"Convention" has a great weight in such matters. But it seems to be undeniable that the conventional ballet-skirt conceals the beautiful movement of the leg on the hip joint, a disadvantage from which the male dancer does not suffer. Skirts are, in fact, out of place in really fine dancing. Flowing light drapery, or better still the Circassian jacket and full gauzy trousers fastened at the ankles, are the only possible dress for a really great danseuse.
The dramatic ballet or ballet d'action lasted until the end of the fifties in London, and then ceased almost suddenly to occupy the leading position which it once held at the Opera House. In London, as in Paris and Vienna, it was transformed into a mere spectacular display of costume and meaningless rhythmic drill. The dramatic ballet ceased to exist. The great tradition of fine stage-dancing and ballet-drama was, however, preserved in Russia. It is not easy to explain, but the fact is that two peoples so far apart as the Russians and the Spaniards are more devoted to dancing than any other European nationalities. Successive Tsars have spent large sums in maintaining colleges in St. Petersburg and in Moscow, where boys and girls are lodged and carefully educated whilst they are trained from the age of ten years in the art of stage-dancing. The greatest musical composers have been encouraged to write "ballets," and the ablest designers and "producers" have been secured by large salaries. Something like £80,000 a year is spent by the Tsar on the maintenance and development of this beautiful art, which is dead elsewhere, but seems to fit the genius of the Russian people. A new respect for Russia, a profound admiration for the Russian artists, has been the result of the revelation of the Russian ballet by the recent visits of its members to this country.
During the last thirty years of its period of nurture and development in Russia the ballet has developed in two directions. Neither of these are popular and successful in Russia, where the old traditional and established ballet of the early nineteenth century—what may be called "academic" dancing—is alone in demand. What we call "the Russian ballet" is dramatic in nature, and includes such wonderful combinations of music, scenery, costume, and perfect artistic expression by dancing and gesture as we have seen in Scheherazade, Cleopatra, Prince Igorre, Tamar, and Petrouschka. It promises in its latest development to supplant the musical drama known as "opera," in which the human voice is used. But the most striking development is that in which dancing appears as the exponent of lyrical poetry. It is to the teaching of Isadora Duncan that the Russian dancers admit their indebtedness for this new departure. When undertaken by untrained dancers and amateurs (even by the innovator herself) the attempt to interpret lyrical subjects showed some ingenuity in conception, but failed to command general appreciation, as the efforts of a painter or an actor, who has not acquired command of the material of his art, also fail. But when Anna Pavlova brought her lifelong training as a dancer and her poetic imagination to the interpretation of masterpieces of music inspired by such subjects as "Night," "The Dying Rose," "The Wounded Swan," and the moonlight mystery of "Les Sylphides," a new and most poignant form of emotional expression became apparent. A single figure moving over the stage with expressive steps and gestures of the arms, with lips and eyes guided and controlled by consummate art, blended itself with and interpreted to the spectator the poetic thought of a great musical composer and a great writer. This new development of the dancer's art may remain with us. But it requires the presence of one who combines the rare gifts possessed by Madame Pavlova—perfect technique and poetic sympathy.
Many people derive a definite part of the pleasure given to them by an orchestral concert from the contemplation of the movements of the instrumentalists and the directive interpreting gestures of a great "conductor." Others would prefer the orchestra and its leader to be unseen; they find special delight in hearing great music surge and float from no visible source through the dimly-lit aisles of a vast cathedral. They do not desire their eyes to be called in aid of music unless the appeal to vision is complete and worthy of the theme. It is, I think, undeniable that Dr. Richter and my friend Sir Henry Wood, whose expressive backs and persuasive hands are so dear to concert audiences, are a kind of dwindled ballet dancers, connected by the drum-major of the military band and the dancing "choragus" with the primeval phase of the arts when music and dancing were inseparable.
CHAPTER XX
COURTSHIP
IT is always amusing to find the lower animals behaving in various circumstances of life very much as we do ourselves. There is a tendency to look upon such conduct on the animals' part as a more or less clever mimicry of humanity—a sort of burlesque of our own behaviour. Really, however, it has a far greater interest; it is a revelation to us of the nature and origin in our animal ancestry of various deeply-rooted "behaviours" which are common to us and animals. The wooing of a maid by a man and the various strange antics and poses to which love-sick men and women are addicted, are represented by similar behaviour among animals, and that, too, not only among higher animals allied to man, but even among minute and obscure insects and molluscs. In fact, the elementary principle of "courtship" or "wooing," namely, the pursuit of the female by the male, is observed among the lowest unicellular organisms—the Protozoa and the Protophyta—and it holds among plants as well as among animals, for it is the pollen—the male fertilizing material—which travels, carried by wind or by the nectar-bribed "parcels-delivery company" of bees, to the ovules of a distant flower, and not the ovules (the female products) which desert their homes in quest of pollen.
The "reproduction," or producing of new individuals, of many animals and plants can be, and is, effected by the detachment of large pieces of a parent organism. Thus plants split into two or more pieces, each of which carries on life as a new individual. Many worms and polyps multiply by breaking into two or more pieces, and very often the broken-off pieces which thus become new individuals and carry on the race are extremely small, even microscopic in size. The spores of ferns and the minute separable buds of many plants and animals are of this nature. They grow into new individuals without any fusion with fertilizing particles from another individual. Yet there seems to be even in the very simplest living things a need to be met, an advantage to be gained, in the fusion of the substance of two distinct parents in order to carry on the race with the best chance of success. We find that those organisms which can multiply by buds and fission yet also multiply regularly by ovules fertilized by sperms. We see this process in its simplest condition in microscopic plants and animals which are so minute that they consist of only a single "cell"—a single nucleated particle of protoplasm. Such unicellular organisms have definite shape, even limb-like locomotor organs, shells, contractile heart-like cavities within the protoplasm, even mouths, digestive tract, and a vent. They produce new individuals by merely dividing into two equal halves or by more rapidly dividing into several individuals each like the parent, only smaller. But from time to time, at recurring periods or seasons, two of these unicellular individuals (of course, two of the same kind or species) come into contact with one another, not by mere chance, but attracted and impelled (probably by chemical guiding or alluring substances of the nature of perfumes) towards one another, and then fuse into one. Two (or sometimes several) individuals thus melt together and become one individual—a process the exact reverse of the division of one into two. This is known to microscopists as "conjugation." The new individual resulting from conjugation after a time divides, and the individuals thus produced, each consisting of a mixture of the fused and thoroughly mixed substance of the two conjugated individuals, feed and grow and divide in their turn, and so on for several generations, until again the epidemic of conjugation sets in, and the scattered offspring of many distinct pairs of the previous conjugation-season in their turn conjugate.