HUM 303: Reason, Romanticism, and Revolution
Module 1: Performances
Regrets for my Old Dressing Gown (1769) ...... 2 By Denis Diderot (1713-1784) ...... 2 “The Tyger” (1794) ...... 5 By William Blake ...... 5 Sonnet [Lift Not the Painted Veil] (1824) ...... 6 By Percy Bysshe Shelley ...... 6 From Sartor Resartus (1831) ...... 7 By Thomas Carlyle ...... 7 From “A House Full of Horrors” (1852) ...... 11 By Henry Morley ...... 11 “Gamblers” from Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) ...... 12 By Charles Baudelaire ...... 12 “Eleonora Duse” (1900) ...... 13 By Arthur Symons ...... 13 “Rodin” (1902) ...... 17 By Arthur Symons ...... 17 “Esther Kahn” from Spiritual Adventures (1905) ...... 20 By Arthur Symons ...... 20 From My Life (1927) ...... 31 By Isadora Duncan ...... 31 “Art and Isadora” in The Big Money (1933) ...... 36 By John Dos Passos ...... 36
1 Regrets for my Old Dressing Gown (1769) Or, A warning to those who have more taste than fortune By Denis Diderot (1713-1784)
Why didn’t I keep it? It was used to me and I was used to it. It molded all the folds of my body without inhibiting it; I was picturesque and handsome. The other one is stiff, and starchy, makes me look stodgy. There was no need to which its kindness didn’t loan itself, for indigence is almost always officious. If a book was covered in dust, one of its panels was there to wipe it off. If thickened ink refused to flow in my quill, it presented its flank. Traced in long black lines, one could see the services it had rendered me. These long lines announce the litterateur, the writer, the man who works. I now have the air of a rich good for nothing. No one knows who I am.
In its shelter I feared neither the clumsiness of a valet, nor my own, neither the explosion of fire nor the spilling of water. I was the absolute master of my old robe. I have become the slave of the new one.
The dragon that guarded the golden fleece was no more worried than I am. Care envelopes me.
The infatuated old man who turns himself over to the whims, to the mercies of a young girl says, from morning to night; where is my good, my old housekeeper? What demon obsessed me the day I chased her away for this one! And then he cries, he sighs.
I don’t cry, I don’t sigh, but every moment I say: Cursed be he who invented the art of putting a price on common material by tinting it scarlet. Cursed be the precious garment that I revere. Where is my old, my humble, my comfortable rag of common cloth?
My friends, keep your old friends. My friends, fear the touch of wealth. Let my example teach you a lesson. Poverty has its freedoms; opulence has its obstacles.
O Diogenes! How you would laugh if you saw your disciple beneath Aristipius’ luxurious mantle! O Aristipius, this luxurious mantle was paid for by many low acts. What a difference between your soft, crawling, effeminate life and the free and firm life of the rag-wearing cynic. I left behind the barrel in which I ruled in order to serve a tyrant.
But that’s not all, my friend. Lend an ear to the ravages of luxury, the results of a consistent luxury.
My old robe was one with the other rags that surrounded me. A straw chair, a wooden table, a rug from Bergamo, a wood plank that held up a few books, a few smoky prints
2 without frames, hung by its corners on that tapestry. Between these prints three or four suspended plasters formed, along with my old robe, the most harmonious indigence.
All is now discordant. No more coordination, no more unity, no more beauty.
A new, sterile housekeeper who succeeds to a presbytery, the wife who enters the house of a widower, the minister who replaces a disgraced minister, the Molinist prelate who takes over the diocese of a Jansenist prelate cause no more trouble than the scarlet intruder has caused in my household.
I can bear the sight of a peasant woman without disgust. That piece of simple cloth that covers her head, the hair that sparsely falls across her cheeks, those tattered rags that half cover her, that poor short petticoat that doesn’t cover half her legs, her naked feet covered with muck cannot wound me. It is the image of a state I respect; its the ensemble of the of the lack of grace of a necessary and unfortunate condition for which I have pity. But my stomach turns and, despite the perfumed atmosphere that follows her, I distance myself, I turn my gaze away from that courtisan whose coiffure a points d'angleterre, torn sleeves, filthy silk stockings and worn shoes show me the poverty of the day combined with the opulence of the previous evening.
Such would have been my domicile, if the imperious scarlet hadn’t set everything to march in unison with it.
I saw the Bergamo cede the wall to which it had so long been attached to the damascene hanging.
Two prints not without merit: The Chute de la Manne dans le Desert by Poussin and Esther devant Assuerus of the same painter; the one shamefully chased away by an old man by Rubens was the sad Esther; The falling manna was dissipated by a Tempest by Vernet.
The straw chair was relegated to the antechamber by a leather chair.
Homer, Virgil, Horace, and Cicero relieved the weak fir bending under their mass and have been closed in in an inlaid armoire, an asylum more worthy of them than of me.
A large mirror took over the mantle of my fireplace.
Those two lovely molds that I owed to Falconet’s friendship, and which he repaired himself, were moved away by a crouching Venus. Modern clay broken by antique bronze.
The wooden table was still fighting in the field, sheltered by a mass of pamphlets and papers piled up any which way, and which it appeared would protect it from the injuries
3 that threatened it. One day it met its destiny, and despite my laziness the pamphlets and papers put themselves away in a precious bureau.
Evil instinct of the convenient! Delicate and ruinous tact, sublime taste that changes, moves, builds and overturns; that empties the coffers of the fathers; that leaves daughters without a dowry, the sons without an education; that makes so many beautiful things and great evils. You who substituted in my house the fatal and precious desk for the wooden table: it is you who ruins nations, it is you who will perhaps one day take my effects to the Pont Saint-Michel where will be heard the hoarse voice of a certified auctioneer saying: Twenty louis for a crouching Venus.
4 “The Tyger” (1794) By William Blake
Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies, Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
When the stars threw down their spears And water'd heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Image and Text Source: Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyger
5 Sonnet [Lift Not the Painted Veil] (1824) By Percy Bysshe Shelley
Lift not the painted veil which those who live Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there, And it but mimic all we would believe With colours idly spread,—behind, lurk Fear And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave Their shadows, o'er the chasm, sightless and drear. I knew one who had lifted it—he sought, For his lost heart was tender, things to love But found them not, alas! nor was there aught The world contains, the which he could approve. Through the unheeding many he did move, A splendour among shadows, a bright blot Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.
Source: Wikisource https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Sonnet_(Shelley,_1824)
6 From Sartor Resartus (1831) By Thomas Carlyle
CHAPTER I. PRELIMINARY. Considering our present advanced state of culture, and how the Torch of Science has now been brandished and borne about, with more or less effect, for five thousand years and upwards; how, in these times especially, not only the Torch still burns, and perhaps more fiercely than ever, but innumerable Rushlights, and Sulphur-matches, kindled thereat, are also glancing in every direction, so that not the smallest cranny or dog-hole in Nature or Art can remain unilluminated,—it might strike the reflective mind with some surprise that hitherto little or nothing of a fundamental character, whether in the way of Philosophy or History, has been written on the subject of Clothes.
Our Theory of Gravitation is as good as perfect: Lagrange, it is well known, has proved that the Planetary System, on this scheme, will endure forever; Laplace, still more cunningly, even guesses that it could not have been made on any other scheme. Whereby, at least, our nautical Logbooks can be better kept; and water-transport of all kinds has grown more commodious. Of Geology and Geognosy we know enough: what with the labors of our Werners and Huttons, what with the ardent genius of their disciples, it has come about that now, to many a Royal Society, the Creation of a World is little more mysterious than the cooking of a dumpling; concerning which last, indeed, there have been minds to whom the question, How the apples were got in, presented difficulties. Why mention our disquisitions on the Social Contract, on the Standard of Taste, on the Migrations of the Herring? Then, have we not a Doctrine of Rent, a Theory of Value; Philosophies of Language, of History, of Pottery, of Apparitions, of Intoxicating Liquors? Man's whole life and environment have been laid open and elucidated; scarcely a fragment or fibre of his Soul, Body, and Possessions, but has been probed, dissected, distilled, desiccated, and scientifically decomposed: our spiritual Faculties, of which it appears there are not a few, have their Stewarts, Cousins, Royer Collards: every cellular, vascular, muscular Tissue glories in its Lawrences, Majendies, Bichats.
How, then, comes it, may the reflective mind repeat, that the grand Tissue of all Tissues, the only real Tissue, should have been quite overlooked by Science,—the vestural Tissue, namely, of woollen or other cloth; which Man's Soul wears as its outmost wrappage and overall; wherein his whole other Tissues are included and screened, his whole Faculties work, his whole Self lives, moves, and has its being? For if, now and then, some straggling broken-winged thinker has cast an owl's glance into this obscure region, the most have soared over it altogether heedless; regarding Clothes as a property, not an accident, as quite natural and spontaneous, like the leaves of trees, like the plumage of birds. In all speculations they have tacitly figured man as a Clothed Animal; whereas he is by nature a Naked Animal; and only in certain circumstances, by purpose and device, masks himself in Clothes. Shakespeare says, we are creatures that look before and after:
7 the more surprising that we do not look round a little, and see what is passing under our very eyes.
