Certainly “Le Dieu Bleu” has many beauties. It shows us, in a multiplicity of radiant dresses massed against a background of daring colour and design, a rich vein in the decorative art of Léon Bakst. It shows us Karsavina in a part that gives full play to the fierce and passionate quality in her miming. But chiefly it is an excuse for the preciosity of Nijinsky. There is something more than the mere accomplished dancer in that remarkable personality. Others there may be (though one doubts it) as graceful, as agile, as versed in all the _nuances_ of the dancer’s art; but over and above his technical perfections Nijinsky possesses a selective intelligence. His is not a merely imitative instinct; he draws inspiration from sources of his own seeking, and that to which he gives bodily expression is the product of his own original genius working under the afflatus. [Illustration] In “Le Dieu Bleu,” of which the scene is laid in mythical India, Nijinsky has gone for inspiration to Hindu art, with the manifest intention of exhibiting by his impersonation of the title _rôle_, of embodying in himself, the essential principles which underlie the conventions of that ancient phase of artistic expression. The imaginative thought, the sympathetic understanding, which he has brought to his purpose must be judged by the result, of which the subtlety of conception and the precision of execution are beyond comment. [Illustration] The action of the ballet takes place in a rock-girt shrine--a mosaic-patterned platform shut in by high cliffs of tawny orange hue, from excrescences of which, in lazy festoons, hang monstrous serpents. In the middle, at the back, is a pool in which the sacred lotus is supposed to float; a giant tortoise, with gaudily painted carapace, leans over its rim in act of drinking. Massive gates to the left bar the entrance to the shrine which a deep fissure in the cliffs makes possible: a cleft through which the deep blue of the Indian sky is visible.