—PART TWO—
I. A war ballet: framing and rhetoric
In 1915, Vernon Lee released her polemical Ballet of the Nations in an ornately annotated transcription in my appendices. The illustrated monograph has been scanned for free online reading here: https://archive.org/details/balletofnationsp00leev. Quoted material from Lee’s
Ballet of the Nations will not be cited further in this chapter; please see appendix for the full text.
159 Laurel Harris, “Aestheticizing Politics and Politicizing Art: The ‘Magic Apparatus’ of Cinema in Vernon Lee’s Satan the Waster” The Space Between, 8:1 (2012), p. 1.
160 See the 1920 Times Literary Supplement review cited later in this chapter, for example.
illustrated monograph with London publishers Chatto & Windus.161 The protagonist in Lee’s ballet, Satan, is introduced as the “lessee” and “Immortal Impresario” of the allegorical World Theatre, where an assembly of human vices and virtues have collected to participate in and/or view what Satan promises will be his best production to date, Ballet of the Nations. Narrated by frequent dialogue between Satan himself, his assistant Ballet- Master Death, and various incidental participants, the ballet becomes at once an imagined performance and a polemical dialogue about the state of humanity. Satan has called together all the Dancing Nations of the world, each portrayed by one inscribed, voiceless human body, to perform his latest masterpiece. Thus, the author of the interior ballet of the text is Satan himself, not Lee, and Satan’s supreme authority over the proceedings is essential to its success.
As I will show, the ballet is a painfully accurate microcosm of the global situation at the outbreak of war, with each dancing Nation, portrayed by one feeble human body, personifying blind allegiance to power. Conducted by sinister forces, the bloodbath ensues. Watched by other allegorical figures including the prophetic Ages to Come, establishments such as Science and Organisation, and various human Virtues and Vices such as Fear, Lust, and Heroism, the Ballet is a gathering place and focal point for humanity. Over the course of the performance, the Dancing Nations tear each other limb from limb, still dancing, to a range of responses from the audience. They are necessarily complicit in the destruction by watching. The ballet has been choreographed by Death, who bears the title Dance Master: a lank, shadowy skeleton who hovers about the stage, emphasising the tradition of the danse macabre, a trope established in 15th and 16th century visual arts (and, as explored in the previous chapter, taken up by Huxley in his own ballet). According to Maxwell Armfield’s illustrations, the rest of the metaphorical Nations appear in human form, classically robed and virile.162 The emphasis on their corporeality is placed in their idealised beauty and strength: they appear to be the opposite of death. It is the dance that shows us otherwise. 161 According to Patrick Wright, Lee wrote Ballet of the Nations while staying in the home of her suffragist friends Bessie and Isabella Ford in Leeds (Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
162 https://archive.org/details/balletofnationsp00leev [last accessed August 10 2014].
Ballet of the Nations explores its sense of embedded performativity in its visual composition. The monograph was illustrated with classical figures within an environment meant to evoke a proscenium stage163. Interestingly, Armfield’s architectural illustrations are called a “pictorial commentary” on the frontispiece, suggesting a performative, even synaesthetic quality to the physically static design. This parallels the text’s inherent claim that it is a ballet. At the same time, it encourages a range of perspectives from which to read (or view) the Ballet’s action. The framing of the physical page and its inscribed stage situates the reader well outside of the violence within it, but it also puts the reader in league with the evil Impresario and other bystanders who spur it on. The balletic contents of the text are, therefore, subordinate to the raised stage and its decoration, which clearly evoke the classical proscenium theatre:
Figure 12. Example of Maxwell Armfield’s illustrations for Lee’s Ballet of the Nations.
163 Grace Brockington likens the graphic layout of the ballet’s pages to a proscenium, in which “Lee’s narrative literally performs within the theatre it evokes”, p. 144.
In its specific kind of balletic framework, though, Vernon Lee’s ballet claims a pedigree in its adoption of the conventions of the classical French court drama, the ballet des nations.164 “For a quarter or so of a century,” begins The Ballet of the Nations, “Death’s celebrated Dances had gone rather out of fashion”:
Then, with the end of the proverbially bourgeois Victorian age, there set in a revival of taste, and therefore of this higher form of tragic art, combining, as it does, the truest classical tradition with the romantic attractions of the best Middle Ages. In South Africa and the Far East, and then in the Near East quite recently, the well-known Ballet-Master Death had staged some of his vastest and most successful productions.
