY OF THE RUSSIAN BALLET 137
XI. THE RUSSIAN DANCERS 153
XII. THE ENGLISH BALLET 173
XIII. ORIENTAL AND SPANISH DANCING 189
XIV. THE REVIVAL OF THE MORRIS DANCE 203
XV. THE FUTURE OF THE DANCE 215
INDEX 225
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
IN COLOUR
CARMENCITA, after a painting by John Sargent _Frontispiece_
DANSEUSES EN SCÈNE, from a painting by Degas _To face page_ 66
ISADORA DUNCAN “ “ 106
MAUD ALLAN, from a photograph “ “ 112
DANSE ORIENTALE, after a design by Léon Bakst “ “ 132
ANNA PAVLOVA, from a painting by John Lavery “ “ 160
ADELINE GENÉE, from a photograph “ “ 178
RUTH ST DENIS, in a Nautch Dance “ “ 192
IN BLACK AND WHITE
MARIE TAGLIONI, as _La Sylphide_ “ “ 42
CARLOTTA GRISI, in _The Peri_ “ “ 50
FANNY CERITO, in _Ondine_ “ “ 52
KATE VAUGHAN “ “ 72
KATE VAUGHAN, in Turkish costume “ “ 74
ALICE LETHBRIDGE “ “ 76
LETTY LIND, in a Skirt Dance “ “ 78
LETTY LIND “ “ 84
CONNIE GILCHRIST (The Gold Girl), from a painting by
Whistler “ “ 92
REGINA BADET, première danseuse of the Paris Opera “ “ 98
ISADORA DUNCAN “ “ 108
MAUD ALLAN, in _The Vision of Salomé_ “ “ 114
MAUD ALLAN, in Chopin’s Funeral March “ “ 118
THE RUSSIAN BALLET, an undress rehearsal “ “ 126
TROUHANOWA, in an Oriental ballet “ “ 130
WASLAW NIJINSKY, in _Le Pavillon d’Armide_ “ “ 138
LEONTIEV and LEPOUKHAVA, in _Le Carnaval_ “ “ 140
KARSAVINA and NIJINSKY, in _Le Spectre de la Rose_ “ “ 142
LES SYLPHIDES “ “ 144
SERAPHIMA ASTAFIEVA, as _Cleopatra_ “ “ 146
WASLAW NIJINSKY, in _Scheherazade_ “ “ 154
TAMAR KARSAVINA, in _Scheherazade_ “ “ 156
ANNA PAVLOVA “ “ 158
PAVLOVA and MORDKIN “ “ 162
PAVLOVA and MORDKIN, in Russian costume “ “ 164
MADEMOISELLE SCHMOLZ “ “ 166
MIKAIL MORDKIN, in _The Arrow Dance_ “ “ 168
LYDIA KYASHT “ “ 170
LYDIA KYASHT, in _Sylvia_ “ “ 174
ALEXANDRA BALASHOVA “ “ 176
ADELINE GENÉE “ “ 180
ADELINE GENÉE, in _A Dream of Butterflies and Roses_ “ “ 182
PHYLLIS BEDELLS, in _Sylvia_ “ “ 184
BEATRICE COLLIER and FRED FARREN, in _La Danse
des Apaches_ “ “ 186
RUTH ST DENIS “ “ 190
LEONORA, as a Spanish dancer “ “ 194
LA OTERO “ “ 196
LA GUERRERO “ “ 198
MORRIS DANCE: BEAN-SETTING “ “ 206
MIKAIL MORDKIN, in _The Cymbal Dance_ “ “ 216
INTRODUCTION
It is not unlikely that when the art historian of the future comes to
treat of the artistic activity of the first decade of the twentieth
century, he will remark as one of its most notable accomplishments a
renaissance of the art of the Dance.
That this renaissance is an accomplished fact, is a matter of common
knowledge. Within a relatively short period there have appeared several
great dancers, who must necessarily have been preparing themselves for a
considerable time previously to their appearance, yet as it were in
secret, without cognisance of one another, with a common aim, but
without a common plan. Contemporaries in time, they have been as far
removed in space as the East is from the West. In all movements which
touch the spirit, this circumstance of the simultaneous but independent
manifestation of a common impulse is at once the most general and the
most unaccountable. The still small voice whispers into space and those
of a delicate hearing hear and respond. We content ourselves by
repeating the explanation, which is no explanation, that the movement is
“in the air.”
It follows, therefore, that he who sets out to relate adequately the
story of the Dance in recent years should have qualified himself by
being present at many different points, almost at one and the same time,
ready to take account of its various exhibitions. Criticism of the Dance
makes severer demands, at any rate physically, than criticism of
literature. Dancers, even the most peripatetic, do not circulate with
the same freedom as philosophers and novelists. Mahomet must always go
to the mountain. It is true that all the roads of modern art lead to
Paris, and some are continued as far as London. But the critic, even if
he lies in wait at either of these centres, cannot always count on
catching the bird of passage on the wing. To the quality of ubiquity I
make no claim. And I may as well confess now as never that I saw Russia
only when it came to Covent Garden. For the omission in this book,
therefore, of a description of the performances of certain dancers, I
have no better excuse to offer than the fact that I have never seen
them. Silence in many cases must be taken to mean not my ignoring of
their art, but my ignorance of it. I think I may claim, however, that
the names that are omitted will be found to be famous rather on account
of some personal quality in the dancer than on account of her influence
on the development of the Dance.
There are other peculiar difficulties which beset the critic of the
Dance. I do not refer to the difficulty of passing judgment upon a
fugitive art that leaves nothing behind it but an echo of applause, for
with the dancers of the past I have little concern. There is the
difficulty of discriminating between the executant and the composer--a
difficulty greater in dancing than in music, since the dancer is more
than an executant of the art, she is herself the medium of it. In the
popular eye she has in fact always quite eclipsed the choregrapher.
Criticism is in doubt as to the measure of her share in the creation of
the design--an uncertainty that cannot be resolved by any reference to a
score. Further, it is in continual danger of being misled by the glamour
of personal qualities--physical beauty, for example--which are strictly
extraneous to the art. (Taglioni, it should be remembered, was probably
the plainest as well as the greatest of dancers.) In no art, therefore,
is personal prejudice established so readily or on grounds of such
doubtful artistic validity.
The Dance enjoys no immunity from the clash of schools. Indeed,
partisanship is the more bitter as principles of criticism are less
determined. The respective upholders of the school of the ballet and of
the natural or classical style of dancing are barely on speaking terms.
To the advocates of the old school the new classical dancer is little
better than a freak performer; to the austere classicist the
ballet-dancer is but a smiling automaton, and both agree in refusing to
recognise the skirt-dancer as a dancer at all.
To the exponents of conflicting styles I have endeavoured to do justice.
If I have failed, it is of no great moment, since criticism of the Dance
is still so inchoate that the opinion of the expert--and the
responsibilities of his office I unhesitatingly refuse--has little more
authority, except on questions of pure technique, than that of an
expression of personal preference. I care little if the reader tears to
tatters any hazardous conclusions upon which I have ventured. Such
denials I expect. Almost I welcome them. But I care much if by anything
that I have said the reader is provoked to formulate a serious criticism
of his own and to refer his judgment to the abiding principles of art.
CHAPTER I
THE ANCIENT AND MODERN ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE DANCE
In latter, if not in former times, Dancing has commonly been regarded as
the little sister of the Arts.
Gracious, wayward, beguiling, it has been indulged as the amusement of a
trifling hour. It has ranked high among the amenities of life, but low
in the hierarchy of the sincere ministers of beauty. The liberal arts
have looked askance at its intrusion into their company. Dignity,
seriousness of intention, fitness to express grave emotion, power to
touch the heights and depths of the spirit have been denied to it. It
has suffered the disdain which is the habitual attitude of grown men
towards whatever appears to them to savour of the capricious and the
childish. Charm, of course, has been granted it--the butterfly charm of
triviality.
It has been discussed earnestly only to be condemned. Little mercy has
the moralist ever shown to the art of the dance, but he has at least
done it this much justice--he has taken it seriously. To the puritan of
all times all the arts have been more or less suspect, but with regard
to dancing he has never had any doubts at all. He has damned it with
bell, book and candle. Indeed the logic of his own argument has left him
no alternative. For dancing is the life of the senses burning with its
most flamelike intensity. The appeal of all the arts is by their very
nature sensuous, but in none is this appeal so direct and compelling as
in the dance.
Happily the warping and misconceived morality of former generations is a
thing of the past. The old opposition of sense to spirit is discredited
as a false antithesis. It has been displaced by the more handsome creed
that “all good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than
flesh helps soul.” Beauty is a refiner’s fire, and the beauty that
enters in through the doorway of the senses cannot soil but only cleanse
the spirit.
Nowadays the dance has less to fear from the hostility of the moralist
than from the indifference of the artist. And perhaps the difficulty of
restoring it to its ancient and rightful rank becomes thereby greater.
It is easier to convince an angry opponent than the man who smiles
indulgently at everything you have to say and then drops quietly off to
sleep.
It is a true if unfortunate fact that the majority of people, at all
events so far as the Anglo-Saxon race is concerned, not only do not
appreciate the full beauty and meaning of dancing but show little or no
desire ever to understand it. When they do not despise it as puerile, or
actively resent it as immoral, they merely tolerate its performance as
constituting the inevitable dull portion of a pantomime or the
superfluous item in a music-hall programme. That dancing should ever
have entered deeply into the religious and artistic life of nations is
utterly inconceivable to them. To become proficient in the art for the
sake of money or even for the love of admiration does not seem to them
altogether unreasonable; but to dance as the world danced long ago, for
the love of God--well, that falls into the portion of unintelligible
ideas. Dancing has altogether ceased to play, indeed it never has
played, a rôle of any importance in their lives. It means nothing more
than paying occasionally to see the performance of some seven nights’
wonder at a prominent music-hall, or, more usually, gyrating languidly
on a beeswaxed floor to waltz time or bounding along kangaroo-like to
the swinging melody of a popular two-step.
It is not the purpose of this book to present even an outline of the
history of dancing, but in pleading for the “high seriousness” of the
Dance as art it is desirable to consider for a moment the place which it
once held in the ancient world--for this place, if I read the signs of
the times aright, it is about to hold again.
The root of dancing is one with the root of all the arts,
namely--ecstasy. Scorned as it has been by the sister arts of Music,
Painting and Sculpture, it can boast a longer lineage than theirs, for
the dance is more spontaneous than they. All the arts must needs be
founded in emotion, but the moment of passion is usually long past
before the labour of creation begins. The emotion is “recollected in
tranquillity.” But the raw material, if one may call it so, of the dance
is the human body, and all human emotion expresses itself most
spontaneously in bodily gesture. With children and simple peoples who
have never learnt that it is incorrect to display their emotions,
feeling is immediately translated into action. For a child words are
never enough to express the heart’s delight--as may be seen at any
street corner when music is in the wind. The whole body becomes a lively
instrument for joy to play upon. Joy for joy’s sake only, however, is
not yet art. “A child dancing for its own delight,” says Ruskin, “a lamb
leaping or a fawn at play, are happy and holy creatures; but they are
not artists. An artist is a person who has submitted to a law which it
was painful to obey, that he may bestow a delight which it is gracious
to bestow.” It is only when the emotion becomes self-conscious and seeks
to communicate itself, that it evokes the help of formal rhythm--and
where there is rhythm there is the alpha, if not the omega, of art.
This deep ecstasy out of which the dance springs, as a fountain from a
well, is not necessarily joy. Often it is the ecstasy of love--for the
dance, as Lucian said, is as old as love, the oldest of the gods. It may
be the ecstasy of worship or the ecstasy of grief. From the nature of
the emotion out of which it springs the dance takes its
character--voluptuous, solemn, bacchic, mournful, as the case may be.
Whenever the passions of primitive peoples were deeply moved, they
evolved a dance to express them. In the mystic ritual dance they found
some expression for that divine unrest, when the winds in the great
forests or the serenity of the multitudinous stars strangely stirred the
heart to a sense of the nearness of the spiritual order; when the
triumphing warriors returned after driving back the onslaught of a
hostile tribe, the sudden sense of relief from the fear of extermination
could not but find vent in the dance of victory; around the bier of the
chief, in sorrow, fear, and uncertainty, they dance the dances of death;
in joy when they stored up for another year the kindly fruits of the
earth they danced the harvest and vintage dances; and always and
everywhere was danced the eternal pantomime of love.
In a passage which is none the less illuminating if its truth is perhaps
imaginative rather than historical, Mr Max Beerbohm aptly illustrates
the spontaneity of the dance and its development out of the ecstasy of
some happy moment. “Some Thessalian vintner, say, suddenly danced for
sheer joy that the earth was so bounteous; and his fellow-vintners,
sharing his joy, danced with him; and ere the breath was spent they
remembered who it was that had given them such cause for merry-making,
and they caught leaves from the vine and twined them in their hair, and
from the fig-tree and the fir-tree they snatched branches, and waved
them this way and that, as they danced, in honour of him who was lord of
these trees and of this wondrous vine. Thereafter this dance of joy
became a custom, ever to be observed at certain periods of the year. It
took on, beneath its joyousness, a formal solemnity, it was danced
slowly around an altar of stone whereon wood and salt were
burning--burning with little flames that were pale in the sunlight.
Formal hymns were chanted around this altar. And some youth, clad in
leopard’s skin and wreathed with ivy, masqueraded as the god himself,
and spoke words appropriate to that august character.”
It was doubtless owing to its close connection with religion that the
dance in ancient times was invested with so great dignity. It was a
ceremonial before it became an amusement. Thus it is in its sacred
character that we meet with the earliest instances of it. It had its
place in the solemn rites of the Hebrew and the Egyptian. The Egyptian
dances were full of esoteric meaning. The mystical circle of dancers
round the altar interpreted the revolutions of the celestial bodies, the
music of the spheres. It is significant that the name given to the
dancing-women was _Awalim_, the wise or learned ones. Their dancing
appears to have been no less elaborately technical than it was symbolic.
From the painted records that have come down to us, it would appear that
they were not unfamiliar with many of the movements of the modern
ballet. There is little doubt that the Egyptian spectator of three or
four thousand years ago delighted in the same pirouette as may be seen
on the stage of St Petersburg and Milan to-day.
If Egypt was the seed-ground of the arts, it was in Greece that they
flowered. As we should naturally expect, it was there that the art of
rhythmic gesture achieved its most perfect expression. Thoroughly to
appreciate the curious poses of the ancient dances of India and Egypt it
would be necessary to understand the exact spiritual meaning of which
those attitudes and gestures were but the symbol. But the dances of
Greece, by their supreme beauty of movement and their power of rendering
all the gamut of human emotion, are of universal appeal. There the dance
escaped from its tutelage to religion and was made free of the kingdom
of art. It had its part in that imperishable achievement of Greece--the
revelation of the full glory and beauty of the “human form divine.” In
its turn it nourished the other arts. Greek sculpture drew no little of
its inspiration from the dance, and its admirable gestures, thus caught
in the fugitive moment and eternalised in stone, have enriched the
world’s heritage of beauty for all time.
In the Greek view, the dance was properly accompanied by music and
song--song being the speech of music and dance the gesture of song. The
three formed together a single imitative art, the aim of which was to
present a definite emotion or idea. The story is told of Sostratus
refusing to dance the dance of “Liberty” before the conqueror of his
native town. “It would not be fitting for me,” he said, “to dance the
‘liberty’ which my native town has lost.” The Greeks never regarded
dancing as a mere frivolous entertainment. From its power of affecting
the emotions, and with them the character, they attributed to it a grave
importance. In constructing his ideal republic, Plato went so far as to
advocate its regulation by the State. The action of the State, let it be
observed, was not to be a mere prohibition of degrading performances; it
was actively to foster and prescribe the best dances with a view to
elevating and perfecting the character of the citizens. Nothing could be
stranger to a modern mind than this attitude of the ancient world to the
dance; yet if it be true--and none I think will care to deny it--that
dancing determines the emotions and that the emotions of a people
determine its character, what could be more reasonable?
It is difficult to realise now to what an extent the whole life of the
ancient world was coloured by the dance. It occupied as great a part as
music, literature and the drama occupy in the life of to-day--perhaps a
greater, for whereas in Western Europe there are many who care for none
of these things, in Egypt, in Greece and in Rome, the dance touched the
life of all classes and at every point. No ceremony of importance was
conducted without dancing. It had its place in the rites of religion, at
weddings and funerals, at private feasts and at public triumphs, in
military exercises and in the theatre. It gave the theme to sculpture
and painting. It went hand in hand with music. Indeed when we think of
the ancient world we almost perforce think of it dancing. In the dance
is summed up all the grace and gaiety of that old pagan life which was
once lived on the sunlit shores of the Mediterranean, and which we are
now wistfully and painfully beginning to attempt to recapture.
It is not a little strange that the dance should have fallen from its
high estate as the handmaid of religion and hierarch of beauty to be the
doubtful amusement of the café and the music-hall. In some measure
undoubtedly its decline was due to the growing licentiousness in which
it became involved. Homer dignified it with the epithet
“irreproachable,” but in Cicero’s time it had already become so
degenerate that he could say, “No sane man dances unless he is mad.”
Sallust was even more emphatic when he told a lady of his acquaintance
that she danced with too much skill to be virtuous. The Catholic Church
at first not only tolerated but actually incorporated the dance in
Christian worship, and survivals of the ancient ritual dance exist in
the churches of Spain to this day. But as the character of the dances
became more equivocal they were condemned. Little by little the dance
fell into disrepute.
But the moralist mistakes when he supposes that the dance stands in a
different category from the other arts by reason of a special taint.
Like all the other arts it reflects the morals of the time. Among
peoples of simple faith and primitive virtue, the dance has always been
marked by a certain strict and hieratic quality. It was so among the
austere Romans of the early republic, and among the Christians of the
first centuries. When manners decay, the dance becomes decadent also. It
is not the dissoluteness of the dance that poisons the morals of the
age; it is the corruption of the age that poisons the dance. The sensual
character of so many eastern dances is the effect and not the cause of
the sensuality of the race. If the dance suffers from any general
relaxation of morality more swiftly and more disastrously than any of
the other arts, it is because it expresses the emotions with such
fidelity and emphasis. It is the most subtle and the most accurate index
of the character of a people.
The dancing that is seen on the stage of to-day, however, is never
reprehensible, and seldom even vulgar, and the fact that in former ages
of looser living the dance became contaminated does not adequately
explain the disesteem with which it appears, until recently, to have
been regarded. The true reason seems to lie in the popular belief, not
that dancing is less incorruptible, but that it is less serious than the
other arts.
This fallacy--for such I take it to be--is doubtless due in part to the
fact that when we speak of dancing we inevitably associate it with the
ball-room. The word carries with it a train of images and recollections
connected with the languorous cadence of waltz music, the perfume of
conservatories, shady corners, champagne and ices, and the premature
arrival of dawn. We can scarcely avoid thinking of it as merely the
amusement of our lighter hours. But between the dancing of the ball-room
and the dancing of art there is about as little connection as between
the snow-man that children make on a winter’s afternoon and the
sculpture of the Parthenon. The one is an amusement, more or less
graceful as the case may be, the other is an inspiration and a science.
In the dancing of a mixed company at an evening party there is as little
relation to art as there would be in an exhibition of pictures by a
group of beginners, who had not yet mastered the elementary rules of
drawing. If the performers derive any pleasure out of their respective
exhibitions, there is an end of the whole matter and an excuse for it.
It is perhaps because everybody is more or less an amateur dancer that
dancing has been lightly assumed to be a facile accomplishment which can
easily be acquired after a few lessons, and a little practice. No
misconception could be further from the truth. Probably there is no art
that necessitates more prolonged and painful study. The dancer must be
“caught young,” if she is to excel. She must spend the whole of her
youth in unremitting toil. She will be confronted with a bewilderingly
elaborate technique. A steel resolution and a kind of passion for her
calling must be hers, if she is not to flinch from the severity even of
an elementary training.
Yet if dancing demanded nothing more than physical effort and mental
application, it could not claim the seriousness of art. The dexterous
execution of a number of intricate steps has no more value than that of
any other _tour de force_. Soulless dancing has as little power to move
the spectator as the feats of a clever acrobat. There can be no great
dancing without emotion. Unless the dancer has the capacity for unusual
emotion, and is also gifted with the power of emotional expression,
which is the beginning and end of all great dancing, the performance
never rises to anything more inspiring than a dreary and unpleasing
display of mechanical accomplishment. If the dancer has nothing in her
to express, she dances in vain. Great dancing demands deep sensibility
and a subtle responsiveness to the strong rhythms of life, together with
the power of translating these emotions into beauty of bodily movement.
Dancing can be taught just as much and just as little as any other art.
The great dancer is born.
But probably the seriousness of great art has been denied to dancing
because of a common misapprehension as to what that seriousness consists
in. It is almost always assumed that the seriousness of art depends upon
its subject-matter. Serious art, it is supposed, must have a “message.”
It must be concerned with actual problems, social or religious. It must
in some way be oppressed with the burden of contemporary life. But an
art which has nothing to say, no conundrums to ask, no solutions to
offer--what claim can that have upon our serious attention?
It is forgotten that it is not the subject that makes art serious or
trivial, but the mood. There are problem pictures over which the public
wrinkles its brows that are frivolous as a picture post-card from the
point of view of art. And there are pictures of the bric-à-brac of a
room, or a table spread for a meal, that are as grave as tragedy. It all
depends upon the quality of the emotion that has gone to the making of
them. The dance expresses the most serious thing in life--that is,
ecstasy. All dull things are trivial. Art which has only the interest of
contemporary problems is ephemeral, for when the problem is solved, the
interest vanishes. The dance is the expression of the moods, and the
moods are eternal. It has its source in passion, and where there is
passion there is life at its utmost and seriousness at its highest.
In the present revival and development of the dance there is something
at once significant and hopeful. It is not perhaps too conjectural to
discern in it the hint of a reaction against one of the least agreeable
tendencies in much of present-day art. It would seem that the arts are
tending to become more and more enmeshed in contemporary affairs. They
are exchanging the artistic conscience for a social conscience. When we
ask for beauty they give us advice. Our serious novels are blue-books.
Their writers appear to have no other interest than exposing the weak
places of the social order. Drama has long since abandoned itself almost
entirely to a painstaking study of marriage and divorce, and the problem
picture we have always with us. Art has taken for its task the solution
of the query, What’s wrong with the world? It is furiously justifying
its existence by hurrying to the rescue of the politician and the social
reformer.
Into this vexed and anxious company of the arts the Dance strays a
little timidly, bringing with it the serenity and grace of a less
troubled age. It cannot produce the passport of discontent, without
which it seems doubtful whether it is entitled to be admitted. It can
contribute neither message nor criticism. It seeks not to reform us but
only to please. It recalls us to the joy of life which the other arts
had almost persuaded us to forget. It has but a single purpose--to
quicken our pulses with beauty and to renew our life with its own
untiring ecstasy.
CHAPTER II
THE RISE OF THE BALLET
Any account of the modern renaissance of dancing must needs begin with
the ballet. In one sense it is in the ballet that the dance attains its
completest mode of expression. It may be regarded as the limit of its
evolution, its most complex and elaborate statement. The more orderly
sequence would be to trace the simpler forms of dancing through the
various stages of their evolution until they arrive at their ultimate
development in the ballet. The concern of this book, however, is not
with the history of the dance, but rather with the interest which it has
for the present time as an art-form. And it is with the dance as ballet
that the awakening of this interest begins.
If the dance is essentially the art of democracy, springing out of the
gladness of the crowd, the ballet in its origin is aristocratic. It was
the diversion of courts before it became the delight of the populace.
In spite of its lavish production of masterpieces of art, the
Renaissance would nevertheless have been incomplete without the ballet;
for the ballet provided a perfectly fitting expression for two of the
peculiar characteristics of the age--its love of pageant and its love of
mythological allegory. If nothing akin to the ballet had ever existed in
the world before, the fifteenth century would have been compelled to
invent it. Invent it it did, and although there were precedents in the
mysteries and interludes of the Middle Ages and in the old Roman
saturnalia and pantomimi, the invention gave a new art-form to the
world.
The ballet of the court was a mixed entertainment, consisting of poetry,
music and dancing, in which princes and nobles took part. A poet was
commissioned to write the verses, a musician to compose the score, a
ballet-master to arrange the steps, and a painter to devise the artistic
effects. These splendid court entertainments originated in Italy. The
gorgeous spectacular display given in honour of the marriage of Galeazzo
Visconti, Duke of Milan, in 1489, made a sensation not only in Italy but
throughout Europe. The pageantry of the court ballet appealed to the
heart of the splendour-loving Medici. Catherine de Medici introduced it
into France.
It was in France that the _ballet de la cour_ found its home. Henri IV.
and Louis XIII. were both lovers of the ballet, while Louis XIV. may be
said to have had a passion for it. The great cardinals, Richelieu and
Mazarin, were its patrons. The first historian of the ballet, Le Père
Ménestrier, gives an account of a “moral ballet” that was danced on
Richelieu’s birthday in 1634. The theme was _Truth, the Enemy of
Seeming, upheld by Time_. It opened, we are told, with “a chorus of
those False Rumours and Suspicions which usher in Seeming and Falsehood.
They were represented by actors dressed as cocks and hens, who sang a
dialogue, partly Italian, partly French, with a refrain of clucking and
crowing. After this song the background opened and Seeming appeared,
seated upon a huge cloud and accompanied by the Winds. She had the wings
and the great tail of a peacock, and was covered with mirrors. She
hatched eggs, from which issued Pernicious Lies, Deceptions, Frauds,
Agreeable Lies, Flatteries, Intrigues, Ridiculous Lies, Jocosities,
Little Fibs.
“The Deceptions were inconspicuously clad in dark colours, with serpents
hidden among flowers. The Frauds, clothed in fowlers’ nets, had bladders
which they burst while dancing. The Flatteries were disguised as apes;
the Intrigues as crayfishers, carrying lanterns on their heads and in
their hands; the Ridiculous Lies as crippled beggars on wooden legs.
“Then Time, having put to flight Seeming with her train of Lies, had the
nest opened from which these had issued; and there was disclosed a great
hour-glass. And out of this hour-glass Time raised up Truth, who
summoned the Hours and danced the grand ballet with them.”
But for the rather strident moral emphasis we seem to be breathing the
atmosphere of Leicester Square! What has usually been regarded as a
latter-day corruption of the ballet--the intrusion of a mass of
irrelevant properties and stage-mechanism--appears to have been a kind
of original sin which attached to it even in its origin.
In the reign of Louis XIV. the ballet passed definitely from the court
to the theatre. In the earlier part of his reign the king himself
frequently appeared in the ballet, usually taking the part of a god; but
in course of time _le Grand Monarque_ put on flesh and exchanged the
rôle of an actor for that of a spectator. In 1661 was founded the
_Académie royale de musique et de danse_, with Quinault as its first
director, and the ballet henceforth took possession of the stage.
But before it assumed the form in which we know it, the ballet had to
pass through several transformations. Originally the ballet, like the
play, had been performed exclusively by men. The parts of bacchantes and
nymphs had been taken by youths of slight and graceful build, and the
use of masks, which at this time was general, assisted the convention.
But in a ballet given at Saint-Germain in 1681, entitled _Le Triomphe de
l’Amour_, Lulli, the composer, introduced the innovation of female
dancers. The fashion became immediately popular. The part of the male
dancer grew continually less important until in the ballets of the
latter part of the nineteenth century it became altogether negligible,
to be revived again in the Russian ballet of our own day.
The next step was the abolition of the mask. This did not take place
until nearly a hundred years later. The custom of wearing the mask had
its origin in the classical theatre and formed an essential part of the
ballet from the Renaissance onwards. In 1772 Rameau’s opera _Castor and
Pollux_ was given in Paris, the part of Apollo being taken by Gætano
Vestris, who appeared, according to the fashion of the time, in a mask
and an enormous full-bottomed black wig. One night he was unable to
perform and Gardel, one of the leading dancers of the day, consented to
act as a substitute, but only on condition that he was allowed to
discard the mask and wig and appear in his own long fair hair. The
happy innovation pleased the public and from that day the fashion of the
mask was doomed.
But the character of the ballet was chiefly affected by the revolution
in costume. In the earlier days of the ballet the dancers were dressed
in the elaborate and fulsome costume of the period--the women in hooped
petticoats falling to the ankle, with their powdered hair piled up a
foot or more upon their heads, the men in long-skirted coats set out
from their hips with padding. So long as this costume was worn the dance
was necessarily confined almost entirely to the dignified and gliding
movements of the minuet. It permitted none of the airy and intricate
steps which are peculiar to the technique of the ballet proper. Noverre,
the eighteenth-century _maître de ballet_, who is chiefly responsible
for giving the ballet its present form, wrote as follows:--“I wish to
reduce by three quarters the ridiculous paniers of our _danseuses_. They
are opposed equally to the freedom, the quickness, and the prompt and
animated action of the dance. They deprive the figure of its elegance
and of the just proportions which it ought to possess. They diminish the
beauty of the arms; they _bury_, so to speak, the graces. They embarrass
and distract the dancer to such a degree that the movement of her panier
sometimes occupies her more seriously than that of her limbs.”
Mademoiselle de Camargo, the famous dancer of the first half of the
eighteenth century, started the innovation in dress. She was the first
to execute the entrechat, a light and brilliant step during the
performance of which the dancer rapidly crosses the feet while in
mid-air. In her dances, therefore, she took the precaution of wearing
the _caleçon_, from which the tight-fitting fleshing of the
ballet-dancer was subsequently evolved. This reform in costume brought
about a transformation in the dance. When the limbs were freed from the
thraldom of clothes, the movements of the ballet became swifter and more
complex. Its technique was developed by the introduction of pirouettes,
entrechats, jetés-battus, ballones. From an elegant accomplishment in
which the lords and ladies of the court could take part, the ballet
passed into a serious science, demanding the exclusive devotion of the
performer. The reign of the amateur was over; that of the artist began.
To Noverre, whom Garrick called the “Shakespeare of dance,” is chiefly
due the creation of the ballet as an art-work, single, complete and
harmonious in itself. Until his time it had existed principally as an
auxiliary to opera. In the ballet-opera, which had reigned supreme on
the stage hitherto, and has never in fact been entirely abandoned, the
dances interpolated between the acts had borne little relation to the
argument of the play. They were merely a diversion of quite secondary
interest. The opera was not created for them but they for the opera. The
revolution which Noverre effected was the creation of the _ballet
d’action_, the unravelling of a plot by dancing and gesture pure and
simple. For Noverre the ballet was something much more serious than a
mere saltatory display. It was an æsthetic composition which demanded
the harmonious co-operation of a number of arts. “The master of the
ballet,” he said, “must study the works of painters and sculptors, he
must know anatomy.... Everything which subserves the ends of painting
must also be of service to the dance.” He insisted upon the importance
to the dancer of a knowledge of pantomime and himself studied closely
the methods of Garrick. He deprecated the performance of the dance to
any haphazard arrangement of lively airs. Music must be an integral
portion of the ballet, written specially for it and informed with the
spirit of the action. The costumes and the _décor_ of the theatre must
also be treated with a view to obtaining one single artistic effect.
Thus Noverre succeeded in creating a new theatrical formula. He laid
down the main lines along which the ballet has subsequently developed.
Although the English may claim to have been a nation of dancers in the
old pre-Puritan days, dancing has certainly never been native to the
English stage. The most brilliant of the dancers in the ballets that are
produced upon the British stage to-day are foreign, and it has been so
from the first. The ballet was late in coming to England. It sprang
somewhat suddenly and dazzlingly to life upon the London stage in 1734.
In that year Mademoiselle Sallé, who had already achieved fame in
Paris, appeared at Covent Garden in the ballet of _Pygmalion and
Galatea_. Like all the greatest dancers, she was a woman of
distinguished personality. She counted Locke among her friends. Handel
wrote specially for her the ballet of _Terpsichore_. Voltaire vacillated
between his admiration of her and of her rival, Camargo, whom he
apostrophised thus:
“Ah! Camargo, que vous êtes brillante!
Mais que Sallé, grand Dieu, est ravissante!
Que vos pas sont légers et que les siens sont doux!
Elle est inimitable et vous êtes nouvelle!
Les nymphes sautent comme vous,
Mais les Grâces dansent comme elle!”
Her dancing was full of expression and characterised by a certain simple
dignity of motion; very rapid measures and eccentric movements she never
attempted. She assisted in the reform of costume which Mademoiselle de
Camargo had initiated. The _Mercure de France_ noted that she appeared
at Covent Garden “sans panier, sans jupe, sans corps, échevelée et sans
aucun ornement sur la tête.”
Her success was immediate and tumultuous. The public was frenzied with
delight--whether at this first surprising revelation of the ballet or at
the vision of the ravishing figure, “échevelée et sans jupe,” it is
impossible to say. And the enthusiasm of the British public in the
eighteenth century appears to have had a Latin quality of abandon, which
suggests the inference that the British character is not more but less
emotional than it was. The crowds around the doors of the theatre, we
are told, fought for a sight of the ballerina. The spectators had to
force their way to the doors sword in hand. And, in the manner of
Spaniards applauding a popular matador at a bull-fight, the Londoners
showered upon the stage purses filled with guineas and jewels, which the
cupids and satyrs of the troupe gathered up, keeping time to the music!
Seven years later England saw the greatest dancer of the
century--perhaps the greatest _danseur_ who has ever lived--Gætano
Vestris. He was by birth an Italian and styled himself, with a better
knowledge of his own accomplishments than of the pronunciation of the
French language, “le diou de la danse.” His amazing vanity was the
source of innumerable anecdotes. “This century has produced but three
great men,” he used to say, “myself, Voltaire and Frederick the Great.”
One night in coming from the opera a portly lady happened to tread
rather heavily upon his foot. She apologised, and hoped she had not hurt
him very much. “Me, madam!” exclaimed the god of the dance, “me! You
have only put Paris into mourning for a fortnight!” His son
Auguste-Armand inherited almost all his father’s talent. Gætano was wont
to say of him, “If Auguste does not continue to float in mid-air, it is
only out of consideration for his less gifted fellow-mortals.”
As England never produced a great school of dancing, the vicissitudes of
the ballet in this country fluctuated with its fortunes abroad. The
French Revolution brought about the break-up, in 1789, of the
_Communeauté des Maîtres à danser_ founded by Louis XIV. Whenever the
spirit of a people has been caught up in the great winds of emotion
which sweep over the world with an invariable periodicity, the dance has
always been the most immediate expression of the popular excitement.
Perhaps France never danced so madly as during the Revolution. Paris
danced between the massacres. The revolutionary spirit embodied itself
in the Carmagnole. But it was the dance of the people, not the dance of
art, that flourished during the Revolution. The _grand ballet_, in spite
of an attempt to make it a vehicle for political ideas, languished.
Among his multitudinous interests, however, Napoleon appears to have
included a concern for the art of dancing, and in his enumeration of the
requisites of his Egyptian expedition “a troupe of ballet girls” figures
among the quota of cannon and ammunition.
A consequence of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, which does not
usually figure in the pages of the historian, was that the supply of
Parisian _danseuses_ for the English stage was cut off for a generation
or more. Even for some years after the peace, the French were inclined
to keep their best performers for themselves and sent over to England
only their discarded favourites. The golden period of the ballet in
England began in the twenties of the nineteenth century and lasted until
the fifties. In 1821 a determined effort was made to secure some of the
most dazzling stars of the Parisian ballet. The difficulties to be
overcome were not light, for, as the Parisian dancers were trained in an
academy maintained by the state, none could leave the country without
the permission of the Government. The British ambassador was himself
charged with the negotiations. After many pourparlers, a treaty was
drawn up, signed and sealed, by which one of the two high-contracting
parties agreed to loan to the other two first and two second dancers
from the Academy, while the other in return was to pledge itself not to
attempt to import any other dancer without the Academy’s consent.
The first two to arrive were the _danseur_ Albert and the _première
danseuse_ Noblet, who were engaged at a salary of £1700 and £1500
respectively. They took London by storm. They were the idols of society;
the fashionable world could think and talk of nothing but their dancing.
The reign of the ballet had begun. Already in the first season the cost
of the ballet exceeded that of the opera by some £2000. No other form of
theatrical art approached the ballet in popularity. The King’s Theatre,
afterwards transformed and renamed Her Majesty’s, kept a permanent
_corps de ballet_. The Haymarket, Her Majesty’s, and Covent Garden
nightly drew crowded houses to witness displays of the most accomplished
dancing that had ever been seen on the English stage. With the advent of
Taglioni enthusiasm reached its utmost limits.
For about a quarter of a century England was enraptured with the ballet.
It is impossible for us to attempt to envisage the early Victorian era
without the ballet entering prominently into the picture. It appears to
present the just embodiment of the formal but naïve gaiety, the
untroubled imagination, the somewhat vulgarian æstheticism of the age.
The ballerina, with her straightly parted hair, her rose wreath, her
innocent affectations, is the complement to the whiskered dandy of the
D’Orsay period. The ballet seems to be as closely attached to early
Victorianism as are Louis Quinze furniture or Chelsea porcelain
shepherdesses to their respective periods. It is not altogether easy for
us to regard it otherwise than as a revival. Even now the ballet, in its
costumes, its music, its _décor_, is not free from a tendency to hark
back to the thirties and forties of the last century.
CHAPTER III
THE HEYDAY OF THE BALLET
“Will the young folks ever see anything so charming, anything so
classic, anything like Taglioni?” The question occurs in “Pendennis,”
and how shall we answer it?
The dance is the most fugitive of the arts. Time makes but slow headway
in obliterating a picture or a statue, and a verse is too elusive for
his grasp; but the dancer’s art dies with her, or rather the dancer
herself outlives it. Painting may preserve some phantom of her grace,
but the soul of the grace is in the motion which it cannot represent.
The dancer lives only in hearsay, in the memory of spectators, and when
the last eye-witness is gone she is no more than a name to posterity.
Taglioni’s is perhaps the greatest name in the annals of dancing, but a
comparison of her art with that of her successors of the present day is
well-nigh impossible. We can only judge of her genius by the echoes of
the applause which have not even yet quite died away.
Marie Taglioni was born in Stockholm in 1804. Her father was an Italian,
her mother a Swede. Her name was already well known in the world of the
theatre, as her father was a _maître de ballet_ and two of her aunts had
been celebrated dancers. But although she was born into the tradition,
she appears not to have been formed by nature to be a dancer. When her
father took her as a child to see Coulon, a famous dancing-master at the
beginning of the last century, the master turned to him and said, “What
the devil am I to make of that little hunchback!” But by years of
assiduous training she overcame any defect of form that may have been
hers by birth.
She made her début in 1822 at Vienna in a ballet which her father had
composed specially for her, entitled _Réception d’une jeune Nymphe à la
Cour de Terpsichore_. Her success there was immediate and it was not
long before the young dancer became one of the “stars” of the Opera.
When she appeared in Paris, however, five years later, in _Le Sicilien_,
her reception was somewhat cold. Perseverance was one of Taglioni’s
characteristics and she determined to achieve the conquest of the French
capital, a measure which was even more necessary then than now to the
dancer who aspired to universal fame. She succeeded and her success
there set the seal upon her artistic fortunes. She appeared successively
in _La Vestale_, _Mars et Vénus_, _Fernand Cortez_, _Les Bayadères_, and
_Le Carnaval de Venise_. She was acclaimed as the greatest dancer of the
day. In _La Sylphide_ she achieved a triumph which resounded throughout
the whole of Europe.
From Paris she extended her conquests to London, where she first
appeared in 1830 in Didelot’s ballet, _Flore et Zéphire_. An incident
which happened during her stay in London is significant of the
discipline upon which her father insisted. He had a small sloping stage
erected in his daughter’s room, in order that she might practise her
steps every night. A gentleman occupying the floor below sent word that
the dancer was on no account to interrupt her practice from fear of
disturbing him. Philippi Taglioni resented the courtesy. “Tell the
gentleman,” he said, “that I, her father, have never yet heard my
daughter’s step--if ever that should happen, I would have no more to do
with her!”
She had been brought to England as a counter-attraction to the famous
Lablache and Malibran, then in the zenith of their popularity in Italian
opera. She at once became the idol of the British public. The theatre
was literally besieged on those nights when she was announced to appear.
It was in England that she found a public ever ready to cry her praises
when her fame was being seriously challenged by younger rivals abroad.
