CHAPTER XIITHE ENGLISH BALLET

WASLAW NIJINSKYINShehérazadePhotograph: Bert, Paris

WASLAW NIJINSKY

INShehérazade

Photograph: Bert, Paris

for a dancer with his zest for work, his post at the Imperial Opera was more or less of a sinecure. The ballet, which only performed about six times a month, was too intermittent to give a proper scope for his activity.

With a dead complexion, lank, dun-coloured hair, high cheekbones, long and somewhat obliquely set eyes, Nijinsky has the racial characteristics of the Slav. His expression is one of a serenity that is untroubled by the glory of the present or the cares of the future. His eye is bright and expressive. In repose his face has a certain dreamy preoccupation, which at a word spoken or a sight that arrests his attention, passes swiftly into an absorbing interest in the life of the moment. His is clearly a highly-strung temperament—indeed he told me that what he found most difficult in his art was the conquest of the nerves.

Nijinsky has the genius for taking pains. A movement, a gesture, which upon the stage has often the appearance of a happy improvisation, is invariably the result of careful study. How searching is his preparation I only realised when I saw him one morning practising with Madame Karsavina on the stage at Covent Garden. His instructor, M. Cecchetti, a distinguished member of the Diaghilew company (he is the wicked marquis inLe Pavillon d’Armide, the Grand Eunuch inScheherazade), took him through even the most elementary exercises with the severity of a drill sergeant. For the young dancer, however, it was not a mechanical routine, but a kind of play, into which he entered with a certain smiling gaiety. If he found that he was executing a movement imperfectly, he stopped short in the middle of it with a gesture of half-amused vexation and repeated it over and over again until he had made it faultless. The actual mastery of the technique appeared to him to be in itself a delight, and not, as with many dancers, a painful task-work. In his practice I found that the turns of his pirouettes and the cuts of his entrechats were more numerous than in the actual performance, for he never perverts the intention of the dance by introducing into it acrobatic feats merely for the sake of dazzling the spectator.

It is not altogether easy to analyse the qualities of Nijinsky’s dancing in virtue of which he is rightly regarded as the finestdanseurof the age. Perhaps his chief merit consists in that very versatility which seems to conceal the pre-eminence of any single feature. He never repeats himself. His personality appears to inhabit not one but several bodies, or rather his personality itself is multiple. Did not one know that it were the fact, would it be possible to believe that the lustful negro ofScheherazadewas one with the tender flower-spirit ofLe Spectre de la Rose, or the impish and irresponsible Arlequin ofLe Carnavalthe same as the courteous and adoring page ofLe Pavillon d’Armide? He identifies himself in each ballet with the spirit of the action and of the music.

Nijinsky makes us understand that a gesture is, as Blake said of a tear, an intellectual thing. His gestures, by which I do not mean the technical steps, are different in manner and in spirit from those of the traditional Italian school. With the conventional gestures of the academies, which mimic such attitudes as men are supposed naturally to adopt when they perform certain actions or experience certain emotions, he will have nothing to do. Nijinsky’s gestures mimic nothing. They are not the result of a double translation of idea into words, and words into dumb show. They are the mood itself. His limbs possess a faculty of speech. Wit is expressed in his Arlequin dance as lucidly as in an epigram. InLe Spectre de la Rosehe dances a sonnet of delighted devotion. He makes credible the suggestion, intended satirically, that La Rochefoucauld’s “Maximes” should be rendered choregraphically. His genius consists in a singular pliancy of the body to the spirit.

His technique is characterised by extreme brilliance and agility. He is weirdly grotesque or daintily graceful at will. Where he is perhaps lacking is in gravity and statuesque pose. Nijinsky does not realise the Pheidian ideal as perfectly as Mordkin, and therefore he can never be his equal in creating that impression of the glorious virility of a Greek statue, in whose firm lines a mighty strength lies sleeping. Nor have I ever seen him adequately represent the fierceness of human passion. Even in hisScheherazadedances there is not so much a deep exultation as a kind of schoolboy merriment. But these are the necessary limitations of a youthful body and

TAMAR KARSAVINAINShehérazadePhotograph: Bert, Paris

TAMAR KARSAVINA

INShehérazade

Photograph: Bert, Paris

a youthful spirit. Nor would we have it otherwise. We will leave the rest to time. The years will deepen and dignify his art. If he is too happy to enter into certain phases of the spirit we will gladly bear with his shortcomings. We are content to take him as he is—the genial, leaping, happy dionysiac fawn!

It is interesting to record here some of his impressions and his remarks about himself.

“I love dancing to the music of Chopin,” he says, “you see we are fellow-countrymen. I am not a Russian really; my parents were Poles, and I am a Catholic and not Orthodox. I always imagine that it is only a Pole who can really interpret Chopin; we understand the melancholy of his music.”

