MODERN DANCING AND DANCERS

Carmencita

AFTER A PAINTING BY JOHN S. SARGENT

MODERN DANCING
AND DANCERS

BY
J. E. CRAWFORD FLITCH, M.A.
AUTHOR OF “MEDITERRANEAN MOODS”

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

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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

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

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

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

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:

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 DANCING[1]

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

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

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.”