She received a salary paid to no other dancer in the world. She
demanded and obtained a hundred pounds a night, in addition to which
several of her relations had to be financed as well. An inordinate love
of money was one of the least favourable of her traits. One night the
manager of Her Majesty’s Theatre was compelled to come before the
curtain to apologise for the fact that the ballet had not begun, because
Taglioni, sitting in her dressing-room, refused to appear on the stage
until a large sum of money had been paid her on account. Her temper
behind the scenes intimidated even the most hardened manager. One
evening, when the male dancer Perrot happened to receive a greater
amount of applause than herself, she refused to continue the
performance, and accused everybody right and left of having plotted to
dethrone her. But she had only to dance and everything was forgiven her.
She was the spoilt child of the play-going world.
Apart from the glamour which she cast over her contemporaries, Taglioni
exercised a considerable influence over the development of the ballet.
She finally freed it from the remains of the eighteenth-century
artificiality and affectation which had given a certain grotesqueness to
most of the dancers before her time. She helped to do away with the
rather heavy pseudo-classicism of the earlier ballet; her dancing was
Catholic, if the expression may be allowed, rather than pagan. She
adopted a quality of restraint in her dress and manner. She danced in a
long tunic of white silk-muslin, which reached almost to her ankles and
fell in graceful folds from her figure. Indeed so long was her skirt
that when she was dancing in St Petersburg it is said that the Czar was
compelled to leave his box and take a seat in the stalls. Her hair was
dressed in the style of the Madonna, falling back severely on either
side and encircled by a wreath of roses. Her eyes were usually downcast,
her attitude demure.
As a woman she had few if any pretensions to real beauty; her jaw was
too square, her features too pronounced. Her form also came short of
physical perfection. But apart from her genius for dancing she possessed
an extraordinary charm of manner. With her modest appearance, her
unadorned simplicity, her virginal air of innocence, she seemed to bring
a new atmosphere into the ballet. She was remarkable in winning the
whole-hearted admiration of her own sex. One of her male acquaintances
once asked her if she would not modify her costume so as to display more
of the grace of her figure. Her reply is characteristic. “Sir,” she
asked, “are you married?” He replied that he was. “Well,” retorted the
dancer, “I dance not for you, but for your wife and daughters.”
Her dancing was marked by an entire absence of the false consequence and
bombast of carriage and manner which appear to have characterised most
of the dancers of the time. Its chief note was a certain spirituality.
Taglioni appealed to the spirit rather than to the sense. She seemed
less a being of flesh and blood than some creature of the spiritual
order, always about to take wing and soar away from the earth. Her dance
was remarkable in suggesting flight. One of her most wonderful attitudes
was an _arabesque_ which gave her the appearance of actually flying. She
completely lacked the fire and abandon of her great rival Fanny Elssler.
Her dance was chastened and aspiring rather than voluptuous and
intoxicating. “_La Sylphide_ marks a ballet epoch,” says Mr Chorley, the
author of “Musical Recollections,” “as a work that introduced an element
of delicate fantasy and fairyism into the most artificial of all
dramatic exhibitions, one which to some extent poetised it. After _La
Sylphide_ were to come _La Fille de Danube_ and _Giselle_ (containing
some of Adolphe Adam’s best music), _L’Ombre_ and a score of ballets, in
which the changes were rung on naiad and nereid life, on the
ill-assorted love of some creatures of the elements for an earthly
mortal. The purity and ethereal grace of Mademoiselle Taglioni’s style
suggested the opening of this vein, as it also founded a school of
imitators. Her mimic powers, however elegant, were limited. Her face had
few changes. Her character dances, as in _Guillaume Tell_ and _La
Bayadère_, were new and graceful; but their seduction and piquancy were
to be outdone. When she touched our English ground, however, the sylph
excited as much enthusiasm as the most idolised songstress can now
evoke.”
Perhaps not a little of her popularity was due to the fact that the age
saw in her the concrete expression of the qualities which it most
esteemed. The emotions she expressed were placid, not of the
[Illustration: MARIE TAGLIONE
AS _La Sylphide_]
soul-shattering order. She was the gracious incarnation of the early
Victorian ideal.
Unfortunately, however, the virtue of domesticity was sadly lacking in
her private life. The blame however rests entirely with her husband. In
1832 she married Count Gilbert des Voisins, but the union was of brief
duration, for almost on the morrow of the wedding she was forgotten by
him. She met him twenty years later, so it is related, at a dinner given
by the Duc de Morny. When he appeared she demanded of Morny to know why
he had invited her to dine in such disreputable company. After dinner
Gilbert de Voisins, who feared nothing, not even his wife, had the
audacity to ask to be introduced to Marie Taglioni. “I fancy, monsieur,”
she remarked, “that I had the honour of being presented to you in 1832!”
Taglioni lived long enough to taste all the bitterness of the discarded
favourite. When she became too old to practise her art, and other less
gifted but more youthful dancers usurped her place, she passed swiftly
into oblivion. At the last, the dancer who had been wont to receive the
homage of kings and princes, and the adulation of the public of two
continents, remained without a friend. She lost all her fortune and in
her distress was compelled to give lessons in dancing and deportment.
“It was a sad sight,” says Henri Bauer, “to see her, a white-haired old
lady, escorting a bevy of English schoolgirls in Hyde Park in the
winter, at Brighton in the summer, or, accompanied by a little old
Italian, teaching dances and court curtseys to the proud daughters of
the gentry.”
“I would be young again to dance,” she said to a friend who had asked
her if she would like to live her life all over again, “I would be young
again to dance--but not from any love of life, not to repeat any other
experiences and pleasures.”
Marie Taglioni died at Marseilles in 1884.
The passion for the ballet in the nineteenth century reached its climax
in the amazing rivalry between Taglioni and Fanny Elssler. The
appearance of the Austrian dancer brought about a schism in the cult of
Taglioni. It was fought out with all the fury of the _odium
theologicum_. The two claimants to the sceptre of the dance divided the
world into rival camps. And how shall posterity, to whom both are little
more than shadowy names, make a just award?
Fanny Elssler was born in Vienna in 1810. Her father was Haydn’s copyist
and factotum, and the composer interested himself greatly in the
beginnings of her career. It began early, for at the age of six she was
dancing at a little Viennese theatre in one of the _ballets d’enfants_
then in vogue. She was first taught in the old, stereotyped style of
ballet-dancing which was revolutionised by Taglioni and fell into
disfavour about 1830. Her studies were completed in Italy, where she
passed a great part of her life. She first came into note at Naples and
danced her way through Italy to Berlin and London. Paris she reserved
for her latest conquest. It was when she was dancing at Her Majesty’s
Theatre that Véron, the director of the Paris opera, saw Elssler and
immediately secured her for the next operatic season. The English at
this time, in spite of their enthusiasm for ballet, appear to have
lacked the artistic perception to discover a dancer for themselves. A
great reputation abroad was the only royal road to success on the London
stage. And so it was that they failed to discover what a genius they had
in their midst until it was too late and the new dancer was being
acclaimed in Paris as a serious rival to the incomparable Taglioni.
Fanny Elssler had the advantage over Taglioni in possessing a beauty so
striking that she had only to appear upon the stage when a kind of
passionate shudder swept through the audience, more significant than the
loudest tumult of applause. Her beauty was of the sort that consists
less in the parts than in the harmony of the whole. No single feature
imperiously demanded the homage of the eye, but her perfect unity was
like that of a Greek statue. Her hands and feet were perfectly adjusted
to her limbs; her head was attached to her body by the purest lines of
neck and shoulder; her arms were supple and alert; her strength never
trespassed upon her grace. Her form had a suggestion of masculine
beauty. She has been compared to that ravishing chimera of Greek art,
the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, whose body was united with the nymph
of a river while bathing. This ambiguous quality in her beauty expressed
itself in all her actions. Even in the yielding form and seductive charm
of the dancer there was a hint of the agility, the brusque alertness,
the steel muscles of the young athlete.
She added to her grace of movement an exceptional command of expression.
Her eyes were lit with a certain malicious voluptuousness; when she
smiled a trace of irony played about her lips. In repose her face was
like a marble mask; in action it was capable of expressing the whole
range of the emotions, from tragic grief to the maddest gaiety.
The début of Fanny Elssler in Paris proved to be the great sensation of
the season. Curiosity had already been aroused by the rumour of her
liaison with the Duc de Reichstadt, the son of the first Napoleon--a
rumour wholly baseless as she had never even seen the youth.
Nevertheless the imagination of the large body of Bonapartists then
living in Paris was so fired that they made her début the occasion of a
great demonstration against Louis-Philippe.
The ballet in which she appeared was founded upon Shakespeare’s
_Tempest_. “Tout-Paris” flocked to the theatre. But of all the
notabilities the figure that excited most interest was that of a woman
sitting alone in a small box on the right of the stage. It was Marie
Taglioni. She knew, and everybody else knew, that Véron, the manager,
had brought the new-comer over from London specially to dethrone her.
With a somewhat scornful disdain she had come to take stock of her
rival. Perhaps she anticipated her discomfiture; in any case she can
scarcely have been prepared for the suddenness of her triumph. The new
dancer did not appear until the second of the two acts. Her success was
never in doubt for an instant. Her very first dance created a profound
impression, and the enthusiasm at the close of the performance knew no
limits. As she came before the curtain to acknowledge the thunder of
applause, many eyes were turned towards Taglioni’s box. It is said that
the tears were streaming down the face of the Italian dancer.
The newspapers of the following morning without exception published
eulogies of the débutante. The general public, however, was almost
evenly divided between the merits of the rival schools. Open war was now
declared between the two dancers. Taglioni’s reply was to revive the
ballet of _La Sylphide_, in which she had achieved her greatest triumph
and captured the heart of the Parisian public years before. The result
was that the pendulum of popularity swung back violently in her favour.
The admirers of the Austrian retorted by throwing ridicule upon the
affected innocence of Taglioni’s style, which after Elssler’s dancing
appeared altogether lacking in passion and fire.
The war between the Taglionists and the Elsslerites continued for years.
Nothing like it had been known since the rivalry of Pylades and
Bathyllus, when every Roman was either a Bathyllian or a Pyladian, or
the contests between the reds and the blues of the circus in Byzantium.
The Taglionists claimed the victory and the Elsslerites considered their
opponents vanquished. Each party strove to vindicate the perfection of
one or other of two utterly opposed styles of dancing. They were, in
fact, incomparable with one another. Taglioni’s dancing was spiritual,
while that of Elssler was distinctly of the terrestrial order. Elssler
was warmly human, passionate, dramatic; Taglioni when dancing seemed
scarcely to belong to the earth. Elssler introduced into the ballet an
abandon, fire, petulance, temperament, which the strict limits of art
seemed all too narrow to contain. The classical pirouette provided no
adequate outlet for her passion; she demanded the freer motions of the
South and East. She brought to the dance the ardour of the meridian, the
_fougue espagnole_. She was at her best in Spanish dances, especially in
the famous _cachucha_, which she made entirely her own. Théophile
Gautier said that he had seen Rosita Diez, Lola, the best dancers of
Madrid, of Seville, of Cadiz, of Granada, and the gipsies of Albaycin,
but he had never seen anything to approach the _cachucha_ as danced by
Fanny Elssler.
Chorley, the English critic, also agrees in attributing a unique
character to her dancing. “The exquisite management of her bust and arms
(one of the hardest things to acquire in dancing) set her apart from
everyone whom I have ever seen before or since. Nothing in execution was
too daring for her, nothing too pointed. If Mademoiselle Taglioni flew,
she flashed. The one floated on to the stage like a nymph, the other
showered every sparkling fascination round her like a sorceress. There
was more, however, of the Circe than of the Diana in her smile.”
If Taglioni embodied the ideals of early Victorian England, Elssler was
the incarnation of the Romantic movement of the Continent. She was the
new wine that was too strong for the old wineskins of classical
tradition. She had in her blood the northern enthusiasm for the South
which was the keynote of the movement. She drew her inspiration from
Spain, and so her spirit was attuned to that of the Romantics, whose
gaze also was towards the Pyrenees. She falls naturally into line with a
school which cared more for tumultuous movement than for classical
repose, for colour more than for form, for intense immediate sensation
more than for considered and reflective statement.
Some of the magic of Elssler’s dancing is caught in Gautier’s
description of her appearance in the Spanish ballet _El Diablo Cojuelo_.
“Clad in a skirt of rose-coloured satin clinging closely to the hips,
adorned with deep flounces of black lace, she comes forward with a bold
carriage of her slender figure, and a flashing of diamonds on her
breast. Her leg, like polished marble, gleams through the frail net of
the stocking. Her small foot is at rest, only awaiting the signal of the
music to start into motion. How charming she is with the large comb in
her hair, the rose behind her ear, her flame-like glance and her
sparkling smile! At the extremity of her rose-tipped fingers tremble the
ebony castanets. Now she darts forward; the castanets commence their
sonorous clatter; with her hands she seems to shake down clusters of
rhythm. How she twists! how she bends! what fire! what voluptuousness of
motion! what eager zest! Her arms seem to swoon, her head droops, her
body curves backwards until her white shoulders almost graze the ground.
What charm of gesture! And with that hand which sweeps over the dazzle
of the footlights would not one say that she gathered all the desires
and all the enthusiasms of those who watch her?”
The climax of the famous Taglioni-Elssler rivalry came when, in
defiance of all precedent, Elssler appropriated the most celebrated of
her predecessor’s ballets. Taglioni had made her name famous throughout
the world in _La Sylphide_. She had made the part so exclusively her own
that the pretension of any other dancer to appear in it seemed little
less a desecration than an impertinence. The announcement that Elssler
had determined to challenge her rival on her own ground fell like a
bombshell in the ranks of Taglionists and Elsslerites alike. But in this
instance the ambition of the Austrian dancer overshot the mark. The part
demanded the ethereal grace which none but Taglioni possessed. Elssler’s
performance was almost a failure. Deeply chagrined at the reverse, she
left soon afterwards for America.
Théophile Gautier lamented in a whimsical strain her loss to Europe.
“Ungrateful, she has left us,” he wrote, “she has gone away to America,
to the savages and the Yankees, whom she has wrought to such a madness
with the clatter of her castanets and the swaying of her hips that
senators drag her carriage through the streets and whole populations
follow her with cheers and fanfares.”
In America Elssler aroused a delirium of enthusiasm which put her
brightest European triumphs into the shadow--for America appears to have
a capacity for worship which the older continent has exhausted and for
two glorious years Elssler was its goddess. She was received by the
President of the Union himself, Van Buren, surrounded by his ministers.
During her visit to Washington the wheels of legislation and public
business ceased for a time to revolve. It was decided that Congress
should only meet on those days when Fanny was not dancing. Dollars
rained upon her. Daily she received bizarre and costly presents--massive
gold cigar-boxes and chemises embroidered with precious stones. “At
present she possesses fragments of the coffins of Napoleon and George
Washington,” her companion, Catherine Prinster, gravely
related--suggesting a future pregnant with grim possibilities. When she
returned from the theatre at night crowds followed her with blaring
bands; flowers and carpets were spread for her carriage to pass over;
illuminated arches were raised to brighten her progress. The very
handkerchiefs which she had used after dancing were fought for as
precious relics; the water in which she had dipped her hands was
preserved in bottles; and her admirers drank her health in champagne out
of the shoes in which she had danced the delirious _cachucha_.
On her return from America Elssler paid many visits to Italy, appearing
for several successive seasons at La Scala, in Milan. There she was
caught up in the vortex of international politics. The school of ballet
which had been founded at La Scala in 1811 was encouraged by the
Austrian Government, partly in the hope of providing a safety-valve for
that effervescence of enthusiasm without which an Italian populace
appears unable to exist. The glories of the ballet, it was supposed,
would prevent the popular mind from dwelling too insistently upon the
glories of Italian independence. Everywhere throughout the city was seen
the portrait of the ballerina. The theatre was decorated with roses when
she appeared. Listening to the cheers with which she was received,
Radetzky, the governor, rubbed his hands gleefully and said, “At any
rate they are not plotting any revolutions now!”
1848, however, was the year of Elssler’s Sedan. Revolution was in the
air and the governor sent for Elssler to dance it away. The ballet which
was selected was Perrot’s _Faust_. In the first scene, all the members
of the _corps de ballet_ appeared wearing a medal representing Pius IX.,
the new liberal Pope, giving his benediction to a united Italy.
Unfortunately Elssler regarded the demonstration as directed specially
against herself as an Austrian. Behind the scenes she told the director
that she refused to go on the stage again unless the offending medals
were taken off. The order was given accordingly. The audience was
speedily informed of the cause of the change, and when the _première
danseuse_ next appeared on the stage she was received with a tempest of
hisses. Though she never danced with greater brilliance and grace, the
only response to her endeavours to conciliate the anger of the
spectators was a sepulchral silence from the stalls and a running fire
of insults from the gallery. Bravely she smiled upon them, but the
patriots forgot the dancer in the Austrian and replied with cries of
_Basta! Basta!_ She fainted. At last the idol had fallen. She was
looked upon merely as the instrument of the foreign domination. She
tore up her contract with the impresario and returned to Vienna.
Elssler retired in 1851. The end of her career was in striking contrast
to that of Taglioni. In spite of a prodigal charity she had accumulated
a fortune of a quarter of a million. She preserved the freshness of her
youth to the last. In society she was always the most elegant figure.
She was beloved by the poor. In Milan it had been her wont to send all
the flowers she received to be placed before a statue of the Virgin in
the Church of San Fedele. In Vienna she was as famous for her charities
as for her dancing. The final curtain was rung down upon the long
rivalry of the two dancers in 1884, when the Austrian capital went into
mourning for the death of Elssler and Taglioni died poor and forgotten
in Marseilles.
Théophile Gautier, perhaps the most discriminating critic of the ballet,
said of Fanny Elssler that she was the most vital, the most precise, the
most intelligent dancer who ever graced the boards of the stage. Her
dancing had not the exquisite lightness, the purity of gesture and
attitude, the ethereal qualities of Taglioni; but in dramatic
significance, in fire, passion and imagination, her art never has been,
and probably never will be, equalled.
After the disappearance of the two immortal rivals, who was to carry on
the great tradition? Gautier gives us the answer: “For a long time,” he
writes, “women had said--What can come after the misty grace, the decent
abandon of Taglioni? For a long time men had asked--What can come after
the provocative verve, the spirited and wanton caprice, the purely
Spanish fire of Fanny Elssler? Carlotta Grisi has come--light and chaste
as the first, vivacious, joyous and precise as the second, only with the
inestimable advantage of counting no more than twenty-two Aprils and of
being fresh as a nosegay wet with dew.”
Carlotta Grisi was born in 1821 in a remote mountain village of Istria.
At the age of seven she was dancing in Milan at La Scala, where Perrot
discovered her. She profited by the excellent tuition of the great
_maître de ballet_, and subsequently danced in Naples, Venice, Vienna
and London. Those who witnessed her
[Illustration: CARLOTTA GRISI
IN _La Péri_]
début at the Paris Opera House in _Zingaro_ wondered whether she would
become more famous as a dancer or a singer. Her voice was so pure and
just that Malibran, the famous operatic singer, advised her to devote
herself entirely to music. But guided by that inner voice which speaks
infallibly to all great artists she decided to remain faithful to the
dance. She was the _première danseuse_ at the Paris Opera from 1841 to
1848.
Grisi was of medium height; her feet exquisitely shaped; her limbs
clean, nervous, of great purity of line; her complexion so fresh that
the only use she made of rouge was to revive the fading colour of her
pink dancing-shoes. Her expression had a childish _naïveté_, a gay and
communicative happiness. This fresh and almost infantile gaiety was the
keynote of her dancing. When she appeared upon the stage she seemed to
bring with her the freshness of her native mountain air and the sparkle
of the sun upon the snow.
What _La Sylphide_ was to Taglioni and _El Diablo Cojuelo_ to Elssler,
the ballet of _Giselle_ was to Grisi. It was the work of three famous
men: Heine furnished the subject, Gautier wrote the scenario and Adolphe
Adam composed the music. The scene was laid among the mountains, at the
season of the gathering of the grapes. At the vintage fête Giselle
danced with such unwearied zest that her mother said to her: “Luckless
child, you will dance yourself to death, and when you die you will
become a will-o’-the-wisp. You will go to the ball at midnight in a robe
of moonshine and with bracelets of dew-pearls on your cold white feet.
You will entice lost travellers into the fatal circle and you will lead
them, all warm and breathing, into the icy waters of the lake. You will
be a vampire of the dance!” Grisi’s most marvellous dance was her dance
of death and resurrection as a fairy-spirit. Giselle sickened with
despair of love until she lost her reason. Her madness did not take the
form of an Ophelia-like melancholy. She began to dance, she danced ever
more swiftly and furiously. As she danced, a gleam of reason came to
her; she remembered her sorrow and, resolving to end it and her life
together, she ran upon the point of a sword. Wounded to death she went
on dancing swooningly, and after some last disordered steps died in a
marvellous kind of choregraphic agony. In the next act came her no less
wonderful dance of resurrection. After she is dead, her grave in the
forest is discovered by the fairy troop. She is awaked by magic from her
long sleep. She rises and dances with a tottering motion like one still
dazed with dream. Gradually her limbs forget the contraction of the
grave-clothes; the cool air of the night and the light of the moon
restore her gaiety; delightedly she takes possession of space and
abandons herself to the ecstasy of her new fairy life. Grisi made of the
ballet a true poem, a kind of choregraphic elegy, full of tender charm.
More than one spectator who had never expected to be moved by a
_rond-de-jambe_ or _arabesque_ was surprised by tears. Henceforth the
part was impossible for any other dancer and the name of Carlotta became
inseparable from that of _Giselle_.
The perfect art of these three dancers, Taglioni, Elssler and Carlotta
Grisi, raised the ballet during the term of their fame to the highest
degree of excellence which it had ever reached. To their names must be
added those of Fanny Cerito, who was known in Italy as the “fourth
Grace,” and Lucille Grahn, who according to some critics combined the
ideal form of Taglioni with the realism of Elssler and the sprightliness
of Carlotta Grisi. These two dancers would probably have been without a
rival in any less brilliant epoch than that of the marvellous forties.
In England the ballet may be said to have reached its apogee on the 12th
of July 1845. On that memorable day four of the foremost dancers of the
age, Marie Taglioni, Carlotta Grisi, Fanny Cerito and Lucille Grahn,
danced a _pas de quatre_ before Queen Victoria. The bringing together of
such a glittering constellation of stars on a single stage is best told
in the words of the impresario who conceived and accomplished the
achievement.
“With such materials in my grasp as the four celebrated _danseuses_,
Taglioni, Carlotta Grisi, Cerito and Lucille Grahn, it was my ambition
to unite them all in one striking _divertissement_. But ambition, even
seconded by managerial will, scarcely sufficed to put such a project
into execution. The government of a great state was but a trifle
[Illustration: FANNY CERITO
IN _Ondine_]
compared to the government of such subjects as those whom I was
_supposed_ to be able to command; for these were subjects who considered
themselves far above mortal control, or, more properly speaking, each
was a queen in her own right--alone, absolute, supreme.... But there
existed difficulties even beyond a manager’s calculations. Material
obstacles were easily overcome. When it was feared that Carlotta Grisi
would not be able to leave Paris in time to rehearse and appear for the
occasion, a vessel was chartered from the Steam Navigation Company to
waft the sylph at a moment’s notice across the Channel; a special train
was engaged and ready at Dover; relays of horses were in waiting to aid
the flight of the _danseuse_ all the way from Paris to Calais. In the
execution of the project the difficulty was again manifold. Every
twinkle of each foot in every _pas_ had to be nicely weighed in the
balance, so as to give no preponderance. Each _danseuse_ was to shine in
her peculiar style and grace to the last stretch of perfection; but no
one was to outshine the others, unless in her own individual belief.
Lastly, the famous _Pas de Quatre_ was composed with all the art of
which the distinguished ballet-master, Perrot, was capable.
“All was at length adjusted. Satisfaction was in every mind; the _Pas de
Quatre_ was rehearsed--was announced; the very morning of the event had
arrived; no further hindrances were expected. Suddenly, while I was
engaged with the lawyers in my room, poor Perrot rushed unannounced into
my presence in a state of intense despair. He uttered frantic
exclamations, tore his hair, and at last found breath to say that all
was over--the _Pas de Quatre_ had fallen to the ground, and could never
be given. With difficulty the unfortunate ballet-master was calmed down
to a sufficient state of reason to be able to explain the cause of his
anguish. When all was ready, I had desired Perrot to regulate the order
in which the separate _pas_ of each _danseuse_ should come. The place of
honour, the _last_ in such cases, as in regal processions, had been
ceded without over-much hesitation to Mademoiselle Taglioni. Of the
remaining ladies who claimed equal rights, founded on talent and
popularity, neither would appear before the others. ‘Mon Dieu!’
exclaimed the ballet-master, ‘Cerito will not begin before Carlotta, nor
Carlotta before Cerito; there is no way to make them stir--all is
finished.’ ‘The solution is easy,’ said I; ‘let the _oldest_ take her
unquestionable right to the envied position.’ The ballet-master smote
his forehead, smiled assent, and bounded from the room upon the stage.
The judgment of the manager was announced. The ladies tittered, laughed,
drew back, and were now as much disinclined to accept the right of
position as they had been before eager to claim it. The order of the
ladies being settled, the _Grand Pas de Quatre_ was finally performed on
the same night before a delighted audience, who little knew how nearly
they had been deprived of their promised treat.”
It is scarcely possible now to conceive the excitement which this
performance created. It overshadowed for the time every other national
interest. The reports were eagerly awaited by the Continent. Foreign
courts received accounts of it enclosed in the official despatches. It
was a European event.
But even in the heyday of its prosperity there was a premonition of the
waning of the popularity of ballet. In the very year of this triumphant
dance, Jenny Lind was heard for the first time in London. The human
voice was about to drive the speechless ballet from the theatre.
CHAPTER IV
THE DECLINE OF THE BALLET
The history of every art-form is a record of growth, maturity, decay and
rebirth. The life of art appears to be subject to cycles, the recurrence
of which is as certain and as inexplicable as those of nature. When
perfect facility of execution has been attained, the period of decline
is at hand. Nothing is left to the artist but to attempt to elaborate
forms that are already perfect. The mode of art which has reached its
zenith has expressed everything which the age had to say through that
particular medium. Executive skill may still remain but the creative
spirit is no longer present to inform it. The result almost necessarily
is a barren accomplishment which has ceased to have any significance.
The artist seeks to conceal his lack of inspiration by purely mechanical
dexterity. He produces that over-elaboration of detail which is the sure
mark of decadent art. An art which is full-blown can never begin to bud
again until it has drawn up the sap of a new emotion and again has
something significant to express to the age.
The history of the ballet has shown no exception to this general law.
After its brilliant efflorescence in the second quarter of the last
century it passed into a season of decay. The first cause naturally was
the disappearance of the dancers of genius whose careers have been
briefly sketched in the last chapter. When she danced in the famous _Pas
de Quatre_ in 1845 Marie Taglioni had already passed her fortieth year;
Fanny Elssler never danced after 1851; Carlotta Grisi and Cerito quitted
the stage shortly afterwards. More than any other art, dancing lives by
the genius of its exponents. Unlike painting, sculpture and literature,
it leaves no permanent record behind it--only a name and a reputation.
If there is a gap in the sequence of great dancers, there ceases to be
any living art to serve as a source of inspiration for the next
generation. The traditional methods may be carried on, but without the
living exponent they rapidly become lifeless.
The great dancers had no successors of equal genius. The French and
Italian schools, which in a single generation had produced so many of
the world’s most famous dancers, suddenly became sterile. All the great
dancers of the nineteenth century were grounded upon the Italian method.
In Milan they mastered the technique; in Paris, where the ballet was
closely connected with the best artistic life of the day, they seem to
have found the inspiration of art. Now, the teaching genius of both
schools appeared to have deserted them. Dancers still flooded the
theatres of Europe; most of them had been through the finishing school
of the French capital; they modelled their style upon the great Taglioni
and Elssler traditions; but their achievement was stale and unbeautiful.
The attitudes with which Taglioni had enraptured the whole world were
copied with a marvellous fidelity; but the inspiration was lacking, the
effect was unmoving.
Virtuosity had always been the danger of the Italian school. The rapid
degeneration of the ballet was due to the insistence upon a merely
technical accomplishment at the expense of grace and spontaneity.
Admiration was centred exclusively in the difficulty of the execution of
the steps. The most elaborate gestures and evolutions of the old school
were laboured and exaggerated. In particular the _pointes_ or dance upon
the tips of the toes came to be regarded as the highest form of
accomplishment. This step when it is abused becomes the curse of
ballet-dancing. There are moments when it completes an attitude, giving
a suggestion of ethereal lightness, the poise of a winged god alighting
for an instant upon the earth. In one brief passage across the stage,
the tips of the toes scarcely brushing the dust off the boards, the
dancer may capture something of the grace of a bird’s flight. But the
step in itself is unnatural, and naturalness is above all things
essential in the dance. When the part which it plays in the ballet is no
longer incidental--the emphasis given to a moment’s pose or the
suggestion of intriguing daintiness added to a brief passage--but
becomes the basis of all the dancer’s movements, it results in producing
a sense of utter weariness on the part of the spectator. The effect of
fairy lightness for which it was originally introduced is lost in the
ugliness of the effort. In the music-hall it is not infrequently
applauded as though it were the climax of the performance, but the
dancer should remember that the same applause has probably a few minutes
before been given to a dog walking on its hind-legs. In all arts, and in
none more than in dancing, it is always the _tour de force_ rather than
the nuance of beauty that creates the delight of the crowd.
It was this step which began to take a disproportionate place in the
ballet when it entered upon its period of decline. It was a feat which
Taglioni could do extremely well, but she never once sacrificed
gracefulness to obtain her effect. Her followers on the other hand threw
all gracefulness to the winds. They pirouetted, they walked, they
tottered on one toe until the shape of their legs became positively
disfigured. The popular caricature of the ballet-dancer of the day
represented her with her calves standing out like the biceps of a
blacksmith. It was a performance which had nothing to recommend it but
its painfulness. Little wonder that the public wearied of this
meaningless dexterity and came to regard the ballet as but a little
above the display of the contortionist.
The final blow to the waning popularity of the operatic ballet was given
by the music-dramas of Wagner and Berlioz. Before their advent, a visit
to the opera meant primarily a visit to the ballet. Madame Malibran was
perhaps the only singer who was able to draw the attention of the
amusement-loving world from the fascination of the dance. She alone used
to fill the old King’s Theatre in London to its utmost capacity on those
nights when the ballet was billed as the principal attraction. During
the years when Marie Taglioni, Fanny Elssler, Fanny Cerito, Carlotta
Grisi, Lucille Grahn, and one or two other of the great _premières
danseuses_, were the popular enchantresses, the public turned a deaf ear
to the singer. During the vocal and dramatic portions of the opera, the
spectators were wont to pass the time in chatting with their friends or
promenading in the foyer, until the moment arrived when the _corps de
ballet_ appeared and riveted their attention upon the stage.
With the début of Jenny Lind the glory of the singing voice once more
came into its own. The ballet, which for so long had held the principal
place upon the programme, was gradually relegated to an inferior
position. At Her Majesty’s Theatre it was eventually omitted altogether.
At Covent Garden, where the Italian opera found a home in London, it no
longer formed a part of the current repertory. Dancers with a certain
Continental reputation used to visit England from time to time, but they
disappeared almost as silently as they came. The _corps de ballet_,
which had been accustomed to give itself amazing airs and to look upon
the vocalists, however proficient, as merely interludes in the major
attraction of the ballet, was suddenly dispersed. With its proverbial
fickleness, the public forgot its old favourites and turned its back
upon the dancers over whom it once used to shout itself hoarse. Nobody
talked any more about dancing--it was no longer the vogue. Jenny Lind,
Titiens, Patti, took the place of Taglioni, Elssler, Grisi, in the
popular affection. In Paris, in Milan, and in most of the Continental
opera houses, the _corps de ballet_ still retained a prominent place
upon the programme, but none of the schools succeeded in producing a
dancer of the very first order. The dance suffered eclipse. As Taglioni
herself remarked, “La danse est comme la Turquie--bien malade.”
It is interesting to observe that Wagner in his early days attached no
little importance to the ballet in opera. He was disappointed at not
being able to carry out his original intention of introducing into
_Rienzi_ the story of the rape of Lucrece and the expulsion of the
Tarquins from Rome in the form of a ballet. He intended the ballet in
the Venusberg scene in _Tannhaüser_ to be something more that a mere
interlude and to have a serious interest of its own. “I have in my
mind,” he wrote, “an epitome of everything the highest dancing and mimic
art can offer, a wild yet seductive chaos of movement and grouping.”
The argument of this wild scene was set forth at considerable length in
the score, but it failed of realisation on the stage on account of the
exigencies of the production. When Wagner explained to the _maître de
ballet_ of the Paris Opera House that the conventional ballet steps
would not be in accord with his music, and asked him to supply something
“bold and savagely sublime,” the ballet-master replied: “I see what you
want, but it would need a corps of first dancers.” It was in some
measure owing to his determination to make the ballet an integral part
of the opera that he wrecked his chances of success in Paris. At that
period it was customary for the ballet to be performed at an hour
sufficiently late in the evening to allow time for the latest patrons of
the opera to get to their places. Its inclusion in the first act aroused
the wrath of Parisian society, and of the influential members of the
French Jockey Club in particular. In later days Wagner wrote of the
“fripperies of opera and ballet.” Perhaps he would have allowed the
ballet a more serious importance if he could have seen the Russian
dancers in _Prince Igor_, a performance which must have realised his
ideal of a dance “bold and savagely sublime.”
_Le Corsair_ may be considered as the last of the cycle of the grand
ballets. Rosati, the last of the great _danseuses_, took the part of
Medora. An immense sum was expended upon it, but in spite of the
splendour of the production it was a failure. The tide had already
turned. Only twice after the fifties did London see anything like a
revival of the former splendours of the ballet. The dancing of Madame
Dore in _Babil and Bijou_ at Covent Garden in 1872 achieved the
distinction of calling forth an enthusiastic article in _The Spectator_,
but the unusualness of such a notice only served to show how completely
the ballet had ceased to be regarded as a serious art-form. Shortly
afterwards, Marenco, the Italian _maître de ballet_, produced
_Excelsior_. After having been played with enormous success in Italy, it
was seen in Paris and New York, and finally appeared in England at Her
Majesty’s in 1885. It had an allegorical meaning agreeable to the spirit
of the time, representing the conflict between progress and
superstition, invention and reaction. It took a place apart from all
contemporary ballets, not so much because of the dancing of
individuals--Adelina Rossi was the _prima ballerina_--as on account of
the artistry of its design, the beauty of the general movement, the
ingenious handling of crowds.
In the seventies the ballet entered into a new phase of life, or, as
some would say, decline. Ejected from the opera house, it found a refuge
in the theatres of varieties that were then coming into existence.
Naturally it changed its character not a little when it left Covent
Garden and entered Leicester Square. Twenty-five or thirty years ago, if
one went to the Empire or the Alhambra, the Oxford or the Pavilion, one
did not choose to have it known. The music-hall was not a proper subject
of conversation at the dinner-table or the tea-party. No respectable
British matron would have dreamed of being seen within its walls, much
less of taking her daughters there. The most expensive seats in the
Alhambra in those days, it should be remembered, were three shillings.
It was largely owing to the ballet, however, that these houses were
lifted into another atmosphere and began to attract a class of audience
that would never have entered Leicester Square to see a variety show.
The ballet at the theatre of varieties was a _divertissement_ rather
than a _ballet d’action_, but nevertheless it was not without
considerable merits. The ballets were arranged by mistresses and masters
of the dance, like Katti Lanner, Carlo Coppi, Bertrand and Dewinne, who
possessed a correct if not a liberal notion of their science; the music
was often by distinguished composers, such as Hervé, Sullivan, Jacobi
and Wenzel; and at the Alhambra there was an orchestra trained to
understand and interpret ballet music. If the _corps de ballet_ was
lacking in finish, the dancing of the _prime ballerine_, almost all of
whom were foreign, left little to be desired. The names of Pertoldi,
Gellert, Palladino, Cerali, Giuri, Legnano and Lydia Nelidova are
nowadays doubtless well-nigh forgotten, but although they rank below the
great names of the preceding generation they were all dancers of
distinction.
Indeed the decline of the ballet during this period was due less to the
quality of the dancing than to the fact that it was no longer regarded
as a serious art-form. The ballet is in effect the combination of a
number of arts, co-operating in the production of a single whole. It
achieves distinction only when it attracts to itself the best artistic
talent of the day. The ballet-master is powerless unless he is assisted
by the artist and the musician. The dancing, the music, and the _décor_
should be informed by a single spirit. There had been a time when the
foremost men of letters and composers had shared in the production of
the ballet. Now its direction was left to the music-hall manager. The
result was necessarily a vulgarisation of the ballet. It ceased to have
any relation to contemporary culture. It became an affair of pretty
faces, banal attitudes, waving drapery, tawdry brocades, limelight
effects and romping music. It tended to become of the same order as the
Christmas pantomime.
But the first reform that was needed was a more serious study of the
dancing itself, for the ballet, however interesting the music and the
scenery, is essentially an exhibition of the dance. The ballet in
England has always suffered from the absence of any official school of
dancing. In France, in Italy, in Russia, in Denmark, the academies are
maintained by the State; the dancers are in a manner civil servants,
holding a permanent appointment and receiving a pension on retirement.
An adequate training is therefore possible, a continuous tradition is
maintained and a high average, at all events in the technique of the
dance, is ensured. In England, however, it has been rather the custom
for the _danseuse_ to go to this or that teacher to learn a single dance
necessary for a certain performance, but not to learn dancing. Indeed it
is impossible as a general rule for the dancer out of her slender salary
to pay one or two guineas an hour, or whatever the fee may be, in order
to attain a proficiency which even when acquired is rarely appreciated.
The managers, rightly or wrongly, believed that the public did not care
to see good dancing, but only good looks and a dazzling show. The
sounder view was probably that taken by the Rev. Stewart Headlam, who
always held that the ballet was worthy of serious criticism. Writing in
the _Pall Mall Gazette_ in 1886 he said: “If either of those houses
[the Alhambra and the Empire] want a really new sensation, to take the
town, let them have a small ballet, not only with the best principals
who can be got--these indeed they have often now--but with the whole
ballet composed solely of dancers, picked dancers, who have been
regularly and constantly at practice under a really good master.” Time
has justified his words, for it is in no small degree to this minute and
general excellence that the success of the Russian ballet is due.
The ballet, at the time of which we are speaking, had indeed become
involved in a vicious circle. Because of its vulgarisation it had fallen
into disrepute, and because of its disrepute it was considered demeaning
for any serious person to undertake that criticism which was a necessary
condition of its reform. In those days it required a certain amount of
courage to treat the ballet as worthy of serious consideration and
encouragement. The Rev. Stewart Headlam was almost alone in maintaining
that the ballet should rank as art and stage-dancing as an honourable
profession, and that the religious world had done grievous harm by
adopting a policy of isolation towards it. His praise of the ballet of
_Yolande_, probably the most beautiful that ever appeared upon the
Alhambra stage, drew down the Episcopal censure. It is almost impossible
to believe in these days that the Bishop of London should have “prayed
that he might not have to meet before the Judgment-seat those whom his
encouragement first led to places where they lost the blush of shame and
took the first downward step to vice and misery.” Mr Headlam’s reply was
to recommend the Bishop to go to see the _Swans_ at the Alhambra or
_Excelsior_ at Her Majesty’s--on the principle that only by the patient
study of any form of art can even a bishop understand its laws and
intention.
As late as twenty years ago Leicester Square produced some ballets of
real excellence. Two in particular, _The Swans_ and _The Seasons_ at the
Alhambra, were exquisite things of their kind. In the latter the dancers
were all dressed as birds. The colours were harmonious and restrained
and the stage was never overcrowded. But the tendency of the period was
to elaborate the staging of the ballet at the expense of the quality of
the dancing. The dictatorship of the late Sir Augustus Harris, skilful
impresario as he was, led to the overcrowding of the stage, to the
accumulation of mere monstrosities of scenery, of costume and of
properties. The ballet became a spectacle. It was buried beneath a mass
of unmeaning accessories. The stage was encumbered with gorgeous
properties and with the crowd of those who did not dance but merely took
their place in the pageant. The effect may have been magnificent, but it
was not art. At the same time the ballet-dancers, whose business was to
dance, were transformed into members of a chorus, whose chief function
was to look pretty. They marched and counter-marched across the stage,
performing a number of evolutions with a kind of military precision.
