_Sadko_ is simply a magical and magnificent pantomime, and Rimski-Korsakov's ballet music gives me the sense of the swirl and confusion, of the bewilderments and infinite changes in the realm of the sea-king. And, apart from the riotous Russian dancing, most of the ballet is made of nervous gestures of the hands and arms, that have an exciting effect on the nerves, and that recall to my memory certain aspects of the sea; as when I saw a deadly sluggish sea, a venomous serpent coil and uncoil inextricable folds; symbols of something suddenly seen on the sea-surface in contrast with a wizard transmutation of colors. But, most of all, one aspect of curdling thick green masses of colors under a curdling green sea. In that instant I saw all the beauty of corruption. Then the underworld became visible, close under the sea: with palaces (like Poe's); streets, people, ruins; forests thick with poisonous weeds, void spaces, strange shifting shapes: symbols I could not fathom. Then came a stealthy, slow, insidious heaving of the reluctant waves. Then, again, the surging and swaying; and, always motionless, yet steadily changing in shape, the somber and unholy underworld.
In Tchernicheva I saw an actual Princess of the Sea, gorgeously dressed, and enchanting. Yet, all of the spectacle was not beautiful; it was singularly inhuman and, at times, unnatural. Nothing but beauty should exist on the stage. Visible beauty comes with the ballet, an abstract thing; gesture adds pantomime, with which drama begins; and then words bring in the speech by which life tries to tell its secret. Still, in the two extremes, pantomime and the poetic drama, the appeal is to the primary emotions, and with an economy and luxuriance of means, each of which is in its own way inimitable. Pantomime addresses itself, by the artful limitations of its craft, to universal human experiences, knowing that the moment it departs from those broad lines it will become unintelligible.
Pantomime, in its limited way, is no mere imitation of nature: it is a transposition. It can appeal to the intellect for its comprehension, and, like ballet, to the intellect through the eyes. To watch it is like dreaming. And as I watched this ballet I felt myself drawn deep into an opium-dream, as when I wrote of: