THE GOLDEN AGE OF DANCING
Louis XIV brought public interest in the ballet to a point of eager
excitement; indeed, the influence of a monarch’s consistent patronage,
including the foundation of a national academy, added to the example of
his prominent participation in about thirty allegorical dancing
spectacles, could not fail to be powerful.
With the growth of public interest and intelligence, the ballet and the
technique of dancing developed commensurately. The two enthusiasms of
public and artists reacted on each other to the advantage of both; in
the uninterrupted enrichment of the ballet the public never failed to
find its attention repaid in ever-increasing fascination. Dancers,
composers and directors, on their side, abandoned themselves to their
work with the zeal that comes of certainty that no good thing will pass
unnoticed.
Such conditions bring good results more than can be foreseen even by
those actively engaged. As, in fiction, the miner in trying to loosen a
nugget usually uncovers a vein, so it may occur in the arts. For
instance, Camargo found that her _entrechat_ was difficult and
ineffectual under the weight and length of the fashionable skirt of the
period. She therefore had a skirt made reaching midway from knee to
foot. A simple solution? Certainly. But it was thought of only after
centuries of submission to clothes that considered fashion and
disregarded the problems and possibilities of the dancer’s art. And it
represented the species of decision that risks acting counter to an
accepted, unquestioned institution. It was not an effort to draw
attention by means of a spurious originality. Camargo’s work explained
the change. The public understood and approved. The ballet was directed
toward its costume; a long journey lay ahead of it, but it was rightly
started.
Liberty of movement so attained at once put a premium on higher and more
open steps; technical invention was set to work as never before. The
_balloné_, various _pas battus_ and _ronds-de-jambe_ that followed
immeasurably enhanced the scope of the ballet as an instrument of
ocular-orchestral expression. New _enchainements_, striking in the
contrast of little work with big, soon made the court dances--which for
a period had constituted the ballet’s working material--look
old-fashioned. The stage now required considerable elevation, decided
contrasts, increasing scope. And, whatever the cost in skill and energy,
there were dancers eager to expend the energy and to give the needed
years to acquiring the skill.
Since the days of the Roman Empire, masks had been worn to identify
characters. Not a bit of cloth to cover the face, merely; but cumbersome
things with plumes, wings, metallic spikes (i. e., the rays of the sun
worn by Louis XIV in the Ballet of Night) or what-not, so extended that
they restricted the action of the arms, so heavy as to interfere with
steps. It was a clumsy convention, but it was as integrally a part of
stage representation as scenery is to-day, and the few who wished its
abolition were outvoted by a cautious majority. At last, according to
her custom of helping an enterprise that is doing well, Fate took a
hand. Auguste Vestris failed to appear for a certain performance; as the
time for his entrance drew near, the anxious stage director asked Gardel
to “go on” in Vestris’ part. Gardel, an until-that-time ineffectual
rebel against the mask, consented; but with the condition that the mask
be omitted. In default of arrangements more to his satisfaction, the
director consented. The public at once saw the advantage of the change,
and were pleased with Gardel’s appearance. So began the end of the
dominion of the mask.
Of the notable personalities that the early rays of the eighteenth
century illuminated, the aforementioned Auguste Vestris was the
interesting son of a more interesting father. The latter was a genius of
the very first water, with a conceit so incredibly exaggerated that it
is almost lovable. “This century,” he was accustomed to observe, “has
produced but three great men--myself, Voltaire, and Frederick the
Great.” He sometimes signed himself “_le Diou de la Danse_”; himself a
Florentine, the relation of French spelling to pronunciation was
contrary to his ideas. The phrase as he put it had a special merit, and
as “_le Diou de la Danse_” he was known through his long life. A lady,
having stepped on his foot, expressed a hope that she had not hurt him.
“Le Diou” depreciated the hurt to himself, but informed the lady that
she had put Paris into a two-weeks’ mourning. Of his son’s leaps he said
that if Auguste did not remain in the air forever, it was because he did
not wish to humiliate his comrades.
The foundation of the Opera was another of the impulses to act
favourably, if indirectly, upon the interests of dancing. Its modest
beginning had been made a few years after that of the ballet academy.