Little more skill was demanded of them than of the banner-bearers at a
Christmas pantomime. The ballet of the period has been described as
chiefly a procession of “rank after rank and file after file of honest
bread-winners from Camberwell and Peckham Rye, performing mechanical
manœuvres with the dogged perseverance of a company of Boy Scouts.” It
was, in fact, the honest British bread-winners of the _corps de ballet_,
willing but unskilled, that persuaded the British public that ballet was
a bore. The result was that popular enthusiasm was directed towards
skirt-dancing, and the art of the ballerina fell into undeserved
contempt.
Although practically extinct in England the ballet continued to maintain
a healthy, if not a flourishing, existence on the Continent. This was
due not only to the fact, of which I have already spoken, that the
Continental schools of ballet were attached to the great opera houses
and usually subsidised by the Government, but also to a high level of
criticism and technical knowledge of the ballet on the part of the
general public. The indifference of the British public was at once the
cause and the excuse of the indifferent performance of the British
ballet. This aspect of the decline of the ballet has been well stated by
Mr S. L. Bensusan, whose authority on all that concerns the art of
theatrical dancing is supreme.
“Not only are many of the steps that must be studied exceedingly
difficult,” he says, speaking of the work of the Continental ballerina,
“but the dancer who has learnt her work in the schools of Vienna, Milan,
Moscow, or Paris knows well enough that should she falter in their
execution, she will have no chance at all with the public. In Italy, for
example, the audience understands the technical side of a dancer’s art
just as well as it understands the quality of a singer’s voice, or just
as well as the patrons of a London music-hall understand the chorus of a
comic song.... The dancer who failed in ballet to execute a difficult
step with absolute neatness and precision, would find a decidedly
unpleasant reception awaiting the end of the movement. Her audience have
a standard of judgment and will understand what the movement should have
been like. In London, on the other hand, several great dancers have told
me that it is not worth their while to take trouble about very difficult
steps, because unfortunately they are not understood; while something
that is obvious and childlike in its simplicity, like a _pas de
bourrée_, is safe to meet with a measure of applause at least as great
as that which rewards some movements which can only be acquired at the
end of long years of study by a very few dancers whose natural gifts are
exceptional. If you watch a really distinguished dancer, you are bound
to notice that she never has an ungraceful movement or unhappy pose. It
is not a case of occasional happy moments, but of one long succession of
movements whose rhythm has the beauty of fine verse. The results that
make the great dancers so much admired by those who are at any pains to
study their work, are quite within the reach of English girls; but it is
an unfortunate fact, for which every great ballet-mistress will vouch,
that English girls as a class do not take the trouble to work hard
enough to acquire the perfect control over limbs and movement that is
the reward of their Continental sisters. It is on this account that what
is sometimes called English dancing cannot be taken seriously. Of course
one cannot blame the English dancers altogether: it is of very little
use to prepare a delicate dish for the delectation of the sturdy animal
whose favourite food is thistles; and
[Illustration: DANSEUSES EN SCÈNE
FROM A PAINTING BY DÉGAS]
while the public remain content with a pretty face, a pleasing figure, a
dainty dress, and an air for which barrel-organs cry aloud, English
girls may regard it as a labour lost to give them anything better. And
yet the successes in years past of dancers like Katti Lanner and Malvina
Cavallazzi, and the triumph that has fallen to Adeline Genée to-day,
must prove that there is an English audience for better things. Perhaps,
if we had more dancers who could and would take their work seriously,
the tone of what so many people are generously pleased to call their
taste might cease to be contemptible.”
CHAPTER V
THE SKIRT DANCE
The discovery of a new medium has not infrequently infused a new
vitality into a declining art. Certainly the nature of the medium has
been almost as important a factor in determining style as the nature of
the artist. One of the media through which the dance expresses itself is
costume. It has been pointed out how the evolution of the _caleçon_
revolutionised the technique of the ballet. The rediscovery of the
flowing skirt brought about a revolution in modern dancing.
The flowing skirt appears to us to be a natural appurtenance of the
dance. But it must be remembered that the infinitesimal skirt of the
ballet-dancer had become a cherished convention, and such is the tyranny
of convention that it makes whatever is contrary to it appear to be
unnatural. The development of the ballet had been largely due to the
abandonment of the fulsome skirt of the early eighteenth century; it was
felt that to adopt it once again would be to involve the dance in the
swaddling-clothes of its infancy.
The introduction of the long skirt, however, provided an outlet from the
impasse into which dancing had been driven. On the one hand was the
classical school of the ballet, now in an unfortunate condition of
decadence. It lacked all those elements which make of the ballet a
living art. The public was sick and tired of it. On the other hand a
more or less vulgar type of dancing, which had no relation to art,
enjoyed a certain popularity on the music-hall stage. It consisted
chiefly of the Clog Dance, believed originally to have come from the
cotton mills of Lancashire, and various kinds of acrobatic dancing. In
the race for popularity the ugly but energetic Step Dance was first,
the classical ballet nowhere. Between the two there was no happy medium.
The Skirt Dance was essentially a compromise between the academical
method of the ballet and the grotesque step-dancing which appealed to
the popular taste of the time. It stood nearer perhaps to the more
serious form of dancing, for in its elements, at least, it was modelled
upon the method of the ballet. The exchange, the pirouette, the balance,
all the first steps necessary to the ballet-dancer, are the same in
both. But while retaining the academical steps as a foundation, it
permitted the performer greater license in the use of them. Remembering
the passionate dancing of Fanny Elssler, it would perhaps not be correct
to say that it introduced more spirit into the dance; but its tendency
was towards greater vividness and the play of temperament. The
domination of the ballet had in some measure confined dancing to one
particular method and, especially in the period of its decline, had
exalted technical proficiency at the expense of the display of
personality. The Skirt Dance broadened the scope of dancing. In itself
never a performance of very great artistic merit, it had all the value
of a revolt. It broke down the dominion of a tradition which had become
too narrow. It opened up new vistas. It contained the seeds of future
movements. In particular it recalled the forgotten dances of antiquity.
Though essentially modern, and notably so in its lapses into vulgarity,
it nevertheless suggested new possibilities in the grace of flowing
drapery, the value of line, the simplicity and naturalness that were
characteristic of Greek dance.
But the Skirt Dance was chiefly justified by its success, which can only
be described as sensational. The utter absence of enthusiasm for the
academic dance made it manifest that the time was ripe for the discovery
of a new form of dancing. The wit to invent the novel mode that was to
revolutionise theatrical dancing in England came from Mr John D’Auban,
for many years ballet-master and director of the dances at Drury Lane.
It was of him that “Punch” wrote the doggerel eulogy:
[Illustration: KATE VAUGHAN
_Photograph: W. & D. Downey_]
“Mr Johnny D’Auban,
He’s so quick and nimble
He’d dance on a thimble--
He’s more like an elf than a man.”
In a short sketch with the unpromising title, _Ain’t she very shy?_ in
which he appeared with his sister, he first introduced the Skirt Dance
to the public.
Perhaps the fortune of the Skirt Dance would have been different if it
had not at once found an exponent who has no small claim to rank with
the great dancers of the century. This was Kate Vaughan. She alone in
the host of dancers who obtained a passing fame in this style of dancing
possessed a touch of real genius. The fact that she satisfied the
discriminating taste of two men of such artistic perception as Ruskin
and Burne-Jones is enough to establish her reputation. Burne-Jones
called her “Miriam Ariadne Salome Vaughan,” and his wife in her
biography of her husband relates how he and Ruskin “fell into each
other’s arms in rapture upon accidentally discovering that they both
adored her.”
Kate Vaughan was the daughter of a musician named Candelon, who earned a
meagre living by playing in the orchestra of the once famous Grecian
Theatre. At the Grecian she studied dancing under Mrs Conquest, and it
is significant that, unlike most other skirt-dancers, she was thoroughly
grounded in the careful method of the ballet. One of her first successes
as a dancer was in the _Ballet of the Furies_ at the old Holborn
Amphitheatre in 1873. Dressed in a black skirt profusely trimmed with
gold, she created a great sensation in the rôle of the Spirit of
Darkness. After the contortions of the gymnastic dancers, whose
popularity testifies to the lamentable condition of the dance at this
time--the name of one of the favourites, “Wiry Sal,” is a sufficient
commentary upon the school!--the exquisite grace of the new dancer,
whose style was both precise and refined, was no less than a revelation.
The old Gaiety Theatre was at this time just entering upon its career of
phenomenal popularity, and its ingenious manager, Mr John Hollingshead,
was not slow to perceive that the new dance would quickly oust the
step-dancer and the contortionist from their place in the popular
favour. He was among the first to recognise the genius of Kate Vaughan,
and he had the means of presenting her to the public to the greatest
advantage. From the day in which she appeared in the famous Gaiety
Quartet, in _Little Don Caesar de Bazan_, her success was established.
She was as supreme in her time as Taglioni, Elssler, Grisi and Cerito
had been in theirs. Not only was she the popular idol of her generation,
but in spite of the tawdry glitter of the Gaiety stage she was able to
engage the interest of serious artists.
Her career is full of pathos if not tragedy. Although she possessed the
born instincts of a dancer she had an ambition to excel as an actress.
She left the Gaiety and spent most of her life with touring companies.
She lived long enough to outstay her welcome. London tired of her; only
the provinces remained faithful. Ill-health rendered her performances
more and more painful. Her dancing became a torture to her, yet she had
the resolution to go through with it even although she frequently had to
be carried off the stage for very weakness and pain. Worn out with
failure and illness, she left England for South Africa, where she hoped
that her fame as a dancer would make her season a success. But her name
had no magic for the younger generation that had sprung up in the
colony. Neither as a _comédienne_ nor as a dancer was she received with
any degree of enthusiasm. Almost broken-hearted, she fell ill, and died
in great loneliness and distress in Johannesburg in 1903.
In spite of her adoption of a new mode of dancing, Kate Vaughan belonged
primarily to the school of Taglioni. Although of course she never
reached the perfection of her predecessor, it was to her careful
training in the school of the ballet that she owed the ease and grace of
her movements and the wonderful effect of spontaneity with which she
accomplished even the most difficult steps. She danced not only with her
feet, but with every limb of her frail body. She depended not merely
upon the manipulation of the skirt for her effect, but upon her facility
of balance and the skilful use of arms and hands. Her _andante_
movements in particular were a glorious union of majesty and grace. It
is true that she
[Illustration: KATE VAUGHAN
IN TURKISH COSTUME
_Photograph: W. & D. Downey_]
condescended at times to introduce into her dance some of those hideous
steps which vulgarised the dancing of the period--in particular that
known as the “high kick”; but even this unpleasant step she accomplished
with a certain sense of elegance and refinement which disguised its
essential ugliness and suggestion of contortion. She danced with a
distinct inspiration, and upon her style was built up all that was best
in the dancing of her time.
The followers of Kate Vaughan were legion. Most of them were not dancers
at all in the proper sense of the word. They devoted themselves to the
Skirt Dance merely because it was the fashion of the hour, but of every
other branch of dancing they were almost wholly ignorant. But there were
three dancers who were something more than imitators of Kate
Vaughan--Letty Lind, Alice Lethbridge and Sylvia Grey. It is notable
that all of them were originally trained for the ballet. Alice
Lethbridge showed that she was no revolutionary in her view of what she
regarded as the foundation of all technical excellence in dancing, when
she said: “As long as dancing continues, the special movements of the
older ballet, its entrechats, pirouettes, and countless other steps,
must also exist, for they are but the great groundwork of it all.”
It was she who developed the Skirt Dance by introducing a revolving
motion, to which she gave the rather vague name of the “waltz movement.”
While dancing the ordinary waltz, she bent her body backwards until it
was almost horizontal, and in this position, still making all the
correct steps of the dance, she rotated the body around its own axis and
at the same time described a large circle round the stage. The swaying
of the body in slow time to the rapid movements of the feet and the
graceful waving of the skirts produced a curious and pleasing effect
which won for her an enormous celebrity. Her other most famous
performances were her Marionette Dance, her Fire Dance and some clever
shadow dances, which depended for their effect chiefly upon the skilful
use of reflected lights. Her dancing was characterised by an extreme
vivacity, by the lightnings of eye and hand, which were nevertheless
always subdued to the rhythm of the music.
Letty Lind was a dancer almost by accident. When still quite unknown
she was somewhat embarrassed by having a song given her in one of her
plays. She knew the limitations of her voice and asked if she might be
allowed to do a dance instead. Her performance was an astonishing
success, and from that moment her career was made. She devoted herself
to musical comedy, which was then coming into vogue, realising that
there is always room on the lighter operatic stage for an actress who is
also an accomplished dancer. For some years she was one of the principal
“stars” at Daly’s Theatre, but her reputation was always based chiefly
upon her dancing. As a skirt-dancer she never reached the perfection of
Kate Vaughan, but she always showed herself a dainty and finished
artist.
The Skirt Dance, with its swift rushes and billowy undulations of
flowing drapery, was at most a charming but trivial dance, of no great
pretension or particular significance. It demanded only an average
ability on the part of the performer, and no previous training in the
intricacies of the dance. It came at a time when, apart from the ballet
proper, the usual style of dancing was a kind of energetic
double-shuffling and step-dance, generally performed by ponderous
principal “boys” in vividly-coloured tights. Kate Vaughan brought to it
a personality which would have given distinction to a dance far less
artistic, and a daintiness of peculiar fascination. If it had followed
more closely the Greek models, with which it had some remote connection,
it might have evolved into a dance of greater artistic importance; but
its development was in the contrary direction. It degenerated into a
romp; it lost whatever precision of technique it had once demanded; and
as the width of the skirt grew to larger and larger dimensions, the
dancer gradually disappeared in the extravagance of her costume.
The original exponents of the Skirt Dance, as we have seen, were
ballet-dancers, whose novelty consisted rather in their costume than in
their methods. They adapted the steps of the ballet to the new style
without great modification. They brought to the dance that culture of
the whole body and not merely of the legs, which is proper to the
well-trained ballet-dancer as distinguished from the mere step-dancer.
But the misfortune of the
[Illustration: ALICE LETHBRIDGE
_Photograph: Ellis & Walery_]
Skirt Dance was that it afforded a convenient concealment to the
incompetent dancer. Less eminent artists were not slow to perceive that
the instruction which had failed to give them distinction in the
academic style was quite sufficient to make them resplendent as
skirt-dancers. There is a menace that always threatens the dance, no
less than the theatre, and that is the incursion of the incompetent
professional beauty. The generous public is willing to pardon a
multitude of sins for the sake of a pretty face. Now was the signal
opportunity for the unintelligent beauty to masquerade as a dancer.
Amateurs vied with professionals in seeking success in the simple
intricacies of the Skirt Dance. By performing it in a London theatre at
a charity matinée, the Countess Russell and her sister gave the dance
the sanction of the social world. Philanthropy became the hobby of the
fashionable skirt-dancer. A wit remarked that “charity uncovered a
multitude of shins.”
In a criticism of the period, Mr G. Bernard Shaw ridiculed this cult of
good looks and incompetence for which the Skirt Dance was responsible.
“Thanks to it,” he said, “we soon had young ladies carefully trained on
an athletic diet of tea, soda-water, rashers, brandy, ice-pudding,
champagne and sponge-cake, laboriously hopping and flopping, twirling
and staggering, as nuclei for a sort of bouquet of petticoats of many
colours, until finally, being quite unable to perform the elementary
feat, indispensable to a curtsey, of lowering and raising the body by
flexing and straightening the knee, they frankly sat down panting on
their heels, and looked piteously at the audience, half begging for an
encore, half wondering how they would ever be able to get through one.
The public on such occasions behaved with its usual weakness.... It was
mean enough to ape a taste for the poor girls’ pitiful sham dancing,
when it was really gloating over their variegated underclothing. Who has
not seen a musical comedy or comic farce interrupted for five minutes,
whilst a young woman without muscle or practice enough to stand safely
on one foot--one who, after a volley of kicks with the right leg has, on
turning to the other side of the stage, had to confess herself
ignominiously unable to get beyond a stumble with her left, and, in
short, could not, one would think, be mistaken by her most
infatuated adorer for anything but an object-lesson in saltatory
incompetence--clumsily waves the inevitable petticoats at the public as
silken censers of that _odor di femina_ which is the real staple of
five-sixths of our theatrical commerce?” For his part, he continues,
“the young lady who can do no more than the first sufficiently brazen
girl in the street could, may shake all the silk at Marshall and
Snelgrove’s at me in vain.”
It was possibly this fatal facility of the Skirt Dance that gave it its
unparalleled vogue. For a time everybody skirt-danced. There has
probably been no such sudden craze for any style of dancing as that
which seized England at the time of the famous _Pas de Quatre_ in _Faust
up to Date_. The schottische-like melody composed for the dance by Meyer
Lutz, the Gaiety conductor, was performed to satiety upon every
orchestra in the country. In a mild form the dance was introduced into
the ball-room, while certainly for years no pantomime was complete
without the inevitable four girls in short accordion-pleated skirts,
standing in a row behind one another, kicking out first one leg and then
the other in time to the jerky music.
The grace of Kate Vaughan had given an extraordinary vitality to the
Skirt Dance; her imitators’ lack of grace killed it. Because Kate
Vaughan danced in the moonlight--or the livid hue which then passed for
moonlight on the stage--every dancer had the lights turned down, with a
special ray from the wings upon her whirling petticoats. Moreover the
performers of the step-dance from the halls, the only dance really
popular with the public before this time, took up the new fashion with
alacrity and threw into it more than all their ancient energy. The dance
became more and more violent. It was burlesqued out of recognition. The
prettiness of the Skirt Dance as it was danced by Kate Vaughan perished
in the contortions that were introduced from the Moulin Rouge and
popularised in England by Lottie Collins.
[Illustration: LETTY LIND
IN A SKIRT DANCE
_Photograph: Ellis & Walery_]
CHAPTER VI
THE SERPENTINE DANCE
Although its origin was in a manner accidental, the Serpentine Dance was
a derivation of the Skirt Dance. The accident happened to an American,
with whose name it will always remain associated--Loie Fuller. For the
matter of that it was an accident which might have happened to any woman
at any time, and as a matter of fact it actually befell Lady Emma
Hamilton nearly a hundred years earlier. Goethe relates how at the house
of the British Ambassador at Caserta he met “a beautiful young
Englishwoman, who danced and posed with extraordinary grace.” A moment’s
whim led her to pick up two shawls of varied hues and wave them as she
danced. Struck by the brilliant effect of colour, she called to Sir
William Hamilton to hold the candles in such a way that the light shone
through the gauzy drapery. She did not pursue the discovery any further,
however--indeed in the absence of electricity it would have been of
little avail if she had. It is improbable that Loie Fuller ever heard of
this incident, for the suggestion of the Serpentine Dance came to her
quite spontaneously.
Loie Fuller was born in Chicago. It is said that she made her first bow
before the public at the immature age of two, and at eleven the
elocutionary powers which she displayed in her little temperance
lectures had given her fame throughout the state of Illinois as the
“Western Temperance Prodigy.” The only lessons that she ever received in
dancing were given her by a friend who tried to teach her the Highland
Fling, but she introduced so many variations of her own that the friend
had to abandon the attempt. At Chicago a professional musician was so
favourably impressed with her singing that he offered to give her free
tuition for two years. As Loie Fuller was gifted with an excellent
memory, assiduous in mastering the details of whatever work she was
engaged in, always willing to take any part, big or little, that was
offered her, it is not surprising that she should early have won for
herself a considerable reputation. She travelled with a touring company,
playing in both comedy and tragedy. She first appeared in New York in
_Jack Sheppard_, in which her salary was seventy-five dollars a week.
Shortly afterwards she was in the cast of _Caprice_ in London. She
returned to America to take part in _Quack M.D._ at the Harlem Opera
House. It was while rehearsing for this piece that she received from a
young Indian officer, whom she had met in London, a present which was to
change her whole career.
One morning a box was delivered at the hotel where she was staying, and
on opening it she found that it contained an Eastern robe of fine white
silk, the sort that passes through a ring uncreased. The difficulty--not
infrequently incidental to presents--was to know what to do with it. To
cut it up would have been a desecration. The quality of the texture was
so rare that the piece was fine enough for a museum. Yet its excessive
length rendered it useless as a dress without mutilation. But no woman,
certainly no American woman, could receive such a present without
endeavouring to exhaust all its possibilities as wearing apparel. Taking
a piece of string, Loie Fuller fastened the material loosely about her.
While playfully waving the soft folds of silk in the air she caught
sight of herself in a mirror facing the window. At that moment the sun’s
rays transfigured the dress into a mass of shimmering light. The beams
dancing among the transparent folds of the Eastern material gave it an
indescribable delicacy. So strange and beautiful was the effect that the
dancer stood for hours before the mirror lost in admiration. She tried
innumerable variations of pose, and all were delightful. Suddenly while
gazing at the floating clouds of sunlit drapery there came a sound of
distant music. The melody was one that the dancer knew well, and in step
to the music she danced round the room, tossing the light billowy
material about her. At that moment the Serpentine Dance was born.
Loie Fuller devoted the next few months to developing the novel effects
which she had discovered and to inventing an accompaniment of slow,
gliding steps such as would best accord with the involutions of the
skirt rising and falling upon the air.
The invention of the Serpentine Dance coincided with the discovery of
electricity as a method of lighting the stage. Until that time gas alone
had been used. Loie Fuller immediately saw the possibilities of the new
scientific illumination, and with the aid of a few friends she devised a
means by which the effect of vivid sunshine could be obtained through
the use of powerful electric lights placed in front of reflectors. Then
various experiments with colour were tried; for the white light of the
electricity were substituted different shades of reds, greens, purples,
yellows, blues, by the combination of which innumerable and wonderful
rainbow-like effects of colour were obtained. Played upon by the
multitudinous hues, the diaphanous silk gave an impression of startling
originality and beauty. Coming at a time when the artistic lighting of
the stage was scarcely studied at all, the riot of colour created a
sensation. Nothing like it had been seen before. The old-fashioned
limelight, the flickering gas-jets, the smoking red and blue flames dear
to the Christmas pantomime, paled before this discovery of science which
apparently possessed inexhaustible possibilities as a stage illuminant.
Loie Fuller introduced her new dance with its accessories to the variety
stage in the States, where she soon became famous. But it was not until
she came to Europe that her performance received its full meed of
appreciation, not as a mere raree-show sandwiched in between the turns
of acrobats and performing seals, but as a thing of intrinsic beauty.
She visited first Germany and then Paris. The Parisians, who have the
habit in common with the ancient Athenians of spending their time in
nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing, welcomed the
novelty of her dancing and quickly adopted her as “La Loie.” Her début
at the Folies Bergère was a triumph. To the accompaniment of the
tinkling strains of Gillet’s “Loin du Bal”--a melody inevitably
associated with Loie Fuller’s dancing--the dazzling figure of light
suddenly shone out of the gloom of the darkened stage like some
mysteriously illuminated flower, fluttering its petals in the breeze. On
batons held in each hand were hung yards upon yards of shimmering
gossamer fabric. The least movement of the wand sent the airy mass
floating in undulating billows and twisting in streaming spirals. And as
the multitudinous moving forms succeeded one another, the light from
below shifted through all the combinations of the colours of the
rainbow. “La Loie” immediately became the rage. The management of the
Folies Bergère engaged her for three years at the handsome salary of two
hundred pounds a week--an engagement which unfortunately circumstances
prevented her from fulfilling. Not unnaturally, therefore, when some
time afterwards she revisited America, she was enthusiastically welcomed
on the sacred stage of New York’s Metropolitan Opera House.
Strict connoisseurs of the dance are disposed to scoff at Loie Fuller’s
performance, but the fact must not be overlooked that the arrangement of
the drapery is not such an easy matter as might be supposed when viewed
from the other side of the footlights. When the enormous dimensions of
the skirt are taken into account, the achievement of managing it with
grace is not altogether to be despised. The strain on the arms is
severe. To wave them in such a manner that the folds of the skirt do not
become entangled with one another, and that the whole of it is in motion
at the same time, is a feat of dexterity difficult of accomplishment.
Certainly the crowd of imitators who sought notoriety in this style
never achieved the variety and beauty of the effects which “La Loie”
obtained. Amateurs who took up the dance in the enthusiasm of the moment
gave exhibitions of embarrassed entanglement that provided their
audience with a more amusing entertainment than they had anticipated. I
have heard of at least one lady, who elected to follow in Loie Fuller’s
footsteps for the sake of charity, becoming so enveloped in her hundred
yards of drapery that she had at last to be carried ignominiously from
the stage in the arms
[Illustration: LETTY LIND
_Photograph: Ellis & Walery_]
of an attendant and unravelled behind the scenes like a twisted ball of
string.
After it was first introduced, the Serpentine Dance underwent much
elaboration. Not only were various harmonies of colour thrown upon the
dress, but also strange and wonderful patterns of flowers and lace and
barbaric designs. The variety of effects thus obtained were endless. At
one moment the skirt was a moving wave of rose-pink; the next it had
changed to a dark purple on which gleamed golden stars; afterwards it
took the design of a Japanese embroidery; and again it became a flame of
fire burning in the darkness. And not content with these bewildering
displays, some of those whose business it is to refine upon vulgarity
devised a startling and terrible novelty--they utilised the dancer as a
backcloth and projected upon her photographs of the prominent people of
the day!
Among the most famous of Loie Fuller’s dances were the Widow Dance,
which she danced in a black robe, the Rainbow Dance, the Flower Dance,
the Butterfly Dance, the Good-night Dance and the Mirror Dance. In the
latter the multiplication of mirrors gave the appearance of eight Loies
dancing at the same time, the whole stage being bathed in a flood of
light and filled with a maze of cloud-like vestures. But the most
successful elaboration of the Serpentine Dance was that known as the
“Danse du Feu.” It is said to have owed its birth to another happy
accident. It was originally designed for Loie Fuller’s play _Salomé_, in
which it was the dance commanded by Herod. It was called “The Salute of
the Sun,” as it drew its inspiration from the effects of the sunset. The
Paris audience, however, mistook its intention. Overlooking the evening
light which gilded the pinnacles of Solomon’s temple, they saw only the
fiery rays playing upon the dancer’s dress, and exclaimed with delight,
“A fire dance, a fire dance!” With her fertile imagination La Loie saw
the possibility of the new idea and determined to give them a fire dance
indeed.
As in all other Serpentine variations, the Fire Dance necessitated a
vast paraphernalia of accessories and an army of associates. The
dancer’s dress was a voluminous smoke-coloured skirt, to which long
strips of the same material were loosely attached. She danced in the
centre of a darkened stage before an opening in the floor through which
a powerful electric light shot up flame-coloured rays. At first only a
pale indecisive bluish flame appeared in the midst of the surrounding
darkness; little by little it took shape, quickened into life, trembled,
grew, mounted upwards, until it embraced all the stage in its wings of
fire, developed into a mighty whirlwind in the midst of which emerged a
woman’s head, smiling, enigmatical, while a shifting phosphorescence
played over the body that the lambent flames held in their embrace. The
effect has been described as a superhuman vision. Undoubtedly from the
point of view of sensationalism, “La Danse du Feu” was little short of
an inspiration.
The Fire Dance became popular. The stages of all the variety theatres in
Paris became enveloped in flame. Legions of dancers waving burning
veils, under a cross-fire from masked batteries of limelight men, took
possession of the stage. The art of dancing appeared about to perish in
a general conflagration. Ballets were converted into luminous
symphonies. Such themes as _Les Amours du Roi des Tenèbres pour
l’Aurore_ and _Arc-en-ciel_ gave marvellous scope for the display of the
talents, if not of the dancers, at any rate of the electricians. The
common light of day was henceforth too meagre to please; every
atmospheric effect from dawn to sunset was exhausted; moonlight was
turned on in floods and the night skies were ransacked for comets and
meteors; the kingdom of faery was invaded and despoiled of its sheen by
intrepid managers, who poured upon the stage from electric projectors
the light that never was on land or sea.
It is doubtful whether this invention of Loie Fuller comes within the
sphere of dancing in the proper sense of the word at all. The Serpentine
Dance has no steps, no gestures, no poses, none of the usual criteria by
which dancing can be judged. The function of the limbs is merely to put
measureless lengths of drapery in motion. The dancer juggles with stuffs
and veils as others with knives and billiard balls. Loie Fuller’s chief
merit was her faculty of invention. The best part of her work was done
off the stage. When the dance began it was the activity of the army of
operators in the wings that became the centre of interest. If we were
adequately to discuss the theory of the Serpentine Dance we should have
to converse of electricity and optics. It belongs to the realm of
science rather than of art. It is an art of electricians and mechanics;
it is they, and not the lady upon whom they operate, who should come
before the footlights to take the applause and receive the floral
tributes of the audience.
Although Loie Fuller was an expert in the art of theatrical illumination
rather than in that of dancing, that she possessed a considerable
artistic talent is unquestionable. Her love of colour amounted to a real
passion. She was peculiarly sensitive to its effects. Every colour had a
different influence upon her; she was unable to dance the same measure
in a yellow light as in a blue. There was something more than
sensationalism in her wonderful Lily Dance, when she disposed the
serpentine skirt in such a way that it floated across the stage like the
bizarre and gigantic flower of a strange dream; in her Rose Dance, when
she sank down covered with crimson petals; in her Radium Dance, one of
the most beautiful effects of colour and lighting ever seen upon the
stage, almost prohibitive on account of its costliness; in her Fire
Dance, which was full of a kind of demoniacal splendour, the madness of
a hashish-begotten delirium.
She owed her success very largely to her immense capacity for taking
pains. No detail was too small to demand her attention. She had
miniature models of the stage constructed for her, with which she
conducted her experiments. The complicated lighting apparatus was
managed by her brothers, with whom she practised almost daily, inventing
and elaborating new effects. She devised with equal care the design of
her dresses. The secret of their shape was jealously guarded. On leaving
the theatre, her mother, who always accompanied her, enveloped her in a
huge black cloak. One silk gown was painted by artists in sections, and
the artists themselves had no idea as to what their work was intended
for.
Loie Fuller herself is perfectly aware of the limitations of her
dancing. She has made her genial apologia as follows:--“To-day
everything is governed by laws and precedents, and as I obey no laws of
the dancing schools and follow no precedents, I suppose, you know, that
really I am not a dancer at all! I have never studied, and I don’t
believe the ancient Greek dancers ever studied how to move their feet,
but danced with their whole bodies--with their head and arms and trunk
and feet. I believe that they studied more the _impression_ that they
wished to convey by their dancing than the actual way of dancing.” The
criticism that she ignored the obvious fact that no human being was
really necessary in her performance at all, and that a small motor or
gas-engine could have done the work with equal animation and less
fatigue, is a little less than just.
Latterly La Loie has come under the influence of Miss Isadora Duncan. In
Paris she directs a school of young children, whom she instructs in the
“natural” style of dancing. Her pupils appeared in London in 1908, when
they performed Mozart’s ballet, _Les Petits Riens_. The performance was
no less notable for its lighting than for its grace of movement, as each
of the fourteen movements of the ballet was seen against a great open
sky, changing with the history of the day from dawn to sunset.
The influence of Loie Fuller upon the theatre will always be felt,
particularly in the lighting of the scene and in the disposition of
draperies. But she was never a great dancer. She was an apparition.
CHAPTER VII
THE HIGH KICKERS
It is always interesting to observe the interaction of life and art. All
art is of its time, the greatest as well as the least. It may be
supposed that the dance has too slight a content to express to be under
the obligation of borrowing anything from the ideas of the age. But it
has always responded not only to the rhythm of personal emotional life,
but also to the larger social rhythm of the time. We have hinted at a
relation between the conventional ballets of the forties, with their
tranquil emotions, and the placid, domestic temper of the early
Victorian era, between the passionate style of Elssler and the spirit of
the Romantics. As the century waned, the older formal and unhasting
rhythms tended to break up; the pace quickened; the tranquillity which
the nineteenth century had carried over from the eighteenth disappeared
in the excitement of the _fin-de-siècle_ spirit. The temperature of the
blood was rising towards the fever-point of the “naughty nineties.” They
were probably much less naughty than they supposed themselves to be, and
they had an unfortunate tendency to mistake vulgarity for vice.
Something of the change of the social spirit was reflected in the dance.
Paris began to force the pace in the latter days of the Second Empire.
It was a somewhat feverish era, electric with the sense of political
change and hazardous speculation, echoing with _coups d’état_ and _coups
de bourse_. Something of the general unrest penetrated the spirit of the
dance. It took on a more exciting allure, became more disordered and
furious. The quadrille in particular was completely metamorphosed; its
elegance was exchanged for violent movements, resembling the
oscillations of a drunkard. In the form of the Cancan and the Chahut it
was the delight of the _bals publics_ of the French capital. Céleste
Mogador, Rose Ponpon, Clara Pomaré, with their _beauté de diable_, gave
a vogue to the new and more abandoned style of dancing. These stars
disappeared after a brief and noisy career, but the dance survived in
undiminished vigour. Its two principal strongholds were the Bal Bullier
on Mont St Geneviève and the Moulin de la Galette on Montmartre. The
transition from Empire to Republic did not have a sobering influence
upon the dance, but rather the reverse. Its natural violence was
stimulated by the revolutionary excitement. The fury of the barricades
animated its gestures. Students and grisettes, inveterate
_révolutionaires_, revelled in it as a kind of vague protest against
authority, the bourgeoisie, the spirit of order and propriety. Like the
impressionism of contemporary painting, it was championed by those who
were rather uncertain as to the articles of their artistic faith but had
a very strong sense of being “agin the goverment,” civil or spiritual.
It was an affirmation of revolution.
To the average home-staying Briton of the period, Paris meant
Montmartre, and Montmartre meant the Cancan. Even to-day the word
conjures up a vision of the old Moulin Rouge, with its sinister, winking
lights, its crude sensationalism, its wild fandango of forced hilarity.
In this hot-house atmosphere of feverish yet mirthless gaiety, the dance
forgot its ancient origin in hushed forest glades and laughing
vineyards, forgot its long sojourn in dignified courts, forgot its
strict discipline in the academies; it became little more than an
appetiser to the feast of debauch. But among the mob of flamboyant
bacchanales for whom the dance was merely a means by which they could
display their wares to the market, there were one or two dancers with a
distinct personality, who gave the _école montmartroise_ the vitality,
if not the dignity, of a kind of art. The chief of these were La Goulue,
Grille d’Égout and Nini Patte-en-l’air.
In her private _dossier_ La Goulue was known to the State as Louise
Weber. She is said to have earned her soubriquet by her gluttony as a
child. Doubtless she had the excuse of the stimulus of hunger, for she
was the daughter of poor working-class people.
[Illustration: CONNIE GILCHRIST
(THE GOLD GIRL)
_From a painting by Whistler_]
She had, however, all the impertinent charm of the _petite Parisienne_.
And, moreover, she had a passion for her métier. Small, fair,
intriguing, with delicately rounded limbs, ivory shoulders and a
mutinous little head crowned with light gold hair, she startled Paris by
her dancing at the Elysée Montmartre. To the abandon of the Cancan she
added in her rendering of it novel effects of an audacity that won her
immediate fame. She was to the eighties what Mogador and Rose Ponpon
were to the sixties. She became a person of note and the spoilt child of
the _jeunesse dorée_. The story is told of how she was invited to supper
at the Maison d’Or--she was an astonishingly vulgar little being in
those days--by a Russian prince. A well-meaning friend, wishing to give
her a genial hint to be on her best behaviour, wrote her a note, which
was handed to her on a salver by the _mâitre d’hôtel_. She opened it,
and with some difficulty spelled out the advice, to the amusement of her
host: “Speak very nicely to the Grand-Duke in order to strengthen the
Franco-Russian alliance!”
In her dancing there was no order, no method, but a sure sense of rhythm
and an ingenuous frankness and gaiety. To grace of movement she made no
pretension--the dance was a negation of it. It was a frenzy, a delirium,
a contortion. Her legs were agitated like those of a marionette, they
pawed the air, jerked out in the manner of a pump-handle, menaced the
hats of the spectators. She sought the _geste suspect_ with hand, foot,
and body, although at the Moulin Rouge she was obliged to cut discreeter
capers. Much of her popularity depended upon a purely personal
attraction. She had all the fascination of brilliant and irresponsible
youth: she was frankly proud of her charms and daring in displaying
them.
In personal appearance Grille d’Égout was in every way her opposite.
Dark, thin, with no claims to beauty--her upper jaw was prominent, her
chin receding--she resembled La Goulue only in her youth, her spirit and
her passion for the dance. In her ordinary movements she had a somewhat
gauche and embarrassed manner; hers was the type of the unassuming
bourgeoise. But at the first sound of the music everything was changed.
She launched into the dance with an astonishing assurance, verve and
directness of attack. She was more correct than eccentric, gay rather
than voluptuous, arresting by gestures that were droll rather than
exciting. Her dancing, a _délire des jambes_, gave a suggestion of the
antics of the Parisian gamin.
But the most striking personality of all was that of Nini
Patte-en-l’air. She was dark as the night, with a strange, mask-like
face of deathly pallor, eyes sunk in deep hollows overarched by thick
eyebrows, suggestive of Rops’ etching of “La Mort qui danse.” Her slight
body quivered with intensity of life--_la vie à outrance_--as though
charged with electric fluid. The rapidity of her movements was dazzling,
and every movement was unforeseen, incalculable, and executed without a
trace of effort. Five, ten, twenty times her foot flew above her head;
then it remained suspended at the level of her face; it twisted,
writhed, agitated, as though it possessed a life independent of the leg;
it was a prisoner and struggled to escape; the dancer watched its
contortions, an amused spectator of its restlessness; at last it was
released; it darted to the ground, recovered its strength and resumed
its command of the dance. Then, this by-play over, the dancer rested her
hand on the arm of a cavalier, and began a wild, grotesque and fantastic
career among the spectators. At every step her foot leapt to the
ceiling, her head was thrown violently back, her body maintained a
difficult equilibrium, her emaciated features shone with a delirious
excitement. Twice she made this frenzied revolution of the hall, then,
coming to a sudden standstill, her heel slid along the floor and she
sank abruptly in a final dislocation, her legs extended horizontally on
either side. It was the dance bewitched, bedevilled, a frenzy and agony
of movement, without a parallel except in the maniacal contortions of
the Aïssaouas or the revolutions of the howling Dervishes.
These dancers had their followers, of whom the names alone
survive--Folette, Rayon d’Or, La Soubrette, La Glu, La Cigale. The dance
of _école montmartroise_ was a variation upon one perpetual theme--the
dislocation of the leg. To name the variations is to indicate the
bizarre gestures which formed the stock-in-trade of the school--_La
Friture_, _Le Port d’Armes_, _La Jambe derrière la tête_, _Le
Croisement_--the latter executed by two dancers whose feet touched in
mid-air, describing a kind of ogival arch. It is unnecessary to comment
upon this style of dancing. In it the search for the sensational, the
incredible, the impossible, reached its limit. The aim of the dancer was
to escape as far as possible from the grace of natural bodily movement,
to caricature the human form, to imitate the convulsions of the
epileptic. It was an instance of one of those maladies which at times
afflict the arts. But it is a disease which cannot recur, for the world,
having once seen what the dance can achieve when it loses its sanity, is
not likely to wish for a repetition of the spectacle. Montmartre
remains--chastened, perhaps, if not repentant. It is possible that the
tradition still lingers and that there are dancers who, to the confusion
of the unsophisticated British or transatlantic stranger, can at need
give a dim suggestion of what the _école montmartroise_ was at the
height, or perhaps rather at the depth, of its fame. But the dance is
dead, and not only dead but damned.
