A consequence of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, which does not usually figure in the pages of the historian, was that the supply of Parisian danseuses for the English stage was cut off for a generation or more. Even for some years after the peace, the French were inclined to keep their best performers for themselves and sent over to England only their discarded favourites. The golden period of the ballet in England began in the twenties of the nineteenth century and lasted until the fifties. In 1821 a determined effort was made to secure some of the most dazzling stars of the Parisian ballet. The difficulties to be overcome were not light, for, as the Parisian dancers were trained in an academy maintained by the state, none could leave the country without the permission of the Government. The British ambassador was himself charged with the negotiations. After many pourparlers, a treaty was drawn up, signed and sealed, by which one of the two high-contracting parties agreed to loan to the other two first and two second dancers from the Academy, while the other in return was to pledge itself not to attempt to import any other dancer without the Academy’s consent.
The first two to arrive were the danseur Albert and the première danseuse Noblet, who were engaged at a salary of £1700 and £1500 respectively. They took London by storm. They were the idols of society; the fashionable world could think and talk of nothing but their dancing. The reign of the ballet had begun. Already in the first season the cost of the ballet exceeded that of the opera by some £2000. No other form of theatrical art approached the ballet in popularity. The King’s Theatre, afterwards transformed and renamed Her Majesty’s, kept a permanent corps de ballet. The Haymarket, Her Majesty’s, and Covent Garden nightly drew crowded houses to witness displays of the most accomplished dancing that had ever been seen on the English stage. With the advent of Taglioni enthusiasm reached its utmost limits.
For about a quarter of a century England was enraptured with the ballet. It is impossible for us to attempt to envisage the early Victorian era without the ballet entering prominently into the picture. It appears to present the just embodiment of the formal but naïve gaiety, the untroubled imagination, the somewhat vulgarian æstheticism of the age. The ballerina, with her straightly parted hair, her rose wreath, her innocent affectations, is the complement to the whiskered dandy of the D’Orsay period. The ballet seems to be as closely attached to early Victorianism as are Louis Quinze furniture or Chelsea porcelain shepherdesses to their respective periods. It is not altogether easy for us to regard it otherwise than as a revival. Even now the ballet, in its costumes, its music, its décor, is not free from a tendency to hark back to the thirties and forties of the last century.
CHAPTER III
THE HEYDAY OF THE BALLET
“WILL the young folks ever see anything so charming, anything so classic, anything like Taglioni?” The question occurs in “Pendennis,” and how shall we answer it?
The dance is the most fugitive of the arts. Time makes but slow headway in obliterating a picture or a statue, and a verse is too elusive for his grasp; but the dancer’s art dies with her, or rather the dancer herself outlives it. Painting may preserve some phantom of her grace, but the soul of the grace is in the motion which it cannot represent. The dancer lives only in hearsay, in the memory of spectators, and when the last eye-witness is gone she is no more than a name to posterity. Taglioni’s is perhaps the greatest name in the annals of dancing, but a comparison of her art with that of her successors of the present day is well-nigh impossible. We can only judge of her genius by the echoes of the applause which have not even yet quite died away.