The overcoming of difficulty is one of the elements of the pleasure
which we take in any art, and part of our enjoyment of a sonnet, for
example, must be ascribed to the apparent ease with which the poet is
able to express his thought, amply and completely, within the rigid
limitations of his fourteen lines, with their prescribed arrangement of
five or six rimes. But our delight is diminished if we are made
conscious of the effort it has cost the artist to attain his aim. Many a
later performer on the Flying Trapeze let us see that the feats he is
attempting are so difficult that they cannot be accomplished without
obvious effort. That is to say, we are made aware that the acrobat is
exhibiting a "stunt," and this is bad art. Difficulty overcome is worth
while only when it is overcome seemingly without any strain, and when
art is sufficient to conceal itself. However difficult the artist's
achievement may be, its charm is doubled if he can make it appear to be
easy.
It happens that I am able to bring his personal testimony to the fact
that this was the principle which always governed Leotard himself. When
the French gymnast paid his only visit to the United States, more than
forty years ago, he used to practise in a gymnasium which I also
frequented. He spoke no English, and I had a little school-boy French,
so that a certain intimacy sprang up. One day Leotard asked me to swing
a trapeze for him, and he sprang off and caught it with a single hand,
and then as the second trapeze returned he twisted and grasped the first
trapeze again with one hand. This evoked from me an immediate
exclamation of astonishment and admiration at the startling conquest of
difficulty, and it was followed by the natural question why so
extraordinary a feat had never been exhibited in public. Leotard
explained that the leaps from trapeze to trapeze with the aid of one
hand only must be lopsided, since the body is inevitably more or less
twisted, and he added that as there was an unavoidable and ungraceful
wrenching of the person, he had determined never to exhibit this feat in
public, difficult as it might be.
But altho Leotard was not willing to perform in public with only one
hand, it was a most invaluable exercise in private. His ability to
accomplish his leaps thus handicapped gave him a redoubled confidence
when he was using both of his hands. That he was right in resisting the
temptation to startle the spectators by a "stunt" of surprising
difficulty is beyond question. It could not be made to seem easy, and it
could not be accomplished with grace. Therefore it was not fit for
exhibition, even tho Leotard might feel sure that he could do it without
risk of failure. Here the French acrobat revealed himself as bound by
the eternal principles which underlie all the arts, that of the acrobat
no less than those of the painter and the poet. There is lack of art in
the performances of many acrobats of remarkable skill, who attempt feats
which they are not always certain of achieving. Indeed, they are
sometimes willing to profit by this very uncertainty. They fail the
first time of trying, and even the second, and these failures serve the
purpose of advertising to the spectators the difficulty of the task they
have undertaken. Then the third time, or the fourth, they succeed,
whereupon they reap the unworthy reward of applause from the unthinking.
The artist should never let us see his failures. If he is not certain
that he can perform what he promises, then he had better refrain from
the attempt. It was in the same winter that Leotard was in New York, in
the late sixties of the nineteenth century, that the Hanlon Brothers
paid one of their welcome visits to America. The Hanlons they were then,
and they were acrobats pure and simple, altho later, when they called
themselves the Hanlon-Lees, they had become pantomimists. As acrobats
they held fast to the same principles which governed Leotard in his
performances. They insisted upon certainty of execution; they never
failed to perform the feat they set out to accomplish, and to perform it
successfully the first time they attempted it. And no matter how
difficult the feat might be, or how novel or how effective, if they
could not attain absolute certainty of execution, they refrained from
setting it before the public. I was told at the time that there were two
or three surprising and alluring exercises which the Hanlons had
invented themselves, which they practised laboriously and faithfully all
that winter, and which they wisely refrained from ever putting on their
program because they were never able to assure themselves of a uniformly
successful result. They could do any one of these feats four times out
of five, but the fifth time there would be a miscalculation of energy,
and the attempt would have to be repeated. And they were unwilling to
let the public witness any performance of theirs which was not perfect
in its execution.