But here, as in so many other cases, Germany, learned, indefatigable, deep-thinking Germany comes to our aid. It is, after all, a blessing that, in these revolutionary times, there should be one country where abstract Thought can still take shelter; that while the din and frenzy of Catholic Emancipations, and Rotten Boroughs, and Revolts of Paris, deafen every French and every English ear, the German can stand peaceful on his scientific watch-tower; and, to the raging, struggling multitude here and elsewhere, solemnly, from hour to hour, with preparatory blast of cow-horn, emit his Horet ihr Herren und lasset's Euch sagen; in other words, tell the Universe, which so often forgets that fact, what o'clock it really is. …
The Editor of these sheets, though otherwise boasting himself a man of confirmed speculative habits, and perhaps discursive enough, is free to confess, that never, till these last months, did the above very plain considerations, on our total want of a Philosophy of Clothes, occur to him; and then, by quite foreign suggestion. By the arrival, namely, of a new Book from Professor Teufelsdrockh of Weissnichtwo; treating expressly of this subject, and in a style which, whether understood or not, could not even by the blindest be overlooked. In the present Editor's way of thought, this remarkable Treatise, with its Doctrines, whether as judicially acceded to, or judicially denied, has not remained without effect…
CHAPTER VIII. THE WORLD OUT OF CLOTHES. "Strange enough how creatures of the human-kind shut their eyes to plainest facts; and by the mere inertia of Oblivion and Stupidity, live at ease in the midst of Wonders and Terrors. But indeed man is, and was always, a blockhead and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider. Prejudice, which he pretends to hate, is his absolute lawgiver; mere use-and-wont everywhere leads him by the nose; thus let but a Rising of the Sun, let but a Creation of the World happen twice, and it ceases to be marvellous, to be noteworthy, or noticeable. Perhaps not once in a lifetime does it occur to your ordinary biped, of any country or generation, be he gold-mantled Prince or russet- jerkined Peasant, that his Vestments and his Self are not one and indivisible; that he is naked, without vestments, till he buy or steal such, and by forethought sew and button them.
"For my own part, these considerations, of our Clothes-thatch, and how, reaching inwards even to our heart of hearts, it tailorizes and demoralizes us, fill me with a certain horror at myself and mankind; almost as one feels at those Dutch Cows, which, during the wet season, you see grazing deliberately with jackets and petticoats (of striped sacking), in the meadows of Gouda. Nevertheless there is something great in the moment when a man first strips himself of adventitious wrappages; and sees indeed that he is naked, and, as
8 Swift has it, 'a forked straddling animal with bandy legs;' yet also a Spirit, and unutterable Mystery of Mysteries."
CHAPTER XI. PROSPECTIVE. "All visible things are emblems; what thou seest is not there on its own account; strictly taken, is not there at all: Matter exists only spiritually, and to represent some Idea, and body it forth. Hence Clothes, as despicable as we think them, are so unspeakably significant. Clothes, from the King's mantle downwards, are emblematic, not of want only, but of a manifold cunning Victory over Want. On the other hand, all Emblematic things are properly Clothes, thought-woven or hand-woven: must not the Imagination weave Garments, visible Bodies, wherein the else invisible creations and inspirations of our Reason are, like Spirits, revealed, and first become all-powerful; the rather if, as we often see, the Hand too aid her, and (by wool Clothes or otherwise) reveal such even to the outward eye?
"Men are properly said to be clothed with Authority, clothed with Beauty, with Curses, and the like. Nay, if you consider it, what is Man himself, and his whole terrestrial Life, but an Emblem; a Clothing or visible Garment for that divine ME of his, cast hither, like a light-particle, down from Heaven? Thus is he said also to be clothed with a Body.
"Language is called the Garment of Thought: however, it should rather be, Language is the Flesh-Garment, the Body, of Thought. I said that Imagination wove this Flesh- Garment; and does not she? Metaphors are her stuff: examine Language; what, if you except some few primitive elements (of natural sound), what is it all but Metaphors, recognized as such, or no longer recognized; still fluid and florid, or now solid-grown and colorless? If those same primitive elements are the osseous fixtures in the Flesh-Garment, Language,—then are Metaphors its muscles and tissues and living integuments. An unmetaphorical style you shall in vain seek for: is not your very Attention a Stretching- to? The difference lies here: some styles are lean, adust, wiry, the muscle itself seems osseous; some are even quite pallid, hunger-bitten and dead-looking; while others again glow in the flush of health and vigorous self-growth, sometimes (as in my own case) not without an apoplectic tendency. Moreover, there are sham Metaphors, which overhanging that same Thought's-Body (best naked), and deceptively bedizening, or bolstering it out, may be called its false stuffings, superfluous show-cloaks (Putz-Mantel), and tawdry woollen rags: whereof he that runs and reads may gather whole hampers,—and burn them."
Than which paragraph on Metaphors did the reader ever chance to see a more surprisingly metaphorical? However, that is not our chief grievance; the Professor continues:—
"Why multiply instances? It is written, the Heavens and the Earth shall fade away like a Vesture; which indeed they are: the Time-vesture of the Eternal. Whatsoever sensibly exists, whatsoever represents Spirit to Spirit, is properly a Clothing, a suit of Raiment, put
9 on for a season, and to be laid off. Thus in this one pregnant subject of CLOTHES, rightly understood, is included all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and been: the whole External Universe and what it holds is but Clothing; and the essence of all Science lies in the PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES."
Excerpts from: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1051/1051-h/1051-h.htm
10 From “A House Full of Horrors” (1852) By Henry Morley
“I could have cried, sir. I was ashamed of the pattern of my own trowsers, for I saw a piece of them hung up there as a horror. I dared not pull out my pocket-handkerchief while any one was by, lest I should be seen dabbing the perspiration from my forehead with a wreath of coral. I saw it all; when I went home I found that I had been living among horrors up to that hour. The paper in my parlour contains four kinds of birds of paradise, besides bridges and pagodas” (61).
“As old horrors wear out, I shall replace them according to correct principles of Taste. Whenever anything new is to be bought, since it will cost no more to have a thing in right taste than in wrong, I mean to be particular about the choosing of it.” (61) “I am a haunted man, molested in my peace by horrid sights, which follow one another almost without intermission. A person with my present correct principles of taste is naturally shocked every hour of his life in London.” (61-62)
“Mr Frippy, sir,” I replied, “one correct principle of taste in dress is, that the pattern of a dress should harmonise with the form and motions of the body upon which it is worn. Stripe your trousers vertically if they must be striped, so that the lines may harmonise in direction with the movement of your figure. The bars across your legs and body suggest obstacle and opposition. They are ungraceful also in being large and violently visible. Against a small check in which there is no strong contrast of colours, and which has no strongly pronounced lines in any direction, the authority on which I stand wages no war. There are four trouser patterns hung up in the Chamber of Horrors at Marlborough House, not one of which is so detestable as that which you are wearing.” (63)
Morley, Quoting from the Great Exhibition Catalogue “The art of ornamenting consists in the application of natural modes of decoration, not in applying pictures or sculptures of natural objects to our fabrics. If you ask me why Oriental ornamentation is so agreeable and natural, though it consists of little that resembles natural objects, I reply at once, it is because Oriental fabrics are ornamented in the same way as natural objects are. The forms employed are natural and beautiful forms; the colours are arranged, and contrasted, and modified as we find them in nature. The lines are such as we find in almost every other flower or object that meets us, and therefore always pleasing. The object of the ornamentist is not to make mere copies of natural objects, and to paint pictures, or carve images of them on the furniture and appliances of life. His purpose is to adorn the contrivances of mechanical and architectural skill, by the application of those principles of decoration, and of those forms and modes of beauty, which Nature herself has employed in adorning the structure of the world.” (64-65)
Morley, Henry. “A House Full of Horrors.” Household Words (Dec. 1852): 59-73.
11 “Gamblers” from Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) By Charles Baudelaire
They sit in shabby armchairs, ancient whores with eyebrows painted over pitiless eyes, simpering so that the garish gems they wear jiggle at their withered powdered ears.
Around the green felt, lipless faces loom or colorless lips and toothless jaws, above feverish fingers that cannot lie still but fumble in empty pockets, trembling breasts; under the dirty ceilings and a row of dusty chandeliers, the low-hung lamps sway over famous poets' shadowed brows, the sweat of which they come to squander here; this hideous pageant passed before my eyes as if a nightmare picked out each detail: I saw myself in a corner of that hushed den watching it all, cold, mute - and envious! envying the stubborn passion of such men, the deadly gaiety of those old whores - all blithely trafficking, as I looked on, in honor or beauty - whatever they could sell!
Horrible, that that I should envy these who rush so recklessly into the pit, each in his frenzy ravenous to prefer pain to death, and hell to nothingness!
Source: Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du Mal (1857). Trans. Richard Howard. David R. Godine, 1982.
12 “Eleonora Duse” (1900) By Arthur Symons
I. Eleonora Duse is a great artist, the type of the artist, and it is only by accident that she is an actress. Circumstances having made her an actress, she is the greatest of living actresses; she would have been equally great in any other art. She is an actress through being the antithesis of the actress; not, indeed, by mere reliance upon nature, but by controlling nature into the forms of her desire, as the sculptor controls the clay under his fingers. She is the artist of her own soul, and it is her force of will, her mastery of herself, not her abandonment to it, which make her what she is.
A great, impersonal force, rushing towards the light, looking to every form of art for help, for sustenance, for inspiration; a soul which lives on the passionate contemplation of beauty, of all the forms of beauty, without preference for Monteverde or Rodin, for Dante or Leonardo; an intelligence alert to arrest every wandering idea that can serve it; Duse seems to live in every nerve and brain-cell with a life which is sleepless and unslackening. She loves art so devotedly that she hates the mockery of her own art, in which disdain forces her to be faultless; hating the stage, wondering why some one in the audience does not rise from his seat, and leap upon the stage, and cry, ‘Enough of this!’ she acts half mechanically, with herself, pulling up all the rags of her own soul, as she says, and flinging them in the face of the people, in a contemptuous rage. When she is not on the stage she forgets the stage; if, in the street, some words of one of her parts come to her with a shiver, it is some passage of poetry, some vivid speech in which a soul speaks. Why she acts as she does, and how she succeeds in being so great an artist while hating her art, is her secret, she tells us; hinting that it is sorrow, discontent, thwarted desires, that have tortured and exalted her into a kind of martyrdom of artistic mastery, on the other side of which the serenity of a pained but indomitable soul triumphs.