England has always kept a circumspect eye upon the heights of
Montmartre, and no dance that was danced upon that hill could long be
hid. Needless to say, the Cancan in all its native freedom was never
performed in this country--for there are performances which depend for
their success, if not for their very existence, upon a certain
indefinable but quite perceptible _rapport_ between performer and
spectator, and in England there was no atmosphere for this sympathy to
ripen in. But in spite of this, England enjoyed for many years a very
sensational imitation of the Montmartre school. The Skirt Dance and the
Serpentine Dance, after they had lost the charm of novelty, began to
pall. Tired of the monotony of their limited movements, the public was
ready to welcome a dance with a wild gaiety and abandon which had all
the attractiveness of contrast. The appetite for sensation grows by what
it feeds on, and very soon a dancer who could not kick her legs higher
than the head, who had not cultivated the “splits” and the “cart-wheel”
to perfection, who did not, in fact, exhibit the art of dancing as a
series of grotesque contortions, could not count upon holding the
attention of an audience. The Cancan was not called by its original
name after it had crossed the Channel, nor was it danced as a quadrille;
but to all intents and purposes the famous dance which Lottie Collins
executed after singing her “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay” song--a dance which
sent England and America hysterical with delight--was none other than
the famous Cancan, only slightly modified in accordance with Anglo-Saxon
traditions of modesty and decorum.
The anglicised version of the Cancan was closely associated with that
popular song, the last lamentable echoes of which have only recently
died away. The origins of “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay” have been discussed with
an interest worthier of a more classical literature. The melody has been
derived from an old German Volkslied; it has been asserted that it was
heard in a Potsdam tea-garden in 1872 and in a Parisian café a hundred
years ago, when it was played as the accompaniment to an Algerian _danse
du ventre_; it is stated to have been whistled and sung for generations
among the rice-fields of the Southern States by negroes whose ancestors
had danced to it in the barbaric orgies of Central Africa. Whatever its
origin, and the latter derivation is the most probable, it was Lottie
Collins who first introduced the tune to European audiences. The words,
of course, were entirely rewritten, but their barbaric originals could
not have been more idiotic than those which were composed to suit the
music-hall sense of humour. The dance which accompanied the song was,
however, the great feature of the entertainment. Lottie Collins burst
upon London just as a dull theatrical season was drawing to a close, and
for several years she held the audiences at the Gaiety and Palace
Theatre in the hollow of her hand. The rendering of the Cancan on an
English stage was a notable event, but Lottie Collins had the invaluable
instinct of knowing how far to go without ever once overstepping the
border-line of propriety. In spite of the storms of protest which it
raised in certain quarters, her dance was never even in its wildest
moments very shocking. The extraordinary jerks of her body, her sudden
and startling high kicks, her frantic pirouettes, were more astonishing
than indecorous; while the spirit with which they were executed and the
utter disregard of the sense of rhythm was a revelation to the English
public, which was held spell-bound.
In America Lottie Collins met with a repetition of her London success.
She began her tour with an unfortunate experience. Having to remain in
quarantine owing to a case of cholera which had occurred on the voyage,
in her exasperation she telegraphed to her manager the concise
aspersion,--“Hang America.” This indiscretion did not predispose the
American people, always sensitive to the appreciation of foreigners, in
her favour, and the moment when she made her bow to a New York audience
was not unnaturally a critical one. That her subsequent success in the
States was as great as it had been in London seems to prove that there
was something more attractive in her dance than those who know it only
by the melody could have imagined possible. The American idiom lends
itself to a description of her performance. “Lottie Collins,” so ran the
account in the leading daily paper of Kansas City, “has the stage all to
herself and she bounces and dances and races all over it in the most
reckless and irresponsible way, precisely as if she was a happy child so
full of health and spirits that she couldn’t keep still if she wanted
to. Sometimes she simply runs headlong all the way round the stage,
finishing the lap with perhaps a swift whirl or two, or a whisk and a
kick. Sometimes she simply jumps or bounces, and sometimes she doubles
up like a pen-knife with the suddenness of a spring lock to emphasise
the ‘Boom.’ She is invariably in motion except when she stops to chant
the gibberish that passes for verses, but the wonder is that she has
breath enough to sing after the first cyclonic interlude.” Mr Clement
Scott, the dramatic critic, writing of her in the _Daily Telegraph_,
confirms the impression of her antics so succinctly conveyed by the
Kansas City press. “Bang goes the drum and the quiet, simple-looking,
nervous figure is changed into a bacchanalian fury. But wild and wilder
as the refrain grows, half-maddened as the dancer seems to become, no
one can reasonably detect one trace of vulgarity or immodesty in a
single movement.”
Undoubtedly popular taste has undergone a radical change within the last
generation. The enthusiasm which Lottie Collins aroused is much less
intelligible to us now than the homage that in earlier days used to be
rendered to Taglioni. Occasionally in the obscurer theatres of the
provinces an agile young woman may still be seen throwing out her legs
in all directions, performing the “splits” and imitating the rotation of
a cart-wheel, but the sight leaves us wondrously cold. We find it
difficult to understand how a former generation could have gone
delirious with delight over such a display. _Autres temps, autres
mœurs._ ...
But lest we should wrap ourselves too closely in our self-complacency we
should recollect that, at all events so far as the more popular style of
dancing is concerned, we have possibly only exchanged vulgarity for
banality. The popular taste is a little more queasy than formerly; it
demands not lustiness, but prettiness. Prettiness, insignificant but
cheerful, is the peculiar note of the _école anglaise_, if such a thing
may be said to exist. Lottie Collins left a legacy of style behind her
which her successors possibly found to be a _damnosa hereditas_. But
they have prudently selected the prettier features and rejected the
rest. The most famous exponents of the English method are the girls who
have been trained at the well-known schools of Mr John Tiller, in
Manchester, London and Paris. So apt was this training to meet the
popular taste that the demand for pupils by theatrical and music-hall
managers, not only in England but on the Continent, grew with amazing
rapidity. The cry in the world of amusement was for Tiller girls and yet
more Tiller girls. It is impossible to mistake a Tiller girl. She is
invariably young, invariably pretty, and invariably cheerful, if with a
somewhat infantine gaiety; and, while she is free from the affected
mannerisms of an inferior ballerina, she is a conscientious performer,
with a thorough knowledge of her special though limited technique. She
usually appears in troupes of eight or ten. The most famous of these are
the Palace Girls, chiefly to be seen at the popular theatre of varieties
in Shaftesbury Avenue, London. Others with a marked family likeness,
better known perhaps on the Continent than in England, are the Houp-La
Girls, the Casino Girls, the Ohio Girls, the Snow Drops, the Cocktails,
Les Ping Pongs. No provincial pantomime is quite complete without
[Illustration: REGINA BADET
PREMIÈRE DANSEUSE OF THE PARIS OPERA
_Photograph: Central Illustrations_]
one or other of them. They are to be found in the Parisian Revues, and
on the stages of America, Germany, Austria and even Spain, where they
are welcomed as the typical representatives of the English school of
dancing.
Their charm is of the surface, depending a little upon their science and
a great deal upon their maturely immature graces. They go through the
same movements in the same manner, at exactly the same time, and with
the same unwearying smile. Occasionally they vary the performance with a
little singing--simple melodious ditties dealing with bees and
honeysuckle, nightingales and the moon, love and the Swiss mountains.
But vocal accomplishment is not their strong point. It is not the accent
of London or Manchester, but the freshness, the buoyancy, the cheerful
innocence, the absence of all excess, the easy execution of simple
movements, above all the unimpeachable prettiness, that constitute the
chief characteristic of this peculiarly English contribution to the art
of the dance.
It may have seemed that in England, at any rate until the recent
revival, the dance had fallen quite out of relation to the other arts.
It appears to have been familiar only with the music of the streets. It
has given no inspiration to sculpture or painting. It has been
shamefully cold-shouldered by serious artists. But perhaps it has not
been so entirely uninfluenced by popular British art as may seem to be
the case. It has certainly worshipped at the same shrine of prettiness
and gentle undisturbing emotionalism. It has always been laudably bent
on pleasing; it has shunned violence and extremes, even if in so doing
it has had to submit to be vapid; it has been artful only in order to
appear artless; if never profound it has always been respectable. Surely
in their rendering of happy incidents, their genial flow of spirits,
their easy and pretty accomplishment, many of the pictures of official
British art are inspired by the same spirit as that which animates the
Tiller Girls!
CHAPTER VIII
THE REVIVAL OF CLASSICAL[1] DANCING
When an art grows infirm, there always comes a time when the
practitioners hold council over the failing body and prescribe the
remedy. And the remedy is always the same--they recommend a return to
Nature. Art must go back to its nursing mother, nourish itself again
upon the elemental milk from which it drew its earliest life, and be
made whole.
Towards the close of the last century, the dance was sick with a fever,
sick unto death. The mild and genial palliatives of Mr John Tiller were
unavailing. In vain he taught his pupils to smile, to shun the movements
of delirium, to simulate a childish glee, to be cheerful even though the
heavens should fall. The result too often showed that a dancer might
smile and smile and be a failure. Her naturalness was not really Nature.
Her passion for honeysuckle and the mountains was as little sincere as
the morning blush upon her cheek. The dance could not be tricked back to
health by such artless deceptions. It demanded the more radical cure of
a genuine return to nature.
The goal was clear, but the way was not plain to be seen. For where was
nature to be found? All dancing is merely a refinement upon unconscious
bodily gesture. It is the poetic rendering of the prose of ordinary
human movement. But the modern world has lost the old graceful motions
natural to man in a less artificial state. The characteristic of
natural movement is undulation. Waters, winds, trees, all living forms,
obey a sovereign law of rhythm. Nature moves in curves and gradations
rather than by leaps and bounds. And man in his happiest
circumstances--when he lives close to nature, when his occupations are
genial and not arduous, when the processes of his labour are even and
uncomplicated, when his body is freely exercised and is not forced to
conform itself to a special and restricted task--moves with the regular
rhythm, the freedom, the equipoise, of nature itself. In that pleasant
tract of life, midway between the savage and the civilised state, the
occupations of man seem to have developed equally his vigour and his
grace. The ancient world had the instinct to know how far labour might
be saved without the labourer being sacrificed to the machine. The pause
and ictus of the scythe, the even swing of the oar, the circular sweep
of the sling, the balance of the seat upon the unbitted and barebacked
horse--such were the movements that formed a breed of men capable of all
the heights and depths of human grace. Civilisation--in the canting
sense of the word--means specialisation of employment, and such
specialisation in its turn too often means the deformation of the body.
In the modern civilised world the body is usually exercised either too
little or too continuously in a single occupation. The dependence upon
easy means of locomotion, the resort to labour-saving appliances, the
endless dull circulation through the rigid streets, the long periods of
inaction interrupted by sudden spells of haste, have quenched the old
buoyant and even rhythms. Human motion nowadays tends to be not flowing
but angular, jerky, abrupt, disjointed, full of gestures not flowing
imperceptibly one into another, but broken off midway. A return to
nature means a turning away from the precedents of art to the incidents
of contemporary life. The difficulty of applying this precept to the
dance lay in the fact that there was no nature to return to, or rather
that nature itself had become corrupt and sophisticated.
In this predicament what was to be done? Happily when nature fails us we
can still have recourse to a counsellor of almost equal authority and
wisdom--the art of the antique world. And whereas for some of the
modern arts--for painting and music, for example--classical art is but a
taciturn guide, for the dance it is full of instruction. Their interests
are one and the same--the body and bodily movement. Greek sculpture has
caught innumerable moments of freely flowing action, at a time when
action was probably most pure, removed equally far from the rudeness of
the savage and the inexpressiveness of the modern. All its salient
gestures of sport and war and of the emotional states are as clear to us
as if we had been the contemporaries of Pericles and Pheidias. The Greek
frieze has been described as a kind of incomplete cinematographic film
of the Greek dance. And the so-called Tanagra figures represent a whole
alphabet of the silent plastic speech of everyday life.
To recall the dance to nature by the way of Greek art was the work of an
American woman, perhaps the greatest personality who has ever devoted
herself to developing the art of the dance, Isadora Duncan. Her
interests ranged over a wide field of activities. There was a time when
she wished to initiate a reform of human life in its least details of
costume, of hygiene, of morals. But gradually she came to concentrate
her interest upon the dance. For her the dance is not merely the art
which permits the spirit to express itself in movement; it is the base
of a whole conception of life, a life flexible, harmonious, natural. In
the development of the dance she found herself confronted by the dilemma
which has just been alluded to. On the one hand was the limited
technique of the ballet, on the other the unnatural contortions of the
eccentric school. To return to the unconscious gesture of the
people--that is to say, the crude, stereotyped gestures of the
street--offered no way of escape. She found the solution in a return to
the natural gesture of human life as represented in Greek art.
In order to get at her point of view it is best to let her speak in her
own words--although, as she would say, one speaks better about the dance
in dancing than in commentaries and explanations.
“To seek in nature the fairest forms and to find the movement which
expresses the soul of these forms--this is the art of the dancer. It is
from nature alone that the dancer must draw his inspirations, in the
same manner as the sculptor, with whom he has so many affinities. Rodin
has said: ‘To produce good sculpture it is not necessary to copy the
works of antiquity; it is necessary first of all to regard the works of
nature, and to see in those of the classics only the method by which
they have interpreted nature.’ Rodin is right; and in my art I have by
no means copied, as has been supposed, the figures of Greek vases,
friezes and paintings. From them I have learned to regard nature, and
when certain of my movements recall the gestures that are seen in works
of art, it is only because, like them, they are drawn from the grand
natural source.
“My inspiration has been drawn from trees, from waves, from clouds, from
the sympathies that exist between passion and the storm, between
gentleness and the soft breeze, and the like, and I always endeavour to
put into my movements a little of that divine continuity which gives to
the whole of nature its beauty and its life.”
It must not be supposed that Isadora Duncan despised technique or
attempted to dispense with it. It was the technique of the current modes
of dancing that she found unsatisfactory. “I have closely studied the
figured documents of all ages and of all the great masters,” she says,
“but I have never seen in them any representations of human beings
walking on the extremity of the toes or raising the leg higher than the
head. These ugly and false positions in no way express that state of
unconscious dionysiac delirium which is necessary to the dancer.
Moreover movements, just like harmonies in music, are not invented; they
are discovered.”
It is a mistake, which some exponents of the “natural” style of dancing
have fallen into, to imagine that they can express the spirit that moves
them by any haphazard agitation of the limbs. To dance “naturally” does
not mean to dance impromptu, relying upon the inspiration of the moment.
In art the simplest effects are usually those which have cost the
greatest effort, and no effort is more severe than the attempt to
imitate the inimitable model of nature. The dance demands as rigorous a
technique as any other art. Without a technique it is inarticulate. Miss
Duncan
[Illustration: ISADORA DUNCAN]
has undergone a training as elaborate as any _prima ballerina_. From her
childhood upwards she has devoted twenty years to the study of the
dance. She had to invent, or rather discover, her own technique. Taking
for her models the poses of Greek art, she endeavoured to reconstruct
from a single attitude the whole continuous flowing movement, of which
the statuesque pose is of course but an arrested moment. She had to fill
in the gaps, as it were, in the interrupted cinematographic film, to
pass rhythmically from one gesture to the next. She found at first that
her body failed to respond. It suffered from the unpliability, the
general wrongness of movement, which is the outcome of modern conditions
of life and the loss of tradition. She found that she had to begin with
the elements of motion, to learn to walk, to run, to leap rhythmically
before she could dance rhythmically. She started therefore to learn to
govern her body, to recover a lost art of balance and flexibility, to
make each slightest movement a harmonious expressive gesture. For she
demands none but the finest gestures for the dance. Everything common
and contemptible she would exclude by a severe test.
“Every movement that can be danced by the side of the sea without being
in harmony with the rhythm of the waves, every movement that can be
danced in the midst of a forest without being in harmony with the
swaying of the foliage, every movement that can be danced, naked, in the
broad sunlight of the open field, without being in harmony with the
vibration and solitude of the landscape--all these movements are false
movements in that they are discords in the harmony of the great natural
lines. That is why the dancer must choose above all the movements which
express the strength, the health, the grace, the nobility, the languor
or the gravity of living things.”
The steps of the dance, therefore, have to be studied with a care which
makes even the elaboration of the technique of the ballet appear simple.
But the steps are not the end; they are only a means. The end at which
in Miss Duncan’s view the dance aims is “to express the noblest and most
profound sentiments of the human soul, those which come from Apollo,
from Pan, from Bacchus and from Aphrodite. To see in it no more than a
frivolous or agreeable diversion is to offer an insult to the dance.”
She is in thorough accord with the Greek view that the dance reacts upon
the moral mood. “The attitudes which we take have an influence upon our
soul. A simple throwing back of the head, done passionately, causes us a
sudden tremor of joy, of heroism or of desire. All gestures have a moral
resonance, and thus can directly express every possible moral state.”
Hers also was the Greek view that music and the dance should be mutually
interpretative. Before her time music had been regarded primarily as an
accompaniment, a time-keeper; she enunciated the theory that its
function was to give the keynote of the mood of the dance. Music and the
dance were to be two bodies animated by a single soul. She selected as
her prime composer Gluck, a master of simple and obvious melody. But she
not only interprets him, she enlarges and sublimates him. The handling
of musical themes in this way is of course a dangerous matter, and might
give rise to discussion which would be out of place in this book. It may
be maintained that a consummate composition, a symphonic movement by
Beethoven, is complete in itself. The best music is its own interpreter
and needs no elucidation. Music, moreover, is large and broad in its
emotional expression; it transcends words, and how therefore should it
not transcend gesture? It is as likely as not that a choregraphic
commentary may limit rather than enhance the musical conception. It is
possible that the movements of a dancer might not at all correspond with
the mood that a Chopin nocturne, for instance, awakes in us. To these
misgivings I do not propose to reply. The only adequate answer is to be
found in Miss Duncan’s dancing. On this debatable ground her tread is
sure. In each of her interpretations of music there is a self-evident
rightness which silences censure.
Miss Duncan at first suffered the lot of most reformers. Novelty is
usually found to be amusing; the public laughed because it failed to
understand. When she appeared some twelve years ago in New York, she had
already struggled long and hard to perfect
[Illustration: ISADORA DUNCAN
_Photograph: Dover Street Studios, Ltd._]
her art and she sorely needed the invaluable stimulus of recognition and
appreciation. She performed a dance which was suggested by “The
Rubáiyát” of Omar Khayyám. The newspaper humorists made merry over her
work. One summed up the general verdict in the phrase: “Our public will
probably prefer Omar’s lines to Miss Duncan’s.”
When she came to Europe, however, Miss Duncan’s art met with speedy
recognition. In rapid succession she captured Berlin, Paris, St
Petersburg and London. London perhaps found the new gospel somewhat hard
to accept, but the educational authorities both in Germany and France
were anxious to obtain her services in the instruction of children. In
Paris she has trained a troupe of young children whose delightful
dancing charmed London audiences a year or two ago.
In the power of expressing the depth and subtlety of spiritual moods
Isadora Duncan is supreme. She is a poet no less than a dancer. Her
dancing is so deeply rooted in the soul that it ignores the superficial
and often coquettish graces of the popular dancer. And yet she is
feminine in her dancing, but feminine in the simple, calm, womanly
grandeur of the three fates of the Parthenon marbles. Hers is the
essential and eternal type of womanhood, the type of the Madonna, of the
peasant woman, breathing of the warm earth and the open air, of Ceres
rather than of Circe. Her dance has perhaps the beauty of full summer
rather than of spring. Its lines are flowing, but full of dignity and
restraint. There is perhaps still a suggestion of the frieze in it. A
new technique necessarily at first inclines towards rigidity.
There is no surer proof of the true greatness of her art than the fact
that it can produce in the spectator that sense of shock which only work
of an elemental character can give, a shock which sends the mind surging
forward down vistas opening up an undiscovered prospect not merely of
art but of life. This sensation has been well described by Mr W. R.
Titterton in a glowing pæan of praise. “I remember when I first saw her,
at the Theater des Westens in Berlin. My friends had led me to expect
something fine, and then the Duncan came and struck me like a
thunderclap. Will you believe me? I shuddered with awe. Once in a
century, in ten centuries, comes a New Idea, and here was I the
spectator of the latest born. In this idea--this free, simple, happy,
expressive rhythmic movement--was focused all I and a hundred others had
been dreaming. This was our symbol--the symbol of a new art, a new
literature, a new national polity, a new life. I saw crowds of happy
children, of happy men and women, dancing that dance on village greens,
in the green forest, on the green hill-tops. Pedants at their books,
pedants at their figures, pedants on their platforms vanished in smoke
before the exultant dances of this glorious woman. As the walls of
Jericho before the trump of Joshua, so before her the factory walls fell
down, the festering slums and ugly places of London crumbled to dust,
and away to Arcady we danced to the sound of her Shepherd’s piping.”
If Isadora Duncan propounded the gospel of the classical dance, Maud
Allan promulgated it with the greatest popular success. She won the ear
of England for the new word. Not that she was by any means a mere
copyist--her talent was too original for that. Coming after her great
predecessor, she nevertheless found her own inspiration in herself. With
a certain assurance in the strength of her own individuality, she
treated the classical dance with some freedom and boldness. She added
the personal touch that gained the applause of the crowd.
Miss Maud Allan is Canadian born, but she spent the best part of her
childhood and youth in the state of California. There she lived a breezy
out-of-door life, romping, riding, swimming, mountain climbing, drinking
in health with the virgin air--all unconsciously, no doubt, acquiring
the strength and suppleness of body that were to be invaluable to her in
later years. Very early she began the serious study of music, but even
in those early days she seems to have been conscious of the
possibilities of the expression of emotion through the medium of
gesture. When Sarah Bernhardt visited San Francisco, the art of the
great actress left a deep impression upon her. Shortly afterwards, when
she was playing at the piano, her mind still attentive to the rhythm of
the French artist’s gestures, her mother asked her of what she was
thinking. “Of Sarah Bernhardt’s wonderful talent, of the beautiful
movements of her body,” she replied. “She seems to express more with it
than with her lips.”
It was decided that Maud Allan should go to Berlin to continue her
musical studies at the Royal High School of Music. The next five and a
half years of her life were spent in an atmosphere of music, literature
and art. Her work was varied by travel in Italy and elsewhere. Her visit
to Italy was a turning-point in her artistic career. Already at times
she had experienced a feeling of being a prisoner while at the piano;
music was still an intense delight to her, but it was no longer
all-sufficing. A new idea took shape in her mind as she stood before
Botticelli’s “Primavera” in Florence, an idea that she too might render
her body eloquent to speak of the joy of spring and of the scented woods
and of emotions yet more various and profound. She returned to Berlin,
where she developed her idea, concentrating her interest on physical
culture, studying in museums and libraries the poses of classical art,
seeking to discover the relation between music and gesture. The new
interest so engrossed her that it allowed no time for any other pursuit.
She no longer had any doubt as to her true vocation. She left the Royal
High School of Music and began her career as a dancer. She gave her
first public performance in Vienna in 1903. Three years had elapsed
since the idea had crystallised before Botticelli’s picture in
Florence--three years of continuous training and preparation.
It is interesting to note that when Joachim saw the dance-programme of
his young friend, he called her aside and said: “Little girl, you may
dance anything you like, but, dear child, please don’t dance my
Beethoven!” It was another musician, however, Marcel Remy, the Belgian
composer, who gave her the greatest encouragement and assistance in the
prosecution of her studies.
The success of the new dancer in Vienna was immediate, and in the
following years she appeared in most of the larger cities of Germany,
Switzerland, Austria and Hungary. It was in 1907 that she received the
command to appear before King Edward VII. at Marienbad. “I remember that
it was with fear and trembling that I began my work,” so she tells the
story, “although when in the midst of any of my dances I am seldom
cognisant of any personality near. But I think I should be forgiven if,
that once, the thought of England’s King watching me gravely influenced
me and, afterwards I realised, favourably. I think it was the happiest
moment of my life when he took my hand with his calm, great dignity and
told me he considered my art a beautiful one, and my dances worthy of
the word classical.”
In the spring of 1908 Maud Allan first appeared before an English
audience at the Palace Theatre, London. Since that date much water has
flowed under the bridge, and it is not without interest now to recall
the notice that appeared in _The Times_ newspaper the following morning:
“There is little doubt that Miss Maud Allan will make a great success.
If so she will be the first to rouse London to enthusiasm with a kind of
dancing to which it has never yet taken very kindly--the dancing of
gesture and posture. As Miss Allan represents it, it is a thing of such
interest and beauty that it may even drive high kicking off the stage.”
The programme informed us in magniloquent phrase that the new dancer had
“ransacked the shrines of plastic beauty and worshipped humbly and
prayerfully before the Art of the Universe.” Little wonder, therefore,
that there was a hush of expectancy when the violin bows glided softly
into the opening strains of Chopin’s valse in A minor and, preceded by a
sinuous arm, the dancer slipped through the velvet hangings, drawn
forward apparently by the magnetism of the music. Her limbs and feet
were bare, her form lightly clothed in a loose classic drapery. A ripple
ran along her arms from the shoulder to the finger-tips, undulating like
a wave of the sea. When the music changed from the minor to the major
key, her body passed into the corresponding mood, suddenly becoming
brilliant with hope and delight. Then as quickly the joy faded out of
her face and limbs, and she relapsed with the music into a passive
despair. When the music ceased, her heart too seemed to have ceased
beating. Silently she glided back through the curtain. Already London
had capitulated.
Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song” was an _allegretto grazioso_ chase of
[Illustration: MAUD ALLAN
_Photograph: Foulsham & Banfield, Ltd._]
butterflies and plucking of wild flowers. With rapid sallies hither and
thither, now a-tiptoe, now on bended knee, she danced the joy of all
living things in the spring. The dream she dreamed before Botticelli’s
“Primavera” had become reality. A comparison with Pavlova’s “Danse des
Papillons” inevitably suggests itself, and it is hardly possible to
claim that in sheer brilliance of movement, in papilionaceous gaiety,
the “natural” school has yet outstripped a style that is founded upon
the older technique of the ballet.
But the climax of the performance was the “Vision of Salomé.” Many harsh
things have been said of this dance, from the propriety of the costume
of jewels and gauze to that of rendering a stage version of a Biblical
episode. It has been called by a respectable critic, “sensuous,
decadent, _macabre_.” It was stated that it preserved a nice balance
between the lascivious and voluptuous. Above all, the Corporation of
Manchester, believing that it would sully the immaculate atmosphere of
their city, prohibited its performance within the limits of their
jurisdiction--an action which resembles nothing so much as that of an
English duchess, who, when she was offered the translation of a French
play that she was witnessing, refused it, saying, “I do not wish to
understand.” It is to be feared, however, that the deputation of City
Fathers that was sent down to witness the dance was able only to
misunderstand. To state that the dance was as pure in intention as it
was powerful in execution would be a superfluous commentary. I cannot do
better than let the dancer relate in her own words the meaning of the
vision:
“Drawn by an irresistible force, Salome in a dream descends the marble
steps leading from the bronze doors that she has just flung to, behind
her frightened attendants. The sombre stone obelisks, backed by the inky
darkness of the cypress trees, shut out the silver rays of the moon,
and, save for the flickering red light of the cresset flames that the
slaves have lit, all is mystic darkness, and to Salome’s overwrought
brain all is fantastic, vague.
“She lives again the awful moments of joy and of horror which she has
just passed through. Alone in the gloom the poor child’s fancy assumes
dominion over her.
“Slowly, to the strains of the distant music, reminiscently she raises
her willowy arms. The movement thrills her whole slender frame and she
glides as if in a dream. A voice whispers ‘Your duty--your duty! Does
not the child owe obedience to its mother?’ On, on--wilder and more
reckless than ever before! She sees once more the greedy glittering eyes
of her stepfather--she hears again the whispered praises and encouraging
words of her mother, and Salome, child that she is, realises a power
within her and exults. She sees again her triumph approach, her swaying
limbs are in readiness to give way, when suddenly from out of the sombre
death-still hall the wail of muffled distress--and a pale, sublime face
with its mass of long black hair arises before her--the head of John the
Baptist! There is a sudden crash. She is horror-stricken! Suddenly a
wild desire takes possession of her. Why, ah! why should her mother have
longed for this man’s end? Salome feels a strange longing, compelling
her once more to hold in her hands this awful reward of her obedience,
and slowly, very slowly, and with ecstasy mingled with dread, she seems
to grasp the vision of her prize and lay it on the floor before her.
Every fibre of her youthful body is quivering; a sensation hitherto
utterly unknown to her is awakened, and her soul longs for comfort.
Hark! a sound of approaching feet. Frightened lest her treasure be taken
from her before she has solved its mystery, she stands guard over it,
and when the footsteps die away in the distant halls her relief knows no
limit! In the mad whirl of childish joy she is drawn again to
dance--dance around this strange silent presence. Soon exhaustion breaks
the spell. Salome, Princess of Galilee, lies prone on the cold grey
marble.
“The awakening is that of her childish heart. The realisation of a
superior power has so taken possession of her that she is spurred on to
sacrifice everything even unto herself to conquer. Reared in luxury--her
every wish granted since her days began--was it to be thought possible
she would subject herself to the will of another, a stronger and an
intangible force at that, without a fierce conflict?
“What passes in those few moments through this excited,
half-terror-stricken, half-stubborn brain makes of little Salome a
woman!
“Now, instead of wanting to conquer, she wants to be conquered,
[Illustration: MAUD ALLAN
IN _The Vision of Salomé_
_Photograph: Foulsham & Banfield, Ltd._]
craving the spiritual guidance of the man whose wraith is before her;
but it remains silent! No word of comfort, not even a sign! Crazed by
the rigid stillness, Salome, seeking an understanding, and knowing not
how to obtain it, presses her warm, vibrating lips to the cold lifeless
ones of the Baptist! In this instant the curtain of darkness that had
enveloped her soul falls, the strange grandeur of a power higher than
Salome has ever dreamed of beholding becomes visible to her, and her
anguish becomes vibrant.
“She begs and prays for mercy of the stern head--alas, without response!
Salome flees in despair, and though her pride, her princely rank,
confront her, and she halts, it is but for a moment. The Revelation of
Something far greater still breaks upon her, and stretching out her
trembling arms turns her soul rejoicing towards Salvation. It is gone!
Where, oh, where! A sudden wild grief overmasters her, and the fair
young Princess, bereft of all her pride, her childish gaiety, and her
womanly desire, falls, her hands grasping high above her for her lost
redemption, a quivering huddled mass.”
It was a dance of a strange and haunting fascination, deriving no little
of its disquieting effect from the weird Oriental strains of Strauss’s
music. There were many who found themselves unaccountably drawn to it
and were compelled to return to the tragic vision night after night. Yet
as a presentment of tragic emotion, finer even than the “Vision of
Salomé,” or the rendering of Chopin’s “Funeral March,” was the dance of
“Ase’s Death” in Grieg’s _Peer Gynt_ suite. It was a study of mournful
poses, inspired by that grief which lies too deep and still to explode
in tumultuous and exciting gesture. There is, however, in her ecstasies
both of joy and grief just that lack of fire which makes intelligible,
if it does not quite justify, the somewhat harsh words of Mr W. R.
Titterton when he says of Miss Maud Allan that “she is the English Miss
in art. She is an ineffectual angel beating in the limelight her
luminous wings in vain. She has many pretty movements; she is light and
dainty, she has an elfin prance, with bent knee and waving hands, but
she has no temperament, and no presence; she is spectral; you think you
can see through her. And above all, she is monotonous. She repeats and
repeats and repeats. How she sickens me in the end, for example, with
that, at first, so beautiful ripple of the hands.”
The truth may possibly be that that freedom from convention in which she
glories is in reality a bondage. In her own words, “dancing is the
spontaneous expression of the spiritual state.” The dance is “not an
acquired but a spontaneous art, revealing the temperament of the
dancer.” She is compelled to acknowledge the necessity for technique,
but she fears that if it becomes excessive the art will no longer be
able to stir the soul. In this theory lurks a certain element of danger.
The dance, like all the arts, seeks the effect of spontaneity, of
inevitableness, but this spontaneity is highly self-conscious. And it
expresses itself most readily by technique--for technique, when it is
really fluent, does not hinder but facilitates the expression of
temperament. For us moderns the “spontaneous” gesture is the clumsy,
inexpressive movement of everyday life; the dancer requires a conscious
technique that comes more naturally to her than the unconscious
technique of the street, in order to be truly spontaneous and
expressive. It is perhaps her detestation of the stereotyped steps of
the ballet that causes her to incline to the opposite extreme. But she
herself would be the first to admit that her art has cost her pains no
less than that of the ballet-dancer. It is one of her complaints that
many suppose that she has learned to dance with no more than the
exertion of a fluttering butterfly. It is not for Miss Allan herself,
but for her imitators, that the theory that technique is relatively
unimportant is so dangerous a pitfall. The conventions of classical or
“natural” dancing are not yet so fixed as those of the ballet. Where the
path is less clearly marked out there is more danger of going astray.
Would-be dancers of the “natural” school, imagining that nothing is so
easy as to dance “naturally,” forget that they have to unlearn the
movements they are accustomed to before they can produce anything worthy
of the name of art.
If Isadora Duncan is a poet, Maud Allan is before all things a musician.
In the musical qualities of her art she has no rival. Apart from her
instinct for music, she has profited by a musical training such as
probably no other dancer has been equipped with. Her steps are to the
eye the exact equivalent of the notes which reach the ear. One of the
most felicitous of her accomplishments is her ability to pass with the
music from the major to the minor key, or _vice versa_. When a phrase
occurs first in one key and then in the other, it is repeated in her
dancing with just that modification of aspect and accent which expresses
the change of mood. Some of the movements in Grieg’s first _Peer Gynt_
suite gave her admirable scope for this beautiful art of transposition.
The faithfulness with which her movements follow the moods of the
composer is probably only fully realised by those who are musicians as
well as connoisseurs of the dance. Her translation of music has not
seldom that rare quality of translations of being finer than the
original, and there are not a few who, when they hear again,
unaccompanied, the music which her dancing has ennobled, will be
conscious of a sense of incompleteness and loss.
If only Joachim had seen her art in its maturity, he would perhaps have
been content to allow her dance his beloved Beethoven!
In any account of the classical dance it is scarcely possible to forbear
mention of Mlle Magdeleine, although it is difficult to know exactly
where to place her. For the characteristic of her dancing is that it
purports to be unconscious. Some eight or nine years ago Mlle Magdeleine
came for hypnotic treatment to Professor Magnin of the Paris School of
Magnetism. M. Magnin accidentally discovered that while in a state of
trance she was susceptible to the influence of music in a quite
extraordinary degree, and that although she had learnt nothing of the
art of dancing, she accompanied the music that was played to her in her
trance with motions of the utmost beauty and significance. She was
strictly examined by a number of eminent scientists, who certified that
to the best of their belief her dancing was performed in a genuine state
of unconscious, or rather subconscious, activity. She interpreted with
strange suggestiveness the music that the foremost musicians of the day
played to her, and the painters and sculptors who saw her, including
Rodin, were astounded at the strength and beauty of her poses.
Naturally the main interest of her performance rests upon its
genuineness, and it is easier to believe that it was given under true
hypnotic conditions than that the best scientific judgment of the day
was deceived.
Mlle Magdeleine interpreted music ranging in character as widely as
Handel’s “Largo,” a valse of Chopin’s, and “The Marseillaise.” Her
rendering of the latter was the very embodiment of human passion and
blood-lust. Her power of dramatic expression is indeed terrifying. In
her gestures there is at times something tremendous and heroic; at other
times they are distinctly faulty and fall into the conventional and the
commonplace. It is said that her trance tends to become mixed with the
recollections of her waking consciousness, and that when the two states
ultimately coincide she will lose her distinctive quality, her absolute
rightness of gesture. In any case her dancing is a unique phenomenon;
she cannot found a school or perpetuate a method. But she points the way
for the art of that great tragic dancer of whom the dance is
expectant--an art which was only partially realised in the dancing of
Miss Maud Allan. Of the three Ladies of Sorrow of whom De Quincey speaks
it was perhaps possible for the dancer of the “Vision of Salomé” to
represent our Lady of Tears, “who goes abroad upon the winds when she
hears the sobbing of litanies or the thundering of organs,” or even of
Our Lady of Sighs, “whose eyes are filled with perishing dreams, and
with wrecks of forgotten deliriums”; but it was reserved for the
Magdeleine to portray that third and most terrible sister, Mater
Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness, the defier of God, the mother of
lunacies and the suggestress of suicides, who “moves with incalculable
motions, bounding and with tiger’s leaps,” who “wears the fierce light
of a blazing misery that rests not for matins or for vespers, for noon
of day or noon of night, for ebbing or for flowing tide.” The dances of
delight and gaiety come almost instinctively to those of a happy
temperament; but the dances of grief, of fear, of madness, of despair,
these are they which put the dancer to the severest test, which strip
her of the acquired graces of the schools, and leave her dependent only
on the quality of her own soul.
[Illustration: MAUD ALLAN
IN CHOPIN’S FUNERAL MARCH
_Photograph: Foulsham & Banfield, Ltd._]
Of the uninspired imitators who have followed in the steps of the great
dancers of the classical school, there is happily no need to speak at
length. Mme Knipper-Rabeneck of the Artistic Theatre of Moscow trained a
group of dancers, who performed in London last year. Their
interpretation of the music which they accompanied with their dancing
was not very subtle, but if they failed to catch the finest shades of
Schumann, Brahms and Chopin, they nevertheless gave a pleasing
exhibition of youthful liveliness. The sisters Wiesenthal have added to
the classical method a “pretty fluttering, tottering marionette manner
of their own.” And Lady Constance Stuart Richardson was the first of the
aristocratic amateurs who, when any new style of dancing becomes the
vogue, are always ready to rush in where professionals sometimes fear to
tread.
Indeed there are signs that classical dancing may be overtaken by a fate
not unlike that which befell the Skirt Dance--an event which would
indeed be a calamity, and not, as in the earlier mode, a happy release.
Whatever may be said in dispraise of the school of the ballet--and it
has its detractors not a few--it has at least the advantage of
possessing a technique, the terrors of which are sufficient to protect
it against the incursion of that mob of gentlewomen who dance with ease,
or rather who would dance with ease were it not for the necessary pains
without which that ease cannot be acquired. “Natural” dancing, by its
very name, is inviting to those who are averse to hard work. The theory
that a dancer can ignore with impunity the restrictions of technique,
that she is bound to please if only she is natural and happy, and allows
herself to follow the momentary inspiration of the music, and dances
with the same gleeful spontaneity as a child dancing to a barrel-organ,
is a doctrine as seductive as it is fatal. Already we have seen upon the
stage performers who, in the name of Greek art, race and romp rather
than dance. We are threatened with performances in which naïve young
creatures in tenuous classic drapery amuse themselves by capering on
bare feet, gathering and scattering make-believe roses, splashing in
imaginary rivers, undulating snaky arms, shooting arrows, playing ball,
butterfly catching. The dance cannot return to nature, in the sense
which Isadora Duncan intended, by returning to this rather kindergarten
Arcadia. The classical dance has its hidden law, which is perhaps more
difficult than that of the ballet because it is more secret. If the
dancer despises technique and relies only on her natural endowment, she
must at least expect that the least flaw of beauty, grace or
intelligence will be exposed in painful nakedness to the general gaze.
CHAPTER IX
THE IMPERIAL RUSSIAN BALLET
It is now time to pick up the thread of the story of the ballet.
We have seen how a new spirit in dancing came from the West; for the new
spirit in ballet we must look to the East.[2] Many strange and fine
things of the spiritual order have come out of Russia in these latter
times. Our music, our literature, our art, have been profoundly affected
by the spirit of that people which appears to have all the unfathomable
reservoirs of barbaric life to draw upon. But perhaps there has come to
us nothing so supremely excellent, so unsurpassably beautiful, as
Russian dancing.
As with all other peoples who still preserve the traditions of the elder
generations, with the Russians dancing is a natural act. The peasants
learn the graceful national dances, which vary from province to
province, as simply as they learn their mother tongue. In summer, on the
evenings of Sundays and holidays, the gaily-decked youths and maidens
collect in a field or on a bridge near the village and dance to the
music of the twittering _balalaika_ or the monotonous ululations of a
cheap concertina. Unfortunately in Russia, as everywhere else, the old
order is giving place to the new, and for the immemorial national dances
are being substituted foreign quadrilles and lancers. But though the
character of the dance changes, the passion and the natural aptitude for
it remain. In the People’s Palace at St Petersburg the young men and
girls from the factories may be seen dancing the intricate measures of
the mazurka with an ease and abandon which some of the trained dancers
of Western Europe might envy.
To this native spirit, however, the ballet owes little or nothing.
Doubtless it has in a manner fertilised the soil, created a public
interested in the dance and, if heredity counts for anything, provided a
raw material ready for the ballet-master to mould to his will. But the
ballet, as I have said before, is in its origin aristocratic, and
nowhere more so than in Russia. The Russian ballet is entirely the
product of the Court. It was of course originally a foreign importation.
