V—CAUSE CÉLÈBRE
Quite early in the winter evening, before the light had died out of the sky, central Paris was beginning to be pleasurably excited. The aspect of the streets and of the cafés showed that. One saw it and heard it in the gestures and tones of the people; one had a proof of it in oneself. The whole city was in a state of delightful anxiety; and it was happy because the result of the night, whatever fate chose to decide, could not fail to be amusing and even thrilling. All the thoroughfares converging upon the small and crowded island which is the historical kernel of Paris, were busier and livelier than usual. In particular, automobiles thronged—the largest, glossiest, and most silent automobiles, whose horns were orchestras—automobiles which vied with motor-omnibuses for imposingness and moved forward with the smooth majesty of trains.
There came a point, near the twinkling bridges, where progress was impossible, where an impalpable obstacle intervened, and vehicles stood arrested in long treble files, and mysterious words were passed backwards from driver to driver. But nobody seemed to mind; nobody seemed impatient; for it was something to be thus definitely and materially a part of the organised excitement. Hundreds of clever resourceful persons had had the idea of avoiding the main avenues, and creeping up unobserved to the centre of attraction by the little streets. So that all these ancient, narrow, dark lanes that thread between high and picturesque architectures were busy with automobiles and carriages. And in the gloom one might see shooting round a corner the brilliant interior of an automobile, with electric light and flowers and a pet dog, and a couple of extremely fashionable young women in it, their eyes sparkling with present joy and the confident expectation of joy to come. And such young women, utterly correct, were doing the utterly correct thing. But all these little streets led at last to the same impalpable obstacle. So that from a high tower, for instance, the Tour St. Jacques close by, one might have beheld the black masonry of the centre of attraction as it were beleaguered on every side by the attacking converging files that were held back by some powerful word; while the minutes elapsed, and the incandescent signs of shops and theatres increased in the sky, and the Seine, dividing to clasp the island, darkened into a lamp-reflecting mirror along which tiny half-discerned steamers restlessly plied.
Despite the powerful word, the Palace of Justice, the centre of attraction, was tremendously alive and gay with humanity. Traffic could not be stopped, and was not stopped, and those who had sufficient energy and perseverance could insinuate themselves into its precincts. The great gold lamps that flank the staircase of honour gleamed upon a crowd continually ascending and descending. The outer hall was full of laughing chatter and of smoke. And barristers, both old and young, walked to and fro in hieratic converse, waving their cigarettes in sober curves, and on every one of their faces as they gazed negligently at the public was the announcement that they could tell “an they would.” All the interminable intersecting corridors were equally vivacious, with their diminishing perspectives of stoves against which groups warmed themselves. Groups of talkers made the circuit of the corridors as it might have been the circuit of a town, passing a given spot regularly, and repeating and repeating the same arguments. And the solemn arched immensity of the Hall of Lost Footsteps was like a Bourse. Here, more than anywhere else, one had the sense of audience-chambers concealed behind doors, where fatal doings were afoot; one had the sense of the terrific vastness and complexity of the Palace wherein scores of separate ceremonious activities simultaneously proceeded in scores of different halls. The general public knew only that somewhere within the Palace, somewhere close at hand, at the end of some particular passage, guarded doors hid the spectacle whose slightest episode was being telegraphed to all the cities of the entire civilised world, and the general public was content, even very content, to be near by.
The affair was in essence a trifle; merely the trial of a woman for the murder of her husband. But this woman was a heroic woman; this woman belonged by right of brain and individual force to the great race of Thérèse Humbert. Years before, she had moved safely in the background of a sensational tragedy involving the highest personages of the Republic. And now in the background of her own tragedy there moved somebody so high and so potent that no newspaper dared or cared to name his name. All that was known was that this enigmatic and awful individual existed, that he was involved, that had he been less sublime he would have had to appear before the court, that he would not appear, and that justice would suffer accordingly. In the ordeal of extremest publicity, the woman had emerged a Titaness. Throughout all her altercations with judge, advocates, witnesses, and journalists, she had held her own grandly, displaying not only an astounding force of character, but a superb appreciation of the theatrical quality of her rôle. She was of a piece with yellow journalism, and the multitude that gapes for yellow journalism. She was shameless. She was caught again and again in a net of lies, and she always escaped. She admitted nearly everything: lyings, adulteries, and manifold deceits; but she would not admit that she knew anything about the murder of her husband. And even though it was obvious that the knots by which she was bound when the murder was discovered were not serious knots, even though she left a hundred incriminating details unexplained, a doubt concerning her guilt would persist in the minds of the impartial. She was indubitably a terrible creature, but she was an enchantress, and she was also beyond question an exceedingly able housekeeper and hostess. She might be terrible without being a murderess.
