Romantic Love and Personal Beauty / Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities

by Henry T. Finck

In the waltzes, mazourkas, and polonaises of Chopin we see still more strikingly that the true function of dance-music is amorous. Even as Dante’s Love for Beatrice was too super-sensual, too ethereal for this world, so Chopin’s dance-pieces are too subtle, too full of delicate nuances of tempo and Love episodes, to be adapted to a ballroom with ordinary mortals. Graceful fairies alone could dance a Chopin waltz; mortals are too heavy, too clumsy. They can follow an amorous Chopin waltz with the imagination alone, which is the abode of Romantic Love. To a Strauss waltz a hundred couples may make love at once, hence he writes for the orchestra; but Chopin wrote for the parlour piano, because the feelings he utters are too deep to be realised by more than two at a time—one who plays and one who listens, till their souls dance together in an ecstatic embrace of Mutual Sympathy.

THE DANCE OF LOVE

It is at Vienna, which has more feminine grace and beauty to the square mile than any other city in the world, that the art of dancing is to be seen in its greatest perfection. No wonder that it is the home of the Waltz-King, Johann Strauss; and that a Viennese feuilletonist has shown the deepest insight into the psychology of the dance in an article from which the following excerpts are taken:—

"The waltz has a creative, a rejuvenating power, which no other dance possesses. The skipping polka is characterised by a certain stiffness and angularity, a rhythm rather sober and old-fashioned. The galop is a wild hurricane, which moves along rudely and threatens to blow over everything that comes in its way; it is the most brutal of all dances, an enemy of all tender and refined feelings, a bacchanalian rushing up and down....

"The waltz, therefore, remains as the only true and real dance. Waltzing is not walking, skipping, jumping, rushing, raving; it is a gentle floating and flying; from the heaviest men it seems to take away some of their materiality, to raise the most massive women from the ground into the air. True, the Viennese alone know how to dance it, as they alone know how to play it....

“The waltz insists on a personal monopoly, on being loved for its own sake, and permits no vapid side-remarks regarding the fine weather, the hot room, the toilets of the ladies; the couple glide along hardly speaking a word; except that she may beg for a pause, or he, indefatigable, insatiable, intoxicated by the music and motion, the fragrance of flowers and ladies, invites her to a new flight around the hall. And yet is this mute dance the most eloquent, the most expressive and emotional, the most sensuous that could be imagined; and if the dancer has anything to say to his partner, let him mutely confide it to her in the sweet whirl of a waltz, for then the music is his advocate, then every bar pleads for him, every note is a billet-doux, every breath a declaration of love. Jealous husbands do not allow their wives to waltz with another man. They are right, for the waltz is the Dance of Love.”

BALLET-DANCING

There is one more form of dancing which may be briefly alluded to, because it illustrates the hypocrisy of the average mortal as well as the rarity of true æsthetic taste. Solo ballet-dancing is admired not only by the bald-headed old men in the parquet, but there are critics who seriously discuss such dancing as if it were a fine art; generally lamenting the good old times of the great and graceful ballet-dancers. The truth is that ballet-dancing never can be graceful, as now practised. To secure graceful movement it is absolutely necessary to make use of the elasticity of the toes—to touch the ground at the place where the toes articulate with the middle foot, and to give the last push with the yielding great toe. Ballet-dancers, however, walk on the tips of their stiffened toes, the result of which is, as the anatomist, Professor Kollmann, remarks, that “their gait is deprived of all elasticity and becomes stiff, as in going on stilts.”

It speaks well for the growing sensibility of mankind that this form of dancing is gradually losing favour. Like the vocal tight-rope dancing of the operatic prime donne with whom ballet-dancers are associated, their art is a mere circus-trick, gaped at as a difficult tour de force, but appealing in no sense to æsthetic sentiments.

These strictures, of course, apply merely to solo-dancing on tiptoe. The spectacular ballet, which delights the eye with kaleidoscopic colours and groupings, is quite another thing, and may be made highly artistic.