|WHAT would a dramatist make of Gauthier's little idyl of the vision of the Rose? What would an actor and actress make of it if it could be dramatized? I am afraid to answer these questions. Fortunately they need not be answered, as no dramatist now will be fool enough to rush in where dancers have trodden on such light feet. ("The beautiful is light. All divine things run on light feet.") A young girl returns from a ball. She sinks into a chair and, kissing the rose in her hand, which reminds her of the evening's innocent pleasure, she falls asleep. She dreams that the rose comes to life and invites her to dance with it. She dances in her dream. (Does she see the rose, I wonder, or is it invisible to her while visible to us?) She knows a joy in which there is no fatigue, a love in which there is no threat to her virginity. The phantom rose disappears. She wakes. The real rose is at her feet where the dream rose had lain for a moment. She picks it up and kisses it again, poor little faded and finite sign of a fresh infinite thing which has shown itself for a moment and passed out of earth's tiny room. [Illustration: 0054] A Paradox |IT is one of those paradoxes, of which the Russian ballet is rich in examples, that the music of this fragile little poem should be Weber's "Invitation à la Valse," robustly orchestrated by Berlioz. I can imagine how sickly and pale specially written music might have been! The healthy, strong melody, the sound, marked rhythm help to create that sense of the _impossible_ which is the abiding impression of the phantom of the rose. [Illustration: 0056] How this music pulsates! Its deep expectant breathing increases one's sensation that we are all dreaming--dancers and audience too. Tamar Karsavina, who in other roles shows a nervous force, a tragic power, a strange and luring grace which account even better than her dancing for her triumphant prominence, is so gentle, so modest, so suppliant in the "Spectre de la Rose," that she becomes the incarnation of snow-white youth, dreaming of a heavenly lover. And Nijinsky becomes the spirit of that dream. I feel sorry for that young girl, who perhaps will wake next day in that queer Bakst bedroom, and think of the partner who gave her the rose, not of the Rose itself, who came to her as virginal as the thought which summoned him. I don't like the idea of the remembrance of an ordinary flirtation at a ball walking in at the door of that room, out of whose window the mystical figure of the Rose flew forth into the night, which was, I am sure, day to him!