died, I must reply that our modern Harlequin is no more than a
_marionnette_; he has returned whence he came. A man may play him, but
he is--as he was first of all--a doll. From doll-hood Arlecchino took
life, and, so promoted, flitted through a thousand comedies, only to be
again what he first was; save that, as once a doll played the man, so now
a man plays the doll. It is but a memory of Arlecchino that our children
see, a poor statue or image endowed with mobility rather than with life.

With Mercutio, vanished the light heart that had given to the serious
ages of the world an hour's refuge from the unforgotten burden of
responsible conscience; the light heart assumed, borrowed, made
dramatically the spectator's own. We are not serious now, and no heart
now is quite light, even for an hour.




THE LITTLE LANGUAGE


Dialect is the elf rather than the genius of place, and a dwarfish master
of the magic of local things.

In England we hardly know what a concentrated homeliness it nourishes;
inasmuch as, with us, the castes and classes for whom Goldoni and Gallina
and Signor Fogazzaro have written in the patois of the Veneto, use no
dialect at all.

Neither Goldoni nor Gallina has charged the Venetian language with so
much literature as to take from the people the shelter of their almost