consciousness. They know what they are doing. Fairies do not. . . . Human creatures, I think, know what they are doing only too well, because performance never agrees with desire. But with fairies, desire to do and performance are instinctive and simultaneous. If they think, they think in action, and in this they are far more like animals than human creatures."
How well Nijinsky has realised some such conception will be plain to anyone who has seen the Prélude. For quite apart from the beauty and the interest of the thing as a spectacle, his impersonation of a being so like us in the unspoken motives of its nature, so different in the instant activities of its life, is, to say the least of it, an astonishing achievement. This, indeed, is not simply ballet-dancing in a new mode. It is acting, and as
68
