one or other of them. They are to be found in the Parisian Revues, and on the stages of America, Germany, Austria and even Spain, where they are welcomed as the typical representatives of the English school of dancing.
Their charm is of the surface, depending a little upon their science and a great deal upon their maturely immature graces. They go through the same movements in the same manner, at exactly the same time, and with the same unwearying smile. Occasionally they vary the performance with a little singing—simple melodious ditties dealing with bees and honeysuckle, nightingales and the moon, love and the Swiss mountains. But vocal accomplishment is not their strong point. It is not the accent of London or Manchester, but the freshness, the buoyancy, the cheerful innocence, the absence of all excess, the easy execution of simple movements, above all the unimpeachable prettiness, that constitute the chief characteristic of this peculiarly English contribution to the art of the dance.
It may have seemed that in England, at any rate until the recent revival, the dance had fallen quite out of relation to the other arts. It appears to have been familiar only with the music of the streets. It has given no inspiration to sculpture or painting. It has been shamefully cold-shouldered by serious artists. But perhaps it has not been so entirely uninfluenced by popular British art as may seem to be the case. It has certainly worshipped at the same shrine of prettiness and gentle undisturbing emotionalism. It has always been laudably bent on pleasing; it has shunned violence and extremes, even if in so doing it has had to submit to be vapid; it has been artful only in order to appear artless; if never profound it has always been respectable. Surely in their rendering of happy incidents, their genial flow of spirits, their easy and pretty accomplishment, many of the pictures of official British art are inspired by the same spirit as that which animates the Tiller Girls!
WHEN an art grows infirm, there always comes a time when the practitioners hold council over the failing body and prescribe the remedy. And the remedy is always the same—they recommend a return to Nature. Art must go back to its nursing mother, nourish itself again upon the elemental milk from which it drew its earliest life, and be made whole.
Towards the close of the last century, the dance was sick with a fever, sick unto death. The mild and genial palliatives of Mr John Tiller were unavailing. In vain he taught his pupils to smile, to shun the movements of delirium, to simulate a childish glee, to be cheerful even though the heavens should fall. The result too often showed that a dancer might smile and smile and be a failure. Her naturalness was not really Nature. Her passion for honeysuckle and the mountains was as little sincere as the morning blush upon her cheek. The dance could not be tricked back to health by such artless deceptions. It demanded the more radical cure of a genuine return to nature.
The goal was clear, but the way was not plain to be seen. For where was nature to be found? All dancing is merely a refinement upon unconscious bodily gesture. It is the poetic rendering of the prose of ordinary human movement. But the modern world has lost the old graceful motions natural to man in a less artificial state. The characteristic of natural movement is undulation. Waters, winds, trees, all living forms, obey a sovereign law of rhythm. Nature moves in curves and gradations rather than by leaps and bounds. And man in his happiest circumstances—when he lives close to nature, when his occupations are genial and not arduous, when the processes of his labour are even and uncomplicated, when his body is freely exercised and is not forced to conform itself to a special and restricted task—moves with the regular rhythm, the freedom, the equipoise, of nature itself. In that pleasant tract of life, midway between the savage and the civilised state, the occupations of man seem to have developed equally his vigour and his grace. The ancient world had the instinct to know how far labour might be saved without the labourer being sacrificed to the machine. The pause and ictus of the scythe, the even swing of the oar, the circular sweep of the sling, the balance of the seat upon the unbitted and barebacked horse—such were the movements that formed a breed of men capable of all the heights and depths of human grace. Civilisation—in the canting sense of the word—means specialisation of employment, and such specialisation in its turn too often means the deformation of the body. In the modern civilised world the body is usually exercised either too little or too continuously in a single occupation. The dependence upon easy means of locomotion, the resort to labour-saving appliances, the endless dull circulation through the rigid streets, the long periods of inaction interrupted by sudden spells of haste, have quenched the old buoyant and even rhythms. Human motion nowadays tends to be not flowing but angular, jerky, abrupt, disjointed, full of gestures not flowing imperceptibly one into another, but broken off midway. A return to nature means a turning away from the precedents of art to the incidents of contemporary life. The difficulty of applying this precept to the dance lay in the fact that there was no nature to return to, or rather that nature itself had become corrupt and sophisticated.
In this predicament what was to be done? Happily when nature fails us we can still have recourse to a counsellor of almost equal authority and wisdom—the art of the antique world. And whereas for some of the modern arts—for painting and music, for example—classical art is but a taciturn guide, for the dance it is full of instruction. Their interests are one and the same—the body and bodily movement. Greek sculpture has caught innumerable moments of freely flowing action, at a time when action was probably most pure, removed equally far from the rudeness of the savage and the inexpressiveness of the modern. All its salient gestures of sport and war and of the emotional states are as clear to us as if we had been the contemporaries of Pericles and Pheidias. The Greek frieze has been described as a kind of incomplete cinematographic film of the Greek dance. And the so-called Tanagra figures represent a whole alphabet of the silent plastic speech of everyday life.
