I have always regarded these dolls as a mistake, for they must needs be anonymous, and how can one tell if the acting is good if one does not know the name of the performers? I think too, that if one is to have puppets at all, they should be either grotesque or fairy-like, and these were neither, resembling instead those early Egyptian or Indian sculptures we have so far out-distanced, or those Byzantine paintings, which, once thought beautiful, would look so oddly on the walls of Burlington House. I must confess that their movements were graceful, their deftness above that of any human being, but not more so than one could imagine human beings capable of. They were actuated, not by strings, but by some invisible power, and everything they did seemed to be of such happy invention that one felt they had all nature at their command to use. But I detected a grave error in the way the fairfusser made the words issue from their lips, for they did not speak at all like actors, but simply and swiftly, as we all try to do in real life, and it is not for that we go to the theatre. Their speeches were so cadenced that they dwelt in the ear like a harmony in music, which is contrary to all experience, so that the characters did not seem like men ennobled, but, rather, fleshly embodiments of the thought or feeling it was their purpose to express. One enthusiast, eager to convert me, quoted to me the words of some foreign actress of our time:[9] “To save the Theatre, the Theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible,” which is cruel and absurd, and in any case should not have come from an actress. For these semblances of mankind by their remoteness banished all the accidental things which make a play realistic and warmly human, and all the personal emotion which makes us feel for an actor, and applaud him for the pain he has gone through. But we cannot feel for a puppet, or applaud him, even if he has played King Lear, for we know his sufferings were not real. [9] Eleonora Duse (Ed.).