Behind the Scenes: Empire
The little painted angels flit,
See, down the narrow staircase, where
The pink legs flicker over it!
Blonde, and bewigged, and winged with gold,
The shining creatures of the air
Troop sadly, shivering with cold.
The gusty gaslight shoots a thin
Sharp finger over cheeks and nose
Rouged to the colour of the rose.
All wigs and paint, they hurry in:
Then, bid their radiant moment be
The footlights’ immortality!
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Behind the Scenes: Empire first appeared in Arthur Symons’s 1895 collection, London Nights. The symbolist poet wrote passionately about dance in prose as well as verse; in The World as Ballet, he begins by declaring that “the abstract thinker, to whom the question of practical morality is indifferent, has always loved dancing, as naturally as the moralist has hated it.” By “abstract”, Symons presumably means the ability to be objective, rather than proscriptive, about natural human behaviour. Dance “has always mimed the instincts”, hence the moralist’s outrage; Symons as regards it as pure symbol, expressing “possession and abandonment, the very pattern and symbol of earthly love”. Many of his poems about dance are written in the same spirit.
Behind the Scenes: Empire is one of a triptych of vignettes headed Décor de Théâtre. The other poems are The Primrose Dance: Tivoli and La Mélinite: Moulin Rouge. Each specifies a theatre, and the Tivoli and Moulin Rouge poems celebrate a solo dancer. Behind the Scenes: Empire, about the Empire Theatre in London’s Leicester Square, is the opening vignette, and the most original of the three. I think it may be his best dance poem.
The glimpses of harsh chorus line discipline before the curtain rises point forward to work by Colette and Jean Rhys. The pictures of the dance troupe might seem more sentimental or objectifying than anything by either of those brilliant writers: Rhys in her novel Voyage in the Dark, and Colette in her short story, Gribiche, for example, write memorably, sometimes harrowingly, on the subject of “chorus-girls”, drawing on painful personal experience.
“The shining creatures of the air/ Troop sadly, shivering with cold”: that verb, “troop”, is a homonym, reminding us that the chorus dancers are a troupe, a drilled unit in the military sense, subjected to collective discipline. Symons catches them at the “shivering” moment when they are not yet transformed to the brave, aesthetic regiment they will become on stage. These chorus-dancers are chimeras, vulnerable flesh as well as shining visions. Symons ensures his “painted angels” are not entirely earthbound in their descent; their legs “flicker” over the “narrow staircase”, almost as if not touching it.
“Blonde, and be-wigged and winged with gold” is a combination that intensifies the interplay of bodily reality and cosmetic illusion: the adjectives are deployed so as to contradict each other. “Be-wigged” and “winged” make a wonderful pair, consonantal in sound, dissonant as image. To be winged is to be elevated: to wear a theatrical wig is the imposition of an uncomfortable ideal.
The notion of insult deepens in the personification of the “gusty gaslight”, and invites a feminist reading. That “sharp finger over cheeks and nose” created by the flaring light suggests a judgemental male impresario. Crude, sexist appraisal dominates a sphere where the young women of the period fought for independence. The last stanza reads strangely: “Then, bid their radiant moment be/The footlights’ immortality!” Are the dancers to be given immortality by the footlights, or do they give the footlights immortality? The conflict of the “radiant moment” with the “immortality” seems unresolved.
I think this poem is strengthened by containing “the quarrel with ourselves”, the forge of any true poem according to WB Yeats (Symons’s sometime flatmate). Symons wrote many lyric poems about dancing and dancers which, despite their formalism, have a mimetic quality: they aspire to the condition of dance, and delight in the art. Here, he peels through to his own distant ambivalence about the social underpinnings of a commercialised art form. The poem may be decorative in its technique, but the perspective is instinctively sympathetic to those who are themselves likely to be treated as decorations.
Symons was an important figure in bringing early 20th century French writers to Anglophone poetry’s wider attention, not least that of TS Eliot. His seminal critical book, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, reissued by Carcanet in 2014, includes a number of translations by Symons of the French poets to which Modernism owes so much. Symons’s own poetry deserves a place in that tradition.