Sylvain’s is the only good restaurant in the centre of Paris where you
can dine in the open air, that is to say, in the street. Close by, the
dark, still mass of the Opéra rises hugely out of the dusk and out of
the flitting traffic at its base. Sylvain’s is full of diners who have
no eyes to see beyond the surfaces of things.
By virtue of a contract made between Sylvain’s and the city, the diners
are screened off from the street and from the twentieth century by a row
of high potted evergreens. Pass within the screen, and you leave behind
you the modern epoch. The Third Republic recedes; the Second Empire
recedes; Louis-Philippe has never been, nor even Napoleon; the
Revolution has not begun to announce itself. You are become suddenly
a _grand seigneur_. Every gesture and tone of every member of the
_personnel_ of Sylvain’s implores your excellency with one word:
“Deign!”
It is curious that while a modern shopkeeper who sells you a cigar or an
automobile or a quarter of lamb does not think it necessary to make you
a noble of the _ancien régime_ before commencing business, a shopkeeper
who sells you cooked food could not omit this preliminary without losing
his self-respect. And it is the more curious since all pre-democratic
books of travel are full of the cheek of these particular shopkeepers.
Such tales of old travellers could scarcely be credited, in spite
of their unison, were it not that the ancient tradition of rapacious
insolence still survives in wild and barbaric spots like the cathedral
cities of England.
Your excellency, attended by his gentlemen-in-waiting (who apparently
never eat, never want to eat), in the intervals of the ceremonious
collation will gaze with interest at the Opéra, final legacy of the
Empire to the Republic. A great nation owes it to itself to possess a
splendid opera-palace. Art must be fostered. The gracious amenities of
life must be maintained. And this is the State’s affair. The State has
seen to it. The most gorgeous building in Paris is not the legislative
chamber, nor the hall of the University, nor the clearing-house of
charity. It is the Opéra. The State has paid for it, and the State pays
every year for its maintenance. That is, the peasant chiefly pays. There
is not a peasant in the farthest corner of France who may not go to bed
at dark comforted by the thought that the Opéra in Paris is just
opening its cavalry-sentinelled doors, and lighting its fifteen thousand
electric candles, and that he is helping to support all that. Paris does
not pay; the _habitués_ of the Opéra do not pay; the yawning tourists
do not pay; the grandiose classes do not pay. It is the nation, as a
nation, that accepts the burden, because the encouragement of art is a
national duty. (Moreover, visiting monarchs have to be diverted.) Of one
sort or another, from the tenor to the vendor of programmes, there are
twelve hundred priests and priestesses of art in the superb building.
A few may be artists. But it is absolutely certain that all are
bureaucrats.
The Opéra is the Circumlocution Office. The Opéra is a State department.
More, it is probably the most characteristic of all the State
departments, and the most stubbornly reactionary. The nominal director,
instead of being omnipotent and godlike, is only a poor human being
whose actions are the resultant of ten thousand forces that do not fear
him. The Opéra is above all the theatre of secret influences. Every
mystery of its enormous and wasteful inefficiency can be explained
either by the operation of the secret influence or by the operation of
the bureaucratic mind. If the most tedious operas are played the most
often, if the stage is held by singers who cannot sing, if original
artists have no chance there, if the blight of a flaccid perfunctoriness
is upon nearly all the performances, if astute mothers can sell the
virginity of their dancing daughters to powerful purchasers in the
wings, the reason is a reason of State. The Opéra is the splendid
prey of the high officers of State. If such a one wants an evening’s
entertainment, or a mistress, or to get rid of a mistress, the Opéra is
there, at his disposition. The _foyer de la danse_ is the most wonderful
seraglio in the western world, and it is reserved to the Government and
to subscribers. Thus is art fostered, and for this does the peasant pay.
Nevertheless the Opéra is a beautiful and impressive sight in the late,
warm dusk of June. Against the deep purple sky the monument stands up
like a mountain; and through its innumerable windows--holes in the
floor of heaven--can be glimpsed yellow clusters of candelabra and
perspectives of marble pillars and frescoed walls. And at the foot of
the gigantic _façade_ little brightly coloured figures are running
up the steps and disappearing eagerly within: they are the world of
fashion, and they know that they are correct and that the Opéra is the
Opéra.