The two arts at once combined to produce a new variety of musical
spectacle, namely, opera. Great music came to the fore in response to
the added encouragement--but digressions must be repressed.
Contemporary with Camargo and Sallé was a dreamer of dreams too great to
be realized in his own time, but whose ideas take place among the
lasting good influences in art. Garrick called him “the Shakespeare of
the Dance”: his name was Noverre.
To the post of ballet-master at the Opera he brought the experience of
years in similar service in Stuttgart, Vienna and St. Petersburg. His
work he regarded with the broad vision of cultivated understanding of
painting, music, story, acting and dancing, and the functions of each.
His genius was, above all else, constructive; his ideal was to bring the
arts into a harmonious union, to which each should contribute its
utmost, while all should be informed with and dominated by a single
æsthetic purpose.
The obstacle always blocking his path was not incompetence of aides and
artists, not lack of money, nor any of the _bêtes noires_ to which more
recent idealists are accustomed. His enemy was the inert, impalpable and
almost invincible force of custom, paradoxically persistent despite the
public’s demand for new things. It was custom that the composer of a
ballet should always arrange for the introduction of the specialties of
the several principals, irrespective of motives. Custom obliged him to
arrange entrances in the inverse order of the artists’ relative
ranks--he of least rank “going on” first, the star being the last to
appear. Noverre broke up this usage, and characters thereafter entered
at times consistent with plot-development. Plots had been crippled by
accepted beliefs that certain dance sequences were unalterable; a
_Gavotte_, for instance, had to be followed by a _Tambourin_ and a
_Musette_; the sequence had not been questioned. Noverre saw the
possibilities of dancing as an instrument of expression; he insisted
that steps and _enchainements_ should be composed to intensify the
motive of the passage. Scenery, he held, should contribute in the same
way to the mood of the act it decorates. Pretty it had been, and
executed by capable painters; but Noverre found its composition lacking
in consideration of proper relationship to the other elements of the
production. With himself he associated Boucher and one or two other
decorators of lesser name; under his comprehension of the scene’s
dramatic intent, settings were designed that reasserted in line, form
and colour the argument of the scene’s plot, music and dance. In this
department he was less successful than in others. Boucher made beautiful
sketches, some of which are extant. But one has only to consider opera
in his own day to realise that any influence Noverre exercised toward
the unification of scenery with music and plot, was not strong enough to
last. Stories taken from legend, set among surroundings as realistic as
skill can paint them; tragic scenes among architecture and foliage
coloured in the key of care-free frivolity--to enumerate the familiar
discrepancies is unnecessary. Tradition specifies a bright first-act
“set” for _Carmen_, and grey for the prison interior in _Faust_. But the
profound correlation of colour and line with the explicit mood of the
piece has remained for the Russian, Léon Bakst. In the recent volcanic
renaissance of dancing effected by his fellow-countrymen, M. Bakst and
his ideas have been a force second only to the marvellous work of the
dancers themselves. His scenery strikes the note of the drama, attunes
the spectator with its mood, at the rise of the curtain. His knowledge
of pictorial composition he has extended to the designing of costumes;
his broad artist’s intelligence he has applied to the composition and
direction of ballets! It is his happy rôle to realise Noverre’s dream.
In music Noverre worked with Gluck, in certain productions at least; and
happily. “Instead of writing the steps on prescribed airs,” in a free
translation of his own words, “as is done with couplets of familiar
tunes, I composed--if I may so express myself--the dialogue of my ballet
and had the music made for each phrase and each idea. It was just so
that I dictated to Gluck the characteristic air of the ballet of the
savages in _Iphigenia in Tauris_; the steps, the gestures, the
expressions of the different personages that I designed for him gave to
the celebrated composer the character of the composition of that
beautiful bit of music.”
The abolition of the mask was among Noverre’s desires; its fortuitous
accomplishment at a later time already has been described. In his ideals
for costume reform in general he was only partly successful. What he
strove for seems to have been costuming in something of the sense of its
present-day interpretation by the Russians; garments wholly in character
with the beings represented, in regard to race and period, yet conceding
enough in line and colour to enable them to be used as part of the
material of abstract interpretation. At the beginning of his
administration of the Opera he found each performer dressed, for the
most part, according to individual choice: either the drawing-room
costume of the period, or the same with shortened skirt, à la Camargo.