The first ballet was presented in 1675, before the Tsar Alexis, the
second of the Romanovs. Peter the Great, in his efforts to westernise
Russia, introduced the Western modes of dancing, and, as he was his own
shipwright, so he was his own dancing-master. He sets about teaching his
Court, and himself made such “caprioles,” says Bergholz, that any
dancing-master might envy him.
But the institution of the ballet in Russia was due to the Empress Anne.
In 1735 she appointed the Neapolitan composer Francesca Areja to compose
the music and conduct the orchestra, and a Frenchman, Landé, to act as
ballet-master. She commanded an Italian _intermedio_ with a ballet to be
played before her once a week. At first, as there were yet no
professional dancers, the young noblemen of the military cadet schools
were instructed in the dance. Gradually they were superseded by a
specially trained corps. Landé collected a number of boys and girls of
the poorer classes and trained them free of charge. So delighted was the
Empress with their performance that she undertook to defray all the
expenses of their education out of the Imperial exchequer. Landé
received a fee for teaching them, rooms were provided for them in one of
the palaces, and we learn that the children were entrusted to the care
of a widow of one of the Court coachmen. Such were the modest beginnings
of the famous Dramatic School of St Petersburg.
Catherine II. followed in the footsteps of her predecessor. In her reign
the services of the cadets were no longer required. To her initiative
was due the erection of the Grand Theatre, which is now supplanted by
the famous Marianski Theatre. She organised the theatre and brought it
into relation with the bureaucratic regime, appointing a director, with
two committees under his control, one in Moscow and one in St
Petersburg, to superintend theatrical spectacles.
Didelot, who was called to St Petersburg in 1802, raised the ballet to a
level of excellence which was not surpassed even in Milan. As a
ballet-master he was a martinet, almost a fanatic in his passion for his
art. Under him the ballet took that prominent place in Russian life
which it has never since lost. He regarded _plastique_ and _mime_ as
even more important features in the ballet than dancing itself. He
insisted that there was no limit to what the ballet could express, and
to prove his case staged Racine’s tragedy, _Phèdre_, in ballet form with
considerable success. So great became the popularity of the ballet that
even when opera came into fashion it was the custom for the _corps de
ballet_ to repeat in dumb show during the _entr’actes_ the foregoing act
of the opera.
During all this time the Imperial Ballet closely followed the academic
Italian tradition. It was in no way distinctively Russian. Fifty years
ago, and even less, most of the principal dancers in Moscow and St
Petersburg were Italians--a complete reversal of the state of affairs at
the present day, when Preobrajenskaya, one of the greatest dancers at
the Marianski, appears as _prima ballerina_ at La Scala, the home of the
ballet in Milan.
The excellence of the Russian ballet is the direct outcome of the system
of State maintenance and control, which has been in vogue for a century
and a half. The large expenditure necessary for its upkeep is met by the
funds annually set apart for the Minister of the Court. The Imperial
Ballet provides all the dancers for the operas given throughout the
season at the Marie Theatre in St Petersburg and at the Opera House in
Moscow. On two evenings a week, Wednesday and Sunday, it gives a special
performance devoted entirely to the ballet. Moreover, some of the less
distinguished dancers perform from time to time at the People’s Palace
in St Petersburg. The country, therefore, may be said to get good value
for its money.
Attached to the great theatres, primarily reserved as homes of ballet,
is the Imperial School of Dancing, which is of course supported by the
State. The pupil--boy or girl--is entered at the age of about nine or
ten. After the necessary nomination has been secured, a stringent
examination with regard to health, intelligence, beauty of form and
natural gracefulness has to be passed before the child is finally
accepted. Mr Rothay Reynolds, who has an intimate knowledge of Russian
life, gives an interesting account of the training:
“The school contains a great room for dancing, with a floor sloped at
the same angle as that of the stage at the Marinsky Theatre. Here one
may see a class of merry boys instructed in their art. A master, usually
one of the best dancers in the theatre, shows them the steps and
movements to be learnt, and half-a-dozen do their best to copy him.
After ten minutes they go and rest, and a second batch comes forward.
The boys seem to enjoy the work, and even when they are supposed to be
resting some of them will continue to practise and give each other
friendly hints. In another and similar room is the girls’ class, where
the method is the same. Then there is a room with many toilet-tables on
which grease-paints are set out and with mirrors and electric lights
arranged exactly as at the theatre. Here the pupils assemble for lessons
in make-up. A boy has to learn to transform himself into a Chinese or an
old man or a beautiful young Greek, and he has to pass examinations at
different points of his school career in this art. I remember once
meeting a young man in the waiting-room of a Polish dentist” (he goes on
to relate). “He told me he had toothache and a nervous break-down,
brought on he believed by the strain of a difficult examination. I asked
what were the subjects of the examination. ‘French,’ he said, ‘because
we must be cultured, dancing, the history of dancing, and painting my
face.’ I had the curiosity to ask where this unusual curriculum was
followed. ‘At the Imperial School of Ballet,’ he said, mentioned his
name with the air of one who felt that he ought to have been recognised,
and added: ‘Thank heaven I’ve passed, and now I am a _premier danseur_.
It is a delightful life, and when I am too old to dance the State will
give me a pension.’”
[Illustration: THE RUSSIAN BALLET
AN UNDRESS REHEARSAL]
The pupil at the Imperial Ballet School receives in fact a sound
secondary education. Four hours a day are devoted to dancing during the
eight years he is at school. While still at school the children
occasionally appear on the stage in special _ballets d’enfants_. They
also take part in “crowds” in operas where children are needed, as in
the first act of Tchaikovsky’s _Dame de Pique_. At seventeen they begin
their career as members of the _corps de ballet_, from which the most
proficient rise upwards, through the various grades of _coryphée_,
_second sujet_, _premier sujet_, _première danseuse_ or _ballerina_, and
_ballerina assoluta_. The dancer retires, after eighteen years’ service,
at thirty-five--only artists of exceptional merit are permitted to
continue after that age--and receives a pension of from one hundred and
twenty pounds to two hundred and sixty pounds a year.
The fine quality of the performances of the Russian ballet is
undoubtedly due in the first place to the prolonged and thorough
training, not only of the principal dancers but of each individual
performer. An average of five or six hours’ dancing a day is the rule
rather than the exception; for a ballet that is to be performed at night
is always rehearsed during the day, however many times it may have been
given before. The counsel of Carlo-Blasis, the eighteenth-century
ballet-master is fulfilled to the letter: “Il faut encore étudier,” he
wrote, “lors même qu’on sera tout-à-fait formé.... Dans la musique, dans
la peinture, etc., l’on n’a pas besoin d’un travail aussi opiniâtre pour
conserver ce que l’on sait. L’art du danseur, comme tous ceux
d’exercice, ne jouit pas de cet avantage.” In the Russian ballet there
is a perfect co-operation between the performers and an all-round
technical excellence quite unlike anything that has ever been seen in
this country.
Moreover the art of the male dancer, which had almost died out in other
countries, has not only been kept alive in Russia but has been developed
equally with that of the ballerina. The “principal boy” of the English
stage is, as we know, always a girl. A note of character and energy
disappeared from the ballet when it became solely the medium of feminine
dancing. The strength and breadth of the Russian ballet have gained
enormously by the retention and development of male dancing. Indeed its
virility is one of the most striking features. The fierceness of the
warrior dances in _Prince Igor_ and the adroitness of the dance of
buffoons in _Le Pavillon d’Armide_ are among its most memorable
achievements. _Scheherazade_ without Nijinsky would be like _Hamlet_
without the Prince of Denmark. We realise now that without the masculine
element the ballet is as incomplete as an orchestra without the bass.
In Russia the music of the ballet has received the same careful
consideration as the choregraphy. In some cases, music which was not
written specially for the purpose has been adapted to the uses of the
ballet. But latterly it has been the custom of the directors to apply to
the leading composers of the day for ballet music written expressly for
a given subject. In earlier times it was of course the custom for
composers to write the music for the ballets that were interpolated in
the opera. Tchaikovsky was one of the first to compose a ballet
independent of opera and complete in itself. This was _The Sleeping
Beauty_, first presented in 1890, in his own opinion the best thing he
ever did, with the exception of his opera, _Eugène Onegin_. He showed
his recognition of the necessity of an absolute co-ordination among the
collaborators of the ballet by working in accordance with the
suggestions of the choregrapher. The _maître de ballet_, after composing
the design of the dances that were to express the spirit and action of
the piece, sent to the musician a detailed schedule of the music
required; thus:
No. 1. Musique douce, 64 mesures.
No. 2. L’arbre s’éclaire. Musique pétillant de 8 mesures.
No. 3. L’entrée des enfants. Musique bruyante et joyeuse de 24 mesures,
etc.
_Casse-Noisette_, another ballet by the same composer, appeared in 1892.
The original and powerful music of Borodin has been pressed into the
service of the ballet, and entire ballets have been written by
Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazounov and Arensky. In the execution of the music
there is the same specialisation. The leaders of the orchestra qualify
specially for the ballet, having no part in the orchestra at any other
time.
It is clear, therefore, that in Russia the ballet has long been regarded
as a serious art-form. A keen and intelligent criticism and an
enthusiastic public interest provide it with that bracing atmosphere
without which it is difficult for any composite form of art to thrive.
On the nights devoted exclusively to the ballet, the large Marianski
Theatre is so crowded that it is difficult to obtain a seat. Most of the
stalls and boxes are subscribed for, and the people renew their
subscriptions year after year. Mr Rothay Reynolds relates how, when an
elderly gentlemen who for a great number of years had had a seat in the
front row suddenly died, a friend of his rushed to the theatre and
offered the young lady at the box-office twenty guineas if she would
secure him the seat. “Alas!” she said, “I have already received over a
hundred applications.”
When the Russian ballet was being performed for the first time at Covent
Garden, an enthusiast was heard to express his intention of emigrating
to Russia in order to see the ballet in its true home. If he had carried
out his intention it is to be feared that he would have suffered
grievous disappointment. For it is a great misapprehension to suppose
that the Russian ballet as it has been seen in Paris and London is
typical of the official ballet at St Petersburg and Moscow. When the
Diaghilew company first appeared at the Theatre du Châtelet, the
republican convictions of Paris received a shock. Could any good thing
come out of Tsardom? Had autocracy succeeded where the alliance of
liberty, fraternity and equality had failed? Was it then true that
venerable tradition, assisted by a bureaucratic regime, was a kinder
nursing mother to the arts than the revolutionary spirit? Little by
little the truth leaked out. The Russian ballet, which had been welcomed
as the most modern manifestation of theatrical art, was not traditional
but revolutionary. It was not the child of the official art of St
Petersburg but the outcast. Its leaders were dangerous innovators whom
the intransigent conservatives had expelled as hastily as if they had
been political agitators. Paris was reassured.
The truth is that the excellence of the Imperial School of Ballet of
which I have spoken is an excellence of method and technique rather than
of spirit and conception. In ideals the Imperial Ballet has not
travelled far from those of Milan in the earlier part of the nineteenth
century. It has elaborated and refined, but it has not greatly widened
them. The visitor at the St Petersburg Opera House would discover that
the unmeaning and unbeautiful acrobatics of an earlier day have not yet
altogether disappeared. He would find that the ballet in _Aida_, for
example, does not differ in many material points, excepting always the
accomplishment of the performers, from what he has been accustomed to
see in Milan or Vienna. It was in Russia that the spirit of criticism
gave rise to new ideas, but the exponents of these new ideas came into
sharp collision with the authorities at the Imperial theatres of St
Petersburg and Moscow.
The spectacles which have been seen in London and Paris--some of which
have never been produced in Russia--are the production of a group of
daring and subversive artists, whom M. Serge de Diaghilew, the organiser
of the ballets, has gathered round him--notably M. Fokine, the
choregraphic director, MM. Leon Bakst and Benois, the designers of the
scenery and costume, M. Tcherepnin, the musical composer and conductor,
and of course M. Nijinsky and Mme Karsavina. M. Fokine, it is true, is
the assistant ballet-master at the St Petersburg Opera, but he is said
to be in command there only at the rarest intervals. M. Bakst has not
worked for the Imperial theatres, and M. Tcherepnin comes, not from the
St Petersburg Opera, but from the Conservatorium, where he is in charge
of the orchestral class. They are able, of course, to avail themselves
of the marvellous technical powers of the dancers who have joined them,
practically all of whom were trained at the Imperial School of Ballet;
but few of these are now regular members of the corps, and Nijinsky, the
greatest genius of them all, recently received his formal discharge at
the hands of the St Petersburg authorities. Long tradition, careful
science and State patronage helped to make of the Imperial Ballet an
elaborate, smoothly-working and faultless piece of theatrical mechanism;
it only wanted the breath of genius to give it artistic life.
What then are the essential characteristics which differentiate the
“revolutionary” Russian ballet from the traditional ballet as
[Illustration: TROUHANOWA
IN AN ORIENTAL BALLET
_Photograph: Gersche_]
it has hitherto been known both in Russia and elsewhere? The essential
difference is to be found, not in technique, but in idea. The ballet has
been brought into relation with life. Dancing, which had its origin in
the most elemental emotions, gradually strayed further and further from
its source, until in the ballet it lost its last remnant of vital
significance. The ballet was relegated to a kind of barren limbo of the
imagination; it was the _mise en scène_ of the fairy tale; none of the
echoes of the real world ever disturbed its enchanted silence; no
excitement, no passion, no humour, was permitted to relax the fixity of
its unmeaning smile. It was supposed to be structurally incapable of
supporting anything more weighty than merely gossamer fancies, eternal
variations upon the themes of coquetry--invitation and refusal, pursuit
and evasion. Such inconsequential argument as there was served only to
introduce a series of independent dances which were quite unrelated to
any central inward idea. The ballet’s complete sterility of idea was
acquiesced in as a necessary condition of its existence. It was an
artificial and somewhat withered paradise from which the river of life
was carefully diverted. The work of the revolutionaries was to open the
sluice-gates and let in the fertilising flood of vital emotion. The
ineffectual rhythms of the dance were suddenly caught up into the
masterful rhythms of life itself. What is revolutionary in the new
ballet is the power to rouse and trouble the imagination. The innovators
have extended the range of the ballet, a range as wide as that of the
drama--one is tempted to say wider, for not only does it express a
minute grace as choice as the grouping of the petals of a rose, but at
times its huge leaping rhythms throb with an unconstrained and elemental
violence, all too shattering for the formal mould of speech.
If the aim of the new movement is the strict subjection of the ballet to
an artistic idea which shall express a high emotional impulse, the means
by which it is attained is no less novel and characteristic. The ballet
is a composite form of art, at once plastic, decorative and musical. Its
success therefore depends upon an intimate collaboration between its
composers, the choregraphic designer, the painter and the musician. An
obviously necessary condition?--yes, but one which until the advent of
the revolutionary ballet had been considerably neglected. Its neglect
had resulted in the production of a mosaic of more or less artistic
effects, jarring and warring among themselves. Too often the dance did
not concur with the action. The steps were considered not as a means of
expression, a language, but only as a brilliant exercise, without more
signification than an acrobatic performance. Occasionally, as in the
production of Tchaikovsky’s _Sleeping Beauty_, the musician and the
ballet-master worked in accord, but more often independently. The
scene-painter produced a finished and usually photographic picture
without any thought of the placing of the performers in the scene. The
costumier, again, was accorded his own sweet will, and added his private
inharmonious notes to the general discord. The new composers worked on
the principle that there was not one design of the dance, another of the
music and a third of the _décor_, but one design, one rhythm, one
dominating impulse of the whole. In their ballets, the lines, the
colours and the movements together interpret the spirit and the action,
mutually reinforcing one another and producing a cumulative effect of
strength and beauty, which at once grips and delights us.
If one of the collaborators of the revolutionary ballet has impressed
upon it his personality more strongly than another it is M. Leon Bakst.
He belongs to the new romantic school of painting, though he himself
prefers to call it the new classical school, which is in full revolt
against the illusion that the realists have set up as the final aim of
art. He is a member of the Salon d’Automme, a pioneer and leader of the
art movement which seeks to apply the principles of “post-Impressionism”
to the decoration of the stage. The importance, not to say the
pre-eminence, of the place which he claims in the theatre for the
decorator, is best stated in his own words. “I believe,” he says, “the
time for the conventional producer to arrange the sunshine and shadow of
the ‘scene’ has passed for ever. The peculiar form of ‘mental’
intelligence which has dominated the theatre for so many years is about
to be replaced by the plastic intelligence, and the tone of the ensemble
will be determined by the painter. The evolution of the
[Illustration: DANSE ORIENTALE
AFTER A DESIGN BY LÉON BAKST]
theatre is towards a plastic ideal, and the action of a piece, sometimes
full of invention, is weak and ineffective if it has not been conceived
according to an artistic vision; just as an exaggerated ‘literary’
picture repels a true connoisseur. So give place to the painter in the
theatre--and a leading place. It is the painter who should now (taking
the place of the erudite director) create everything, know everything,
foresee everything and organise everything. It is the painter who must
be master of the situation, understand its finesse and decide the style
of the piece. To his plastic judgment and taste must be subordinated the
thousand details which compass the imposing ensemble of a fine work of
the theatre.”
How thoroughly M. Bakst’s personality enters into the least details of
the scene is evident in the two ballets which he has staged most
brilliantly--_Cléopâtre_ and _Scheherazade_. He introduces the
“leitmotiv” into the scene and uses it as effectively as the musician.
Rimsky-Korsakov’s overture in _Scheherazade_ does not more vividly
suggest the sultry, sensual, Oriental atmosphere with its lurking
brutalities than do the voluptuous lines and sinister colours of the
artist. The feeling is continued in the costumes, which are not only
fitly adjusted to the languorous movements of the dancers but also serve
to carry out the colour-scheme of the scene. Each dress is a note of
colour, chosen as carefully as an artist forms his tone upon the
palette, and placed in its proper relation to the whole.
But the keynote of M. Bakst’s art is simplicity and severity. “The
painter of the future demands a severe style,” he says, “because the
excess of detail has become intolerable to him.” Realism he abhors no
less than pedantry of detail. He seeks to suggest the mood and not to
photograph the event. His most gorgeous effects are obtained by an
economy of material, which in comparison with one of the modern
successful, over-propertied Shakespearian productions might seem
positively parsimonious. And what he can achieve when he limits himself
to the minimum of material may be seen in _Le Carnaval_, in which the
two roguish sofas are probably the most eloquent and expressive
properties ever placed upon the stage. Simplicity, suggestion,
style--these are the qualities of M. Bakst’s work in the theatre, and,
above all, that all-embracing rhythm which, uniting with the rhythm of
the music and the dance, helps to create one unity of colour, sound and
movement.
Perhaps this is not the place to speak of the wide-reaching effect of
the revolutionary ballet upon the general world of art. The colour and
design of Leon Bakst’s scenes, the provocative gestures of Nijinsky’s
dancing, the strange and startling patterns of the dancers, have
suggested to artists a new source of inspiration, which in Paris at all
events has already not been without its influence on their work. The
ballet is in the van of the artistic movement of the day, and the dance,
through the ballet, has attained a position which it has never held
since the days of ancient Greece--being once more received into its
proper and inseverable fellowship with music and the plastic arts.
CHAPTER X
THE REPERTORY OF THE RUSSIAN BALLET
The Russian ballets are based upon an endless variety of themes, but the
dancing may be said to draw its inspiration from three sources. First
and foremost, of course, is the traditional method of the old Italian
masters. This is the mother tongue of the ballet, which is spoken from
Copenhagen to Moscow, with only the least perceptible trace of local
accent. But this common language the Russians have refined to a purity
unknown elsewhere; from being the vehicle of the stiff rhetoric of the
conventional ballet, they have transformed it into a flexible speech, in
which they have been able to utter such gem-like poems as _Le Spectre de
la Rose_, _Le Carnaval_ and _Les Sylphides_. Next, they have gone for
inspiration to their own national dances. They have refreshed the stage
with the bracing air of the steppes. In the Polovtsian dances of _Prince
Igor_ they have given to an art that was nurtured in courts and has
always moved with courtly grace, the tigerish motions of a full-blooded
barbaric life. Finally they have enlarged the scope of the ballet by
making use of the classical and Oriental dance. And for the sources of
the classical dance they have gone not only to Greece but to Egypt. The
theme of _Cléopâtre_ is really the Egyptian attitude, just as the theme
of _Scheherazade_ is the Eastern attitude.
The Diaghilew ballet has an extensive repertory, wide enough to display
to the full the genius of the composers and the talents of the dancers.
Naturally, during the six seasons in which it has appeared in Paris, its
large variety has been better exhibited there than in London. The
principal pieces which have been given at Covent Garden are _Le Pavillon
d’Armide_, _Le Carnaval_, _Prince Igor_, _Les Sylphides_, _Le Spectre
de la Rose_, _Cléopâtre_, _Scheherazade_.
_Le Pavillon d’Armide_ is a link with the old conventional ballet. The
fable is full of unreason. The pavilion is a spacious apartment in an
old French château, deriving its name from the personage who forms the
subject of a piece of Gobelin tapestry on the wall. To this castle comes
one night a storm-belated traveller. He is hospitably entertained by the
wicked marquis, the owner of the castle, who is an amateur magician of
considerable attainments. After admiring the pictured figure of Armide,
he falls asleep. As he sleeps the figures on the tapestry come to life,
and he is transported in dream to the Court of Armide, where her captive
knights dance in a chain of roses. He conceives a grand passion for the
princess, and the king, whom he does not recognise to be the wizard
marquis, blesses their union. The magic Court vanishes and the traveller
wakes to find himself still in the bare, dawn-lit chamber. When the
marquis enters to ask how he has slept he recognises with horror that he
is none other than the king in the dream. And yet it was not wholly a
dream, for at the same time he finds the actual golden scarf which
Armide had given to him in plighting her troth. He knows himself to have
been the victim of a fatal enchantment, and thereupon somewhat
irrelevantly dies.
M. Fokine has made of this irrational fable the framework of a number of
dances which display the perfect unity and discipline of the dancers.
But Nijinsky, as the servant of the traveller, and Karsavina, as Armide,
are scarcely given adequate scope for their originality and faculty of
interpretation. The thing is good of its kind--it is the perfection of
the traditional _ballet d’action_--but it has been done before. The most
satisfying feature of the performance is a dance of seven buffoons, of
whom the premier buffoon is M. Rosai. Incidentally they execute several
steps which technically are among the most difficult in the dancer’s
repertory. But the chief merit of their display is its grotesque wit,
the mimicry of the half-human antics of marionettes, executed with a
faultless rhythmical precision.
The decoration was devised by M. Benois and, at all events
[Illustration: WASLAW NIJINSKY
IN _Le Pavillon d’Armide_
_Photograph: Gerschel_]
as it was presented at Covent Garden, it cannot be said to have been
really successful. The pavilion had no other hint of a fatal spell than
that which the lowered lights could suggest; the Court of Armide, who
was surely twin-sister to “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” might have been
made to evoke some vision akin to that which Keats saw of “pale kings
and princes too, pale warriors, death-pale were they all.” But, perhaps
largely owing to the faulty lighting, it was a rather garish spectacle,
a noisy conflict of pure reds, greens and blues. Only for a moment did
the scene really live,--when the mists began to wash round the
battlements, the colours fused together in a trembling twilight, the
tumult of the action died away and the motionless figures gazed after
the victim traveller led away by his fatal lover.
But doubtless the composers of the ballet do not claim for it any
special seriousness of intention. We are to take it or leave it as a
simple _ballet d’action_ of the conventional school, no more than a
groundwork for some very brilliant and elaborate dancing. It is only a
failure when judged by canons which we should not think of applying to
any ballet but that of M. Diaghilew.
The theme of _Le Carnaval_ may be regarded as even more flippant, but it
expresses a series of purely musical ideas, and moreover it shows how
the ballet can be made as witty as dialogue. It is an adaptation by M.
Fokine of Schumann’s well-known pianoforte solo. Hardly a note has been
added to Schumann’s music or taken away from it by the four composers
who have skilfully provided the instrumentation--Rimsky-Korsakov,
Liadov, Glazounov and Tcherepnin. Not only has Schumann’s work lost
nothing of its original savour, but rather it has gained in expression
and brilliance. In this fantasy, beloved of pianists, Schumann sought to
represent various personages whom the ballet presents to us in material
form. The composer’s explanation of the work was given to Moscheles, to
whom he wrote: “The _Carnaval_ was written mostly for different
occasions, and, excepting three or four of the pieces, is all founded on
the notes A. S. (A flat), C. H (B natural), which form the name of a
little town in Bohemia where I had a musical friend, and which,
curiously enough, are also the only musical letters in my name. I wrote
the titles later.... As a whole, the work has absolutely no artistic
merit; but individually the various states of feeling seem to me
interesting.” The pieces are written round a number of imagined
characters--Arlequin, Columbine, Estrella, Chiarina, Pierrot, Pantalon,
Papillon, Florestan, Eusebius. The Chiarina was supposed to be Madame
Schumann, the Estrella, as Schumann told Moscheles, “a name such as one
writes under portraits to impress the picture on the mind,” and in
Florestan and Eusebius he represented himself.
M. Fokine has been wiser than to impose upon these irresponsible
creatures of the musician’s fancy the burden of a formal plot. They
merely flit across the stage in a succession of amorous episodes which
take place during a masked fête--Pierrot deceived and suffering,
Pantalon duped, Eusebius romantic, Florestan impetuous, Chiarina
sentimental and Estrella turbulent.
M. Bakst, the decorator, has completed the ballet by making it an
exquisitely delicate artistic whole. The tinsel glitter and vast
expenditure of means upon which the conventional ballet is usually built
up has been utterly discarded. In its place is a simplicity verging on
bareness, an economy of material in which every tone and line has an
individual value, and bespeaks the guidance of a single directing mind.
The curtain rises upon an almost empty scene, the ante-chamber of a
ball-room. The backcloth is a broad band of purplish blue uplifting a
deep frieze of red tulips. The furniture of the scene consists solely of
two droll tiny striped sofas, crouching against the black and gold dado,
which instantly put us on the tiptoe of expectation and give the keynote
of airy mockery that characterises the piece. Suddenly the tall curtains
of this fastidious ante-chamber are parted and Chiarina and Estrella,
followed by their distraught lovers, scamper in and out again. Gradually
the room fills with crinolined figures, flashing amorous glances through
the slits of their silk masks, and comical gentlemen whose quaintly cut
green and golden brown jackets seem to travesty their woeful passions.
The gaiety of the music dances through the shifting lights and softly
flowing lines. And through this happy and heartless crowd moves the
tragic
[Illustration: LEONTIEV AND LEPOUKHAVA
IN _Le Carnaval_
_Photograph: Bert, Paris_]
figure of Pierrot, whose unrequited love his fellows make a mock of. His
costume and attitude are a masterpiece of design. His sleeves, a world
too long, droop far below his finger-tips, forming a scheme of painful
angles which most poignantly express his grotesque and lamentable
passion.
Of course this foolish, fluttering world of philanderers we never for an
instant really believe in. They are the graceful, graceless figures of a
Conder fan come to life. They are as hollow as the porcelain amorists
our grandmothers were wont to put upon their chimney-pieces. We laugh at
their impatient ardours as well as at their harrowing griefs. Even
Pierrot we refuse to take seriously. He himself does not expect it--else
he would not pretend that Chiarina were a butterfly and attempt to catch
her beneath his conical white hat, and then, lifting it cautiously
half-an-inch from the ground, make a gesture of farcical despair at
finding her escaped. The whole ballet has the effect of transporting us
into an unreal world--not a fantastic and fairy world, but a
half-familiar world, a Lilliputian world, in which all the serious
traffic of our hearts is mocked and parodied. We laugh because we do not
recognise the likeness of these parabolic puppets to ourselves, for if
we did we should surely weep. If its intention were a shade more serious
the ballet would become a sermon, with _Vanitas vanitatum_ for its text;
it carefully stops short, however, at that indefinite border-line where
trifling passes into satire, but not before it has shown us that the
ballet can be made the vehicle of ironic laughter.
If _Le Carnaval_ is gently satiric, _Prince Igor_, in its suggestion of
historic catastrophe, is epic. The _Danses Polovtsiennes_, of which the
ballet chiefly consists, are taken from an opera by Borodin--“a rather
tedious opera,” it has been called--founded upon a Russian ballad of
doubtful authenticity. It is a case in which the dance is not merely an
interlude in the opera, but the very life and soul of it. The story is
of no interest; it is effaced by the terrible intensity of the barbaric
dancing. The scene takes us to the Russian steppes. The design is by
Roehrich--a Tartar camp standing out against a landscape that is
sinister with a wrathful, blood-dark glow. “How excellently every means
that the theatre offers has been made use of to produce the desired
effect!” writes a discriminating critic in an admirable analysis of the
qualities that make so resistless an appeal to the imagination; “the
menace of the coming cloud of barbarians that is to lie for centuries on
the desolate face of Russia--not the loud blustering of a Tamburlaine
the Great, but the awful quiet vigour, half melancholy, half playful, of
a tribe that is itself but a little unit in the swarm; the infinite
horizons of the steppe, with the line of the burial tumuli stretching
away to endless times and places, down the centuries, into Siberia; the
long-drawn, resigned, ego-less music (Borodin drew his themes from real
Tartar-Mongol sources); the women that crouch unconscious of themselves,
or rise and stretch lazy limbs, and in the end fling themselves
carelessly prone when their dance is over; the savage-joyful
panther-leaping of the men; the stamping feet and quick nerve-racking
beat of the drum; and, more threatening than all, the gambolling of the
boys, like kittens unwittingly preparing themselves for the future
chase.”
The scene is a symbol of that peril of the barbarians which has always
lain on the remote frontiers of civilisations. The tremendous rhythm
with which the warriors come bounding down the stage communicates a
sense of exhilaration not altogether unmixed with terror. The dance
quickens to the frenzy of delirium. Its triumphant motions seem to throb
with all those volcanic forces which one knows to be slumbering always
in the heart of man: all the eternal unrest of his blood, all his sheer
delight in life and strife, all that central fire which kindles from age
to age the conflagrations of war and revolution. It is probably the most
exciting presentment of barbaric frenzy the stage has ever seen.
Considered as an artistic achievement it is astounding. For it must be
remembered that this effect of surging tumult is only obtained by the
most rigid discipline, by unanimity and a perfectly calculated precision
of rhythm.
From epic the composers of the ballet turn to lyricism in _Le Spectre de
la Rose_. The music is Weber’s “Invitation à la Valse” as scored by
Berlioz; the pantomimic text is suggested by a poem
[Illustration: KARSAVINA AND NIJINSKY
IN _Le Spectre de la Rose_
_Photograph: Bert, Paris_]
of Théophile Gautier. It is the story of a young girl who falls asleep
in her chair, worn out with the fatigue and excitement of the ball. In
her dream the rose which she holds in her hand becomes a genie, who
dances with her, kisses her and disappears at break of day.
Here again Leon Bakst has created a scene of grave yet tender
simplicity, with the fine, strict lines of a Beardsley drawing. The
girl’s bedroom is a scheme of white and blue; on one side an alcove with
a bed, on the other a plain white dressing-table. The windows open upon
a garden. Moonlight falls upon the floor. It is all very intimate,
reposeful and virginal. The girl wears a simple white frock, the spirit
of the rose a fantastic costume of crimson and purple petals.
The _pas de deux_ is executed by Nijinsky and Karsavina. Nothing could
be more graciously conceived than Mme Karsavina’s representation of the
girl dancing in her dream. With half-closed eyes she rises slowly from
her chair and sways across the room in a kind of swoon, following the
gentle guidance of the flower-spirit. Then as her dream becomes more
vivid she recovers a little strength and dances of her own motion, but
always with a suggestion of unconsciousness, as though less to the music
of the orchestra than to some dimly remembered melody of the brain. As
in the manner of episodes in a dream, she darts into swift movements,
which pass again into languor. For an instant the kiss awakens her, she
looks round upon the familiar aspect of her room, then the tired head
sinks again upon her breast. It is a very gentle rendering of the mood
of recollection and happy, unperturbed trance.
In this dream-ballet Nijinsky is a being of amazing agility and grace.
He is as light upon the air as a rose petal. He contrives to bring into
his dancing something of the gentleness of the moonlit night and the
fragrance of the dawn. He shows himself as capable of delicate and
almost womanly motion as he is of masculine vivacity and vigour. And
when he floats out through the open window back to his rose-garden, he
almost persuades one for the moment that he has discovered the secret of
human flight.
In _Les Sylphides_ the producers have been daring enough to forget to
be modern. They have rehabilitated a form of ballet for which a few
years ago one would have said there could be no resurrection. The piece
has no action, no colour, no idea, almost no sentiment--it is
choregraphy pure and simple, as abstract as mathematics. It is described
vaguely as a romantic reverie. The romantic note is sounded by the dim
backcloth of ruins and moonlight by M. Benois. The score of dancers wear
the traditional costume, pure white, the skirt rather long, as Taglioni
might have worn it.
The piece, however, has no connection with the ballet of a similar name
in which Taglioni made her great success. It is an adaptation of various
compositions of Chopin, which have been orchestrated by Glazounov and
other composers. The orchestral version is less faithful to the original
than that of Schumann’s _Carnaval_, but the additions are all in the
spirit of the whole. Nijinsky and Karsavina each danced a mazurka, and
together in the Valse in C sharp minor they executed a _pas de deux_
that was a perfectly finished artistic achievement. For the finale there
was the Valse brillante in E flat, in which the grouping of the dancers
displayed the skill of M. Fokine at its highest.
_Les Sylphides_ is somewhat in the nature of a challenge, and it must be
admitted that it is a successful challenge. In it the producers claim
that the purely musical and choregraphic interests are sufficient. Of
its kind it is no less than perfect. It is from beginning to end a
rhythmic flow of flawless gestures, which make a rounded whole of a
chaste and immaculate quality like that of the finest sculpture. More
remarkable than the steps is the purity of the lines of the arms,
interweaving like the overarching branches of a forest glade or the
groining of the aisle of a Gothic cathedral. Yet was there not perhaps a
moment when the disconcerting thought intruded itself: Supposing the
ballet were always to move in this atmosphere of perfect calm? Without a
doubt _Les Sylphides_ gained some of its charm from its place in
sequence of the ballets. As an interlude among pieces of more violent
action, it had the repose of a statue in the midst of canvases hot with
colour and tumultuous with movement.
[Illustration: LES SYLPHIDES
_Photograph: Bert, Paris._]
If it is in such pieces as _Les Sylphides_, _Le Carnaval_ and _Le
Spectre de la Rose_ that the composers of the ballets with their
coadjutant mimes most deftly lay the privy net for beauty, they ensnare
her, more brutally perhaps, but none the less surely in the Oriental
pageants with their closely knit web of line and tone and rhythm. For
these many-faceted compositions, ballet is perhaps an incomplete
expression, and we should substitute the term, “mimodrama.” Dancing
plays a more subordinate part in them than in the ballet proper. It
falls into a natural relation to the ensemble, and yet the dance, in the
exotic world here represented to us, is the apt, indeed the only
conceivable gesture.
_Cléopâtre_ is a name of ominous import and prepares us for voluptuous
and sombre passion. We are transported to a temple on the banks of the
Nile. This scene is the supreme achievement of M. Bakst’s art. It
represents an immense stone forecourt which might be none other than the
great Hall of Columns built by the father of Rameses the Great. But the
artist is contemptuous of pedantic archæological detail--he seeks only
to impress, one might rather say to stun, the senses by a vision of
grandiose and sinister masonry. This effect is obtained by simple lines
and vast proportions. The towering walls, the procession of squat,
colossal columns, the gigantic intimidating statues on either flank,
fill the scene with a sense of awe and a premonition of disaster. It is
noteworthy that M. Bakst himself has said that the painters of the
future will take for their subjects man and stone. In this scene he has
given to the dumb and eternal stone a voice of tragedy. He has made of
these sexless caryatides a kind of chorus, the immortal and ironic
spectators of the comedy of human life.
Broken by the compacted row of columns, we see the flowing waters of the
Nile, violet and emerald--fit stream to bear the burnished barge of
Cleopatra with its poop of beaten gold and perfumed purple sails.
Perhaps it is this visiting river that gives the note of expectancy
which is so often present in M. Bakst’s scenes. Satisfying the scene is
in itself, but the eternal stone awaits its fugitive inhabitant--man.
With all reverence, preceded by maidens strewing rose-leaves, the negro
slaves bear in the regal litter. Egypt’s queen is lifted as carefully
as a jewel out of its casket and stands immobile as an image while her
servants divest her of her silken wrappings. Then, with an attitude of
languor unutterable, weary with the deceitful satiety of her desires,
supported by her abject crouching slaves, she passes to her couch.
The part of Cleopatra was played in Paris by Ida Rubinstein, at Covent
Garden by Seraphima Astafieva. The rôle is one not for a dancer, but for
a mime, pure and simple. These artists in their studied and astonishing
gestures appear to have created a new art of pantomime. Ida
Rubinstein--and perhaps the same may be said of Astafieva--has trained
the body to a silent speech outvying in subtlety the subtlest of spoken
words. The least of her gestures takes an importance so grave and so
surprising that it becomes henceforth impossible to dissociate it from
the personage whom she evokes. Her hieratic attitudes, with their
meticulous and adorable gaucherie, their touching faults of perspective,
derive from the Egyptian bas-relief and the Italian primitives. The
unexpected lines of the slowly moving limbs are instinct with the very
genius of _plastique_.
Little wonder that the noble Amoun leaves his love, to whom he has
plighted his troth but a moment before, and is drawn by the fatal
magnetism of this odalisque of a woman. At his audacity the listless
queen leaps into a momentary tigerish passion; and then, moved by the
young man’s beauty and willing to amuse her tedium with a new
excitement, she promises him the fulfilment of his dreams at the price
of his life. As the infatuated youth fondles her upon her couch, the
court fills with the retinue of slaves and begins to throb with the
luminous coils of their dance.
The lines of the dance repeat the all-embracing lines of the
architecture. The attitudes of the dancers are freely modelled upon the
poses of the figures depicted on the ancient Egyptian monuments. When M.
Bakst sets his figures in motion, he is mindful of their relation to the
_décor_. They are not set against the scene as against a background, but
become actually a part of it. He constructs his picture so that the
actors shall be the complement of the design and of the colour-scheme.
His method has been thus
[Illustration: SERAPHIMA ASTAFIEVA
AS _Cleopatra_
_Photograph: Dover Street Studios, Ltd._]
described: “He places a number of pure, fresh colours on the stage. The
colours are first placed in order of their relationship to each other,
and thereafter arranged according to a complete gradation of tints. Thus
he selects, say, six colours--red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet.
From these he evolves six rows of colours, starting with each colour at
full pitch, and gradating it till he reaches the lowest, subtlest, and
most Whistler-like key. Then he sets all these reds and yellows and
blues and greens revolving. The effect is indescribable. The whole scene
begins to pulsate. The walls and the floor clothe themselves with
designs of perfectly designed rhythmical lines. Masses move in all
directions according to a law of ordered disorder. The air becomes dense
with a quivering sheen of colour so violently contrasted, yet so
harmonious.”
But the distinguishing characteristic of _Cléopâtre_ is the
subordination of the dancing to the _décor_. In spite of the intensity
of the frenzy of madly whirling limbs, the spectator is never allowed to
forget the grim stone witnesses of the human tumult. With something
malevolent in the gaze of their obliquely set eyes, the erect, abiding
figures glance down upon the momentary riot. The men of stone are
mightier than the men of flesh. Suddenly, when passion is storming
through the veins, we are reminded of the triviality and transience of
everything human. Here again is that ironic note which in so many of the
Russian ballets forms a menacing undertone to their music.
A hush falls upon the dancers. The night of love is over and Cleopatra
is about to take toll of her lover. With an incredibly cruel gesture she
passes, or rather insinuates, the cup brimmed with poisons. The youth
drinks. Cleopatra, with greedy, curious eyes, watches him stagger and
writhe in his death-agony. Then this newest sensation of excitement
fails her, her unutterable languor repossesses her, and, leaning upon
her bending slaves, she passes slowly beneath the towering portal, along
the terrace by the river, and her retinue dumbly follow her.
Then the artist speaks his last unerring word. The priest covers the
prostrate body with a black pall. The voided forecourt resumes its
immensity of space. A warm flush clothes the broad surfaces of the
columns; brightness lies on the river; and the single stain of black
sets the seal of tragedy upon the empty scene.
