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.
“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
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
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
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.
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