*****
I looked over the crimson plush edge of the box down into Egypt, where
Cleopatra was indulging her desires; into a civilisation so gorgeous,
primitive, and far-off that when compared to it the eighteenth and the
twentieth centuries seemed as like as two peas in their sophistication
and sobriety. Cleopatra had set eyes on a youth, and a whim for him had
taken her. By no matter what atrocious exercise of power and infliction
of suffering, that whim had to be satisfied on the instant. It was
satisfied. And a swift homicide left the Queen untrammelled by any
sentimental consequences. The whole affair was finished in a moment, and
the curtain falling on all that violent and gorgeous scene. In a moment
this Oriental episode, interpreted by semi-Oriental artists, had made
all the daring prurient suggestiveness of French comedy seem timid and
foolish. It was a revelation. A new standard was set, and there was not
a vaudevillist in the auditorium but knew that neither he nor his
interpreters could ever reach that standard. The simple and childlike
gestures of the slave-girls as with their bodies and their veils they
formed a circular tent to hide Cleopatra and her lover--these gestures
took away the breath of protest.
[Illustration: 0107]
The St. Petersburg and the Moscow troupes, united, of the Russian
Imperial Ballet, had been brought to Paris, at vast expense and
considerable loss, to present this astounding spectacle of mere
magnificent sanguinary lubricity to the cosmopolitan fashion of Paris.
There the audience actually was, rank after rank of crowded toilettes
rising to the dim ceiling, young women from the Avenue du Bois and young
women from Arizona, and their protective and possessive men. And nobody
blenched, nobody swooned. The audience was taken by assault. The West
End of Europe was just staggered into acceptance. As yet London has seen
only fragments of Russian ballet. But London may and probably will see
the whole. Let there be no qualms. London will accept also. London might
be horribly scared by one-quarter of the audacity shown in _Cleopatra_,
but it will not be scared by the whole of that audacity. An overdose of
a fatal drug is itself an antidote. The fact is, that the spectacle was
saved by a sort of moral nudity, and by a naïve assurance of its own
beauty. Oh! It was extremely beautiful. It was ineffably more beautiful
than any other ballet I had ever seen. An artist could feel at once
that an intelligence of really remarkable genius had presided over its
invention and execution. It was masterfully original from the beginning.
It continually furnished new ideals of beauty. It had drawn its
inspiration from some rich fountain unknown to us occidentals. Neither
in its scenery, nor in its grouping, nor in its pantomime was there any
clear trace of that Italian influence which still dominates the European
ballet. With a vengeance it was a return to nature and a recommencement.
It was brutally direct. It was beastlike; but the incomparable tiger is
a beast. It was not perverse. It was too fresh, zealous, and alive to be
perverse. Personally I was conscious of the most intense pleasure that
I had experienced in a theatre for years. And this was Russia! This
was the country that had made such a deadly and disgusting mess of the
Russo-Japanese War.
*****
The box was a stage-box. It consisted of a suite of two drawing-rooms,
softly upholstered, lit with electric light, and furnished with
easy-chairs and mirrors. A hostess might well have offered tea to a
score of guests therein. And as a fact there were a dozen people in it.
Its size indicated the dimensions of the auditorium, in which it was
a mere cell. The curious thing about it was the purely incidental
character of its relation to the stage. The front of it was a narrow
terrace, like the mouth of a bottle, which offered a magnificent
panorama of the auditorium, with a longitudinal slice of the stage
at one extremity. From the terrace one glanced vertically down at the
stage, as at a street-pavement from a first-storey window. Three persons
could be comfortable, and four could be uncomfortable, on the terrace.
One or two more, by leaning against chair-backs and coiffures, could see
half of the longitudinal slice of the stage. The remaining half-dozen
were at liberty to meditate in the luxurious twilight of the
drawing-room. The Republic, as operatic manager, sells every night some
scores, and on its brilliant nights some hundreds, of expensive seats
which it is perfectly well aware give no view whatever of the stage:
another illustration of the truth that the sensibility of the conscience
of corporations varies inversely with the size of the corporation.
