It was this dance which inspired Mr Holbrook Jackson’s spirited eulogy. “She does not make you think of herself,” he writes in his “Romance and Reality”; “she sets you dreaming of all the dancing that has ever been, of all the dancing that is. Whilst watching her I could not help thinking she was not merely following the rules of an art, but that she was following the rules of life. The leaves
PAVLOVA AND MORDKIN
IN RUSSIAN COSTUME
Photograph: Foulsham & Banfield, Ltd.
dance in the breeze, the flowers dance in the sun, the worlds dance in space, and Pavlova dancing is a part of this cosmic measure.
“Everybody in the theatre must have felt something similar—especially when she and Michael Mordkin, her superb consort in the art, danced together the Bacchanale of Glazounov. I imagine also those dim segments of faces in the darkened auditorium, many of them reflecting the frigid morality of English respectability, would be touched to strange emotions. Their staid owners would feel a new wakefulness, recalling as in a dream all that had ever happened to them of passion or beauty, all that might have happened to them had they followed their real desires, their sacred whims.... The swaying form of Pavlova rhymed and romped with life and joy, with love and beauty. O the wild flight across the stage, the hot pursuit, the sweet dalliance, and then the rich luxury of surrender! The very essence of life was there: life so full of joy that it overflowed with blissful abandonment until it sank from the only pardonable excess—excess of happiness.”
In this dance Pavlova has met the exponents of the modern “barefoot” school on their own ground, and,—shall we say? vanquished them. Her training in the strict traditional method has taught her that lesson, invaluable in all the arts, the restraint of emotion. For even in the Bacchanale there is restraint, the art that conceals art, else she could not have attained that perfect unison of rhythm which gives to the dance the swinging quality of a wave.
Pavlova may be said to have introduced impressionism into the dance, and so to have brought it into line with the tendencies of modern art. Not impressionism as Zola understood it—“merely an excuse for not taking pains.” In this respect her faultless precision more resembles the fine work of a Dutch genre painting. But she is an impressionist in creating a sudden and brilliant effect without the appearance of laboured effort and without the addition of a superfluous touch, in presenting with an economy of swift gesture the firm outline of an incident, the essential summary of a scene, the breathing heart of an emotion. Although she flashes across the vision for no more than a few seconds, she nevertheless leaves in the mind the memory of a complete utterance, something perfectly finished, definite, precise, whole, like a clear-sounding lyric, or a finely-cut sculpture. For in her work, as in all true impressionism, there is nothing blurred; it is rapid, but it is just and sure; it goes to the roots; it ignores what is irrelevant and seizes on the essential. Actual mimicry has no place in her dance; she is not a copyist of nature; she embodies the salient moments, the vital energies, of beauty and passion.