That it should be their performance as a whole which has sealed the success of the Russians, is the more remarkable when the exceptional quality of the individual performers is considered. It is not merely that the standard of excellence, both in acting and miming, throughout the entire _corps de ballet_ is so high: under ordinary circumstances (unfortunately) one would expect to see such performers as MM. Bolm, Cecchetti, Kotchetovsky, Mdmes. Karsavina, Federova, Astafieva, Piltz--to name but a few--each figuring as that abomination a “star”: probably supported by a company whose mediocrity would tend to mitigate rather than enhance the brilliance of the leading light. But the Russians know better than this, and though it may be difficult to imagine “L’Oiseau de Feu” without Karsavina, “Cléopâtre” without Federova, “Prince Igor” without Bolm, it is of the dancer’s association with the ballet, not of the ballet as a background to the dancer, that one thinks. “The play’s the thing.” There are two personalities, however, which the performances of the Russian Ballet have thrown forward with especial prominence. The first is, of course, M. Nijinsky, than whom it may be doubted whether any more accomplished dancer has ever appeared. He excited the more astonishment, perhaps, on his appearance in London, because the male dancer was hitherto unknown--at least in any other than a grotesque or comic capacity. (Nothing, by the way, could be more eloquent of the debasement of the ballet in this country than the custom of having the male parts taken by women.) But the perfection of Nijinsky’s technical skill, extraordinary as this is, provides but the lesser reason for his triumph. He is an artist as well as a wonderful dancer. He appeals not only to the eye but to the imagination. Conceivably there might be found another dancer with equal command of movement, and another mime with equal subtlety of pose and gesture: but one who can so weld into a single faculty of expression the twin arts of pantomime and the dance is surely far to seek. Consider his dancing, and he seems to be less a dancer (as the word is ordinarily understood) than a mime who adds movement to gesture: regard him as a mime, and he seems rather a dancer who is acting while he dances. Nijinsky, in brief, is the true dancer: dancing is his proper medium of expression, in the use of which he shows himself an artist of fine perception. To watch him as Harlequin in “Le Carnaval” or as the Spectre of the Rose (in which _rôles_ it was the present writer’s memorable good fortune to see him for the first time) is to receive a revelation of what the dancer’s art can compass. Let it be added that in the case of Nijinsky no more unfitting prominence is allowed to the dancer’s personality than in the case of his colleagues already named. One may shudder at the thought of “Le Spectre de la Rose” without Nijinsky as the Spectre, but it is the banality which a lesser