With regard to themilieuof his performance he has said: “One thing I am determined not to do, and that is to go on the music-hall stage. I have had several tempting offers; but after all what is money? I think more of art than of money, and I refuse to be sandwiched between performing dogs and acrobats.”

Before he appeared at Covent Garden he said, “I am frightened of London. I like the town, it is so big and serious, but the thought of dancing at Covent Garden makes me feel nervous.”

After he had danced there, however, he was not nervous of criticising the Covent Garden audience. “They are not very demonstrative compared with the Parisians, but they are faithful, they seem to come again and again in great numbers. But they have a horrible habit—during the last piece on the programme there is always a constant stream of people going out. I think this is disgracefully ill-mannered, and I refuse now to dance in the last piece on the programme. I refuse to dance to an audience that is melting away—it is an insult to art. At Paris, all the times I have danced there, not a single person has stirred at a single performance until the curtain fell at the end. And here at London we end quite early—at eleven o’clock. That gives people plenty of time to get their suppers, doesn’t it? Fortunately the stage at Covent Garden is conveniently big. It has one disadvantage—it does not slope at all. It is quite flat, so that when I was dancing there at first I kept falling forwards.”

Madame Karsavina, thepremière danseuseof the Diaghilew company, is in every way a fit colleague for the incomparable Nijinsky. Although still quite young, she is fast making for herself a reputation that will probably be second to none in the Russian ballet. Last year the retirement of Mademoiselle Preobrajenskaya from regular work and the withdrawal of Madame Pavlova left her an arduous task to fulfil in St Petersburg. In order to fill the gaps that she alone was capable of filling, she was obliged to study new parts which the retired dancers had made peculiarly their own—an undertaking of considerable delicacy. But her genius enabled her to draw even from the most exacting critics that quiet smile of inward appreciation which she has acutely declared to be the highest tribute to the artist. She is hard-working, very ambitious, and takes her art very seriously in all its branches.

Of her performances at Covent Garden, all were marked by such rare technique and instructed grace that it is difficult to put any one before another; but certainly she never surpassed her achievement inLe Spectre de la Rose. Her dancing caught the very spirit of a maiden’s reverie, and nothing could have been more finely imagined than those transitions from languor into quick rushes of darting movement, which illustrate the abrupt and irrational episodes of a troubled dream. She was the very embodiment of faint desire. We felt, as it were, a breath of perfume, and were troubled in spite of ourselves. Moreover, the long partnership between the two performers seemed to have resulted in a very special and intimate harmony. For the most part they simply floated about the stage as though borne upon a common current of emotion. There was a marriage, not only between their bodily movements, but between their spirits, such as I have never noted in the union of any other dancers. InScheherazadeMadame Karsavina proved herself to be the possessor of a dramatic sense which the other ballets had not sufficiently displayed. As the faithless Zobeide, she mimed with astonishing subtlety an inward conflict of warring emotions, fear mingling with desire, rapture giving place to despair. Her gestures were charged with the same passionate significance as those of Ida Rubinstein and Astafieva.

ANNA PAVLOVAPhotograph: Dover Street Studios, Ltd.

ANNA PAVLOVA

Photograph: Dover Street Studios, Ltd.

Both her miming and her dancing were characterised by a certain natural softness of movement, the quality of languor rather than of passion, which was nevertheless consistent with the greatest firmness of outline.

While in Paris, Madame Karsavina sketched a comparison of the French and Russian ballets, which indicates her own conception of the art: “Our school is the same. We derive equal inspiration from the great traditions of the dance, bequeathed by Auguste Vestris and Jean-Georges Noverre. Only the French ballet has rested in these traditions, without troubling to renew them. The academic style of the French dancers is the same as that of a century ago. After having carefully studied these traditions and profited by them, we have sought something more. We have wished to present faithful images of the life round about us. Our epoch is finer, depend upon it, than any other. Human emotions have been refined or transformed. The spectacles of former times no longer move us very deeply. I have been to seeCoppeliaat the Opera. It is good, very good. ButCoppeliais quite démodé. Really it is possible to imagine choregraphic arrangements more modern, more closely in touch with life—this fine and various and over-brimming life of to-day.”

When Madame Anna Pavlova was leaving Russia, she parted with an old general, who was saying good-bye to her, with the farewell wish, “May all that is best be yours!” To this he replied, “How can the best be ours when you are depriving us of the very best we had?” Not every member of the Imperial ballet has yet visited Paris and London, and therefore it is difficult for those who have never been to Russia to speak in terms of comparison, but we are willing to believe in the justice of the general’s appraisement.

