A discerning critic has pointed out that perhaps the terrifying suggestiveness of _Scheherazade_ lies not so much in the catastrophe of the plot as in the dreadful significance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s music. “Passages that may have meant no more, as pure music, than the secrecy of the East and the plaintive mysteriousness of women (like that often-repeated passage on the first violin) get a new colour of tragic passion, of yearning in the shadow of death, from their allotment in the dramatic scheme. There is the sound of fate and murder, mingled with the saddest ironical comedy, in the insistent blast of the hunting horns. The swift huddling of deceitful wives, the tripping and scurrying, the wheedling of the old eunuch, the ravenous mien of the negroes, the magnificent stride and gesture of the fruit-bearing attendants, the complicated frenzy of the dance, the drama of fear and despair in Karsavina’s proud rendering, leave a solemn impression beyond anything in those other fantastic ballets. How much depends upon the music it is hard to gauge--much more than one is disposed to admit at first; for the mind pouring stagewards through the eyes, receives the musical impressions half unconsciously, as a direct emotional influence, scarcely registered in the sensuous ear.” Of the other ballets which complete the repertory of the Diaghilew company, and which have not yet been seen in London--of _Petrouchka_, a Russian burlesque taken from an old folk-story, Harlequin in love with the clown’s wife; of _Sadko_, a strange submarine drama; of _Narcisse_, an idyll which seeks to recapture the sylvan mood of ancient Greece--I will not attempt to give any description. Enough has been said to show that the revolutionary composers, with the co-operation of Nijinsky, Karsavina and a _corps de ballet_, every member of which is a tried artist, have given a new significance to the ballet, have indeed given a new art-form to the stage. CHAPTER XI THE RUSSIAN DANCERS Could the Diaghilew ballet exist without Waslaw Nijinsky--this marvellous youth who is already a supreme master of the technique of dancing, who cannot make a gesture that has not a graceful or a witty significance, who has confounded Newton and demonstrated that the law of gravity is a figment of the scientists?