at looks like a
beginning of a centre of art elsewhere. The easiness of travel, which is
always growing, began by emptying the country, but it may end by filling
it; for adventures like this of Stratford-on-Avon show that people are
ready to journey from all parts of England and Scotland and Ireland, and
even from America, to live with their favourite art as shut away from the
world as though they were 'in retreat,' as Catholics say. Nobody but an
impressionist painter, who hides it in light and mist, even pretends to
love a street for its own sake; and could we meet our friends and hear
music and poetry in the country, none of us that are not captive would
ever leave the thrushes. In London, we hear something that we like some
twice or thrice in a winter, and among people who are thinking the while
of a music-hall singer or of a member of parliament, but there we would
hear it and see it among people who liked it well enough to have travelled
some few hours to find it; and because those who care for the arts have
few near friendships among those that do not, we would hear and see it
among near friends. We would escape, too, from those artificial tastes and
interests we cultivate, that we may have something to talk about among
people we meet for a few minutes and not again, and the arts would grow
serious as the Ten Commandments.

II

I do not think there is anything I disliked in Stratford, beside certain
new houses, but the shape of the theatre; and as a larger theatre must be
built sooner or later, that would be no great matter if one could put a
wiser shape into somebody's head. I cannot think there is any excuse for
a half-round theatre, where land is not expensive, or no very great
audience to be seated within earshot of the stage; or that it was adopted
for a better reason than because it has come down to us, though from a
time when the art of the stage was a different art. The Elizabethan
theatre was a half-round, because the players were content to speak their
lines on a platform, as if they were speakers at a public meeting, and we
go on building in the same shape, although our art of the stage is the art
of making a succession of pictures. Were our theatres of the shape of a
half-closed fan, like Wagner's theatre, where the audience sit on seats
that rise towards the broad end while the play is played at the narrow
end, their pictures could be composed for eyes at a small number of points
of view, instead