Continuing with the same commentary-style of voice, the ballet positions the nations in the virtual court space of the book, arranged to the pleasure of the ballet-master Satan. Lee exploits ballet to provide a vehicle for social commentary: in this case, it is what she demonstrates as the senseless bloodshed of World War One. The text performs on multiple levels to promote the ideas of the ballet, the war, and fundamental human indecency, using the medium of print to illuminate different kinds of performativity.165
The story-world author of the Ballet of the Nations, the proud and verbose Satan, is provoked by his audience to volunteer a preface to the spectacle:
The scheme of the Ballet is very simple, and its variety arises out of the great number—I hope I may say the constantly increasing number—of Dancing Nations. The main motif is, of course—for we are thoroughly up to date, although our dear Impresario does not give us credit for it—the main theme is that each Nation is repelling the aggression of its vis-à-vis, and at the same time defending its partner.
Satan employs terminology familiar to the ballet world: particularly in his use of “Impresario”, which conjures up the rhetoric surrounding figureheads of the art such as Diaghilev. This is not intended to villify Diaghilev and his colleagues, but rather to emphasise the hierarchy of this particular production. By being branded “Impresario” and,
164 As Marie-Claude Canova-King writes, “The so-called Ballet des nations, that is, the ritualized parade of foreigners on the court stage, was a common feature of French royal entertainments in the 1620s and 1630s.' It developed from occasional entries of such exotic characters as Turks, Blackamoors or Indians into comprehensive reviews of diverse peoples and nations from the four corners of the world, come to pay homage to the French king”. Marie-Claude Canova-King. “Dance and ritual: the Ballet des nations at the court of Louis XIII”. Renaissance Studies 9:4, 1995.
165 In addition to referencing the French court tradition, Lee may also be conjuring various 19th Century historical war spectacles whose complexity sometimes bordered on reenactment. For examples see Claire M. Tylee’s The Great War and Women’s Consciousness: Images of Militarism
and Womanhood in Women’s Writings, 1914-64. London: Macmillan, 1990, p. 26.
later “Creative Connoisseur”, Satan acquires hyperbolic artistic authority and his spectacle consequently receives the rapt attention of the Nations, the Ages, and vices and virtues. His rhetoric in this opening mimics the rules of a game, as though they are clear and finite and destined to be obeyed. The simplicity, even flippancy, with which Satan details the proceedings as a play between “repelling” and “defending” reduces the activity of real war to such basic terms that it shrouds, or at least undermines, the game’s implications. The definition of the slaughter as an “up to date” “motif” further trivialises it.
Satan also demands a certain style of performance from his nation-bodies. While they undertake the business of the ballet, they must retain an appearance of beauty and decorum:
There are two minor themes of outstanding Dancers flying to the rescue of the main groups: the two themes together giving rise to all manner of surprising inventions. It is, I need scarcely say, very conducive to a fine effect that all the Nations should keep a strictly innocent expression of countenance, while endeavouring to tear off as much of the costume and ornaments, and lop off as many as possible of the limbs of their vis-à-vis. This further emphasises the sardonic double-meaning of this particular ballet. The participants must behave in a refined, composed manner throughout the war. It is an affect that represents the “stiff upper lip” sterility that Lee so deplored in her fellow Britons. The bodies playing the Nations become further dehumanised with their physical expressions of fear, pain, and viciousness stifled:
At the end of the main action the Chief Dancers may be called upon to shift sides or take part in a general breakdown of a highly modern and anarchical style, something like the Paris impromptu after the pas de deux of 1870, only on a vast scale. And now! [T]he first position, please!166
Complementing Lee’s allegorical space and body is a musical troupe embodied by a patriotic collective who crowd the theatre with their classical instruments. They are chided by many of the other spectators but defended by Satan who says that they will not last long; some of the more modern attendees will begin to play their “wonderful mechanical instruments when the rest of [the] classic band have neither breath nor strings left”. As
166 Lee may be referencing the famous pas de deux in Delibes’s Coppélia, arguably the most significant Paris ballet premiere of 1870; the reference to “the Paris impromptu” is less clear.
compassion gives way to blind cruelty and lutes give way to gramophones, modernity is replacing tradition on every level of the production and in its very meaning.