And now the trial was closing. The verdict, it was stated, would be rendered that night even if the court sat till midnight. It would be a pity to keep an amiable public, already on the rack of impatience for many days, waiting longer. The time was ripe. Further, the woman had had enough. Her resources were exhausted, and to continue the fight would mean an anti-climax. The woman had completely lost the respect of the public—that was inevitable—but she had not lost its admiration. The attitude of the public was cruel, with the ignoble cruelty which is practised towards women in Latin countries alone; she had even been sarcastically sketched in the most respectable illustrated paper in the attitude of a famous madonna; but beneath the inconceivably base jeers, there remained admiration; and there remained, too, gratitude—the gratitude offered to a gladiator who has fought well and provided a really first-class diversion.
The supper-restaurants were visited earlier and were much more crowded than usual on that night. It was as though the influence of the trial had been aphrodisiacal. Or it may have been that the men and women of pleasure wished to receive the verdict in circumstances worthy of its importance in the annals of pleasure. Or it may have been that dinner had been deranged by the excitations connected with the trial and that people felt honestly hungry. I went into one of these restaurants, in a square whose buildings are embroidered with inviting letters of fire until dawn every morning throughout the year. A stern attendant took me up in a lift, and instantly I had quitted the sternness of the lift I was in another atmosphere. There was the bar, and there the illustrious English barman, drunk. For in these regions the barman must always be English and a little drunk. The barman knows everybody, and not to know his Christian name and the feel of his hand is to be nobody. This barman is a Parisian celebrity. But let an accident or a misadventure disqualify him from his work, and he will be forgotten utterly in less than a week. And in his martyred old age he will certainly recount to charitable acquaintances, who find him ineffably tedious, how he was barman at the unique Restaurant Lepic in the old days when fun was really fun, and the most appalling iniquity was openly tolerated by the police.
The bar and the barman and the cloak-room attendant (another man of genius) are only the prelude to the great supper-hall, which is simply and completely dazzling, with its profuse festoons of electric bulbs, its innumerable naked shoulders, arms, and bosoms, its fancy costumes, its bald heads, its music, clatter, and tinkle, and its desperate gaiety. To go into it is like going into a furnace of sensuality. It can be likened to nothing but an orange-lit scene of Roman debauch in a play written and staged by Mr. Hall Caine. One feels that one has been unjust in one’s attitude to Mr. Hall Caine’s claims as a realist.
Although the restaurant will positively not hold any more revellers, more revellers insist on coming in, and fresh tables are produced by conjuring and placed for them between other tables, until the whole mass of wood and flesh is wedged tight together and waiters have to perform prodigies of insinuation. The effect of these multitudinous wasters is desolating, and even pathetic. It is the enormous stupidity of the mass that is pathetic, and its secret tedium that is desolating. At their wits’ end how to divert themselves, these bald heads pass the time in capers more antique and fatuous than were ever employed at a village wedding. Some of them find distraction in monstrous gorging—and beefsteaks and fried potatoes and spicy sauces go down their throats in a way to terrorise the arthritic beholder. Others merely drink. Some quarrel, with the boneless persistency of intoxication. One falls humorously under a table, and is humorously fished up by the red-coated leader of the orchestra: it is a marked success of esteem. Many are content to caress the bright odalisques with fond, monotonous vacuity. A few of these odalisques, and the waiters, alone save the spectacle from utter humiliation. The waiters are experts engaged in doing their job. The industry of each night leaves them no energy for dissoluteness. They are alert and determined. Their business is to make stupidity as lavish as possible, and they succeed. To see them surveying with cold statistical glances the field of their operations, to listen to their indestructible politeness, to divine the depth of their concealed scorn—this is a pleasure. And some of the odalisques are beautiful. Fine women in the sight of heaven! They too are experts, with the hard preoccupation of experts. They are at work; and this is the battle of life. They inspire respect. It is—it is the dignity of labour.
Suddenly it is announced that the jury at the Palace are about to deliver their verdict. Nobody knows how the news has come, nor even who first spoke it in the restaurant. But there it is. Humorous guffaws of relief are vented. The fever of the place becomes acute, with a decided influence on the consumption of champagne. The accused lady is toasted again and again. Of course, she had been, throughout, the solid backbone of the chatter; but now she was all the chatter. And everybody recounted again to everybody else every suggestive rumour of her iniquity that had appeared in any newspaper for months past. She was tried over again in a moment, and condemned and insulted and defended, and consistently honoured with libations. She had never been more truly heroic, more legendary, than she was then.
