The Russians have cruelty enough, but not this kind of cruelty; they are more complex than cruel, and why credit them with any real sense of morality? They are gifted with a kind of sick curiosity which makes them infinitely interesting to themselves. And--to concern myself again with these Russian dancers--they live in a prodigious illusion; their life in them is so tremendous that they are capable of imagining anything. And, in the words of Gorki, "in every being who lives there is hidden a vagabond more or less conscious of himself;" but--for all those who revolt--he has one phrase: _l'Épouvante du mal de vivre._ Now, Lubov Tchernicheva, who looked Cleopatra and was dressed after Cleopatra's fashion, had nothing whatever to do, except to be repellent and attractive. She was given no chance to show that the queen she represented was one of those diabolical creatures whose coquetry is all the more dangerous because it is susceptible of passion; one in whom passion was at times like a will-o'-the-wisp that is suddenly extinguished after having given light to a conflagration. _Scheherazade_ is barbaric and gorgeous in _décor_, and in costume exotic and tragic and Oriental as the Russian music is; only, to me, the music is not quite satisfying; it has rather an irritating effect on the nerves. The dances are bewildering, intricate and elaborate, and intensely alive with animal desire. It is really a riot in color, amid an ever-moving crowd of revellers; in which Massine shows himself as the personification of lust, as he makes--with furious and too convulsive leaps in the air and with too obvious gestures and grimaces--frantic love to Zobeide, mimed by Tchernicheva, who has the stateliness of a princess, who glides mysteriously and is wonderful in the plastic quality of her movements, which I can only image as that of a tiger-cat. Carlo Goldoni has been compared as a great comic dramatist with Pietro Longhi, who, in his amazingly amusing pictures, reflects also the follies and revels and miseries of the period. Longhi used to tell Goldoni that they--the painter and the playwright--were brethren in art; and one of Goldoni's sonnets records this saying:-- _Longhi, tu che la mia musa sorella Chiami del tuo pennel che cerca il vero._ It seems that their contemporaries were alive to the similar qualities and the common aims of the two men; for Gasparo Gozzi drew a parallel between them in a number of his Venetian _Gazzetta._ It struck me, as I saw the Goldoni ballet and heard the music of Domenico Scarlatti, that all of the costumes and much of the effect of the miming--which were the most delicious and capricious that I have ever seen--had been designed after Longhi's paintings and drawings; for in many of these he gives a wonderful sense of living motion; but certainly nothing of what is abominably alive in the great and grim and sardonic genius of Hogarth.