To those who have seen Duse only across the footlights, Duse must be impenetrable, almost the contradiction of herself. As one talks with her one begins to realise the artist through the woman. There is in her a sombre and hypnotic quietude, as she broods in meditation, her beautiful, firm hand grasping the arm of the chair without movement, but so tightly that the knuckles grow rigid; her body droops sideways in the chair, her head rests on her other hand, the eyes are like a drowsy flame; the whole body thinks. Her face is sad with thought, with the passing over it of all the emotions of the world, which she has felt twice over, in her own flesh, and in the creative energy of her spirit. Her stillness is the stillness of one in the act to spring. There is no transition from the energy of speech to the energy of silence. When she speaks, the words leap from her lips one after another, hurrying, but always in coloured clothes, and with beautiful movements. As she listens silently to music, she seems to remember, and to drink in nourishment for her soul, as she drinks in perfume, greedily, from flowers, as she possesses a book or a picture, almost
13 with violence. I have never seen a woman so passionate after beauty. I have never seen a woman so devoured by the life of the soul, by the life of the mind, by the life of the body.
When she talks intently with some one whose ideas interest her, she leaves her chair, comes and sits down quite close, leans over till her face almost touches one’s face, the eyes opening wider and wider until one sees an entire rim of white about the great brown pupils; but, though she occasionally makes a gesture, she never touches one, never lays her hand on one’s sleeve; remains impersonal, though so close. Her intent eyes see nothing but the ideas behind one’s forehead; she has no sense of the human nearness of body to body, only of the intellectual closeness of soul to soul. She is a woman always, but she is a woman almost in the abstract; the senses are asleep, or awake only to give passion and substance to the disembodied energy of the intellect. When she speaks of beautiful things her face takes light as from an inner source; the dark and pallid cheeks curve into sensitive folds, the small, thin-lipped mouth, scarcely touched with colour, grows half tender, half ironical, as if smiling at its own abandonment to delight; an exquisite tremor awakens in it, as if it brushed against the petal of a flower, and thrilled at the contact; then the mouth opens, freely, and the strong white teeth glitter in a vehement smile.
I have seen her before a Rodin, a Whistler, and a Turner. As she handled the little piece of clay, in which two figures, suggested, not expressed, embrace passionately, in a tightening quiver of the whole body, which seems to thrill under one’s eyesight, it seemed as if force drank in force until the soul of the woman passed into the clay, and the soul of the clay passed into the woman. As she stood before the portrait of Carlyle, which she had never seen, though a photograph of it goes with her wherever she goes, there was the quietude of content, perfect satisfaction, before a piece of ardent and yet chastened perfection. As she moved about the room of the Turners, in the National Gallery, it was with little cries, with a sort of unquiet joy. ‘The dear madman!’ she repeated, before picture after picture, in which a Venice, so false to the Venice which she knew, so true to a Venice which had been actually thus seen, rose up like a mist of opals, all soft flame and rushing light. And, her eyes full of that intoxication, she almost ran out of the gallery, refusing to look to right or left, that she might shut down her eyelids upon their vision. …
III. The face of Duse is a mask for the tragic passions, a mask which changes from moment to moment, as the soul models the clay of the body after its own changing image. Imagine Rodin at work on a lump of clay. The shapeless thing awakens under his fingers, a vague life creeps into it, hesitating among the forms of life; it is desire, waiting to be born, and it may be born as pity or anguish, love or pride; so fluid is it to the touch, so humbly does it await the accident of choice. The face of Duse is like the clay under the fingers of Rodin.
But with her there can be no choice, no arresting moment of repose; but an endless flowing onward of emotion, like tide flowing after tide, moulding and effacing
14 continually. Watch her in that scene of ‘La Dame aux Camélias,’ where Armand’s father pleads with Marguerite to give up her lover for the sake of her love. She sits there quietly beside the table, listening and saying nothing, thinking mournfully, debating with herself, conquering herself, making the great decision. The outline of the face is motionless, set hard, clenched into immobility; but within that motionless outline every nerve seems awake, expression after expression sweeps over it, each complete for its instant, each distinct, each like the finished expression of the sculptor, rather than the uncertain forms of life, as they appear to us in passing. The art of the actor, it is supposed, is to give, above all things, this sense of the passing moment, and to give it by a vivacity in expression which shall more than compete with life itself. That is the effective thing; but what Duse does is, after all, the right thing. We have rarely, in real life, the leisure to watch an emotion in which we are the sharers. But there are moments, in any great crisis, when the soul seems to stand back and look out of impersonal eyes, seeing things as they are. At such moments it is possible to become aware of the beauty, the actual plastic beauty, of passionate or sorrowful emotion, as it interprets itself, in all its succession of moods, upon the face. At such moments, as at the supreme moment of death, all the nobility of which a soul is capable comes transformingly into the body; which is then, indeed, neither the handmaid, nor the accomplice, nor the impediment of the soul, but the soul’s visible identity. The art of Duse is to do over again, consciously, this sculpture of the soul upon the body.
The reason why Duse is the greatest actress in the world is that she has a more subtle nature than any other actress, and that she expresses her nature more simply. All her acting seems to come from a great depth, and to be only half telling profound secrets. No play has ever been profound enough, and simple enough, for this woman to say everything she has to say in it. When she has thrilled one, or made one weep, or exalted one with beauty, she seems to be always holding back something else. Her supreme distinction comes from the kind of melancholy wisdom which remains in her face after the passions have swept over it. Other actresses seem to have heaped up into one great, fictitious moment all the scattered energies of their lives, the passions that have come to nothing, the sensations that have withered before they flowered, the thoughts that have never quite been born. The stage is their life; they live only for those three hours of the night; before and after are the intervals between the acts. But to Duse those three hours are the interval in an intense, consistent, strictly personal life; and, the interval over, she returns to herself, as after an interruption.
And this unique fact makes for her the particular quality of her genius. When she is on the stage she does not appeal to us with the conscious rhetoric of the actress; she lets us overlook her, with an unconsciousness which study has formed into a second nature. When she is on the stage she is always thinking; at times, when the playing of her part is to her a mere piece of contemptuous mechanism, she thinks of other things, and her acting suddenly becomes acting, as in ‘Fedora’ and all but the end of ‘The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.’ At every moment of a play in which emotion becomes sincere, intelligent, or in which it is possible to transform an artificial thing into reality, she is profoundly true to
15 the character she is representing, by being more and more profoundly herself. Then it is Magda, or Gioconda, or Marguerite Gautier who thinks, feels, lives, endures love and anguish and shame and happiness before us; and it is Magda, or Gioconda, or Marguerite Gautier because it is the primary emotion, the passion itself, everything in it which is most personal because it is most universal.
To act as Duse acts, with an art which is properly the antithesis of what we call acting, is, no doubt, to fail in a lesser thing in order to triumph in a greater. Her greatest moments are the moments of most intense quietness; she does not send a shudder through the whole house, as Sarah Bernhardt does, playing on one’s nerves as on a violin. ‘Action,’ with her as with Rimbaud, ‘is a way of spoiling something,’ when once action has mastered thought, and got loose to work its own way in the world. It is a disturbance, not an end in itself; and the very expression of emotion, with her, is all a restraint, the quieting down of a tumult until only the pained reflection of it glimmers out of her eyes, and trembles among the hollows of her cheeks. Contrast her art with the art of Irving, to whom acting is at once a science and a tradition. To Irving acting is all that the word literally means; it is an art of sharp, detached, yet always delicate movement; he crosses the stage with intention, as he intentionally adopts a fine, crabbed, personal, highly conventional elocution of his own; he is an actor, and he acts, keeping nature, or the too close semblance of nature, carefully out of his com- position. He has not gone to himself to invent an art wholly personal, wholly new; his acting is no interruption of an intense inner life, but a craftsmanship into which he has put all he has to give. It is an art wholly rhetoric, that is to say wholly external; his emotion moves to slow music, crystallises into an attitude, dies upon a long-drawn-out word. And it is this external, rhetorical art, this dramatised oratory, that we have always understood as acting, until Duse came upon the stage with new ideas and a new method. At once rhetoric disappeared, with all that is obvious in its loss, as well as what is somewhat less obviously gained by it. Duse’s art, in this, is like the art of Verlaine in French poetry; always suggestion, never statement, always a renunciation. It comes into the movement of all the arts, as they seek to escape from the bondage of form, by a new, finer mastery of form, wrought outwards from within, not from without inwards. And it conquers almost the last obstacle, as it turns the one wholly external art, based upon mere imitation, existing upon the commonest terms of illusion, triumphing by exaggeration, into an art wholly subtle, almost spiritual, a suggestion, an evasion, a secrecy.
Source:
Symons, Arthur. “Eleanor Duse.” 1900. Studies in Seven Arts. New York: Dutton and Co, 1907.
16 “Rodin” (1902) By Arthur Symons
The art of Rodin competes with nature rather than with the art of other sculptors. Other sculptors turn life into sculpture, he turns sculpture into life. His clay is part of the substance of the earth, and the earth still clings about it as it comes up and lives. It is at once the flower and the root; that of others is the flower only, and the plucked flower. That link with the earth, which we find in the unhewn masses of rock from which his finest creations of pure form can never quite free themselves, is the secret of his deepest force. It links his creations to nature’s, in a single fashion of growth.
Rodin is a visionary, to whom art has no meaning apart from truth. His first care is to assure you, as you penetrate into that bewildering world which lies about him in his studios, that every movement arrested in those figures, all in violent action, is taken straight from nature. It is not copied, as you or I would see it; it is re-created, as he sees it. How then does he see nature? To Rodin everything that lives is beautiful, merely because it lives, and everything is equally beautiful.
Rodin believes, not as a mystic, but as a mathematician, I might almost say, in that doctrine of ‘correspondences’ which lies at the root of most of the mystical teaching. He spies upon every gesture, knowing that if he can seize one gesture at the turn of the wave, he has seized an essential rhythm of nature. When a woman combs her hair, he will say to you, she thinks she is only combing her hair: no, she is making a gesture which flows into the eternal rhythm, which is beautiful because it lives, because it is part of that geometrical plan which nature is always weaving for us. Change the gesture as it is, give it your own conception of abstract beauty, depart ever so little from the mere truth of the movement, and the rhythm is broken, what was living is dead.
We speak of the rhythm of nature. What is it, precisely, that we mean? Rhythm, precisely, is a balance, a means of preserving equilibrium in moving bodies. The human body possesses so much volume, it has to maintain its equilibrium; if you displace its contents here, they shift there: the balance is regained by an instinctive movement of self- preservation. Thus what we call harmony is really utility, and, as always, beauty is seen to be a necessary thing, the exquisite growth of a need.
