SKATING AS A FINE ART.
Of all the plays that are played by this playful world on its play-days,
there is no play like Skating.
To prepare a board for the moves of this game of games, a panel for the
drawings of this Fine Art, a stage for the _entrechats_ and _pirouettes_
of its graceful adepts, Zero, magical artificer, had been, for the last
two nights, sliding at full speed up and down the North River.
We have heard of Midas, whose touch made gold, and of the virgin under
whose feet sprang roses; but Zero's heels and toes were armed with more
precious influences. They left a diamond way, where they slid,--a hundred
and fifty miles of diamond, half a mile wide and six inches thick.
Diamond can only reflect sunlight; ice can contain it. Zero's product,
finer even than diamond, was filled--at the rate of a million to the
square foot--with bubbles immeasurably little, and yet every one big
enough to comprise the entire sun in small, but without alteration or
abridgment. When the sun rose, each of these wonderful cells was ready to
catch the tip of a sunbeam and house it in a shining abode.
Besides this, Zero had inlaid its work, all along shore, with exquisite
marquetry of leaves, brown and evergreen, of sprays and twigs, reeds and
grasses. No parquet in any palace from Fontainebleau to St. Petersburg
could show such delicate patterns, or could gleam so brightly, though
polished with all the wax in Christendom.
On this fine pavement, all the way from Cohoes to Spuyten Duyvil, Jubilee
was sliding without friction, the Christmas morning of these adventures.
Navigation was closed. Navigators had leisure. The sloops and schooners
were frozen in along shore, the tugs and barges were laid up in basins,
the floating palaces were down at New York, deodorizing their bar-rooms,
regilding their bridal chambers, and enlarging their spittoon
accommodations alow and aloft, for next summer. All the population was out
on the ice, skating, sliding, sledding, slipping, tumbling, to its heart's
content.
One person out of every Dunderbunk family was of course at home, roasting
Christmas turkey. The rest were already at high jinks on Zero's Christmas
present, when Wade and the men came down, from the meeting.
Wade buckled on his new skates in a jiffy. He stamped to settle himself,
and then flung off half a dozen circles on the right leg, half a dozen
with the left, and the same with either leg backwards.
The ice, traced with these white peripheries, showed like a blackboard
where a school has been chalking diagrams of Euclid, to point at with the
"slow unyielding finger" of demonstration.
"Hurrah!" cries Wade, halting in front of the men, who, some on the
Foundry wharf, some on the deck of our first acquaintance at Dunderbunk,
the tug "L Ambuster," were putting on their skates or watching him,
"Hurrah! the skates are perfection! Are you ready, Bill?"
"Yes," says Tarbox, whizzing off rings, as exact as Giotto's autograph.
"Now, then," Wade said, "we'll give Dunderbunk a laugh, as we practised
last night."
They got under full headway, Wade backwards, Bill forwards, holding hands.
When they were near enough to the merry throng out in the stream, both
dropped into a sitting posture, with the left knee bent, and each with his
right leg stretched out parallel to the ice and fitting compactly by the
other man's leg. In this queer figure they rushed through the laughing
crowd.
Then all Dunderbunk formed a ring, agog for a grand show of
SKATING AS A FINE ART.
The world loves to see Great Artists, and expects them to do their duty.
It is hard to treat of this Fine Art by the Art of Fine Writing. Its
eloquent motions must be seen.
To skate Fine Art, you must have a Body and a Soul, each of the First
Order; otherwise you will never get out of coarse art and skating in one
syllable. So much for yourself, the motive power. And your
machinery,--your smooth-bottomed rockers, the same shape stem and
stern,--this must be as perfect as the man it moves, and who moves it.
Now suppose you wish to skate so that the critics will say, "See! this
athlete docs his work as Church paints, as Darley draws, as Palmer
chisels, as Wittier strikes the lyre, and Longfellow the dulcimer; he is
as terse as Emerson, as clever as Holmes, as graceful as Curtis; he is as
calm as Seward, as keen as Phillips, as stalwart as Beecher; be is
Garibaldi, he is Kit Carson, he is Blondin; he is as complete as the
steamboat Metropolis, as Steers's yacht, as Singer's sewing-machine, as
Colt's revolver, as the steam-plough, as Civilization." You wish to be so
ranked among the people and things that lead the age;--consider the
qualities you must have, and while you consider, keep your eye on Richard
Wade, for he has them all in perfection.
First,--of your physical qualities. You must have lungs, not bellows; and
an active heart, not an assortment of sluggish auricles and ventricles.
You must have legs, not shanks. Their shape is unimportant, except that
they must not interfere at the knee. You must have muscles, not
flabbiness; sinews like wire; nerves like sunbeams; and a thin layer of
flesh to cushion the gable-ends, where you will strike, if you
tumble,--which, once for all be it said, you must never do. You must be
all _momentum_, and no _inertia_. You must be one part grace, one force,
one agility, and the rest caoutchouc, Manila hemp, and watch-spring. Your
machine, your body, must be thoroughly obedient. It must go just so far
and no farther. You have got to be as unerring as a planet holding its
own, emphatically, between forces centripetal and centrifugal. Your
_aplomb_ must be as absolute as the pounce of a falcon.
