the imaginative method by which he creates in the mind of the spectators
the image of that which he desires them to see. Still, the quality of
the drama is action. It is always dangerous to pause for
picturesqueness. And the introduction of self-explanatory scenery
enables the modern method to be far more direct, while the loveliness of
form and colour which it gives us, seems to me often to create an
artistic temperament in the audience, and to produce that joy in beauty
for beauty's sake, without which the great masterpieces of art can never
be understood, to which, and to which only, are they ever revealed.

To talk of the passion of a play being hidden by the paint, and of
sentiment being killed by scenery, is mere emptiness and folly of words.
A noble play, nobly mounted, gives us double artistic pleasure. The eye
as well as the ear is gratified, and the whole nature is made exquisitely
receptive of the influence of imaginative work. And as regards a bad
play, have we not all seen large audiences lured by the loveliness of
scenic effect into listening to rhetoric posing as poetry, and to
vulgarity doing duty for realism? Whether this be good or evil for the
public I will not here discuss, but it is evident that the playwright, at
any rate, never suffers.

Indeed, the artist who really has suffered through the modern mounting of
plays is not the dramatist at all, but the scene-painter proper. He is
rapidly being displaced by the stage-carpenter. Now and then, at Drury
Lane, I have seen beautiful old front cloths let down, as perfect as
pictures some of them, and pure painter's work, and there are many which
we all remember at other theatres, in front of which some dialogue was
reduced to graceful dumb-show through the hammer and tin-tacks behind.
But as a rule the stage is overcrowded with enormous properties, which
are not merely far more expensive and cumbersome than scene-paintings,