Madame Pavlova received her training at the Imperial Ballet School at St Petersburg. She speedily passed upwards through the various ranks of the ballet, until she becameprima ballerinaat the Marianski Theatre. She made her début on the foreign stage at Munich, and subsequently appeared in Berlin, Vienna, Paris, and New York. When she came to London in 1910 she immediatelyhad the town at her feet. London was at a disadvantage, however, compared with New York, for whereas in America she performed in the ballet, at the Palace Theatre in London she appeared exclusively in solo dances, or with her partner, Mikail Mordkin. The British amateur of the dance, therefore, has seen but a part of her genius, for that pure mimesis, in which she excels no less than in the actual dancing itself, requires for its full scope the interaction of characters which belongs to the ballet proper. She herself told me that she preferred playing in the ballet to dancing alone, but it is difficult to believe that her personality could find fuller expression than in the single dances in which she has the whole stage to herself. Moreover, when in England she was deprived of the splendid setting of the Russiandécor, the backcloth at the Palace Theatre being a rather distracting and futile example of the British scene-painter’s art.

Anna Pavlova is not merely a great executive, but a creative artist. She is more than a dancer, she is a lyric poet. One feels that she might equally well have chosen any other of the media of art for the expression of her emotion, but she has chosen her body—or perhaps rather her body has chosen her. This beautiful instrument she has refined to the most delicate sensibility and instructed in a perfect precision. As a piece of mechanism—if indeed mechanism be not too harsh a term for what in grace is wholly flower-like—it has been rendered as supple, just and exquisitely responsive as infinite pains could make it. It is perfectly equipped with swiftness, strength, delicacy. Only in the very greatest dancers does the body become the utter slave of the spirit, serving it with a scrupulous and joyful fidelity. But in Pavlova’s dancing we are no longer aware of the conscious and painful obedience of the body to the dictates of a governing mind. It is as though the spirit itself had left its central citadel and, by some unwonted alchemy becoming dissolved in the blood and fibres of her being, had penetrated to the extremities of the limbs. Soul from body is no longer distinguishable, and which is servant to the other none can tell.

It goes without saying that her long and careful apprenticeship in the art of dancing has given Madame Pavlova perfect

Anna PavlovaFROM A PAINTING BY J. LAVERY

Anna Pavlova

FROM A PAINTING BY J. LAVERY

proficiency in that technique of the ballet which is variously known as traditional, academic, or Italian. But although all dancing that is not grounded upon this technique is apt to become to a certain extent wavering and nerveless, it seems certain that this technique alone does not suffice for a dancer who dances with soul as well as body. After she had passed through her years of probation, Pavlova’s individuality naturally began to assert itself, and she demanded a wider scope for the full expression of her emotions. This liberty she found in those gestures and poses, more naturally human than those of the conventional ballet, which had been discovered, or rather rediscovered, by Isadora Duncan, for they are native to the world of Greek art. The characteristic of her dancing, therefore, is the combination of the older traditional method with the freedom that is demanded for the expression of emotional ideas. Other dancers have sought to find this freedom by casting aside, or rather by never troubling to learn, the traditional technique. Pavlova knows well that the freedom of art is not to be attained by a wilful lawlessness, but only by a glad and strict submission to law. Thus she has carried the dance of the ballet a stage further along the lines of its natural evolution, not despising the heritage of the past, but enlarging it to meet the deeper needs of the present.

In particular, she has shown that true dancing demands the service of every member and particle of the body. No one is now so simple as to suppose that dancing is the business only, or even principally, of the legs and feet. Carlo Blasis, a hundred years ago, said that the position, the opposition, all the movements and carriage of the arms, are perhaps the most difficult parts of the dance; and Noverre still earlier remarked, “Peu d’artistes sont distingués par un beau style de bras.” But the more subtly emotional the dance becomes, the more finely must be studied the play of light and shade over the whole surface of the body. Pavlova’s dancing is as expressive in its minutest details as in its general lines. Her dance lives in her finger-tips. The character-play of her hands is astonishing. They take their part in the interpretation of the music; they are, as it were, illuminating appendices tothe story of love and joy, of rapture and fear, that her body relates. Her face dances too. She has a command of vivid facial expression such as few actresses can equal. Never for an instant does she betray the least preoccupation with her steps. Her face is like a mirror, reflecting the passing lights and shadows of the music and the mood. The head dances, the eyes dance, the brow, the neck, the lips dance—the dance, in a word, penetrates her whole being, as the breeze penetrates the body of a tree to the least shuddering of the tiniest leaf.

Indeed in Pavlova’s art is realised the full meaning of the dance, which is none other than the complete possession of the body by the spirit. I understood this best when I saw her, not in motion on the stage, but at rest in her home. Reclining in a chair, she sketched with a few inimitable gestures theDanse des Papillons. It was scarcely more than a turn of the head, a light in the eyes, a fluttering of the fingers, and yet the mood was evoked as surely as a painter in a few nervous strokes might capture an emotion and fix it on his canvas. In this almost intangible expression the dance seemed to become, if you will suffer the paradox, independent even of motion, rather a design living in the brain, an intellectual thing which could communicate itself by a hint, a breath, by an energy of the spirit rather than of the body.