To recall the dance to nature by the way of Greek art was the work of an American woman, perhaps the greatest personality who has ever devoted herself to developing the art of the dance, Isadora Duncan. Her interests ranged over a wide field of activities. There was a time when she wished to initiate a reform of human life in its least details of costume, of hygiene, of morals. But gradually she came to concentrate her interest upon the dance. For her the dance is not merely the art which permits the spirit to express itself in movement; it is the base of a whole conception of life, a life flexible, harmonious, natural. In the development of the dance she found herself confronted by the dilemma which has just been alluded to. On the one hand was the limited technique of the ballet, on the other the unnatural contortions of the eccentric school. To return to the unconscious gesture of the people—that is to say, the crude, stereotyped gestures of the street—offered no way of escape. She found the solution in a return to the natural gesture of human life as represented in Greek art.
In order to get at her point of view it is best to let her speak in her own words—although, as she would say, one speaks better about the dance in dancing than in commentaries and explanations.
“To seek in nature the fairest forms and to find the movement which expresses the soul of these forms—this is the art of the dancer. It is from nature alone that the dancer must draw his inspirations, in the same manner as the sculptor, with whom he has so many affinities. Rodin has said: ‘To produce good sculpture it is not necessary to copy the works of antiquity; it is necessary first of all to regard the works of nature, and to see in those of the classics only the method by which they have interpreted nature.’ Rodin is right; and in my art I have by no means copied, as has been supposed, the figures of Greek vases, friezes and paintings. From them I have learned to regard nature, and when certain of my movements recall the gestures that are seen in works of art, it is only because, like them, they are drawn from the grand natural source.
“My inspiration has been drawn from trees, from waves, from clouds, from the sympathies that exist between passion and the storm, between gentleness and the soft breeze, and the like, and I always endeavour to put into my movements a little of that divine continuity which gives to the whole of nature its beauty and its life.”
It must not be supposed that Isadora Duncan despised technique or attempted to dispense with it. It was the technique of the current modes of dancing that she found unsatisfactory. “I have closely studied the figured documents of all ages and of all the great masters,” she says, “but I have never seen in them any representations of human beings walking on the extremity of the toes or raising the leg higher than the head. These ugly and false positions in no way express that state of unconscious dionysiac delirium which is necessary to the dancer. Moreover movements, just like harmonies in music, are not invented; they are discovered.”
It is a mistake, which some exponents of the “natural” style of dancing have fallen into, to imagine that they can express the spirit that moves them by any haphazard agitation of the limbs. To dance “naturally” does not mean to dance impromptu, relying upon the inspiration of the moment. In art the simplest effects are usually those which have cost the greatest effort, and no effort is more severe than the attempt to imitate the inimitable model of nature. The dance demands as rigorous a technique as any other art. Without a technique it is inarticulate. Miss Duncan
has undergone a training as elaborate as any prima ballerina. From her childhood upwards she has devoted twenty years to the study of the dance. She had to invent, or rather discover, her own technique. Taking for her models the poses of Greek art, she endeavoured to reconstruct from a single attitude the whole continuous flowing movement, of which the statuesque pose is of course but an arrested moment. She had to fill in the gaps, as it were, in the interrupted cinematographic film, to pass rhythmically from one gesture to the next. She found at first that her body failed to respond. It suffered from the unpliability, the general wrongness of movement, which is the outcome of modern conditions of life and the loss of tradition. She found that she had to begin with the elements of motion, to learn to walk, to run, to leap rhythmically before she could dance rhythmically. She started therefore to learn to govern her body, to recover a lost art of balance and flexibility, to make each slightest movement a harmonious expressive gesture. For she demands none but the finest gestures for the dance. Everything common and contemptible she would exclude by a severe test.
“Every movement that can be danced by the side of the sea without being in harmony with the rhythm of the waves, every movement that can be danced in the midst of a forest without being in harmony with the swaying of the foliage, every movement that can be danced, naked, in the broad sunlight of the open field, without being in harmony with the vibration and solitude of the landscape—all these movements are false movements in that they are discords in the harmony of the great natural lines. That is why the dancer must choose above all the movements which express the strength, the health, the grace, the nobility, the languor or the gravity of living things.”
The steps of the dance, therefore, have to be studied with a care which makes even the elaboration of the technique of the ballet appear simple. But the steps are not the end; they are only a means. The end at which in Miss Duncan’s view the dance aims is “to express the noblest and most profound sentiments of the human soul, those which come from Apollo, from Pan, from Bacchus and from Aphrodite. To see in it no more than a frivolous or agreeable diversion is to offer an insult to the dance.” She is in thorough accord with the Greek view that the dance reacts upon the moral mood. “The attitudes which we take have an influence upon our soul. A simple throwing back of the head, done passionately, causes us a sudden tremor of joy, of heroism or of desire. All gestures have a moral resonance, and thus can directly express every possible moral state.”
