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of the background, and play and players alike were upraised to a lofty plane of solemn stateliness by the stately reality of those noble walls: which themselves were tragedies, because of the ruin that had come to them with age. Upon the comedy that so injudiciously was interpolated into the program the effect of the heroic environment was hopelessly belittling. M. Arene's "L'Ilote" and M. Ferrier's "Revanche d'Iris" are charming of their kind, and to see them in an ordinary theatre--with those intimate accessories of house life which such sparkling trifles require--would be only a delight. But at Orange their sparkle vanished, and they were jarringly out of place. Even the perfect excellence of the players--and no Grecian actress, I am confident, ever surpassed Mademoiselle Rachel-Boyer in exquisitely finished handling of Grecian draperies--could not save them. Quite as distinctly as each of the tragedies was a success, the little comedies were failures: being overwhelmed utterly by their stately surroundings, and lost in the melancholy bareness of that great stage. It was all the more, therefore, an interesting study in the psychology of the drama to perceive how the comparatively few actors in the casts of the tragedies--how even, at times, only one or two figures--seemed entirely to fill the stage; and how at all times those plays and their setting absolutely harmonized. VIII Of scenery, in the ordinary sense of the word, there was none at all. What we saw was the real thing. In the opening scene of "Oedipus," the _King_--coming forward through the royal portal, and across the raised platform in the rear of the stage--did literally "enter from the palace," and did "descend the palace steps" to the "public place" where _Creon_ and the priests awaited him. It was a direct reversal of the ordinary effect in the ordinary theatre: where the play loses in realism because a current of necessarily recognized, but purposely ignored, antagonistic fact underruns the conventional illusion and compels us to perceive that the palace is but painted canvas, and (even on the largest stage) is only four or five times as high as the _Prince_. The palace at Orange--towering up as though it would touch the very heavens, and obviously of veritable stone--was a most peremptory reality. [Illustration: SCENE FROM THE FIRST ACT OF "OEDIPUS"] The fortuitous accessory of the trees growing close beside the stage added to the outdoo
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