_Les Sylphides_ is somewhat in the nature of a challenge, and it must be admitted that it is a successful challenge. In it the producers claim that the purely musical and choregraphic interests are sufficient. Of its kind it is no less than perfect. It is from beginning to end a rhythmic flow of flawless gestures, which make a rounded whole of a chaste and immaculate quality like that of the finest sculpture. More remarkable than the steps is the purity of the lines of the arms, interweaving like the overarching branches of a forest glade or the groining of the aisle of a Gothic cathedral. Yet was there not perhaps a moment when the disconcerting thought intruded itself: Supposing the ballet were always to move in this atmosphere of perfect calm? Without a doubt _Les Sylphides_ gained some of its charm from its place in sequence of the ballets. As an interlude among pieces of more violent action, it had the repose of a statue in the midst of canvases hot with colour and tumultuous with movement. [Illustration: LES SYLPHIDES _Photograph: Bert, Paris._] If it is in such pieces as _Les Sylphides_, _Le Carnaval_ and _Le Spectre de la Rose_ that the composers of the ballets with their coadjutant mimes most deftly lay the privy net for beauty, they ensnare her, more brutally perhaps, but none the less surely in the Oriental pageants with their closely knit web of line and tone and rhythm. For these many-faceted compositions, ballet is perhaps an incomplete expression, and we should substitute the term, “mimodrama.” Dancing plays a more subordinate part in them than in the ballet proper. It falls into a natural relation to the ensemble, and yet the dance, in the exotic world here represented to us, is the apt, indeed the only conceivable gesture. _Cléopâtre_ is a name of ominous import and prepares us for voluptuous and sombre passion. We are transported to a temple on the banks of the Nile. This scene is the supreme achievement of M. Bakst’s art. It represents an immense stone forecourt which might be none other than the great Hall of Columns built by the father of Rameses the Great. But the artist is contemptuous of pedantic archæological detail--he seeks only to impress, one might rather say to stun, the senses by a vision of grandiose and sinister masonry. This effect is obtained by simple lines and vast proportions. The towering walls, the procession of squat, colossal columns, the gigantic intimidating statues on either flank, fill the scene with a sense of awe and a premonition of disaster. It is noteworthy that M. Bakst himself has said that the painters of the future will take for their subjects man and stone. In this scene he has given to the dumb and eternal stone a voice of tragedy. He has made of these sexless caryatides a kind of chorus, the immortal and ironic spectators of the comedy of human life.