The idea of the dance—the choregraphic design—is sometimes suggested to her by music, by fragments from the works of Delibes, Chopin, Tchaikovsky or Saint-Saëns; sometimes it is hinted in a chance sight or incident of everyday life; sometimes it springs into being independently of any external impulse, as spontaneously as a melody is conceived in the musician’s or an image in the poet’s mind.Le Cygne, which she dances to the music of Saint-Saëns, owed its origin to a walk with M. Fokine in a park in St Petersburg. Seeing some swans floating upon the water, M. Fokine remarked to Madame Pavlova that it would be easy for her with her supple and slender throat to take the graceful motion of the bird as the theme of one of her dances. Her figure has something of the easy dignity of the swan, and in the gliding motions, to the accompaniment of the cool music of Saint-Saëns, she is perhaps more at ease

PAVLOVAANDMORDKINPhotograph: Foulsham & Banfield, Ltd.

PAVLOVAANDMORDKIN

Photograph: Foulsham & Banfield, Ltd.

than in those passages which demand a more stormy energy. In this dance she represents with singular beauty the proud carriage of that remote bird, its swooning death and its sudden collapse into lifelessness. It displays her skill in the difficult act of falling; she sinks to earth without any suggestion of arrangement or preparedness, ceasing to dance as swiftly and silently as a flame may cease to burn, her limbs failing her, as though her body had actually resigned its spirit.

Her interpretation of Strauss’sBlue Danubeis a perfect personification of the river-spirit. From beginning to end it sounds a clear note of joy and untrammelled life. Pavlova dances it in her freest style; the pirouette and the entrechat have no part in this simulation of the triumphing flood. All the phases of the river’s moods live in her dancing—its strong, pulsating race in mid-torrent, its bursts of sky-flung spray, its quiet dalliance in secret, wood-browned pools, its gentle play with the entangling weeds, its smooth descents over the breasting rocks ending in a laughing and ecstatic tumult.

What expression Pavlova can obtain even in the narrower scope of the traditional school may be seen in one of her dances to a Chopin valse. She appears as a young girl on the night of her first ball, in a simple white frock, somewhat longer than the usual ballet-dancer’s skirt. She is dancing the dreams of girlhood in the garden after the ball is ended, when suddenly the lover, to whom she has just lost her heart, appears on a balcony and throws her a rose. She gathers it to her breast and in her happy dance she lives over again those revealing moments when her heart suddenly blossomed into the life of love. Then looking up she blows a kiss to the balcony where her lover had stood. To her shy dismay she finds him still standing there, a witness to her confessed surrender. She is confused with a modest shame for what in her maiden innocence she fears must seem an unmaiden-like boldness. The surprised and delighted lover offers his proposal. After a moment of the most delicious embarrassment she fearfully nods her assent and skips away in a transport of excited joy. It is a delicate suggestion of the troubled and innocent emotions of first love,as suggestive in its rendering of that neutral and indefinite age that lies between girlhood and womanhood as a picture by Greuze.

But perhaps the most perfect of all Pavlova’s dances is thePapillons. It has been said that she “does not so much imitate the movement of a butterfly as the emotional quality of a butterfly-flight, the sense raised in our minds by watching it; and then it is not an ordinary butterfly, nor a plain lepidopteron, but a Grimm butterfly, a dream butterfly, a butterfly multiplied many times by itself, raised as it were to the Pavlova-th power.” With that sense of the elimination of weight which is characteristic of her dancing, Pavlova is able to suggest the grace of things flying, things swimming, things borne upon the breeze. ThePapillonsis the quintessence of the spirit of everything that dances in the wind, and is kissed by the sun, and has intrigues with the flowers, and lives its irresponsible life between the sunrise and sunset of a summer day. It appears to be danced almost wholly with the eyes and the finger-tips; the dancer is on the stage and off again all within the incredibly short space of thirty seconds. Yet she told me that, on account of its ceaseless vibrating motion, of all her dances it is the most exhausting.

But Pavlova’s dancing is not limited to the expression merely of thistledown lightness and inconsequential gaiety; it has a deeper reach, and at times is borne upon a flood of passion.L’Automne Bacchanaleis a stormy and tumultuous dance, affecting the mind like that vision which Keats saw in the “marble brede of men and maidens” on a Grecian urn:

“What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”

It was this dance which inspired Mr Holbrook Jackson’s spirited eulogy. “She does not make you think of herself,” he writes in his “Romance and Reality”; “she sets you dreaming of all the dancing that has ever been, of all the dancing that is. Whilst watching her I could not help thinking she was not merely following the rules of an art, but that she was following the rules of life. The leaves

PAVLOVAANDMORDKININ RUSSIAN COSTUMEPhotograph: Foulsham & Banfield, Ltd.

