THE RISE OF THE BALLET
Any account of the modern renaissance of dancing must needs begin with
the ballet. In one sense it is in the ballet that the dance attains its
completest mode of expression. It may be regarded as the limit of its
evolution, its most complex and elaborate statement. The more orderly
sequence would be to trace the simpler forms of dancing through the
various stages of their evolution until they arrive at their ultimate
development in the ballet. The concern of this book, however, is not
with the history of the dance, but rather with the interest which it has
for the present time as an art-form. And it is with the dance as ballet
that the awakening of this interest begins.
If the dance is essentially the art of democracy, springing out of the
gladness of the crowd, the ballet in its origin is aristocratic. It was
the diversion of courts before it became the delight of the populace.
In spite of its lavish production of masterpieces of art, the
Renaissance would nevertheless have been incomplete without the ballet;
for the ballet provided a perfectly fitting expression for two of the
peculiar characteristics of the age--its love of pageant and its love of
mythological allegory. If nothing akin to the ballet had ever existed in
the world before, the fifteenth century would have been compelled to
invent it. Invent it it did, and although there were precedents in the
mysteries and interludes of the Middle Ages and in the old Roman
saturnalia and pantomimi, the invention gave a new art-form to the
world.
The ballet of the court was a mixed entertainment, consisting of poetry,
music and dancing, in which princes and nobles took part. A poet was
commissioned to write the verses, a musician to compose the score, a
ballet-master to arrange the steps, and a painter to devise the artistic
effects. These splendid court entertainments originated in Italy. The
gorgeous spectacular display given in honour of the marriage of Galeazzo
Visconti, Duke of Milan, in 1489, made a sensation not only in Italy but
throughout Europe. The pageantry of the court ballet appealed to the
heart of the splendour-loving Medici. Catherine de Medici introduced it
into France.
It was in France that the _ballet de la cour_ found its home. Henri IV.
and Louis XIII. were both lovers of the ballet, while Louis XIV. may be
said to have had a passion for it. The great cardinals, Richelieu and
Mazarin, were its patrons. The first historian of the ballet, Le Père
Ménestrier, gives an account of a “moral ballet” that was danced on
Richelieu’s birthday in 1634. The theme was _Truth, the Enemy of
Seeming, upheld by Time_. It opened, we are told, with “a chorus of
those False Rumours and Suspicions which usher in Seeming and Falsehood.
They were represented by actors dressed as cocks and hens, who sang a
dialogue, partly Italian, partly French, with a refrain of clucking and
crowing. After this song the background opened and Seeming appeared,
seated upon a huge cloud and accompanied by the Winds. She had the wings
and the great tail of a peacock, and was covered with mirrors. She
hatched eggs, from which issued Pernicious Lies, Deceptions, Frauds,
Agreeable Lies, Flatteries, Intrigues, Ridiculous Lies, Jocosities,
Little Fibs.
“The Deceptions were inconspicuously clad in dark colours, with serpents
hidden among flowers. The Frauds, clothed in fowlers’ nets, had bladders
which they burst while dancing. The Flatteries were disguised as apes;
the Intrigues as crayfishers, carrying lanterns on their heads and in
their hands; the Ridiculous Lies as crippled beggars on wooden legs.
“Then Time, having put to flight Seeming with her train of Lies, had the
nest opened from which these had issued; and there was disclosed a great
hour-glass. And out of this hour-glass Time raised up Truth, who
summoned the Hours and danced the grand ballet with them.”
But for the rather strident moral emphasis we seem to be breathing the
atmosphere of Leicester Square! What has usually been regarded as a
latter-day corruption of the ballet--the intrusion of a mass of
irrelevant properties and stage-mechanism--appears to have been a kind
of original sin which attached to it even in its origin.
In the reign of Louis XIV. the ballet passed definitely from the court
to the theatre. In the earlier part of his reign the king himself
frequently appeared in the ballet, usually taking the part of a god; but
in course of time _le Grand Monarque_ put on flesh and exchanged the
rôle of an actor for that of a spectator. In 1661 was founded the
_Académie royale de musique et de danse_, with Quinault as its first
director, and the ballet henceforth took possession of the stage.
But before it assumed the form in which we know it, the ballet had to
pass through several transformations. Originally the ballet, like the
play, had been performed exclusively by men. The parts of bacchantes and
nymphs had been taken by youths of slight and graceful build, and the
use of masks, which at this time was general, assisted the convention.
But in a ballet given at Saint-Germain in 1681, entitled _Le Triomphe de
l’Amour_, Lulli, the composer, introduced the innovation of female
dancers. The fashion became immediately popular. The part of the male
dancer grew continually less important until in the ballets of the
latter part of the nineteenth century it became altogether negligible,
to be revived again in the Russian ballet of our own day.
