Part 22 (1/2)

Potier, the famous comedian, was playing the leading part in a certain vaudeville, and was required, in the course of the performance, to sit at the table of a cheap cafe and consume a bottle of beer. The beer was brought him by a _figurant_, or mute performer, in the character of a waiter, charged with the simple duty of drawing the cork from the bottle and filling the gla.s.s of the customer. Potier was struck with the man's neat performance of his task, and especially with a curious comical gravity which distinguished his manner, and often bestowed upon the humble actor an encouraging smile or a nod of approval. The man at length urged a request that he might, as he poured out the beer, be permitted to say a few words. Potier sanctioned the gag. It moved the laughter of the audience. Potier gagged in reply: and there was more laughter. During later representations the waiter was allowed further speeches, relieved by the additional gag of Potier, until at the end of a week it was found that an entirely new scene had been added to the vaudeville, and eventually the conversation between Potier and the _garcon_--not a line of which had been invented or contemplated by the dramatist--became the chief attraction of the piece. It was the triumph of gag. The _figurant_, from this modest and accidental beginning of his career as an actor, speedily rose to be famous. He was afterwards known to the world as ARNAL, one of the most admirable of Parisian _farceurs_.

CHAPTER x.x.xII.

BALLETS AND BALLET-DANCERS.

Dr. Barten Holyday, in the notes to his translation of ”Juvenal,”

published at Oxford in 1673, describes the Roman plays as being followed by an exodium ”of the nature of a _jig_ after a play, the more cheerfully to dismiss the spectators”--the word ”jig” signifying in the doctor's time something almost of a _ballet divertiss.e.m.e.nt_, with an infusion of rhyming songs or speeches delivered by the clown of the theatre to the accompaniment of pipe and tabor. Jigs of this kind commonly terminated the performances upon the Elizabethan stage, which otherwise consisted of one dramatic piece only. Mr. Payne Collier holds that these supplemental exhibitions probably originated with, and certainly depended mainly upon, the actors who supported the characters of fools and clowns in the regular dramatic representations.

He points out that Tarleton, one of Queen Elizabeth's players, much famed for his comicality, obtained great success by his efforts in jigs, and that, upon the showing of the tract ent.i.tled Tarleton's ”News from Purgatory,” jigs usually lasted for an hour. The precise nature of these entertainments cannot now be ascertained; for although each jig had what may be called its _libretto_, which was duly printed and published when the popularity of the work so required, yet no specimen of any such performance is now extant. The Stationers' registers, however, contain entries in 1595 of two jigs described respectively as Phillips's ”Jig of the Slippers,” and Kempe's ”Jig of the Kitchen-stuff Woman.” Other jigs referred to by contemporary writers are ”The Jig of the s.h.i.+p” and ”The Jig of Garlick.” It may be a.s.sumed, therefore, that each jig possessed special characteristics in the nature of distinct plot and characters; but in what respects ”The Jig of the Kitchen-stuff Woman,” let us say, differed from ”The Jig of Garlick,” or what was the precise story either was supposed to narrate, we must now be content to leave to the conjecture of the curious.

Probably dancing, as a dramatic entertainment, first came upon our stage in the form of these jigs. Of course, as a means of recreation among all ranks of people, it had thriven since a very remote period.

Into the question of the state of dancing prior to the invention of any method of denoting by signs or characters the length or duration of sounds, we need scarcely enter. Doubtless music was felt and appreciated by a sort of instinct long before it was understood scientifically, or duly measured out and written down upon a recognised system. If dancing is to be viewed as dependent upon its correspondence with mensurable music, it must date simply from the invention of the Cantus Mensurabilis, attributed by some writers to Franco, the scholastic of Liege, who flourished in the eleventh century; and by others to Johannes de Muris, doctor of Sorbonne and a native of England, at the beginning of the fourteenth century.

