Isadora Duncan’s Misfortune

Margaret C. Anderson

It is impossible to write about the art of Isadora Duncan. She has no connection with that mysterious phenomenon.

Now, please, all you people who put us down as æsthetes or shallow cultists or youth rebelling for the sake of sensation, or tiresome upholders of art “principles,” or sapless supporters of art as a “hole and corner” affair—please for a moment, just listen. If you get enraged with the censorship of the vicious Mr. Sumner every one knows it is not because you wish to flaunt your theories of good literature to the heavens for the want of something better to do. Very well. Grant me the same sincerity. And grant me also another thing: that I may possibly have something true to say.

I have waited five years to see Isadora Duncan. I went to the Metropolitan expecting to see the Dionysian, “the feet of the Centaur trampling the stage,” etc. I expected inspiration in a form that you are lucky enough to experience a very few times in your life. Everybody had talked to me this way about Isadora Duncan; every poet, painter, sculptor and musician, every radical I know, had said, “She has real greatness.” Well, this is what I saw:

Isadora Duncan ran and jumped and skipped and stamped and swooned about the stage, dragging with her a body that was never meant to move in rhythmic line, turning music into stories of war and religion, illustrating the stories with obvious gesticulations toward the heavens or maudlin manoeuverings towards the grave, using the same gestures for the sweetness of Schubert as for the sacraments of César Franck, moving always inside the music, never dominating it, never even controlling it, never holding or pushing it to an authentic end. In all my life I have never felt such disappointment or such a weary knowledge of the public’s predilection for what is truly bad. It didn’t occur to me to conceal these ideas. I tried to explain what was wrong. I used Isadora Duncan as the best example I knew of the differentiation between the artist and the pseudo-artist. I tried to show how her conception of Art was identical with only one other conception in the world: the dream of the adolescent brain: that to feel greatly is to make Art and to put your passion and your anguish into expression is to create. Isadora felt a great deal. She shook her head and arms in such a fury of feeling that she appeared to be strangling; and when there was no way of reaching a further intensification she shook her whole body in a kind of spasm of human inability to bear the grief of the world. And every move was a futile and pitiable one because never once did her body become that mould through which a design is to shape its course and flow into its ultimate form. If the music made a wide swinging curve she made a cramped sudden curve; if it made a descending line she interpreted that, for some mysterious reason, by reverently clutching her abdomen and looking to God.

“Oh,” they say, “you are talking about technique.”

No, no, no! I am not talking about technique. I am almost never talking technique.

Yvette Guilbert has so little voice that she couldn’t sustain the singing of a single song through with beauty—as we commonly speak of beauty. Yet every time she moves her hand or turns her bird-like head or throws that voice into the creation of her design she shows herself an artist in the one real sense of the word. Is that a matter of technique? Cezanne studied light until he was able to paint objects as though they were reflected in a kind of eternal light. Is that merely technique? Harold Bauer studied sound until he has made the technique of the older pianists sound not like an end, nor even like a means to an end, but merely like a lack of full vision. What do you call that? James Joyce writes a novel in which a new kind of literary architecture is achieved not by his following of but by his departure from what has been established as the technique of good writing. What do you call that?

“Well, then,” says Mr. John Cowper Powys, when we argue all this, “you are at fault. Whenever you allow any theory of art to interfere with your enjoyment you are doing a silly thing.” But why should it occur to you that I am doing that? Is it the obtrudance of an obstinate art theory that makes you acclaim the poetry of Byron quite second-rate poetry compared to that of Shelley or Keats? You would not say that your esoteric art principles interfered with your enjoyment of Mr. Kipling, but that Mr. Kipling interfered with your enjoyment of what might have been his art. Isadora herself interferes with the possibility of any æsthetic experience out of her dancing. What she does is to inspire the mob with the only kind of feeling the mob is ever inspired with. If you were much moved by what she suggested to you—“the trampling feet of the Centaur, the look in her face as though she could drink blood”—why not realize that you can feel those things, if you feel like it, in the performance of the cheapest amateur.

Almost no expression of the arts is too decadent to give you such reactions. But that is no criterion of Art. In fact the more of those feelings you have the more you will know that what you are viewing is not Art. Because in the presence of the latter you feel almost nothing, you imagine nothing, you are like a being in vacuo, “your mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal.” So you are talking only of what Isadora made you feel, not what Isadora made. And the best—perhaps the only—test for Art is that your emotion is focused on the forms in the picture, not sidetracked to what those forms suggest to you or inform you of—as in descriptive painting or any other bad expression. Clive Bell has said all this and said it more than lucidly. Why should I be repeating it? You all believe it, and all your shrines are built to this one miracle.

So you must not insist to us that Isadora Duncan is an artist. This generation can’t be fed on any such stuff. We are tired of that kind of loose valuation. We all know and share the debt the world owes Isadora Duncan, and which the Russian Ballet acknowledged and put to a use she herself could not do. But you should not force us into a position where it positively takes courage to stand up for those values which you yourselves believe in. Isadora Duncan, as you will know after seeing her once, is a woman of small intelligence, a monument of undirected adolescent vision, an ingrained sentimentalist. The spectacle of her dancing draped in an American flag is bad enough; but her unconsciousness of how emotion must be transmuted through a significant medium is to me far more sad.

A soft liquid joy flowed through the words where the soft loud vowels hurtled noiselessly and fell away, lapping and flowing back and ever shaking the white bells of their waves in mute chime and mute peal and soft swooning cry; and he felt that the augury he had sought in the wheeling darting birds and in the pale space of sky above him had come forth from his heart like a bird from a turret quietly and swiftly....

Darkness was falling.... A trembling joy, lambent as a faint light, played like a fairy host around him. But why? Her passage through the darkening air or the verse with its black vowels and its opening sound, rich and lutelike?—From James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man”.