And this rhythm runs through all nature, producing every grace and justifying every apparent defect. The same swing and balance of forces make the hump on a dwarf’s back and the mountain in the lap of a plain. One is not more beautiful than the other, if you will take each thing simply, in its own place. And that apparent ugliness of the average, even, has its place, does not require the heightening energy of excess to make it beautiful. It, too, has the beauty of life.
17 There was a time, Rodin will tell you, when he sought for beautiful models; when he found himself disappointed, dissatisfied, before some body whose proportions did not please him. He would go on working merely because the model was there; and, after two hours’ work, discover suddenly the beauty of this living thing which was turning into a new kind of life under his fingers. Why choose any longer? why reject this always faultless material? He has come to trust nature so implicitly that he will never pose a model, leaving nature to find its own way of doing what he wants of it. All depends on the way of seeing, on the seizure of the perfect moment, on the art of rendering, in the sculptor’s relief, ‘the instant made eternity.’
Rodin was studying drawing, with no idea but of being a draughtsman, when the idea of modelling in clay came to him. He had been drawing the model from different points of view, as the pivot turned, presenting now this and now that profile. It occurred to him to apply this principle to the clay, in which, by a swift, almost simultaneous, series of studies after nature, a single figure might be built up which would seem to be wholly alive, to move throughout its entire surface. From that time until now, he has taken one profile after another, each separately, and all together, turning his work in all directions, looking upward at the model to get the arch and hollow of the eyebrows, for instance, looking down on the model, taking each angle, as if, for the time, no other existed, and pursuing the outlines of nature with a movement as constant as her own. At the end, the thing is done, there is no need of even a final point of view, of an adjustment to some image of proportion: nature has been caught on the wing, enfolded by observation as the air enfolds the living form. If every part is right, the whole must be right.
But, for the living representation of nature in movement, something more is needed than the exact copy. This is a certain deliberate exaggeration; not a correction, not a deviation, but a means of interpretation, the only means by which the softness and the energy of nature can be rendered in clay. It is a manner of expressing in clay what nature expresses with the infinite resources of its moving blood. ‘All art,’ said Mérimée, ‘is exaggeration à propos.’ It is on the perfection of this à propos that everything depends, and here Rodin’s training as a draughtsman gives him his safety in freedom. He, who never measures his proportions, can rely implicitly on the exactitude of his eye, in preserving the proportion of every exaggeration. …
It was not until he could copy nature so exactly as to deceive the eyes of those who imagined that they knew nature when they saw it, it was not until he had the body by heart, that he began to make the body think. He had given it form; the form must be awakened. The touch of life and of thought comes, then, from an exaggeration here, an exaggeration there; a touch, inexplicable and certain, which is at once his method and his secret.
It is on these two methods that Rodin relies for the rendering of his vision of life. The art of the sculptor gives him but one means of expression; all is in relief, all depends on the power, balance, and beauty of the relief. Watching the living movement from every
18 angle, turning about it as a wild beast turns about its prey, spying for the moment to pounce, seize, and possess, he must translate form, movement, light and shadow, softness, force, everything which exists in nature, by the cunning adjustment of his relief. ‘Le style, c’est l’homme,’ we say; ‘le modelé, c’est l’art,’ Rodin would say.
Source:
Symons, Arthur. “Rodin.” 1902. Studies in Seven Arts. New York: Dutton and Co, 1907.
19 “Esther Kahn” from Spiritual Adventures (1905) By Arthur Symons
Esther Kahn was born in one of those dark, evil-smelling streets with strange corners which lie about the Docks. It was a quiet street, which seemed to lead nowhere, but to stand aside, for some not quite honest purpose of its own. The blinds of some of these houses were always drawn; shutters were nailed over some of the windows. Few people passed; there were never many children playing in the road; the women did not stand talking at their open doors. The doors opened and shut quietly; dark faces looked out from behind the windows; the Jews who lived there seemed always to be at work, bending over their tables, sewing and cutting, or else hurrying in and out with bundles of clothes under their arms, going and coming from the tailors for whom they worked. The Kahns all worked at tailoring: Esther's father and mother and grandmother, her elder brother and her two elder sisters. One did seaming, another button-holing, another sewed on buttons; and, on the poor pay they got for that, seven had to live.
As a child Esther had a strange terror of the street in which she lived. She was never sure whether something dreadful had just happened there, or whether it was just going to happen. But she was always in suspense. She was tormented with the fear of knowing what went on behind those nailed shutters. She made up stories about the houses, but the stories never satisfied her. She imagined some great, vague gesture; not an incident, but a gesture; and it hung in the air suspended like a shadow. The gestures of people always meant more to her than their words; they seemed to have a secret meaning of their own, which the words never quite interpreted. She was always unconsciously on the watch for their meaning.
At night, after supper, the others used to sit around the table, talking eagerly. Esther would get up and draw her chair into the corner by the door, and for a time she would watch them, as if she were looking on at something, something with which she had no concern, but which interested her for its outline and movement. She saw her father's keen profile, the great, hooked nose, the black, prominent, shifty eye, the tangled black hair straggling over the shirt-collar; her mother, large, placid, with masses of black, straight hair coiled low over her sallow cheeks; the two sisters, sharp and voluble, never at rest for a moment; the brother, with his air of insolent assurance, an immense self-satisfaction hooded under his beautifully curved eyelids; the grandmother, with her bent and mountainous shoulders, the vivid malice of her eyes, her hundreds of wrinkles. All these people, who had so many interests in common, who thought of the same things, cared for the same things, seemed so fond of one another in an instinctive way, with so much hostility for other people who were not belonging to them, sat there night after night, in the same attitudes, always as eager for the events of to-day as they had been for the events of yesterday. Everything mattered to them immensely, and especially their part in things; and no one thing seemed to matter more than any other thing. Esther cared only to look on; nothing mattered to her; she had no interest in their interests; she was not sure
20 that she cared for them more than she would care for other people; they were what she supposed real life was, and that was a thing in which she had only a disinterested curiosity.
Sometimes, when she had been watching them until they had all seemed to fade away and form again in a kind of vision more precise than the reality, she would lose sight of them altogether and sit gazing straight before her, her eyes wide open, her lips parted. Her hand would make an unconscious movement, as if she were accompanying some grave words with an appropriate gesture; and Becky would generally see it, and burst into a mocking laugh, and ask her whom she was mimicking.
'Don't notice her,' the mother said once; 'she's not a human child, she's a monkey; she's clutching out after a soul, as they do. They look like little men, but they know they're not men, and they try to be; that's why they mimic us.'
Esther was very angry; she said to herself that she would be more careful in future not to show anything that she was feeling.
At thirteen Esther looked a woman. She was large-boned, with very small hands and feet, and her body seemed to be generally asleep, in a kind of brooding lethargy. She had her mother's hair, masses of it, but softer, with a faint, natural wave in it. Her face was oval, smooth in outline, with a nose just Jewish enough for the beauty of suave curves and unemphatic outlines. The lips were thick, red, strung like a bow. The whole face seemed to await, with an infinite patience, some moulding and awakening force, which might have its way with it. It wanted nothing, anticipated nothing; it waited. Only the eyes put life into the mask, and the eyes were the eyes of the tribe; they had no personal meaning in what seemed to be their mystery; they were ready to fascinate innocently, to be intolerably ambiguous without intention; they were fathomless with mere sleep, the unconscious dream which is in the eyes of animals.
Esther was neither clever nor stupid; she was inert. She did as little in the house as she could, but when she had to take her share in the stitching she stitched more neatly than any of the others, though very slowly. She hated it, in her languid, smouldering way, partly because it was work and partly because it made her prick her fingers, and the skin grew hard and ragged where the point of the needle had scratched it. She liked her skin to be quite smooth, but all the glycerine she rubbed into it at night would not take out the mark of the needle. It seemed to her like the badge of her slavery.
She would rather not have been a Jewess; that, too, was a kind of badge, marking her out from other people; she wanted to be let alone, to have her own way without other people's help or hindrance. She had no definite consciousness of what her own way was to be; she was only conscious, as yet, of the ways that would certainly not be hers.
21 She would not think only of making money, like her mother, nor of being thought clever, like Becky, nor of being admired because she had good looks and dressed smartly, like Mina. All these things required an effort, and Esther was lazy. She wanted to be admired, and to have money, of course, and she did not want people to think her stupid; but all this was to come to her, she knew, because of some fortunate quality in herself, as yet undiscovered. Then she would shake off everything that now clung to her, like a worn- out garment that one keeps only until one can replace it. She saw herself rolling away in a carriage towards the west; she would never come back. And it would be like a revenge on whatever it was that kept her stifling in this mean street; she wanted to be cruelly revenged.
As it was, her only very keen pleasure was in going to the theatre with her brother or her sisters; she cared nothing for the music-halls, and preferred staying at home to going with the others when they went to the Pavilion or the Foresters. But when there was a melodrama at the Standard, or at the Elephant and Castle, she would wait and struggle outside the door and up the narrow, winding stairs, for a place as near the front of the gallery as she could get. Once inside, she would never speak, but she would sit staring at the people on the stage as if they hypnotised her. She never criticised the play, as the others did; the play did not seem to matter; she lived it without will or choice, merely because it was there and her eyes were on it.
But after it was over and they were at home again, she would become suddenly voluble as she discussed the merits of the acting. She had no hesitations, was certain that she was always in the right, and became furious if any one contradicted her. She saw each part as a whole, and she blamed the actors for not being consistent with themselves. She could not understand how they could make a mistake. It was so simple, there were no two ways of doing anything. To go wrong was as if you said no when you meant yes; it must be wilful.
'You ought to do it yourself, Esther,' said her sisters, when they were tired of her criticisms. They meant to be satirical, but Esther said, seriously enough: 'Yes, I could do it; but so could that woman if she would let herself alone. Why did she try to be something else all the time?'
