Page:Works of Heinrich Heine 01.djvu/73

Rh accompaniment with the great drum. It was strange music, a mixture of awkward ill-temper and voluptuous tickling, and I noted in it a pathetic, fantastic, mournfully bold and bizarre melody, which was, however, of the strangest simplicity. But I forgot the music as soon as the young girl began to dance.

"Both dancer and dance attracted my whole attention. It was not the classic dancing such as we still see in great ballets, where, as in classic tragedy, only sprawling unities and artificial effects flourish. It was not those footed Alexandrines, those declamatory leaps, those antithetic entrechats, that noble passion which whirls in pirouettes so distractingly clown on one foot that one sees nothing but heaven and stockinette—nothing but ideality and lies! There is really nothing so repulsive to me as the ballet in the great opera in Paris, where the traditions of 'classic' dancing have been most perfectly preserved, while the French have overthrown the classic system in all other arts, poetry, music, and painting. But it will be hard for them to bring about a similar revolution in the art of dancing, unless it be that here, as in their political revolution, they fly to terrorism, and guillotine the legs of the obstinate male and female dancers of the old régime.

"Mademoiselle Laurence was no great danseuse,