Page:The Art of Nijinsky.djvu/69

THE BALLETS familiar slave is one of a dozen masterpieces. Not only does he find and use the opportunity of displaying some of the most intricate and characteristic steps of the Russian method, but he also endows the whole spectacle with just that appropriate tensity of feeling which alone can raise fine dancing to the plane of fine art. For Nijinsky, the vivid, radiant boy, is also the hierophant of mysteries, and in the glamour of his presence Armide comes to seem not merely a matchless display of lovely form in lovely motion, but also a type of the supreme functioning of a state of being most strange and utterly alien from our own.

The court of Armide, one believes, is part of a definite and settled polity, with its own laws, its own customs, and its own business from day to day. It is more objective in feeling than the scene