Time went slowly with Esther; but when she was seventeen she was still sewing at home and still waiting. Nothing had come to her of all that she had expected. Two of her cousins, and a neighbour or two, had wanted to marry her; but she had refused them contemptuously. To her sluggish instinct men seemed only good for making money, or, perhaps, children; they had not come to have any definite personal meaning for her. A little man called Joel, who had talked to her passionately about love, and had cried when she refused him, seemed to her an unintelligible and ridiculous kind of animal. When she dreamed of the future, there was never any one of that sort making fine speeches to her.
22 But, gradually, her own real purpose in life had become clear. She was to be an actress. She said nothing about it at home, but she began to go round to the managers of the small theatres in the neighbourhood, asking for an engagement. After a long time the manager gave her a small part. The piece was called 'The Wages of Sin,' and she was to be the servant who opens the door in the first act to the man who is going to be the murderer in the second act, and then identifies him in the fourth act.
Esther went home quietly and said nothing until supper-time. Then she said to her mother: 'I am going on the stage.'
'That's very likely,' said her mother, with a sarcastic smile; 'and when do you go on, pray?'
'On Monday night,' said Esther.
'You don't mean it!' said her mother.
'Indeed I mean it,' said Esther, 'and I've got my part. I'm to be the servant in "The Wages of Sin."'
Her brother laughed. 'I know,' he said, 'she speaks two words twice.'
'You are right,' said Esther; 'will you come on Monday, and hear how I say them?'
When Esther had made up her mind to do anything, they all knew that she always did it. Her father talked to her seriously. Her mother said: 'You are much too lazy, Esther; you will never get on.' They told her that she was taking the bread out of their mouths, and it was certain she would never put it back again. 'If I get on,' said Esther, 'I will pay you back exactly what I would have earned, as long as you keep me. Is that a bargain? I know I shall get on, and you won't repent of it. You had better let me do as I want. It will pay.'
They shook their heads, looked at Esther, who sat there with her lips tight shut, and a queer, hard look in her eyes, which were trying not to seem exultant; they looked at one another, shook their heads again, and consented. The old grandmother mumbled something fiercely, but as it sounded like bad words, and they never knew what Old Testament language she would use, they did not ask her what she was meaning.
On Monday Esther made her first appearance on the stage. Her mother said to her afterwards: 'I thought nothing of you, Esther; you were just like any ordinary servant.' Becky asked her if she had felt nervous. She shook her head; it had seemed quite natural to her, she said. She did not tell them that a great wave of triumph had swept over her as she felt the heat of the gas footlights come up into her eyes, and saw the floating cluster of white faces rising out of a solid mass of indistinguishable darkness. In that moment she drew into her nostrils the breath of life.
23
Esther had a small part to understudy, and before long she had the chance of playing it. The manager said nothing to her, but soon afterwards he told her to understudy a more important part. She never had the chance to play it, but, when the next piece was put on at the theatre, she was given a part of her own. She began to make a little money, and, as she had promised, she paid so much a week to her parents for keeping her. They gained by the bargain, so they did not ask her to come back to the stitching. Mrs. Kahn sometimes spoke of her daughter to the neighbours with a certain languid pride; Esther was making her way.
Esther made her way rapidly. One day the manager of a West End theatre came down to see her; he engaged her at once to play a small but difficult part in an ambitious kind of melodrama that he was bringing out. She did it well, satisfied the manager, was given a better part, did that well, too, was engaged by another manager, and, in short, began to be looked upon as a promising actress. The papers praised her with moderation; some of the younger critics, who admired her type, praised her more than she deserved. She was making money; she had come to live in rooms of her own, off the Strand; at twenty-one she had done, in a measure, what she wanted to do; but she was not satisfied with herself. She had always known that she could act, but how well could she act? Would she never be able to act any better than this? She had drifted into the life of the stage as naturally as if she had never known anything else; she was at home, comfortable, able to do what many others could not do. But she wanted to be a great actress.
An old actor, a Jew, Nathan Quellen, who had taken a kind of paternal interest in her, and who helped her with all the good advice that he had never taken to himself, was fond of saying that the remedy was in her own hands.
'My dear Esther,' he would tell her, smoothing his long grey hair down over his forehead, 'you must take a lover; you must fall in love; there's no other way. You think you can act, and you have never felt anything worse than a cut finger. Why, it's an absurdity! Wait till you know the only thing worth knowing; till then you're in short frocks and a pinafore.'
He cited examples, he condensed the biographies of the great actresses for her benefit. He found one lesson in them all, and he was sincere in his reading of history as he saw it. He talked, argued, protested; the matter seriously troubled him. He felt he was giving Esther good advice; he wanted her to be the thing she wanted to be. Esther knew it and thanked him, without smiling; she sat brooding over his words; she never argued against them. She believed much of what he said; but was the remedy, as he said, in her own hands? It did not seem so.
As yet no man had spoken to her blood. She had the sluggish blood of a really profound animal nature. She saw men calmly, as calmly as when little Joel had cried because she would not marry him. Joel still came to see her sometimes, with the same entreaty in his eyes, not daring to speak it. Other men, very different men, had made love to her in very
24 different ways. They had seemed to be trying to drive a hard bargain, to get the better of her in a matter of business; and her native cunning had kept her easily on the better side of the bargain. She was resolved to be a business woman in the old trade of the affections; no one should buy or sell of her except at her own price, and she set the price vastly high.
Yet Quellen's words set her thinking. Was there, after all, but one way to study for the stage? All the examples pointed to it, and, what was worse, she felt it might be true. She saw exactly where her acting stopped short.
She looked around her with practical eyes, not seeming to herself to be doing anything unusual or unlikely to succeed in its purpose. She thought deliberately over all the men she knew; but who was there whom it would be possible to take seriously? She could think of only one man: Philip Haygarth.
Philip Haygarth was a man of five-and-thirty, who had been writing plays and having them acted, with only a moderate success, for nearly ten years. He was one of the accepted men, a man whose plays were treated respectfully, and he had the reputation of being much cleverer than his plays. He was short, dark, neat, very worldly-looking, with thin lips and reflective, not quite honest eyes. His manner was cold, restrained, with a mingling of insolence and diffidence. He was a hard worker and a somewhat deliberately hard liver. He avoided society and preferred to find his relaxation among people with whom one did not need to keep up appearances, or talk sentiment, or pay afternoon calls. He admired Esther Kahn as an actress, though with many reservations; and he admired her as a woman, more than he had ever admired anybody else. She appealed to all his tastes; she ended by absorbing almost the whole of those interests and those hours which he set apart, in his carefully arranged life, for such matters.
He made love to Esther much more skilfully than any of her other lovers, and, though she saw through his plans as clearly as he wished her to see through them, she was grateful to him for a certain finesse in his manner of approach. He never mentioned the word 'love,' except to jest at it; he concealed even the extent to which he was really disturbed by her presence; his words spoke only of friendship and of general topics. And yet there could never be any doubt as to his meaning; his whole attitude was a patient waiting. He interested her; frankly, he interested her: here, then, was the man for her purpose. With his admirable tact, he spared her the least difficulty in making her meaning clear. He congratulated himself on a prize; she congratulated herself on the accomplishment of a duty.
Days and weeks passed, and Esther scrutinised herself with a distinct sense of disappointment. She had no moral feeling in the matter; she was her own property, it had always seemed to her, free to dispose of as she pleased. The business element in her nature persisted. This bargain, this infinitely important bargain, had been concluded, with
25 open eyes, with a full sense of responsibility, for a purpose, the purpose for which she lived. What was the result?
She could see no result. The world had in no sense changed for her, as she had been supposing it would change; a new excitement had come into her life, and that was all. She wondered what it was that a woman was expected to feel under the circumstances, and why she had not felt it. How different had been her feeling when she walked across the stage for the first time! That had really been a new life, or the very beginning of life. But this was no more than a delightful episode, hardly to be disentangled from the visit to Paris which had accompanied it. She had, so to speak, fallen into a new habit, which was so agreeable, and seemed so natural, that she could not understand why she had not fallen into it before; it was a habit she would certainly persist in, for its own sake. The world remained just the same.
And her art: she had learned nothing. No new thrill came into the words she spoke; her eyes, as they looked across the footlights, remembered nothing, had nothing new to tell.
And so she turned, with all the more interest, an interest almost impersonal, to Philip Haygarth when he talked to her about acting and the drama, when he elaborated his theories which, she was aware, occupied him more than she occupied him. He was one of those creative critics who can do every man's work but their own. When he sat down to write his own plays, something dry and hard came into the words, the life ebbed out of those imaginary people who had been so real to him, whom he had made so real to others as he talked. He constructed admirably and was an unerring judge of the construction of plays. And he had a sense of acting which was like the sense that a fine actor might have, if he could be himself and also some one looking on at himself. He not only knew what should be done, but exactly why it should be done. Little suspecting that he had been chosen for the purpose, though in so different a manner, he set himself to teach her art to Esther.
He made her go through the great parts with him; she was Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra; he taught her how to speak verse and how to feel the accent of speech in verse, another kind of speech than prose speech; he trained her voice to take hold of the harmonies that lie in words themselves; and she caught them, by ear, as one born to speak many languages catches a foreign language. She went through Ibsen as she had gone through Shakespeare; and Haygarth showed her how to take hold of this very different subject-matter, so definite and so elusive. And they studied good acting-plays together, worthless plays that gave the actress opportunities to create something out of nothing. Together they saw Duse and Sarah Bernhardt; and they had seen Réjane in Paris, in crudely tragic parts; and they studied the English stage, to find out why it maintained itself at so stiff a distance from nature. She went on acting all the time, always acting with more certainty; and at last she attempted more serious parts, which she learned with Haygarth at her elbow.
26 She had to be taught her part as a child is taught its lesson; word by word, intonation by intonation. She read it over, not really knowing what it was about; she learned it by heart mechanically, getting the words into her memory first. Then the meaning had to be explained to her, scene by scene, and she had to say the words over until she had found the right accent. Once found, she never forgot it; she could repeat it identically at any moment; there were no variations to allow for. Until that moment she was reaching out blindly in the dark, feeling about her with uncertain fingers.
