meant to be seen only from a distance, a garland of imitation
flowers, exceedingly well done, costing perhaps two pounds, where two
or three brushes of paint would have supplied its place more
effectively. When d'Annunzio's "Francesca da Rimini" was put on the
stage in Rome, a pot of basil was brought daily from Naples in order
that it might be laid on the window-sill of the room in which Francesca
and Paolo read of Lancelot and Guinevere. In an interview published in
one of the English papers, d'Annunzio declared that he had all his stage
decorations made in precious metal by fine craftsmen, and that he had
done this for an artistic purpose, and not only for the beauty of the
things themselves. The gesture, he said, of the actor who lifts to his
lips a cup of finely-wrought gold will be finer, more sincere, than that
of the actor who uses a gilded "property."

If so, I can but answer, the actor is no actor, but an amateur. The true
actor walks in a world as real in its unreality as that which surrounds
the poet or the enthusiast. The bare boards, chairs, and T-light, in the
midst of which he rehearses, are as significantly palaces or meadows to
him, while he speaks his lines and lives himself into his character, as
all the real grass and real woodwork with which the manager will cumber
the stage on the first night. As little will he need to distinguish
between the gilt and the gold cup as between the imaginary characters
who surround him, and his mere friends and acquaintances who are
speaking for them.

This costly and inartistic aim at reality, then, is the vice of the
modern stage, and, at its best or worst, can it be said that it is
really even what it pretends to be: a perfectly deceptive imitation of
the real thing? I said once, to clinch an argument against it, by giving
it its full possible credit, that the modern staging can give you the
hour of the day and the corner of the country with precise accuracy. But
can it? Has the most gradual of stage-moons ever caught the miraculous
lunar trick to the life? Has the real hedgerow ever brought a breath of
the country upon the stage? I do not think so, and meanwhile, we have
been trying our hardest to persuade ourselves that it is so, instead of
abandoning ourselves to a new, strange atmosphere, to the magic of the
play itself.

What Mr. Craig does is to provide a plain, conventional, or darkened
background for life, as life works out its own ordered lines on the