The childlike company loudly demanded the verdict, with their tongues and with their feet.
A beautiful young girl of about eighteen, the significant features of whose attire were long black stockings and a necklace, said to a gentleman who was helping her to eat a vast entrecote and to drink champagne:
“If it comes not soon, it will be too late.”
“The verdict?” said the fatuous swain. “How?—too late?”
“I shall be too drunk,” said the girl, apparently meaning that she would be too drunk to savour the verdict and to get joy from it. She spoke with mournful and slightly disgusted certainty, as though anticipating a phenomenon which was absolutely regular and absolutely inevitable.
And then, on a table near the centre of the room, instead of plates and glasses appeared a child-dancer who might have been Spanish or Creole, but who probably had never been out of Montmartre. This child seemed to be surrounded by her family seated at the table—by her mother and her aunts and a cousin or so, all with simple and respectable faces, naïvely proud of and pleased with the child. From their expressions, the child might have been cutting bread and butter on the table instead of dancing. The child danced exquisitely, but her performance could not moderate the din. It was a lovely thing gloriously wasted. The one feature of it that was not wasted on the intelligence of the company was the titillating contrast between the little girl’s fresh infancy and the advanced decomposition of her environment.
She ceased, and disappeared into her family. The applause began, but it was mysteriously and swiftly cut short. Why did every one by a simultaneous impulse glance eagerly in the direction of the door? Why was the hush so dramatic? A voice—whose?—cried near the doorway:
“Acquittée!”
And all cried triumphantly: “Acquittée! Acquittée! Acquittée! Acquittée!” Happy, boisterous Bedlam was created and let loose. Even the waiters forgot themselves. The whole world stood up, stood on chairs, or stood on tables; and shouted, shrieked, and whistled. But the boneless drunkards were still quarrelling, and one bald head had retained sufficient presence of mind to wear a large oyster-shell facetiously for a hat. And then the orchestra, inspired, struck into a popular refrain of the moment, perfectly apposite. And all sang with right good-will:
“Le lendemain elle était sonnante.”
VI—RUSSIAN IMPERIAL BALLET AT THE OPERA
Sylvain’s is the only good restaurant in the centre of Paris where you can dine in the open air, that is to say, in the street. Close by, the dark, still mass of the Opéra rises hugely out of the dusk and out of the flitting traffic at its base. Sylvain’s is full of diners who have no eyes to see beyond the surfaces of things.
By virtue of a contract made between Sylvain’s and the city, the diners are screened off from the street and from the twentieth century by a row of high potted evergreens. Pass within the screen, and you leave behind you the modern epoch. The Third Republic recedes; the Second Empire recedes; Louis-Philippe has never been, nor even Napoleon; the Revolution has not begun to announce itself. You are become suddenly a grand seigneur. Every gesture and tone of every member of the personnel of Sylvain’s implores your excellency with one word:
“Deign!”
It is curious that while a modern shopkeeper who sells you a cigar or an automobile or a quarter of lamb does not think it necessary to make you a noble of the ancien régime before commencing business, a shopkeeper who sells you cooked food could not omit this preliminary without losing his self-respect. And it is the more curious since all pre-democratic books of travel are full of the cheek of these particular shopkeepers. Such tales of old travellers could scarcely be credited, in spite of their unison, were it not that the ancient tradition of rapacious insolence still survives in wild and barbaric spots like the cathedral cities of England.
Your excellency, attended by his gentlemen-in-waiting (who apparently never eat, never want to eat), in the intervals of the ceremonious collation will gaze with interest at the Opéra, final legacy of the Empire to the Republic. A great nation owes it to itself to possess a splendid opera-palace. Art must be fostered. The gracious amenities of life must be maintained. And this is the State’s affair. The State has seen to it. The most gorgeous building in Paris is not the legislative chamber, nor the hall of the University, nor the clearing-house of charity. It is the Opéra. The State has paid for it, and the State pays every year for its maintenance. That is, the peasant chiefly pays. There is not a peasant in the farthest corner of France who may not go to bed at dark comforted by the thought that the Opéra in Paris is just opening its cavalry-sentinelled doors, and lighting its fifteen thousand electric candles, and that he is helping to support all that. Paris does not pay; the habitués of the Opéra do not pay; the yawning tourists do not pay; the grandiose classes do not pay. It is the nation, as a nation, that accepts the burden, because the encouragement of art is a national duty. (Moreover, visiting monarchs have to be diverted.) Of one sort or another, from the tenor to the vendor of programmes, there are twelve hundred priests and priestesses of art in the superb building. A few may be artists. But it is absolutely certain that all are bureaucrats.