There were dances of the court and dances of the people. The Morris dance, which seems to have been an invention of the Moors, had firmly established itself in England in the sixteenth century. The country dance was even of earlier date. The old Roundel or Roundelay has been described by ancient authorities as an air appropriate to dancing, and would indicate little more than a circular dance with the hands joined. Among the n.o.bler and statelier dances in vogue at the court of the Tudors, were the Pavan (from _pavo_, a peac.o.c.k), with the Galliard (a lighter measure, which was probably to the Pavan what in later years the Gavotte was to the Minuet), the Pa.s.samezzo, the Courant, and the Saraband. Sir John Elyot, who published in 1531 his book called ”The Governor,” wherein he avers that dancing by persons of both s.e.xes is a mystical representation of matrimony, mentions other dances, such as Bargenettes and Turgyons, concerning which no explanation can be offered, except perhaps that the former may be derived from Berger, and be something of a shepherd's dance. There was also an esteemed dance called the Braule, in which several persons joining hands danced together in a ring, which was no doubt identical with the Branle or Brantle mentioned by Mr. Pepys in his description of a grand ball at Whitehall: ”By-and-by comes the king and queen, the duke and d.u.c.h.ess, and all the great ones; and after seating themselves the king takes out the d.u.c.h.ess of York, and the Duke the d.u.c.h.ess of Buckingham; the Duke of Monmouth my Lady Castlemaine; and so other lords other ladies; and they danced the Brantle. After that the king led a lady a single Coranto; and then the rest of the lords, one after another, other ladies. Very n.o.ble it was and great pleasure to see. Then to country dances; the king leading the first, which he called for.... The manner was, when the king dances, all the ladies in the room, and the queen herself, stand up; and indeed he dances rarely and much better than the Duke of York.”

Dancing, however, had degenerated in King Charles's time. In his ”Table Talk,” Selden writes of the matter in very quaint terms: ”The court of England is much altered. At a solemn dancing, first you had the grave measures, then the Corantoes and the Galliards, and this kept with ceremony; and at length to Trenchmore and the cus.h.i.+on-dance; then all the company dances, lord and groom, lady and kitchen-maid, no distinction. So in our court in Queen Elizabeth's time gravity and state were kept up. In King James's time things were pretty well. But in King Charles's time there has been nothing but Trenchmore and the cus.h.i.+on-dance, _omnium gatherum_, tolly polly, hoite c.u.m toite.” The Trenchmore was a lively dance, mention of which may be found in ”The Pilgrim” and ”Island Princess” of Beaumont and Fletcher, and in ”The Rehearsal” of the Duke of Buckingham. The last editor of Selden, it may be noted, by altering the word to ”Frenchmore,” has considerably obscured the author's meaning.

In former times men of the gravest profession did not disdain to dance. Even the judges, in compliance with ancient custom, long continued to dance annually on Candlemas Day in the hall of Serjeants'

Inn, Chancery Lane. Lincoln's Inn, too, had its revels--four in each year--with a master duly elected of the society to direct the pastimes. Nor were these ”exercises of dancing,” as Dugdale calls them, merely tolerated; they were held to be ”very necessary, and much conducing to the making of gentlemen more fit for their books at other times.” Indeed, it appears that, by an order made in James I.'s time, the junior bar was severely dealt with for declining to dance: ”the under barristers were by decimation put out of commons for example's sake, because the whole bar offended by not dancing on Candlemas Day preceding, according to the ancient order of this society, when the judges were present; with this, that if the like fault were committed afterwards they should be fined or disbarred.”

Gradually jigs disappeared from the stage. Even in 1632, when s.h.i.+rley wrote his comedy of ”Changes, or Love in a Maze,” jigs had been discontinued at Salisbury Court Theatre, and probably at other private playhouses. s.h.i.+rley complains that, instead of a jig at the end, a dance in the middle of the piece was now required by the spectators.

Possibly that dance of all the _dramatis personae_ with which so many of the old comedies conclude is due to the earlier fas.h.i.+on of terminating theatrical performances by a jig.

With Sir William Davenant as patentee and manager of the Duke's Theatre, stage dancing and singing acquired a more distinguished position among theatrical entertainments. It was Davenant's object, by submitting attractions of this nature to the public, to check the superiority enjoyed by Killigrew, the patentee of the Theatre Royal, and the comedians privileged to call themselves ”His Majesty's Servants.” Davenant, indeed, first brought upon the English stage what were then called ”dramatic operas,” but what we should now rather designate ”spectacles,” including Dryden's version of ”The Tempest,”

the ”Psyche” of Shadwell, and the ”Circe” of Charles Davenant, ”all set off,” as Cibber writes of them, ”with the most expensive decorations of scenes and habits, with the best voices and dancers.”