The next step was the abolition of the mask. This did not take place
until nearly a hundred years later. The custom of wearing the mask had
its origin in the classical theatre and formed an essential part of the
ballet from the Renaissance onwards. In 1772 Rameau’s opera _Castor and
Pollux_ was given in Paris, the part of Apollo being taken by Gætano
Vestris, who appeared, according to the fashion of the time, in a mask
and an enormous full-bottomed black wig. One night he was unable to
perform and Gardel, one of the leading dancers of the day, consented to
act as a substitute, but only on condition that he was allowed to
discard the mask and wig and appear in his own long fair hair. The
happy innovation pleased the public and from that day the fashion of the
mask was doomed.
But the character of the ballet was chiefly affected by the revolution
in costume. In the earlier days of the ballet the dancers were dressed
in the elaborate and fulsome costume of the period--the women in hooped
petticoats falling to the ankle, with their powdered hair piled up a
foot or more upon their heads, the men in long-skirted coats set out
from their hips with padding. So long as this costume was worn the dance
was necessarily confined almost entirely to the dignified and gliding
movements of the minuet. It permitted none of the airy and intricate
steps which are peculiar to the technique of the ballet proper. Noverre,
the eighteenth-century _maître de ballet_, who is chiefly responsible
for giving the ballet its present form, wrote as follows:--“I wish to
reduce by three quarters the ridiculous paniers of our _danseuses_. They
are opposed equally to the freedom, the quickness, and the prompt and
animated action of the dance. They deprive the figure of its elegance
and of the just proportions which it ought to possess. They diminish the
beauty of the arms; they _bury_, so to speak, the graces. They embarrass
and distract the dancer to such a degree that the movement of her panier
sometimes occupies her more seriously than that of her limbs.”
Mademoiselle de Camargo, the famous dancer of the first half of the
eighteenth century, started the innovation in dress. She was the first
to execute the entrechat, a light and brilliant step during the
performance of which the dancer rapidly crosses the feet while in
mid-air. In her dances, therefore, she took the precaution of wearing
the _caleçon_, from which the tight-fitting fleshing of the
ballet-dancer was subsequently evolved. This reform in costume brought
about a transformation in the dance. When the limbs were freed from the
thraldom of clothes, the movements of the ballet became swifter and more
complex. Its technique was developed by the introduction of pirouettes,
entrechats, jetés-battus, ballones. From an elegant accomplishment in
which the lords and ladies of the court could take part, the ballet
passed into a serious science, demanding the exclusive devotion of the
performer. The reign of the amateur was over; that of the artist began.
To Noverre, whom Garrick called the “Shakespeare of dance,” is chiefly
due the creation of the ballet as an art-work, single, complete and
harmonious in itself. Until his time it had existed principally as an
auxiliary to opera. In the ballet-opera, which had reigned supreme on
the stage hitherto, and has never in fact been entirely abandoned, the
dances interpolated between the acts had borne little relation to the
argument of the play. They were merely a diversion of quite secondary
interest. The opera was not created for them but they for the opera. The
revolution which Noverre effected was the creation of the _ballet
d’action_, the unravelling of a plot by dancing and gesture pure and
simple. For Noverre the ballet was something much more serious than a
mere saltatory display. It was an æsthetic composition which demanded
the harmonious co-operation of a number of arts. “The master of the
ballet,” he said, “must study the works of painters and sculptors, he
must know anatomy.... Everything which subserves the ends of painting
must also be of service to the dance.” He insisted upon the importance
to the dancer of a knowledge of pantomime and himself studied closely
the methods of Garrick. He deprecated the performance of the dance to
any haphazard arrangement of lively airs. Music must be an integral
portion of the ballet, written specially for it and informed with the
spirit of the action. The costumes and the _décor_ of the theatre must
also be treated with a view to obtaining one single artistic effect.
Thus Noverre succeeded in creating a new theatrical formula. He laid
down the main lines along which the ballet has subsequently developed.
Although the English may claim to have been a nation of dancers in the
old pre-Puritan days, dancing has certainly never been native to the
English stage. The most brilliant of the dancers in the ballets that are
produced upon the British stage to-day are foreign, and it has been so
from the first. The ballet was late in coming to England. It sprang
somewhat suddenly and dazzlingly to life upon the London stage in 1734.
In that year Mademoiselle Sallé, who had already achieved fame in
Paris, appeared at Covent Garden in the ballet of _Pygmalion and
Galatea_. Like all the greatest dancers, she was a woman of
distinguished personality. She counted Locke among her friends. Handel
wrote specially for her the ballet of _Terpsichore_. Voltaire vacillated
between his admiration of her and of her rival, Camargo, whom he
apostrophised thus:
“Ah! Camargo, que vous êtes brillante!
Mais que Sallé, grand Dieu, est ravissante!
Que vos pas sont légers et que les siens sont doux!
Elle est inimitable et vous êtes nouvelle!
Les nymphes sautent comme vous,
Mais les Grâces dansent comme elle!”
Her dancing was full of expression and characterised by a certain simple
dignity of motion; very rapid measures and eccentric movements she never
attempted. She assisted in the reform of costume which Mademoiselle de
Camargo had initiated. The _Mercure de France_ noted that she appeared
at Covent Garden “sans panier, sans jupe, sans corps, échevelée et sans
aucun ornement sur la tête.”
