There they would find Bakst, who was collecting the material that oftentimes was queer enough, and who in fact worked out the whole review. No task was too hard for him. He would group the various component parts and make up the pages. It would happen that Diaghileff, disconcerted over an engraving that came out badly and that had the earmarks of a confused work, would come to Bakst who would take up the work on the plate and give form to an amorphous jumble of touches. Another one of his steady tasks was that of decorating the book, of designing the cover, of drawing the ornamented letters, of supplying the tail=pieces. In this connection it should be recalled that the art of book decorating was revived at the end of the last century. The English, with Walter Crane at the head, started the procession. It was an Englishman, furthermore,--Aubrey Beardsley--who designed arabesques of extraordinary sharpness and delicacy upon the geometrical quadrangles of the pages. This new method was also being experimented upon in Petrograd. A number of artists of the second generation of “Mir Iskousstva”, such as Narbout and Mitrochin, are exclusively “vignettistes”. As for this first group, they had to do everything and accordingly they did everything. Benois, Somov, that other Russianized Frenchman Lanceray--all were experts at this art. Bakst, too, went through it. There are magazine covers of his extant [Illustration: XIII STAGE DECORATIONS FOR OSCAR WILDE’S “SALOMEA”. (GOUACHE)] [Illustration: XIV “PHAEDRA” TRAGEDY. PHÆDRA’S NURSE] [Illustration: A YOUNG BEOTIAN. (“NARCISSUS” BALLET). WATER COLOUR] on which statuettes in Directoire style flank a medaillon, or on which there are artistic frames. At the same time he tried his hands at pure illustrating; there is, for instance, a water-color of his which illustrated “The Nose”, a grotesque story by Gogol. Today we look upon these designs as the first attempts at the masterful costume-pages of later days. “Bakst has hands of gold”, wrote Benois in his history of Russian painting, a work of which we shall speak again later. He admired his manual skill and the elasticity of his spirit and of his workmanship. But he was unconscious of his powerful personality. Later on, dissatisfied with pen sketching that was then reproduced by the mechanical process of engraving, the group tried themselves at original lithography. Here, again, Bakst was successful: a head of Levitan brings out in sharp juxtaposition the intense black and white of the drawing.