PAVLOVAANDMORDKIN

IN RUSSIAN COSTUME

Photograph: Foulsham & Banfield, Ltd.

dance in the breeze, the flowers dance in the sun, the worlds dance in space, and Pavlova dancing is a part of this cosmic measure.

“Everybody in the theatre must have felt something similar—especially when she and Michael Mordkin, her superb consort in the art, danced together theBacchanaleof Glazounov. I imagine also those dim segments of faces in the darkened auditorium, many of them reflecting the frigid morality of English respectability, would be touched to strange emotions. Their staid owners would feel a new wakefulness, recalling as in a dream all that had ever happened to them of passion or beauty, all that might have happened to them had they followed their real desires, their sacred whims.... The swaying form of Pavlova rhymed and romped with life and joy, with love and beauty. O the wild flight across the stage, the hot pursuit, the sweet dalliance, and then the rich luxury of surrender! The very essence of life was there: life so full of joy that it overflowed with blissful abandonment until it sank from the only pardonable excess—excess of happiness.”

In this dance Pavlova has met the exponents of the modern “barefoot” school on their own ground, and,—shall we say? vanquished them. Her training in the strict traditional method has taught her that lesson, invaluable in all the arts, the restraint of emotion. For even in theBacchanalethere is restraint, the art that conceals art, else she could not have attained that perfect unison of rhythm which gives to the dance the swinging quality of a wave.

Pavlova may be said to have introduced impressionism into the dance, and so to have brought it into line with the tendencies of modern art. Not impressionism as Zola understood it—“merely an excuse for not taking pains.” In this respect her faultless precision more resembles the fine work of a Dutchgenrepainting. But she is an impressionist in creating a sudden and brilliant effect without the appearance of laboured effort and without the addition of a superfluous touch, in presenting with an economy of swift gesture the firm outline of an incident, the essential summary of a scene, the breathing heart of an emotion. Although she flashesacross the vision for no more than a few seconds, she nevertheless leaves in the mind the memory of a complete utterance, something perfectly finished, definite, precise, whole, like a clear-sounding lyric, or a finely-cut sculpture. For in her work, as in all true impressionism, there is nothing blurred; it is rapid, but it is just and sure; it goes to the roots; it ignores what is irrelevant and seizes on the essential. Actual mimicry has no place in her dance; she is not a copyist of nature; she embodies the salient moments, the vital energies, of beauty and passion.

But when all is said, nothing is said. She refuses to yield herself to analysis. Too swift for the eye, she altogether outpaces the pen. One can only repeat the words of that baffled interviewer who wisely wrote: “Pavlova can only be adequately understood by the person to whom she is an everlasting mystery—by the mind that cannot understand her. The man who feels he can, or thinks he can, or knows he can, sum her up in so many words; who fancies he has done his duty to her and to reason when he has declared that she is the finest dancer that he has ever seen in all his life; who says ‘I have seen Pavlova’ as a man would say ‘I have seen the boat-race’—as if the whole thing were over and done with, and that nothing more was to be learned, or not learned, by another and another visit: such a man speaks without having felt.... She is uninterviewable—unphotographable—undrawable. But she is not uncaricaturable; for are not all the phrases of the pen and strokes of the pencil but caricatures that attempt to describe and picture perfection? And what is perfection but Pavlova?”

In the troupe which accompanied Madame Pavlova at the Palace Theatre in London there were several artistic performers, but one calls for special notice—Mademoiselle Schmolz. Her dancing in Glinka’s “Mazurka” and Brahms’ “Rhapsodie Hongroise” had all that lilt and swing and hint of devilry which, by every rule of the theatre at any rate, the dancing of half-barbaric peasants ought to have. A dance which she and Mademoiselle Plaskaweska danced to the most mischievously ironical of Chopin’s waltzes was, I have no hesitation in saying, one of the most completely satisfying things

MADEMOISELLE SCHMOLZPhotograph: Dover Street Studios, Ltd.

MADEMOISELLE SCHMOLZ

Photograph: Dover Street Studios, Ltd.

ever seen upon the stage. The credit belongs in part to Mikail Mordkin, who was the composer, but it is scarcely possible to conceive a more spirited interpretation than that given by the two executants. The theme was simply a petty squabble about a rose. One of the maidens covets the love-token which the other flaunts so provokingly; there follows a pretty wrangle on tiptoe, lively grimaces, and the trophy is wrested from its rightful owner. The latter now becomes the aggressor, displays a delightful petulance, and, between smiles and tears, pursues the laughing thief. The nosegay is won back, and then, just as your sympathy is becoming earnestly engaged in the alternations of triumph and despair, the rose is tossed upon the ground, and both minxes run away with mocking laughter, leaving you half aggrieved at having been fooled into a serious concern in their empty mischief. It is simple, trivial, silly if you like, and it is all over in half-a-minute—yet it prints on the mind a picture like one of those rare glimpses of incidents sometimes seen in real life, the memory of which goes with a man for half a lifetime.

