IN Shehérazade
Photograph: Bert, Paris
for a dancer with his zest for work, his post at the Imperial Opera was more or less of a sinecure. The ballet, which only performed about six times a month, was too intermittent to give a proper scope for his activity.
With a dead complexion, lank, dun-coloured hair, high cheekbones, long and somewhat obliquely set eyes, Nijinsky has the racial characteristics of the Slav. His expression is one of a serenity that is untroubled by the glory of the present or the cares of the future. His eye is bright and expressive. In repose his face has a certain dreamy preoccupation, which at a word spoken or a sight that arrests his attention, passes swiftly into an absorbing interest in the life of the moment. His is clearly a highly-strung temperament—indeed he told me that what he found most difficult in his art was the conquest of the nerves.
Nijinsky has the genius for taking pains. A movement, a gesture, which upon the stage has often the appearance of a happy improvisation, is invariably the result of careful study. How searching is his preparation I only realised when I saw him one morning practising with Madame Karsavina on the stage at Covent Garden. His instructor, M. Cecchetti, a distinguished member of the Diaghilew company (he is the wicked marquis in Le Pavillon d’Armide, the Grand Eunuch in Scheherazade), took him through even the most elementary exercises with the severity of a drill sergeant. For the young dancer, however, it was not a mechanical routine, but a kind of play, into which he entered with a certain smiling gaiety. If he found that he was executing a movement imperfectly, he stopped short in the middle of it with a gesture of half-amused vexation and repeated it over and over again until he had made it faultless. The actual mastery of the technique appeared to him to be in itself a delight, and not, as with many dancers, a painful task-work. In his practice I found that the turns of his pirouettes and the cuts of his entrechats were more numerous than in the actual performance, for he never perverts the intention of the dance by introducing into it acrobatic feats merely for the sake of dazzling the spectator.
It is not altogether easy to analyse the qualities of Nijinsky’s dancing in virtue of which he is rightly regarded as the finest danseur of the age. Perhaps his chief merit consists in that very versatility which seems to conceal the pre-eminence of any single feature. He never repeats himself. His personality appears to inhabit not one but several bodies, or rather his personality itself is multiple. Did not one know that it were the fact, would it be possible to believe that the lustful negro of Scheherazade was one with the tender flower-spirit of Le Spectre de la Rose, or the impish and irresponsible Arlequin of Le Carnaval the same as the courteous and adoring page of Le Pavillon d’Armide? He identifies himself in each ballet with the spirit of the action and of the music.
Nijinsky makes us understand that a gesture is, as Blake said of a tear, an intellectual thing. His gestures, by which I do not mean the technical steps, are different in manner and in spirit from those of the traditional Italian school. With the conventional gestures of the academies, which mimic such attitudes as men are supposed naturally to adopt when they perform certain actions or experience certain emotions, he will have nothing to do. Nijinsky’s gestures mimic nothing. They are not the result of a double translation of idea into words, and words into dumb show. They are the mood itself. His limbs possess a faculty of speech. Wit is expressed in his Arlequin dance as lucidly as in an epigram. In Le Spectre de la Rose he dances a sonnet of delighted devotion. He makes credible the suggestion, intended satirically, that La Rochefoucauld’s “Maximes” should be rendered choregraphically. His genius consists in a singular pliancy of the body to the spirit.
His technique is characterised by extreme brilliance and agility. He is weirdly grotesque or daintily graceful at will. Where he is perhaps lacking is in gravity and statuesque pose. Nijinsky does not realise the Pheidian ideal as perfectly as Mordkin, and therefore he can never be his equal in creating that impression of the glorious virility of a Greek statue, in whose firm lines a mighty strength lies sleeping. Nor have I ever seen him adequately represent the fierceness of human passion. Even in his Scheherazade dances there is not so much a deep exultation as a kind of schoolboy merriment. But these are the necessary limitations of a youthful body and
