titude and
passion--flit in the backward places of the stage.

Ariel fulfils his office, and is not of one kind with those he serves. Is
there a memory of Harlequin in that delicate figure? Something of the
subservient immortality, of the light indignity, proper to Pantaleone,
Brighella, Arlecchino, Colombina, and the Clown, hovers away from the
stage when Ariel is released from the trouble of human things.

Immortality, did I say? It was immortality until Mercutio fell. And if
some claim be made to it still because Harlequin has transformed so many
scenes for the pleasure of so many thousand children, since Mercutio
died, I must reply that our modern Harlequin is no more than a
_marionnette_; he has returned whence he came. A man may play him, but
he is--as he was first of all--a doll. From doll-hood Arlecchino took
life, and, so promoted, flitted through a thousand comedies, only to be
again what he first was; save that, as once a doll played the man, so now
a man plays the doll. It is but a memory of Arlecchino that our children
see, a poor statue or image endowed with mobility rather than with life.

With Mercutio, vanished the light heart that had given to the serious
ages of the world an hour's refuge from the unforgotten burden of
responsible conscience; the light heart assumed, borrowed, made
dramatically the spectator's own. We are not serious now, and no heart
now is quite light, even for an hour.

THE LITTLE LANGUAGE

Dialect is the elf rather than the genius of place, and a dwarfish master
of the magic of local things.

In England we hardly know what a concentrated homeliness it nourishes;
inasmuch as, with us, the castes and classes for whom Goldoni and Gallina
and Signor Fogazzaro have written in the patois of the Veneto, use no
dialect at all.

Neither Goldoni nor Gallina has charged the Venetian language with so
much literature as to take from the people the shelter of their almost
unwritten tongue. Signor Fogazzaro, bringing tragedy into the homes of
dialect, does but show us how the language staggers under such a stress,
how it breaks down, and resigns that office. One of the finest of the
characters in the ranks of his admirable fiction is that old manageress
of the narrow things of the house whose daughter is dying insane. I have
called the dialect a shelter. This it is; but the poor lady does not
cower within; her resigned head erect, she is shut out from that homely
refu