To this was added the mask, an enormous wig (unrelated to the character)
and some such symbol as a leopard skin, a wreath of flowers, or more
likely a property such as a bow and quiver of arrows, or a pair of
bellows. In the order mentioned, such articles represented a bacchante,
Flora, Cupid, and Zephyrus. Excepting the superadded marks of
identification, artists provided their own wardrobe. The lack of
consistent supervision and its natural consequence is exemplified in an
anecdote of a member of the _corps de ballet_ in _Le Carnaval et la
Folie_: in the performance she exhibited a series of gowns of Adrienne
Lecouvreur, which she had thriftily picked up at a sale of the recently
deceased tragedienne’s effects.
In the ballet of _The Horatii_, of Noverre’s own composition, “_Camilla_
wore a huge hooped petticoat, her hair piled up three feet high with
flowers and ribbons. Her brothers wore long-skirt coats, set out from
their hips by padding.” And so forth.
It is to be noted that Roman and Greek mythology lived and flourished,
but no longer excluded other lore from the composer’s use. A list of
Noverre’s _ballets d’action_ includes _The Death of Ajax_, _The Judgment
of Paris_, _Orpheus’ Descent into Hell_, _Rinaldo and Armida_, _The
Caprices of Galatea_, _The Toilette of Venus and the Roses of Love_,
_The Jealousies of the Seraglio_, _The Death of Agamemnon_, _The
Clemency of Titus_, _Cupid the Pirate_ and _The Embarkation for
Cythera_. His work of permanent value, still read by composers and
ballet-masters, is his book _Letters on the Imitative Arts_. For his
light composition, _Les Petits Riens_, the music was by Mozart.
Notwithstanding his failure to accomplish all he hoped in the several
departments of his organisation, and in spite of his rather pessimistic
opinions of early eighteenth-century conditions affecting the ballet,
the dance was entering its golden age. Pantomime--largely owing to the
enrichment he had given it out of the fruits of his study of Garrick’s
methods--had exponents who could touch the heart. Writings began to show
intelligent and explicit criticism, and that of a nature to prove that
choreographic execution had reached a high point. The added scope
afforded by new acquisitions of material in the steps allowed artists to
go far in development of individuality. Camargo charmed by perfection of
technique; “she danced to dance, not to stir emotion.” Her special steps
are enumerated: besides the _entrechat_, she shone in _jetés battus_ and
a frictionless _entrechat coupé_. About her work there was a healthy
public controversy, a vigourous minority protesting against idolisation
of one who they asserted had virtuosity only. And the protests show
analytical understanding of the dance.
Sallé’s more deliberate, probably more feeling work, has been noted in
an earlier chapter. Her popularity hardly could have been less, all
told, than that of her rival.
Mlles. Allard and Guimard were two stars who followed a little later in
the same period. The former combined extraordinary vigour with pathetic
pantomime. The work of Guimard was delicate, pretty, light. “She is a
shadow, flitting through Elysian groves,” one of her contemporaries
wrote of her. Certainly she had the art of pleasing, on the stage or
off. The list of eminent competitors for her affection is eloquent
not in its length, but in the number of occupants of high
station--including three princes of the Church. With a passion for
theatrical and political intrigue she combined a spirit of the utmost
generosity. To her the painter David owed his professional beginnings;
he was an art student without means to study, and engaged in
house-painting for a livelihood, when Guimard secured him a pension that
afforded him study at Rome. Some of Fragonard’s best decorations were
made for her establishments.
Her refusal to have any rival about her kept the Opera in an uproar.
Perfectly appointed little theatres in both her country and city homes
enabled her, with her taste, means, and popularity among the people of
the stage, to give performances for which invitations were most highly
prized. For these performances she made a practice of setting dates to
coincide with court receptions, knowing from experience that the best
wit and most of the elegance of Paris would make excuses to the court.
From this estate she was reduced, partly by the storm of the Revolution,
to a condition of miserable poverty lasting until her death; which was
delayed until her seventy-fourth year.
