by civilisation.  Only the body speaks in it, the mind is absent; and the body abandons itself completely to the animal force of its instincts.  With a great artist like Sada Yacco in the death scene of “The Geisha and the Knight,” the effect is overwhelming; the whole woman dies before one’s sight, life ebbs visibly out of cheeks and eyes and lips; it is death as not even Sarah Bernhardt has shown us death.  There are moments, at other times and with other performers, when it is difficult not to laugh at some cat-like or ape-like trick of these painted puppets who talk a toneless language, breathing through their words as they whisper or chant them.  They are swathed like barbaric idols, in splendid robes without grace; they dance with fans, with fingers, running, hopping, lifting their feet, if they lift them, with the heavy delicacy of the elephant; they sing in discords, striking or plucking a few hoarse notes on stringed instruments, and beating on untuned drums.  Neither they nor their clothes have beauty, to the limited Western taste; they have strangeness, the charm of something which seems to us capricious, almost outside Nature.  In our ignorance of their words, of what they mean to one another, of the very way in which they see one another, we shall best appreciate their rarity by looking on them frankly as pictures, which we can see with all the imperfections of a Western misunderstanding.

V. THE PARIS MUSIC-HALL

It is not always realised by Englishmen that England is really the country of the music-hall, the only country where it has taken firm root and flowered elegantly.  There is nothing in any part of Europe to compare, in their own way, with the Empire and the Alhambra, either as places luxurious in themselves or as places where a brilliant spectacle is to be seen.  It is true that, in England, the art of the ballet has gone down; the prima ballerina assoluta is getting rare, the primo uomo is extinct.  The training of dancers as dancers leaves more and more to be desired, but that is a defect which we share, at the present time, with most other countries; while the beauty of the spectacle, with us, is unique.  Think of “Les Papillons” or of “Old China” at the Empire, and then go and see a fantastic ballet at Paris, at Vienna, or at Berlin!

And it is not only in regard to the ballet, but in regard also to the “turns,” that we are ahead of all our competitors.  I have no great admiration for most of our comic gentlemen and ladies in London, but I find it still more difficult to take any interest in the comic gentlemen and ladies of Paris.  Take Marie Lloyd, for instance, and compare with her, say, Marguerite Deval at the Scala.  Both aim at much the same effect, but, contrary to what might have been expected, it is the Englishwoman who shows the greater finesse in the rendering of that small range of sensations to which both give themselves up frankly.  Take Polin, who is supposed to express