Sir John Hawkins describes these productions as ”musical dramas,” or ”tragedies with interludes set to music.”

But as yet the ballet, or rather the ballet of action--which may be defined to be a ballet with a plot or story of some kind told by means of dancing dumb motions, and musical accompaniments--was not known upon our stage; and when an entertainment of this kind did make its appearance it was promptly designated a pantomime, and so has become confused with the distinct kind of performances still presented under that name at our larger theatres at Christmas time. ”When one company is too hard for another,” writes Cibber, ”the lower in reputation has always been forced to exhibit some new-fangled foppery to draw the mult.i.tude after them;” which is, however, only a way of saying that managers need the stimulus of opposition to induce them to provide new entertainments. In 1721 there was great rivalry between Drury Lane--Cibber being one of its managers--and the theatre then newly erected in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Of the ”new-fangled foppery,” which it now became necessary for the one theatre to resort to as a weapon of offence against its rival, singing and dancing had been effectual instances. But singing was not to be thought of under the circ.u.mstances; as Cibber writes: ”At the time I am speaking of, our English music had been so discountenanced since the taste of Italian operas prevailed, that it was to no purpose to pretend to it. Dancing, therefore, was now the only weight in the opposite scale, and as the new theatres sometimes found their account in it, it could not be safe for us wholly to neglect it. To give even dancing, therefore, some improvement, and to make it something more than motion without meaning, the fable of Mars and Venus was formed into a connected presentation of dances in character, wherein the pa.s.sions were so happily expressed, and the whole story so intelligibly told by a mute narrative of gesture only, that even thinking spectators allowed it both a pleasing and a rational entertainment.” This was certainly a ballet of action, and it is remarkable that the production involved but a small outlay; the managers, distrusting its reception, did not venture ”to decorate it with any extraordinary expense of scenes or habits.” Great success, however, attended the performance, and from it is to be dated the establishment both of ballet and pantomime upon our stage. ”From this original hint, then, but every way unequal to it, sprang forth that succession of monstrous medleys that have so long infested the stage, and which arose upon one another alternately at both houses, outvying in expense, like contending bribes on both sides at an election, to secure a majority of the mult.i.tude.” Cibber indeed waxes very wrath over the matter, and appears to desire that lawful authority should ”interpose to put down these poetical drams, these gin-shops of the stage, that intoxicate its auditors and dishonour their understanding with a levity for which I want a name.” But Cibber's anger is in truth very much that of a manager vying with the liberal outlay of a rival, and in such wise forced to expend large sums in costly entertainments.

At an earlier date ballet-dancers had been imported from France. Some time about 1704 the great Mr. Betterton and his company, suffering from insufficient patronage at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, had been reduced to resort to ”foreign novelties.” Three of the most famous dancers of the French Opera, L'Abbee, Balon, and Mademoiselle Subligny, were at several times brought over at extraordinary rates to revive that sickly appet.i.te which plain sense and nature had satiated.

In Paris, indeed, the ballet was very securely inst.i.tuted. The Academie Royale de Musique et de Danse had been founded in 1669, and from that date the ballet, as an entertainment of dancing only, may be said to have come into being. There had been earlier ballets, but these were of the nature of old English masques, and consisted of songs and spoken dialogues in addition to dances; the term _ballet_, it need hardly be explained, being derived from the Italian _ballata_, the parent of our own _ballad_. At first the French Opera or Academy suffered from the smallness of its troop; vocalists could be obtained from the church choirs, but for the ballet it was hard to find recruits; and sometimes young boys were pressed into the service, and constrained to personate nymphs, dryads, and shepherdesses--”_danseurs_,”

writes a French historian of the Opera, ”_qui sous un masque et des vetements feminins, les formes arrondies par l'art et le coton, n'excitaient qu'un enthousiasme modere_.” At court there was no lack of dancers of the gentler s.e.x, however, and at court the ballet prospered greatly. A ballet performed in 1681 was at any rate strongly cast, since there appeared among the dancers Madame la Dauphine, the Princesse de Conti, and Mdlle. de Nantes, supported by the Dauphin, the Prince de Conti, and the Duc de Vermandois; but these distinguished personages probably sang more than they danced.