Men did not fall short of women in merit and recognition. Beside the
Vestris, father and son, fame touched Javillier, Dauberval, and the
comedy dancer Lany. Maximilian Gardel, he who substituted for Auguste
Vestris on condition of appearing without the mask (Apollo, in _Castor
and Pollux_ was the rôle), was a composer of note as well as a dancer.
His brother Pierre added to these qualities skill as a violinist.
* * * * *
The progress of the ballet was halted by the Revolution. Gardel headed
an effort to keep it in motion with the aid of a spectacle _La
Marseillaise_ as vehicle; but the people were on the streets, dancing
_la Carmagnole_, and nobility were as far from Paris as possible. It is
probable that the ballet was set down as an aristocratic institution.
Napoleon included a _corps de ballet_ in the equipment of the campaign
in Egypt; but it signified nothing to the advantage of the art.
Immediately after the Terror, eighteen hundred dance-halls were opened
in Paris, to furnish, seven nights a week, relief for fever and frenzy.
Even England was too preoccupied to offer the ballet a dwelling; its
organisation, for the time being, was lost.
But only for the time being. History records a bit of international
negotiation indicating Europe’s readiness to return to the realities of
life and the happiness thereof. In 1821 an ambassador of a great power
acted officially as an impresario of dancers.
England, whose best public taste never has been satisfied with the work
of her own people, was, within a few years after the peace, again
seeking dancers in France. Efforts to get the best were handicapped. The
national character of the French Academy makes its pupils and graduates
wards of their government, in effect; government permission is and was
necessary as a condition to leaving the country. Negotiations therefore
were put into the hands of the British ambassador, less formal dealings
apparently having failed to produce results. The agreement was
incorporated in the form of a treaty, France agreeing to lend England
two first and two second dancers, England in return agreeing not to
attempt to engage any others without the Academy’s consent.
M. Albert and Mlle. Noblet were the first two artists to be taken to
London under the new arrangement, at salaries of £1700 and £1500
respectively. During the same period, and for years after, Her Majesty’s
Theatre had the services of Carlo Blasis, one of the most capable
ballet-masters of his time, father of several virtuosi, and the writer
of books of lasting value on the subject of his profession. Dancing
reached a popularity that would seem the utmost attainable, were it not
for disclosures to be made in the years soon to come.
Beauty and its appreciation will carry a public to a condition of
ecstasy. If to this be added the incessant discussion attendant on a
controversy, with the hot partisanship that accompanies the coexistence
of rival stars, the devotional flame is augmented by fuel of high
calorific value. Not without cause were the hostilities of Pylades and
Bathyllus, of Sallé and Camargo, associated with great public
enthusiasm. To artistic appreciation they added the element of sporting
interest.
In Marie Taglioni and Fanny Ellsler, Europe had the parties to a
years-long competition that was Olympian in quality and incredible in
its hold on the sympathies of the public. Both goddesses in art, their
personalities and the _genres_ of their work were at opposite extremes.
In _Pendennis_ Thackeray asks, “Will the young folks ever see anything
so charming, anything so classic, anything like Taglioni?” Of Ellsler,
Flitch quotes words equally enthusiastic--and less coherent--from the
pen of Theophile Gautier, who was an incurable maniac and copious writer
on the subject of dancing: “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 backward 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 that watch her?”
This referred to a _Cachucha_ that she had brought from Spain; a dance
whose steps have been recomposed under other names, its original name
forgotten except in association with the name and the art of Ellsler. It
was a perfect vehicle for the exploitation of the ardent qualities that
the little Austrian was made of, and on her rendering of it was based a
great part of her fame.
Taglioni, in contrast, was a being of spirit, innocent of mortal
experience, free from ties of the earth. Her training was strictly
within the bounds of the classic ballet; during her career she greatly
amplified its range, yet she always kept within its premise. Though born
in Stockholm, her father was an Italian ballet-master, and two of her
aunts were dancers of reputation. Her achievements represented a triumph
of choreographic inheritance and training over an ill-formed body; in
childhood she is said to have been a hunchback. With training her figure
became normal in strength, and attained a quality of form in keeping
with her selected rôles. But overstrong features deprived her of the
dancer’s adventitious aid of facial beauty. Her triumphs were achieved
by art alone.
