SUMMONED BEFORE BEAUTY

A Brief Meditation on Degas' "The Ballet Class" (1871-74)

Happy Sunday, My Friends, and Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

I hope this finds you well.

The morning here in the Shenandoah Valley is still trying to make up its mind between sun and clouds. (Note the lone cow on the hill in the second photo.)

McINERNY’S MUSINGS

• On Monday of this past week I went down to Old Town, Alexandria, Virginia and recorded an interview with The Purposeful Lab Podcast, produced by the Magis Center. Thanks to Joe Miller and his crew, along with the hosts Catherine Hadro and Dr. Dan Kuebler, for such a delightful conversation about art, beauty, and entertainment culture. I’ll share the conversation once it’s posted.

• And this past Wednesday evening at Christendom College, where I teach, was a special night, as the members of the Christendom Players put their formidable talents on display in a workshop of my play, The Actor. Often a workshop of a play consists of nothing more than a table reading. But the Christendom Players were game enough to read through the play “on their feet,” as it were, doing as much real acting as they were capable of in the moment. And they proved capable of so much! As I watched them, it was as if my play was receiving a “living edit.” I am so grateful to the Players for their generosity, and so eager now to get back to my writing desk and improve what needs improving in the play. The Actor, about the wartime subversive theatrical activities of the young Karol Wojtyla, the man who would become Pope St. John Paul II, will premiere at Christendom College in the fall of this year. (A photo gallery from the workshop is below.)

• This past week also marked the one-year anniversary of the publication of my novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair. By way of celebration, I will send a signed copy of the novel to the first two subscribers (free or paid) who email me at danielmcinerny@gmail.com.

• And while we’re on the subject of FREE. If you’re not a paid subscriber and not (yet!) interested in becoming a paid subscriber, but you would like to read something from The Comic Muse that is behind the paywall, do not fear! Substack has a new feature called “Teaser Posts,” which allows free subscribers, at least, the opportunity to enjoy one teaser post for free. Just scroll down to claim your free post. Details here.

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  Now, let’s take a look at that Degas…

Where did your eye go first?

To the green bow around the waist of the dancer in the immediate foreground.

Or perhaps to the orangey-red bow in her auburn hair.

Where did your eye go next?

I’m guessing, to the yellow bow around the waist of the dancer sitting on top of the piano on the left of the frame.

(When looking at a painting, our eye typically goes to color first. Color is more immediately affective and captivating than line and composition.)

After the first shock of color, the crowded ballet studio slowly unfolds itself to our attention.

But before you linger over the little dog at the feet of the dancer in the foreground, over the ballet master with his stick standing center-right, over the dancer behind the ballet master’s right shoulder adjusting the strap on her dress…

Before you take in the wholeness of the composition, notice this:

You are not thinking of yourself.

Rather, you have been summoned—summoned first at the sensory level by the arresting colors—before a reality that is decidedly not you: the picture Degas prepared for us.

“We are anxiety-ridden animals,” writes the philosopher Iris Murdoch. “Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world.”[1]

But one of the powers of great art is its ability to tear down this falsifying veil and make us submit, as it were, to a reality not ourselves.  

“Good art, unlike bad art, unlike ‘happenings,’ is something pre-eminently outside us and resistant to our consciousness,” continues Murdoch. “We surrender ourselves to its authority with a love which is unpossessive and unselfish.”[2]

We do not judge Hamlet. Hamlet judges us.

Which means—to return to the idea of the transcendent Mr. Darcy—that a great artist like Shakespeare or Degas pictures for us the priority of ends to purposes: ends which both provide and take the measure of us as human beings.  

Degas’ The Ballet Class, I suggest, is a behind-the-scenes look at the demands of an artistic practice (in this case, the art of ballet) as it calls its participants to excellence.

The purposes of the dancers in the scene are likely all aligned with the end of artistic excellence.

But what Degas is most interested in showing us is the difficulty of keeping one’s purposes aligned to the end of artistic excellence. Art isn’t easy, as the song goes. Fatigue and boredom soon set in, even as we struggle to maintain focus on the skill we are attempting to acquire (see the dancer in the middle of the picture, also with a green bow around her waist, intent on taking the teacher’s instruction.)

Degas’ The Ballet Class is itself a picture of the anxious, usually self-preoccupied human animal submitting to authority. (My favorite character in the scene is the dancer at the left sitting on top of the piano: itchy, achy, tired, bored, yet, no doubt, still eager to perform when called upon.)

And as we take in the picture we too, like the dancers in the scene, are called upon, whatever our fatigue and boredom, to recognize in the picture an authoritative beauty that takes the measure of us.    

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From The Actor Workshop, March 13, 2024

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[1] Iris Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts,” in The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Routledge, 1996, first published 1970), 84.

[2] Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts,” 88.