DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV
49
situation thus in
The Dance of Life
(1923):
"If
it is significant
that Descartes appeared a few years after the death of Malherbe,
it is equally significant that Einstein was immediately preceded
by the Russian Ballet."
Ellis makes Diaghilev
<Ii
John the Baptist of a "classico–
mathematical Renaissance," and the notion that
this
was a
renaissance of some kind or other was evidently in the air. How–
ever, such credit as is due to its heralds should not all be awarded
to the Russian ballet. There was, obviously, Isadora Duncan;
she was powerfully associated with poetry and specifically with
Symbolist poetry (she married Yesenin and was called a "Sym–
bolist dancer") as well as with Gordon Craig; and she was the
mother of Modem Dance, a movement which has produced an
enormous quantity of theory, mostly of a sort that makes it con–
genial to Mrs. L3illger. But Isadora doesn't take us to the root of
the matter. Where, for my purposes, that lies, I can perhaps sug–
gest in this way: what Camille Mauclair said of Diaghilev was
somewhat disloyally said, for he had used almost the same words
years before of the American dancer Loie Fuller.
Art,
he de–
clared, was one homogeneous essence lying at the root of the
diversified arts, not a fusion of them; and Loie Fuller was it, "a
spectacle ... which defies all definition.... Art, nameless, ra-
diant ... a homogeneous and complete place ... indefinable,
absolute ... a fire above all dogmas." The language is Mallar-
mean; as we shall see, it was all but impossible to write of Loie
Fuller otherwise, unless you were very naive. Still, not even Mal–
larme could start a renaissance single-handed, and there has to
be
a word or two here about whatever it was th<lit predisposed
everybody to get excited in this particular way about dancers.
The peculiar prestige of dancing over the past seventy or
eighty years has, I
think,
much to do with the notion that it
somehow represents art in an undissociated and unspecialized
form-a notion made explicit by Yeats and hinted at by Valery
in
his remark,
"If
Aesthetic could materialise, the arts would
vanish before her." The notion is essentially primitivist; it de-