Vienna she conquered at the age of twenty, in 1822, the year of her
début. Paris was not so readily moved; but a success in that capital was
a practical necessity to a great career, and Taglioni never rested until
she secured its approval, expressed in terms that penetrated Europe.
Business generalship was not the least of the attributes of the
Taglioni, father and daughter; they recognised the propitious hour for
an engagement in London. The contract included pensioning a number of
their family, and £100 a performance. Results more than justified the
terms; ticket sales for Taglioni’s nights usually were of the nature of
riots. It is as fair to connect with this box-office success, as with
any quality of the artist herself, the story of her “holding up” a
performance until the management of the theatre should make a
substantial payment on an account due. It is unlovable in an artist to
keep an audience waiting, and put a manager to the necessity of making
explanations. It is unlovable in a coal dealer to discontinue supplies
until a debt is settled.
Taglioni paid as heavily for the excellence she put into her work as
ever did miner or merchant for the goods he put on his scales. Her
training began in early childhood, and covered probably twelve years
before her début. Her professional career, with its inevitable
anxieties, in no wise reduced the rigour of study, discipline, and
precaution. Under her father’s eye she practiced hours daily. She went
to the length of having installed in her London lodgings a stage built
to duplicate the slope of the stage in the theatre.
Apart from the possession of ideals of sheer execution that undoubtedly
were higher than any that her predecessors had dreamed of, and whose
attainment involved almost superhuman effort and patience, Taglioni was
a productive inventor of new steps. Flying _brisés_ and other aërial
work make their first appearance in her work, according to Mme. Genée’s
historical programme of ballet evolution. We infer that her effort was
directed toward the illusion of flight; a writer of the period refers
to an _arabesque_ that conveyed that sensation with striking reality.
The great addition she made to elevation may naturally be attributed not
to any interest in that property for its own sake, but rather to an
endless search for lightness. And that, above all others, was the
quality she made her own. _La Sylphide_ (not the composition recently
popularised by the Russians) was the part with which she was most
unified in the minds of the public. Her work appears always to have had
the creation of fairy fantasy as a definite purpose. In pantomime she
was limited. She had none of the stage artist’s familiar tricks devised
to capture the audience, nor did she avail herself of any vivid
contrasts in her costume. She dressed her hair in Madonna fashion,
surrounded by a wreath of little roses; further adornment she
deliberately avoided.
Ellsler was six years the younger; and, at some sacrifice of time in the
acquisition of fame, she reserved Paris as the last of the great cities
in which to appear. Taglioni therefore was well established when her
destined rival first showed her steps to the Parisians. In fact, she
occupied a box at Ellsler’s first Paris performance, where it is said
she silently wept before the end of the other’s first number.
The Swede had succeeded almost in spite of circumstances; Ellsler’s
natural endowment contained almost everything the gods in a generous
mood can give. The perfection of proportion of hands, feet, wrists and
ankles were hers, as well as a Greek perfection of figure. Though her
legs were of steel, and her strength in general that of an athlete, not
a line suffered in sculptural grace nor a movement in freedom. Her face
had a beauty that captivated an audience at the moment of her entrance
on the stage, and a range of expression covering the moods of the human
mind. Her training, like Taglioni’s, had begun early. Mozart, for whom
Ellsler’s father worked as copyist and otherwise, had interested himself
in her to the extent at least that her early years were not misspent.
With her technical tuition--whatever it may have been--she absorbed
stage experience almost from the days of infancy. She danced in a
children’s ballet in Vienna when she was six years old. Before appearing
in Paris she had succeeded in Naples, Berlin and London. The audience of
l’Opéra therefore saw her first at the full maturity of her art and
equipped with ample knowledge of how to present it to the best
advantage.
Her success was not in doubt for a moment. The opening number was a
riotous triumph, the morning papers were undivided in praise of the
newcomer. Taglioni felt that Ellsler had been brought to Paris expressly
to undermine her, and the appearances are that Ellsler lost no time in
putting herself on a war footing.
