54
FRANK KERMODE
historian of the time. Toulouse-Lautrec, who was not interested
in these matters, had an English
savant
thrown out of a dance–
hall for plaguing
him
about antiquity; this could have been
Mead but not necessarily. At a time when it was relatively easy
for a dancer to acquire a reputation for learning, Loie Fuller was
said on high authority (Anatole France) to be wise in the history
of dancing; she took as her prototype Miriam, who, according to
Philo, as quoted by Mead, symbolizes perfect sense, as Moses
symbolizes perfect mind.
The presence of the
savant
in the
bal
tells us something
about the seriousness with which music-hall dancing was taken
on both sides of the Channel. From Symons and the Goncourts
one knows that it was so; and of course this was a period of close
relations between London and Paris. Yvette Guilbert often ap–
peared in London, Marie Lloyd in Paris; it was fashionable to
treat them both as very great artists. This cult of the music haJl
has been persistent; there is a classic expression of it in Mr.
Eliot's essay on Marie Lloyd (1923), and it still goes on in a
London which has only one or two feeble survivors, constantly
threatened with demolition. Nothing distresses some English in–
tellectuals more than the closing of a music hall. This attitude is
a weak descendant of a positive avant-garde reaction against
commercial theater in the Nineties; failing dance-drama or iiber–
marionettes, there were still Marie Lloyd and Little Tich, defy–
ing cultural and social division, freely satirical, speaking with the
voice of the belly. You could talk of Yvette Guilbert, who, ac–
cording to Andre Raffalovitch, sang "the sufferings of those the
world calls vile," in the same breath as the Duse.
The Parisian music halls were certainly not short of a simi–
lar intellectual
reclame,
and had their place, as part of the metro–
politan experience, with all the other amusements devised for an
elite that took its pleasures seriously-fine clothes, Japanese
prints, neurasthenia. They are as important in the early history
of modern art as folk-music and primitive painting, with which
