presented before the Imperial Court as early as 1675. Peter the Great had insisted on Western dancing as one of the means to his end of bringing Russia abreast of the times. Indeed he is supposed to have learned it and taught it himself, as he did shipbuilding. In 1735 the Empress Anne engaged a Neapolitan composer and musical director and a French ballet-master, and bade them present a ballet every week. Cadets from the military academy were at first impressed into service; which may be contributory to the military exactness of the organisation of the Ballet Academy.
As ballet material, the cadets were gradually (according to Flitch) replaced by boys and girls of the poorer classes, whom the ballet-master trained free of charge. The assignment of quarters to them in the palace, the appointment of a coachman’s widow to take care of them, an appropriation of extra pay to the ballet-master for teaching, may be said to mark the beginnings of the Academy. Its existence has been uninterrupted, and, under the almost idolatrous Russian love of ballet representations, its growth has been steady. A composite French-Italian technique was adopted, as before stated, and kept unmodified until the recent romantic movement had proven its worth. Italian principal dancers were employed until, a generation ago, the need of them was ended by the Imperial Academy’s arrival at a condition of adequacy.
The difference between the romantic ballet and the classic could not be described in an infinity of words, but it can be summarised in a few, and its character suggested in a few sketches. Briefly, the difference consists in liberty to depart from classic restriction of pose and movement, wherever such emancipation will contribute to expression. This freedom inevitably clashes with ballet tenets that have been unquestioned for a hundred and fifty years. The classic keeps the shoulders down; the romantic does not hesitate to raise them, one or both, to portray fear, disdain, or what-not. In the eyes of the classicists, straightness of body (its detractors call it rigidity) is of absolute importance; romanticists, in their Oriental representations, for instance, do not hesitate to exploit the body’s sinuosity to the utmost. Yet, in their apparent disregard of choreographic law, they have preserved rigourously the underlying truth of choreographic structure. Than their brilliant steps those of no dancer are cleaner or more perfect; in equilibrium, in exactness, in all that makes for style and finish, they have no superiors. Nevertheless some of the classic ballet people, especially the Milan element, still protest that the romantic idea, with all its appurtenances, is a heresy. M. Legatt, of the St. Petersburg Academy, is said to group all the new elements into one category: Duncanism!
As the painter Bakst (and with him may be mentioned Boris Anisfeldt and others of the same artistic creed), while preserving recognisable national character in his scenes and costumes, does not scruple to subordinate historical facts to his motives, so does the romantic ballet-master disregard the natural limitations of folk-dances that he may choose to employ in his composition. If it suited the dramatic intention of M. Fokine to bring an Arabian dancer on to the point, or to introduce into her work a pure pirouette, it is fairly safe to assume that he would do so, despite the fact that Arabic dancing itself knows no such devices. It is to be added that although he should make such amendment to an