Page:Catalogue of an exhibition of water-colour drawings and other original works by Edmund Dulac.pdf/14

 similar way with Bakst. This important work will have its premiere in New York City this Spring. Finally he has designed a series of masks, settings and costumes for William Butler Yeats' symbolical play, entitled "At the Hawk's Well" or "Waters of Immortality," a poetical drama, modelled upon the Noh stage tradition of aristocratic Japan. The properties devised by Dulac are so simple that the actors can bring them in a single cab, and perform during their leisure hours in any drawing room. Mr. Yeats, in his still unpublished preface, tells us what a stirring adventure it would be "for a poet and an artist working together, to create once more heroic or grotesque types, that keeping always an appropriate distance from life, would seem images of those profound emotions that exist only in solitude and in silence." It would seem that in Dulac he found an artist who could not only enter into the spirit of his poetry, but who was moreover familiar with the ancient theatrical traditions of the Romans, and of those consummate Japanese masters who hundreds of years ago moulded masks for various types of tragic character. "What could be more suitable," asks the poet, "than that Cuchulain, let us 11