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 moment, the emotion to which that gesture corresponds.  In our marionettes, then, we get personified gesture, and the gesture, like all other forms of emotion, generalised.  The appeal in what seems to you these childish manoeuvres is to a finer, because to a more intimately poetic, sense of things than the merely rationalistic appeal of very modern plays.  If at times we laugh, it is with wonder at seeing humanity so gay, heroic, and untiring.  There is the romantic suggestion of magic in this beauty.

Maeterlinck wrote on the title-page of one of his volumes “Drames pour marionettes,” no doubt to intimate his sense of the symbolic value, in the interpretation of a profound inner meaning of that external nullity which the marionette by its very nature emphasises.  And so I find my puppets, where the extremes meet, ready to interpret not only the “Agamemnon,” but “La Mort de Tintagiles”; for the soul, which is to make, we may suppose, the drama of the future, is content with as simple a mouthpiece as Fate and the great passions, which were the classic drama.

PLAYS AND ACTING

NIETZSCHE ON TRAGEDY

I have been reading Nietzsche on the Origin of Tragedy with the delight of one who discovers a new world, which he has seen already in a dream.  I never take up Nietzsche without the surprise of finding something familiar.  Sometimes it is the answer to a question which I have only asked; sometimes it seems to me that I have guessed at the answer.  And, in his restless energy, his hallucinatory, vision, the agility of this climbing mind of the mountains, I find that invigoration which only a “tragic philosopher” can give.  “A sort of mystic soul,” as he says of himself, “almost the soul of a Maenad, who, troubled, capricious, and half irresolute whether to cede or fly, stammers out something in a foreign tongue.”

The book is a study in the origin of tragedy among the Greeks, as it arose out of music through the medium of the chorus.  We are apt to look on the chorus in Greek plays as almost a negligible part of the structure; as, in fact, hardly more than the comments of that “ideal spectator” whom Schlegel called up out of the depths of the German consciousness.  We know, however, that the chorus was the original nucleus of the play, that the action on which it seems