Perhaps this is not the place to speak of the wide-reaching effect of the revolutionary ballet upon the general world of art. The colour and design of Leon Bakst’s scenes, the provocative gestures of Nijinsky’s dancing, the strange and startling patterns of the dancers, have suggested to artists a new source of inspiration, which in Paris at all events has already not been without its influence on their work. The ballet is in the van of the artistic movement of the day, and the dance, through the ballet, has attained a position which it has never held since the days of ancient Greece--being once more received into its proper and inseverable fellowship with music and the plastic arts. CHAPTER X THE REPERTORY OF THE RUSSIAN BALLET The Russian ballets are based upon an endless variety of themes, but the dancing may be said to draw its inspiration from three sources. First and foremost, of course, is the traditional method of the old Italian masters. This is the mother tongue of the ballet, which is spoken from Copenhagen to Moscow, with only the least perceptible trace of local accent. But this common language the Russians have refined to a purity unknown elsewhere; from being the vehicle of the stiff rhetoric of the conventional ballet, they have transformed it into a flexible speech, in which they have been able to utter such gem-like poems as _Le Spectre de la Rose_, _Le Carnaval_ and _Les Sylphides_. Next, they have gone for inspiration to their own national dances. They have refreshed the stage with the bracing air of the steppes. In the Polovtsian dances of _Prince Igor_ they have given to an art that was nurtured in courts and has always moved with courtly grace, the tigerish motions of a full-blooded barbaric life. Finally they have enlarged the scope of the ballet by making use of the classical and Oriental dance. And for the sources of the classical dance they have gone not only to Greece but to Egypt. The theme of _Cléopâtre_ is really the Egyptian attitude, just as the theme of _Scheherazade_ is the Eastern attitude. The Diaghilew ballet has an extensive repertory, wide enough to display to the full the genius of the composers and the talents of the dancers. Naturally, during the six seasons in which it has appeared in Paris, its large variety has been better exhibited there than in London. The principal pieces which have been given at Covent Garden are _Le Pavillon d’Armide_, _Le Carnaval_, _Prince Igor_, _Les Sylphides_, _Le Spectre de la Rose_, _Cléopâtre_, _Scheherazade_.