DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV
69
The Fire Dance had
all
the qualities Yeats asked of the art, for
not only was the dancer unconsumed, but she also wore the ob–
ligatory enigmatic smile. "From this flame which does not
bum," says Menil
in
his
Histoire de la Danse
(1904), "there
leaps, between two volutes of light, the head of a woman wearing
an enigmatic smile." Menil, as it happens, goes on-as Jourdain
did-to question whether all this trickery of silk and electric
light was really dancing at all, and he wonders how, from the
vulgarity of the cheap glare and waving skirt there could come
this hashish-like experience.
Other dances were greeted with equal rapture. Georges
Rodenbach draws widely on Fuller's repertoire in his poem "La
Loie Fuller," first published in
Figaro
in May, 1896, and warmly
praised by Mallarme. Everything in Rodenbach's poem conspires
to bring Fuller's performance into the position of an emblem of
the Image of art, "self-begotten" in Yeats's favorite word, or like
the body of.a woman, yet not in any natural sense alive
(prodige
d'irreel)
,
enigmatic, having the power of election. The darkness
of the stage at the end of the performance is the natural darkness
of the modem soul, which only the Image, hardly come by and
evanescent, can illuminate: "the embrace of eternity lasts us only
a short moment." More completely than any other dancer before
her, Loie Fuller seemed to represent in visible form the incom–
prehensible Image of art
in
the modem world,
5
as Mauclair said,
"The Symbol of Art itself, a fire above all dogmas." And she re–
mains the dancer of Symbolism, from Mallarme to Yeats; a
woman, yet totally impersonal, "dead, yet flesh and bone";
upoeme degage de tout appareil du scribe."
"Thanks to her," said
Roger Marx, "the dance has once more become the 'poem with–
out words' of Simonides ... above all one
is
grateful to her for
giving substance to that ideal spectacle of which Mallarme once
dreamed-a mute spectacle, which escaped the limits of space
5. I ought to say that this passage will make more sense to anybody who
has
read my
Romantic Image (1957) .
