After seeing a ballet, a farce, and the fragment of an opera performed
by the marionettes at the Costanzi Theatre in Rome, I am inclined to ask
myself why we require the intervention of any less perfect medium
between the meaning of a piece, as the author conceived it, and that
other meaning which it derives from our reception of it. The living
actor, even when he condescends to subordinate himself to the
requirements of pantomime, has always what he is proud to call his
temperament; in other words, so much personal caprice, which for the
most part means wilful misunderstanding; and in seeing his acting you
have to consider this intrusive little personality of his as well as the
author's. The marionette may be relied upon. He will respond to an
indication without reserve or revolt; an error on his part (we are all
human) will certainly be the fault of the author; he can be trained to
perfection. As he is painted, so will he smile; as the wires lift or
lower his hands, so will his gestures be; and he will dance when his
legs are set in motion.
Seen at a distance, the puppets cease to be an amusing piece of
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
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. 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
you will afterwards. Gesture on the stage is the equivalent of rhythm in
verse, and it can convey, as a perfect rhythm should, not a little of
the inner meaning of words, a meaning perhaps more latent in things.
Does not gesture indeed make emotion, more certainly and more
immediately than emotion makes gesture? You may feel that you may
suppress emotion; but assume a smile, lifted eyebrows, a clenched fist,
and it is impossible for you not to assume along with the gesture, if
but for a moment, the emotion to which that gesture corresponds. In our
marionettes, then, we get personified gesture, and the gesture, like all
other forms of emotion, generalised. The appeal in what seems to you
these childish manoeuvres is to a finer, because to a more intimately
poetic, sense of things than the merely rationalistic appeal of very
modern plays. If at times we laugh, it is with wonder at seeing humanity
so gay, heroic, and untiring. There is the romantic suggestion of magic
in this beauty.
Maeterlinck wrote on the title-page of one of his volumes "Drames pour
marionettes," no doubt to intimate his sense of the symbolic value, in
the interpretation of a profound inner meaning of that external nullity
which the marionette by its very nature emphasises. And so I find my
puppets, where the extremes meet, ready to interpret not only the
"Agamemnon," but "La Mort de Tintagiles"; for the soul, which is to
make, we may suppose, the drama of the future, is content with as simple
a mouthpiece as Fate and the great passions, which were the classic
drama.