While the Greeks had far more opportunities than are vouchsafed to us moderns to behold the human body exhibiting its strength and its skill in graceful play, we have the advantage that many of the most effective exercises are latter-day inventions. It seems unlikely that the Athenians and the Spartans, even tho they were horsemen, had attained to the art of bareback riding; they may have bestraddled a saddleless steed, but they had not learned how to stand on his back, and to turn somersets in time with the stride of the horse. It is, of course, possible that they were familiar with this, but no sculpture and no vase-painting, no anecdote in the works of the prose-writers, and no line of the lyrists survives to authorize us to believe it. And it is fairly certain, also, that they lacked the horizontal bar, which affords limitless possibilities to the adventurous acrobat of our own times, both when it is erected singly and when it is combined in sets of three, either fixed in the arena or raised aloft in the air to produce the appearance of a remoter ethereality.
The trapeze has a name of Greek origin, and it was possibly known to the Greeks. But the Greeks did not foresee the full possibilities of the trapeze, since its most startling utilization, the feat known as the Flying Trapeze, was invented by the French acrobat, Léotard, only a little later than the middle of the nineteenth century. The Flying Trapeze is the ultimate achievement of acrobatic art, and it demands the utmost combination of skilful strength and of easy grace. It was a feat that the Greeks would have appreciated and enjoyed, since it demanded and disclosed the perfection of physical courage and of physical skill. Of late, the Flying Trapeze has been complicated and doubled in difficulty by the introduction of a second performer, who at first makes the leap simultaneously with his partner, and afterward separates from him and springs thru the air to the trapeze which his associate has just abandoned, the pair thus floating past each other in mid-air. In this more elaborated form the task is more perilous, no doubt, and far less easy of accomplishment; but it cannot be achieved with quite the same graceful mastery as when a single performer seems to glide ethereally from bar to bar, as tho it was impossible for him to fall or to fail to catch his almost invisible support. This graceful mastery was the most marked characteristic of Léotard, the original inventor of the Flying Trapeze; and it may be doubted whether any of those who have followed the path he traced thru the air, and who have vanquished difficulties beyond those which he conquered, have been able to outdo him in the abiding essential of grace.
III
The overcoming of difficulty is one of the elements of the pleasure which we take in any art, and part of our enjoyment of a sonnet, for example, must be ascribed to the apparent ease with which the poet is able to express his thought, amply and completely, within the rigid limitations of his fourteen lines, with their prescribed arrangement of five or six rimes. But our delight is diminished if we are made conscious of the effort it has cost the artist to attain his aim. Many a later performer on the Flying Trapeze let us see that the feats he is attempting are so difficult that they cannot be accomplished without obvious effort. That is to say, we are made aware that the acrobat is exhibiting a "stunt," and this is bad art. Difficulty overcome is worth while only when it is overcome seemingly without any strain, and when art is sufficient to conceal itself. However difficult the artist's achievement may be, its charm is doubled if he can make it appear to be easy.
It happens that I am able to bring his personal testimony to the fact that this was the principle which always governed Léotard himself. When the French gymnast paid his only visit to the United States, more than forty years ago, he used to practise in a gymnasium which I also frequented. He spoke no English, and I had a little school-boy French, so that a certain intimacy sprang up. One day Léotard asked me to swing a trapeze for him, and he sprang off and caught it with a single hand, and then as the second trapeze returned he twisted and grasped the first trapeze again with one hand. This evoked from me an immediate exclamation of astonishment and admiration at the startling conquest of difficulty, and it was followed by the natural question why so extraordinary a feat had never been exhibited in public. Léotard explained that the leaps from trapeze to trapeze with the aid of one hand only must be lopsided, since the body is inevitably more or less twisted, and he added that as there was an unavoidable and ungraceful wrenching of the person, he had determined never to exhibit this feat in public, difficult as it might be.
But altho Léotard was not willing to perform in public with only one hand, it was a most invaluable exercise in private. His ability to accomplish his leaps thus handicapped gave him a redoubled confidence when he was using both of his hands. That he was right in resisting the temptation to startle the spectators by a "stunt" of surprising difficulty is beyond question. It could not be made to seem easy, and it could not be accomplished with grace. Therefore it was not fit for exhibition, even tho Léotard might feel sure that he could do it without risk of failure. Here the French acrobat revealed himself as bound by the eternal principles which underlie all the arts, that of the acrobat no less than those of the painter and the poet. There is lack of art in the performances of many acrobats of remarkable skill, who attempt feats which they are not always certain of achieving. Indeed, they are sometimes willing to profit by this very uncertainty. They fail the first time of trying, and even the second, and these failures serve the purpose of advertising to the spectators the difficulty of the task they have undertaken. Then the third time, or the fourth, they succeed, whereupon they reap the unworthy reward of applause from the unthinking.
The artist should never let us see his failures. If he is not certain that he can perform what he promises, then he had better refrain from the attempt. It was in the same winter that Léotard was in New York, in the late sixties of the nineteenth century, that the Hanlon Brothers paid one of their welcome visits to America. The Hanlons they were then, and they were acrobats pure and simple, altho later, when they called themselves the Hanlon-Lees, they had become pantomimists. As acrobats they held fast to the same principles which governed Léotard in his performances. They insisted upon certainty of execution; they never failed to perform the feat they set out to accomplish, and to perform it successfully the first time they attempted it. And no matter how difficult the feat might be, or how novel or how effective, if they could not attain absolute certainty of execution, they refrained from setting it before the public. I was told at the time that there were two or three surprising and alluring exercises which the Hanlons had invented themselves, which they practised laboriously and faithfully all that winter, and which they wisely refrained from ever putting on their program because they were never able to assure themselves of a uniformly successful result. They could do any one of these feats four times out of five, but the fifth time there would be a miscalculation of energy, and the attempt would have to be repeated. And they were unwilling to let the public witness any performance of theirs which was not perfect in its execution.
IV
Here again the modern acrobat, who is guided by a real feeling for his art, is in accord with the principles which the Greeks obeyed. In Attic tragedy, for example, there are no exhibitions of violence, no scuffles, and no assassinations, and this is not so much because the Greeks shrank from scenes of blood, as some critics have vainly contended, but rather because the actors in the Attic drama were raised on thick boots and were topped by towering masks, which made it almost impossible for them to take part in episodes of vigorous action, in hand-to-hand struggles, in murders before the eyes of the spectators, without danger of displacing the mask, and thereby distracting the attention of the audience from the immediate purpose of the dramatic poet. What could not be done gracefully the Greeks refrained from attempting. The exhibition of difficulty for the sake of difficulty, still more the failure to accomplish a "stunt" for the sake of calling attention to its difficulty—these things the Greeks abhorred. They would as surely have disapproved of the misguided artifices of the acrobats who make a practise of failing once or twice in order to multiply the immediate effect of their ultimate success as they would reprove the exhibition of a difficulty conquered for its own sake. It is only in the best acrobatic performances that we moderns are privileged to perceive what was a constant delight to the Greeks—the beauty of the human form, in its finest physical perfection, certain of its strength and easy in its grace.
(1912.)