Louis XIV. frequently figured in ballets, one of his favourite characters being the Sun in ”Flora,” said to be the eighteenth ballet in which he had played a part. Lulli, the composer, director of the Opera, paid great attention to the ballet, occasionally appearing as a dancer; as a singer and comic actor he had already acquired fame. To Lulli has been attributed the introduction of rapid dancing, in opposition to the solemn and deliberate steps favoured by the court during the early part of the reign of Louis XIV. It may be added, that the king held out a measure of encouragement to such of his n.o.bility and courtiers as were disposed to follow his example and exhibit upon the scene. ”It is our pleasure,” he says in the patent granted to the Abbe Perrin, the first director of the French Opera, 1669, ”that all gentlemen and ladies may sing in the said pieces and representations of our Royal Academy, without being considered on that account to derogate from their letters of n.o.bility or from their privileges, rights, and immunities.” The dramatic ballet, or ballet of action, is said to have been invented by the d.u.c.h.esse du Maine, whose theatrical entertainments at Sceaux rivalled the festivities of Versailles, and obtained the preference of many n.o.bles of the court. The lady, however, unfortunately meddled with the Spanish conspiracy--she should have confined herself to the plots of ballets--and forthwith the establishment at Sceaux was broken up. In this way Mouret, her musical director, who also composed several operas and ballets for the Academy, suffered severe loss; eventually he went mad and died in the lunatic asylum at Charenton.

Mademoiselle de Subligny came to England armed with letters of introduction from Thiriot and the Abbe Dubois to John Locke of all people! Locke probably was not very sympathetic in regard to the lady's art, yet respect for his friends led him to bestow upon her due civility and attention; according to Fontenelle, he const.i.tuted himself her _homme d'affaires_. Another dancer, Mademoiselle Salle, whose charms and graces Voltaire had celebrated in verse, appeared in London with letters of introduction from Fontenelle to Montesquieu, then amba.s.sador at the court of St. James's. It is clear that the ballet-dancers were becoming personages of real importance.

Mdlle. Salle, it seems, achieved extraordinary success in the year 1734 at Covent Garden Theatre, which a French journal of that date describes curiously as the _Theatre du Commun Jardin_. The lady was an admirable dancer, and brought with her complete dramatic ballets, the characters in which were appropriately dressed according to the time and place of the story they related; for Mdlle. Salle was a reformer in the matter of stage costumes. She discarded paniers and hoops and false hair. As Galatea in a ballet upon the story of Pygmalion, she wore nothing, we are told, ”in addition to her bodice and under petticoats, but a simple robe of muslin draped after the manner of a Greek statue.” She won great applause, too, by her performance of Ariadne in a ballet called ”Bacchus and Ariadne,” the beauty of her dances, att.i.tudes, and gestures, and her skill in depicting by movements without words, grief, anger, love, and despair, obtaining the warmest approval. She was patronised by the king, queen, and the royal family, and her benefit produced an ”overflow” and something more; tickets were sold at most exorbitant prices, and the people fought for places both with swords and fists. There are stories, too, of purses full of gold being flung upon the stage, with showers of bonbons--not ordinary sugar-plums, but rouleaux of guineas tightly wrapped up in bank-notes. The dancer is said to have profited by her benefit to the extent of some 10,000. It must be owned, however, that the story of Mdlle. Salle's success is of a very highly-coloured description, and can only be credited absolutely by persons largely endowed with credulity.

Satire, of course, found occupation in the successes of the ballet-dancers. In 1742 Hogarth published his ”Charmers of the Age,” a caricature of the aspects and att.i.tudes of M. Desnoyer and the Signora Barberina, then performing at Drury Lane Theatre. A grotesque air was given to these artists, popularly regarded as personifications of grace and elegance, and a measured line was added to the drawing that their leaps and bounds might be fairly estimated.