So much for a few of the physical qualities necessary to be a Great Artist
in Skating. See Wade, how be shows them!
Now for the moral and intellectual. Pluck is the first;--it always is the
first quality. Then enthusiasm. Then patience. Then pertinacity. Then a
fine aesthetic faculty,--in short, good taste. Then an orderly and
submissive mind, that can consent to act in accordance with the laws of
Art. Circumstances, too, must have been reasonably favorable. That
well-known skeptic, the King of tropical Bantam, could not skate, because
he had never seen ice and doubted even the existence of solid water.
Widdrington, after the Battle of Chevy Chace, could not have skated,
because he had no legs,--poor fellow!
But granted the ice and the legs, then if you begin in the elastic days of
youth, when cold does not sting, tumbles do not bruise, and duckings do
not wet; if you have pluck and ardor enough to try everything; if you work
slowly ahead and stick to it; if you have good taste and a lively
invention; if you are a man, and not a lubber;--then, in fine, you may
become a Great Skater, just as with equal power and equal pains you may
put your grip on any kind of Greatness.
The technology of skating is imperfect. Few of the great feats, the Big
Things, have admitted names. If I attempted to catalogue Wade's
achievements, this chapter might become an unintelligible rhapsody. A
sheet of paper and a pen-point cannot supply the place of a sheet of ice
and a skate-edge. Geometry must have its diagrams, Anatomy its _corpus_ to
carve. Skating also refuses to be spiritualized into a Science; it remains
an Art, and cannot be expressed in a formula.
Skating has its Little Go, its Great Go, its Baccalaureate, its M.A., its
F.S.D., (Doctor of Frantic Skipping,) its A.G.D., (Doctor of Airy
Gliding,) its N.T.D., (Doctor of No Tumbles,) and finally its highest
degree, U.P. (Unapproachable Podographer).
Wade was U.P.
There were a hundred of Dunderbunkers who had passed their Little Go and
could skate forward and backward easily. A half-hundred, perhaps, were
through the Great Go; these could do outer edge freely. A dozen had taken
the Baccalaureate, and were proudly repeating the pirouettes and
spread-eagles of that degree. A few could cross their feet, on the edge,
forward and backward, and shift edge on the same foot, and so were
_Magistri Artis_.
Wade, U.P., added to these an indefinite list of combinations and fresh
contrivances. He spun spirals slow, and spirals neck or nothing. He
pivoted on one toe, with the other foot cutting rings, inner and outer
edge, forward and back, He skated on one foot better than the M.A.s could
on both. He ran on his toes; he slid on his heels; he cut up shines like a
sunbeam on a bender; he swung, light as if he could fly, if he pleased,
like a wing-footed Mercury; he glided as if will, not muscle, moved him;
he tore about in frenzies; his pivotal leg stood firm, his balance leg
flapped like a graceful pinion; he turned somersets; he jumped, whirling
backward as he went, over a platoon of boys laid flat on the ice;--the
last boy winced, and thought he was amputated; but Wade flew over, and the
boy still holds together as well as most boys. Besides this, he could
write his name, with a flourish at the end, like the _rubrica_ of a
Spanish _hidalgo_. He could podograph any letter, and multitudes of
ingenious curlicues which might pass for the alphabets of the unknown
tongues. He could _not_ tumble.
It was Fine Art.
Bill Tarbox sometimes pressed the champion hard. But Bill stopped just
short of Fine Art, in High Artisanship.
How Dunderbunk cheered this wondrous display! How delighted the whole
population was to believe they possessed the best skater on the North
River! How they struggled to imitate! How they tumbled, some on their
backs, some on their faces, some with dignity like the dying Caesar, some
rebelliously like a cat thrown out of a garret, some limp as an ancient
acrobate! How they laughed at themselves and at each other!
"It's all in the new skates," says Wade, apologizing for his
unapproachable power and finish.
"It's suthin' in the man," says Smith Wheelwright.
"Now chase me, everybody," said Wade.
And, for a quarter of an hour, he dodged the merry crowd, until at last,
breathless, he let himself be touched by pretty Belle Purtett, rosiest of
all the Dunderbunk bevy of rosy maidens on the ice.
"He rayther beats Bosting," says Captain Isaac Ambuster to Smith
Wheelwright. "It's so cold there that they can skate all the year round;
but he beats them, all the same."
The Captain was sitting in a queer little bowl of a skiff on the deck of
his tug, and rocking it like a cradle, as he talked.
"Bosting's always hard to beat in anything," rejoined the ex-Chairman.
"But if Bosting is to be beat, here's the man to do it."
* * * * *
And now, perhaps, gentle reader, you think I have said enough in behalf of
a limited fraternity, the Skaters.
The next chapter, then, shall take up the cause of the Lovers, a more
numerous body, and we will see whether True Love, which never makes
"smooth running," can help its progress by a skate-blade.