The Opéra is the Circumlocution Office. The Opéra is a State department. More, it is probably the most characteristic of all the State departments, and the most stubbornly reactionary. The nominal director, instead of being omnipotent and godlike, is only a poor human being whose actions are the resultant of ten thousand forces that do not fear him. The Opéra is above all the theatre of secret influences. Every mystery of its enormous and wasteful inefficiency can be explained either by the operation of the secret influence or by the operation of the bureaucratic mind. If the most tedious operas are played the most often, if the stage is held by singers who cannot sing, if original artists have no chance there, if the blight of a flaccid perfunctoriness is upon nearly all the performances, if astute mothers can sell the virginity of their dancing daughters to powerful purchasers in the wings, the reason is a reason of State. The Opéra is the splendid prey of the high officers of State. If such a one wants an evening’s entertainment, or a mistress, or to get rid of a mistress, the Opéra is there, at his disposition. The foyer de la danse is the most wonderful seraglio in the western world, and it is reserved to the Government and to subscribers. Thus is art fostered, and for this does the peasant pay.
Nevertheless the Opéra is a beautiful and impressive sight in the late, warm dusk of June. Against the deep purple sky the monument stands up like a mountain; and through its innumerable windows—holes in the floor of heaven—can be glimpsed yellow clusters of candelabra and perspectives of marble pillars and frescoed walls. And at the foot of the gigantic façade little brightly coloured figures are running up the steps and disappearing eagerly within: they are the world of fashion, and they know that they are correct and that the Opéra is the Opéra.
I looked over the crimson plush edge of the box down into Egypt, where Cleopatra was indulging her desires; into a civilisation so gorgeous, primitive, and far-off that when compared to it the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries seemed as like as two peas in their sophistication and sobriety. Cleopatra had set eyes on a youth, and a whim for him had taken her. By no matter what atrocious exercise of power and infliction of suffering, that whim had to be satisfied on the instant. It was satisfied. And a swift homicide left the Queen untrammelled by any sentimental consequences. The whole affair was finished in a moment, and the curtain falling on all that violent and gorgeous scene. In a moment this Oriental episode, interpreted by semi-Oriental artists, had made all the daring prurient suggestiveness of French comedy seem timid and foolish. It was a revelation. A new standard was set, and there was not a vaudevillist in the auditorium but knew that neither he nor his interpreters could ever reach that standard. The simple and childlike gestures of the slave-girls as with their bodies and their veils they formed a circular tent to hide Cleopatra and her lover—these gestures took away the breath of protest.
The St. Petersburg and the Moscow troupes, united, of the Russian Imperial Ballet, had been brought to Paris, at vast expense and considerable loss, to present this astounding spectacle of mere magnificent sanguinary lubricity to the cosmopolitan fashion of Paris. There the audience actually was, rank after rank of crowded toilettes rising to the dim ceiling, young women from the Avenue du Bois and young women from Arizona, and their protective and possessive men. And nobody blenched, nobody swooned. The audience was taken by assault. The West End of Europe was just staggered into acceptance. As yet London has seen only fragments of Russian ballet. But London may and probably will see the whole. Let there be no qualms. London will accept also. London might be horribly scared by one-quarter of the audacity shown in Cleopatra, but it will not be scared by the whole of that audacity. An overdose of a fatal drug is itself an antidote. The fact is, that the spectacle was saved by a sort of moral nudity, and by a naïve assurance of its own beauty. Oh! It was extremely beautiful. It was ineffably more beautiful than any other ballet I had ever seen. An artist could feel at once that an intelligence of really remarkable genius had presided over its invention and execution. It was masterfully original from the beginning. It continually furnished new ideals of beauty. It had drawn its inspiration from some rich fountain unknown to us occidentals. Neither in its scenery, nor in its grouping, nor in its pantomime was there any clear trace of that Italian influence which still dominates the European ballet. With a vengeance it was a return to nature and a recommencement. It was brutally direct. It was beastlike; but the incomparable tiger is a beast. It was not perverse. It was too fresh, zealous, and alive to be perverse. Personally I was conscious of the most intense pleasure that I had experienced in a theatre for years. And this was Russia! This was the country that had made such a deadly and disgusting mess of the Russo-Japanese War.