Her success was immediate and tumultuous. The public was frenzied with
delight--whether at this first surprising revelation of the ballet or at
the vision of the ravishing figure, “échevelée et sans jupe,” it is
impossible to say. And the enthusiasm of the British public in the
eighteenth century appears to have had a Latin quality of abandon, which
suggests the inference that the British character is not more but less
emotional than it was. The crowds around the doors of the theatre, we
are told, fought for a sight of the ballerina. The spectators had to
force their way to the doors sword in hand. And, in the manner of
Spaniards applauding a popular matador at a bull-fight, the Londoners
showered upon the stage purses filled with guineas and jewels, which the
cupids and satyrs of the troupe gathered up, keeping time to the music!
Seven years later England saw the greatest dancer of the
century--perhaps the greatest _danseur_ who has ever lived--Gætano
Vestris. He was by birth an Italian and styled himself, with a better
knowledge of his own accomplishments than of the pronunciation of the
French language, “le diou de la danse.” His amazing vanity was the
source of innumerable anecdotes. “This century has produced but three
great men,” he used to say, “myself, Voltaire and Frederick the Great.”
One night in coming from the opera a portly lady happened to tread
rather heavily upon his foot. She apologised, and hoped she had not hurt
him very much. “Me, madam!” exclaimed the god of the dance, “me! You
have only put Paris into mourning for a fortnight!” His son
Auguste-Armand inherited almost all his father’s talent. Gætano was wont
to say of him, “If Auguste does not continue to float in mid-air, it is
only out of consideration for his less gifted fellow-mortals.”
As England never produced a great school of dancing, the vicissitudes of
the ballet in this country fluctuated with its fortunes abroad. The
French Revolution brought about the break-up, in 1789, of the
_Communeauté des Maîtres à danser_ founded by Louis XIV. Whenever the
spirit of a people has been caught up in the great winds of emotion
which sweep over the world with an invariable periodicity, the dance has
always been the most immediate expression of the popular excitement.
Perhaps France never danced so madly as during the Revolution. Paris
danced between the massacres. The revolutionary spirit embodied itself
in the Carmagnole. But it was the dance of the people, not the dance of
art, that flourished during the Revolution. The _grand ballet_, in spite
of an attempt to make it a vehicle for political ideas, languished.
Among his multitudinous interests, however, Napoleon appears to have
included a concern for the art of dancing, and in his enumeration of the
requisites of his Egyptian expedition “a troupe of ballet girls” figures
among the quota of cannon and ammunition.
A consequence of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, which does not
usually figure in the pages of the historian, was that the supply of
Parisian _danseuses_ for the English stage was cut off for a generation
or more. Even for some years after the peace, the French were inclined
to keep their best performers for themselves and sent over to England
only their discarded favourites. The golden period of the ballet in
England began in the twenties of the nineteenth century and lasted until
the fifties. In 1821 a determined effort was made to secure some of the
most dazzling stars of the Parisian ballet. The difficulties to be
overcome were not light, for, as the Parisian dancers were trained in an
academy maintained by the state, none could leave the country without
the permission of the Government. The British ambassador was himself
charged with the negotiations. After many pourparlers, a treaty was
drawn up, signed and sealed, by which one of the two high-contracting
parties agreed to loan to the other two first and two second dancers
from the Academy, while the other in return was to pledge itself not to
attempt to import any other dancer without the Academy’s consent.
The first two to arrive were the _danseur_ Albert and the _première
danseuse_ Noblet, who were engaged at a salary of £1700 and £1500
respectively. They took London by storm. They were the idols of society;
the fashionable world could think and talk of nothing but their dancing.
The reign of the ballet had begun. Already in the first season the cost
of the ballet exceeded that of the opera by some £2000. No other form of
theatrical art approached the ballet in popularity. The King’s Theatre,
afterwards transformed and renamed Her Majesty’s, kept a permanent
_corps de ballet_. The Haymarket, Her Majesty’s, and Covent Garden
nightly drew crowded houses to witness displays of the most accomplished
dancing that had ever been seen on the English stage. With the advent of
Taglioni enthusiasm reached its utmost limits.
For about a quarter of a century England was enraptured with the ballet.
It is impossible for us to attempt to envisage the early Victorian era
without the ballet entering prominently into the picture. It appears to
present the just embodiment of the formal but naïve gaiety, the
untroubled imagination, the somewhat vulgarian æstheticism of the age.
The ballerina, with her straightly parted hair, her rose wreath, her
innocent affectations, is the complement to the whiskered dandy of the
D’Orsay period. The ballet seems to be as closely attached to early
Victorianism as are Louis Quinze furniture or Chelsea porcelain
shepherdesses to their respective periods. It is not altogether easy for
us to regard it otherwise than as a revival. Even now the ballet, in its
costumes, its music, its _décor_, is not free from a tendency to hark
back to the thirties and forties of the last century.