|SO free and yet so disciplined!" said someone of Nijinsky's dancing. It was a very good criticism. But I like even better these words from a French appreciation by M. Charles Mèryel: "We should not begin by praising him for his prodigious physical ability for leaving the ground. Let us think first of his power of evoking, through the means of a human body in movement, a sort of beautiful dream, of his power of subjugating his material appearance so that he becomes a _visitation divine_ and almost immaterial." I remember in this connection something that was said to me by Christopher St. John after "Les Sylphides": "This gives us a conception of what our glorified bodies after the Resurrection will be like, the same bodies, but spiritualized and agile!" I thought, "This is too much!" and laughed at an excess of enthusiasm! But the French writer and the English one were both expressing the same idea. [Illustration: 8036] Whatever his role, the young Russian dancer projects an interior emotion which has in it all the force of spontaneity, but is at the same time conscious and considered. As an actress, that has always been my ideal of expression. But actors express emotions; it is generally their duty to _realise_, in fact, to recall a man. Nijinsky never recalls human experience, never suggests the passions of mankind. He is always the dancer. Now the miming of ordinary ballet-dancers has often in the past seemed to be more than a little ridiculous. Love and joy and pleasure, pain and hate and death--how could they be simulated by pirouettings, posings and posturings? Did I reject them as absurdly unconvincing because I did not understand the language of choreography? I think I was alienated because I had never heard the language spoken well. I am sure now that it can be infinitely expressive, but the better it is spoken by the dancer's body the less it will resemble the expression of mortals. I could never call Nijinsky a good actor. I can, and do, call him a great dancer. [Illustration: 0040] The Dance Poems |IT has been said that the Russian ballet makes a vivid and brutal appeal to the senses, and certainly there is some truth in this as regards the ballets of which the artist Bakst is the guiding spirit. The old saying that you cannot see the wood for the trees may be borrowed to express a criticism. You cannot see color for the colors in some Bakst ballets. Yet even Bakst sometimes helps to aid that impression of a visitation divine which Nijinsky in his own person produces. You will see that Miss Pamela Colman Smith has given what some may think a disproportionate amount of space to her studies of "Les Sylphides," "Le Carnaval," and "Le Spectre de la Rose." I think she was, perhaps unconsciously, more strongly attracted by these three dance poems (for dance poems they should be called rather than ballets) because of their greater wealth in the immaterial. [Illustration: 0042] Les Sylphides