It was in France, however, that the _ballerina_ secured her greatest triumph, and the _ballet d'action_ attained its fullest vitality. The dancer became a power in the State, influencing princes, ministers, and people. Poets were her slaves, and oftentimes philosophers were caught in her toils. From Mdlle. la Fontaine of two centuries since, ”_la premiere des premieres danseuses_,” who received the t.i.tle of ”La Reine de la Danse,” there being at the time, however, but three other professional dancers in Paris, through a long line of most distinguished artists, the _ballerina_ of to-day may trace her descent. But now, however, there is pause in her success, a cloud over her career. Indeed, it must be said, that for a generation almost there has been no new triumph registered of the ballet and its artists. Here the ”opera-dancers,” as they were once called, have certainly ceased to be. Once standing, as it were, on the tips of their toes, they supported opera upon their shoulders. But now there are no dancers at the opera. Euterpe has dispensed with the aid of Terpsich.o.r.e; the ballet has fled from the boards of our lyric theatres. It has been said, indeed, that the _ballet d'action_ has never been really naturalised in this country; that although it has thrived for a while, it was but an exotic, needing careful watching and tending. Still it was for many years a most prosperous entertainment, especially at our Italian opera-house; and it is to be noted that its decline has not been confined to this country. Even in France, its natural home and headquarters, ballet is by no means what it once was. It lives, perhaps, but in a fallen state. There is no _danseuse_ now really of the first cla.s.s. Has the ballet declined on this account, or is this to be ascribed to the decline of the ballet?

Or can it be that the dances of the streets have overcome and ousted from their due position the dances of the stage?

After Mdlle. la Fontaine came Mdlles. Roland and Prevost; the famous Camargo and her rival Salle, of whom some mention has already been made; Mdlle. Marie Madeleine Guimard, exquisitely graceful and fascinating, but of such slender proportions that she obtained the surname of ”_le squelette des Graces_,” while witty but malicious, perhaps jealous, Sophie Arnould described her as ”the spider;”

Mafleuroy, who married Boeldieu, and Mercandotti, who married Mr. Ball Hughes, otherwise ”Golden Ball,” the greatest gambler of his time, which is saying a good deal; n.o.blet and the Ellslers; Pauline Leroux, who became the wife of Lafont, the most elegant actor of the modern theatre; Duvernay and Taglioni--to name no more, for we have now come to surviving artists--these are among the more famous of the ”Reines de la Danse” who have ruled absolutely at the Academie Royale of Paris and elsewhere.

In England ballet has enjoyed many triumphs, while it has nevertheless experienced sundry disasters. There was great trouble, for instance, at Drury-lane Theatre in 1755, when Mr. Garrick's ”Chinese Festival” with its French dancers was sternly, even savagely, condemned by the audience. The manager was over-fond of spangles and spectacles, or inclined to over-estimate his public's regard for such matters, and a sharp but necessary lesson was read to him upon that occasion. Then he was very obstinate, and in such wise roused the British lion inordinately. He would not withdraw the play from his stage; promptly the audience determined that no stage should be left him upon which to represent either the ”Chinese Festival” or anything else. Of course he had to yield at last, as managers must when playgoers are resolute; he had to live by pleasing, not displeasing.

But he did not give way until there had been some six nights of uproar and riot. In vain did various n.o.ble lords and gentlemen, friends of the management, and supporters of spectacle and the ballet, draw their swords, endeavouring to awe malcontents, to restore order, and to defend the theatre from outrage. The mob would have its way. The benches were torn up, the decorations torn down, chandeliers smashed, even scenes and properties were ruthlessly destroyed. There was, indeed, a wild proposition rife at one time to fire the house and burn it to the ground. Garrick could but strike his flag, and yield up his ”Chinese Festival.” Still it was agreed that he had hesitated too long. The mob therefore repaired to Southampton Street, and smashed his window-panes, doing other mischief to his property there. He began even to tremble for his life, and from his friends in power obtained a guard of soldiery to protect him. Strange to say, on two of the nights of riot the king was present--a fact that did not in the least hinder or mitigate the violent demonstrations of the audience.