What a change to turn from such a production to the whimsies, romance and fantasy of such a thing as Schumann’s “Carnaval!” Here was the obverse of the romanticism of “Les Sylphides”; the undercurrent of mockery and poetic cynicism so characteristic of Schumann’s own music in its lighter moods, characteristic of Heine and of de Musset. Here again one found a masterly idea in the audacious simplicity of the stage setting. To see the great stage of Covent Garden decorated with long curtains and two sofas of the truly early-Victorian pattern--stiff, prim, unyielding, and covered with striped repp--was a thing to take one’s breath away, until, as the music began, little figure after little figure slipped, like figures in a dream, between the curtains: Pierrot, Pierrette, Harlequin--little men and women of the ’thirties mingling with these eternal characters of drama, to make a series of pictures of wooings and repulses, of meetings and partings, of provocations and denials, revealing the comedy of life, seen as it were in a glass “not darkly,” but as a dream far off and mistily; eminently unreal; yet, in some other world far, far away, in some mysterious land of dreams, one felt such things perchance might be. “Le Sacre du Printemps” was an ambitious attempt at primitivism--if one may use the word--but while disliking its suggestion of megalomania and the formlessness of its decoration, one could not but admire so audacious an endeavour to break wholly with tradition; and it was redeemed by the virility and fantastic, mocking humour and scenic splendour of Rimsky-Korsakov and Michel Fokine’s “Le Coq d’Or,” and still more by the beauty of Leon Bakst and Tcherepinin’s “Narcisse,” and the poetic charm of “Le Spectre de la Rose.” These, however, are but brief impressions of recent pleasures, shared by many others who may have been differently impressed. We have had many books and articles on the Russian ballet--some perhaps a little over-enthusiastic--and it is not my purpose to deal extensively with history so recent that most readers can as readily give account thereof.