Mikail Mordkin received his training in the same school as Anna Pavlova, that attached to the Marianski Theatre in St Petersburg. The two have been associated in a somewhat uneasy partnership at the Palace Theatre in London, and in the United States. Mordkin has achieved the distinction of being the onlydanseurwho has ever found favour in America. There, as in England, before the coming of the Russians, the chief function of the man dancer was to rush out at the psychological moment and rescue the ballerina as she fell into his arms, with her eyes staring into the drops and one toe pointing upwards towards the limelight man. Apart from performing this useful service, on account of which he was tolerated as a kind of necessary nuisance, his part was almost a sinecure.

The performances of Mordkin, together with those of Nijinsky, have brought about a reversal of the somewhat contemptuous popular judgment upon male dancing, for undoubtedly the Anglo-Saxon public shared to some extent the prejudice of Southey, who said that every male dancer ought to be hamstrung. Thereis nothing of the twittering effeminacies of the proverbial “French dancing-master” in Mordkin’s dancing; its main characteristic is manliness. His build is robust, massive, noble. His physical qualities undoubtedly leave some of his less critical admirers blind to the deficiencies of his art. His splendid physique is fortified by a course of rigorous and continual training. In addition to his daily exercise, it is not unusual for him to go to the theatre three hours before the performance begins and, without the accompaniment of music, to go through all the preliminary postures of the dance. Instead of becoming exhausted by this exercise, he is fit and eager for the ballet to begin.

Mordkin has shown that grace is not only consistent with true virility in dancing, but is indispensable to it. In their folk-dances the top-booted Russian dancers give a fine display of masculine vigour, but it is always upon the edge of the grotesque. The beauty of a man’s strength is hidden rather than revealed by these spasms of violence; it is best seen in those lines, suggestive of sleeping force, which give to Mordkin’s poses the heroic quality of Greek sculpture. His dancing is distinguished by its reserve. It always leaves something to the imagination. His gestures in the “Arrow Dance” derive no little of their effectiveness from what they suggest, but leave unsaid. It is the warrior not at war but at play, and like the gambolling of young tigers affects us by the passion that it only hints at. His dancing has a constant tendency to forsake motion for repose. In his entrechats and pirouettes I seemed to note a certain reluctance, as though they were a concession demanded by popular taste, or a lingering tradition of the ballet technique. Yet when motion is required, Mordkin can give it, and of the freest, most buoyant, most swinging quality. The reckless swing of the galloping entry in theAutomne Bacchanalewas magnificent. That was a dance of dances! The riot of wine, the sap of youth, the tumult of love, the sudden liberation of vigorous limbs, were all expressed in a rush of movement that was somehow curiously restrained, as the foaming progress of a wave is restrained, never tempted by excess of ecstasy into breaking the steady sweep of its own rhythm.

MIKAIL MORDKININThe Arrow DancePhotograph: Foulsham & Banfield, Ltd.

MIKAIL MORDKIN

INThe Arrow Dance

Photograph: Foulsham & Banfield, Ltd.

A comparison of the art of Mordkin and Nijinsky would be almost irrelevant. Their style differs just in the same degree as their physique. If Nijinsky is the winged Mercury of the dance, Mordkin is the Apollo. Nijinsky’s is the dancing of motion, Mordkin’s of repose; the temper of the one is volatile, of the other equable and restrained; wit, gaiety, elegance, ebullience of youthful spirits, are the characteristics of the younger dancer; dignity, power, and a slumbering passion, of the elder. The hint of Puck-like fancy is entirely absent in Mordkin’s performances; his dramatic qualities are less elastic than Nijinsky’s, his personality less various, more rigidly settled in a definite mould.