Hers also was the Greek view that music and the dance should be mutually interpretative. Before her time music had been regarded primarily as an accompaniment, a time-keeper; she enunciated the theory that its function was to give the keynote of the mood of the dance. Music and the dance were to be two bodies animated by a single soul. She selected as her prime composer Gluck, a master of simple and obvious melody. But she not only interprets him, she enlarges and sublimates him. The handling of musical themes in this way is of course a dangerous matter, and might give rise to discussion which would be out of place in this book. It may be maintained that a consummate composition, a symphonic movement by Beethoven, is complete in itself. The best music is its own interpreter and needs no elucidation. Music, moreover, is large and broad in its emotional expression; it transcends words, and how therefore should it not transcend gesture? It is as likely as not that a choregraphic commentary may limit rather than enhance the musical conception. It is possible that the movements of a dancer might not at all correspond with the mood that a Chopin nocturne, for instance, awakes in us. To these misgivings I do not propose to reply. The only adequate answer is to be found in Miss Duncan’s dancing. On this debatable ground her tread is sure. In each of her interpretations of music there is a self-evident rightness which silences censure.
Miss Duncan at first suffered the lot of most reformers. Novelty is usually found to be amusing; the public laughed because it failed to understand. When she appeared some twelve years ago in New York, she had already struggled long and hard to perfect
her art and she sorely needed the invaluable stimulus of recognition and appreciation. She performed a dance which was suggested by “The Rubáiyát” of Omar Khayyám. The newspaper humorists made merry over her work. One summed up the general verdict in the phrase: “Our public will probably prefer Omar’s lines to Miss Duncan’s.”
When she came to Europe, however, Miss Duncan’s art met with speedy recognition. In rapid succession she captured Berlin, Paris, St Petersburg and London. London perhaps found the new gospel somewhat hard to accept, but the educational authorities both in Germany and France were anxious to obtain her services in the instruction of children. In Paris she has trained a troupe of young children whose delightful dancing charmed London audiences a year or two ago.
In the power of expressing the depth and subtlety of spiritual moods Isadora Duncan is supreme. She is a poet no less than a dancer. Her dancing is so deeply rooted in the soul that it ignores the superficial and often coquettish graces of the popular dancer. And yet she is feminine in her dancing, but feminine in the simple, calm, womanly grandeur of the three fates of the Parthenon marbles. Hers is the essential and eternal type of womanhood, the type of the Madonna, of the peasant woman, breathing of the warm earth and the open air, of Ceres rather than of Circe. Her dance has perhaps the beauty of full summer rather than of spring. Its lines are flowing, but full of dignity and restraint. There is perhaps still a suggestion of the frieze in it. A new technique necessarily at first inclines towards rigidity.
There is no surer proof of the true greatness of her art than the fact that it can produce in the spectator that sense of shock which only work of an elemental character can give, a shock which sends the mind surging forward down vistas opening up an undiscovered prospect not merely of art but of life. This sensation has been well described by Mr W. R. Titterton in a glowing pæan of praise. “I remember when I first saw her, at the Theater des Westens in Berlin. My friends had led me to expect something fine, and then the Duncan came and struck me like a thunderclap. Will you believe me? I shuddered with awe. Once in a century, in ten centuries, comes a New Idea, and here was I the spectator of the latest born. In this idea—this free, simple, happy, expressive rhythmic movement—was focused all I and a hundred others had been dreaming. This was our symbol—the symbol of a new art, a new literature, a new national polity, a new life. I saw crowds of happy children, of happy men and women, dancing that dance on village greens, in the green forest, on the green hill-tops. Pedants at their books, pedants at their figures, pedants on their platforms vanished in smoke before the exultant dances of this glorious woman. As the walls of Jericho before the trump of Joshua, so before her the factory walls fell down, the festering slums and ugly places of London crumbled to dust, and away to Arcady we danced to the sound of her Shepherd’s piping.”
If Isadora Duncan propounded the gospel of the classical dance, Maud Allan promulgated it with the greatest popular success. She won the ear of England for the new word. Not that she was by any means a mere copyist—her talent was too original for that. Coming after her great predecessor, she nevertheless found her own inspiration in herself. With a certain assurance in the strength of her own individuality, she treated the classical dance with some freedom and boldness. She added the personal touch that gained the applause of the crowd.
Miss Maud Allan is Canadian born, but she spent the best part of her childhood and youth in the state of California. There she lived a breezy out-of-door life, romping, riding, swimming, mountain climbing, drinking in health with the virgin air—all unconsciously, no doubt, acquiring the strength and suppleness of body that were to be invaluable to her in later years. Very early she began the serious study of music, but even in those early days she seems to have been conscious of the possibilities of the expression of emotion through the medium of gesture. When Sarah Bernhardt visited San Francisco, the art of the great actress left a deep impression upon her. Shortly afterwards, when she was playing at the piano, her mind still attentive to the rhythm of the French artist’s gestures, her mother asked her of what she was thinking. “Of Sarah Bernhardt’s wonderful talent, of the beautiful movements of her body,” she replied. “She seems to express more with it than with her lips.”
It was decided that Maud Allan should go to Berlin to continue her musical studies at the Royal High School of Music. The next five and a half years of her life were spent in an atmosphere of music, literature and art. Her work was varied by travel in Italy and elsewhere. Her visit to Italy was a turning-point in her artistic career. Already at times she had experienced a feeling of being a prisoner while at the piano; music was still an intense delight to her, but it was no longer all-sufficing. A new idea took shape in her mind as she stood before Botticelli’s “Primavera” in Florence, an idea that she too might render her body eloquent to speak of the joy of spring and of the scented woods and of emotions yet more various and profound. She returned to Berlin, where she developed her idea, concentrating her interest on physical culture, studying in museums and libraries the poses of classical art, seeking to discover the relation between music and gesture. The new interest so engrossed her that it allowed no time for any other pursuit. She no longer had any doubt as to her true vocation. She left the Royal High School of Music and began her career as a dancer. She gave her first public performance in Vienna in 1903. Three years had elapsed since the idea had crystallised before Botticelli’s picture in Florence—three years of continuous training and preparation.
It is interesting to note that when Joachim saw the dance-programme of his young friend, he called her aside and said: “Little girl, you may dance anything you like, but, dear child, please don’t dance my Beethoven!” It was another musician, however, Marcel Remy, the Belgian composer, who gave her the greatest encouragement and assistance in the prosecution of her studies.
The success of the new dancer in Vienna was immediate, and in the following years she appeared in most of the larger cities of Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Hungary. It was in 1907 that she received the command to appear before King Edward VII. at Marienbad. “I remember that it was with fear and trembling that I began my work,” so she tells the story, “although when in the midst of any of my dances I am seldom cognisant of any personality near. But I think I should be forgiven if, that once, the thought of England’s King watching me gravely influenced me and, afterwards I realised, favourably. I think it was the happiest moment of my life when he took my hand with his calm, great dignity and told me he considered my art a beautiful one, and my dances worthy of the word classical.”
In the spring of 1908 Maud Allan first appeared before an English audience at the Palace Theatre, London. Since that date much water has flowed under the bridge, and it is not without interest now to recall the notice that appeared in The Times newspaper the following morning: “There is little doubt that Miss Maud Allan will make a great success. If so she will be the first to rouse London to enthusiasm with a kind of dancing to which it has never yet taken very kindly—the dancing of gesture and posture. As Miss Allan represents it, it is a thing of such interest and beauty that it may even drive high kicking off the stage.”
The programme informed us in magniloquent phrase that the new dancer had “ransacked the shrines of plastic beauty and worshipped humbly and prayerfully before the Art of the Universe.” Little wonder, therefore, that there was a hush of expectancy when the violin bows glided softly into the opening strains of Chopin’s valse in A minor and, preceded by a sinuous arm, the dancer slipped through the velvet hangings, drawn forward apparently by the magnetism of the music. Her limbs and feet were bare, her form lightly clothed in a loose classic drapery. A ripple ran along her arms from the shoulder to the finger-tips, undulating like a wave of the sea. When the music changed from the minor to the major key, her body passed into the corresponding mood, suddenly becoming brilliant with hope and delight. Then as quickly the joy faded out of her face and limbs, and she relapsed with the music into a passive despair. When the music ceased, her heart too seemed to have ceased beating. Silently she glided back through the curtain. Already London had capitulated.
Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song” was an allegretto grazioso chase of
butterflies and plucking of wild flowers. With rapid sallies hither and thither, now a-tiptoe, now on bended knee, she danced the joy of all living things in the spring. The dream she dreamed before Botticelli’s “Primavera” had become reality. A comparison with Pavlova’s “Danse des Papillons” inevitably suggests itself, and it is hardly possible to claim that in sheer brilliance of movement, in papilionaceous gaiety, the “natural” school has yet outstripped a style that is founded upon the older technique of the ballet.
