DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV
71
against this view that the dance took over in his mind some of
the importance of music; for syntax is the purposeful movement
of language and such movement has, in either art, to be assimi–
lated to the necessarily autonomous condition of the Image. The
dance is more perfectly devoid of ideas, less hampered by its
means, than poetry, since it has not the strong antipathy of lan–
guage toward illogic; yet it is not absolutely pure; the dancer is
not inhuman. Mallarme deals with precisely this point in the
opening article of
Crayonne au The/itre
(before 1887), when
he discusses the ambiguous position of the dancer, half-imper–
sonal, very like the position of the poet ("the pure work requires
that the poet vanish from the utterance" in so far as he can).
But Fuller was more purely emptied of personality: an appari–
tion, a vision of eternity for Rodenbach; for Mallarme
"['incor–
poration visuelle de ['idee."
If
it seemed necessary, as it did, for poets to reclaim their
property from music, the dance provided something more exactly
fitted as an emblem of what was aspired to; and in a sense
Fuller stands for the liberation of Symbolist poetic from Wagner.
She is much more properly the Symbolist dancer than any ortho–
dox ballerina; and there is a clear discontinuity between the
general admiration for dancers, of French poets earlier than
Mallarme and his praise of Fuller. In Baudelaire the human and
palpable element counts for much; in Gautier also. But in the
new age, the age of Ma:llarme and Yeats, what matters is that
the dancer "is not a woman"; that she is "dead, yet flesh and
bone." The difference constitutes a shift in the whole climate of
poetry, represented by the shift in English poetics from Symons
to Pound, from Symbolism as primarily an elaborate system of
suggestion, of naming by not naming, to the dynamism of the
Vortex and the Ideogram. For Fuller is a kind of Ideogram:
"l'incorporation visuelle de ['idee,"
a spectacle defying all defini–
tion, radiant, homogeneous.
Such, at any rate, was the way those people saw Fuller who
saw her with eyes opened to dance as a
majestueuse auverture