The box was a stage-box. It consisted of a suite of two drawing-rooms, softly upholstered, lit with electric light, and furnished with easy-chairs and mirrors. A hostess might well have offered tea to a score of guests therein. And as a fact there were a dozen people in it. Its size indicated the dimensions of the auditorium, in which it was a mere cell. The curious thing about it was the purely incidental character of its relation to the stage. The front of it was a narrow terrace, like the mouth of a bottle, which offered a magnificent panorama of the auditorium, with a longitudinal slice of the stage at one extremity. From the terrace one glanced vertically down at the stage, as at a street-pavement from a first-storey window. Three persons could be comfortable, and four could be uncomfortable, on the terrace. One or two more, by leaning against chair-backs and coiffures, could see half of the longitudinal slice of the stage. The remaining half-dozen were at liberty to meditate in the luxurious twilight of the drawing-room. The Republic, as operatic manager, sells every night some scores, and on its brilliant nights some hundreds, of expensive seats which it is perfectly well aware give no view whatever of the stage: another illustration of the truth that the sensibility of the conscience of corporations varies inversely with the size of the corporation.
But this is nothing. The wonderful aspect of the transaction is that purchasers never lack. They buy and suffer; they buy again and suffer yet again; they live on and reproduce their kind. There was in the hinterland of the box a dapper, vivacious man who might (if he had wasted no time) have been grandfather to a man as old as I. He was eighty-five years old, and he had sat in boxes of an evening for over sixty years. He talked easily of the heroic age before the Revolution of ‘48, when, of course, every woman was an enchantress, and the farces at the Palais Royal were really amusing. He could pipe out whole pages of farce. Except during the entr’actes this man’s curiosity did not extend beyond the shoulders of the young women on the terrace. For him the spectacle might have been something going on round the corner of the next street. He was in a spacious and discreet drawing-room; he had the habit of talking; talking was an essential part of his nightly hygiene; and he talked. Continually impinging, in a manner fourth-dimensional, on my vision of Cleopatra’s violent afternoon, came the “Je me rappelle” of this ancient. Now he was in Rome, now he was in London, and now he was in Florence. He went nightly to the Pergola Theatre when Florence was the capital of Italy. He had tales of kings. He had one tale of a king which, as I could judge from the hard perfection of its phraseology, he had been repeating on every night-out for fifty years. According to this narration he was promenading the inevitable pretty woman in the Cascine at Florence, when a heavily moustached person en civil flashed by, driving a pair of superb bays, and he explained not without pride to the pretty woman that she looked on a king.
“It is that, the king?” exclaimed the pretty ingénue too loudly.
And with a grand bow (of which the present generation has lost the secret) the moustaches, all flashing and driving, leaned from the equipage and answered: “Yes, madame, it is that, the king.”
“Et si vous avez vu la tête de la dame...!”
In those days society existed.
I should have heard many more such tales during the entr’acte, but I had to visit the stage. Strictly, I did not desire to visit the stage, but as I possessed the privilege of doing so, I felt bound in pride to go. I saw myself at the great age of eighty-five recounting to somebody else’s grandchildren the marvels that I had witnessed in the coulisses of the Paris Opéra during the unforgettable season of the Russian Imperial Ballet in the early years of the century, when society existed.
At an angle of a passage which connects the auditorium with the tray (the stage is called the tray, and those who call the stage the stage at the Opéra are simpletons and lack guile) were a table and a chair, and, partly on the chair and partly on the table, a stout respectable man: one of the twelve hundred. He looked like a town-councillor, and his life-work on this planet was to distinguish between persons who had the entry and persons who had not the entry. He doubted my genuineness at once, and all the bureaucrat in him glowered from his eyes. Yes! My card was all right, but it made no mention of madame. Therefore, I might pass, but madame might not. Moreover, save in cases very exceptional, ladies were not admitted to the tray. So it appeared! I was up against an entire department of the State. Human nature is such that at that moment, had some power offered me the choice between the ability to write a novel as fine as Crime and Punishment and the ability to triumph instantly over the pestilent town-councillor, I would have chosen the latter. I retired in good order. “You little suspect, town-councillor,” I said to him within myself, “that I am the guest of the management, that I am extremely intimate with the management, and that, indeed, the management is my washpot!” At the next entr’acte I returned again with an omnipotent document which instructed the whole twelve hundred to let both monsieur and madame pass anywhere, everywhere. The town-councillor admitted that it was perfect, so far as it went. But there was the question of my hat to be considered. I was not wearing the right kind of hat! The town councillor planted both his feet firmly on tradition, and defied imperial passports. “Can you have any conception,” I cried to him within myself, “how much this hat cost me at Henry Heath’s?” Useless! Nobody ever had passed, and nobody ever would pass, from the auditorium to the tray in a hat like mine. It was unthinkable. It would be an outrage on the Code Napoléon.... After all, the man had his life-work to perform. At length he offered to keep my hat for me till I came back. I yielded. I was beaten. I was put to shame. But he had earned a night’s repose.
