sometimes from the back of the stage, and marches before your vision
as obtrusive as an advertisement, while the band plays some tune like
"You made me love you." One should not say "marches" perhaps, but
glides. The glide seems to be the ideal at which the modern woman aims
in her walk, and the mannequin glides with every exaggeration. But, if
you have ever seen cows ambling along a country road you have seen
something strangely like the glide that is now in fashion, yet no one
thinks of speaking of cows as "gliding." The mannequins come before
us one by one at this slow cattle-walk, and pass along one of those
Reinhardt pathways above the heads of the people in the stalls. Then
they raise their arms and turn round as in a showroom and smile as in
the advertisement of a tooth-wash. And so on till ten or a dozen of
them have appeared and disappeared. Then out glides the whole school
of them again not singly this time, but in a procession, all smiling
under their barbaric panaches and their towering crest of feathers,
and one of them with her head and chin wrapped in gilt embroideries
that make her look like a queen with a toothache. All smiles and
paint, the girls nevertheless seem to have no more relation to their
gowns than a statue to the hat which someone has perched on its head.
They give us no drama of dress. They are simply lay-figures imitating
the colours of the rainbow. Perhaps, to a student of fashion, they
have some meaning and interest. But a student of fashion does not go
for his lessons to a music-hall. To the rest of us they are simply a
trash of fine clothes. They are a decadent substitute for gladiatorial
exhibitions. They are a last wild--no, no; not wild--a last tame
parody on life. Life as a parade of mannequins--the satiric
imagination could invent nothing more contemptuously comic. Perhaps,
in the theatre of the future, the characters of the plays will remain
as mannequins, while the words will be left out as superfluous. Hamlet
will appear in his inky cloak at the right intervals, turn round so as
to give us a good back and front view, and Ophelia will then take his
place in a procession of fine dresses, the whole play being a solemn
in-and-out movement of silent gowned figures. Shakespeare ought to be
much more popular that way. Even Shakespeare on the cinematograph
could hardly compete with it.

What, one wonders, is the cause of all this mannequinism? Is it a
survival of the passion for doll