ment, 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.

PLAYS AND ACTING

NIETZSCHE ON TRAGEDY

I have been reading Nietzsche on the Origin of Tragedy with the delight
of one who discovers a new world, which he has seen already in a dream.
I never take up Nietzsche without the surprise of finding something
familiar. Sometimes it is the answer to a question which I have only
asked; sometimes it seems to me that I have guessed at the answer. And,
in his restless energy, his hallucinatory, vision, the agility of this
climbing mind of the mountains, I find that invigoration which only a
"tragic philosopher" can give. "A sort of mystic soul," as he says of
himself, "almost the soul of a Maenad, who, troubled, capricious, and
half irresolute whether to cede or fly, stammers out something in a
foreign tongue."

The book is a study in the origin of tragedy among the Greeks, as it
arose out of music through the medium of the chorus. We are apt to look
on the chorus in Greek plays as almost a negligible part of the
structure; as, in fact, hardly more than the comments of that "ideal
spectator" whom Schlegel called up out of the depths of the German
consciousness. We know, however, that the chorus was the original
nucleus of the play, that the action on which it seems only to comment
is no more than a development of the chorus. Here is the problem to
which Nietzsche endeavours to find an answer. He finds it, unlike th