But the climax of the performance was the “Vision of Salomé.” Many harsh things have been said of this dance, from the propriety of the costume of jewels and gauze to that of rendering a stage version of a Biblical episode. It has been called by a respectable critic, “sensuous, decadent, macabre.” It was stated that it preserved a nice balance between the lascivious and voluptuous. Above all, the Corporation of Manchester, believing that it would sully the immaculate atmosphere of their city, prohibited its performance within the limits of their jurisdiction—an action which resembles nothing so much as that of an English duchess, who, when she was offered the translation of a French play that she was witnessing, refused it, saying, “I do not wish to understand.” It is to be feared, however, that the deputation of City Fathers that was sent down to witness the dance was able only to misunderstand. To state that the dance was as pure in intention as it was powerful in execution would be a superfluous commentary. I cannot do better than let the dancer relate in her own words the meaning of the vision:
“Drawn by an irresistible force, Salome in a dream descends the marble steps leading from the bronze doors that she has just flung to, behind her frightened attendants. The sombre stone obelisks, backed by the inky darkness of the cypress trees, shut out the silver rays of the moon, and, save for the flickering red light of the cresset flames that the slaves have lit, all is mystic darkness, and to Salome’s overwrought brain all is fantastic, vague.
“She lives again the awful moments of joy and of horror which she has just passed through. Alone in the gloom the poor child’s fancy assumes dominion over her.
“Slowly, to the strains of the distant music, reminiscently she raises her willowy arms. The movement thrills her whole slender frame and she glides as if in a dream. A voice whispers ‘Your duty—your duty! Does not the child owe obedience to its mother?’ On, on—wilder and more reckless than ever before! She sees once more the greedy glittering eyes of her stepfather—she hears again the whispered praises and encouraging words of her mother, and Salome, child that she is, realises a power within her and exults. She sees again her triumph approach, her swaying limbs are in readiness to give way, when suddenly from out of the sombre death-still hall the wail of muffled distress—and a pale, sublime face with its mass of long black hair arises before her—the head of John the Baptist! There is a sudden crash. She is horror-stricken! Suddenly a wild desire takes possession of her. Why, ah! why should her mother have longed for this man’s end? Salome feels a strange longing, compelling her once more to hold in her hands this awful reward of her obedience, and slowly, very slowly, and with ecstasy mingled with dread, she seems to grasp the vision of her prize and lay it on the floor before her. Every fibre of her youthful body is quivering; a sensation hitherto utterly unknown to her is awakened, and her soul longs for comfort. Hark! a sound of approaching feet. Frightened lest her treasure be taken from her before she has solved its mystery, she stands guard over it, and when the footsteps die away in the distant halls her relief knows no limit! In the mad whirl of childish joy she is drawn again to dance—dance around this strange silent presence. Soon exhaustion breaks the spell. Salome, Princess of Galilee, lies prone on the cold grey marble.
“The awakening is that of her childish heart. The realisation of a superior power has so taken possession of her that she is spurred on to sacrifice everything even unto herself to conquer. Reared in luxury—her every wish granted since her days began—was it to be thought possible she would subject herself to the will of another, a stronger and an intangible force at that, without a fierce conflict?
“What passes in those few moments through this excited, half-terror-stricken, half-stubborn brain makes of little Salome a woman!
“Now, instead of wanting to conquer, she wants to be conquered,
craving the spiritual guidance of the man whose wraith is before her; but it remains silent! No word of comfort, not even a sign! Crazed by the rigid stillness, Salome, seeking an understanding, and knowing not how to obtain it, presses her warm, vibrating lips to the cold lifeless ones of the Baptist! In this instant the curtain of darkness that had enveloped her soul falls, the strange grandeur of a power higher than Salome has ever dreamed of beholding becomes visible to her, and her anguish becomes vibrant.
“She begs and prays for mercy of the stern head—alas, without response! Salome flees in despair, and though her pride, her princely rank, confront her, and she halts, it is but for a moment. The Revelation of Something far greater still breaks upon her, and stretching out her trembling arms turns her soul rejoicing towards Salvation. It is gone! Where, oh, where! A sudden wild grief overmasters her, and the fair young Princess, bereft of all her pride, her childish gaiety, and her womanly desire, falls, her hands grasping high above her for her lost redemption, a quivering huddled mass.”
It was a dance of a strange and haunting fascination, deriving no little of its disquieting effect from the weird Oriental strains of Strauss’s music. There were many who found themselves unaccountably drawn to it and were compelled to return to the tragic vision night after night. Yet as a presentment of tragic emotion, finer even than the “Vision of Salomé,” or the rendering of Chopin’s “Funeral March,” was the dance of “Ase’s Death” in Grieg’s Peer Gynt suite. It was a study of mournful poses, inspired by that grief which lies too deep and still to explode in tumultuous and exciting gesture. There is, however, in her ecstasies both of joy and grief just that lack of fire which makes intelligible, if it does not quite justify, the somewhat harsh words of Mr W. R. Titterton when he says of Miss Maud Allan that “she is the English Miss in art. She is an ineffectual angel beating in the limelight her luminous wings in vain. She has many pretty movements; she is light and dainty, she has an elfin prance, with bent knee and waving hands, but she has no temperament, and no presence; she is spectral; you think you can see through her. And above all, she is monotonous. She repeats and repeats and repeats. How she sickens me in the end, for example, with that, at first, so beautiful ripple of the hands.”
