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NIJINSKY

It must be, I think, this sense of outline which also endows Nijinsky's art with that exquisite neatness which some have actually interpreted as its limitation. Dancing, such people say, is of the essence of freedom. To restrain is to sterilise and to reduce the living body of man to nothing better than a mechanism of springs and steel. Well, there is this amount of truth in such a criticism: that Nijinsky's method does not actually seem so nicely adapted to express certain moods of natural abandonment as, say, Mordkin expressed in that famous Bacchanale he danced with Anna Pavlova. Still, no artist is at his best in every mood, and to expect him to be so is to deny to him the gift of personality. As a matter of fact, a feeling for outline like Nijinsky's allows a far wider range of effect than that possible to a looser method; implies,

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