Regard Beardsley’s drawings as fashion plates, and the reader will arrive at a very fair idea of Karsavina’s appearance as Salome. Her costume is exiguous--even allowing for the lace-edged undergarment which appears round one thigh but not round the other. Her legs and arms are bare, but with a blood red heart and other devices stencilled on them. A high head-dress surmounts the tiny [Illustration] face of one of Beardsley’s women, with blue smudges for eyes and wee vermilion lips. Of Karsavina’s dance, in the character of Salome, it is quite impossible to write with any detail. It is devised in the same pseudo-macabre spirit as the rest of the ballet, and is more remarkable as a feat of acrobatic agility and physical endurance than as an artistic performance. One is told that the dance is “at first frantic and insane; then more proud and sorrowful, more remote and ecstatic. It is the expression and avowal of her sensual torment and of her atonement through the very misery of her unassuageable desire.” Well, maybe it is all that: perhaps something more, perhaps a very great deal less. For myself, I should have been interested to learn at what point the insanity died down and pride and sorrow took its place. Of ecstasy I could find no real suggestion, though the counterfeit was plausible; and the only remoteness was when the dance unexpectedly ended and the curtain came down. “La Tragédie de Salome” might serve, in company of those other productions with which it was classed at the outset of these notes, as an answer to the question, When is a ballet not a ballet? In all these latter performances which the Russians have staged, they appear not only to misconceive the functions of ballet, but to overlook its limitations. This is the more remarkable since in the earlier productions those limitations were plainly recognised, and the restraint which every art exacts scrupulously observed. There is now a lack of perspective, which one suspects to be the result of the dancer turned ballet-master. A journalist may write brilliantly, yet be quite incapable of editing a paper. The sooner the controlling influence of Michel Fokine is restored to the Russian Ballet the better. Otherwise there seems imminent danger that so much fertility will merely run to seed. [Illustration] LE LAC DES CYGNES. PANTOMIME BALLET BY M. TCHAIKOVSKY. MUSIC BY P. TCHAIKOVSKY. DANCES AND SCENES BY M. PETIPA. SCENERY AND COSTUMES BY C. KOROVIN AND A. GOLOVIN.