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.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25