Indeed the decline of the ballet during this period was due less to the quality of the dancing than to the fact that it was no longer regarded as a serious art-form. The ballet is in effect the combination of a number of arts, co-operating in the production of a single whole. It achieves distinction only when it attracts to itself the best artistic talent of the day. The ballet-master is powerless unless he is assisted by the artist and the musician. The dancing, the music, and the décor should be informed by a single spirit. There had been a time when the foremost men of letters and composers had shared in the production of the ballet. Now its direction was left to the music-hall manager. The result was necessarily a vulgarisation of the ballet. It ceased to have any relation to contemporary culture. It became an affair of pretty faces, banal attitudes, waving drapery, tawdry brocades, limelight effects and romping music. It tended to become of the same order as the Christmas pantomime.
But the first reform that was needed was a more serious study of the dancing itself, for the ballet, however interesting the music and the scenery, is essentially an exhibition of the dance. The ballet in England has always suffered from the absence of any official school of dancing. In France, in Italy, in Russia, in Denmark, the academies are maintained by the State; the dancers are in a manner civil servants, holding a permanent appointment and receiving a pension on retirement. An adequate training is therefore possible, a continuous tradition is maintained and a high average, at all events in the technique of the dance, is ensured. In England, however, it has been rather the custom for the danseuse to go to this or that teacher to learn a single dance necessary for a certain performance, but not to learn dancing. Indeed it is impossible as a general rule for the dancer out of her slender salary to pay one or two guineas an hour, or whatever the fee may be, in order to attain a proficiency which even when acquired is rarely appreciated. The managers, rightly or wrongly, believed that the public did not care to see good dancing, but only good looks and a dazzling show. The sounder view was probably that taken by the Rev. Stewart Headlam, who always held that the ballet was worthy of serious criticism. Writing in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1886 he said: “If either of those houses [the Alhambra and the Empire] want a really new sensation, to take the town, let them have a small ballet, not only with the best principals who can be got—these indeed they have often now—but with the whole ballet composed solely of dancers, picked dancers, who have been regularly and constantly at practice under a really good master.” Time has justified his words, for it is in no small degree to this minute and general excellence that the success of the Russian ballet is due.
The ballet, at the time of which we are speaking, had indeed become involved in a vicious circle. Because of its vulgarisation it had fallen into disrepute, and because of its disrepute it was considered demeaning for any serious person to undertake that criticism which was a necessary condition of its reform. In those days it required a certain amount of courage to treat the ballet as worthy of serious consideration and encouragement. The Rev. Stewart Headlam was almost alone in maintaining that the ballet should rank as art and stage-dancing as an honourable profession, and that the religious world had done grievous harm by adopting a policy of isolation towards it. His praise of the ballet of Yolande, probably the most beautiful that ever appeared upon the Alhambra stage, drew down the Episcopal censure. It is almost impossible to believe in these days that the Bishop of London should have “prayed that he might not have to meet before the Judgment-seat those whom his encouragement first led to places where they lost the blush of shame and took the first downward step to vice and misery.” Mr Headlam’s reply was to recommend the Bishop to go to see the Swans at the Alhambra or Excelsior at Her Majesty’s—on the principle that only by the patient study of any form of art can even a bishop understand its laws and intention.
As late as twenty years ago Leicester Square produced some ballets of real excellence. Two in particular, The Swans and The Seasons at the Alhambra, were exquisite things of their kind. In the latter the dancers were all dressed as birds. The colours were harmonious and restrained and the stage was never overcrowded. But the tendency of the period was to elaborate the staging of the ballet at the expense of the quality of the dancing. The dictatorship of the late Sir Augustus Harris, skilful impresario as he was, led to the overcrowding of the stage, to the accumulation of mere monstrosities of scenery, of costume and of properties. The ballet became a spectacle. It was buried beneath a mass of unmeaning accessories. The stage was encumbered with gorgeous properties and with the crowd of those who did not dance but merely took their place in the pageant. The effect may have been magnificent, but it was not art. At the same time the ballet-dancers, whose business was to dance, were transformed into members of a chorus, whose chief function was to look pretty. They marched and counter-marched across the stage, performing a number of evolutions with a kind of military precision. Little more skill was demanded of them than of the banner-bearers at a Christmas pantomime. The ballet of the period has been described as chiefly a procession of “rank after rank and file after file of honest bread-winners from Camberwell and Peckham Rye, performing mechanical manœuvres with the dogged perseverance of a company of Boy Scouts.” It was, in fact, the honest British bread-winners of the corps de ballet, willing but unskilled, that persuaded the British public that ballet was a bore. The result was that popular enthusiasm was directed towards skirt-dancing, and the art of the ballerina fell into undeserved contempt.
Although practically extinct in England the ballet continued to maintain a healthy, if not a flourishing, existence on the Continent. This was due not only to the fact, of which I have already spoken, that the Continental schools of ballet were attached to the great opera houses and usually subsidised by the Government, but also to a high level of criticism and technical knowledge of the ballet on the part of the general public. The indifference of the British public was at once the cause and the excuse of the indifferent performance of the British ballet. This aspect of the decline of the ballet has been well stated by Mr S. L. Bensusan, whose authority on all that concerns the art of theatrical dancing is supreme.
“Not only are many of the steps that must be studied exceedingly difficult,” he says, speaking of the work of the Continental ballerina, “but the dancer who has learnt her work in the schools of Vienna, Milan, Moscow, or Paris knows well enough that should she falter in their execution, she will have no chance at all with the public. In Italy, for example, the audience understands the technical side of a dancer’s art just as well as it understands the quality of a singer’s voice, or just as well as the patrons of a London music-hall understand the chorus of a comic song.... The dancer who failed in ballet to execute a difficult step with absolute neatness and precision, would find a decidedly unpleasant reception awaiting the end of the movement. Her audience have a standard of judgment and will understand what the movement should have been like. In London, on the other hand, several great dancers have told me that it is not worth their while to take trouble about very difficult steps, because unfortunately they are not understood; while something that is obvious and childlike in its simplicity, like a pas de bourrée, is safe to meet with a measure of applause at least as great as that which rewards some movements which can only be acquired at the end of long years of study by a very few dancers whose natural gifts are exceptional. If you watch a really distinguished dancer, you are bound to notice that she never has an ungraceful movement or unhappy pose. It is not a case of occasional happy moments, but of one long succession of movements whose rhythm has the beauty of fine verse. The results that make the great dancers so much admired by those who are at any pains to study their work, are quite within the reach of English girls; but it is an unfortunate fact, for which every great ballet-mistress will vouch, that English girls as a class do not take the trouble to work hard enough to acquire the perfect control over limbs and movement that is the reward of their Continental sisters. It is on this account that what is sometimes called English dancing cannot be taken seriously. Of course one cannot blame the English dancers altogether: it is of very little use to prepare a delicate dish for the delectation of the sturdy animal whose favourite food is thistles; and
Danseuses en Scène
FROM A PAINTING BY DÉGAS