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 stage; he gives us suggestion instead of reality, a symbol instead of an imitation; and he relies, for his effects, on a new system of lighting from above, not from below, and on a quite new kind of drill, as I may call it, by which he uses his characters as masses and patterns, teaching them to move all together, with identical gestures.  The eye is carried right through or beyond these horizons of canvas, and the imagination with it; instead of stopping entangled among real stalks and painted gables.

I have seen nothing so imaginative, so restful, so expressive, on the English stage as these simple and elaborately woven designs, in patterns of light and drapery and movement, which in “The Masque of Love” had a new quality of charm, a completeness of invention, for which I would have given all d’Annunzio’s golden cups and Mr. Tree’s boats on real Thames water.

Here, for once, we see the stage treated in the proper spirit, as material for art, not as a collection of real objects, or the imitation of real objects.  Why should not the visible world be treated in the same spirit as the invisible world of character and temperament?  A fine play is not the copy of an incident or the stenography of a character.  A poetical play, to limit myself to that, requires to be put on the stage in such a way as to suggest that atmosphere which, if it is a true poem, will envelop