And, with her, the understanding came with the power of expression, sometimes seeming really to proceed from the sound to the sense, from the gesture inward. Show her how it should be done, and she knew why it should be done; sound the right note in her ears, arrest her at the moment when the note came right, and she understood, by a backward process, why the note should sound thus. Her mind worked, but it worked under suggestion, as the hypnotists say; the idea had to come to her through the instinct, or it would never come.
As Esther found herself, almost unconsciously, becoming what she had dreamed of becoming, what she had longed to become, and, after all, through Philip Haygarth, a more personal feeling began to grow up in her heart toward this lover who had found his way to her, not through the senses, but through the mind. A kind of domesticity had crept into their relations, and this drew Esther nearer to him. She began to feel that he belonged to her. He had never, she knew, been wholly absorbed in her, and she had delighted him by showing no jealousy, no anxiety to keep him. As long as she remained so, he felt that she had a sure hold on him. But now she began to change, to concern herself more with his doings, to assert her right to him, as she had never hitherto cared to do. He chafed a little at what seemed an unnecessary devotion.
Love, with Esther, had come slowly, taking his time on the journey; but he came to take possession. To work at her art was to please Philip Haygarth; she worked now with a double purpose. And she made surprising advances as an actress. People began to speculate: had she genius, or was this only an astonishingly developed talent, which could go so far and no farther?
For, in this finished method, which seemed so spontaneous and yet at the same time so deliberate, there seemed still to be something, some slight, essential thing, almost unaccountably lacking. What was it? Was it a fundamental lack, that could never be supplied? Or would that slight, essential thing, as her admirers prophesied, one day be supplied? They waited.
Esther was now really happy, for the first time in her life; and as she looked back over those years, in the street by the Docks, when she had lived alone in the midst of her family, and since then, when she had lived alone, working, not finding the time long, nor wishing it to go more slowly, she felt a kind of surprise at herself. How could she have gone through it all? She had not even been bored. She had had a purpose, and now that
27 she was achieving that purpose, the thing itself seemed hardly to matter. Her art kept pace with her life; she was giving up nothing in return for happiness; but she had come to prize the happiness, her love, beyond all things.
She knew that Haygarth was proud of her, that he looked upon her talent, genius, whatever it was, as partly the work of his hands. It pleased her that this should be so; it seemed to bind him to her more tightly.
In this she was mistaken, as most women are mistaken when they ask themselves what it is in them that holds their lovers. The actress interested Haygarth greatly, but the actress interested him as a problem, as something quite apart from his feelings as a man, as a lover. He had been attracted by the woman, by what was sombre and unexplained in her eyes, by the sleepy grace of her movements, by the magnetism that seemed to drowse in her. He had made love to her precisely as he would have made love to an ignorant, beautiful creature who walked on in some corner of a Drury Lane melodrama. On principle, he did not like clever women. Esther, it is true, was not clever, in the ordinary, tiresome sense; and her startling intuitions, in matters of acting, had not repelled him, as an exhibition of the capabilities of a woman, while they preoccupied him for a long time in that part of his brain which worked critically upon any interesting material. But nothing that she could do as an artist made the least difference to his feeling about her as a woman; his pride in her was like his pride in a play that he had written finely, and put aside; to be glanced at from time to time, with cool satisfaction. He had his own very deliberate theory of values, and one value was never allowed to interfere with another. A devoted, discreet amateur of woman, he appreciated women really for their own sakes, with an unflattering simplicity. And for a time Esther absorbed him almost wholly.
He had been quite content with their relations as they were before she fell seriously in love with him, and this new, profound feeling, which he had never even dreaded, somewhat disturbed him. She was adopting almost the attitude of a wife, and he had no ambition to play the part of a husband. The affections were always rather a strain upon him; he liked something a little less serious and a little more exciting.
Esther understood nothing that was going on in Philip Haygarth's mind, and when he began to seem colder to her, when she saw less of him, and then less, it seemed to her that she could still appeal to him by her art and still touch him by her devotion. As her warmth seemed more and more to threaten his liberty, the impulse to tug at his chain became harder to resist. His continued, unvarying interest in her acting, his patience in helping her, in working with her, kept her for some time from realising how little was left now of the more personal feeling. It was with sharp surprise, as well as with a blinding rage, that she discovered one day, beyond possibility of mistake, that she had a rival, and that Haygarth was only doling out to her the time left over from her rival.
It was an Italian, a young girl who had come over to London with an organ-grinder, and who posed for sculptors, when she could get a sitting. It was a girl who could barely read
28 and write, an insignificant creature, a peasant from the Campagna, who had nothing but her good looks and the distinction of her attitudes. Esther was beside herself with rage, jealousy, mortification; she loved, and she could not pardon. There was a scene of unmeasured violence. Haygarth was cruel, almost with intention; and they parted, Esther feeling as if her life had been broken sharply in two.
She was at the last rehearsals of a new play by Haygarth, a play in which he had tried for once to be tragic in the bare, straightforward way of the things that really happen. She went through the rehearsals absent-mindedly, repeating her words, which he had taught her how to say, but scarcely attending to their meaning. Another thought was at work behind this mechanical speech, a continual throb of remembrance, going on monotonously. Her mind was full of other words, which she heard as if an inner voice were repeating them; her mind made up pictures, which seemed to pass slowly before her eyes: Haygarth and the other woman. At the last rehearsal Quellen came round to her, and, ironically as she thought, complimented her on her performance. She meant, when the night came, not to fail: that was all.
When the night came, she said to herself that she was calm, that she would be able to concentrate herself on her acting and act just as usual. But, as she stood in the wings, waiting for her moment to appear, her eyes went straight to the eyes of the other woman, the Italian model, the organ-grinder's girl, who sat, smiling contentedly, in the front of a box, turning her head sometimes to speak to some one behind her, hidden by the curtain. She was dressed in black, with a rose in her hair: you could have taken her for a lady; she was triumphantly beautiful. Esther shuddered as if she had been struck; the blood rushed into her forehead and swelled and beat against her eyes. Then, with an immense effort, she cleared her mind of everything but the task before her. Every nerve in her body lived with a separate life as she opened the door at the back of the stage, and stood, waiting for the applause to subside, motionless under the eyes of the audience. There was something in the manner of her entrance that seemed to strike the fatal note of the play. She had never been more restrained, more effortless; she seemed scarcely to be acting; only, a magnetic current seemed to have been set in motion between her and those who were watching her. They held their breaths, as if they were assisting at a real tragedy; as if, at any moment, this acting might give place to some horrible, naked passion of mere nature. The curtain rose and rose again at the end of the first act; and she stood there, bowing gravely, in what seemed a deliberate continuation, into that interval, of the sentiment of the piece. Her dresses were taken off her and put on her, for each act, as if she had been a lay-figure. Once, in the second act, she looked up at the box; the Italian woman was smiling emptily, but Haygarth, taking no notice of her, was leaning forward with his eyes fixed on the stage. After the third act he sent to Esther's dressing-room a fervent note, begging to be allowed to see her. She had made his play, he said, and she had made herself a great actress. She crumpled the note fiercely, put it carefully into her jewel-box, and refused to see him. In the last act she had to die, after the manner of the Lady of the Camellias, waiting for the lover who, in this case, never came. The pathos of her acting
29 was almost unbearable, and, still, it seemed not like acting at all. The curtain went down on a great actress.
Esther went home stunned, only partly realising what she had done, or how she had done it. She read over the note from Haygarth, unforgivingly; and the long letter that came from him in the morning. As reflection returned, through all the confused suffering and excitement, to her deliberate, automatic nature, in which a great shock had brought about a kind of release, she realised that all she had wanted, during most of her life, had at last come about. The note had been struck, she had responded to it, as she responded to every suggestion, faultlessly; she knew that she could repeat the note, whenever she wished, now that she had once found it. There would be no variation to allow for, the actress was made at last. She might take back her lover, or never see him again, it would make no difference. It would make no difference, she repeated, over and over again, weeping uncontrollable tears.
30 From My Life (1927) By Isadora Duncan
From Chapter Eight I spent long days and nights in the studio seeking that dance which might be the divine expression of the human spirit through the medium of the body's movement. For hours I would stand quite still, my two hands folded between my breasts, covering the solar plexus. My mother often became alarmed to see me remain for such long intervals quite motionless as if in a trance—but I was seeking and finally discovered the central spring of all movement, the crater of motor power, the unity from which all diversities of movements are born, the mirror of vision for the creation of the dance—it was from this discovery that was born the theory on which I founded my school. The ballet school taught the pupils that this spring was found in the centre of the back at the base of the spine. From this axis, says the ballet master, arms, legs and trunk must move freely, giving the result of an articulated puppet. This method produces an artificial mechanical movement not worthy of the soul. I on the contrary sought the source of the spiritual expression to flow into the channels of the body filling it with vibrating light—the centrifugal force reflecting the spirit's vision. After many months, when I had learned to concentrate all my force to this one Centre I found that thereafter when I listened to music the rays and vibrations of the music streamed to this one fount of light within me— there they reflected themselves in Spiritual Vision not the brain's mirror, but the soul's, and from this vision I could express them in Dance—I have often tried to explain to artists this first basic theory of my Art. Stanislavski mentions my telling him of this in his book: "My Life in Art."
It would seem as if it were a very difficult thing to explain in words, but when I stood before my class of even the smallest and poorest children and said: "Listen to the music with your soul. Now, while listening, do you not feel an inner self awakening deep within you—that it is by its strength that your head is lifted, that your arms are raised, that you are walking slowly toward the light?" they understood. This awakening is the first step in the dance, as I conceive it.
Even the youngest child understands; from then on, even in walking, and in all their movements, they possess a spiritual power and grace which do not exist in any movement born from the physical frame, or created from the brain. This is the reason why quite small children in my school appearing in the Trocadero or the Metropolitan Opera House before vast audiences have been enabled to hold those audiences with a magnetism generally possessed only by very great artists. But when these children grew older the counteracting influences of our materialistic civilisation took this force from them—and they lost their inspiration.
