in a series of violent revolutions.

Therefore it is natural that I go to Asia for a stage-convention, for
more formal faces, for a chorus that has no part in the action and
perhaps for those movements of the body copied from the marionette shows
of the 14th century. A mask will enable me to substitute for the face of
some common-place player, or for that face repainted to suit his own
vulgar fancy, the fine invention of a sculptor, and to bring the audience
close enough to the play to hear every inflection of the voice. A mask
never seems but a dirty face, and no matter how close you go is still a
work of art; nor shall we lose by staying the movement of the features,
for deep feeling is expressed by a movement of the whole body. In
poetical painting & in sculpture the face seems the nobler for lacking
curiosity, alert attention, all that we sum up under the famous word of
the realists 'vitality.' It is even possible that being is only possessed
completely by the dead, and that it is some knowledge of this that
makes us gaze with so much emotion upon the face of the Sphinx or Buddha.
Who can forget the face of Chaliapine as the Mogul King in Prince Igor,
when a mask covering its upper portion made him seem like a Phoenix at
the end of its thousand wise years, awaiting in condescension the burning
nest and what did it not gain from that immobility in dignity and in
power?


IV

Realism is created for the common people and was always their peculiar
delight, and it is the delight to-day of all those whose minds educated
alone by school-masters and newspapers are without the memory of beauty
and emotional subtlety. The occasional humorous realism that so much