While other Russian dancers pass with meteoric flight across the English stage, Madame Lydia Kyasht burns like a fixed star of all but the first magnitude. Discerning critics observed her with pleasure behind the footlights of the Empire Theatre for the first time one autumn evening in 1908. She had been summoned from Russia to dance in London for four weeks,—she has been dancing there for three years and her engagement has still two more to run. Her position aspremière danseusein an English ballet has both its advantages and its dangers. Appearing in a ballet that is really very little more than a ballet of amateurs, she achieves without great difficulty the effect desired I suppose by every ballet-dancer,—that of a visitant from some more gracious and ethereal sphere. She trips where her companions tramp. She alone has wings. Yet, although her art profits by the contrast, it suffers from the isolation. It is difficult for her to keep it keyed to its highest pitch when she is deprived of the stimulus of criticism and emulation. Moreover, as there is no competent master of the ballet to compose for her, she is compelled to be her own choregrapher, and the work of composition demands a different order of intelligence from that of the executant. Yet in spite of these unfavourable conditions, the character of her dancing remains remarkably pure. If it lacks the dazzling executive brilliance of her former fellow-pupils, Pavlova and Karsavina, it is marked by a certain statuesque dignity which is somewhat notable in a ballerina. Even a great dancer may have arresting attitudes but fail to connectthem. Lydia Kyasht passes from attitude to attitude in a single continuous sequence of admirable poses which flow one into another without a pause and without a flaw. Her purity of line is never broken by one of those inartistic feats of athletic dexterity which sometimes disfigure the dancing of Adeline Genée. She invariably resists the besetting temptation of a clever dancer to let accomplishment trespass upon grace. Unfortunately the good fairy who has endowed her with so many gifts appears to have withheld the greatest of them all—imagination. Finish and refinement can never make amends for the absence of mood. At times her dancing leaves us so cold that we are persuaded that she is dancing with her head but not with her heart.

It is worth while remarking that when any Russian dancer appears in England or America, she is almost invariably described as the “première danseuse of the Russian Imperial Ballet.” This denomination is vague, and usually inaccurate. Theoretically there can be only twoballerine assolutein all the Russias—one in St Petersburg and one in Moscow. As a matter of fact, in St Petersburg at the present moment both Kschesinskaya and Preobrajenskaya hold this rank, although of the two, the former is granted precedence. The latter has now nominally retired, but she continues to make six or eight appearances every season. Madame Kschesinskaya has never performed in England. She once visited London privately, but when she found that an engagement there would necessitate appearing nightly, she declared that such a task was “blood-drying work,” and fled incontinently to Russia. In the Russian capital she herself chooses the occasions when she deigns to appear. Theballerina assolutaof Moscow is Mademoiselle Catrina Geltzer, who has recently appeared at the Alhambra. Madame Pavlova belongs to the grade known asballerina, orpremière danseuse, the next below that ofballerina assoluta. She is marked out to succeed to the place vacated by Madame Preobrajenskaya in the supreme rank in the hierarchy. Madame Karsavina and Mademoiselle Balashova are at present equal in degree to Madame Pavlova. Madame Lydia Kyasht is in Russia still onlypremière sujet.

LYDIA KYASHTPhotograph: Ellis & Walery

LYDIA KYASHT

Photograph: Ellis & Walery

IN a retrospect of the performances of the Russians in London this year, a correspondent ofThe Timessummed up the effect of their achievement upon the state of mind of the spectator of the English ballet in these words: “This summer of 1911 has brought more than an æsthetic revolution with it: in bringing the Russian ballet to Covent Garden it has brought a positively new art, it has extended the realm of beauty for us, discovered a new continent, revealed new faculties and means of salvation in ourselves. Alas! many pleasant illusions have been shattered thereby, many idols have tumbled from their pedestals; we have grown up terribly fast and lost the power of enjoying things that pleased our callow fancies a year or two ago. Who can go back now with the old zest to the robust vivacity of X or the amateurishminauderiesof Y? Who will put up any longer with the battered themes, the insipid music, the ingenious setting, and the clumsy grouping to which we were accustomed once? They will still have their public, those things; they will serve for entertainment, for stuffing to that pillow on which the backbone of the British nation leans till bedtime; but they will no longer do for the ‘seven hundred honest folk’ who seek at that hour for the means to ‘make their souls.’”

Although I cannot claim to be one of the honest folk who go to the Empire at that hour “to make their souls,” it was nevertheless somewhat dismayedly that, with the rhythm of the Russians still marching through the brain, I once again witnessed a ballet fairly representative of the modern English type. We were no longer in the atmosphere of art, but in the atmosphere of commerce. The peculiarity of the atmosphere of commerce is that itleaves nothing to the imagination, and therefore it leaves the imagination cold. “The art of the pen,” said Meredith in the person of one of the characters of his novels, “is to rouse the inward vision, instead of labouring with a drop-scene brush, as if it were to the eye.” The English ballet is not content with the primitive simplicity of a drop-scene brush; it labours with a host of mechanical devices—with extravagant properties, with photographic scenery, with the stratagems of electricians, with all the means that the stage manager can array to dissuade the inward vision from rousing itself. Its aim apparently is to create a diversion for the eye so that the imagination may slumber undisturbed. The stage as a rule is so crowded, that any suggestion of a governing design is lost in a general bewildering flicker of motion like that of the cinematograph. Frequently thecorps de ballethave no room for any more elaborate step than an artless hop and a right-about turn, a kind of convalescent pirouette. Perhaps it is as well—safety may sometimes lie in numbers. “What has come to us,” asked Professor Selwyn Image a dozen years agoaproposof theButterfliesballet, “that we are all gone crazy over crowds and jumble and properties and frippery?”

