NIJINSKY
mime. For pantomime, remember, seeks to express emotion through realistic gestures, whereas dancing makes use of a convention of its own—a gesture in which the ordinary values of realism have no place.
The apparent oddness of a ballet like Jeux is due, then, not at all to perversity of subject, but to the employment of a dance-convention with which we do not happen to have been familiar. The Faune, you see, was played in London without protest and was quickly one of the most appreciated of Russian ballets, largely because the convention employed in it, though new to the stage, was familiar enough to anyone who could boast of a smattering of Greek culture. But in Jeux, where a more novel convention was practised on a modern theme, the stalls gracefully tittered and the critics next
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