CHAPTER XVII
A FRENCH DANCER IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON
We have seen that the state of dancing in England was nothing to boast of in the early eighteenth century. We have seen that London had not yet what Paris had had some fifty years—State-aided Opera and Ballet.
But the public appreciation of art was there all the same, and an astute manager of that day was as capable of realising, quite as well as any modern, that where there was no home supply it might be profitable to import foreign talent.
Strange, is it not, that there was not then, any more than to-day, anyone clever enough, apparently, to realise that since foreign talent would prove attractive to a dance and spectacle-loving public (had not the English proved their innate love of spectacle in Elizabethan times?) it might be less expensive and still more profitable, to encourage native talent. Still that is our way. We let the foreign artist discover England, and then discover the foreign artist. We never seem to discover ourselves. We shirk the horrible revelation that the English really are an artistic, an art-loving nation. But whatsoever the foreigner may have or have had against us, he can never accuse us of lack of enthusiasm, of indifference to his efforts to please.
In the early eighteenth century—French actors, dancers, and acrobats; in the later eighteenth and mid-nineteenth—Italian opera singers and ballet; in the later nineteenth—light French Opera (at the Criterion, Gaiety and Opera Comique); and in the twentieth—Russian Opera and Ballet; these London has had, and more, and always greeted with generous praise and enthusiastic approval. Whatsoever may be said of the English as a nation of “shopkeepers” slow to adopt new ideas, there is nothing small or hesitating about their adoption and praise of foreign art and artists; and so it was that the delectable French dancer Mlle. Marie Sallé, one of the two chief pupils of the famous Prévôt, found a warm welcome when she visited London in the reign of George I.
Mlle. Sallé, born in 1707, was the daughter of one minor theatrical manager, niece of another, and made her first appearance at the age of eleven in an opera-comique by Le Sage—author of the lively “Gil Blas”—entitled “La Princesse de Carisme,” at the St. Laurent Fair, in Paris, in 1718. She spent the next few years in touring, or, when not on tour, in playing at the Fair theatres in Paris. It is just possible that Watteau may have seen her as a young girl at the Fair theatres before he died in 1721. That, however, though pleasant to contemplate as a possibility, is less our concern than the circumstances of her début, and her subsequent appearance in London.
“La Princesse de Carisme,” a romantic-satirical, three-act musical comedy, dealt with the love-affairs and adventures of a Persian Prince and his boon companion and “confident”—Arlequin. There was some charming music in it, and so great was its success at the theatre of the St. Laurent Fair that it was put on at the Opera in Paris by Royal command.
By the year 1718, it will be remembered, old Christopher Rich had died, leaving his theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London to his son John Rich, who made himself famous and increased his wealth by producing the first pantomimes ever seen in the great metropolis, which were mounted on the stage with all the attractions of gorgeous scenery and dresses, grand “mechanical effects,” appropriate music, and striking ballets; the various acts of the spectacle being interspersed with a comic or serio-comic element, supplied by the eternal love-affairs of Arlequin and Columbine.