The famous, the notorious foyer de la danse was empty. Here was an evening given exclusively to the ballet, and not one member of the corps had had the idea of exhibiting herself in the showroom specially provided by the State as a place or rendezvous for ladies and gentlemen. The most precious quality of an annual subscription for a seat at the Opéra is that it carries with it the entry to the foyer de la danse (provided one’s hat is right); if it did not, the subscriptions to the Opéra would assuredly diminish. And lo! the gigantic but tawdry mirror which gives a factitious amplitude to a room that is really small, did not reflect the limbs of a single dancer! The place had a mournful, shabby-genteel look, as of a resort gradually losing fashion. It was tarnished. It did not in the least correspond with a young man’s dreams of it. Yawning tedium hung in it like a vapour, that tedium which is the implacable secret enemy of dissoluteness. This, the foyer de la danse, where the insipidly vicious heroines of Halévy’s ironic masterpiece achieved, with a mother’s aid, their ducal conquests! It was as cruel a disillusion as the first sight of Rome or Jerusalem. Its meretriciousness would not have deceived even a visionary parlour-maid. Nevertheless, the world of the Opéra was astounded at the neglect of its hallowed foyer by these young women from St. Petersburg and Moscow. I was told, with emotion, that on only two occasions in the whole season had a Russian girl wandered therein. The legend of the sobriety and the chastity of these strange Russians was abroad in the Opéra like a strange, uncanny tale. Frankly, Paris could not understand it. Because all these creatures were young, and all of them conformed to some standard or other of positive physical beauty! They could not be old, for the reason that a ukase obliged them to retire after twenty years’ service at latest; that is, at about the age of thirty-six, a time of woman’s life which on the Paris stage is regarded as infancy. Such a ukase must surely have been promulgated by Ivan the Terrible or Catherine!. . . No!
Paris never recovered from the wonder of the fact that when they were not dancing these lovely girls were just honest misses, with apparently no taste for bank-notes and spiced meats, even in the fever of an unexampled artistic and fashionable success.
Amid the turmoil of the stage, where the prodigiously original peacock-green scenery of Scheherazade was being set, a dancer could be seen here and there in a corner, waiting, preoccupied, worried, practising a step or a gesture. I was clumsy enough to encounter one of the principals who did not want to be encountered; we could not escape from each other. There was nothing for it but to shake hands. His face assumed the weary, unwilling smile of conventional politeness. His fingers were limp.
“It pleases you?”
“Enormously.”
I turned resolutely away at once, and with relief he lapsed back into his preoccupation concerning the half-hour’s intense emotional and physical labour that lay immediately in front of him. In a few moments the curtain went up, and the terrific creative energy of the troupe began to vent itself. And I began to understand a part of the secret of the extreme brilliance of the Russian ballet.
The brutality of Scheherazade was shocking. It was the Arabian Nights treated with imaginative realism. In perusing the Arabian Nights we never try to picture to ourselves the manners of a real Bagdad; or we never dare. We lean on the picturesque splendour and romantic poetry of certain aspects of the existence portrayed, and we shirk the basic facts: the crudity of the passions, and the superlative cruelty informing the whole social system. For example, we should not dream of dwelling on the more serious functions of the caliphian eunuchs.
In the surpassing fury and magnificence of the Russian ballet one saw eunuchs actually at work, scimitar in hand. There was the frantic orgy, and then there was the barbarous punishment, terrible and revolting; certainly one of the most sanguinary sights ever seen on an occidental stage. The eunuchs pursued the fragile and beautiful odalisques with frenzy; in an instant the seraglio was strewn with murdered girls in all the abandoned postures of death. And then silence, save for the hard breathing of the executioners!... A thrill! It would seem incredible that such a spectacle should give pleasure. Yet it unquestionably did, and very exquisite pleasure. The artists, both the creative and the interpretative, had discovered an artistic convention which was at once grandiose and truthful. The passions displayed were primitive, but they were ennobled in their illustration. The performance was regulated to the least gesture; no detail was unstudied; and every moment was beautiful; not a few were sublime.
