Thus, in availing themselves of advances in the arts of music, scenery and costume, both opera and ballet have strayed from pure classic tradition. And there is no harm in that, per se. But a point to be most strongly emphasised is this: that the Russian ballet has re-created, in its essence, the best of classic drama.
Employment of the full eloquence of step, pose and facial expression, without the restriction that the spoken word imposes upon meaning—that is the paramount distinction of the Russian ballet’s dramatic form. Hardly second in importance is its independence of elaborate stage mechanism as a means to effects. The first opera busied itself with mechanical contrivances to an extent that was commented upon—with amusement—by writers in its time. How far its originators were justified in believing that they had re-created a great classic form needs no further comment. That the Russians, searching for the great fundamentals of art, devised a form practically coincidental with that accepted by the best intelligence of the best period of Athens, is a chapter of dramatic history whose importance is not likely to be exaggerated.
We left the secessionists, on an earlier page, in the position of having defied a strong-handed government. In this crisis, M. Sergius Diagilew enters the narrative, not as an artist, but as one of art’s indispensable allies. He it was who, some years before, had arranged the exhibitions that first acquainted western Europe and America with modern Russian painting. When the rift occurred in the Ballet Academy, M. Diagilew, by virtue of experience and sympathies, was the one man to perform certain needed diplomatic services in the interest of the rebels. Their situation lacked little of being politically serious. M. Diagilew performed the felicitous miracle of turning a fault into a virtue.
To proper government authorities he outlined a plan which in itself deserves a place in diplomatic history. “Contract-breakers these people are,” he admitted, “and on a par with deserters from the army. But instead of punishing them, I have another suggestion.
“They have created a new and great art. Their combined work represents a greater expression than any living man has seen, perhaps the finest thing of its kind that ever has existed in the world.
“Europe respects Russia for her force, not for her thought. Its common belief is that Russia is a nation of savages, because it has seen no purely Russian art that it would call great.
“My proposal is that these people be reinstated in the Opera and the Academy, that they be granted a long leave of absence, and that I be commissioned to arrange for them a season in Paris, as an exhibition of representative Russian art, sanctioned by the Russian government.”
The capital necessary for a full equipment of costumes and scenery was provided by Baron Ginsberg. And there followed the first season of le Ballet Russe at the Châtelet Théâtre, in 1905. Paris, like every other progressive city in the world, was surfeited with plays that would better have been enclosed between the covers of books on law, sociology or medicine. Its ballet, though fighting valiantly against the effect that time works on old governments, old religions, old institutions, had settled into the ways of habit, and could no longer fire the mind or the imagination. As to all that miscellany of “musical comedies” that, with their