The truth may possibly be that that freedom from convention in which she glories is in reality a bondage. In her own words, “dancing is the spontaneous expression of the spiritual state.” The dance is “not an acquired but a spontaneous art, revealing the temperament of the dancer.” She is compelled to acknowledge the necessity for technique, but she fears that if it becomes excessive the art will no longer be able to stir the soul. In this theory lurks a certain element of danger. The dance, like all the arts, seeks the effect of spontaneity, of inevitableness, but this spontaneity is highly self-conscious. And it expresses itself most readily by technique—for technique, when it is really fluent, does not hinder but facilitates the expression of temperament. For us moderns the “spontaneous” gesture is the clumsy, inexpressive movement of everyday life; the dancer requires a conscious technique that comes more naturally to her than the unconscious technique of the street, in order to be truly spontaneous and expressive. It is perhaps her detestation of the stereotyped steps of the ballet that causes her to incline to the opposite extreme. But she herself would be the first to admit that her art has cost her pains no less than that of the ballet-dancer. It is one of her complaints that many suppose that she has learned to dance with no more than the exertion of a fluttering butterfly. It is not for Miss Allan herself, but for her imitators, that the theory that technique is relatively unimportant is so dangerous a pitfall. The conventions of classical or “natural” dancing are not yet so fixed as those of the ballet. Where the path is less clearly marked out there is more danger of going astray. Would-be dancers of the “natural” school, imagining that nothing is so easy as to dance “naturally,” forget that they have to unlearn the movements they are accustomed to before they can produce anything worthy of the name of art.
If Isadora Duncan is a poet, Maud Allan is before all things a musician. In the musical qualities of her art she has no rival. Apart from her instinct for music, she has profited by a musical training such as probably no other dancer has been equipped with. Her steps are to the eye the exact equivalent of the notes which reach the ear. One of the most felicitous of her accomplishments is her ability to pass with the music from the major to the minor key, or vice versa. When a phrase occurs first in one key and then in the other, it is repeated in her dancing with just that modification of aspect and accent which expresses the change of mood. Some of the movements in Grieg’s first Peer Gynt suite gave her admirable scope for this beautiful art of transposition. The faithfulness with which her movements follow the moods of the composer is probably only fully realised by those who are musicians as well as connoisseurs of the dance. Her translation of music has not seldom that rare quality of translations of being finer than the original, and there are not a few who, when they hear again, unaccompanied, the music which her dancing has ennobled, will be conscious of a sense of incompleteness and loss.
If only Joachim had seen her art in its maturity, he would perhaps have been content to allow her dance his beloved Beethoven!
In any account of the classical dance it is scarcely possible to forbear mention of Mlle Magdeleine, although it is difficult to know exactly where to place her. For the characteristic of her dancing is that it purports to be unconscious. Some eight or nine years ago Mlle Magdeleine came for hypnotic treatment to Professor Magnin of the Paris School of Magnetism. M. Magnin accidentally discovered that while in a state of trance she was susceptible to the influence of music in a quite extraordinary degree, and that although she had learnt nothing of the art of dancing, she accompanied the music that was played to her in her trance with motions of the utmost beauty and significance. She was strictly examined by a number of eminent scientists, who certified that to the best of their belief her dancing was performed in a genuine state of unconscious, or rather subconscious, activity. She interpreted with strange suggestiveness the music that the foremost musicians of the day played to her, and the painters and sculptors who saw her, including Rodin, were astounded at the strength and beauty of her poses. Naturally the main interest of her performance rests upon its genuineness, and it is easier to believe that it was given under true hypnotic conditions than that the best scientific judgment of the day was deceived.
Mlle Magdeleine interpreted music ranging in character as widely as Handel’s “Largo,” a valse of Chopin’s, and “The Marseillaise.” Her rendering of the latter was the very embodiment of human passion and blood-lust. Her power of dramatic expression is indeed terrifying. In her gestures there is at times something tremendous and heroic; at other times they are distinctly faulty and fall into the conventional and the commonplace. It is said that her trance tends to become mixed with the recollections of her waking consciousness, and that when the two states ultimately coincide she will lose her distinctive quality, her absolute rightness of gesture. In any case her dancing is a unique phenomenon; she cannot found a school or perpetuate a method. But she points the way for the art of that great tragic dancer of whom the dance is expectant—an art which was only partially realised in the dancing of Miss Maud Allan. Of the three Ladies of Sorrow of whom De Quincey speaks it was perhaps possible for the dancer of the “Vision of Salomé” to represent our Lady of Tears, “who goes abroad upon the winds when she hears the sobbing of litanies or the thundering of organs,” or even of Our Lady of Sighs, “whose eyes are filled with perishing dreams, and with wrecks of forgotten deliriums”; but it was reserved for the Magdeleine to portray that third and most terrible sister, Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness, the defier of God, the mother of lunacies and the suggestress of suicides, who “moves with incalculable motions, bounding and with tiger’s leaps,” who “wears the fierce light of a blazing misery that rests not for matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon of night, for ebbing or for flowing tide.” The dances of delight and gaiety come almost instinctively to those of a happy temperament; but the dances of grief, of fear, of madness, of despair, these are they which put the dancer to the severest test, which strip her of the acquired graces of the schools, and leave her dependent only on the quality of her own soul.