_Scheherazade_ is an illuminated page torn from the book of “The
Thousand and One Nights.” The music, the scenery, the dances, the
costumes, the appointments, all the circumstances of the ballet are
designed to create a heavy perfumed atmosphere of Eastern
voluptuousness. The severity and simplicity of the Egyptian temple is
exchanged for the semi-barbaric sumptuousness of the harem of an Arabian
palace. A massive curtained canopy of an impure green stained with
purple hangs in billowy folds over the scene; massy silvern lamps depend
from a ceiling splendid with arabesques and floral designs; a latticed
window gives upon a garden of tainted verdure; the floor is inlaid with
blood-coloured porphyry. The sensuous lines of M. Bakst’s _décor_ are
echoed in the throbbing waves of Rimsky-Korsakov’s music. Here again is
the complete sympathy between musician and decorator, which fuses these
ballets into an organic whole. In spite of the wealth of the
accessories, there is not an irrelevant line or tone; there is economy
and constraint even in the splendour, so that the spectator receives an
impression of singleness and unity like that of Greek drama.
At the very commencement the keynote is given in the dance of three
odalisques, in which languor intertwines with the energy of desire. As
the ballet proceeds the gust of passion blows more strongly, and the
riot begins after the departure of the two sultans, when the Grand
Eunuch unlocks first a bronze door, through which enter negroes clothed
in copper-coloured costumes, and then a silver door, which gives entry
to another band of negroes attired in silver. Zobeide, the favourite
faithless wife of the sultan Schahriar, still remains without her
consort. She crouches half fearfully against a curtain, which at last is
pulled aside and her lover, a gorgeous negro in a golden dress, leaps
upon her with one tremendous panther-like bound. Undoubtedly the climax
of the ballet is reached in the ecstatic dances of Nijinsky as the
slate-coloured negro. He has learnt a whole new grammar of grotesque,
savage gestures. Part monkey, part tiger, part human, he fawns, he
caresses, he grimaces, he passes from delirium to devotion, from awe to
lust, his body elemental fire, motion, passion. At times his swiftness
renders him momentarily almost invisible; at times he becomes a living
boomerang, and after a marvellous circuit in space returns unerringly to
his point of departure; one moment he is an arrow shot through the air,
the next a crouching, servile beast worshipping the feet of his
mistress. And in the mad final orgy he is the vortex of the swirling
throng, the happy, leaping heart which shoots its ecstasy to the
outermost limits of the coiling maze of lovers.
With a sound of dismay the music signals the return of the betrayed
sultans. The harem becomes a slaughter-house. A flashing scimitar cuts
down the golden negro. Zobeide drives the dagger into her breast and
falls grasping the feet of her outraged lord.
A discerning critic has pointed out that perhaps the terrifying
suggestiveness of _Scheherazade_ lies not so much in the catastrophe of
the plot as in the dreadful significance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s music.
“Passages that may have meant no more, as pure music, than the secrecy
of the East and the plaintive mysteriousness of women (like that
often-repeated passage on the first violin) get a new colour of tragic
passion, of yearning in the shadow of death, from their allotment in the
dramatic scheme. There is the sound of fate and murder, mingled with the
saddest ironical comedy, in the insistent blast of the hunting horns.
The swift huddling of deceitful wives, the tripping and scurrying, the
wheedling of the old eunuch, the ravenous mien of the negroes, the
magnificent stride and gesture of the fruit-bearing attendants, the
complicated frenzy of the dance, the drama of fear and despair in
Karsavina’s proud rendering, leave a solemn impression beyond anything
in those other fantastic ballets. How much depends upon the music it is
hard to gauge--much more than one is disposed to admit at first; for the
mind pouring stagewards through the eyes, receives the musical
impressions half unconsciously, as a direct emotional influence,
scarcely registered in the sensuous ear.”
Of the other ballets which complete the repertory of the Diaghilew
company, and which have not yet been seen in London--of _Petrouchka_, a
Russian burlesque taken from an old folk-story, Harlequin in love with
the clown’s wife; of _Sadko_, a strange submarine drama; of _Narcisse_,
an idyll which seeks to recapture the sylvan mood of ancient Greece--I
will not attempt to give any description. Enough has been said to show
that the revolutionary composers, with the co-operation of Nijinsky,
Karsavina and a _corps de ballet_, every member of which is a tried
artist, have given a new significance to the ballet, have indeed given a
new art-form to the stage.
CHAPTER XI
THE RUSSIAN DANCERS
Could the Diaghilew ballet exist without Waslaw Nijinsky--this
marvellous youth who is already a supreme master of the technique of
dancing, who cannot make a gesture that has not a graceful or a witty
significance, who has confounded Newton and demonstrated that the law of
gravity is a figment of the scientists?
Nijinsky has danced ever since he was an infant. Both his mother and
father were in the ballet at the Imperial theatre in Warsaw, where he
sometimes danced with them. His first appearance was as a little Chinese
with a pigtail, when he was yet only six years old. The serious study of
his art began in 1898, when he entered the Imperial Ballet School at St
Petersburg. He passed his final examinations in 1907, and danced at the
Imperial theatres for a year and a half before he visited other
countries. In 1909 he danced in the Russian Ballet at the Théâtre du
Châtelet at Paris, and in the following year at the Opera. Subsequently
he has appeared with the Diaghilew company in Berlin, Brussels, Rome,
Monte Carlo and London. At Paris he caught typhoid, and when he was
convalescent went to Venice, where he danced with Isadora Duncan. It is
the place he loves best of all. Already, at the age of only twenty-one,
he has received the enthusiastic applause of the most brilliant and
exacting audiences of Europe; critics have minutely discussed and
lavishly eulogised his dancing; artists have studied and reproduced his
gestures; he has been the darling of society in half-a-dozen
capitals--and yet the miracle is that he is untouched by conceit. He
remains a modest, ingenuous youth, tireless in application, teachable,
seeking continually to bring his art to a more precise perfection.
In February 1911 the world of the theatre was astounded to hear that
Nijinsky had been asked to withdraw from the Imperial Opera at St
Petersburg. Various ungrounded stories have been afloat as to the cause
of the rupture, but the truth is that it was merely an incident, perhaps
an inevitable one, in the antagonism between the traditional and
revolutionary schools of the ballet. For a moment the older school
triumphed, and Nijinsky left Russia to undertake the enterprise of the
conquest of Europe.
The pretext which the officials seized upon to rid themselves of the
young revolutionary was a detail of costume. Madame Kschesinskaya, the
fixed star in the Imperial firmament, wished Nijinsky to appear with her
in one of the ballets of the stereotyped Italian school. He, on the
other hand, preferred to take the part of Loys in _Giselle_, the ballet
by Gautier and d’Adam in which Grisi won her greatest triumph. He
carried the day, and the ballet was produced at considerable expense.
His costume, a _maillot_ of yellow silk, was designed by Benois. He had
some doubts as to whether it would be acceptable to the authorities, and
therefore obtained special permission from the “commandant general” of
the Imperial ballets to wear it. At the last moment one of the directors
objected to the costume, and ordered Nijinsky to change it. The dancer
expostulated, and as there was not sufficient time to replace it with
another, the director did not insist. The evening on which he appeared
for the first and last time in _Giselle_ at the St Petersburg Opera, the
Imperial box was full. The dancer was received by the whole house with
the greatest enthusiasm. The Dowager Empress and the Grand Dukes were
warm in their applause, and at the conclusion of the performance the
Empress told one of the directors that she had never seen its equal. The
next day, however, on the pretext that the _maillot_ was objectionable,
Nijinsky received notice that his services were no longer required. The
repentance of the management came speedily, but the dancer declined
their request that he should return. What influenced him probably not a
little in his determination to leave was the fact that,
[Illustration: WASLAW NIJINSKY
IN _Shehérazade_
_Photograph: Bert, Paris_]
for a dancer with his zest for work, his post at the Imperial Opera was
more or less of a sinecure. The ballet, which only performed about six
times a month, was too intermittent to give a proper scope for his
activity.
With a dead complexion, lank, dun-coloured hair, high cheekbones, long
and somewhat obliquely set eyes, Nijinsky has the racial characteristics
of the Slav. His expression is one of a serenity that is untroubled by
the glory of the present or the cares of the future. His eye is bright
and expressive. In repose his face has a certain dreamy preoccupation,
which at a word spoken or a sight that arrests his attention, passes
swiftly into an absorbing interest in the life of the moment. His is
clearly a highly-strung temperament--indeed he told me that what he
found most difficult in his art was the conquest of the nerves.
Nijinsky has the genius for taking pains. A movement, a gesture, which
upon the stage has often the appearance of a happy improvisation, is
invariably the result of careful study. How searching is his preparation
I only realised when I saw him one morning practising with Madame
Karsavina on the stage at Covent Garden. His instructor, M. Cecchetti, a
distinguished member of the Diaghilew company (he is the wicked marquis
in _Le Pavillon d’Armide_, the Grand Eunuch in _Scheherazade_), took him
through even the most elementary exercises with the severity of a drill
sergeant. For the young dancer, however, it was not a mechanical
routine, but a kind of play, into which he entered with a certain
smiling gaiety. If he found that he was executing a movement
imperfectly, he stopped short in the middle of it with a gesture of
half-amused vexation and repeated it over and over again until he had
made it faultless. The actual mastery of the technique appeared to him
to be in itself a delight, and not, as with many dancers, a painful
task-work. In his practice I found that the turns of his pirouettes and
the cuts of his entrechats were more numerous than in the actual
performance, for he never perverts the intention of the dance by
introducing into it acrobatic feats merely for the sake of dazzling the
spectator.
It is not altogether easy to analyse the qualities of Nijinsky’s
dancing in virtue of which he is rightly regarded as the finest
_danseur_ of the age. Perhaps his chief merit consists in that very
versatility which seems to conceal the pre-eminence of any single
feature. He never repeats himself. His personality appears to inhabit
not one but several bodies, or rather his personality itself is
multiple. Did not one know that it were the fact, would it be possible
to believe that the lustful negro of _Scheherazade_ was one with the
tender flower-spirit of _Le Spectre de la Rose_, or the impish and
irresponsible Arlequin of _Le Carnaval_ the same as the courteous and
adoring page of _Le Pavillon d’Armide_? He identifies himself in each
ballet with the spirit of the action and of the music.
Nijinsky makes us understand that a gesture is, as Blake said of a tear,
an intellectual thing. His gestures, by which I do not mean the
technical steps, are different in manner and in spirit from those of the
traditional Italian school. With the conventional gestures of the
academies, which mimic such attitudes as men are supposed naturally to
adopt when they perform certain actions or experience certain emotions,
he will have nothing to do. Nijinsky’s gestures mimic nothing. They are
not the result of a double translation of idea into words, and words
into dumb show. They are the mood itself. His limbs possess a faculty of
speech. Wit is expressed in his Arlequin dance as lucidly as in an
epigram. In _Le Spectre de la Rose_ he dances a sonnet of delighted
devotion. He makes credible the suggestion, intended satirically, that
La Rochefoucauld’s “Maximes” should be rendered choregraphically. His
genius consists in a singular pliancy of the body to the spirit.
His technique is characterised by extreme brilliance and agility. He is
weirdly grotesque or daintily graceful at will. Where he is perhaps
lacking is in gravity and statuesque pose. Nijinsky does not realise the
Pheidian ideal as perfectly as Mordkin, and therefore he can never be
his equal in creating that impression of the glorious virility of a
Greek statue, in whose firm lines a mighty strength lies sleeping. Nor
have I ever seen him adequately represent the fierceness of human
passion. Even in his _Scheherazade_ dances there is not so much a deep
exultation as a kind of schoolboy merriment. But these are the necessary
limitations of a youthful body and
[Illustration: TAMAR KARSAVINA
IN _Shehérazade_
_Photograph: Bert, Paris_]
a youthful spirit. Nor would we have it otherwise. We will leave the
rest to time. The years will deepen and dignify his art. If he is too
happy to enter into certain phases of the spirit we will gladly bear
with his shortcomings. We are content to take him as he is--the genial,
leaping, happy dionysiac fawn!
It is interesting to record here some of his impressions and his remarks
about himself.
“I love dancing to the music of Chopin,” he says, “you see we are
fellow-countrymen. I am not a Russian really; my parents were Poles, and
I am a Catholic and not Orthodox. I always imagine that it is only a
Pole who can really interpret Chopin; we understand the melancholy of
his music.”
With regard to the _milieu_ of his performance he has said: “One thing I
am determined not to do, and that is to go on the music-hall stage. I
have had several tempting offers; but after all what is money? I think
more of art than of money, and I refuse to be sandwiched between
performing dogs and acrobats.”
Before he appeared at Covent Garden he said, “I am frightened of London.
I like the town, it is so big and serious, but the thought of dancing at
Covent Garden makes me feel nervous.”
After he had danced there, however, he was not nervous of criticising
the Covent Garden audience. “They are not very demonstrative compared
with the Parisians, but they are faithful, they seem to come again and
again in great numbers. But they have a horrible habit--during the last
piece on the programme there is always a constant stream of people going
out. I think this is disgracefully ill-mannered, and I refuse now to
dance in the last piece on the programme. I refuse to dance to an
audience that is melting away--it is an insult to art. At Paris, all the
times I have danced there, not a single person has stirred at a single
performance until the curtain fell at the end. And here at London we end
quite early--at eleven o’clock. That gives people plenty of time to get
their suppers, doesn’t it? Fortunately the stage at Covent Garden is
conveniently big. It has one disadvantage--it does not slope at all. It
is quite flat, so that when I was dancing there at first I kept falling
forwards.”
Madame Karsavina, the _première danseuse_ of the Diaghilew company, is
in every way a fit colleague for the incomparable Nijinsky. Although
still quite young, she is fast making for herself a reputation that will
probably be second to none in the Russian ballet. Last year the
retirement of Mademoiselle Preobrajenskaya from regular work and the
withdrawal of Madame Pavlova left her an arduous task to fulfil in St
Petersburg. In order to fill the gaps that she alone was capable of
filling, she was obliged to study new parts which the retired dancers
had made peculiarly their own--an undertaking of considerable delicacy.
But her genius enabled her to draw even from the most exacting critics
that quiet smile of inward appreciation which she has acutely declared
to be the highest tribute to the artist. She is hard-working, very
ambitious, and takes her art very seriously in all its branches.
Of her performances at Covent Garden, all were marked by such rare
technique and instructed grace that it is difficult to put any one
before another; but certainly she never surpassed her achievement in _Le
Spectre de la Rose_. Her dancing caught the very spirit of a maiden’s
reverie, and nothing could have been more finely imagined than those
transitions from languor into quick rushes of darting movement, which
illustrate the abrupt and irrational episodes of a troubled dream. She
was the very embodiment of faint desire. We felt, as it were, a breath
of perfume, and were troubled in spite of ourselves. Moreover, the long
partnership between the two performers seemed to have resulted in a very
special and intimate harmony. For the most part they simply floated
about the stage as though borne upon a common current of emotion. There
was a marriage, not only between their bodily movements, but between
their spirits, such as I have never noted in the union of any other
dancers. In _Scheherazade_ Madame Karsavina proved herself to be the
possessor of a dramatic sense which the other ballets had not
sufficiently displayed. As the faithless Zobeide, she mimed with
astonishing subtlety an inward conflict of warring emotions, fear
mingling with desire, rapture giving place to despair. Her gestures were
charged with the same passionate significance as those of Ida Rubinstein
and Astafieva.
[Illustration: ANNA PAVLOVA
_Photograph: Dover Street Studios, Ltd._]
Both her miming and her dancing were characterised by a certain natural
softness of movement, the quality of languor rather than of passion,
which was nevertheless consistent with the greatest firmness of outline.
While in Paris, Madame Karsavina sketched a comparison of the French and
Russian ballets, which indicates her own conception of the art: “Our
school is the same. We derive equal inspiration from the great
traditions of the dance, bequeathed by Auguste Vestris and Jean-Georges
Noverre. Only the French ballet has rested in these traditions, without
troubling to renew them. The academic style of the French dancers is the
same as that of a century ago. After having carefully studied these
traditions and profited by them, we have sought something more. We have
wished to present faithful images of the life round about us. Our epoch
is finer, depend upon it, than any other. Human emotions have been
refined or transformed. The spectacles of former times no longer move us
very deeply. I have been to see _Coppelia_ at the Opera. It is good,
very good. But _Coppelia_ is quite démodé. Really it is possible to
imagine choregraphic arrangements more modern, more closely in touch
with life--this fine and various and over-brimming life of to-day.”
When Madame Anna Pavlova was leaving Russia, she parted with an old
general, who was saying good-bye to her, with the farewell wish, “May
all that is best be yours!” To this he replied, “How can the best be
ours when you are depriving us of the very best we had?” Not every
member of the Imperial ballet has yet visited Paris and London, and
therefore it is difficult for those who have never been to Russia to
speak in terms of comparison, but we are willing to believe in the
justice of the general’s appraisement.
Madame Pavlova received her training at the Imperial Ballet School at St
Petersburg. She speedily passed upwards through the various ranks of the
ballet, until she became _prima ballerina_ at the Marianski Theatre. She
made her début on the foreign stage at Munich, and subsequently appeared
in Berlin, Vienna, Paris, and New York. When she came to London in 1910
she immediately had the town at her feet. London was at a disadvantage,
however, compared with New York, for whereas in America she performed in
the ballet, at the Palace Theatre in London she appeared exclusively in
solo dances, or with her partner, Mikail Mordkin. The British amateur of
the dance, therefore, has seen but a part of her genius, for that pure
mimesis, in which she excels no less than in the actual dancing itself,
requires for its full scope the interaction of characters which belongs
to the ballet proper. She herself told me that she preferred playing in
the ballet to dancing alone, but it is difficult to believe that her
personality could find fuller expression than in the single dances in
which she has the whole stage to herself. Moreover, when in England she
was deprived of the splendid setting of the Russian _décor_, the
backcloth at the Palace Theatre being a rather distracting and futile
example of the British scene-painter’s art.
Anna Pavlova is not merely a great executive, but a creative artist. She
is more than a dancer, she is a lyric poet. One feels that she might
equally well have chosen any other of the media of art for the
expression of her emotion, but she has chosen her body--or perhaps
rather her body has chosen her. This beautiful instrument she has
refined to the most delicate sensibility and instructed in a perfect
precision. As a piece of mechanism--if indeed mechanism be not too harsh
a term for what in grace is wholly flower-like--it has been rendered as
supple, just and exquisitely responsive as infinite pains could make it.
It is perfectly equipped with swiftness, strength, delicacy. Only in the
very greatest dancers does the body become the utter slave of the
spirit, serving it with a scrupulous and joyful fidelity. But in
Pavlova’s dancing we are no longer aware of the conscious and painful
obedience of the body to the dictates of a governing mind. It is as
though the spirit itself had left its central citadel and, by some
unwonted alchemy becoming dissolved in the blood and fibres of her
being, had penetrated to the extremities of the limbs. Soul from body is
no longer distinguishable, and which is servant to the other none can
tell.
It goes without saying that her long and careful apprenticeship in the
art of dancing has given Madame Pavlova perfect
[Illustration: ANNA PAVLOVA
FROM A PAINTING BY J. LAVERY]
proficiency in that technique of the ballet which is variously known as
traditional, academic, or Italian. But although all dancing that is not
grounded upon this technique is apt to become to a certain extent
wavering and nerveless, it seems certain that this technique alone does
not suffice for a dancer who dances with soul as well as body. After she
had passed through her years of probation, Pavlova’s individuality
naturally began to assert itself, and she demanded a wider scope for the
full expression of her emotions. This liberty she found in those
gestures and poses, more naturally human than those of the conventional
ballet, which had been discovered, or rather rediscovered, by Isadora
Duncan, for they are native to the world of Greek art. The
characteristic of her dancing, therefore, is the combination of the
older traditional method with the freedom that is demanded for the
expression of emotional ideas. Other dancers have sought to find this
freedom by casting aside, or rather by never troubling to learn, the
traditional technique. Pavlova knows well that the freedom of art is not
to be attained by a wilful lawlessness, but only by a glad and strict
submission to law. Thus she has carried the dance of the ballet a stage
further along the lines of its natural evolution, not despising the
heritage of the past, but enlarging it to meet the deeper needs of the
present.
In particular, she has shown that true dancing demands the service of
every member and particle of the body. No one is now so simple as to
suppose that dancing is the business only, or even principally, of the
legs and feet. Carlo Blasis, a hundred years ago, said that the
position, the opposition, all the movements and carriage of the arms,
are perhaps the most difficult parts of the dance; and Noverre still
earlier remarked, “Peu d’artistes sont distingués par un beau style de
bras.” But the more subtly emotional the dance becomes, the more finely
must be studied the play of light and shade over the whole surface of
the body. Pavlova’s dancing is as expressive in its minutest details as
in its general lines. Her dance lives in her finger-tips. The
character-play of her hands is astonishing. They take their part in the
interpretation of the music; they are, as it were, illuminating
appendices to the story of love and joy, of rapture and fear, that her
body relates. Her face dances too. She has a command of vivid facial
expression such as few actresses can equal. Never for an instant does
she betray the least preoccupation with her steps. Her face is like a
mirror, reflecting the passing lights and shadows of the music and the
mood. The head dances, the eyes dance, the brow, the neck, the lips
dance--the dance, in a word, penetrates her whole being, as the breeze
penetrates the body of a tree to the least shuddering of the tiniest
leaf.
Indeed in Pavlova’s art is realised the full meaning of the dance, which
is none other than the complete possession of the body by the spirit. I
understood this best when I saw her, not in motion on the stage, but at
rest in her home. Reclining in a chair, she sketched with a few
inimitable gestures the _Danse des Papillons_. It was scarcely more than
a turn of the head, a light in the eyes, a fluttering of the fingers,
and yet the mood was evoked as surely as a painter in a few nervous
strokes might capture an emotion and fix it on his canvas. In this
almost intangible expression the dance seemed to become, if you will
suffer the paradox, independent even of motion, rather a design living
in the brain, an intellectual thing which could communicate itself by a
hint, a breath, by an energy of the spirit rather than of the body.
The idea of the dance--the choregraphic design--is sometimes suggested
to her by music, by fragments from the works of Delibes, Chopin,
Tchaikovsky or Saint-Saëns; sometimes it is hinted in a chance sight or
incident of everyday life; sometimes it springs into being independently
of any external impulse, as spontaneously as a melody is conceived in
the musician’s or an image in the poet’s mind. _Le Cygne_, which she
dances to the music of Saint-Saëns, owed its origin to a walk with M.
Fokine in a park in St Petersburg. Seeing some swans floating upon the
water, M. Fokine remarked to Madame Pavlova that it would be easy for
her with her supple and slender throat to take the graceful motion of
the bird as the theme of one of her dances. Her figure has something of
the easy dignity of the swan, and in the gliding motions, to the
accompaniment of the cool music of Saint-Saëns, she is perhaps more at
ease
[Illustration: PAVLOVA AND MORDKIN
_Photograph: Foulsham & Banfield, Ltd._]
than in those passages which demand a more stormy energy. In this dance
she represents with singular beauty the proud carriage of that remote
bird, its swooning death and its sudden collapse into lifelessness. It
displays her skill in the difficult act of falling; she sinks to earth
without any suggestion of arrangement or preparedness, ceasing to dance
as swiftly and silently as a flame may cease to burn, her limbs failing
her, as though her body had actually resigned its spirit.
Her interpretation of Strauss’s _Blue Danube_ is a perfect
personification of the river-spirit. From beginning to end it sounds a
clear note of joy and untrammelled life. Pavlova dances it in her freest
style; the pirouette and the entrechat have no part in this simulation
of the triumphing flood. All the phases of the river’s moods live in her
dancing--its strong, pulsating race in mid-torrent, its bursts of
sky-flung spray, its quiet dalliance in secret, wood-browned pools, its
gentle play with the entangling weeds, its smooth descents over the
breasting rocks ending in a laughing and ecstatic tumult.
What expression Pavlova can obtain even in the narrower scope of the
traditional school may be seen in one of her dances to a Chopin valse.
She appears as a young girl on the night of her first ball, in a simple
white frock, somewhat longer than the usual ballet-dancer’s skirt. She
is dancing the dreams of girlhood in the garden after the ball is ended,
when suddenly the lover, to whom she has just lost her heart, appears on
a balcony and throws her a rose. She gathers it to her breast and in her
happy dance she lives over again those revealing moments when her heart
suddenly blossomed into the life of love. Then looking up she blows a
kiss to the balcony where her lover had stood. To her shy dismay she
finds him still standing there, a witness to her confessed surrender.
She is confused with a modest shame for what in her maiden innocence she
fears must seem an unmaiden-like boldness. The surprised and delighted
lover offers his proposal. After a moment of the most delicious
embarrassment she fearfully nods her assent and skips away in a
transport of excited joy. It is a delicate suggestion of the troubled
and innocent emotions of first love, as suggestive in its rendering of
that neutral and indefinite age that lies between girlhood and womanhood
as a picture by Greuze.
But perhaps the most perfect of all Pavlova’s dances is the _Papillons_.
It has been said that she “does not so much imitate the movement of a
butterfly as the emotional quality of a butterfly-flight, the sense
raised in our minds by watching it; and then it is not an ordinary
butterfly, nor a plain lepidopteron, but a Grimm butterfly, a dream
butterfly, a butterfly multiplied many times by itself, raised as it
were to the Pavlova-th power.” With that sense of the elimination of
weight which is characteristic of her dancing, Pavlova is able to
suggest the grace of things flying, things swimming, things borne upon
the breeze. The _Papillons_ is the quintessence of the spirit of
everything that dances in the wind, and is kissed by the sun, and has
intrigues with the flowers, and lives its irresponsible life between the
sunrise and sunset of a summer day. It appears to be danced almost
wholly with the eyes and the finger-tips; the dancer is on the stage and
off again all within the incredibly short space of thirty seconds. Yet
she told me that, on account of its ceaseless vibrating motion, of all
her dances it is the most exhausting.
But Pavlova’s dancing is not limited to the expression merely of
thistledown lightness and inconsequential gaiety; it has a deeper reach,
and at times is borne upon a flood of passion. _L’Automne Bacchanale_ is
a stormy and tumultuous dance, affecting the mind like that vision which
Keats saw in the “marble brede of men and maidens” on a Grecian urn:
“What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”
It was this dance which inspired Mr Holbrook Jackson’s spirited eulogy.
“She does not make you think of herself,” he writes in his “Romance and
Reality”; “she sets you dreaming of all the dancing that has ever been,
of all the dancing that is. Whilst watching her I could not help
thinking she was not merely following the rules of an art, but that she
was following the rules of life. The leaves
[Illustration: PAVLOVA AND MORDKIN
IN RUSSIAN COSTUME
_Photograph: Foulsham & Banfield, Ltd._]
dance in the breeze, the flowers dance in the sun, the worlds dance in
space, and Pavlova dancing is a part of this cosmic measure.
“Everybody in the theatre must have felt something similar--especially
when she and Michael Mordkin, her superb consort in the art, danced
together the _Bacchanale_ of Glazounov. I imagine also those dim
segments of faces in the darkened auditorium, many of them reflecting
the frigid morality of English respectability, would be touched to
strange emotions. Their staid owners would feel a new wakefulness,
recalling as in a dream all that had ever happened to them of passion or
beauty, all that might have happened to them had they followed their
real desires, their sacred whims.... The swaying form of Pavlova rhymed
and romped with life and joy, with love and beauty. O the wild flight
across the stage, the hot pursuit, the sweet dalliance, and then the
rich luxury of surrender! The very essence of life was there: life so
full of joy that it overflowed with blissful abandonment until it sank
from the only pardonable excess--excess of happiness.”
In this dance Pavlova has met the exponents of the modern “barefoot”
school on their own ground, and,--shall we say? vanquished them. Her
training in the strict traditional method has taught her that lesson,
invaluable in all the arts, the restraint of emotion. For even in the
_Bacchanale_ there is restraint, the art that conceals art, else she
could not have attained that perfect unison of rhythm which gives to the
dance the swinging quality of a wave.
Pavlova may be said to have introduced impressionism into the dance, and
so to have brought it into line with the tendencies of modern art. Not
impressionism as Zola understood it--“merely an excuse for not taking
pains.” In this respect her faultless precision more resembles the fine
work of a Dutch _genre_ painting. But she is an impressionist in
creating a sudden and brilliant effect without the appearance of
laboured effort and without the addition of a superfluous touch, in
presenting with an economy of swift gesture the firm outline of an
incident, the essential summary of a scene, the breathing heart of an
emotion. Although she flashes across the vision for no more than a few
seconds, she nevertheless leaves in the mind the memory of a complete
utterance, something perfectly finished, definite, precise, whole, like
a clear-sounding lyric, or a finely-cut sculpture. For in her work, as
in all true impressionism, there is nothing blurred; it is rapid, but it
is just and sure; it goes to the roots; it ignores what is irrelevant
and seizes on the essential. Actual mimicry has no place in her dance;
she is not a copyist of nature; she embodies the salient moments, the
vital energies, of beauty and passion.
But when all is said, nothing is said. She refuses to yield herself to
analysis. Too swift for the eye, she altogether outpaces the pen. One
can only repeat the words of that baffled interviewer who wisely wrote:
“Pavlova can only be adequately understood by the person to whom she is
an everlasting mystery--by the mind that cannot understand her. The man
who feels he can, or thinks he can, or knows he can, sum her up in so
many words; who fancies he has done his duty to her and to reason when
he has declared that she is the finest dancer that he has ever seen in
all his life; who says ‘I have seen Pavlova’ as a man would say ‘I have
seen the boat-race’--as if the whole thing were over and done with, and
that nothing more was to be learned, or not learned, by another and
another visit: such a man speaks without having felt.... She is
uninterviewable--unphotographable--undrawable. But she is not
uncaricaturable; for are not all the phrases of the pen and strokes of
the pencil but caricatures that attempt to describe and picture
perfection? And what is perfection but Pavlova?”
In the troupe which accompanied Madame Pavlova at the Palace Theatre in
London there were several artistic performers, but one calls for special
notice--Mademoiselle Schmolz. Her dancing in Glinka’s “Mazurka” and
Brahms’ “Rhapsodie Hongroise” had all that lilt and swing and hint of
devilry which, by every rule of the theatre at any rate, the dancing of
half-barbaric peasants ought to have. A dance which she and Mademoiselle
Plaskaweska danced to the most mischievously ironical of Chopin’s
waltzes was, I have no hesitation in saying, one of the most completely
satisfying things
[Illustration: MADEMOISELLE SCHMOLZ
_Photograph: Dover Street Studios, Ltd._]
ever seen upon the stage. The credit belongs in part to Mikail Mordkin,
who was the composer, but it is scarcely possible to conceive a more
spirited interpretation than that given by the two executants. The theme
was simply a petty squabble about a rose. One of the maidens covets the
love-token which the other flaunts so provokingly; there follows a
pretty wrangle on tiptoe, lively grimaces, and the trophy is wrested
from its rightful owner. The latter now becomes the aggressor, displays
a delightful petulance, and, between smiles and tears, pursues the
laughing thief. The nosegay is won back, and then, just as your sympathy
is becoming earnestly engaged in the alternations of triumph and
despair, the rose is tossed upon the ground, and both minxes run away
with mocking laughter, leaving you half aggrieved at having been fooled
into a serious concern in their empty mischief. It is simple, trivial,
silly if you like, and it is all over in half-a-minute--yet it prints on
the mind a picture like one of those rare glimpses of incidents
sometimes seen in real life, the memory of which goes with a man for
half a lifetime.
Mikail Mordkin received his training in the same school as Anna Pavlova,
that attached to the Marianski Theatre in St Petersburg. The two have
been associated in a somewhat uneasy partnership at the Palace Theatre
in London, and in the United States. Mordkin has achieved the
distinction of being the only _danseur_ who has ever found favour in
America. There, as in England, before the coming of the Russians, the
chief function of the man dancer was to rush out at the psychological
moment and rescue the ballerina as she fell into his arms, with her eyes
staring into the drops and one toe pointing upwards towards the
limelight man. Apart from performing this useful service, on account of
which he was tolerated as a kind of necessary nuisance, his part was
almost a sinecure.
The performances of Mordkin, together with those of Nijinsky, have
brought about a reversal of the somewhat contemptuous popular judgment
upon male dancing, for undoubtedly the Anglo-Saxon public shared to some
extent the prejudice of Southey, who said that every male dancer ought
to be hamstrung. There is nothing of the twittering effeminacies of the
proverbial “French dancing-master” in Mordkin’s dancing; its main
characteristic is manliness. His build is robust, massive, noble. His
physical qualities undoubtedly leave some of his less critical admirers
blind to the deficiencies of his art. His splendid physique is fortified
by a course of rigorous and continual training. In addition to his daily
exercise, it is not unusual for him to go to the theatre three hours
before the performance begins and, without the accompaniment of music,
to go through all the preliminary postures of the dance. Instead of
becoming exhausted by this exercise, he is fit and eager for the ballet
to begin.
Mordkin has shown that grace is not only consistent with true virility
in dancing, but is indispensable to it. In their folk-dances the
top-booted Russian dancers give a fine display of masculine vigour, but
it is always upon the edge of the grotesque. The beauty of a man’s
strength is hidden rather than revealed by these spasms of violence; it
is best seen in those lines, suggestive of sleeping force, which give to
Mordkin’s poses the heroic quality of Greek sculpture. His dancing is
distinguished by its reserve. It always leaves something to the
imagination. His gestures in the “Arrow Dance” derive no little of their
effectiveness from what they suggest, but leave unsaid. It is the
warrior not at war but at play, and like the gambolling of young tigers
affects us by the passion that it only hints at. His dancing has a
constant tendency to forsake motion for repose. In his entrechats and
pirouettes I seemed to note a certain reluctance, as though they were a
concession demanded by popular taste, or a lingering tradition of the
ballet technique. Yet when motion is required, Mordkin can give it, and
of the freest, most buoyant, most swinging quality. The reckless swing
of the galloping entry in the _Automne Bacchanale_ was magnificent. That
was a dance of dances! The riot of wine, the sap of youth, the tumult of
love, the sudden liberation of vigorous limbs, were all expressed in a
rush of movement that was somehow curiously restrained, as the foaming
progress of a wave is restrained, never tempted by excess of ecstasy
into breaking the steady sweep of its own rhythm.
[Illustration: MIKAIL MORDKIN
IN _The Arrow Dance_
_Photograph: Foulsham & Banfield, Ltd._]
A comparison of the art of Mordkin and Nijinsky would be almost
irrelevant. Their style differs just in the same degree as their
physique. If Nijinsky is the winged Mercury of the dance, Mordkin is the
Apollo. Nijinsky’s is the dancing of motion, Mordkin’s of repose; the
temper of the one is volatile, of the other equable and restrained; wit,
gaiety, elegance, ebullience of youthful spirits, are the
characteristics of the younger dancer; dignity, power, and a slumbering
passion, of the elder. The hint of Puck-like fancy is entirely absent in
Mordkin’s performances; his dramatic qualities are less elastic than
Nijinsky’s, his personality less various, more rigidly settled in a
definite mould.
While other Russian dancers pass with meteoric flight across the English
stage, Madame Lydia Kyasht burns like a fixed star of all but the first
magnitude. Discerning critics observed her with pleasure behind the
footlights of the Empire Theatre for the first time one autumn evening
in 1908. She had been summoned from Russia to dance in London for four
weeks,--she has been dancing there for three years and her engagement
has still two more to run. Her position as _première danseuse_ in an
English ballet has both its advantages and its dangers. Appearing in a
ballet that is really very little more than a ballet of amateurs, she
achieves without great difficulty the effect desired I suppose by every
ballet-dancer,--that of a visitant from some more gracious and ethereal
sphere. She trips where her companions tramp. She alone has wings. Yet,
although her art profits by the contrast, it suffers from the isolation.
It is difficult for her to keep it keyed to its highest pitch when she
is deprived of the stimulus of criticism and emulation. Moreover, as
there is no competent master of the ballet to compose for her, she is
compelled to be her own choregrapher, and the work of composition
demands a different order of intelligence from that of the executant.
Yet in spite of these unfavourable conditions, the character of her
dancing remains remarkably pure. If it lacks the dazzling executive
brilliance of her former fellow-pupils, Pavlova and Karsavina, it is
marked by a certain statuesque dignity which is somewhat notable in a
ballerina. Even a great dancer may have arresting attitudes but fail to
connect them. Lydia Kyasht passes from attitude to attitude in a single
continuous sequence of admirable poses which flow one into another
without a pause and without a flaw. Her purity of line is never broken
by one of those inartistic feats of athletic dexterity which sometimes
disfigure the dancing of Adeline Genée. She invariably resists the
besetting temptation of a clever dancer to let accomplishment trespass
upon grace. Unfortunately the good fairy who has endowed her with so
many gifts appears to have withheld the greatest of them
all--imagination. Finish and refinement can never make amends for the
absence of mood. At times her dancing leaves us so cold that we are
persuaded that she is dancing with her head but not with her heart.
It is worth while remarking that when any Russian dancer appears in
England or America, she is almost invariably described as the “première
danseuse of the Russian Imperial Ballet.” This denomination is vague,
and usually inaccurate. Theoretically there can be only two _ballerine
assolute_ in all the Russias--one in St Petersburg and one in Moscow. As
a matter of fact, in St Petersburg at the present moment both
Kschesinskaya and Preobrajenskaya hold this rank, although of the two,
the former is granted precedence. The latter has now nominally retired,
but she continues to make six or eight appearances every season. Madame
Kschesinskaya has never performed in England. She once visited London
privately, but when she found that an engagement there would necessitate
appearing nightly, she declared that such a task was “blood-drying
work,” and fled incontinently to Russia. In the Russian capital she
herself chooses the occasions when she deigns to appear. The _ballerina
assoluta_ of Moscow is Mademoiselle Catrina Geltzer, who has recently
appeared at the Alhambra. Madame Pavlova belongs to the grade known as
_ballerina_, or _première danseuse_, the next below that of _ballerina
assoluta_. She is marked out to succeed to the place vacated by Madame
Preobrajenskaya in the supreme rank in the hierarchy. Madame Karsavina
and Mademoiselle Balashova are at present equal in degree to Madame
Pavlova. Madame Lydia Kyasht is in Russia still only _première sujet_.
[Illustration: LYDIA KYASHT
_Photograph: Ellis & Walery_]
CHAPTER XII
THE ENGLISH BALLET
In a retrospect of the performances of the Russians in London this year,
a correspondent of _The Times_ summed up the effect of their achievement
upon the state of mind of the spectator of the English ballet in these
words: “This summer of 1911 has brought more than an æsthetic revolution
with it: in bringing the Russian ballet to Covent Garden it has brought
a positively new art, it has extended the realm of beauty for us,
discovered a new continent, revealed new faculties and means of
salvation in ourselves. Alas! many pleasant illusions have been
shattered thereby, many idols have tumbled from their pedestals; we have
grown up terribly fast and lost the power of enjoying things that
pleased our callow fancies a year or two ago. Who can go back now with
the old zest to the robust vivacity of X or the amateurish _minauderies_
of Y? Who will put up any longer with the battered themes, the insipid
music, the ingenious setting, and the clumsy grouping to which we were
accustomed once? They will still have their public, those things; they
will serve for entertainment, for stuffing to that pillow on which the
backbone of the British nation leans till bedtime; but they will no
longer do for the ‘seven hundred honest folk’ who seek at that hour for
the means to ‘make their souls.’”
Although I cannot claim to be one of the honest folk who go to the
Empire at that hour “to make their souls,” it was nevertheless somewhat
dismayedly that, with the rhythm of the Russians still marching through
the brain, I once again witnessed a ballet fairly representative of the
modern English type. We were no longer in the atmosphere of art, but in
the atmosphere of commerce. The peculiarity of the atmosphere of
commerce is that it leaves nothing to the imagination, and therefore it
leaves the imagination cold. “The art of the pen,” said Meredith in the
person of one of the characters of his novels, “is to rouse the inward
vision, instead of labouring with a drop-scene brush, as if it were to
the eye.” The English ballet is not content with the primitive
simplicity of a drop-scene brush; it labours with a host of mechanical
devices--with extravagant properties, with photographic scenery, with
the stratagems of electricians, with all the means that the stage
manager can array to dissuade the inward vision from rousing itself. Its
aim apparently is to create a diversion for the eye so that the
imagination may slumber undisturbed. The stage as a rule is so crowded,
that any suggestion of a governing design is lost in a general
bewildering flicker of motion like that of the cinematograph. Frequently
the _corps de ballet_ have no room for any more elaborate step than an
artless hop and a right-about turn, a kind of convalescent pirouette.
