w quality crept into stage expression through
this characterization. Margaret Wycherly, one of the most active
admirers of the dancer, told me after the first performance that she
felt that he had for the first time leaped into the hearts of the great
American public, whose appreciation of his subtler art as expressed in
_Narcisse_, _Petrouchka_, and even _Scheherazade_, had been more
moderate. There were those who protested that this was not the Till of
the German legends, but any actor who attempts to give form to a folk
or historical character, or even a character derived from fiction, is
forced to run counter to many an observer's preconceived ideas.

[Illustration: WASLAV NIJINSKY IN DEBUSSY'S _JEUX_ (1913)]

"It is an error to believe that pantomime is merely a way of doing
without words," writes Arthur Symons," that it is merely the equivalent
of words. Pantomime is thinking overheard. It begins and ends before
words have formed themselves, in a deeper consciousness than that of
speech. And it addresses itself, by the artful limitations of its craft,
to universal human experience, knowing that the moment it departs from
those broad lines it will become unintelligible. It risks existence on
its own perfection, as the rope-dancer does, to whom a false step means
a down-fall. And it appeals democratically to people of all nations....
And pantomime has that mystery which is one of the requirements of true
art. To watch it is like dreaming. How silently, in dreams, one gathers
the unheard sounds of words from the lips that do but make pretence of
saying them! And does not every one know that terrifying impossibility
of speaking which fastens one to the ground for the eternity of a
second, in what is the new, perhaps truer, computation of time in
dreams? Something like that sense of suspense seems to hang over the
silent actors in pantomime, giving them a nervous exaltation, which has
its subtle, immediate effect upon us, in tragic and comic situation. The
silence becomes an atmosphere, and with a very curious power of giving
distinction to form and motion. I do not see why people should ever
break silence on the stage except to speak poetry. Here, in pantomime,
you have a gracious, expressive silence, beauty of gesture, a perfectly
discreet appeal to the emotions, a transposition of the world into an
elegant accepted convention."

Arthur Symons wrote these words before he had seen the Russian Ballet,
before the Russ