IT is always interesting to observe the interaction of life and art. All art is of its time, the greatest as well as the least. It may be supposed that the dance has too slight a content to express to be under the obligation of borrowing anything from the ideas of the age. But it has always responded not only to the rhythm of personal emotional life, but also to the larger social rhythm of the time. We have hinted at a relation between the conventional ballets of the forties, with their tranquil emotions, and the placid, domestic temper of the early Victorian era, between the passionate style of Elssler and the spirit of the Romantics. As the century waned, the older formal and unhasting rhythms tended to break up; the pace quickened; the tranquillity which the nineteenth century had carried over from the eighteenth disappeared in the excitement of the fin-de-siècle spirit. The temperature of the blood was rising towards the fever-point of the “naughty nineties.” They were probably much less naughty than they supposed themselves to be, and they had an unfortunate tendency to mistake vulgarity for vice. Something of the change of the social spirit was reflected in the dance.
Paris began to force the pace in the latter days of the Second Empire. It was a somewhat feverish era, electric with the sense of political change and hazardous speculation, echoing with coups d’état and coups de bourse. Something of the general unrest penetrated the spirit of the dance. It took on a more exciting allure, became more disordered and furious. The quadrille in particular was completely metamorphosed; its elegance was exchanged for violent movements, resembling the oscillations of a drunkard. In the form of the Cancan and the Chahut it was the delight of the bals publics of the French capital. Céleste Mogador, Rose Ponpon, Clara Pomaré, with their beauté de diable, gave a vogue to the new and more abandoned style of dancing. These stars disappeared after a brief and noisy career, but the dance survived in undiminished vigour. Its two principal strongholds were the Bal Bullier on Mont St Geneviève and the Moulin de la Galette on Montmartre. The transition from Empire to Republic did not have a sobering influence upon the dance, but rather the reverse. Its natural violence was stimulated by the revolutionary excitement. The fury of the barricades animated its gestures. Students and grisettes, inveterate révolutionaires, revelled in it as a kind of vague protest against authority, the bourgeoisie, the spirit of order and propriety. Like the impressionism of contemporary painting, it was championed by those who were rather uncertain as to the articles of their artistic faith but had a very strong sense of being “agin the goverment,” civil or spiritual. It was an affirmation of revolution.
To the average home-staying Briton of the period, Paris meant Montmartre, and Montmartre meant the Cancan. Even to-day the word conjures up a vision of the old Moulin Rouge, with its sinister, winking lights, its crude sensationalism, its wild fandango of forced hilarity. In this hot-house atmosphere of feverish yet mirthless gaiety, the dance forgot its ancient origin in hushed forest glades and laughing vineyards, forgot its long sojourn in dignified courts, forgot its strict discipline in the academies; it became little more than an appetiser to the feast of debauch. But among the mob of flamboyant bacchanales for whom the dance was merely a means by which they could display their wares to the market, there were one or two dancers with a distinct personality, who gave the école montmartroise the vitality, if not the dignity, of a kind of art. The chief of these were La Goulue, Grille d’Égout and Nini Patte-en-l’air.
In her private dossier La Goulue was known to the State as Louise Weber. She is said to have earned her soubriquet by her gluttony as a child. Doubtless she had the excuse of the stimulus of hunger, for she was the daughter of poor working-class people.
CONNIE GILCHRIST
(THE GOLD GIRL)
From a painting by Whistler