Fanny Crowne Quotes

Very unchivalrous the world counts these woodsmen; — very little the world knows about their ways and romances, for nowhere does romance bear a more fragrant blossom or bloom so long. The sprig of cedar, many years preserved, because with it a woman crowned an act of daring; the wild flower, pressed in the crumpled corner of a greasy pocketbook, because a woman called it beautiful; the chance track in the roadway where a week before an unknown woman stepped, kept from obliteration just because she was a woman, — no line of life that men follow to-day comes so close to the high mark of mediaeval chivalry with its superb faith in womankind, regardless of the faults of individual women. But the life is rough? So surely was chivalry! Rougher than we know for. Its faith saved it; and what grew into mariolatry in the past is still, in the unromantic present, the better part of many other rough men's religion.

All of these occasions gave me unmitigated delight, but the crowning ecstasy of all I found in the ballet. Fanny Elssler and Cerito were both upon the stage. The former had lost a little of her prestige, but Cerito, an Italian, was then in her first bloom and wonderfully graceful. Of her performance my sister said to me, "It seems to make us better to see anything so beautiful." This remark recalls the oft-quoted dialogue between Margaret Fuller and Emerson apropos of Fanny Elssler's dancing:— "Margaret, this is poetry." "Waldo, this is religion." I remember, years after this time, a talk with Theodore Parker, in which I suggested that the best stage dancing gives us the classic in a fluent form, with the illumination of life and personality. I cannot recall, in the dances which I saw during that season, anything which appeared to me sensual or even sensuous. It was rather the very ecstasy and embodiment of grace.