"Le Sacre," on the other hand, is the man-machine viewed not from without, and unsympathetically, but from within. So far, it is Strawinsky's masterwork, the completest and purest expression of his genius. For the elements that make for the originality of style of "Petruchka" and the other of Strawinsky's representative compositions, in this work attain a signal largeness and powerfulness. The rhythmic element, already fresh and free in the scherzo of "L'Oiseau de feu" and throughout "Petruchka," attains virile and magistral might in it, surges and thunders with giant vigor. The instrumentation, magical with all the magic of the Russian masters in the earlier ballets, here is informed by the sharpness, hardness, nakedness which is originally Strawinsky's. Besides, the latter work has the thing hitherto lacking somewhat in the young man's art--grandeur and severity and ironness of language. In it he stands completely new, completely in possession of his powers. And in it the machine operates. Ostensibly, the action of the ballet is laid in prehistoric times. Ostensibly, it figures the ritual with which a tribe of stone-age Russians consecrated the spring. Something of the sort was necessary, for an actual representation of machines, a ballet of machines, would not have been as grimly significant as the angular, uncouth gestures of men, would by no means have as nakedly revealed the human engine. Here, in the choreography, every fluid, supple, curving motion is suppressed. Everything is angular, cubical, rectilinear. The music pounds with the rhythm of engines, whirls and spirals like screws and fly-wheels, grinds and shrieks like laboring metal. The orchestra is transmuted to steel. Each movement of the ballet correlates the rhythms of machinery with the human rhythms which they prolong and repeat. A dozen mills pulsate at once. Steam escapes; exhausts breathe heavily. The weird orchestral introduction to the second scene has all the oppressive silence of machines immobile at night. And in the hurtling finale the music and the dancers create figure that is at once the piston and a sexual action. For Strawinsky has stripped away from man all that with which specialization, differentiation, have covered him, and revealed him again, in a sort of cruel white light, a few functioning organs. He has shown him a machine to which power is applied, and which labors in blind obedience precisely like the microscopic animal that eats and parturates and dies. The spring comes; and life replenishes itself; and man, like seed and germ, obeys the promptings of the blind power that created him, and accomplishes his predestined course and takes in energy and pours it out again. But, for a moment, in "Le Sacre du printemps," we feel the motor forces, watch the naked wheels and levers and arms at work, see the dynamo itself.