DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV
55
indeed they are obviously associated. Our received idea of this
world owes more to Toulouse-Lautrec than anybody else, and
there is no reason to think it very inaccurate. The circus, the
vaudeville, the
bal,
were serious pleasures; the primitive, the
ugly, the exotic were in demand. The brutal patter of Aristide
Bruant, La Goulue coarsely cheeking the Prince of Wales, the
emaciated and psychopathic May Belfort, the cherished ugliness
of Mme. Abdala: all are characteristic. The mood is that of the
violent Lautrec drawings of Guilbert and Jane Avril, of dancers
calling themselves Grille d'Egout or La Goulue, of cafe-concerts
named Le Divan Japonais and prostitutes with such noms de
guerre as Outamoro. In this atmosphere
all
the dancers I am
concerned with did their work, and were treated very seriously.
Of a good many of them it was enough to say, as Symons
did in his excited lines on Nini Patte-en-l'air, that they possessed
The art of knowing how to be
Part lewd, aesthetical in part,
And fin-de-siecle essentially.
Symons was one of those Englishmen whose solemn Parisian
pleasures were the admiration of Lautrec- Conder, the strangest
of them, he often drew, superbly drunk in his fine evening
clothes. But Symons was building an aesthetic in which dancing
was to have a central place- the climactic essay is called "The
World as Ballet"-and so his interest was slightly different from
the painter's. Lautrec was equally absorbed by La Goulue and
Jane Avril; but for Symons the former, a Messalina who wore
her heart embroidered on the bottom of her knickers, was less
important than the latter, who demonstrated that the female
body was "Earth's most eloquent Music, divinest human har–
mony."
Sometime in the Thirties a French exhibition, devoted to
life under the Third Republic, showed Jane Avril and Loie
