Photograph: Ellis & Walery
CHAPTER XII
THE ENGLISH BALLET
IN a retrospect of the performances of the Russians in London this year, a correspondent of The Times summed up the effect of their achievement upon the state of mind of the spectator of the English ballet in these words: “This summer of 1911 has brought more than an æsthetic revolution with it: in bringing the Russian ballet to Covent Garden it has brought a positively new art, it has extended the realm of beauty for us, discovered a new continent, revealed new faculties and means of salvation in ourselves. Alas! many pleasant illusions have been shattered thereby, many idols have tumbled from their pedestals; we have grown up terribly fast and lost the power of enjoying things that pleased our callow fancies a year or two ago. Who can go back now with the old zest to the robust vivacity of X or the amateurish minauderies of Y? Who will put up any longer with the battered themes, the insipid music, the ingenious setting, and the clumsy grouping to which we were accustomed once? They will still have their public, those things; they will serve for entertainment, for stuffing to that pillow on which the backbone of the British nation leans till bedtime; but they will no longer do for the ‘seven hundred honest folk’ who seek at that hour for the means to ‘make their souls.’”
Although I cannot claim to be one of the honest folk who go to the Empire at that hour “to make their souls,” it was nevertheless somewhat dismayedly that, with the rhythm of the Russians still marching through the brain, I once again witnessed a ballet fairly representative of the modern English type. We were no longer in the atmosphere of art, but in the atmosphere of commerce. The peculiarity of the atmosphere of commerce is that it leaves nothing to the imagination, and therefore it leaves the imagination cold. “The art of the pen,” said Meredith in the person of one of the characters of his novels, “is to rouse the inward vision, instead of labouring with a drop-scene brush, as if it were to the eye.” The English ballet is not content with the primitive simplicity of a drop-scene brush; it labours with a host of mechanical devices—with extravagant properties, with photographic scenery, with the stratagems of electricians, with all the means that the stage manager can array to dissuade the inward vision from rousing itself. Its aim apparently is to create a diversion for the eye so that the imagination may slumber undisturbed. The stage as a rule is so crowded, that any suggestion of a governing design is lost in a general bewildering flicker of motion like that of the cinematograph. Frequently the corps de ballet have no room for any more elaborate step than an artless hop and a right-about turn, a kind of convalescent pirouette. Perhaps it is as well—safety may sometimes lie in numbers. “What has come to us,” asked Professor Selwyn Image a dozen years ago apropos of the Butterflies ballet, “that we are all gone crazy over crowds and jumble and properties and frippery?”
A strange circumstance is that the English ballet not infrequently has the air of being discontented with its enforced silence. At its best the ballet is not the translation of words into gesture: it is the translation, or rather the transposition of life into gesture. It is the presentment to eye and ear by means of rhythmic motion and pictorial design, of a certain feeling about life, of certain moods and visions which have never crystallised into words. “It begins and ends,” it has been well said, “before words have formed themselves, in a deeper consciousness than that of speech.” To think of ballet merely as dumb show is the same as to think of painting merely as illustration. It exists as the supplement rather than as the substitute of words. It does not merely tell a story; it tells it, or rather it should tell it, in a way in which words alone could not tell it. It tells it with a beauty which, we will not say is greater than, but is at any rate different from, the beauty of words. But the ballet of commerce, aiming at literalness rather than suggestion,
LYDIA KYASHT