Tieck, who understood stage machinery perfectly, gave it free play where, as in modern operas, machinery is everything.  The same is true of Mendelssohn.  His music yields reverently to the spoken word.  It merely accompanies the play like a new fairy who strews a strain or two across the stage before his companions enter, and lends them wings by which they may again disappear.  Only when the words and the characters who utter them have gone, does the music brood over the forest like a mist of reminiscence, in which our imagination may once more synthesize the picture of what has gone before.”

Tieck’s adaptation is still the standard one.  Englishmen often stage Shakespeare’s romantic plays more elaborately.  They even show us a ship at sea in The Tempest.  But Shakespeare has fled England; they are left with their properties, out of which the spirit of Shakespeare will not rise.  It is significant that the most distinguished dramaturg of Germany, Dingelstedt, planned a few years before to go to London with some of the best actors in Germany to teach Englishmen how to play Shakespeare once more.

Bjornson closes this general discussion of scenery and properties with a word about the supreme importance of imagination to the playgoer.  “I cannot refrain from saying that the imagination that delights in the familiar is stronger and healthier than that which loses itself in longings for the impossible.  To visualize on the basis of a few and simple suggestions—­that is to possess imagination; to allow the images to dissolve and dissipate—­that is to have no imagination at all.  Every allusion has a definite relation to the familiar, and if our playgoers cannot, after all that has been given here for years, feel the least illusion in the presence of the properties in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, then it simply means that bad critics have broken the spell.”  Why should Norwegians require an elaborate wood-scene to be transported to the living woods?  A boulevardier of Paris, indeed, might have need of it, but not a Norwegian with the great forests at his very doors.  And what real illusion is there in a waterfall tumbling over a painted curtain, or a ship tossing about on rollers?  Does not such apparatus rather destroy the illusion?  “The new inventions of stage mechanicians are far from being under such perfect control that they do not often ruin art.  We are in a period of transition.  Why should we here, who are obliged to wait a long time for what is admittedly satisfactory, commit all the blunders which mark the way to acknowledged perfection?”

It would probably be difficult to find definite and tangible evidence of Shakespeare’s influence in Bjornson’s work, and we are, therefore, doubly glad to have his own eloquent acknowledgement of his debt to Shakespeare.  The closing passus of Bjornson’s article deserves quotation for this reason alone.  Unfortunately I cannot convey its warm, illuminating style:  “Of all the poetry I have ever read,