with impunity the restrictions of technique, that she is bound to please if only she is natural and happy and allows herself to follow the momentary inspiration of the music and dances with the same gleeful spontaneity as a child dancing to a barrel-organ is a doctrine as seductive as it is fatal.’ The future solution of the movement lies in perfection of the technique and in grasping the deeper depths of musical relation to the art of dancing. ‘The chief value of reaction resides in its negative destructive element,’ says Prince Volkhonsky. ‘If, for instance, we had never seen the old ballet, with its stereotyped character, I do not think that the appearance of Isadora Duncan would have called forth such enthusiasm. In Isadora we greeted the deliverance. Yet in order to appreciate liberty we must have felt the chains. She liberated, and her followers seek to exploit that liberty.’ CHAPTER XVII THE NEW RUSSIAN BALLET The old ballet: arguments _pro_ and _con_--The new movement: Diaghileff and Fokine; the advent of Diaghileff’s company; the ballets of Diaghileff’s company; ‘Spectre of the Rose,’ ‘Cleopatra,’ _Le Pavillon d’Armide_, ‘Scheherezade’--Nijinsky and Karsavina--Stravinsky’s ballets: ‘Petrouchka,’ ‘The Fire-Bird,’ etc.; other ballets and arrangements. I Gordon Craig very aptly characterized the French ballet as the most deliciously artificial impertinence that ever turned up its nose at Nature. Commenting on this Prince Volkhonsky says: ‘Seldom one meets in a short definition with such an exhausting acknowledgment of the positive and negative sides of the question. How easy and pleasant it is to agree with a judgment which is penetrated with such impartiality. Who will not acknowledge that that powdered Marquise is charming, and yet who will not acknowledge that that huge pile of false hair sprinkled with powder is against Nature?’ Magnificent as the old Russian ballet has been dramatically and acrobatically, yet it failed to acknowledge the artificialities of its form and the deficiencies of its phonetic conceptions. It failed to see what Delsarte, Mrs. Hovey, Isadora Duncan and the partisans of the naturalistic school had grasped: the call of Nature. Though it banished the powdered Marquise of the French school from the stage, yet it did not banish the creed from the ballerina’s toe--the unmusical acting, the spectacular leaps and pirouettes, the umbrella-like tunics, the acrobatic stunts, the fossilized forms of the dead ages. In praise of the old ballet Mr. A. Levinsohn has written in a Russian magazine of the dance: ‘When a ballerina rises on the tips of her toes (_pointés_), she frees herself of a natural movement and enters a region of fantastic existence.’ The principal meaning of all the ballet technique in preaching the toe-dance is to defy the laws of gravity and give the dance the semblance of a flight, or floating in the air. There is no question