Perhaps it is as well--safety may sometimes lie in numbers. “What has
come to us,” asked Professor Selwyn Image a dozen years ago _apropos_ of
the _Butterflies_ ballet, “that we are all gone crazy over crowds and
jumble and properties and frippery?”
A strange circumstance is that the English ballet not infrequently has
the air of being discontented with its enforced silence. At its best the
ballet is not the translation of words into gesture: it is the
translation, or rather the transposition of life into gesture. It is the
presentment to eye and ear by means of rhythmic motion and pictorial
design, of a certain feeling about life, of certain moods and visions
which have never crystallised into words. “It begins and ends,” it has
been well said, “before words have formed themselves, in a deeper
consciousness than that of speech.” To think of ballet merely as dumb
show is the same as to think of painting merely as illustration. It
exists as the supplement rather than as the substitute of words. It does
not merely tell a story; it tells it, or rather it should tell it, in a
way in which words alone could not tell it. It tells it with a beauty
which, we will not say is greater than, but is at any rate different
from, the beauty of words. But the ballet of commerce, aiming at
literalness rather than suggestion,
[Illustration: LYDIA KYASHT
IN _Sylvia_
_Photograph: Bassano, Ltd._]
seems strangely handicapped by its speechlessness. It appears to be
groping for the libretto. It does not tell a story so much as suggest
that it has a story to tell, which it would, if it could, impart to the
spectator. Probably because they never seek to go outside the narrow
circle of conventionalised gestures, which the English ballet has
received as a sacred tradition from the Italian, the performers have the
air of attempting to communicate with one another in the deaf and dumb
language of a mute, or rather of one who wilfully deprives himself of
the use of his tongue. The feeling that they arouse in the spectator is
one almost of impatience, as with the folly of a man who uses a finger
alphabet when he might just as well talk rationally.
In speaking of the English ballet, Mr Max Beerbohm has gaily admitted
his inability to master the meaning of formalised gesture: “When a
ballerina lays the palms of her hands against her left cheek, and then
snatching them away, regards them with an air of mild astonishment, and
then swaying slightly backwards, touches her forehead with her
finger-tips, and then suddenly extends both arms above her head, I ought
of course to be privy to her inmost meaning. I ought to have a thorough
grasp of her exact state of mind. Friends have often explained to me,
with careful demonstrations, the significance of the various gestures
that are used in the ballet--and these gestures are not very many--and I
have more than once committed them to memory, hoping that though I could
never be illuded, I might at least be not bemused. But, after all this
trouble, the next ballet that I have seen has teased and puzzled me as
unkindly as ever. Is it that gestures were given to the ballerina to
conceal her thoughts? Or is it merely that the quickness of the hand
deceives the eye?”
One of the criteria of the ballet is the quality of its silence. In the
perfect ballet the silence is never apprehended as a negation or a
deficiency, any more than it is in a painting or a statue. The
interpolation of words would indeed be felt to be an impertinence. Where
the rhythm is entirely satisfying, the mind is content. Not the least of
the merits of the Russian ballet is this quality of completeness in its
silence. There are some exceptions: at times the action of _Le Pavillon
d’Armide_ stumbles and seems to cry for speech; but in _Le Spectre de la
Rose_ would not a single spoken word break the spell? The gestures of
the dancers are never drawn from that limited stock of conventions which
Mr Beerbohm tried in vain to memorise, which are in fact a kind of
stock-in-trade, and can be borne in mind and applied at will like the
commonplaces of the newspaper leader-writers; they are fluid and
variable and flow naturally out of the emotion. They are in fact
gestures, and not, as they usually are in the English ballet,
gesticulations.
But there is good reason to believe that the English ballet is on the
eve of a renaissance. The success of the Russians must have taught the
managers that a gorgeous spectacle is not really necessary for the
delight of the public,--in the Russian repertory probably the simplest
ballets were the most appreciated. Already in the _Dance Dream_ the
Alhambra has produced a ballet which, if the theme was insipid, at any
rate had the crowning virtue of breadth and simplicity of treatment. A
sense of space was created; the tumult of action was varied by passages
of sobriety; an effect of beauty was produced, larger and serener than
any that has been seen in the English ballet during recent years. The
principals of course were Russians--Mademoiselle Balashova succeeded
Mademoiselle Geltzer as _première danseuse_--but the performance of the
English dancers showed that under proper handling they are capable of
better things than the pantomime displays to which they have been used
to be restricted. The English ballet still awaits the coming of the
great English dancer--it is too early yet to know whether Miss Phyllis
Bedells will be she--but now that public interest is at last wide awake
the primary condition of the creation of a native school of ballet is
satisfied.
But there is one dancer of genius, whom, if the English stage has not
produced, it at any rate monopolises. It has become difficult to think
of Madame Adeline Genée as belonging to any other country than England,
nevertheless the conscientious annalist must record, however
unwillingly, the fact that she was born at Aarhus, in Denmark. If she
was not born dancing, she danced almost from her cradle. At the age of
eight she began that
[Illustration: ALEXANDRA BALASHOVA
_Photograph: Dover Street Studios, Ltd._]
arduous course of training which forms the solid groundwork of her art.
She was instructed by her uncle, Alexander Genée. She also profited
greatly by the strict supervision of her aunt, who, it is interesting to
note, was a Hungarian. If, indeed, there be any natural magic in the
dancing of the natives of Eastern Europe, it must have passed into
Genée’s style long before the Russian dancers were heard of in this
country. Her aunt was her most vigorous and helpful critic; when she
pleased her audiences she was glad, but when she pleased this exacting
connoisseur she was content. Madame Genée made her first appearance at
the Opera House at Copenhagen; at the age of sixteen she was dancing at
the Royal Theatre in Berlin, from whence she proceeded to Munich. It was
there that she received that telegram which may be said to have
determined her subsequent career--the invitation to take the position of
_première danseuse_ for six weeks at the Empire Theatre, London.
She made her début in England in _Monte Cristo_, in November 1897. She
has remained the popular favourite of the English public ever since, and
perhaps not of the English public only, but of the American also. Amid
the crowd of dancers of all nationalities she has maintained her pride
of place. In _Vineland_ her dancing first seemed to attain its full
brilliance. Then followed the _Milliner Duchess_ and _High Jinks_, the
latter notable for the famous hunting scene in which the verve and
spirit of her dancing won all hearts. Finally came Delibes’ _Coppelia_,
an example of the classic ballet at its best. _Coppelia_ was to Genée
what _La Sylphide_ was to Taglioni, _Giselle_ to Grisi, and _Eoline_ to
Lucille Grahn. Naturally it is, as she told me, her favourite ballet.
But perhaps her triumph in the _Dryad_ was even greater. It gave her an
opportunity for displaying not only her marvellous technique, but also a
perhaps half-unsuspected power of raising and expressing emotion. It
afforded scope for the range of her feeling and revealed the actress
beneath the dancer. In the first scene she comes out of the tree trunk
in which the jealousy of Aphrodite has imprisoned her. Once a year she
is allowed to roam abroad and delight in the sunlight and the flowers
and the breeze. Her heart is on fire with joy at all the sights and
sounds about her; but a still greater joy is in store for her--she meets
a shepherd who falls in love with her. She relates her story to him in
gestures which are as explicit as speech, and tells him he must go away
and return at the end of ten years--she delightfully counts out the tale
of years on the flowers she has gathered. If throughout the ten years he
is faithful to her she will be released. The ten years pass, and on an
autumn evening she comes out of her tree prison once again. Will he
come? She is sure of it and dances for joy. Will he come? She searches
for him eagerly through the meadows and down the glades. Will he come?
Troubling doubts assail her, and her eyes begin to fill with despair.
Will he come? Of course he will. She is still rippling and glowing with
joy. She hears his voice. He is singing the old familiar love song. He
is there, and on his arm is a human shepherdess to whom he is singing
the song that once was only hers. The faithless lover and his new-found
love pass through the meadow and down the glade, and then the Dryad,
forsaken and forlorn, turns to the sheltering trunk in which she can
hide herself and her despair.
The fable is slender as a fairy tale, yet it gave Genée the chance of
showing that she could pass from one emotion to another with the same
rapidity, ease and expressiveness that mark her steps. She was by turns
elfish, tender, sad, merry, passionate or despairing. In the first
moments after escaping from the imprisoning tree, her dancing was full
of that quality which so often inspires it--the spirit of the eternal
child.
But the first and foremost quality of Madame Genée’s dancing is its
technical perfection. If there is such a thing as a physical genius for
the dance, independent of the qualities of the spirit, that genius is
hers. She reveals it in the mere act of walking across the room. There
is a brilliance in her movement, a resiliency in her tread, that
distinguishes her from all other women. If the ancients were right in
attributing four elements to the composition of the body, one would say
that hers was compounded solely of air and fire. But whereas many
dancers might have relied almost entirely on this natural genius, which
is hers by right of birth, Genée has added to it a training which in
severity, conscientiousness
[Illustration: ADELINE GENÉE
FROM AN INSTANTANEOUS NEGATIVE TAKEN IN NATURAL COLOUR
_Photograph: The Dover Street Studios, Ltd._]
and thoroughness perhaps few dancers have equalled. For years she has
spent four hours a day in front of her huge mirror practising her steps,
usually under the careful supervision of her uncle. “I have given my
life and myself to my dancing,” she says, and the words are true in a
very special and literal sense. She has served her art with almost the
rigour of asceticism. She avoids wine. She eats sparely. She shuns a
supper-party. When her work is over her day is done, and she drives from
the theatre home to bed. She has fulfilled to the letter Ruskin’s
affirmation that an artist must submit to a law which it was painful to
obey, in order that she may bestow a delight which it is gracious to
bestow.
In proficiency in the strict, classical school of ballet-dancing, it is
possible that Madame Genée has never been surpassed and perhaps not even
equalled. Within these limits her work is faultless. Every detail is
sedulously studied, and is executed with accuracy and ease. The position
of the fingers, the lines of the arabesque, the resumption of the exact
attitude at the end of no matter how many and how rapid
pirouettes--everything is as exact as if it had been drawn by an artist
with infinite leisure for correction, instead of executed in the heat of
the moment without an instant’s pause between one movement and the next.
Every step has its name; every gesture belongs to its code; there is one
way and no other of executing them rightly, and that way is Madame
Genée’s. But the dance is too rapid and too flowing to be dissected into
its constituent parts. The connoisseur recognises them and knows that
the apparent spontaneity is obtained only by the mastery of a science as
strict as mathematics; the spectator uneducated in the dance remarks the
general effect of beauty, and is instinctively aware that the
performance has something of the qualities of a masterpiece of art. But
this extreme physical sureness and dexterity is not without its dangers.
The dancer is tempted to exhibit mere _tours de force_ which a less
proficient performer would be saved by her very incompetence from
attempting, and the temptation is the greater through the knowledge that
these are the accomplishments which call forth the most tempestuous
applause from a public that cares less for the beautiful than for the
marvellous. In a recent divertissement, _A Dream of Butterflies and
Roses_, no movement, not even the magnificent circles made backwards
with wide flying steps, excited the audience to such a pitch of
enthusiasm as one particularly trying piece of gymnastic--a slow rising
from the ground on one pointed toe. But Genée’s mastery of technique is
so complete that the least hint of strain is eliminated and even this
somewhat acrobatic feat was almost transformed into a delightful flow of
grace. The ease with which she overcomes technical difficulties creates
a delight of its own, cheating one’s fears, and compelling an admission
of beauty where one had dreaded to see only athletic prowess.
To this technical perfection Genée adds certain spiritual qualities
which are all her own. As I have said, the _Dryad_ revealed a dramatic
ability which had been perhaps overlooked in the admiration of her pure
dancing. This capacity for pantomime would probably have been earlier
appreciated if the ballets at the Empire had allowed it more scope. But
the peculiar note of her spirit is an abounding gaiety, as clear and
elemental as that of a child, affecting the heart like vital and
exhilarating laughter. There is a kind of arch-merriment in her dancing
which seems to flow out of the pure exultation of movement, at times
almost threatening to break through the restraints of technique and
convert the dance into a romp. But the elasticity of the dance is always
great enough to meet the freest ebullience of spirits; there is, as it
were, no leakage of vitality; every atom of force is spent in steps and
movements that never lose their precision and exactitude. Genée’s
dancing refutes those detractors who assert that the academic style of
the ballet is a fatal limitation to the artist’s freedom of expression.
She shows that, when it is brought to the perfection to which she has
developed it, it is fluent and elastic enough to express the extremes
of, at any rate, the more volatile emotions. The hunting dance in _High
Jinks_ carries the dance as far in the direction of high spirits, of
exhilaration unmixed with passion, of sheer delight in the physical fact
of life, as it can possibly go. The spirited little horsewoman in the
black riding-habit, that clings closely to the lines of her gay and
lithe
[Illustration: ADELINE GENÉE
_Photograph: Dover Street Studios, Ltd._]
figure, has an air at once of fragility and vigour; she is borne through
the air on her dashing leaps, she curvets, she caracoles, the slender
steely limbs make nothing of the weighty burden of the skirt and
boots--and yet it is all done with such a whirl and wind of enthusiasm
that the motive force appears to be not muscular activity but merely a
fever of the blood. All the jollity, all the glorious high spirits, all
the high-heartedness, all the intoxication of delight, in all the
hunting mornings that ever were, are concentrated in that swaying,
swirling, leaping, laughing figure.
There is something essentially of the North in Genée’s dancing, a
freshness and energy like that of the north wind, a hint of the athlete
in the vigorous clean-limbed movements, an absence of passion, a purity,
shall we say a coldness? Her spirit seems to belong to the heights
rather than to the depths. It is bright rather than subtle. It is full
of high lights but lacking in half-tones.
Although “finish” in a technical sense is the peculiar characteristic of
Genée’s art, it is not marked by those almost indefinable nuances which
give the dance, no less than the painting or the poem, a quality with
which not even the finest workmanship can endow it. These refinements
belong to the region not of the intelligence but of the spirit, and
cannot be laid hold of by analysis. They depend upon a very delicate
perception, upon a subtle responsiveness to the rhythm of life.
Underlying the precision of her work is a kind of crudity. There is no
mood of creative beauty. The outline is firm rather than tender. The
emotional qualities of the dance are explicit, simple and wholesome, but
they are never subtle, nor do they appear to be nourished by a great
depth of spirit. We miss the suggestion of those moods that are
elemental and incalculable. There is a gladness that cannot show itself
in frolicsomeness, and there is an ecstasy too near to tears to have any
likeness to high spirits. Perfect within its own domain, we feel that
beyond the frontiers of her art lie tracts of the spirit unexplored.
To Adeline Genée England in particular owes a debt greater than to any
other dancer. It was she who continued, or rather restored, the
tradition of the great dancing of the earlier half of the last century.
She aroused enthusiasm for the ballet in an age when that enthusiasm had
grown cold. She helped to put an end to a perverted form of dancing. Her
example shone out with a clear light in that thick darkness just before
the dawn, and for more than a decade she remained true to her ideals
through good report and ill. It is safe to say that when the devotees of
many other deities of the dance have ceased to kindle their tapers, her
own shrine will always be brightly illuminated.
Mr Max Beerbohm has paid her a notable tribute, which has all the more
value seeing that he confesses that for him the ballet has no meaning.
“No monstrous automaton is that young lady,” he said, writing of her
performance in _Coppelia_ in 1906. “Perfect though she be in the ‘haute
école,’ she has by some miracle preserved her own self. She was born a
comedian and a comedian she remains, light and liberal as foam. A
mermaid were not a more surprising creature than she--she of whom one
half is as that of an authentic ballerina, whilst the other is that of a
most intelligent, most delightfully human actress. A mermaid were,
indeed, less marvellous in our eyes. She would not be able to diffuse
any semblance of humanity into her tail. Madame Genée’s intelligence
seems to vibrate in her very toes. Her dancing, strictliest classical
though it is, is a part of her acting. And her acting, moreover, is of
so fine a quality that she makes the old ineloquent conventions of
gesture tell their meanings to me, and tell them so exquisitely that I
quite forget my craving for words.... Taglioni in _Les Arabesques_? I
suspect, in my heart of hearts, she was no better than a doll. Grisi in
_Giselle_? She may, or may not, have been passable. Genée! It is a name
our grandchildren will cherish, even as we cherish now the names of
those bygone dancers. And alas! our grandchildren will never believe,
will never be able to imagine, what Genée was.”
Is there a young English dancer of promise who will one day vindicate
the honour of England and succeed to the place which Genée now
triumphantly holds in the popular favour? Miss Phyllis Bedells is a
possible candidate for fame. She has recently taken the principal rôle
in _Sylvia_ at the Empire in the absence of Madame
[Illustration: ADELINE GENÉE
IN _A Dream of Butterflies and Roses_
_Photograph: Dover Street Studios, Ltd._]
Kyasht, but she danced more happily in her original subordinate part.
Her dancing has a charm which in some measure is enhanced by its very
faultiness. It is the charm of immaturity, the suggestion of the
delightful gambolling of a young animal at play. Her training, so far as
it goes, has been painstaking, but what chiefly distinguishes her
performance from the routine work of the average English dancer is an
unaffected zest, almost a vividness of delight, which the obvious
troublesomeness of the technique is unable to depress. The main
difference between the would-be dancer and the born dancer is that the
dance of the former is always the repetition of a lesson, whereas every
dance of the latter is like a new creation. So far as it is already
possible to judge, Miss Bedells belongs to the latter class.
If the English ballet has yet produced no native ballerina worthy to
rank with the great Continental dancers, the absence of a male dancer of
any distinction is still more remarkable. An exception can scarcely be
made in favour of Mr Fred Farren, who fills the dual rôle of _premier
danseur_ and _maître de ballet_ at the Empire. Neither as a composer of
dances nor as an executant has he created anything that calls for
special notice. His most successful achievement has been an adaptation
of the French Apache dance. _La Valse Chaloupée_ was originated, or
rather popularised, by Max Dearly and Mademoiselle Mistinguette, a
dancer who has brought into the dance all the nervous excitement of
modernity. In introducing the Apache dance into _A Day in Paris_ at the
Empire, Mr Farren modified its more _outré_ characteristics and at the
same time gave it a more deeply passionate and dramatic significance.
His able partner, Miss Beatrice Collier, imported into it a note of
human tragedy that was more moving than the mere devilry of
Mistinguette.
Probably the real reason why England has failed to produce a great
school of ballet is principally owing to the absence of a _maître de
ballet_ of genius. The late Madame Katti Lanner and Madame Cavalazzi
both possessed a thorough knowledge of technique, and were capable of
designing dances that were suited to the capacities of their pupils; but
their ideas were limited and their imagination feeble. There is no
reason in the nature of things why English dancers should not rise to
the same level of excellence as those of St Petersburg or Moscow.
Probably the material is there, but the artist who can mould it into a
design of the highest plastic beauty is lacking.
The dancer, after all, is very much in the position of a pawn in the
game. She can provide an individual note of fine quality and tone, but
it requires the genius of a master to provide the orchestration. The
ballet is perhaps more responsive to the attitude of the public than any
other branch of art, and the absence of a public seriously and
critically interested in the dance has doubtless been responsible for
the fact that the ballet has failed to attract the energies of men of
talent. The priority of Russia in the art of the ballet is due above all
else to that atmosphere which England lacks, an atmosphere of keen and
enlightened criticism, of understanding sympathy and serious interest,
among the public at large no less than among the artists themselves.
That this is a condition absolutely essential to the success of the
ballet is clearly shown in an instructive passage by the writer whom I
have quoted at the beginning of this chapter.
Speaking of the excellence of the Russians he says:
“This sort of perfection in an art is the result of a long process. The
artists are not only trained to it; they are born to it. The same names
occur again and again in the history of the ballet; sons and daughters
follow the calling of their parents, and find themselves wives and
husbands among their fellow-dancers. Their limbs exist only for grace
and suppleness, and are never stiffened by any other use. All their
lives are devoted to dancing; and it is the constant occupation of their
minds. A ballet-master is not an accident or sport of nature, but one
who is acknowledged by his comrades to excel them in the sort of
imagination in which they all share. A certain Russian, living in St
Petersburg, was frequently puzzled by the strange behaviour of the
guests in a flat across the street. An aged lady lived there, and once
or twice a week she held receptions, and the strangest leapings and
gyrations could be dimly seen through the curtains. In the end the aged
lady
[Illustration: PHYLLIS BEDELLS
IN _Sylvia_
_Photograph: Ellis & Walery_]
proved to be Mademoiselle P., the once famous dancer and daughter of
another famous dancer, and these were her friends from the Corps de
Ballet who came to take tea with her; they were merely talking ‘shop,’
and incidentally illustrating their ideas by showing each other various
steps. Monsieur K., the ballet-master, composes ballets as he walks, and
is watched by suspicious policemen swaying and waving his arms, while he
goes absent-mindedly along the streets. When the Russian ballet was in
Vienna, the guests in a certain hotel were roused more than once in the
middle of the night by a heavy bumping and clatter from the room above.
‘It is all right,’ one of the dancers explained to a nervous stranger,
‘it is evidently K. composing a ballet.’ An idea had occurred to him in
bed; and as Strauss, the waltz-maker, in those circumstances used to
jump out to note a tune on his tablets, so Monsieur K. had to jump out
and dance it. Undistracted by other things, a ballet-master goes about
the world gathering all the scattered beautiful gestures, the nice
correlations of innumerable details (and how the tilt of the chin or the
pathos of a smile just crowns the perfection of an attitude of Pavlova’s
or Karsavina’s!), and keeps them ready to issue, in organic order, from
his mind at the inspiration of the appropriate musical phrase.”
It is to be feared that the English ballet-dancer does not take herself
sufficiently seriously. It may even be that she is a little ashamed of
herself. One has the uneasy feeling that she regards dancing as merely a
stepping-stone to higher things--to musical comedy for instance! It is
her profession, not her art. Not until English dancers begin to realise
the significance of the dance as art and to create that choregraphic
atmosphere which at present appears to exist only in Russia, shall we
have a true renaissance of the Ballet in England.
[Illustration: BEATRICE COLLIER AND FRED FARREN
IN _La Danse des Apaches_
_Photographs: Ellis & Walery_]
CHAPTER XIII
ORIENTAL AND SPANISH DANCING
It does not require a very minute observation to discover that peoples
are distinguished not only by their speech, but by their habitual
movements and attitudes. Every country has its special unspoken idiom of
gesture, which sometimes differs in different parts of the same country
as perceptibly as the spoken dialect. This characteristic gesture is the
foundation of every national dance, which does but elaborate and adorn
it.
The composers of the Russian ballets have achieved novel and interesting
effects by using this racial attitude as the basis for the scheme of
some of their dances. In _Cléopâtre_ they have adopted the attitude of
the ancient Egyptians, or rather those attitudes which are depicted on
the pottery and frescoes of the old Egyptian civilisation. Whether these
attitudes were ever really typical of the attitudes of the people is at
least questionable. It is quite as likely that they were an artistic
convention of the time, due to the naïve conceptions of the draughtsman.
But there can be no doubt that ancient Egypt had a characteristic
alphabet of gesture, as individual as that of ancient Greece, although
probably it has been exaggerated in the designs on the figured monuments
by the faultiness of the perspective. This circumstance, however, does
not render it any the less serviceable as an element of design in the
dance. In _Scheherazade_, again, Nijinsky’s dance is based upon the
abrupt, angular, almost apish movements of the negro.
With Italians gesticulation so inevitably accompanies speech that it is
not surprising that the ballet should have been originated and
perfected, at all events so far as its pantomime is concerned, in Italy.
Of course, as a people becomes more intellectual, and learns to express
all the nuances of thought by means of language alone, it relies less
upon the elucidation of gesture. Anglo-Saxons are naturally schooled in
reserve and seek to avoid any betrayal of the emotions by physical
expression. The national gesture nevertheless exists and finds its
embodiment in the national dance, the Morris. America can scarcely be
said to have any national dance, unless it be the cake walk, which is
plainly stamped with all the ungainliness of negro movement. But
American vaudeville artists--I am thinking of some who have danced this
year in London--seem almost unconsciously to have seized upon the
American gesture and realised it in their dances. Naturally they have
distorted it; they have given it the immoderate energy of American life,
the exaggeration of American wit, and the sensationalism of American
advertisement. Who knows but that they will end by giving America its
national dance!
The lines of bodily movement in the West are radically different from
those of the East. The quality of action in the West is energy and
abruptness; it tends to express itself in angles rather than in curves.
The gesture of the East moves with the lethargy, the subtlety,
interrupted by sudden bursts of violence, that are characteristic of the
Eastern temper. Nothing could be less suitable to the tranquillity and
torpor of the East than the swift and intricate dances of more bracing
climes. It may be affirmed as a rough generalisation that Western
dancing gives the greater importance to the feet, Eastern dancing to the
body. In many of the most characteristic Oriental dances, the body
revolves around its own axis, as it were, while the legs remain
stationary. Equally with the motions of the body, the Eastern dance has
made extraordinary use of the motions of the hands and arms. It has
found an invaluable auxiliary in the extreme refinement of the Eastern
woman’s hands, which always seem so infinitely more expressive than the
passive oval mask of her face. For me the eternal, the essential gesture
of the East is symbolised in the movement of a woman’s hand that I saw
through the iron grating of a koubba on the edge of the Sahara--for
where the Arab is, there is the East. The woman herself I did not see,
for she was
[Illustration: RUTH ST DENIS]
crouching upon the floor against the tomb. But her whole body could not
have expressed her character more revealingly than her hand, with its
fingers stained at the tips with henna to a bright orange colour and as
astonishingly slender as those of a Madonna in a primitive Italian
painting. I think I should scarcely be believed if I tried to tell how
much there was of resignation, how much of a refined voluptuousness, in
its delicate gesture.
Eastern dances, performed by really skilled Eastern dancers, have not
yet been seen upon the European stage. Of course the Ouled-Nails and the
hired _almées_ of the Algerian cafés introduced the _danse du ventre_ to
Paris at the time of the first Exhibition. It would be easy to dismiss
this dance with contempt if one had not seen it danced with a certain
barbaric sincerity, far away from the atmosphere of cigarettes and
liqueurs of the cafés of Biskra and Tunis. After all, a dance is very
much like the Spanish inn of the olden days--you find in it principally
what you bring to it. And so acute an observer as Lady Duff Gordon found
in the _danse du ventre_ an intensity that gave it a kind of dignity. “I
could not call it voluptuous,” she says, “any more than Racine’s
_Phèdre_; it is Venus ‘tout entière à sa proie attachée,’ and to me it
seemed tragic. It is far more realistic than the fandango and far less
coquettish, because the thing represented is _au grand sérieux_, not
travestied, _gazé_, or played with.”
But the dancing of the East, or rather of India in particular, has found
a very skilled translator in a dancer of American origin, Miss Ruth St
Denis. I believe it is true that Miss St Denis has never actually been
in India, but she has mixed freely with Indians; she has studied their
art, their religions, their character, she has penetrated into the
spirit of the people as far as it is possible for a Westerner to do so.
She has, in fact, caught the gesture of the East. Her dancing has for
the most part a religious and symbolic character--for it should be
remembered that, besides the dances founded upon the passions, the East
has evolved a whole range of dances illustrative of philosophical ideas.
Buddhism has carried the symbolism of the body to an extraordinary
degree of refinement. The locking and unfolding of the feet, the
uplifting of the arms and the hands, even the very curves of the
fingers, have all their esoteric meaning. The system of symbolism has so
penetrated the actions of the dance that not infrequently the sequence
and shades of the dancer’s movements are unintelligible to an
uninstructed eye. Thus the slow dance movements which Hindus contemplate
with delight for hours, though they may appear drearily monotonous to
the European, are full of instruction to the initiated. The ritual of
the dance is almost as intimately connected with Buddhism as the simpler
ritual of the altar with Catholicism. The wealthier temples possess
trained bands of dancers, a sort of vestal virgins, known as Devadassis,
the slaves of the god. They have the happy and pious custom of dancing
twice daily before the images of the gods, once in propitiation of their
own sins, once in intercession for the sins of the world. It is the
posturing of the Devadassi, rather than the dancing of the more
voluptuous Bayadère, that Miss Ruth Denis has sought to reproduce.
In her physical qualities, Miss St Denis is well fitted to represent the
type of the East. While her beauty has much of the allure of sex, it has
also that childish character which seems peculiar to the women of the
East. Her figure is exquisitely slender and her arms are as supple, her
hands as refined, as those of a Hindu. The way was prepared for her to a
certain extent by the success which Miss Isadora Duncan had already
achieved, and when she gave a series of fashionable matinées in New York
in 1906, previous to her descent upon Europe, her recognition was
immediate.
When she appeared at the Scala Theatre in London in 1908, Miss Ruth St
Denis was accompanied by half-a-dozen natives, who supplied a note of
human colour to the pictures of the street, the palace and the temple,
which formed the background of her dances. In most of the scenes, the
mystic atmosphere was assisted by the subdued light, the odour of
incense and the native melodies embodied in the striking music of Herr
Walter Meyrowitz. Her performances took the form of brief acts,
illustrative of native life.
The Cobra Dance was, strictly speaking, not a dance at all, for it was
performed in sitting, crouching or kneeling postures. The dancer
appeared in the rôle of a snake-charmer, and throwing off
[Illustration: RUTH ST. DENIS
FROM A DESIGN BY PAUL REITH IN _Jugend_ (MUNICH)]
her mantle revealed her arms clasped over either shoulder, like two
coiling snakes. On the first and fourth fingers of each hand two
enormous emeralds gleamed like serpents’ eyes. The arms slowly unwound
and with a curiously sinuous motion began to writhe about her body. They
twined, coiled, fought and darted with lightning flashes in all
directions, simulating the movements of the reptile with astonishing
fidelity. It was a marvellous exercise in the flexibility of the arms.
The Dance of the Spirit of Incense was set in a scene representing the
women’s quarter of an Indian house. The dancer entered bearing aloft a
bowl of smoking incense. With solemn, hierophantic gestures she kindled
the two censers that were placed on either side of the stage, and, as
the smoke curled upwards, she danced gravely and slowly, all the motions
of her body subtly responding to the rhythm of the wreathing smoke and
flowing so imperceptibly one into another that they seemed less a
sequence of separate movements than a single continuous thrill passing
from the feet to the finger-tips.
But it was in the Nautch and the Temple Dances that Miss St Denis really
established her claim to rank as a dancer of the first order. Clad in a
dress of vivid green spangled with gold, her wrists and ankles encased
in chattering silver bands, surrounded by the swirling curves of a gauze
veil, the dancer passed from the first slow languorous movements into a
vertiginous whirl of passionate delirium. Alluring in every gesture, for
once she threw asceticism to the winds, and yet she succeeded in
maintaining throughout that difficult distinction between the voluptuous
and the lascivious. The mystic Dance of the Five Senses was a more
artificial performance and only in one passage kindled into the passion
of the Nautch. As the goddess Radha, she is dimly seen seated
cross-legged behind the fretted doors of her shrine. The priests of the
temple beat gongs before the idol and lay their offerings at her feet.
Then the doors open, and Radha descends from her pedestal to suffer the
temptation of the five senses. The fascination of each sense, suggested
by a concrete object, is shown forth in the series of dances. Jewels
represent the desire of the sight, of the hearing the music of bells,
of the smell the scent of flowers, of the taste wine, and the sense of
touch is fired by a kiss. Her dancing was inspired by that intensity of
sensuous delight which is refined to its furthest limit probably only in
the women of the East. She rightly chose to illustrate the delicacy of
the perceptions not by abandon but by restraint. The dance of touch, in
which every bend of the arms and of the body described the yearning for
the unattainable, was more freely imaginative in treatment. And in the
dance of taste there was one triumphant passage, when, having drained
the wine-cup to the dregs, she burst into a dionysiac nautch, which
raged ever more wildly until she fell prostrate under the maddening
influence of the god of wine. Then by the expression of limbs and
features showing that the gratification of the senses leads to remorse
and despair, and that only in renunciation can the soul realise the
attainment of peace, she returns to her shrine and the doors close upon
the seated image, resigned and motionless. So she affirmed in choice and
explicit gesture the creed of the Buddha.
The art of Miss St Denis is not free from adventitious elements. It is
too much concerned with the expression of ideas to give itself up wholly
to the creation of beauty. It is symbolic, but not in the large,
suggestive way in which Isadora Duncan’s dancing is symbolic; the
symbolism is somewhat limited, artificial and literal. Her dancing,
moreover, with some exceptions, tends to be static, an affair of
postures and poses, and in some cases these postures are more learned
than beautiful. Miss Denis is an imitative rather than a creative
artist--that is to say, she attempts to interpret the East with both
fidelity to the letter and the spirit, rather than to use its gestures
freely, with the bold grasp of an artist, as elements of design. Her
treatment of the East is in direct opposition to that of the creators of
_Scheherazade_, who have been reckless of accuracy of detail, who have
sought only for the materials to build up a gorgeous pattern, and have
passed every concrete fact through the fire of a transforming artistic
imagination. If, as has been said, the art of the future lies in a West
that is conscious of the East, the recognition of the East will be in
the manner of Monsieur Fokine rather than in that of Miss St Denis.
Nevertheless, Miss Ruth
[Illustration: LEONORA
AS A SPANISH DANCER
_Photograph: Dover Street Studios, Ltd._]
St Denis duly ranks as one of the most cultured dancers of the time,
and, in her special sphere, certainly the most learned. Her dancing is
penetrated with the finest spirit of Indian art in much the same way in
which Isadora Duncan’s is imbued with the art of Greece. She has
explored a new tract of the vast country which Miss Duncan opened up,
and by interpreting the art of the East she has perceptibly broadened
the scope of dancing in the West.
Probably those who are trying to revive the Classical Dance would
succeed in getting closer to its spirit if they were to add to their
study of the figures on ancient vases and frescoes an observation of the
living Spanish dance of to-day. The gesture of a people has a more
ancient and unchanging history than its speech, and it is unquestionable
that much of the gesture of the ancient world has been preserved among
the Spanish people, who still retain something of the inner spirit as
well as of the outward circumstances of the ancient civilisation. Many
of the poses found in the Greek figurines are essentially those of
Spanish women; the play of the arms and hands, the sideward movement,
the extreme backward extension of the head and body, are movements
common both to the Greek and the Spanish dance. The castanet, which is
invariably associated with Spanish dancing, was also used in Greece. The
dancing that persists in Spain is almost certainly of a kind that was
once common all round the shores of the Mediterranean. It has of course
been modified by an Oriental influence, but it possessed its special
characteristics long before the coming of the Moors. In the early days
of the Roman Empire the dancers of Cadiz created a furore in Rome
comparable to that which the Russians have aroused in the Paris and
London of to-day.
Spanish dancing has been made familiar to French and English audiences
by several dancers of repute, of whom the best known are Carmencita,
Otero, Guerrero and Tortajada. There are some kinds of dancing, however,
which are untranslatable into the terms of the art of other countries.
The Spanish dance is intensely national. The snapping of the castanets,
the short and insolent skirt, the exciting rhythm of the music, do not
alone suffice for the performance of the _jota_ or the _fandango_, as
some foreign artists would appear to suppose; nor even when the dancer
has caught the trick of the swaying of the hips, the lightning of the
eyes, the arched back and provocative gestures, has she caught the
spirit of the dance. She must first transform herself into a Spaniard.
The Spanish dance depends almost wholly on personality; and not on the
personality of the dancer alone, for it is one of those dances which
seem to require an indefinable “rapport” between the dancer and the
spectator. Mr Havelock Ellis has drawn attention to this feature in an
interesting passage in “The Soul of Spain.” One of the characteristics
of Spanish dancing, he says, “lies in its accompaniments, and
particularly in the fact that under proper conditions all the spectators
are themselves performers. In flamenco dancing, among an audience of the
people, every one takes a part by rhythmic clapping and stamping, and by
the occasional prolonged ‘olés’ and other cries by which the dancer is
encouraged or applauded. Thus the dance is not the spectacle for the
amusement of a languid and passive public, as with us. It is rather the
visible embodiment of an emotion in which every spectator himself takes
an active and helpful part; it is, as it were, a vision evoked by the
spectators themselves and upborne on the continuous waves of rhythmical
sound which they generate. Thus it is that at the end of a dance an
absolute silence often falls, with no sound of applause: the relation of
performer and public has ceased to exist. So personal is this dancing
that it may be said that an intimate association with the spectators is
necessary for its full manifestation. The finest Spanish dancing is at
once killed or degraded by the presence of an indifferent or
unsympathetic public, and that is probably why it cannot be transplanted
but remains local.”
The success of La Carmencita was primarily due to this free play of
personality which the Spanish dance permits. Mr John Sargent’s picture,
by which she will always be known to posterity, admirably displays the
bold carriage, the somewhat defiant attitude, the suggestion of
suppressed fire, which are characteristic of her type. As a dancer pure
and simple, she was surpassed by many who never attained her wide
reputation. She had gone through
[Illustration: LA OTERO
_Photograph: W. & D. Downey_]
no inexorable training. She never pretended to any brilliancy of
execution that was beyond her powers. Her manner was simple and
unaffected. Without making any very strenuous efforts she glided through
a few simple movements that showed off to perfection her supple and
well-proportioned figure. She achieved fame less by the technique of her
dancing than by her character, her allure, the distinction of her
intriguing and exotic personality.
La Tortajada is a figure well known both in London and in America. Her
style is not representative of the purest type of Spanish dancing, as it
is apt to be infected with the atmosphere of the music-hall. Her
personality, moreover, is far less interesting than that of La
Carmencita. She was born in Granada, and her aim is to bring the warmth
and colour of the sun of meridional Spain into her dancing--to dance, in
fact, as she expressed it, “la danse ensoleillée.”
“America,” she says in a naïve account of her career, “has fêted me and
showered dollars on me by the handful. Millionaires in particular have
given me a great ‘réclame,’ among them Pierpont Morgan, Astor and
Vanderbilt. The latter gave me a thousand dollars to dance one Christmas
Day. Another American, Mr Taft, the future President, made a bet that I
was taller than another woman well known to the public. He was at the
pains of coming himself to measure me, and having won the five thousand
dollars, he at once purchased a magnificent piece of jewellery with them
which he offered to me. If the millionaires fêted me, so also did the
poorest citizens of the Republic, the humble Sioux, who are still to be
found in some of the wilder regions. While making a motor tour in the
district of the immense pine forests for the benefit of my health, I
fell in with some of these fine fellows and the idea suddenly occurred
to me that I would dance specially for them. My husband and I improvised
a stage and thereupon I danced my most voluptuous flamenca, which at
first terrified but soon afterwards delighted them. I was royally
rewarded, for the chief made me a present of some gold dust and a purse
fashioned out of serpent’s skin.... But the most curious spectators that
I have known were three thousand Zulus whom I came across when motoring
back from Johannesburg. Unlike the Sioux, they did not look on at my
dance in silent admiration. No sooner had I begun to dance than the
Zulus commenced to caper about all round me. Nothing could have been
more picturesque, and at the same time more ludicrous, than the sight of
a white woman in a mantilla appearing as mistress of the revels in a
negro orgy!”
Guerrero is perhaps a more impassioned dancer than La Tortajada, but she
has strayed even further from the purity of the Spanish dance. At the
Marigny Theatre in Paris, she has this summer been dancing a new and
startling dance called the Tango. It is a curious mixture of composure
and frenzy, and at first acquaintance seems full of complications. Her
rendering of it is said to take away the breath of the English and
American tourists who fill the popular music-hall among the chestnuts of
the Champs Elysée.
But the performances of these exponents of Spanish dancing only serve to
show how swiftly it degenerates as soon as it leaves its native
atmosphere. Even in the peninsula itself the dance seems to lose its
essential character when it is performed in one of those palatial
cosmopolitan music-halls, by the erection of which Spain is endeavouring
to convince the world of its ability to keep abreast of the march of
progress. To see the real classic dancing of an elder Spain, it is
necessary to search among the shabby streets of the poorer quarters of
Seville or Barcelona. There you may perchance discover some stifling,
exuberant little café or theatre of the people, in which, if fortune
favours you, you may find a dancer of talent, even of genius. I remember
such an one in a little café chantant in Barcelona, no bigger and
scarcely less unfurnished than a railway station waiting-room. The
dancer appeared to be on the most intimate terms with the occupants of
the stalls, and could at request lampoon the particular foibles of each
habitué in _copletas_ that were barbed with the cruellest Iberian irony.