London theatre-goers soon were in a position to question whether, after
their elaborate provisions to get good dancers, they had not made a
rather embarrassing misplay. Ellsler had danced at Her Majesty’s
Theatre; the public had enjoyed her work, but, owing either to her lack
of a great continental reputation or their own misgivings about the
soundness of her work, had refrained from very hearty demonstration. On
the first night of the engagement, the manager of l’Opéra--who was in
London to form an estimate of the Austrian’s work--signed her for the
following season.
Contrary to the _metier_ of her rival, Ellsler’s art consisted of a
romantic glorification of life’s physique. One gathers that she gave,
instead of an ordered and consecutive poem, a thrill of delighted
astonishment. She was of a newly forming romantic cult that worshipped
the torrid, the savage, the violent. Her most pronounced success was on
her rendering of the dances of Spain; she used her hips and her smile,
and men--more than women--went into rhapsodies. Gautier, who had seen
the best dancers in Spain, wrote that none of them equalled Ellsler.
Which is credible, with reservations and conditions. If the sole aim of
Spanish dancing is to express fire and temperament, to astonish and
inflame, it is more likely to be realised by a clever Northerner than by
a Spaniard. The headlong enthusiast is not bothered by delicate
considerations of shading, development, and truth of form; seizing the
salient and exotic, an exaggeration of these and the elimination of all
else is sure to produce a startling result. Execution at an abnormally
rapid tempo will conceal inaccuracies from all eyes but those trained to
the dance, and backed by a knowledge of its true forms.
All this by no means intends to assert that Ellsler was not a dancer of
a high degree of skill, and perhaps of some degree of greatness. It is
significant, however, that her encomiums concern themselves only with
that which, boiled down, amounts to praise of a beautiful woman,
performing evolutions at that time novel and surprising, and
frankly--withal in a perfectly clean manner--appealing to sex. The
quality that might be called decorative truth does not appear to have
been an impressive element of her work. Assuredly that is the foundation
of dancing entitled to any consideration in connection with the quality
of greatness. Temperament, expressing what it will, of course is as
necessary to animate the form as true form is to begin with; but
temperamental exuberance cannot take the place of a proper substructure.
Granting the inadequacy of data, and speculating on a basis of
indications only, one is justified in wondering if Ellsler coming to
life to-day could repeat her impression on Paris, with its present
knowledge not only of Spanish dancing, but also of feats of supreme
virtuosity.
Years only augmented the heat of the feud between the two goddesses.
Europe divided itself into acrimonious factions of Taglionites and
Ellslerites. The latter were shocked, however, when, to bring to a flat
comparison the question of merit, Ellsler announced her intention to
play _La Sylphide_. Taglioni had made the part her own; for another to
undertake it was at least an act of doubtful delicacy. Nor was the idea
better advised on grounds of strategy. _La Sylphide_ in its composition
was a tissue of the ethereal, even if Taglioni had not made it so by
association with herself. Ellsler was insistently concrete. Effects
followed causes. Her most ardent partisans could not say after the
performance that the attempt spelled anything but failure.
America’s first vision of a star dancer was the direct consequence of
Ellsler’s vexation over the fiasco. Our fathers and grandfathers
unharnessed the horses from her carriage, and counted it an honour to
get a hand on the rope by which the carriage was drawn; carpeted the
streets where the carriage was to pass, strewed flowers where the
divinity was to set her foot, and in all ways comported themselves as
became the circumstances, during the period of two years that she stayed
on this side of the Atlantic.
Ellsler’s professional collapse was connected not with art, but
politics. After her return from America she danced several seasons in
Milan. The ballet academy of la Scala had been founded in 1811, interest
in the art ran high, and was fed by the Austrian government as a
hoped-for means of distracting the public mind from the revolutionary
sentiment of the mid-century. In 1848, on the occasion of a performance
especially provided to smooth over a crisis, it was arranged that the
people of the ballet should wear a medal recently struck, representing
the pope blessing a united Italy. Ellsler conceived a suspicion that the
idea represented an intent to insult her as an Austrian; she refused to
go on unless the medals be taken off. Meantime the _corps de ballet_ had
made its entrance, wearing the medals. They were removed at the first
opportunity, and promptly missed at the ballet’s next entrance. The
explanation of the change travelled through the house; the _première_,
when she entered, was received with hisses. Tense with political
excitement, the audience saw in her only the representative of the power
that controlled the Italian sceptre. Her efforts received no answer but
furious insults. She fainted.
