d
to the full how large a part of the effect of a good play is due to the
ever-changing series of artistic stage pictures furnished by the
dramatist in collaboration with the actors and the stage manager. This
principle is important throughout a play, but gets its most vivid
illustration in the climax; hence, I enlarge upon it at this point.

Among the most novel, fruitful and interesting experiments now being
made in the theater here and abroad may be mentioned the attempts to
introduce more subtle and imaginative treatment of the possibilities of
color and form in stage setting than have hitherto obtained. The
reaction influenced by familiarity with the unadorned simplicity of the
Elizabethans, the Gordon Craig symbolism, the frank attempt to
substitute artistic suggestion for the stupid and expensive reproduction
on the stage of what is called "real life," are phases of this movement,
in which Germany and Russia have been prominent. The stage manager and
scene deviser are daily becoming more important factors in the
production of a play; and along with this goes a clearer perception of
the values of grouping and regrouping on the part of the plastic
elements behind the footlights.[D] Many a scenic moment, many a climax,
may be materially damaged by a failure to place the characters in such
relative positions as shall visualize the dramatic feeling of the scene
and reveal in terms of picture the dramatist's meaning. After all, the
time-honored convention that the main character, or characters, should,
at the moment when they are dominant in the story, take the center of
the stage, is no empty convention; it is based on logic and geometry.
There is a direct correspondence between the unity of emotion
concentrated in a group of persons and the eye effect which reports that
fact. I have seen so fine a climax as that in Jones's _The
Hypocrites_--one of the very best in the modern repertory--well nigh
ruined by a stock company, when, owing to the purely arbitrary demand
that the leading man should have the center at a crucial moment,
although in the logic of the action he did not belong there, the two
young lovers who were dramatically central in the scene were shunted off
to the side, and the leading man, whose true position was in the deep
background, delivered his curtain speech close up to the footlights on a
spot mathematically exact in its historic significance. True dramatic
relations were sacrificed to relative sal