The peculiar environment of my childhood and youth had developed this power in me to a very great degree, and in different epochs of my life I have been enabled to shut out all
31 outside influences and to live in this force alone. So, after my rather pathetic efforts to gain earthly love, I had a sudden revulsion and return to this force.
Hereafter when André presented himself somewhat timidly and apologetically I deluged him for hours with my discourses on the Art of the Dance and a new school of human movement, and I must say that he never seemed bored or tired but would listen with the sweetest patience and sympathy while I explained to him each movement I had discovered. I also then dreamed of finding a first movement from which would be born a series of movements without my volition, but as the unconscious reaction of the primary movement. I had developed this movement in a series of different variations on several themes,—such as the first movement of fear followed by the natural reactions born of the primary emotion or Sorrow from which would flow a dance of lamentation or a love movement from the unfolding of which like the petals of a flower the dancer would stream as a perfume.
These dances were without actual music, but seemed to create themselves from the rhythm of some invisible music. From these studies I first attempted to express the preludes of Chopin. I was also initiated to the music of Gluck. My mother was never wearied of playing for me, and would repeat the entire score of "Orpheus" over and over until dawn appeared in the studio window.
That window was high, covering the entire ceiling and curtainless—so that always looking up she saw the sky, the stars, the moon—though sometimes the rain pelted down and little trickles of water fell to the floor, for top studio windows are seldom rainproof— also in winter the studio was dreadfully cold and full of drafts, and in summer we baked—and as there was only one room it was not always convenient for our different occupations. But the elasticity of youth defies discomfort, and my mother was an angel of self-effacement and abnegation, only desiring to be helpful to my work. At that time the Countess Greffuhle was the reigning Society Queen. I received an invitation to dance in her drawing-room, where a fashionable throng was gathered, including all the celebrities of Paris Society. The Countess hailed me as a renaissance of Greek Art, but she Was rather under the influence of the "Aphrodite" of Pierre Louys and his "Chanson de Bilitis," whereas I had the expression of a Doric column and the Parthenon pediments as seen in the cold light of the British Museum.
The Countess had erected in her drawing-room a small stage backed with a lattice, and in each opening of the lattice work was placed a red rose. This background of red roses did not at all suit the simplicity of my tunic or the religious expression of my dance, for, at this epoch, although I had read Pierre Louys and the "Chanson de Bilitis," the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid and the songs of Sappho, the sensual meaning of these readings had entirely escaped me, which proves that there is no necessity to censor the literature of the young. What one has not experienced, one will never understand in print.
32 I was still a product of American puritanism—whether due to the blood of my pioneer grandfather and grandmother, who crossed the Plains in a covered wagon in '49, cutting their road through virgin forests over the Rocky Mountains and across the burning plains, sternly keeping off or battling with the hordes of hostile Indians, or my Scottish blood on my father's side, or whatever it was—the land of America had fashioned me as it does most of its youth,—a Puritan, a mystic and a striver after the heroic expression rather than any sensual expression whatever, and I believe that most American artists are of the same mould. Walt Whitman, in spite of the fact that his writings were once prohibited and classed as undesirable literature, and in spite of his frequent proclaiming of the joys of the body, is at heart a Puritan and so are most of our writers, sculptors and painters.
Is it the great, rough land of America, or the broad open wind-swept spaces, or the shadow of Abraham Lincoln that looms over all, as compared to French sensual art? One might say that the American trend of education is to reduce the senses almost to nil. The real American is not a gold chaser or money lover, as the legend classes him, but an idealist and a mystic. Not that I mean for a moment to say that the American is without senses. On the contrary, the Anglo-Saxon in general, or the American with some Celtic blood is, when it comes to the crucial moment, more fiery than the Italian, more sensuous than the French, more capable of desperate excesses than are the Russians. But the habit of early training has enclosed his temperament in a wall of iron, frosted over, and these things only come to pass when some extraordinary incident of life breaks through his reserve. Then one might say that the Anglo-Saxon or Celt is of all the nations the most fiery lover. I have known such characters who go to bed with two suits of pyjamas: one silk, for softness near the skin and one woollen for warmth, with the Times, the Lancet, and a briar pipe, turn suddenly into satyrs such as would leave the Greeks behind, breaking into such a volcano of passion as would frighten an Italian for a week!
Therefore, that evening at the Countess Greffuhle's house, in an overcrowded salon full of marvellously dressed and bejewelled women, stifled by the perfume of the thousands of red roses, and stared at by a front row of jeunesse dorée, whose noses just reached the end of the stage and were almost brushed by my dancing toes, I was extremely unhappy and felt it was all a failure; but the next morning I received from the Countess a gracious little note, thanking me and telling me to call at the concierge's lodge for the cachet. I did not like having to call at the lodge, for I was over-sensitive about money, but the sum, after all, paid the rent of the studio.
Much pleasanter was an evening at the studio of the famous Madame Madeleine Lemaire, where I danced to the music of Orphée, and saw among the spectators, for the first time, the inspired face of the Sappho of France, the Comtesse de Noailles. Jean Lorrain was also present and described his impressions in the Journal.
In addition to the two greatest sources of our joy, the Louvre and the National Library, I now discovered a third: the charming library of the Opéra. The librarian took an affectionate interest in my researches and placed at my disposal every work ever written
33 on dancing, and also all the books on Greek music and Theatre art. I applied myself to the task of reading everything that had ever been written on the Art of Dancing, from the earliest Egyptians to the present day, and I made special notes of all I read in a copy- book; but when I had finished this colossal experiment, I realised that the only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau ("Emile"), Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.
One dark afternoon there was a knock at the studio door. A woman stood there. She was of such imposing stature and such powerful personality that her entrance seemed to be announced by one of those Wagnerian motifs, deep and strong, and bearing portents of coming events and, indeed, the motif then announced has run through my life ever since, bringing in its vibrations stormy, tragic happenings.
"I am the Princess de Polignac," she said, "a friend of the Countess Greffuhle. When I saw you dance your art interested me, and particularly my husband, who is a composer."
She had a handsome face, somewhat marred by a too heavy and protruding lower jaw and a masterful chin. It might have been the face of a Roman Emperor, except that an expression of cold aloofness protected the otherwise voluptuous promise of her eyes and features. When she spoke, her voice had also a hard, metallic twang which was mystifying as coming from her, whom one would have expected to have richer, deeper tones. I afterwards divined that these cold looks and the tone of her voice were really a mask to hide, in spite of her princely position, a condition of extreme and sensitive shyness. I spoke to her of my Art and my hopes, and the Princess at once offered to arrange a concert for me in her studio. She painted, and was also a fine musician, playing both the piano and the organ. The Princess seemed to sense the poverty of our bare, cold studio and our pinched looks, for, when abruptly leaving, she shyly placed an envelope on the table, in which we found two thousand francs.
I believe such acts as these are habitual with Madame de Polignac, in spite of her reputation of being rather cold and unsympathetic.
The next afternoon I went to her home, where I met the Prince de Polignac, a fine musician of considerable talent; an exquisite, slight gentleman, who always wore a little black velvet cap, which framed his delicate, beautiful face. I donned my tunic and danced for him in his music-room, and he was enraptured. He hailed me as a vision and a dream for which he had long waited. My theory of the relation of movement to sounds interested him deeply, as did all my hopes and ideals for the renaissance of the dance as an Art. He played for me delightfully on a charming old harpsichord, which he loved and caressed with his finely tapering fingers. I felt at once for him the warmth of appreciation, and when he finally exclaimed, "Quelle adorable enfant. Isadora, comme tu es adorable," I replied shyly, "Moi, aussi, je vous adore. Je voudrais bien danser toujours pour vous, et composer des danses réligieuses inspirées par votre belle musique."
34 And then we envisaged a collaboration. Alas, what a despairing waste there is on this earth. The hope of a collaboration, which would have been so precious to me, was soon afterwards cut short by his death.
The concert in the studio of the Princess was a great success and, as she had the generous idea of opening her studio to the public, and not limiting the audience to her personal friends, there followed a more general interest in my work. After this we also arranged a series of subscription concerts in our studio, which held an audience of twenty or thirty. The Prince and Princess de Polignac came to all these concerts, and I remember once, in his admiration, the Prince took off his little velvet cap and waved it in the air, crying "Vive Isadora."
Eugène Carrière and his family also came to those concerts and once Carrière did me the great honour of pronouncing a short discourse on the Dance. Among other things he said:
"Isadora, in her desire to express human sentiments, found in Greek art the finest models. Full of admiration for the beautiful bas-relief figures, she was inspired by them. Yet, endowed with an instinct for discovery, she returned to Nature, whence came all these gestures, and, believing in imitating and revivifying the Greek dance, she found her own expression. She thinks of the Greeks, and only obeys her own self. It is her own joy and her own grief which she offers us. Her forgetfulness of the moment and her search for happiness are her own desires. In recounting them to us so well, she invokes ours. Before the Greek works, revived for an instant for us, we are young with her, a new hope triumphs in us; and, when she expresses her submission to the inevitable, we, too, resign ourselves with her.
"The dance of Isadora Duncan is no longer a 'divertissement,' it is a personal manifestation, as a work of art more living, perhaps, and as fecund in inciting us to works for which we ourselves are destined."
Source: Project Gutenberg https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/duncani-mylife/duncani-mylife- 00-h-dir/duncani-mylife-00-h.html
35 “Art and Isadora” in The Big Money (1933) By John Dos Passos
In San Francisco in eighteen seventyeight Mrs. Isadora O’Gorman Duncan, a highspirited lady with a taste for the piano, set about divorcing her husband, the prominent Mr. Duncan, whose behavior we are led to believe had been grossly indelicate; the whole thing made her so nervous that she declared to her children that she couldn’t keep anything on her stomach but a little champagne and oysters; in the middle of the bitterness and recriminations of the family row, into a world of gaslit boardinghouses kept by ruined southern belles and railroadmagnates and swinging doors and whiskery men nibbling cloves to hide the whiskey on their breaths and brass spittoons and fourwheel cabs and basques and bustles and long ruffled trailing skirts (in which lecturehall and concertroom, under the domination of ladies of culture, were the centers of aspiring life) she bore a daughter whom she named after herself Isadora. The break with Mr. Duncan and the discovery of his duplicity turned Mrs. Duncan into a bigoted feminist and an atheist, a passionate follower of Bob Ingersoll’s lectures and writings; for God read Nature; for duty beauty, and only man is vile. Mrs. Duncan had a hard struggle to raise her children in the love of beauty and the hatred of corsets and conventions and manmade laws. She gave pianolessons, she did embroidery and knitted scarves and mittens. [end 121] The Duncans were always in debt. The rent was always due.
