CHAPTER XXX
THE DECLINE AND REVIVAL
Following what may be called “the Taglioni era” came a period of comparative dullness. There were successors who charmed their audiences in London, in Paris, in Rome, Vienna and America. There was the brilliant Caroline Rosati; the stately Amalia Ferraris; dashing Rita Sangalli—who married a Baron; dainty Rosita Mauri; Petipa, Fabbri, and others whose name and fame were brilliant but transient. But these, you will say, were all foreigners. Had we no English ballet dancers? Well, it may safely be said that Ballet in England was never more thoroughly English, or more thoroughly banal, than for some twenty years before and after the Taglioni period.
From 1850 onwards it was the period of the Great Utilities, of which Ballet was not one! Save for a few good examples later at the old Canterbury Music Hall, with Miss Phyllis Broughton as première danseuse, at Weston’s Music Hall, Holborn, and at the Alhambra under Strange’s management, and some good productions at the Crystal Palace arranged by M. Leon Espinosa, it was practically a close time for artistic dance and ballet for something like a quarter of a century.
The state of public disfavour into which the art had fallen is well seen from the interesting extract from the Era Almanack of 1872, in which one reads: “Judging from Mr. Mapleson’s extensive productions the ballet was another sheet anchor on which he relied. Madame Katti Lanner, a Viennese danseuse of great repute, was, with other foreign artists, engaged for the express purpose of reviving an interest in the old-fashioned, elaborate ballet of action. The experiment was boldly made, but failed; and it is clear that all modern audiences care for is an incidental divertissement which may mean something or nothing. As for a story worked out by clever pantomime, people refuse to stay and see it, and the deserted appearance of the theatre while ‘Giselle’ and other ballets were in progress was a significant hint that incidental dances only are appreciated by opera-goers of the present day. The ballets invented by Madame Katti Lanner were ‘La Rose de Séville,’ ‘Hvika’ and one or two nameless divertissements. She danced in them all, and in the first act of ‘Giselle.’”
Thus, London audiences from, roughly, 1850 to 1870, had not that burning interest in the art of ballet which they had displayed for the twenty years or so preceding 1850; indeed, they had little or no interest in it. In Paris conditions were much the same. There were dancers of some ability and transient popularity, as we have noted, but no ballet and no dancer appeared of outstanding merit such as those of the great periods of the eighteenth century, the mid-nineteenth, or such as we have seen to-day. Even dancing, apart from ballet, was of comparatively little interest.
In London, with the ’eighties came the dear old Gaiety and another pas de quatre, that in “Faust Up-to-Date,” a very different one from that of the ’forties, not the toe-dancing of classic ballet, but step-dancing of the characteristic and admirable English school; and it was a very bright and inspiring dance done with tremendous verve by the Misses Florence Levey, Lillian Price, Maud Wilmot, and Eva Greville.
Supreme, however, as an exponent of the English school of dancing was, unquestionably, Kate Vaughan, who, with Sylvia Grey, Alice Lethbridge, Letty Lind, and others of that period, and for well into the ’nineties, were the delight of London.
Kate Vaughan herself was one of the most distinguished dancers England has ever had—distinguished for incomparable grace, finish, and characteristically English refinement of manner. There were no ragged edges to her work. Her art was—as all good art must be—deliberate; her every pose and movement beautiful, and always instinct with the quintessence of a special and personal charm that never failed her to the end. I saw her dance, shortly before her death, at a concert given on behalf of one of the various charities which arose out of the Boer War; and all the art and all the charm which had made Kate Vaughan a stage influence in her time were as amply evident as when she had first delighted us some twenty years before.
With the ’eighties came the rise of the Ballet as a regular London institution, on the founding of those two veteran Vaudeville houses, the Empire and the Alhambra, where for about a quarter of a century, practically without interruption, Ballet was the chief item on their always varied and attractive programmes. Of course, there was in 1884 the famous production of Manzotti’s great ballet “Excelsior” at Her Majesty’s Theatre; but it was not really until the opening of the two aforenamed houses that we had a real revival of Ballet in London apart from the Opera, and without that State-aid which the art receives on the Continent.