Of the uninspired imitators who have followed in the steps of the great dancers of the classical school, there is happily no need to speak at length. Mme Knipper-Rabeneck of the Artistic Theatre of Moscow trained a group of dancers, who performed in London last year. Their interpretation of the music which they accompanied with their dancing was not very subtle, but if they failed to catch the finest shades of Schumann, Brahms and Chopin, they nevertheless gave a pleasing exhibition of youthful liveliness. The sisters Wiesenthal have added to the classical method a “pretty fluttering, tottering marionette manner of their own.” And Lady Constance Stuart Richardson was the first of the aristocratic amateurs who, when any new style of dancing becomes the vogue, are always ready to rush in where professionals sometimes fear to tread.
Indeed there are signs that classical dancing may be overtaken by a fate not unlike that which befell the Skirt Dance—an event which would indeed be a calamity, and not, as in the earlier mode, a happy release. Whatever may be said in dispraise of the school of the ballet—and it has its detractors not a few—it has at least the advantage of possessing a technique, the terrors of which are sufficient to protect it against the incursion of that mob of gentlewomen who dance with ease, or rather who would dance with ease were it not for the necessary pains without which that ease cannot be acquired. “Natural” dancing, by its very name, is inviting to those who are averse to hard work. The theory that a dancer can ignore with impunity the restrictions of technique, that she is bound to please if only she is natural and happy, and allows herself to follow the momentary inspiration of the music, and dances with the same gleeful spontaneity as a child dancing to a barrel-organ, is a doctrine as seductive as it is fatal. Already we have seen upon the stage performers who, in the name of Greek art, race and romp rather than dance. We are threatened with performances in which naïve young creatures in tenuous classic drapery amuse themselves by capering on bare feet, gathering and scattering make-believe roses, splashing in imaginary rivers, undulating snaky arms, shooting arrows, playing ball, butterfly catching. The dance cannot return to nature, in the sense which Isadora Duncan intended, by returning to this rather kindergarten Arcadia. The classical dance has its hidden law, which is perhaps more difficult than that of the ballet because it is more secret. If the dancer despises technique and relies only on her natural endowment, she must at least expect that the least flaw of beauty, grace or intelligence will be exposed in painful nakedness to the general gaze.
IT is now time to pick up the thread of the story of the ballet.
We have seen how a new spirit in dancing came from the West; for the new spirit in ballet we must look to the East.[2] Many strange and fine things of the spiritual order have come out of Russia in these latter times. Our music, our literature, our art, have been profoundly affected by the spirit of that people which appears to have all the unfathomable reservoirs of barbaric life to draw upon. But perhaps there has come to us nothing so supremely excellent, so unsurpassably beautiful, as Russian dancing.
As with all other peoples who still preserve the traditions of the elder generations, with the Russians dancing is a natural act. The peasants learn the graceful national dances, which vary from province to province, as simply as they learn their mother tongue. In summer, on the evenings of Sundays and holidays, the gaily-decked youths and maidens collect in a field or on a bridge near the village and dance to the music of the twittering balalaika or the monotonous ululations of a cheap concertina. Unfortunately in Russia, as everywhere else, the old order is giving place to the new, and for the immemorial national dances are being substituted foreign quadrilles and lancers. But though the character of the dance changes, the passion and the natural aptitude for it remain. In the People’s Palace at St Petersburg the young men and girls from the factories may be seen dancing the intricate measures of the mazurka with an ease and abandon which some of the trained dancers of Western Europe might envy.
To this native spirit, however, the ballet owes little or nothing. Doubtless it has in a manner fertilised the soil, created a public interested in the dance and, if heredity counts for anything, provided a raw material ready for the ballet-master to mould to his will. But the ballet, as I have said before, is in its origin aristocratic, and nowhere more so than in Russia. The Russian ballet is entirely the product of the Court. It was of course originally a foreign importation. The first ballet was presented in 1675, before the Tsar Alexis, the second of the Romanovs. Peter the Great, in his efforts to westernise Russia, introduced the Western modes of dancing, and, as he was his own shipwright, so he was his own dancing-master. He sets about teaching his Court, and himself made such “caprioles,” says Bergholz, that any dancing-master might envy him.
