On seeing the _Carnival_ for the second time I am more than ever struck by the fact that the ballet is a miracle of moving motion. In the dance of Columbine and Harlequin--they danced and mimed like living marionettes--I recalled vividly my impression on seeing a ballet, a farce and the fragments of an opera performed by the marionettes at the Costanzi Theatre in Rome. I was inclined to ask myself why we require the intervention of any less perfect medium between the meaning of a piece, as the audience conceived it, and that other meaning which it derives from our reception of it. In those inspired pieces of living painted wood I saw the illusion that I always desire to find, either in the wings of the theater or from a stall. In our marionettes, then, we get personified gesture, endless gesture, like all other forms of emotion, generalized. The appeal in what seems to you those childish maneuvers is to a finer, because to a more innately poetic sense of things than the rationalistic appeal of very modern plays. If at times we laugh--as one must in this ballet--it is with wonder at seeing humanity so gay, heroic and untiring. There is the romantic suggestion of magic in this beauty. So, in Harlequin, I find the personification of grace, of _souplesse_, in his miming and dancing; and when he is grotesque, I find a singular kind of beauty. A sinister gaiety pervades the ballet; a malevolent undercurrent of subtle meanings gives one the sense of an intricate intrigue; and I almost forgive the fact that the music is German! I am, on the whole, disappointed with the _Cleopatra_ ballet; for the scenery certainly does not suggest Egypt; but, to my mind, suggests rather the scenery used in Paris when I saw Alfred Jarry's _Ubu Roi_, a symbolist farce, given under strange conditions. The action took place in the land of nowhere; and the scenery was painted to represent by adroit conventions temperate and torrid zones at once. Then there were closed windows and a fireplace, containing an alchemist's crucible. These were crudely symbolical, but those in the Coliseum were not. In our search for sensation we have exhausted sensation; and, in that theater, before a people who have perfected the fine shades to their vanishing point, who have subtilized delicacy of perception into the annihilation of the very senses through which we take in ecstasy, I heard a literary Sans-culotte shriek for hours that unspeakable word of the gutter which was the refrain of this comedy of masks. Just as the seeker after pleasure whom pleasure has exhausted, so the seeker after the material illusions of a literary artifice turns finally to that first, subjugated, never quite exterminated element of cruelty which is one of the links which bind us to the earth.