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Updated: May 19, 2025
Do you respect a rope-dancer, or a ballad-singer? BOSWELL. 'No, Sir: but we respect a great player, as a man who can conceive lofty sentiments, and can express them gracefully. JOHNSON. 'What, Sir, a fellow who claps a hump on his back, and a lump on his leg, and cries "I am Richard the Third "? Nay, Sir, a ballad-singer is a higher man, for he does two things; he repeats and he sings: there is both recitation and musick in his performance: the player only recites. BOSWELL. 'My dear Sir! you may turn anything into ridicule.
In the life in which this error has been committed there can be no proper harmony, no satisfaction, no spontaneous delight in effort. The man does not create, he is only desperately keeping up appearances. He has at once become "a base mechanical," and his successes are not much higher than the successes of the acrobat or the rope-dancer.
I hesitated, and fell back, for I felt more inclined to throw them down and run away, and Père Séguin saw it. "Ha! ha!" he exclaimed, fixing his yellow eye upon me. "I thought you were heart of oak, young Sir; are you only a man of straw?" I gave no answer, but I leaped on to the wall like a rope-dancer. "Hum!" he muttered; "good legs, but a faint heart."
Without technique, perfect of its kind, no one is worth consideration in any art. The rope-dancer or the acrobat must be perfect in technique before he appears on the stage at all; in his case, a lapse from perfection brings its own penalty, death perhaps; his art begins when his technique is already perfect.
It is a great many years since I saw Richer, the famous rope-dancer, perform at Sadler's Wells. He was matchless in his art, and added to his extraordinary skill exquisite ease, and unaffected, natural grace. I was at that time employed in copying a half-length picture of Sir Joshua Reynolds's; and it put me out of conceit with it. How ill this part was made out in the drawing!
First, through the dimness of the dusk, I saw a man armed, walking as does a rope-dancer, balancing himself with his spear, across the empty air, for so it seemed, above the broken arch of the bridge.
Still less could the public be prevented from preferring the comedian to the tragedian, the rope-dancer to the comedian, the gladiator to the rope-dancer; or the stage be prevented from revelling by choice amidst the pollution of Hellenic life.
'It was only some stupid remark she made her about looking like a boy, or being dressed like a rope-dancer. A small civility of this sort was her share of the general attention. 'And how did Nina take the insolence? 'With great good-temper, or good-breeding.
'Having heard that this Nation is a great Encourager of Ingenuity, I have brought with me a Rope-dancer that was caught in one of the Woods belonging to the Great Mogul. He is by Birth a Monkey; but swings upon a Rope, takes a pipe of Tobacco, and drinks a Glass of Ale, like any reasonable Creature.
In a little while, the mountebanks will also have disappeared, in order to make room for magnetic séances and reform banquets, and the rope-dancer with her spangled skirt and long balancing-pole will be as remote from us as the bayadère of the Ganges.
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