But when all is said, nothing is said. She refuses to yield herself to analysis. Too swift for the eye, she altogether outpaces the pen. One can only repeat the words of that baffled interviewer who wisely wrote: “Pavlova can only be adequately understood by the person to whom she is an everlasting mystery—by the mind that cannot understand her. The man who feels he can, or thinks he can, or knows he can, sum her up in so many words; who fancies he has done his duty to her and to reason when he has declared that she is the finest dancer that he has ever seen in all his life; who says ‘I have seen Pavlova’ as a man would say ‘I have seen the boat-race’—as if the whole thing were over and done with, and that nothing more was to be learned, or not learned, by another and another visit: such a man speaks without having felt.... She is uninterviewable—unphotographable—undrawable. But she is not uncaricaturable; for are not all the phrases of the pen and strokes of the pencil but caricatures that attempt to describe and picture perfection? And what is perfection but Pavlova?”
In the troupe which accompanied Madame Pavlova at the Palace Theatre in London there were several artistic performers, but one calls for special notice—Mademoiselle Schmolz. Her dancing in Glinka’s “Mazurka” and Brahms’ “Rhapsodie Hongroise” had all that lilt and swing and hint of devilry which, by every rule of the theatre at any rate, the dancing of half-barbaric peasants ought to have. A dance which she and Mademoiselle Plaskaweska danced to the most mischievously ironical of Chopin’s waltzes was, I have no hesitation in saying, one of the most completely satisfying things
MADEMOISELLE SCHMOLZ
Photograph: Dover Street Studios, Ltd.
ever seen upon the stage. The credit belongs in part to Mikail Mordkin, who was the composer, but it is scarcely possible to conceive a more spirited interpretation than that given by the two executants. The theme was simply a petty squabble about a rose. One of the maidens covets the love-token which the other flaunts so provokingly; there follows a pretty wrangle on tiptoe, lively grimaces, and the trophy is wrested from its rightful owner. The latter now becomes the aggressor, displays a delightful petulance, and, between smiles and tears, pursues the laughing thief. The nosegay is won back, and then, just as your sympathy is becoming earnestly engaged in the alternations of triumph and despair, the rose is tossed upon the ground, and both minxes run away with mocking laughter, leaving you half aggrieved at having been fooled into a serious concern in their empty mischief. It is simple, trivial, silly if you like, and it is all over in half-a-minute—yet it prints on the mind a picture like one of those rare glimpses of incidents sometimes seen in real life, the memory of which goes with a man for half a lifetime.
Mikail Mordkin received his training in the same school as Anna Pavlova, that attached to the Marianski Theatre in St Petersburg. The two have been associated in a somewhat uneasy partnership at the Palace Theatre in London, and in the United States. Mordkin has achieved the distinction of being the only danseur who has ever found favour in America. There, as in England, before the coming of the Russians, the chief function of the man dancer was to rush out at the psychological moment and rescue the ballerina as she fell into his arms, with her eyes staring into the drops and one toe pointing upwards towards the limelight man. Apart from performing this useful service, on account of which he was tolerated as a kind of necessary nuisance, his part was almost a sinecure.
The performances of Mordkin, together with those of Nijinsky, have brought about a reversal of the somewhat contemptuous popular judgment upon male dancing, for undoubtedly the Anglo-Saxon public shared to some extent the prejudice of Southey, who said that every male dancer ought to be hamstrung. There is nothing of the twittering effeminacies of the proverbial “French dancing-master” in Mordkin’s dancing; its main characteristic is manliness. His build is robust, massive, noble. His physical qualities undoubtedly leave some of his less critical admirers blind to the deficiencies of his art. His splendid physique is fortified by a course of rigorous and continual training. In addition to his daily exercise, it is not unusual for him to go to the theatre three hours before the performance begins and, without the accompaniment of music, to go through all the preliminary postures of the dance. Instead of becoming exhausted by this exercise, he is fit and eager for the ballet to begin.
Mordkin has shown that grace is not only consistent with true virility in dancing, but is indispensable to it. In their folk-dances the top-booted Russian dancers give a fine display of masculine vigour, but it is always upon the edge of the grotesque. The beauty of a man’s strength is hidden rather than revealed by these spasms of violence; it is best seen in those lines, suggestive of sleeping force, which give to Mordkin’s poses the heroic quality of Greek sculpture. His dancing is distinguished by its reserve. It always leaves something to the imagination. His gestures in the “Arrow Dance” derive no little of their effectiveness from what they suggest, but leave unsaid. It is the warrior not at war but at play, and like the gambolling of young tigers affects us by the passion that it only hints at. His dancing has a constant tendency to forsake motion for repose. In his entrechats and pirouettes I seemed to note a certain reluctance, as though they were a concession demanded by popular taste, or a lingering tradition of the ballet technique. Yet when motion is required, Mordkin can give it, and of the freest, most buoyant, most swinging quality. The reckless swing of the galloping entry in the Automne Bacchanale was magnificent. That was a dance of dances! The riot of wine, the sap of youth, the tumult of love, the sudden liberation of vigorous limbs, were all expressed in a rush of movement that was somehow curiously restrained, as the foaming progress of a wave is restrained, never tempted by excess of ecstasy into breaking the steady sweep of its own rhythm.