[Illustration: 0111]
But this is nothing. The wonderful aspect of the transaction is that
purchasers never lack. They buy and suffer; they buy again and suffer
yet again; they live on and reproduce their kind. There was in the
hinterland of the box a dapper, vivacious man who might (if he had
wasted no time) have been grandfather to a man as old as I. He was
eighty-five years old, and he had sat in boxes of an evening for over
sixty years. He talked easily of the heroic age before the Revolution of
‘48, when, of course, every woman was an enchantress, and the farces at
the Palais Royal were _really_ amusing. He could pipe out whole pages
of farce. Except during the _entr’actes_ this man’s curiosity did not
extend beyond the shoulders of the young women on the terrace. For him
the spectacle might have been something going on round the corner of the
next street. He was in a spacious and discreet drawing-room; he had the
habit of talking; talking was an essential part of his nightly hygiene;
and he talked. Continually impinging, in a manner fourth-dimensional, on
my vision of Cleopatra’s violent afternoon, came the “_Je me rappelle_”
of this ancient. Now he was in Rome, now he was in London, and now he
was in Florence. He went nightly to the Pergola Theatre when Florence
was the capital of Italy. He had tales of kings. He had one tale of
a king which, as I could judge from the hard perfection of its
phraseology, he had been repeating on every night-out for fifty years.
According to this narration he was promenading the inevitable pretty
woman in the Cascine at Florence, when a heavily moustached person _en
civil_ flashed by, driving a pair of superb bays, and he explained not
without pride to the pretty woman that she looked on a king.
“It is _that_, the king?” exclaimed the pretty _ingénue_ too loudly.
And with a grand bow (of which the present generation has lost the
secret) the moustaches, all flashing and driving, leaned from the
equipage and answered: “Yes, madame, it is _that_, the king.”
“_Et si vous avez vu la tête de la dame...!_”
In those days society existed.
[Illustration: 0115]
I should have heard many more such tales during the _entr’acte_, but I
had to visit the stage. Strictly, I did not desire to visit the stage,
but as I possessed the privilege of doing so, I felt bound in pride to
go. I saw myself at the great age of eighty-five recounting to somebody
else’s grandchildren the marvels that I had witnessed in the _coulisses_
of the Paris Opéra during the unforgettable season of the Russian
Imperial Ballet in the early years of the century, when society existed.
At an angle of a passage which connects the auditorium with the tray
(the stage is called the tray, and those who call the stage the stage at
the Opéra are simpletons and lack guile) were a table and a chair, and,
partly on the chair and partly on the table, a stout respectable man:
one of the twelve hundred. He looked like a town-councillor, and his
life-work on this planet was to distinguish between persons who had the
entry and persons who had not the entry. He doubted my genuineness at
once, and all the bureaucrat in him glowered from his eyes. Yes! My
card was all right, but it made no mention of madame. Therefore, I might
pass, but madame might not. Moreover, save in cases very exceptional,
ladies were not admitted to the tray. So it appeared! I was up against
an entire department of the State. Human nature is such that at that
moment, had some power offered me the choice between the ability to
write a novel as fine as _Crime and Punishment_ and the ability to
triumph instantly over the pestilent town-councillor, I would have
chosen the latter. I retired in good order. “You little suspect,
town-councillor,” I said to him within myself, “that I am the guest of
the management, that I am extremely intimate with the management, and
that, indeed, the management is my washpot!” At the next _entr’acte_ I
returned again with an omnipotent document which instructed the
whole twelve hundred to let both monsieur and madame pass anywhere,
everywhere. The town-councillor admitted that it was perfect, so far as
it went. But there was the question of my hat to be considered. I was
not wearing the right kind of hat! The town councillor planted both his
feet firmly on tradition, and defied imperial passports. “Can you have
any conception,” I cried to him within myself, “how much this hat cost
me at Henry Heath’s?” Useless! Nobody ever had passed, and nobody ever
would pass, from the auditorium to the tray in a hat like mine. It was
unthinkable. It would be an outrage on the Code Napoléon.... After all,
the man had his life-work to perform. At length he offered to keep
my hat for me till I came back. I yielded. I was beaten. I was put to
shame. But he had earned a night’s repose.
