at a ballet of living dancers. But is not that a
trifle too obvious sentiment for the true artist in artificial things?
Why leave the ball-room? It is not nature that one looks for on the
stage in this kind of spectacle, and our excitement in watching it
should remain purely intellectual. If you prefer that other kind of
illusion, go a little further away, and, I assure you, you will find it
quite easy to fall in love with a marionette. I have seen the most
adorable heads, with real hair too, among the wooden dancers of a
theatre of puppets; faces which might easily, with but a little of that
good-will which goes to all falling in love, seem the answer to a
particular dream, making all other faces in the world but spoilt copies
of this inspired piece of painted wood.

But the illusion, to a more scrupulous taste, will consist simply in
that complication of view which allows us to see wood and wire imitating
an imitation, and which delights us less when seen at what is called the
proper distance, where the two are indistinguishable, than when seen
from just the point where all that is crudely mechanical hides the
comedy of what is, absolutely, a deception. Losing, as we do, something
of the particularity of these painted faces, we are able to enjoy all
the better what it is certainly important we should appreciate, if we
are truly to appreciate our puppets. This is nothing less than a
fantastic, yet a direct, return to the masks of the Greeks: that learned
artifice by which tragedy and comedy were assisted in speaking to the
world with the universal voice, by this deliberate generalising of
emotion. It will be a lesson to some of our modern notions; and it may
be instructive for us to consider that we could not give a play of
Ibsen's to marionettes, but that we could give them the "Agamemnon."

Above all, for we need it above all, let the marionettes remind us that
the art of the theatre should be beautiful first, and then indeed what
you will afterwards. Gesture on the stage is the equivalent of rhythm in
verse, and it can convey, as a perfect rhythm should, not a little of
the inner meaning of words, a meaning perhaps more latent in things.
Does not gesture indeed make emotion, more certainly and more
immediately than emotion makes gesture? You may feel that you may
suppress emotion; but assume a smile, lifted eyebrows, a clenched fist,
and it is impossible for you not to assume along with the gesture, if
but for a mo