The Project Gutenberg EBook of Plays, Acting and Music, by Arthur SymonsBut 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
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