When the Russian ballet was being performed for the first time at Covent Garden, an enthusiast was heard to express his intention of emigrating to Russia in order to see the ballet in its true home. If he had carried out his intention it is to be feared that he would have suffered grievous disappointment. For it is a great misapprehension to suppose that the Russian ballet as it has been seen in Paris and London is typical of the official ballet at St Petersburg and Moscow. When the Diaghilew company first appeared at the Theatre du Châtelet, the republican convictions of Paris received a shock. Could any good thing come out of Tsardom? Had autocracy succeeded where the alliance of liberty, fraternity and equality had failed? Was it then true that venerable tradition, assisted by a bureaucratic regime, was a kinder nursing mother to the arts than the revolutionary spirit? Little by little the truth leaked out. The Russian ballet, which had been welcomed as the most modern manifestation of theatrical art, was not traditional but revolutionary. It was not the child of the official art of St Petersburg but the outcast. Its leaders were dangerous innovators whom the intransigent conservatives had expelled as hastily as if they had been political agitators. Paris was reassured. The truth is that the excellence of the Imperial School of Ballet of which I have spoken is an excellence of method and technique rather than of spirit and conception. In ideals the Imperial Ballet has not travelled far from those of Milan in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. It has elaborated and refined, but it has not greatly widened them. The visitor at the St Petersburg Opera House would discover that the unmeaning and unbeautiful acrobatics of an earlier day have not yet altogether disappeared. He would find that the ballet in _Aida_, for example, does not differ in many material points, excepting always the accomplishment of the performers, from what he has been accustomed to see in Milan or Vienna. It was in Russia that the spirit of criticism gave rise to new ideas, but the exponents of these new ideas came into sharp collision with the authorities at the Imperial theatres of St Petersburg and Moscow.