it has hitherto been known both in Russia and elsewhere? The essential difference is to be found, not in technique, but in idea. The ballet has been brought into relation with life. Dancing, which had its origin in the most elemental emotions, gradually strayed further and further from its source, until in the ballet it lost its last remnant of vital significance. The ballet was relegated to a kind of barren limbo of the imagination; it was the _mise en scène_ of the fairy tale; none of the echoes of the real world ever disturbed its enchanted silence; no excitement, no passion, no humour, was permitted to relax the fixity of its unmeaning smile. It was supposed to be structurally incapable of supporting anything more weighty than merely gossamer fancies, eternal variations upon the themes of coquetry--invitation and refusal, pursuit and evasion. Such inconsequential argument as there was served only to introduce a series of independent dances which were quite unrelated to any central inward idea. The ballet’s complete sterility of idea was acquiesced in as a necessary condition of its existence. It was an artificial and somewhat withered paradise from which the river of life was carefully diverted. The work of the revolutionaries was to open the sluice-gates and let in the fertilising flood of vital emotion. The ineffectual rhythms of the dance were suddenly caught up into the masterful rhythms of life itself. What is revolutionary in the new ballet is the power to rouse and trouble the imagination. The innovators have extended the range of the ballet, a range as wide as that of the drama--one is tempted to say wider, for not only does it express a minute grace as choice as the grouping of the petals of a rose, but at times its huge leaping rhythms throb with an unconstrained and elemental violence, all too shattering for the formal mould of speech.