Isadora’s earliest memories were of wheedling grocers and butchers and landlords and selling little things her mother had made from door to door, helping hand valises out of back windows when they had to jump their bills at one shabbygenteel boardinghouse after another in the outskirts of Oakland and San Francisco. The little Duncans and their mother were a clan; it was the Duncans against a rude and sordid world. The Duncans weren’t Catholics any more or Presbyterians or Quakers or Baptists; they were Artists.
When the children were quite young they managed to stir up interest among their neighbors by giving theatrical performances in a barn; the older girl Elizabeth gave lessons in society dancing; they were westerners, the world was a goldrush; they weren’t ashamed of being in the public eye. Isadora had green eyes and reddish hair and a beautiful neck and arms. She couldn’t afford lessons in conventional dancing, so she made up dances of her own. They moved to Chicago, Isadora got a job dancing to The Washington Post at the Masonic Temple Roof Garden for fifty a week. She danced at clubs. She went to see Augustin Daly and told him she’d discovered the Dance
36 and went on in New York as a fairy in cheesecloth in a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream with Ada Rehan.
The family followed her to New York. They rented a big room in Carnegie Hall, put mattresses in the corners, hung drapes on the wall and invented the first Greenwich Village studio. They were never more than one jump ahead of the sheriff, they were always wheedling the tradespeople out of bills, standing the landlady up for the rent, coaxing handouts out of rich philistines. Isadora arranged recitals with Ethelbert Nevin danced to readings of Omar Khayyam for society women at [end 122] Newport. When the Hotel Windsor burned they lost all their trunks and the very long bill they owed and sailed for London on a cattleboat to escape the materialism of their native America.
In London at the British Museum they discovered the Greeks; the Dance was Greek. Under the smoky chimneypots of London, in the soot-coated squares they danced in muslin tunics, they copied poses from Greek vases, went to lectures, artgalleries, concerts, plays, sopped up in a winter fifty years of Victorian culture. Back to the Greeks.
Whenever they were put out of their lodgings for nonpayment of rent Isadora led them to the best hotel and engaged a suite and sent the waiters scurrying for lobster and champagne and fruits outofseason; nothing was too good for Artists, Duncans, Greeks; and the nineties London liked her gall. In Kensington and even in Mayfair she danced at parties in private houses, the Britishers, Prince Edward down, were carried away by her preraphaelite beauty her lusty American innocence her California accent.
After London, Paris during the great exposition of nineteen hundred. She danced with Loïe Fuller. She was still a virgin too shy to return the advances of Rodin the great master, completely baffled by the extraordinary behavior of Loïe Fuller’s circle of crackbrained invert beauties. The Duncans were vegetarians, suspicious of vulgarity and men and materialism. Raymond made them all sandals. Isadora and her mother and her brother Raymond went about Europe in sandals and fillets and Greek tunics staying at the best hotels leading the Greek life of nature in a flutter of unpaid bills.
Isadora’s first solo recital was at a theater in Budapest;
37 after that she was the diva, had a loveaffair with a leading actor [end 123]; in Munich the students took the horses out of her carriage. Everything was flowers and handclapping and champagne suppers. In Berlin she was the rage. With the money she made on her German tour she took the Duncans all to Greece. They arrived on a fishingboat from Ithaca. They posed in the Parthenon for photographs and danced in the Theater of Dionysus and trained a crowd of urchins to sing the ancient chorus from the Suppliants and built a temple to live in on a hill overlooking the ruins of ancient Athens, but there was no water on the hill and their money ran out before the temple was finished so they had to stay at the Hôtel d’Angleterre and run up a bill there. When credit gave out they took their chorus back to Berlin and put on the Suppliants in ancient Greek. Meeting Isadora in her peplum marching through the Tiergarten at the head of her Greek boys marching in order all in Greek tunics, the kaiserin’s horse shied, and her highness was thrown.
Isadora was the vogue. She arrived in St. Petersburg in time to see the night funeral of the marchers shot down in front of the Winter Palace in 1905. It hurt her. She was an American like Walt Whitman; the murdering rulers of the world were not her people; the marchers were her people; artists were not on the side of the machineguns; she was an American in a Greek tunic; she was for the people. In St. Petersburg, still under the spell of the eighteenthcentury ballet of the court of the Sunking, her dancing was considered dangerous by the authorities. In Germany she founded a school with the help of her sister Elizabeth who did the organizing, and she had a baby by Gordon Craig. She went to America in triumph as she’d always planned and harried the home philistines with a tour; her followers were all the time getting pinched for wearing Greek tunics; she found no freedom for Art in America.
Back in Paris it was the top of the world; Art meant Isadora. At the funeral of the Prince de Polignac she met the mythical millionaire (sewingmachine king) who was to be her backer and to finance [end 124] her school. She went off with him in his yacht (whatever Isadora did was Art) to dance in the Temple at Paestum only for him, but it rained and the musicians all got drenched. So they all got drunk instead. Art was the millionaire life. Art was whatever Isadora did. She was carrying the millionaire’s child to the great scandal of the oldlady clubwomen and spinster artlovers when she danced on her second American tour; she took to drinking too much and stepping to the footlights and bawling out the boxholders.
38 Isadora was at the height of glory and scandal and power and wealth, her school going, her millionaire was about to build her a theater in Paris, the Duncans were the priests of a cult, (Art was whatever Isadora did), when the car that was bringing her two children home from the other side of Paris stalled on a bridge across the Seine. Forgetting that he’d left the car in gear the chauffeur got out to crank the motor. The car started, knocked down the chauffeur, plunged off the bridge into the Seine. The children and their nurse were drowned.
The rest of her life moved desperately on in the clatter of scandalized tongues, among the kidding faces of reporters, the threatening of bailiffs, the expostulations of hotelmanagers bringing overdue bills. Isadora drank too much, she couldn’t keep her hands off good-looking young men, she dyed her hair various shades of brightred, she never took the trouble to make up her face properly, was careless about her dress, couldn’t bother to keep her figure in shape, never could keep track of her money but a great sense of health filled the hall when the pearshaped figure with the beautiful great arms tramped forward slowly from the back of the stage. She was afraid of nothing; she was a great dancer. ***[end 125]
In her own city of San Francisco the politicians wouldn’t let her dance in the Greek Theater they’d built under her influence. Wherever she went she gave offense to the philistines. When the war broke out she danced the Marseillaise, but it didn’t seem quite respectable and she gave offense by refusing to give up Wagner or to show the proper respectable feelings of satisfaction at the butchery.
On her South American tour she picked up men everywhere, a Spanish painter, a couple of prizefighters, a stoker on the boat, a Brazilian poet, brawled in tangohalls, bawled out the Argentines for niggers from the footlights, lushly triumphed in Montevideo and Brazil; but if she had money she couldn’t help scandalously spending it on tangodancers, handouts, afterthetheater suppers, the generous gesture, no, all on my bill. The managers gypped her. She was afraid of nothing, never ashamed in the public eye of the clatter of scandalized tongues, the headlines in the afternoon papers.
When October split the husk off the old world she remembered St. Petersburg, the coffins lurching through the silent streets, the white faces, the clenched fists that night in St. Petersburg, and danced the Marche Slave
39 and waved red cheesecloth under the noses of the Boston old ladies in Symphony Hall, but when she went to Russia full of hope of a school and work and a new life in freedom, it was too enormous, it was too difficult: cold, vodka, lice, no service in the hotels, new and old still piled pellmell together, seedbed and scrapheap, she hadn’t the patience, her life had been too easy; she picked up a yellowhaired poet and brought him back to Europe and the grand hotels. Yessenin smashed up a whole floor of the Adlon in Berlin in one drunken party, he ruined a suite at the Continental in Paris. When he went back to Russia he killed himself. It was too enormous, it was too difficult. ***[end 126]
When it was impossible to raise any more money for Art, for the crowds eating and drinking in the hotel suites and the rent of Rolls-Royces and the board of her pupils and disciples, Isadora went down to the Riviera to write her memoirs to scrape up some cash out of the American public that had awakened after the war to the crassness of materialism and the Greeks and scandal and Art, and still had dollars to spend. She hired a studio in Nice, but she could never pay the rent. She’d quarreled with her millionaire. Her jewels, the famous emerald, the ermine cloak, the works of art presented by the artists had all gone into the pawnshops or been seized by hotelkeepers. All she had was the old blue drapes that had seen her great triumphs, a redleather handbag, and an old furcoat that was split down the back. She couldn’t stop drinking or putting her arms round the neck of the nearest young man, if she got any cash she threw a party or gave it away. She tried to drown herself but an English naval officer pulled her out of the moonlit Mediterranean.
One day at a little restaurant at Golfe Juan she picked up a goodlooking young wop who kept a garage and drove a little Bugatti racer. Saying that she might want to buy the car, she made him go to her studio to take her out for a ride; her friends didn’t want her to go, said he was nothing but a mechanic, she insisted, she’d had a few drinks (there was nothing left she cared for in the world but a few drinks and a goodlooking young man); she got in beside him and she threw her heavilyfringed scarf round her neck with a big sweep she had and turned back and said, with the strong California accent her French never lost: Adieu, mes amis, je vais à la gloire. The mechanic put his car in gear and started.
40 The heavy trailing scarf caught in a wheel, wound tight. Her head was wrenched against the side of the car. The car stopped instantly; her neck was broken, her nose crushed, Isadora was dead. [end 127]
Source: Dos Passos, John. The Big Money. Houghton Mifflin, 1933.
41