"We're giving our pastor a new drawing-room carpet on the occasion of his jubilee. Show me something that looks nice but isn't too expensive."
"Here is the very thing, Madame—real Kidderminster."
"La Légende de Joseph."
Those who know the kind of attractions that the Russian ballet offers in so many of its themes could have easily guessed, without previous enlightenment, what episode in the life of Joseph had been selected for illustration last week at Drury Lane. But they could never have guessed that Herr Tiessen, author of a shilling guide to the intentions of the composer, would attach a transcendental significance to the conduct of Potiphar's Wife "Through the unknown divine," he informs us, "which is still new and mysterious to her, an imperious desire awakens in her to fathom, to possess this world"—the world, that is to say, which Joseph's imagination creates in the course of an exhibition dance. If this is so, I can only say that her behaviour is strangely misleading.
The scene opens at a party given by Potiphar in Venice. Venice, of course, was not Potiphar's home address; and I marvel a little at the change of venue when I think how much more harmony could have been got out of an Egyptian setting. But then I remind myself that the Russian ballet is nothing if not bizarre. The long banqueting-table recalls the canvases of Veronese, but with discordant notes of the Orient and elsewhere. Potiphar himself, seated on a däis, has the air of an Assyrian bull. By his side Mme. Potiphar wears breeches ending above the knee, with white stockings and high clogs.
For the entertainment of the guests there was a dance of nuptial unveiling and a bout between half-a-dozen Turkish boxers. But it was a decadent and blasé company, and something more piquant was needed for their titillation. This was supplied in the shape of an original dance by the fifteen-year-old Joseph, whom my guide describes as "graceful, wild and pungent." He was introduced in a recumbent posture, and asleep, on a covered stretcher, and at first I had the clever idea that he was the customary corpse that appeared at Egyptian feasts to remind the company of their liability to die. But when he woke up and began to dance I saw at once that I was wrong.
I now know all about the interpretation of Joseph's dance; but I defy anyone to say at sight and without a show-man's assistance what precisely he was after. In the Third Figure (according to my guide-book) "there is in his leaps a feeling of heaviness, as if he were bound to earth, and he stumbles once or twice as one who has missed his goal;" but how was I to guess that this signified that his "searching after God" was still ineffectual? or that when in the Fourth Figure he "leaps with light feet" this meant that "Joseph has found God"? I don't blame the boy for not knowing the rule that forbids one art to trespass on the domain of another; but there is no excuse for Herr Strauss, who must have been well aware that, for the conveyance of any but the most obvious emotions, mute dancing can never be a satisfactory substitute for articulate poetry.
However, Potiphar's guests seemed better instructed than I was, for they threw off their apathy and took quite an intelligent interest in Joseph's pas soul. Indeed, one young man (the episode escaped me at the dress rehearsal, but I