And all this a by-product of Russian politics! If the politics of France are subtly corrupt; if anything can be done in France by nepotism and influence, and nothing without; if the governing machine of France is fatally vitiated by an excessive and unimaginative centralisation—the same is far more shamefully true of Russia. The fantastic inefficiency of all the great departments of State in Russia is notorious and scandalous. But the Imperial ballet, where one might surely have presumed an intensification of every defect (as in Paris), happens to be far nearer perfection than any other enterprise of its kind, public or private. It is genuinely dominated by artists of the first rank; it is invigorated by a real discipline; and the results achieved approach the miraculous. The pity is that the moujik can never learn that one, at any rate, of the mysterious transactions which pass high up over his head, and for which he is robbed, is in itself honest and excellent. An alleviating thought for the moujik, if only it could be knocked into his great thick head! For during the performance of the Russian Imperial Ballet at the Paris Opéra, amid all the roods of toilettes and expensive correctness, one thinks of the moujik; or one ought to think of him. He is at the bottom of it. See him in Tchekoff’s masterly tale, The Moujiks, in his dirt, squalor, drunkenness, lust, servitude, and despair! Realise him well at the back of your mind as you watch the ballet! Your delightful sensations before an unrivalled work of art are among the things he has paid for.
Walking home, I was attracted, within a few hundred yards of the Opéra, by the new building of the Magasins du Printemps. Instead of being lighted up and all its galleries busy with thousands of women in search of adornment, it stood dark and deserted. But at one of the entrances was a feeble ray. I could not forbear going into the porch and putting my nose against the glass. The head-watchman was seated in the centre of the ground-floor chatting with a colleague. With a lamp and chairs they had constructed a little domesticity for themselves in the middle of that acreage of silks and ribbons and feathers all covered now with pale dust-sheets. They were the centre of a small sphere of illumination, and in the surrounding gloom could be dimly discerned gallery after gallery rising in a slender lacework of iron. The vision of Bagdad had been inexpressibly romantic; but this vision also was inexpressibly romantic. There was something touching in the humanity of those simple men amid the vast nocturnal stillness of that organism—the most spectacular, the most characteristic, the most spontaneous, and perhaps the most beautiful symbol of an age which is just as full of romance as any other age. The human machine and the scenic panorama of the big shop have always attracted me, as in Paris so in London. And looking at this particular, wonderful shop in its repose I could contemplate better the significance of its activity. What singular ideals have the women who passionately throng it in the eternal quest! I say “passionately,” because I have seen eyes glitter with fierce hope in front of a skunk boa or the tints of a new stuff, translating instantly these material things into terms of love and adoration. What cruelty is hourly practised upon the other women who must serve and smile and stand on their feet in the stuffiness of the heaped and turbulent galleries eleven hours a day six full days a week; and upon the still other women, unpresentable, who in their high garrets stitch together these confections! And how fine and how inspiriting it all is, this fever, and these delusive hopes, and this cruelty! The other women are asleep now, repairing damage; but in a very few hours they will be converging here in long hurried files from the four quarters of Paris, in their enforced black, and tying their black aprons, and pinning on their breasts the numbered discs which distinguish them from one another in the judgment-books of the shop. They will be beginning again. The fact is that Bagdad is nothing to this. Only people are so blind.
LIFE IN LONDON—1911
I—THE RESTAURANT
You have a certain complacency in entering it, because it is one of the twenty monster restaurants of London. The name glitters in the public mind. “Where shall we dine?” The name suggests itself; by the immense force of its notoriety it comes unsought into the conversation like a thing alive. “All right! Meet you in the Lounge at 7.45.” You feel—whatever your superficial airs—that you are in the whirl of correctness as you hurry (of course late) out of a taxi into the Lounge. There is something about the word “Lounge”. . .! Space and freedom in the Lounge, and a foretaste of luxury; and it is inhabited by the haughty of the earth! You are not yet a prisoner, in the Lounge. Then an official, with the metallic insignia of authority, takes you apart.
He is very deferential—but with the intimidating deference of a limited company that pays forty per cent. You can go upstairs—though he doubts if there is immediately a table—or you can go downstairs. (Strange, how in the West-End, when once you quit the street, you must always go up or down; the planet’s surface is forbidden to you; you lose touch with it; the ground-landlord has taken it and hidden it-) You go downstairs; you are hypnotised into going downstairs; and you go down, and down, one of a procession, until a man, entrenched in a recess furnished to look like a ready-made tailor’s, accepts half your clothing and adds it to his stock. He does not ask for it; he need not; you are hypnotised. Stripped, you go further down and down. You are now part of the tremendous organism; you have left behind not merely your clothing, but your volition; your number is in your hand.
Suddenly, as you pass through a doorway, great irregular vistas of a subterranean chamber discover themselves to you, limitless. You perceive that this wondrous restaurant ramifies under all London, and that a table on one verge is beneath St. Paul’s Cathedral, and a table on the other verge beneath the Albert Memorial. All the tables—all the thousands of tables—are occupied. An official comes to you, and, putting his mouth to your ear (for the din is terrific), tells you that he will have a table for you in three minutes. You wait, forlorn. It reminds you of waiting at the barber’s for a shave, except that the barber gives you an easy-chair and a newspaper. Here you must stand; and you must gather your skirts about you and stand firm to resist the shock of blind waiters. Others are in your case; others have been waiting longer than you, and at every moment more arrive. You wait. The diners see you waiting, and you wonder whether they are eating slowly on purpose.... At length you are led away—far, far from the pit’s mouth into a remote working of the mine. You watch a man whisk away foul plates and glasses, and cover offence with a pure white cloth. You sit. You are saved! And human nature is such that you feel positively grateful to the limited company.. . .
You begin to wait again, having been deserted by your saviours. And then your wandering attention notices behind you, under all the other sounds, a steady sound of sizzling. And there fat, greasy men, clothed and capped in white, are throwing small fragments of animal carcases on to a huge, red fire, and pulling them off in the nick of time, and flinging them on to plates which are continually being snatched away by flying hands. The grill, as advertised! And you wait, helpless, through a period so long that if a live cow and a live sheep had been led into the restaurant to satisfy the British passion for realism in eating, there would have been time for both animals to be murdered, dismembered, and fried before the gaze of a delighted audience. But fear not. The deity of the organism, though unseen, is watching over you. You have not been omitted from the divine plan. Presently a man approaches with a gigantic menu, upon which are printed the names of hundreds of marvellous dishes, and you can have any of them—and at most reasonable prices. Only, you must choose at once. You must say instantly to the respectful but inexorable official exactly what you will have. You are lost in the menu as in a labyrinth, as in a jungle at nightfall.... Quick! For, as you have waited, so are others waiting! Out with it! You drop the menu. “Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding—Guinness.” The magic phrase releases you. In the tenth of a second the official has vanished. A railway truck laden with the gifts of Cuba and Sumatra and the monks of the Chartreuse, sweeps majestically by, blotting out the horizon; and lo! no sooner has it glided past than you see men hastening towards you with plates and bottles. With an astounding celerity the beef and the stout have, arrived—out of the unknown and the unknowable, out of some secret place in the centre of the earth, where rows and rows of slices of beef and bottles of stout wait enchanted for your word.
All the thousands of tables scintillate with linen and glass and silver, and steel and ivory, and are bright with flowers; ten thousand blossoms have been wrenched from their beds and marshalled here in captive regiments to brighten the beef and stout on which your existence depends. The carpet is a hot crimson bed of flowers. The whole of the ceiling is carved and painted and gilded; not a square inch of repose in the entire busy expanse of it; and from it thousands of blinding electric bulbs hang down like stalactites. The walls are covered with enormous mirrors, perversely studded with gold nails, and framed in gold sculpture. And these mirrors fling everything remorselessly back at you. So that the immensity and glow of the restaurant are multiplied to infinity. The band is fighting for its life. An agonised violinist, swaying and contorting in front of the band, squeezes the last drop of juice out of his fiddle. The “selection” is “Carmen” But “Carmen” raised to the second power, with every piano, forte, allegro, and adagio exaggerated to the last limit; “Carmen” composed by Souza and executed by super-Sicilians; a “Carmen” deafening and excruciating! And amid all this light and sound, amid the music and the sizzling, and the clatter of plates and glass, and the reverberation of the mirrors, and the whirring of the ventilators, and the sheen of gold, and the harsh glitter of white, and the dull hum of hundreds of strenuous conversations, and the hoarse cries of the pale demons at the fire, and the haste, and the crowdedness, and the people waiting for your table—you eat. You practise the fine art of dining.