The English theater with its unreal realism and its unimaginative
pretenses toward poetry left me untouched and unconvinced. I found the
beauty, the poetry, that I wanted only in two theaters, the Alhambra and
the Empire. The ballet seemed to me the subtlest of the visible arts,
and dancing a more significant speech than words. I could have said as
Verlaine said to me, in jest, coming away from the Alhambra: "_J'aime
Shakespeare, mais--j'aimes mieux le ballet!_" A ballet is simply a
picture in movement. It is a picture where the imitation of nature is
given by nature itself; where the figures of the composition are real,
and yet, by a very paradox of travesty, have a delightful, deliberate
air of unreality. It is a picture where the colors change, re-combine,
before one's eyes; where the outlines melt into one another, emerge, and
are again lost in the mazes of the dancing.
The most magical glimpse I ever caught of a ballet was from the road in
front, from the other side of the road, one night when two doors were
suddenly thrown open as I was passing. In the moment's interval before
the doors closed again I saw, in that odd, unexpected way, over the
heads of the audience, far off in a sort of blue mist, the whole stage,
its brilliant crowd drawn up in the last pose, just as the curtain was
beginning to go down.
I liked to see a ballet from the wings, a spectator, but in the midst of
the magic. To see a ballet from the wings is to lose all sense of
proportion, all knowledge of the piece as a whole, but, in return, it is
fruitful in happy accidents, in momentary points of view, in chance
felicities of light and movement and shade. It is almost to be in the
performance one's self, and yet passive, with the leisure to look about
one.
The front row of the stalls, on a first night, has a character of its
own. It is entirely filled by men, and the men who fill it have not come
simply from an abstract esthetic interest in the ballet. They have
friends on the other side of the footlights, and their friends on the
other side of the footlights will look down, the moment they come on, to
see who are in the front row, and who are standing by the bar on either
side. The standing room by the bar is the reserve of the first-nighters
with friends who could not get a seat in the front row. On such a night
the air is electrical. A running fire of glances crosses and re-crosses,
above the indifferent, accustomed heads of the gentlemen in the
orchestra; whom it amuses, none the less, to intercept an occasional
smile, to trace it home. On the faces of the men in the front row, what
difference in expression. Here is the eager, undisguised enthusiasm of
the novice, all eyes on one; here is the wary practised attention of the
man who has seen many first nights, and whose scarcely perceptible smile
reveals nothing, compromises nobody, rests on all.
And there is a charm, not wholly imaginary, in that form of illusion
known as make-up. To a face really charming it gives a new kind of
exciting savor; and it has, to the remnant of Puritan conscience that is
the heritage of us all, a certain sense of dangerous wickedness, the
delight of forbidden fruit. The very phrase, painted women, has come to
have an association of sin, and to have put paint on her cheeks, though
for the innocent necessities of her profession, gives to a woman a kind
of symbolic corruption. At once she seems to typify the sorceries and
entanglements of what is most deliberately enticing in her sex, with all
that is most subtle, least like nature, in her power of charm.
_Maquillage_, to be attractive, must, of course, be unnecessary.
The art of the ballet counts for much in the evolution of many favorite
effects of contemporary drawing, and not merely because Degas--who meant
to me everything when I was writing on the ballets, standing in the
wings, writing verses in which I was conscious of transgressing no law
or art in taking that scarcely touched material for new uses--has drawn
dancers, with his reserved, essentially classical mastery of form. By
its rapidity of flight within bounds, by its bird-like and flowerlike
caprices of color and motion, by that appeal to the imagination which
comes from its silence (to which music is but like an accompanying
shadow, so closely, so discreetly does it follow the feet of the
dancers), by its appeal to the eyes and to the senses, its adorable
artificiality, the ballet has tempted almost every draughtsman, as the
interiors of music-halls have also been singularly tempting, with their
extraordinary tricks of light, their suddenness of gesture, their
fantastic humanity. And pantomime, too, in the French and correct,
rather than in the English and incorrect sense of that word, has had its
significant influence. And the point of view is the point of view of
Pierrot--
"_Le subtil génie
De sa malice infinie
De poète-grimacier_"--