human limitations of heart and muscle. The ballet dancer is entitled to a rest after a solo of four minutes; to the ballet, therefore, it would be well to return, for the certainty that the discussion is safe again on the solid ground of reality.
CHAPTER X
THE BALLET IN ITS DARK AGE
WHEN a plant has passed a climax of luxuriant blossoming, a heedless owner is likely to leave it to the mercies of weather and worms, while he turns his interest to other plants whose season of bloom is just beginning.
Taglioni and Ellsler faded about the middle of the nineteenth century. Cerito, Grahn and Grisi were, at best, unable to surpass them. Jenny Lind set people talking about singers, and spending their time listening to songs. Dancers, desperately straining to recatch the lost interest, multiplied entrechats and pirouettes, jumped higher and more bravely than ever. Straining for technical feats, they forgot motive; the public called the ballet meaningless, its work a stupid form of acrobatics, its smile a grimace. A genius could have made such words seem the words of fools; in the default of a genius, the words were accepted as of more or less true judgment.
The years that followed produced a certain amount of dancing that was good, notably some of the operatic ballets of Europe, and a few ballet spectacles of the seventies and eighties; more that could not exactly be called bad; and, lastly and principally, a series of monstrosities that were nearly infinite in both number and ugliness.
In trying to find something that would suit the new and unsettled state of the public taste, managers apparently tried any concoction that could be devised by stage, paint-bridge, property room or box-office. Montmartre dance-halls evolved the Can-can; half of Paris caught its fever; England, and thence America, were engulfed in the lingerie of high kickers. Not dancers, just high kickers.