*****
The famous, the notorious _foyer de la danse_ was empty. Here was an
evening given exclusively to the ballet, and not one member of the
corps had had the idea of exhibiting herself in the showroom specially
provided by the State as a place or rendezvous for ladies and gentlemen.
The most precious quality of an annual subscription for a seat at the
Opéra is that it carries with it the entry to the _foyer de la danse_
(provided one’s hat is right); if it did not, the subscriptions to the
Opéra would assuredly diminish. And lo! the gigantic but tawdry mirror
which gives a factitious amplitude to a room that is really small, did
not reflect the limbs of a single dancer! The place had a mournful,
shabby-genteel look, as of a resort gradually losing fashion. It was
tarnished. It did not in the least correspond with a young man’s dreams
of it. Yawning tedium hung in it like a vapour, that tedium which is the
implacable secret enemy of dissoluteness. This, the _foyer de la danse_,
where the insipidly vicious heroines of Halévy’s ironic masterpiece
achieved, with a mother’s aid, their ducal conquests! It was as cruel
a disillusion as the first sight of Rome or Jerusalem. Its
meretriciousness would not have deceived even a visionary parlour-maid.
Nevertheless, the world of the Opéra was astounded at the neglect of its
hallowed _foyer_ by these young women from St. Petersburg and Moscow. I
was told, with emotion, that on only two occasions in the whole season
had a Russian girl wandered therein. The legend of the sobriety and
the chastity of these strange Russians was abroad in the Opéra like a
strange, uncanny tale. Frankly, Paris could not understand it. Because
all these creatures were young, and all of them conformed to some
standard or other of positive physical beauty! They could not be old,
for the reason that a ukase obliged them to retire after twenty years’
service at latest; that is, at about the age of thirty-six, a time of
woman’s life which on the Paris stage is regarded as infancy. Such
a ukase must surely have been promulgated by Ivan the Terrible or
Catherine!. . . No!
Paris never recovered from the wonder of the fact that when they were
not dancing these lovely girls were just honest misses, with apparently
no taste for bank-notes and spiced meats, even in the fever of an
unexampled artistic and fashionable success.
[Illustration: 0119]
Amid the turmoil of the stage, where the prodigiously original
peacock-green scenery of _Scheherazade_ was being set, a dancer could
be seen here and there in a corner, waiting, preoccupied, worried,
practising a step or a gesture. I was clumsy enough to encounter one of
the principals who did not want to be encountered; we could not escape
from each other. There was nothing for it but to shake hands. His face
assumed the weary, unwilling smile of conventional politeness. His
fingers were limp.
“It pleases you?”
“Enormously.”
I turned resolutely away at once, and with relief he lapsed back into
his preoccupation concerning the half-hour’s intense emotional and
physical labour that lay immediately in front of him. In a few moments
the curtain went up, and the terrific creative energy of the troupe
began to vent itself. And I began to understand a part of the secret of
the extreme brilliance of the Russian ballet.
*****
The brutality of _Scheherazade_ was shocking. It was the Arabian Nights
treated with imaginative realism. In perusing the Arabian Nights we
never try to picture to ourselves the manners of a real Bagdad; or we
never dare. We lean on the picturesque splendour and romantic poetry
of certain aspects of the existence portrayed, and we shirk the
basic facts: the crudity of the passions, and the superlative cruelty
informing the whole social system. For example, we should not dream of
dwelling on the more serious functions of the caliphian eunuchs.
