te, when the company entered upon a four weeks' engagement at
the Metropolitan Opera House, included in the regular subscription
season of opera, the subscribers groaned; many of them groaned aloud,
and wrote letters to the management and to the newspapers. To be sure,
during the tour which had followed the engagement at the Century the
repertoire had been increased, but the company remained the same--until
the coming of Waslav Nijinsky.

When America was first notified of the impending visit of the Russian
Ballet it was also promised that Waslav Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina
would head the organization. It was no fault of the American direction
or of Serge de Diaghilew that they did not do so. Various excuses were
advanced for the failure of Karsavina to forsake her family in Russia
and to undertake the journey to the United States but, whatever the
cause, there seems to remain no doubt that she refused to come. As for
Nijinsky, he, with his wife, had been a prisoner in an Austrian
detention camp since the beginning of the war. Wheels were set grinding
but wheels grind slowly in an epoch of international bloodshed, and it
was not until March, 1916, that the Austrian ambassador at Washington
was able to announce that Nijinsky had been set free.

I do not believe the coming to this country of any other celebrated
person had been more widely advertised, although P. T. Barnum may have
gone further in describing the charitable and vocal qualities of Jenny
Lind. Nijinsky had been extravagantly praised, not only by the official
press representatives but also by eminent critics and private persons,
in adjectives which seemed to preclude any possibility of his living up
to them. I myself had been among the paean singers. I had thrust
"half-man, half-god" into print. "A flame!" cried some one. Another, "A
jet of water from a fountain!" Such men in the street as had taken the
trouble to consider the subject at all very likely expected the arrival
of some stupendous and immortal monstrosity, a gravity-defying being
with sixteen feet (at least), who bounded like a rubber ball, never
touching the solid stage except at the beginning and end of the
evening's performance.

Nijinsky arrived in April. Almost immediately he gave vent to one of
those expressions of temperament often associated with interpretative
genius, the kind of thing I have described at some length in "Music and
Bad Manners." He was not at all pleased with the Balle