A strange circumstance is that the English ballet not infrequently has the air of being discontented with its enforced silence. At its best the ballet is not the translation of words into gesture: it is the translation, or rather the transposition of life into gesture. It is the presentment to eye and ear by means of rhythmic motion and pictorial design, of a certain feeling about life, of certain moods and visions which have never crystallised into words. “It begins and ends,” it has been well said, “before words have formed themselves, in a deeper consciousness than that of speech.” To think of ballet merely as dumb show is the same as to think of painting merely as illustration. It exists as the supplement rather than as the substitute of words. It does not merely tell a story; it tells it, or rather it should tell it, in a way in which words alone could not tell it. It tells it with a beauty which, we will not say is greater than, but is at any rate different from, the beauty of words. But the ballet of commerce, aiming at literalness rather than suggestion,

LYDIA KYASHTINSylviaPhotograph: Bassano, Ltd.

LYDIA KYASHT

INSylvia

Photograph: Bassano, Ltd.

seems strangely handicapped by its speechlessness. It appears to be groping for the libretto. It does not tell a story so much as suggest that it has a story to tell, which it would, if it could, impart to the spectator. Probably because they never seek to go outside the narrow circle of conventionalised gestures, which the English ballet has received as a sacred tradition from the Italian, the performers have the air of attempting to communicate with one another in the deaf and dumb language of a mute, or rather of one who wilfully deprives himself of the use of his tongue. The feeling that they arouse in the spectator is one almost of impatience, as with the folly of a man who uses a finger alphabet when he might just as well talk rationally.

In speaking of the English ballet, Mr Max Beerbohm has gaily admitted his inability to master the meaning of formalised gesture: “When a ballerina lays the palms of her hands against her left cheek, and then snatching them away, regards them with an air of mild astonishment, and then swaying slightly backwards, touches her forehead with her finger-tips, and then suddenly extends both arms above her head, I ought of course to be privy to her inmost meaning. I ought to have a thorough grasp of her exact state of mind. Friends have often explained to me, with careful demonstrations, the significance of the various gestures that are used in the ballet—and these gestures are not very many—and I have more than once committed them to memory, hoping that though I could never be illuded, I might at least be not bemused. But, after all this trouble, the next ballet that I have seen has teased and puzzled me as unkindly as ever. Is it that gestures were given to the ballerina to conceal her thoughts? Or is it merely that the quickness of the hand deceives the eye?”

One of the criteria of the ballet is the quality of its silence. In the perfect ballet the silence is never apprehended as a negation or a deficiency, any more than it is in a painting or a statue. The interpolation of words would indeed be felt to be an impertinence. Where the rhythm is entirely satisfying, the mind is content. Not the least of the merits of the Russian ballet is this quality of completeness in its silence. There are some exceptions: at timesthe action ofLe Pavillon d’Armidestumbles and seems to cry for speech; but inLe Spectre de la Rosewould not a single spoken word break the spell? The gestures of the dancers are never drawn from that limited stock of conventions which Mr Beerbohm tried in vain to memorise, which are in fact a kind of stock-in-trade, and can be borne in mind and applied at will like the commonplaces of the newspaper leader-writers; they are fluid and variable and flow naturally out of the emotion. They are in fact gestures, and not, as they usually are in the English ballet, gesticulations.

But there is good reason to believe that the English ballet is on the eve of a renaissance. The success of the Russians must have taught the managers that a gorgeous spectacle is not really necessary for the delight of the public,—in the Russian repertory probably the simplest ballets were the most appreciated. Already in theDance Dreamthe Alhambra has produced a ballet which, if the theme was insipid, at any rate had the crowning virtue of breadth and simplicity of treatment. A sense of space was created; the tumult of action was varied by passages of sobriety; an effect of beauty was produced, larger and serener than any that has been seen in the English ballet during recent years. The principals of course were Russians—Mademoiselle Balashova succeeded Mademoiselle Geltzer aspremière danseuse—but the performance of the English dancers showed that under proper handling they are capable of better things than the pantomime displays to which they have been used to be restricted. The English ballet still awaits the coming of the great English dancer—it is too early yet to know whether Miss Phyllis Bedells will be she—but now that public interest is at last wide awake the primary condition of the creation of a native school of ballet is satisfied.

But there is one dancer of genius, whom, if the English stage has not produced, it at any rate monopolises. It has become difficult to think of Madame Adeline Genée as belonging to any other country than England, nevertheless the conscientious annalist must record, however unwillingly, the fact that she was born at Aarhus, in Denmark. If she was not born dancing, she danced almost from her cradle. At the age of eight she began that

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