Between these two extremes is an intermediate public that is the more or less innocent cause of endless confusion, and whose good nature is an obstacle to the betterment of standards. In the theatre, even when the chaff outweighs the wheat, it applauds everything. The next day Mr. and Mrs. Intermediate Public advise their friends that the production is stupid. Decreasing attendance may warn the manager that something is lacking: but what? As a criticism, absence is not very illuminating. Acts are changed, cablegrams written and lines rewritten, this man discharged, a woman rushed over from Paris. And when all is said and done, the performance perhaps continues to emphasise features that were the cause of bad impressions. For this confusion, the audiences are at least equally to blame with the manager. They owe it to themselves as well as to others to express themselves frankly.
Exactly what grade of dancing this intermediate public really wants is an unsettled question—and one of paramount importance, since it involves a good part of the potential support of good things. Managers infer, each according to his own disposition; and there is rarely material for the formation of inferences in any way exact. For one reason or another, no undertaking serves the purpose of exact experiment; experience does not lead to any unavoidable conclusion. A few wholly good ballet productions have been given in the Untied States during the past few years; they have not been tremendously successful, up to the present, from the point of view of profits. The optimist, however, counts even small profits a success, in the circumstances. Here is an art that employs a language practically unknown to this country; yet it has not failed to impress. But the men who risked the money take another view of it. They consider that they have had a narrow escape from disaster, that the profits are not commensurate with the risks, and that they are well out of a bad affair. Augustin Daly, at the time of his death, was engaged in a course of instructing the public in the appreciation of pantomime, expecting to lose money on it for two or three consecutive years. But the present moment reveals no Augustin Daly among the potential managers of dancing in America. Few are willing to plant seed for a harvest long deferred. And in justice be it added that the equipment and maintenance of Pygmalion and Galatea or L’Enfant Prodigue, the vehicles of Mr. Daly’s missionary efforts in the interests of pantomime, would be a small fraction of the expenses attaching to a first-class production of any of the great mimetic ballets.
The situation is, in all essentials, the same as that through which operatic and orchestral music passed a few years ago. Music lovers put their favoured art on a substantial basis by means of endowments. Any other course in relation to the ballet results in a matter of probabilities and possibilities, but not of certainties. The present interest in dancing, left to itself, may lead to great things. Or it may lead to nothing at all. The renaissance of interest that followed the Kiralfy successes in the sixties and seventies was killed by counterfeits. The same hostile possibilities exist at present.
The above-indicated dependence of the dance on its ability to show immediate profits is only the first of its handicaps. That difficulty would not be light, even though every manager viewed conditions clearly and fairly, as some of them do. Unfortunately, however, there is in the profession a class that has succeeded because of, or in spite of, a belief that good taste does not exist in America. To prove this, they shape every occurrence into an argument. In gathering “names” for the interest of their advertising, they engage a certain number of capable artists. If the productions employing these artists succeed, the cynical manager will construe such success as proof of American worship of reputation, and its power to blind him to a mess of accompanying mediocrity. If, on the contrary, failure attend the enterprise, it proves American inability to appreciate good work. For the success of a really good work of art, these pessimists will find any explanation except that of good work duly appreciated. Skilful publicity, novelty, a public affectation of good taste, the employment of Oriental motifs, any theory, so long as it acknowledges no taste superior to their own. These are the people who, if Madame Pavlowa’s present tour, for instance, makes a striking financial success, will inundate the country with pseudo-Russian ballets, perverting everything, unable to see the need of beauty and artistry, bringing all dancing into disrepute.
Let it be clearly understood: these people by no means represent the manager’s profession. But they are to an extent in control of the situation, and the person who wants to see dancing is more or less dependent on them as the source of supply. In the absence of any endowed institution, no ballet can be seen except under commercial management—and, as noted, commercial management that cannot or will not knowingly invest in an enterprise that is going to require time to be understood.
The manager desirous of staging a work of genuine choreographic quality finds himself confronted by a discouraging scarcity of even semicompetent material for his ballet—that is, here in America. To bring a corps de ballet from Europe, with guarantees covering a minimum number of weeks of work, transportation both ways, and other proper and just requirements, is commercially dangerous. No reasonable blame can be attached to the usual course of engaging such girls as are easily available, fitting steps to their limitations, insisting on the girls and evading the dance, and making much of draperies and coloured lights.
As a direct result of the scarcity of capable ballet people, dance-lovers not infrequently lose the services of a rare artist. No one artist can give a satisfying two-hour public performance of dancing. Saying nothing of variety as a desideratum in a programme, the question of physical endurance enters. To rest the première between her flights, a corps de ballet is indispensable. Without the latter, the former is to be compared to a commander without an army. But the particular case illustrates, where general statement only explains.
On the face of things, Miss Lydia Lopoukowa’s determination to take up residence in the United States would seem to mean that American dance-lovers might count on her art as a definite acquisition. After her season with Mordkin, the young woman accepted a position as première of a ballet, as good as can be made from native material. A divertissement is composed that pleases public and management, and all concerned except the première herself. She finds her work circumscribed by the necessity of keeping down to a pitch beyond which the support cannot rise. That the public is pleased is not sufficient; with unrestricted self-expression, and freedom of flight, she could bring that public to a point of enthusiasm. Her art is belittled, and she finds herself in a false position. As soon as contracts permit, she withdraws her energies from the effort to accomplish good in that direction. So, for the lack of a competent ballet, the dance-loving portion of the population is robbed. As to Miss Lopoukowa, she has a taste for and demonstrated ability in the drama. Dancing will give her extraordinary distinction in plays that admit its union with the dramatic action. But under better conditions, her dancing need not have been subordinated to another art.
At this point a question might justly be raised as to whether the interests of the ballet are not being adequately cared for by some of the great opera companies. To such possible question the only answer is negative. Nor are the companies chargeable with any neglect or shortcoming in not giving their ballet departments the relative importance of ballet in European opera organisations. The task of popularising great music alone has been somewhat more than a labour of Hercules. Opera as music now has a supporting patronage; to change the ballet’s relative importance would be disturbing, in all probability. Moreover, the Metropolitan (if not the others) has done all that is humanly possible under present conditions, with the principal result of demonstrating that those conditions are to be met by a ballet institution, and nothing less.
At the time of the Metropolitan’s organisation, it will be remembered, the world’s interest in ballet dancing was at a lower pitch than it ever had been since the dissolution of the Roman Empire; that is, about the middle of the Victorian period. Had the undertaking been no more than that of producing opera in a land already friendly to it, it would have been no more than natural if the Metropolitan directors had accepted the ballet’s status as they found it in England. Their task being, however, the production of opera in a country almost hostile to it, a failure to simplify the problem in every possible way would have been bad generalship.