But the institution of the ballet in Russia was due to the Empress Anne. In 1735 she appointed the Neapolitan composer Francesca Areja to compose the music and conduct the orchestra, and a Frenchman, Landé, to act as ballet-master. She commanded an Italian intermedio with a ballet to be played before her once a week. At first, as there were yet no professional dancers, the young noblemen of the military cadet schools were instructed in the dance. Gradually they were superseded by a specially trained corps. Landé collected a number of boys and girls of the poorer classes and trained them free of charge. So delighted was the Empress with their performance that she undertook to defray all the expenses of their education out of the Imperial exchequer. Landé received a fee for teaching them, rooms were provided for them in one of the palaces, and we learn that the children were entrusted to the care of a widow of one of the Court coachmen. Such were the modest beginnings of the famous Dramatic School of St Petersburg.
Catherine II. followed in the footsteps of her predecessor. In her reign the services of the cadets were no longer required. To her initiative was due the erection of the Grand Theatre, which is now supplanted by the famous Marianski Theatre. She organised the theatre and brought it into relation with the bureaucratic regime, appointing a director, with two committees under his control, one in Moscow and one in St Petersburg, to superintend theatrical spectacles.
Didelot, who was called to St Petersburg in 1802, raised the ballet to a level of excellence which was not surpassed even in Milan. As a ballet-master he was a martinet, almost a fanatic in his passion for his art. Under him the ballet took that prominent place in Russian life which it has never since lost. He regarded plastique and mime as even more important features in the ballet than dancing itself. He insisted that there was no limit to what the ballet could express, and to prove his case staged Racine’s tragedy, Phèdre, in ballet form with considerable success. So great became the popularity of the ballet that even when opera came into fashion it was the custom for the corps de ballet to repeat in dumb show during the entr’actes the foregoing act of the opera.
During all this time the Imperial Ballet closely followed the academic Italian tradition. It was in no way distinctively Russian. Fifty years ago, and even less, most of the principal dancers in Moscow and St Petersburg were Italians—a complete reversal of the state of affairs at the present day, when Preobrajenskaya, one of the greatest dancers at the Marianski, appears as prima ballerina at La Scala, the home of the ballet in Milan.
The excellence of the Russian ballet is the direct outcome of the system of State maintenance and control, which has been in vogue for a century and a half. The large expenditure necessary for its upkeep is met by the funds annually set apart for the Minister of the Court. The Imperial Ballet provides all the dancers for the operas given throughout the season at the Marie Theatre in St Petersburg and at the Opera House in Moscow. On two evenings a week, Wednesday and Sunday, it gives a special performance devoted entirely to the ballet. Moreover, some of the less distinguished dancers perform from time to time at the People’s Palace in St Petersburg. The country, therefore, may be said to get good value for its money.
Attached to the great theatres, primarily reserved as homes of ballet, is the Imperial School of Dancing, which is of course supported by the State. The pupil—boy or girl—is entered at the age of about nine or ten. After the necessary nomination has been secured, a stringent examination with regard to health, intelligence, beauty of form and natural gracefulness has to be passed before the child is finally accepted. Mr Rothay Reynolds, who has an intimate knowledge of Russian life, gives an interesting account of the training:
“The school contains a great room for dancing, with a floor sloped at the same angle as that of the stage at the Marinsky Theatre. Here one may see a class of merry boys instructed in their art. A master, usually one of the best dancers in the theatre, shows them the steps and movements to be learnt, and half-a-dozen do their best to copy him. After ten minutes they go and rest, and a second batch comes forward. The boys seem to enjoy the work, and even when they are supposed to be resting some of them will continue to practise and give each other friendly hints. In another and similar room is the girls’ class, where the method is the same. Then there is a room with many toilet-tables on which grease-paints are set out and with mirrors and electric lights arranged exactly as at the theatre. Here the pupils assemble for lessons in make-up. A boy has to learn to transform himself into a Chinese or an old man or a beautiful young Greek, and he has to pass examinations at different points of his school career in this art. I remember once meeting a young man in the waiting-room of a Polish dentist” (he goes on to relate). “He told me he had toothache and a nervous break-down, brought on he believed by the strain of a difficult examination. I asked what were the subjects of the examination. ‘French,’ he said, ‘because we must be cultured, dancing, the history of dancing, and painting my face.’ I had the curiosity to ask where this unusual curriculum was followed. ‘At the Imperial School of Ballet,’ he said, mentioned his name with the air of one who felt that he ought to have been recognised, and added: ‘Thank heaven I’ve passed, and now I am a premier danseur. It is a delightful life, and when I am too old to dance the State will give me a pension.’”