In the surpassing fury and magnificence of the Russian ballet one saw
eunuchs actually at work, scimitar in hand. There was the frantic orgy,
and then there was the barbarous punishment, terrible and revolting;
certainly one of the most sanguinary sights ever seen on an occidental
stage. The eunuchs pursued the fragile and beautiful odalisques with
frenzy; in an instant the seraglio was strewn with murdered girls in
all the abandoned postures of death. And then silence, save for the hard
breathing of the executioners!... A thrill! It would seem incredible
that such a spectacle should give pleasure. Yet it unquestionably did,
and very exquisite pleasure. The artists, both the creative and the
interpretative, had discovered an artistic convention which was at once
grandiose and truthful. The passions displayed were primitive, but they
were ennobled in their illustration. The performance was regulated
to the least gesture; no detail was unstudied; and every moment was
beautiful; not a few were sublime.
[Illustration: 0125]
And all this a by-product of Russian politics! If the politics of France
are subtly corrupt; if anything can be done in France by nepotism and
influence, and nothing without; if the governing machine of France is
fatally vitiated by an excessive and unimaginative centralisation--the
same is far more shamefully true of Russia. The fantastic inefficiency
of all the great departments of State in Russia is notorious and
scandalous. But the Imperial ballet, where one might surely have
presumed an intensification of every defect (as in Paris), happens to be
far nearer perfection than any other enterprise of its kind, public or
private. It is genuinely dominated by artists of the first rank; it is
invigorated by a real discipline; and the results achieved approach the
miraculous. The pity is that the moujik can never learn that one, at any
rate, of the mysterious transactions which pass high up over his head,
and for which he is robbed, is in itself honest and excellent. An
alleviating thought for the moujik, if only it could be knocked into
his great thick head! For during the performance of the Russian Imperial
Ballet at the Paris Opéra, amid all the roods of toilettes and expensive
correctness, one thinks of the moujik; or one ought to think of him.
He is at the bottom of it. See him in Tchekoff’s masterly tale, _The
Moujiks_, in his dirt, squalor, drunkenness, lust, servitude, and
despair! Realise him well at the back of your mind as you watch the
ballet! Your delightful sensations before an unrivalled work of art are
among the things he has paid for.
*****
Walking home, I was attracted, within a few hundred yards of the Opéra,
by the new building of the Magasins du Printemps. Instead of being
lighted up and all its galleries busy with thousands of women in search
of adornment, it stood dark and deserted. But at one of the entrances
was a feeble ray. I could not forbear going into the porch and putting
my nose against the glass. The head-watchman was seated in the centre of
the ground-floor chatting with a colleague. With a lamp and chairs they
had constructed a little domesticity for themselves in the middle of
that acreage of silks and ribbons and feathers all covered now with pale
dust-sheets. They were the centre of a small sphere of illumination, and
in the surrounding gloom could be dimly discerned gallery after gallery
rising in a slender lacework of iron. The vision of Bagdad had been
inexpressibly romantic; but this vision also was inexpressibly romantic.
There was something touching in the humanity of those simple men amid
the vast nocturnal stillness of that organism--the most spectacular,
the most characteristic, the most spontaneous, and perhaps the most
beautiful symbol of an age which is just as full of romance as any other
age. The human machine and the scenic panorama of the big shop have
always attracted me, as in Paris so in London. And looking at this
particular, wonderful shop in its repose I could contemplate better the
significance of its activity. What singular ideals have the women who
passionately throng it in the eternal quest! I say “passionately,”
because I have seen eyes glitter with fierce hope in front of a skunk
boa or the tints of a new stuff, translating instantly these material
things into terms of love and adoration. What cruelty is hourly
practised upon the other women who must serve and smile and stand on
their feet in the stuffiness of the heaped and turbulent galleries
eleven hours a day six full days a week; and upon the still other
women, unpresentable, who in their high garrets stitch together these
confections! And how fine and how inspiriting it all is, this fever, and
these delusive hopes, and this cruelty! The other women are asleep now,
repairing damage; but in a very few hours they will be converging here
in long hurried files from the four quarters of Paris, in their enforced
black, and tying their black aprons, and pinning on their breasts
the numbered discs which distinguish them from one another in the
judgment-books of the shop. They will be beginning again. The fact is
that Bagdad is nothing to this. Only people are so blind.