After three comparatively uneventful years she retired, rich and--in the
main--popular. Her contributions to religion and charity had been
impressive and so continued until her death in 1884. Her wealth was
estimated at one and a quarter million dollars. Taglioni’s end was in
miserable contrast; during part of her latter years she held a petty
position as teacher of deportment in a young ladies’ school in England.
She died lonely and forgotten, after a most unhappy old age.
Among the many dancers brought out by the period of enthusiasm were
three women of whose work the records have only the highest praise. To
Carlotta Grisi, Gautier gave the credit of combining the fiery abandon
and the light exquisiteness of the two great luminaries of the day.
Fanny Cerito and Lucille Grahn were ranked with her. For Queen Victoria
there was arranged a _pas de quatre_ by Taglioni, Grisi, Cerito, and
Grahn. That performance, in 1845, represents one of the climaxes of
ballet history, including as it probably did the greatest sum total of
choreographic ability that ever had been brought together.
But it was the milestone at the top of a high mountain, from which the
road turned downward. Except in England, Taglioni’s prestige was dimmed.
Queen Victoria’s reign, however uplifting in various important respects,
undeniably was depressing in its influence on all the imaginative arts;
and it was an influence that reached far. Furthermore, the elements that
constituted opera began to assume new relative proportions. The voice of
Jenny Lind called attention to the factor of singing. In the present day
of subordination of the dancer to the singer, it is almost incredible
that opera of seventy years ago assigned to the dancer the relative
importance that the singer enjoys now; especially difficult is this
conception to any one whose acquaintance with opera is confined to its
production in America. General indifference has reduced operatic ballet
in this land to a level compared to which its condition in continental
Europe is enviable. Though reduced from past importance, in countries
that support academies it has at least retained standards of execution.
But the strictly modern interpretation of opera, minimising
choreography, has been accepted. New operas are written in conformity
with the altered model. It is likely that the present renaissance of
dancing, though no less vital than any that have gone before, will
effect little change in the art’s importance in opera structure, which
has become a distinct organism to be heard rather than seen. Aroused
interest and intelligence inevitably will force improvement on old
organisations, new appreciation will justify it from the box-office
point of view. But the American dance-lover’s hope lies in the new-old
form of ballet pantomime. This is the expression that the great new
romantic movement has taken, as though in express recognition of those
of us to whom the use of ears has not atrophied eyes.
Against the suddenly discovered passion for singing, the art of Grisi,
Cerito, Grahn and their colleagues could not hold public attention.
Steadfastly the French and Italian academies held to their creeds of
choreographic purity. Upon their fidelity to ideals the latter
nineteenth-century reign of artistic terror made no impression; to their
preservation of the good is due the ability of the present romantic
renaissance to come into its complete expression without the
intervention of a century of rebuilding. Russia and Austria too had
founded national academies for instruction along the lines made classic
by Paris and Milan. Others followed. But it appears that the technical
virtuosity of Taglioni had set a pace that was both difficult and
misleading. Being a genius, perfection meant to her a means of
expression. During a period in which no great genius appeared, efforts
to win back the lost kingdom took the form of striving for technique as
an object. The public was unjustly damned for failure to respond to
marvellously executed students’ exercises. With equal lack of justice,
it became fashionable to include the whole school of the ballet’s art in
the accusation of stiffness and artificiality.
The half-century ending about 1908, during which the stage was given
over to all the flashy choreographic counterfeits that mediocrity could
invent, was saved from complete sterility by the dances that are rooted
in the soil. _Jigs_ and _Reels_, _Hornpipes_ and _Tarantellas_ held
their own like hardy wild flowers in a garden of weeds; like golden,
opulent lilies, the _Seguidillas_ of Spain held their heads above
malformation and decadence. This is a fitting point at which to consider
the nature of some of these ancient expressions of the heart of men who
dwell away from courts.