walls, on the table of the court-martial. Out of the gloom came the
voices and tones of the distinguishable figures, and it is perhaps a
fancy of mine that it made them--given the situation, of course--more
impressive and dramatic.

Auberon. You rail against scenery, but what could belong more to the
order of things extraneous to what you perhaps a little priggishly call
the delicacy of personal art than the arrangement you are speaking of?

Dorriforth. I was talking of the abuse of scenery. I never said anything
so idiotic as that the effect isn't helped by an appeal to the eye and
an adumbration of the whereabouts.

Auberon. But where do you draw the line and fix the limit? What is the
exact dose?

Dorriforth. It's a question of taste and tact.

Florentia. And did you find taste and tact in that coal-hole of the
Theatre Libre?

Dorriforth. Coal-hole is again your joke. I found a strong impression
in it--an impression of the hurried, extemporized cross-examination, by
night, of an impatient and mystified prisoner, whose dreadful fate had
been determined in advance, who was to be shot, high-handedly, in
the dismal dawn. The arrangement didn't worry and distract me: it was
simplifying, intensifying. It gave, what a judicious _mise-en-scene_
should always do, the essence of the matter, and left the embroidery to
the actors.

Florentia. At the "Merry Wives," where you could see your hand before
your face, I could make out the embroidery.

Dorriforth. Could you, under Falstaff's pasteboard cheeks and the sad
disfigurement of his mates? There was no excess of scenery, Auberon
says. Why, Falstaff's very person was nothing _but_ scenery. A false
face, a false figure, false hands, false legs--scarcely a square inch on
which the irrepressible humor of the rogue could break into illustrative
touches. And he is so human, so expressive, of so rich a physiognomy.
One would rather Mr. Beerbohm Tree should have played the part in his
own clever, elegant slimness---that would at least have represented
life. A Falstaff all "make-up" is an opaque substance. This seems to me
an example of what the rest still more suggested, that in dealing with a
production like the "Merry Wives" really the main quality to put
forward is discretion. You must resolve such a production, as a thing
represented, into a tone that the imagination can take an aesthetic
pleasure in. Its grossness must be transposed, as it were, to a fictive
scale, a sca