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FRANK KERMODE
on a reality beyond flux. They saw in her
«Ia voyante de I'in–
jini."
When Diaghilev came, defying the
genres,
overwhelming
the senses with music and color and movement, one or two
people perhaps remembered her as having been the first to do it.
I am convinced that Valery did. Again and again he returns to
the dance as a satisfactory emblem of a desirable poetry. It best
illustrates what he calls non-usage-"the
not
saying 'it is rain–
ing' ": this is the language of poetry; and movement which is
not instrumental, having no end outside itself, is the language of
dancing. "Poetry, like dancing, is action without an end." As the
dancer makes an image of art out of the quotidian motions of
her body, so the poet must from language "draw a pure, ideal
Voice, capable of communicating without weakness, without ap–
parent effort, without offense to the ear, and without breaking
the ephemeral sphere of the poetic universe, an idea of some
Self miraculously superior to Myself." The Dance makes of an
activity of the body-sweat, straining muscle, heaving chest–
an idea, a diagram of a high reality. Valery called
his
dialogue,
DAme et la Danse,
of 1921, "a sort of ballet of which the Image
and the Idea are Coryphaeus in turn." The dialogue embodies in
language of refined wit and gaudy elegance the essence of our
post-Wagnerian aesthetic. Athikte, the central figure, is usually
thought of as a conventional ballet dancer; and she does dance
on her points. But, as Levinson said in his pamphlet on the dia–
logue
(Paul Valery, poete de Ia danse,
1927) the
tourbillon,
her
ecstatic finale, is not merely a ballet step, it is the whirling of a
mystic's dance. Though Valery collected ballet photographs, they
were of a special sort,
chronophotographies;
the plates were ex–
posed in darkness, the dancers carrying lights; and the result was
a whirl of white lines, a record of the pattern of aimless poetical
acts. In any case, we need not suppose him so devoted to the
ballet as to have forgotten Loie Fuller. He was on the point of
refusing the invitation to write the dance dialogue because he
"considered ... that Mallarme had exhausted the subject" and
undertook it finally with the resolve that he would make Mal-
