otic
process, a cunning absorption of the will of another.

"Parsifal" presents itself as before all things a picture. The music,
soaring up from hidden depths, and seeming to drop from the heights, and
be reflected back from shining distances, though it is, more than
anything I have ever heard, like one of the great forces of nature, the
sea or the wind, itself makes pictures, abstract pictures; but even the
music, as one watches the stage, seems to subordinate itself to the
visible picture there. And, so perfectly do all the arts flow into one,
the picture impresses one chiefly by its rhythm, the harmonies of its
convention. The lesson of "Parsifal" is the lesson that, in art, rhythm
is everything. Every moment in the acting of this drama makes a picture,
and every movement is slow, deliberate, as if automatic. No actor makes
a gesture, which has not been regulated for him; there is none of that
unintelligent haphazard known as being "natural"; these people move like
music, or with that sense of motion which it is the business of painting
to arrest. Gesture being a part of a picture, how should it but be
settled as definitely, for that pictorial effect which all action on the
stage is (more or less unconsciously) striving after, as if it were the
time of a song, or the stage direction: "Cross stage to right"? Also,
every gesture is slow; even despair having its artistic limits, its
reticence. It is difficult to express the delight with which one sees,
for the first time, people really motionless on the stage. After all,
action, as it has been said, is only a way of spoiling something. The
aim of the modern stage, of all drama, since the drama of the Greeks,
is to give a vast impression of bustle, of people who, like most people
in real life, are in a hurry about things; and our actors, when they are
not making irrelevant speeches, are engaged in frantically trying to
make us see that they are feeling acute emotion, by I know not what
restlessness, contortion, and ineffectual excitement. If it were once
realised how infinitely more important are the lines in the picture than
these staccato extravagances which do but aim at tearing it out of its
frame, breaking violently through it, we should have learnt a little, at
least, of what the art of the stage should be, of what Wagner has shown
us that it can be.

Distance from the accidents of real life, atmosphere, the space for a
new, fairer world to form itself, being of