Perhaps it is due to this remoteness, to this unreality, that the opera-goer is willing enough to have a story end unhappily, altho the playgoer is now likely to be painfully affected by a tragic ending. Whatever the reason, it is a fact that most of our popular plays end merrily in a church, while most of our popular operas end sadly in a churchyard. The calculation has been made that out of twoscore operas sung in New York at the two opera-houses a season or so ago, only half a dozen ended happily; the large majority of them culminated in the death of the hero or of the heroine or of both together. Music is a sister of poetry, and we need not wonder that the musicians are likely to prefer the opera-book which has a tragic catastrophe.
(1910.)
THE POETRY OF THE DANCE
I
The Greek of old was wise in his generation and poetic as was his habit, when he imagined nine muses and when he feigned that each of them was to watch over a separate art, and to inspire those who might strive to excel in this. It is true that nowadays we cannot help feeling that the sister-muses of Tragedy and of Comedy have been a little derelict to their duty, if they are really responsible for all the plays of our time, not a few of which seem to be sadly lacking in inspiration. But of late another of the sacred nine appears to have aroused herself out of her lethargy and to have awakened to a fuller realization of her opportunity. At least, there are many evidences now visible in the United States that Terpsichore has been attending strictly to business, and sending out travelers with many diverse specimens of her wares. Indeed, there has probably never been a time when so many different varieties of the dance have been on exhibition before the American people. It was once remarked by a shrewd observer that there were only three kinds of dancing, the graceful, the ungraceful, and the disgraceful. And in the United States we have had presented to us in the past few years specimens of all three kinds.
In the middle of September, 1910, the Playground Association of America held an outdoor session in Van Cortlandt Park, in New York, and three hundred persons, mostly children, took part in the exercises. The most interesting feature of the program was a series of national folk-dances executed by boys and girls from the public schools. New York is the huge melting-pot where all nationalities of Europe meet to be fused into Americans; and these children were, most of them, executing the dances of the countries their parents had come from—dances for which they had, therefore, a traditional and hereditary predilection. German girls in the costumes of the Rhine, gave a peasant dance to the simple tune of 'Ach, du lieber Augustin'; and colored children, in perfect rhythm, moved thru a reel to the music of the 'Suwanee River.' The wild Hungarian czardas was carried off with a splendid swing by men and women born on the banks of the Danube; and an Irish quartet displayed their agility and their precision of time-keeping in a four-handed country-dance. And at the end, all the participants in the several national dances took part in a general harvest-dance. This was an effective spectacle, possible only here in America, where representatives of many peoples come to mingle, even tho each of them retains a sentiment of loyalty to the old home it has left forever.
Here in the open air, in a public park, at this meeting of the Playground Association, there was this joyous and wholesome revival of the folk-dances of a dozen different races; and at the same time, in one or another of half a score of the theaters of the great city, ill-trained and half-clothed women were vainly capering about the stage in doubtful efforts to suggest the Oriental contortions of Salomé. These were, most of them, consciously and deliberately inartistic, appealing directly to the baser instincts and to the lower curiosities of man. Nothing could have been in sharper contrast with the folk-dances of the foreign-born children, which were gay and healthy and spontaneous. The exercises in the park were examples of the kind of dancing which cannot help being graceful, while most of the performances in the theaters were specimens of the kind of dancing which can fairly be described as ungraceful, even if they cannot all of them be dismissed as disgraceful. While the folk-dances of the children would fill the heart with a pure delight, the sorry spectacle presented in some of the theaters was not to be witnessed without a certain loss of self-respect; it recalled the gross pantomimes of the later Roman theater, righteously denounced by the Fathers of the Church.
Yet it is only just to record that in other theaters there were then other spectacles to make amends for these sorry exhibitions. There were several interesting attempts to recall the severe beauty of Greek dancing. Lithe figures with free and floating draperies sought to recapture the irreclaimable charm that lives for us in the lovely Tanagra figurines, or that flits elusively around the sides of Attic vases. Ambitious efforts were made by one dancer and by another to translate into step and posture and gesture the intangible poetry of Shelley and the haunting music of Mendelssohn. Unfortunately, the result was rarely commensurate with the effort; and, in fact, a complete success was not possible. The muse of dancing has no right to endeavor to annex the territory of her sisters, who are charged with the care of poetry and music. The several arts are strongest when each remains strictly within its own limitations. For example, program-music is not yet assured of its welcome, and program-dancing is far more difficult to follow with complete comprehension.