mechanism, imitating real people; there is no difference. I protest that
the Knight who came in with his plumed hat, his shining sword, and flung
back his long cloak with so fine a sweep of the arm, was exactly the
same to me as if he had been a living actor, dressed in the same
clothes, and imitating the gesture of a knight; and that the contrast of
what was real, as we say, under the fiction appears to me less ironical
in the former than in the latter. We have to allow, you will admit, at
least as much to the beneficent heightening of travesty, if we have ever
seen the living actor in the morning, not yet shaved, standing at the
bar, his hat on one side, his mouth spreading in that abandonment to
laughter which has become from the necessity of his profession, a
natural trick; oh, much more, I think, than if we merely come upon an
always decorative, never an obtrusive, costumed figure, leaning against
the wall, nonchalantly enough, in a corner of the coulisses.

To sharpen our sense of what is illusive in the illusion of the puppets,
let us sit not too far from the stage. Choosing our place carefully, we
shall have the satisfaction of always seeing the wires at their work,
while I think we shall lose nothing of what is most savoury in the feast
of the illusion. There is not indeed the appeal to the senses of the
first row of the stalls at a ballet of living dancers. But is not that a
trifle too obvious sentiment for the true artist in artificial things?
Why leave the ball-room? It is not nature that one looks for on the
stage in this kind of spectacle, and our excitement in watching it
should remain purely intellectual. 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