To the realistic imagination of the boy, Huck, the circus was a fleeting
spectacle of beauty; and to the romantic imagination of the girl, Rose,
it lingered long as a dream of poetry. Young Americans, both of them,
living in these modern days when the human form, male and female, is
decorously dissembled and disguised by ugly and complicated garments,
they had been allowed by the exceptional freedom of the circus to
recapture something of the frank and innocent delight of the Greeks in
the beauty of the body, in its beauty merely as a body, and not as the
habitation of the mind and the soul. Alert as the Greeks were to admire
the deeds of the mind--no race ever more so--they were no less keen in
their appreciation of the things of the body. They were glad to crown
the poet for his lyric conquest, but they bestowed the laurel wreath
also on the athlete who had won to the front in the race. The lofty
nobility of their tragedy testifies to the clarity of their
intelligence; and the supreme power of their sculpture is evidence of
their loving study of the human body, bearing itself in beauty, clad in
few and flowing garments which allowed the eye to follow the free play
of the muscles.
It is only in the circus or the gymnasium or the swimming-pool that we
moderns are permitted to behold what was a daily spectacle to the
Greeks; and it is because the circus preserves for us this occasional
privilege that it deserves to survive. The jocularities of the clowns,
the intricate evolutions of the trained animals, the golden glitter of
the gorgeous cavalcades--all these are but the casual accompaniments of
the essential privilege of the circus to present to us a succession of
men and women, with their bodies in perfect condition, to exhibit to us
that purely physical beauty which we are ever in danger of overlooking
or even forgetting. These acrobats, slim and handsome, as Huck Finn
found them, in their "shirts and drawers," may display their daring and
their grace, standing on a circling steed or swinging from a flying
trapeze, revolving on a horizontal bar or building themselves up into
human pyramids on the bark of the arena; but, except for the sake of
variety, the way in which they may choose to exhibit their skill and to
show themselves is unimportant. What is important is that we may have
the shifting spectacle of the human body in the highest condition of
physical efficiency, delighting our eyes by obedience to the everlasting
laws of beauty.
While the Greeks had far more opportunities than are vouchsafed to us
moderns to behold the human body exhibiting its strength and its skill
in graceful play, we have the advantage that many of the most effective
exercises are latter-day inventions. It seems unlikely that the
Athenians and the Spartans, even tho they were horsemen, had attained to
the art of bareback riding; they may have bestraddled a saddleless
steed, but they had not learned how to stand on his back, and to turn
somersets in time with the stride of the horse. It is, of course,
possible that they were familiar with this, but no sculpture and no
vase-painting, no anecdote in the works of the prose-writers, and no
line of the lyrists survives to authorize us to believe it. And it is
fairly certain, also, that they lacked the horizontal bar, which affords
limitless possibilities to the adventurous acrobat of our own times,
both when it is erected singly and when it is combined in sets of three,
either fixed in the arena or raised aloft in the air to produce the
appearance of a remoter ethereality.
The trapeze has a name of Greek origin, and it was possibly known to the
Greeks. But the Greeks did not foresee the full possibilities of the
trapeze, since its most startling utilization, the feat known as the
Flying Trapeze, was invented by the French acrobat, Leotard, only a
little later than the middle of the nineteenth century. The Flying
Trapeze is the ultimate achievement of acrobatic art, and it demands the
utmost combination of skilful strength and of easy grace. It was a feat
that the Greeks would have appreciated and enjoyed, since it demanded
and disclosed the perfection of physical courage and of physical skill.
Of late, the Flying Trapeze has been complicated and doubled in
difficulty by the introduction of a second performer, who at first makes
the leap simultaneously with his partner, and afterward separates from
him and springs thru the air to the trapeze which his associate has
just abandoned, the pair thus floating past each other in mid-air. In
this more elaborated form the task is more perilous, no doubt, and far
less easy of accomplishment; but it cannot be achieved with quite the
same graceful mastery as when a single performer seems to glide
ethereally from bar to bar, as tho it was impossible for him to fall or
to fail to catch his almost invisible support. This graceful mastery was
the most marked characteristic of Leotard, the original inventor of the
Flying Trapeze; and it may be doubted whether any of those who have
followed the path he traced thru the air, and who have vanquished
difficulties beyond those which he conquered, have been able to outdo
him in the abiding essential of grace.