It is not among the cardboard glades of the King's Theatre, nor,
indeed, behind any footlights, but in a real and twilit garden that
Grisi, gimp-waisted sylphid, here skips for posterity. To her right,
the roses on the trellis are not paper roses--one guesses them quite
fragrant. And that is a real lake in the distance; and those delicate
pale trees around it, they too are quite real. Yes! surely this is the
garden of Grisi's villa at Uxbridge; and her guests, quoting Lord
Byron's 'al fresco, nothing more delicious,' have tempted her to a
daring by-show of her genius. To her left there is a stone cross, which
has been draped by one of the guests with a scarf bearing the legend
GISELLE. It is Sunday evening, I fancy, after dinner. Cannot one see
the guests, a group entranced by its privilege--the ladies with
bandeaux and with little shawls to ward the dew from their shoulders;
the gentlemen, D'Orsayesque all, forgetting to puff the cigars which
the ladies, 'this once,' have suffered them to light? One sees them
there; but they are only transparent phantoms between us and Grisi, not
interrupting our vision. As she dances--the peerless Grisi!--one
fancies that she is looking through them at us, looking across the ages
to us who stand looking back at her. Her smile is but the formal
Cupid's-bow of the ballerina; but I think there is a clairvoyance of
posterity in the large eyes, and, in the pose, a self-consciousness
subtler than merely that of one who, dancing, leads all men by the
heart-strings. A something is there which is almost shyness. Clearly,
she knows it to be thus that she will be remembered; feels this to be
the moment of her immortality. Her form is all but in profile, swaying
far forward, but her face is full-turned to us. Her arms float upon the
air. Below the stark ruff of muslin about her waist, her legs are as a
tilted pair of compasses; one point in the air, the other impinging the
ground. One tiptoe poised ever so lightly upon the earth, as though the
muslin wings at her shoulders were not quite strong enough to bear her
up into the sky! So she remains, hovering betwixt two elements; a
creature exquisitely ambiguous, being neither aerial nor of the earth.
She knows that she is mortal, yet is conscious of apotheosis. She knows
that she, though herself must perish, is imperishable; for she sees us,
her posterity, gazing fondly back at her. She is touched. And we, a
little envious of those who did once see Grisi plain, always shall find
solace in this pretty picture of her; holding it to be, for all the
artificiality of its convention, as much more real as it is prettier
than the stringent ballet-girls of Degas.
'HO-TEI'