But her dancing had a brilliance, a fire, an abandon, and even a
technical excellence, which I have never seen equalled in the displays
of those artists whose names are known throughout Europe. It was at
once
[Illustration: LA GUERRERO
_Photograph: W. & D. Downey_]
expressive of the individuality of the dancer and of the race. It was as
easy and as eloquent as Spanish speech. It was in fact the dancer’s
manner of conversing with the spectator, and it had all the daring, the
wit, the provocativeness and at times the real poetry of her couplets.
It is little wonder that all the essential fire of the Spanish dance is
quenched when it is performed upon the foreign stage. The atmosphere of
Andalusia cannot be created in London or New York even by dancers of
greater genius than Otero, Guerrero and Tortajada; and it should not be
forgotten that Mr Royall Tyler, whose word upon the inner life of Spain
must be taken as final, has remarked that “neither of those three ladies
dances well enough to earn her living by the art in Spain. Their dances
are intended for exportation into foreign countries where they are more
appreciated.”
CHAPTER XIV
THE REVIVAL OF THE MORRIS DANCE
No view of the modern renaissance of dancing would be complete which did
not take account of the revival of the Morris Dance.
Perhaps it has been too lightly assumed that England being a nation of
shopkeepers has never been a nation of dancers. But shopkeeping is
merely a habit, the product of circumstance, and in its nature a
temporary makeshift. Dancing is a need of the spirit, a daughter of the
high moods, and if, as Lucian said, it is as old as love, it is surely
also as everlasting. The shopkeeping spirit may be, and probably is,
antagonistic to dancing; but by the shopkeeping spirit I do not mean the
modern spirit, for that is an incalculable, energetic and mobile thing,
which is going to bear I know not what strange fruit in life and art. I
mean that austere, unsmiling, level and practical temper which began to
overshadow Western Europe some time in the sixteenth century; which set
its face against ecstasy, and art which is the expression of ecstasy;
which regarded poverty and vagabondage and unrestrained laughter as
disreputable; which worshipped respectability, common-sense, such
success as could be expressed in terms of cash, and all things that were
materially substantial and enduring; which created Puritanism, the
eighteenth century and the industrial revolution. To this temper, which
found a secure lodgment in the Anglo-Saxon mind, dancing was naturally
unsympathetic. But though it long held Britain, and America too, in its
grip, it was not strong enough to strangle the free and joyous spirit
which had created “Merrie England.”
That spirit found its typical expression in the dance, and particularly
in the Morris Dance. Not until the improbable event of the antiquarians
arriving at unanimity will it be determined whether or no the Morris was
originally danced by the Moors or “Moriscos” of Spain and imported by
John of Gaunt into England in the fourteenth century; but if so, it was
“diablement changé en route.” It mixed with the native dances and was
incorporated with a mass of Catholic and even pre-Christian tradition.
In some English villages there are memories of a dance on the 21st of
June, the longest day of the year, of a slaughtered ox, a procession in
which one of the dancers carried a sword and a large wooden cup. To
surmise what dim forgotten rites of a pagan sun-worship linger in this
ritual would take us far into the labyrinth of archæology. But whatever
its origin the Morris gathered unto itself the joy and holiday spirit of
the countryside. It had its roots deep in the soil. It was inspired by
the rhythm of an ancient, simple and full-blooded life, if not by the
very rhythm of the woods and rivers themselves.
In spite of direct attempts at suppression, the inevitable desuetude of
ancient custom, and the changed conditions of the life of the people,
this dancing has come down from Catholic England to our own day. The
Puritan preachers denounced it as “lewde” and “ungodlie”; but it
survived even the tyranny of Cromwell’s major-generals and flourished
gaily under the Merry Monarch. In the eighteenth century it had already
become demoded. In a journal of the period we read of an account of a
_soirée_, in which the writer said of a certain lady, with more candour
than courtesy, that she “looked as silly and gaudy, I do vow, as one of
the old Morris Dancers.” In many villages, particularly in the west and
south-west of England, there still exist “sides” of morris-dancers to
whom the tunes and music have been handed down through an unbroken
tradition. The fidelity of this tradition is in many cases surprising.
Mr Cecil Sharp, to whom is chiefly due the rediscovery of the ancient
dances, relates how he took down a tune from the fiddler of the Bidford
morris-men which was identical, note for note, with one that he had
found in a version printed in 1550. But during the last twenty or thirty
years many of the old morris-sides have been disbanded. The revival has
come at the eleventh hour. Already dances have been collected
representing probably every variety of the morris-step; but in another
generation the memory of the Morris Dance would have almost vanished
from the countryside.
Soon after the Morris Dance took root in England it became incorporated
with the old mummers’ plays, which embodied the cult of Robin Hood. The
traditional characters of Friar Tuck, Little John and Maid Marian
accompanied the dancers. The hobby-horse and the fool, sometimes known
as the dysard, provided the necessary comic relief. But the main
interest, and a very serious interest it was, centred in the dancing. At
one time almost every village possessed its troupe, and among the
various villages there was a rivalry of dancing as keen as the rivalry
of football to-day. Occasionally the contest became so hot that the
victory was only determined by a vigorous bout of cudgelling with the
staves, which served as an accessory in the dance. The Morris Dance was
no hoydenish revel in which any unskilled yokel could take part. It
developed an intricate technique which not unnaturally lent itself to
the introduction of a kind of “star” system among the dancers.
Of these professional performers perhaps the most illustrious was a
certain William Kemp, who achieved fame in Elizabeth’s reign by dancing
the Morris all the way from London to Norwich. He wrote an account of
this feat in a pamphlet called “_Kemp’s Nine Daies’ Wonder_, performed
in a daunce from London to Norwich: Containing the pleasures, paines and
kind entertainment of William Kemp betweene London and that Citty, in
his late _Morrice_.” In his droll and vivid manner he tells how at
Sudbury “there came a lusty tall fellow, a butcher by his profession,
that would in a Morice keepe me company to Bury. I gave him thankes, and
forward wee did set; but ere ever wee had measur’d half a mile of our
way, he gave me over in the plain field, protesting he would not hold
out with me; for, indeed, my pace in dauncing is not ordinary. As he and
I were parting, a lusty country lasse being among the people, cal’d him
faint-hearted lout, saying, ‘If I had begun to daunce, I would have held
out one myle, though it had cost my life.’ At which words many laughed.
‘Nay,’ saith she, ‘if the dauncer will lend me a leash of his bells,
I’le venter to tread one myle with him myself.’ I lookt upon her, saw
mirth in her eyes, heard boldness in her words, and beheld her ready to
tucke up her russat petticoate; and I fitted her with bels, which she
merrily taking garnisht her thicke short legs, and with a smooth brow
bad the tabur begin. The drum strucke: forward marcht I with my merry
Mayde Marian, who shook her stout sides, and footed it merrily to
Melford, being a long myle. There parting with her (besides her
skinfulle of drinke), and English crowne to buy more drinke; for, good
wench, she was in a pittious heate; my kindness she requited by dropping
a dozen good courtsies, and bidding God bless the dauncer. I bade her
adieu; and, to give her her due, she had a good eare, daunst truly, and
wee parted friends.”
The Morris was sometimes danced, as William Kemp and his amateur
roadside companion performed it, as a solo dance; but its most common
characteristic was that it was danced by “sides” or sets of six. Women
but rarely figured as performers. The dress of the men has become
traditional, but it appears originally to have been merely the holiday
dress of the period. It was marked by that “gaudiness” to which the
captious critic of the eighteenth century took exception. The dancer was
plentifully adorned with ribbons and rosettes, and latterly he wore the
tall beaver hat which has become an essential part of the costume. The
outfit was completed by the indispensable bells, which were stitched
upon thongs and tied to the shins. Sometimes both treble and tenor bells
were worn. In some of the dances the performers carried a white
handkerchief and in others a short wooden staff.
In early times the dance was accompanied by a pipe and tabor, otherwise
known as whittle and dub. The pipe was a kind of flageolet, which the
minstrel played with the left hand; from his left thumb was suspended
the tabor or miniature drum. These primitive instruments were superseded
by the fiddle, which in its turn is giving place to the concertina.
The dance of the people is necessarily different from the dance of art.
All national dances are characterised by vigour rather than
[Illustration: MORRIS DANCE: BEAN-SETTING
FROM _The Esperance Morris Book_
_By permission of Messrs. J. Curwen & Sons, Ltd._]
by grace. There is lurking in them a certain note of savagery and
battles long ago. The old fighting England as well as Merrie England
still lives in the Morris. It is not surprising that King Charles’s men
should have danced it on the eve of Naseby fight. It is essentially a
dance for men, and a dance for the open air. It does not sway or glide;
its movement is spirited and abrupt. The foot is lifted as in walking
and then vigorously straightened to a kick; the heels come solidly to
earth. The object of the dancer is to make the bells ring fortissimo,
and to do this he must kick, and kick hard. The Morris does not exhibit
the graceful postures and fawn-like agility of the Spanish country
dances, nor the fiery energy of the Hungarian and the Russian. In its
solid merriment, its even rhythm, its vigorous but restrained movements,
it is essentially British.
It would be impossible to describe the spirit of the Morris Dance better
than in the admirable words of Mr Cecil Sharp, who is not only learned
in the history of the dance, but has sought it out wherever the
tradition lingers on the greensward and under the ancient oaks of an
England that is passing away. “It is, in spirit,” he says, “the
organised, traditional expression of virility, sound health and animal
spirits. It smacks of cudgel-play, of quarter-staff, of wrestling, of
honest fisticuffs. There is nothing sinuous in it, nothing dreamy;
nothing whatever is left to the imagination. It is a formula based upon
and arising out of the life of man, as it is lived by men who hold much
speculation upon the mystery of our whence and whither to be
unprofitable; by men of meagre fancy, but of great kindness to the weak;
by men who fight their quarrels on the spot with naked hands, drink
together when the fight is done, and forget it, or, if they remember,
then the memory is a friendly one. It is the dance of folk who are slow
to anger, but of great obstinacy--forthright of act and speech: to watch
it in its thumping sturdiness is to hold such things as poniards and
stilettos, the swordsman with the domino, the man who stabs in the
back--as unimaginable things. The Morris Dance, in short, is a perfect
expression in rhythm and movement of the English character.”
The modern revival of morris-dancing in England is of very recent
origin, but of astonishingly rapid growth. The story of its rise reads
like a romance. This movement, which is already national in its scope,
which promises to renew the heart of England, which is swelling out into
wider circles that will probably be felt throughout the Empire and
America, was born in a girls’ club in a poor quarter of the north-west
of London. The object of the Espérance Girls’ Club in Cumberland Market
was to bring something of the joyous and serene atmosphere of a younger
and fresher world into the grim and hurried life of the city dwellers.
For some time one of the features of the club had been the encouragement
of music, dancing and play-acting. During some winters Scotch reels and
strathspeys, Irish jigs and folk-songs, had been practised one night a
week. A meeting between Mr H. C. MacIlwaine, the musical director of the
club, and Mr Cecil Sharp, the leading authority on folk-music, led to
the introduction of the English folk-song. From the folk-song to the
folk-dance was only a step. Mr Sharp seven years before had collected a
set of morris-tunes from some dancers in Oxfordshire, in whose family
the Morris had been handed down from father to son for five generations.
The idea suggested itself that as the girls had learnt to sing the old
songs they might also learn to dance the old dances.
In October 1905 Miss Mary Neal, the secretary of the club, who has
throughout been the directing spirit of the movement, went down to
Oxfordshire and brought two of the morris-men up to London, and set them
to teach the members of the club. The success of the experiment was
immediate and astonishing. The girls were as unfamiliar with the steps
and the music as with the speech and dances of ancient Greece; but
perhaps a kind of ancestral memory awoke within them. The rhythms of the
Morris had sprung from the rhythms of the old English life, and the
Londoners, who are said to be never more than three generations from the
soil, responded to a summons of the blood. Within half-an-hour of the
coming of the Oxfordshire dancers the Morris, with its stamping of feet
and clashing of staves, its maze of intricate movements, was in full
swing upon a London floor. Thus was begun the revival of morris-dancing
which to-day is a part of the national life.
The next step was the giving of a public concert to make known to the
larger world the rediscovery of the ancient dances. This took place at
the Small Queen’s Hall in the following April. The public interest was
immediately aroused. As one of the newspapers remarked with prophetic
insight, it was “a little entertainment which may indeed light such a
candle in England as will not immediately be put out.”
From that time the movement progressed by leaps and bounds. Inquiries
began to pour in as to how the traditional dancing could be brought back
into the lives of the English people, to those in the towns who had lost
it altogether as well as to those in the country for whom it was only a
vague memory. Miss Neal’s answer to this demand was to send out the best
dancers among the members of her club to act as teachers. They have
danced the Morris throughout the length and breadth of England. There is
not a county to-day where the merry jangle of the bells and the clatter
of the staves is not heard. In course of time the Board of Education
took cognisance of the movement and introduced the Morris and other
country dances into the curriculum of the elementary schools. In the
spring of 1911 Miss Neal visited America, and by lectures and
demonstration showed to the people of the new continent the old dances
which their Puritan forefathers had omitted to bring with them. In
response to numberless appeals for instruction she left behind one of
the teachers of the Espérance Club, and the movement in the States is
spreading with the same astonishing enthusiasm and rapidity as in
England.
The most significant and hopeful feature of this movement is that it is
in every sense a popular one. The inveterate cavillers may argue that it
is artificially imposed upon the younger generation by a few cultured
and enthusiastic pedants, and they will certainly repeat the well-worn
shibboleth concerning the impossibility of putting back the clock. But
the artificiality has been in the enforced imposition of a Puritan code
that abolished dancing from the village green. To all healthy children
it is as natural to dance as to laugh and sing. The tradition has been
abruptly broken; now it is being restored to them and they respond to it
with every fibre of their being. They are far from regarding it as yet
another troublesome item in a bewildering system of education; they do
not have to be driven to it as to a new species of drill. They revel in
it as in a delightful game, for it satisfies all the child’s inborn love
of music and pantomime and emphatic rhythm. When once the initial
impetus has been given from above, the movement goes on with its own
momentum. Its motive force is not authority but the old indomitable
impulse of the blood.
All that the revival of the old dances will do for the rising generation
it is impossible to foretell. It is giving them back the power of
self-expression, which the common people seem once to have possessed in
the old days when music and song came naturally to birth in the life of
the folk. As Miss Mary Neal has well said: “Music is the one art in
which the otherwise inarticulate can express themselves, and so we have
in this music the truest meeting ground for all classes. The revival and
practice of our English folk-music is part of a great national revival,
a going back from town to country, a reaction against all that is
demoralising in city life. It is a reawakening of that part of our
national consciousness which makes for wholeness, saneness, and healthy
merriment.”
The movement is at present still in its trial stage. If it becomes
indeed a national revival of dancing it must result in a development of
the dance. It cannot remain content with merely perpetuating an ancient
formula. Every form of art which has the seeds of life in it must needs
change and grow. The Morris, as has been said, was originally a men’s
dance, and already its performance by girls is changing something of its
character. The introduction of the feminine element necessarily robs it
of its sturdiness and at the same time lends it an added gaiety and
grace. But the change will probably go deeper than this. The old Morris
was the expression of a mode of life that has passed away; out of it
must be developed some newer variation more fitted to express the spirit
of a broader and fuller life. In a suggestive passage, Mr Holbrook
Jackson indicates the direction of the development: “The old English
folk-dances are limited in range; they are a combination of acrobatic
leaps and hoydenish frisks. They are, indeed, the expression of a
non-reflective and rather boorish peasantry. To-day conditions have
changed. The peasantry are no more, and we have become introspective and
reflective. The bumpkin and his kind have been replaced by the clerk,
with a new set of needs and different nuances of desire; so that we have
to consider not so much the question of reviving the dances of the past,
because, as such, these can never be anything but curiosities, antiques,
but how to pick up the lapsed tradition of the dance at the point in
history when it expressed the emotions of the people, and to give that
tradition a chance of new life in our own day; not a chance of imitating
the past in form, but a chance of imitating the past in spirit, a chance
of doing for to-day what it once did for yesterday.”
The Morris cannot properly be called a dance of art; it is a dance of
the people. It can never be a substitute for the dance of the theatre.
But the popular revival of the old dances is important, not only in
providing a new means of emotional expression, but in arousing a new
interest in the art of the dance itself. Dancing is a sensitive plant
which can only thrive in a congenial atmosphere. In some degree all the
arts appear to live by the breath of popular favour. Their activity is
stimulated, their expression perfected, by interest, criticism and
understanding. The art of dancing has always risen to its highest level
when it has been most esteemed; decadence has always succeeded to
neglect. “Dancing is an art, let the public remember,” a lover and
critic of the dance has said, “which depends on their support for its
very existence. The poet, the painter, the sculptor can work for
posterity; but the dancer’s art is fugitive, not permanent. If the
contemporaries of any dancer fail through ignorance, or dulness, or
bigotry, to appreciate her, no one else can.”
If England becomes once more a nation of dancers, bigotry and dulness
and ignorance will never again be obstacles to the flowering of the art
of the Dance.
CHAPTER XV
THE FUTURE OF THE DANCE
“Men are so unimaginative! My husband has all sorts of appliances for
getting strong quick. He gets up in the morning and pulls at straps,
twirls objects and kicks furiously at nothing. Such antics you never
saw. Doubtless they have some underlying advantage or he wouldn’t
perform them, for he is a practical man. But they are so ridiculous. I
always think of Don Quixote fighting the windmill when I see him
threatening the air and striking absurd attitudes so seriously.”
It is an American woman who speaks, and she speaks as the mouthpiece of
a new idea--the attempt to recreate the lost rhythms of the human body
by the means of dance movements. Not the least important of the results
of the modern renaissance of dancing has been the rediscovery of the
grace of bodily movement by the modern man and woman. The sight of the
beauty of human motion on the stage has naturally suggested the idea of
the introduction of this beauty into daily life. The dancing of Isadora
Duncan, of Maud Allan, of Pavlova and Mordkin, has in fact awakened the
ancestral voices of the blood; the spectator can no longer remain
passive, but demands to be allowed to take his or her part in the cosmic
measure. The speaker continues: “Now, when I get up and feel headachy or
as if my body was stuffed with sawdust, I too have my exercise. But, oh,
the difference! I start the ‘Marche Militaire’ on my patient phonograph,
and the strains are so inspiring that I go through my paces so buoyantly
that my husband stops his seesawing to enjoy my dance. Now the
difference lies in this, that while I am unlimbering my muscles and
starting my blood gaily through my veins, my heart and my mind are also
uplifted with the rhythm of music and pose.”
She then describes how when the patient phonograph is giving forth
Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song” she accompanies the music with a story
related in motion and gesture. “I first point to an imaginary tree, run
lightly to it, stretch up and pull down a bough, take it in my arms,
then gaily throw it aside. This I do three times in different corners of
the room. Suddenly I am attracted by the upspringing grass and trip
lightly over it lest I crush it. Then I see flowers on the grass, sit
down and gather an imaginary bouquet, then toss it over my head. This I
do three times, and perhaps you may think it easy to sit down with one
leg thrust forward and then break your pose gracefully in getting up. My
mood changes. I hear a bird singing and bend forward to listen with one
hand to my ear and my eye following its flight. Then I hear a bird in
another direction and follow it. Three times these movements are
repeated. The pose is now entirely different, the arms outspread as if
in flight. I am by this time fairly enchanted with the spring and give
myself up to the abandon of the moment, until my mood is exhausted and I
calm down with music into final repose.” At the conclusion of these
exercises she remarks: “At this moment I feel as if every part of my
body was enjoying an independent existence, but would, if I wished it,
take a subordinate position for the common good. That is exercise as it
should be.”
The husband, we may suppose, is now thoroughly out of humour with his
get-strong-quick methods. But where is his place in this new system by
which the flexibility of the body and the exhilaration of the mind are
sought in the movements of the dance? The dance, in any other sense than
that of a ball-room accomplishment, is generally regarded as unsuited to
the masculine character. How often has not one heard the remark that it
is unpleasing to see a man dancer. And a man himself would as a rule
rather be caught in the act of stealing than of dancing alone or with
his fellows. The prejudice is new. It is perhaps characteristic of an
artificial society for whose small conventions the liberal code of
nature is too broad. In all simple and virile societies men have
[Illustration: MIKAIL MORDKIN
IN _The Cymbal Dance_
_Photograph: Campbell Gray_]
been dancers--unless some cramping moral code imposed its arbitrary
prohibition--only in more decadent ages have they been content to be
passive spectators. The men who fought at Agincourt, the men who fell in
the Pass of Thermopylæ, were dancers. Greek manhood would not have been
what it was without the dance. The Greek youths danced as simply and
unconsciously as the Greek maidens, and they danced among themselves,
singly and in groups. Nietsche said a wise word to this generation when
he proclaimed his ideal: “Every man fit for warfare, every woman fit for
children, both fit for dancing with head and legs.”
America is seeking to discover a dance fit for men. It has found it in a
translation of the movements proper to athletics, in an expression in
dance form of all the masculine sports, a dance which women could not
perform if they tried. A spectator who has seen an exhibition of this
new method, which is clearly a revival of the old Greek method, has
recorded that “the postures were those of wrestlers or swimmers, or
runners or discus and javelin throwers, always preceded by the vigorous
dance steps. And none of it was in the least feminine. It was dancing,
but it was essentially masculine from start to finish. There was not a
suggestion of airy grace; there was more than a suggestion of strength
and rhythm and of iron muscles under excellent control.... Then,” he
continues, “I began to see the place of dancing in the world, its place
as a wholesome natural recreation and as a form of physical training,
more effective perhaps than any other, since a vigorous athletic dance
brings into play nearly every muscle in the body. I saw that a normal
enjoyment of dancing meant a healthy mind in a healthy body. There is no
more sane and natural form of exercise than the rhythmic buoyant
movements of the dance, performed with the vigour which men throw into
it.”
This form of dancing corresponds almost exactly with the Greek
_gumnāzo_, which was the simpler and more exclusively physical of the
two divisions of the dance, the groundwork for the _orchēsis_, the
intellectual and emotional expression of bodily movement. The former
provided the technique, which was to be mastered not for its own sake,
but as a means of furnishing the body with that eloquence by which it
could utter the moods of the spirit. Without this training in the dance,
the Greek men and women could never have acquired that exquisite
harmony, that easy grace of carriage, such as we see in ancient art. It
may even be said to have made Greek art possible, for as J. A. Symonds
remarked in his “Studies of the Greek Poets”: “The whole race lived out
its sculpture and painting, rehearsed, as it were, the great
masterpieces of Phidias and Polygnotus in physical exercise before it
learnt to express itself in marble and colour.”
The modern revival of the dance will not do the same for the art of our
own time until the dance becomes the common property of the people. For
the ordinary man and woman dancing provides the simplest, the most
natural, the most satisfying means of expression. Self-expression is a
faculty the loss of which the modern age is just beginning to be aware
of. An earlier age realised it in the arts of the folk--in folk-dance,
in folk-song, in folk-lore and in the popular pageants of the Church.
For its loss Puritanism is primarily responsible with its vulgar
shamefacedness; it was further weakened by the Industrial Revolution,
which broke up the old rhythms of social life; and it finally perished
when our artistic pleasures became specialised and we chose to become
passive, inexpressive spectators of professional artists rather than
attempt any artistic expression of our own. Whereas a former age lived
out its spirit in a popular music, a popular ballad literature and
national dances, the present generation prefers to listen to the
wheedling airs of the gramophone, to read a professional journalism and
to watch a paid dancer in the music-halls. The tendency everywhere is
for a passive enjoyment to usurp the place of an active participation
in the arts. But the desire for self-expression is instinctive
and irrepressible. In the dance it will find a means of
satisfaction--complete, elemental, and one which has the saving quality
of beauty.
By no means do I wish to imply that the dance of the theatre will ever
be merged in that of the people, still less that it is desirable that it
should. The dance of art demands the entire surrender of the artist’s
life. It is more than a pastime or a recreation. And as we demand that
it shall become more and more expressive, so the study of the dancer
must needs become more searching and minute. What new forms the dance is
going to take, what new spirit is going to inspire it, only the future
can show, but without pressing too far into the region of conjecture, it
is possible to suggest the probable direction of its development.
In spite of the renewed vigour which the Russians have given to the
ballet, it is difficult to believe that the strict, academic school of
ballet-dancing has still a long term of life before it. Indeed the
Russians--I am speaking exclusively of the Diaghilew company--have
renewed the ballet by revolutionising it. Not only have they utterly
transformed its spirit, but they have introduced a new manner and
gesture. In _Cléopâtre_ and _Scheherazade_ how little remains of the
strict technique of the classic ballet! The ballet is turning away from
Milan and looking towards Greece and the East. Anna Pavlova has pointed
out the way by which the academic style can find salvation. Her dancing
is transitional. From the ballet technique it derives its precision and
firmness of outline, but to these are added a fluency, a multitudinous
play of the nuances of light and shade, a capacity for expressing an
intense personal life. The fatal defect of the academic style is that it
is impersonal. It is the geometry of the dance. If the personality of
the dancer succeeds in disengaging itself, it is not so much expressed
in the movements of the dance as violently imposed upon them. How
drearily impersonal it can be, we are realising afresh now that the
success of the Russian ballet has let loose a flood of indifferent
ballet-dancers upon the stage. It permits a high degree of technical
accomplishment divorced from the slightest emotional significance. It is
the dance _par excellence_ for the uneducated and unintelligent
dancer--and it is she who must be banished from the stage. It justifies
the gentle sarcasm of Pius IX. who, when asked for his consent to the
presentation of a diadem to Fanny Elssler at Rome, assented, but
remarked that in his priestly simplicity he had always believed that
crowns were designed for the head and not for the legs. The famous
Austrian dancer scarcely merited the reproach, for she above all other
dancers danced with the head and the heart; but in general it is a just
indictment of the ballet technique that it has disproportionately
emphasised the importance of the legs and the feet. In the period of the
decline of the ballet, the dancers of Paris and Milan in particular were
little more than automata agitated by a pair of muscular legs, which
worked with the precision and monotony of clockwork. The modern dance
demands expression in every line of the body.
It is certain that the dance of the future will tend towards the fuller
expression of personality. We shall not be content to watch dances that
are merely dexterous, but only those that reveal a fresh and living
emotion. It will follow that the dance must become infinitely more
subtle, the body more responsive to the spirit, and the spirit more
attentive to the delicate rhythms of life. It follows also that the day
of the empty-headed, empty-hearted dancer, the simpering miss of the
pink shoes and fixed smile, will be over. We will listen for what the
artist has to say to us, and if she remains inarticulate, if she is
unable to utter a syllable of poetry or of passion or of wit, we will
politely ask her to trouble us no more.
In the future the content of the dance will be immeasurably enlarged. We
shall learn that, like the ancient Greek dance, “it deals with every
subject, grave and gay, religious and profane, decorous and indecorous;
nothing in nature is too high or too low to be outside its scope; it
embraces the whole scale of human passions.” When it is grown to its
full stature, the dance will probably combine with drama to create a new
language for the imagination. _Sumurûn_, the production of Professor Max
Reinhardt, is a type of a new art-form, neither ballet nor pantomime in
the accepted sense of the words, of which the future is bound to see a
further development. Its medium is gesture, but it is a gesture which,
unlike the gesture of the old pantomime, is never merely a transcript of
words. The twilight procession of figures to the palace of the Sheikh,
moving with the rhythm of a frieze against the blank white wall, was no
less than an event in the evolution of the dance-drama, pregnant with
suggestive ideas. It presented movements and gestures utterly
untranslatable into words, into painting or sculpture--untranslatable
even, I think, into music. They were movements which had been caught up
out of life itself, and fused by the imagination into pure symbols of
beauty and delight, of pride and passion and wit.
The dance, I believe, is still only in its infancy. Is it rash to
imagine that the evolution of dancing will be the special achievement of
art in this century, as the evolution of music was in the last? There is
a whole world of gesture waiting for the dance to take possession of.
The rediscovery of the gesture of the ancient world is perhaps the least
important part of the undertaking. There lies a broad field for
exploration in the innumerable racial and national gestures, each with
its separate beauty, and its separate expressiveness. And beyond this
stretches the yet more inexhaustible domain of nature, its multitudinous
minor rhythms, each various and distinguishable, merging into a grand
rhythm of the whole, the eternal rhythm of life itself. Fragments of
attitude, phrases of motion, are scattered prodigally up and down the
world, awaiting the seeing eye and the understanding mind that can pluck
these happy accidents, store them in the memory, and at the proper time
build up out of them a new pattern of the dance. When the choregrapher
of genius arrives, he will think in gestures, as the musician thinks in
sound, and the painter in mass and colour. And when he has realised the
lavish abundance of his material, he will pour into it like a molten
flood all that there is in the brimming life of our day to fire, to
madden, to delight and to rive the heart.
Then it will be the turn of the other arts to look wonderingly upon this
figure of the Dance, no longer straying timidly into their company, but
coming upon divine feet, with an assured mien and a mature grace, and
each will borrow something from her ancient and untiring ecstasy.
INDEX
A
Académie Royale de Musique et de Danse, 29
Adam, Adolphe, 51
_Aida_, 130
Albert, 34
Alexis, Tsar, 124
Alhambra Theatre, 62, 64, 170, 176
Allan, Maud, 110-118
Anne, Empress of Russia, 124
Apache Dance, 183
_Arabesques, Les_, 182
_Arc-en-ciel_, 86
Areja, Francisco, 124
Arensky, 128
_Arrow Dance_, 168
Astafieva, Seraphima, 146, 158
_Automne Bacchanale, L’_, 164, 168
B
_Babil and Bijou_, 61
Bakst, Léon, 132, 133, 134, 140, 145, 146
Balashova, Alexandra, 170, 176
Bathyllus, 46
Bauer, Henri, 36
_Bayadères, Les_, 40, 42
Bedells, Phyllis, 176, 182
Beerbohm, Mr Max, 18, 174
Beethoven, 111
Benois, M., 130, 138, 142, 154
Bensusan, Mr S. L., 65
Bergholz, 124
Berlioz, 59, 142
Bernhardt, Sarah, 110
Bertrand, 62
Blasis, Carlo, 127, 161
_Blue Danube_, 162
Borodin, 128, 142
Botticelli, 111, 113
Brahms, 166
Buddhism, 191
Burne-Jones, 73
_Butterflies_, 147
C
Cachucha, 49
Camargo, Mlle de, 30, 32
Cancan, 92, 95, 96
Candelon, 61
_Caprice_, 82
Carmenciat, La, 195, 196
_Carnaval, Le_, 133, 137, 139-141
_Carnaval de Venise, Le_, 40
_Casse-Noisette_, 128
Castor and Pollux, 29
Catherine the Second, 124
Cavallazzi, Madame, 67, 183
Cecchetti, M., 155
Cerali, 62
Cerito, Fanny, 52-54, 57
Chahut, 76
Chopin, 112, 115, 118, 144, 157, 162, 163, 166
Chorley, Mr, 42, 46
Cigale, La, 94
_Cléopâtre_, 133, 137, 145-148, 189
Clog Dance, 71
Collier, Beatrice, 183
Collins, Lottie, 78, 96-98
Conquest, Mrs, 73
_Coppélia_, 159, 177, 182
Coppi, Carlo, 62
_Corsair, Le_, 61
Coulon, 39
_Cygne, Le_, 162
D
_Dame de Pique_, 127
_Dance Dream_, 176
Danse du ventre, 191
D’Auban, John, 72, 73
_Day in Paris, A_, 183
Dearly, Max, 183
Delibes, 162, 177
De Quincey, 118
Devadassis, 192
Dewinne, 62
_Diablo Cojuelo, El_, 47, 51
Diaghilew, Serge de, 130, 139
Didelot, 40, 125
Diez, Rosita, 46
Dore, Madame, 61
_Dream of Butterflies and Roses, A_, 180
_Dryad, The_, 177, 180
Duncan, Isadora, 105-110, 153, 161, 194
E
Edward VII., 111
Edwards, Sutherland, 123
Égout, Grille d’, 92-94
Ellis, Mr Havelock, 196
Elssler, Fanny, 42-51, 52, 72, 91, 219
Empire Theatre, 62, 64, 169, 182
_Eoline_, 177
Espérance Club, 208
_Eugène Onegin_, 128
_Excelsior_, 61, 64
F
Fandango, 191, 195
Farren, Fred, 183
_Faust_, 49
_Faust up to Date_, 78
_Fernand Cortes_, 40
_Fille de Danube, La_, 42
Flamenco dancing, 196
_Flore et Zéphire_, 40
Fokine, M., 130, 138, 139, 140, 144, 162, 194
Folette, 94
Folies-Bergère, 83
Frederick the Great, 33
Fuller, Loie, 81-88
G
Gaiety Quartet, 74
Gaiety Theatre, 73, 96
Gardel, 29
Garrick, David, 27
Gautier, Théophile, 48, 50, 142
Gellert, 62
Geltzer, Catrina, 170, 176
Genée, Adeline, 67, 170, 176-182
Gillet, 70
_Giselle_, 42, 51, 52, 182
Giuri, 62
Glazounov, 128, 139, 144, 165
Glinka, 166
Glu, La, 94
Gluck, 89
Goethe, 81
Gordon, Lady Duff, 191
Goulue, La, 92-93
Grahn, Lucille, 52-54
Grey, Sylvia, 76
Grieg, 115, 117
Grisi, Carlotta, 50-54, 57
Guerrero, 195, 198, 199
H
Hamilton, Lady, 81
Handel, 32, 118
Harris, Sir Augustus, 65
Haydn, 44
Headlam, Rev. Stewart, 62, 64
Heine, 51
Henri IV., 28
Hervé, 62
_High Jinks_, 177, 180
Hollingshead, John, 73
I
Image, Prof. Selwyn, 147
J
Jacobi, 62
_Jack Sheppard_, 82
Jackson, Mr Holbrook, 164, 210
Joachim, 111
Jota, 195
K
Karsavina, Tamar, 130, 143, 158-159, 170
Kemp, William, 205-206
Knipper-Rabeneck, 119
Kschesinskaya, 154, 170
Kyasht, Lydia, 169-170
L
Lablache, 40
Landé, 124
Lanner, Katti, 62, 67, 183
Legnano, 62
Lethbridge, Alice, 76
Liadov, 139
Lind, Jenny, 54, 60
Lind, Letty, 75, 76
_Little Don Caesar de Bazan_, 74
Locke, 8, 32
Lola, 46
Louis XIII., 28
Louis XIV., 28, 29, 33
Louis-Philippe, 45
Lucian, 17
Lulli, 29
Lutz, Meyer, 78
M
MacIlwaine, Mr H. C., 208
Magdeleine, Mlle, 117
Magnin, Prof., 117
Malibran, 40, 51, 59
Marenco, 61
Marianski Theatre, 125, 129, 130, 159
_Mars et Vénus_, 40
“Marseillaise, The,” 118
Mazarin, 28
Medici, Catherine de, 28
Mendelssohn, 112
Ménestrier, 28
Meyrowitz, Walter, 192
_Milliner Duchess_, 177
Mistinguette, 183
Mogador, Céleste, 92, 93
_Monte Cristo_, 177
Montmartre, 76, 79
Mordkin, Mikail, 156, 160, 165, 167-169
Morny, Duc de, 43
Moscheles, 139, 140
Mozart, 88
N
Napoleon, 33, 48
_Narcisse_, 150
Nautch Dance, 193
Neal, Miss Mary, 208, 209, 210
Nelidova, Lydia, 62
Nietsche 219
Nijinsky, Waslaw, 128, 130, 134, 138, 143, 148, 153-157
Noblet, 34
Noverre, Jean-Georges, 30, 31, 159
O
Omar Khayyám, 90
_Ombre, L’_, 42
Otero, 195, 199
Ouled-Nails, 191
P
Palace Girls, 98
Palladino, 62
_Papillons, Danse des_, 162, 164
_Pas de Quatre_, 52-54, 57, 78
Patte-en-l’air, Nini., 92, 94
_Pavillon d’Armide, Le_, 128, 138-139
Pavlova, Anna, 113, 159-166, 170, 219
_Peer Gynt_, 115, 117
Perrot, 41, 49, 50, 53
Pertoldi, 62
Peter the Great, 124
_Petits Riens, Les_, 88
_Petrouchka_, 150
Phèdre, 125, 191
Pius IX., 49, 219
Plato, 19
Plaskaweska, 166
_Pointes_, 49
_Polovtsiennes, Danses_, 141
Pomaré, Clare, 92
Ponpon, Rose, 92
Preobrajenskaya, 125, 158, 190
_Prince Igor_, 61, 128, 137, 141
Prinster, Catherine, 48
_Pygmalion and Galatea_, 32
Pylades, 46
Q
_Quack M.D._, 82
Quadrille, 75
Quinalt, 29
R
Racine, 125, 191
Radetzki, 49
Rameau, 29
Rayon d’Or, 94
Reichstadt, Duc de, 45
Reinhardt, Prof. Max, 220
Remy, Marcel, 111
Reynolds, Mr Rothay, 126, 129
Richardson, Lady Constance Stuart, 119
Richelieu, 28
_Rienzi_, 60
Rimsky-Korsakov, 128, 133, 139, 148
Rodin, 117
Roehrich, 141
Romanticism, 47, 91
Rosai, 138
Rossi, Adelina, 62
Rubinstein, Ida, 146, 158
Ruskin, 17
Russell, Countess, 77
S
_Sadko_, 150
Saint-Saëns, 162
Sallé, 32
_Salomé, Vision of_, 113-115
Sallust, 20
Sargent, Mr John, 196
_Scheherazade_, 128, 133, 137, 148-149, 156, 158, 189, 194
Schmolz, 139
Schumann, 159
Scott, Mr Clement, 97
_Seasons, The_, 64
Sharp, Mr Cecil, 204, 207, 208
Shaw, Mr G. Bernard, 77
_Sleeping Beauty_, 128, 132
Soubrette, La, 94
“Soul of Spain, The,” 196
Southey, 167
_Spectator, The_, 61
_Spectre de la Rose, Le_, 142, 156, 158
St Denis, Ruth, 191-195
Strauss, 163
Sullivan, 62
_Sumurûn_, 220
_Swans, The_, 64
_Sylphide, La_, 40, 42, 46, 48, 51
_Sylphides, Les_, 137, 144
_Sylvia_, 182
Symonds, J. A., 218
T
Taft, Mr, 197
Taglioni, Marie, 39-48, 52, 53, 57, 58, 59, 182
Tango, 198
_Tannhaüser_, 60
“Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,” 96
Tchaikovsky, 127, 128, 132
Tcherepnin, 130, 139
_Tell, Guillaume_, 42
Tiller Girls, 98, 99
Tiller, Mr John, 98, 103
Titterton, Mr W. R., 109, 115
Tortajada, 195, 197-199
Tyler, Mr Royall, 199
V
Valse Chaloupée, La, 183
Van Buren, 48
Vaughan, Kate, 73-75, 76, 78
Véron, 44, 45
_Vestale, La_, 40
Vestris, Auguste-Armand, 33, 159
Vestris, Gætano, 29, 33
Victoria, Queen, 52
_Vineland_, 177
Voisins, Count Gilbert de, 43
Voltaire, 32, 33
W
Wagner, 59, 60, 61
Washington, 48
Weber, 142
Weber, Louise, 92
Wenzel, 62
Wiesenthal, 119
Y
_Yolande_, 64
Z
_Zéphire et Flore_, 40
_Zingaro_, 51
Zola, 165
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The use of the word “classical” to denote that class of dancing
which claims kinship with Greek art is somewhat confusing. Before the
recent revival, “classical” was the term applied to the traditional
style of the ballet as distinguished from skirt-dancing, step-dancing
and the various eccentric styles. To avoid confusion I have in general
used the word “academic” instead of “classical” when speaking of the
older school of the ballet.
[2] The late Sutherland Edwards proved himself a singularly accurate
prophet when in 1881 he wrote: “We shall probably have to go as far as
St Petersburg to discover a _première danseuse_ worthy in some manner
to be compared with those of twenty and twenty-five years ago.”
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Modern dancing and dancers" ***
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