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Updated: June 26, 2025
And it would have been true. The hills looked stupendous before we quite came to them; great bunchy black humps of night; but they seemed to kneel like docile elephants as we drew near, to let Apollo mount upon their backs. We passed lovely old cottages, which in the strange white light of our Bleriots looked flat, as stage scenery, against that wide-stretched "back-cloth" of inky velvet.
But the first act, with the Kentish lanes and woods for a back-cloth, must have been charming. Here was the devout lover she had heard of, dreamed of. It is delightful to be regarded as perfection not absolute perfection, for that might put a strain upon us to live up to, but as so near perfection that to be more perfect would just spoil it.
It seemed a long way, but suddenly we stepped into twilight. There was a flight of steps which we descended, and at the foot of the steps a mutilated commissionaire, ornamented with medals, on guard. "Where is Monsieur Alresca?" Sir Cyril demanded. "Behind the back-cloth, where he fell, sir," answered the commissionaire, saluting.
The play was beautifully staged; the garden scene alone probably cost as much as the whole of "Hamlet." The march past the window of the apparently unending army that good old trick which sends the supers flying round the back-cloth to cross the stage again and again created a superb effect. The curtain used to go up and down as often as we liked and chose to keep the army marching!
The Campagna WANTS painting. Tischbein was evidently giving it a good dose of what it wanted. 'It takes no little time, writes Goethe to Frau von Stein, 'merely to cover so large a field of canvas with colours. Ash Wednesday ushered itself in, and ushered the Carnival out. The curtain falls, rising a few days later on the Bay of Naples. Re-enter Goethe and Tischbein. Bright blue back-cloth.
But shafts of light, striking up from it, patterned the underside of a vast dapple of fleecy cloud heliotrope upon the back-cloth of blue ether with fringes and bosses of scarlet flame. Against this, occupying the foreground, the pine trees, which sheltered the terrace, showed up a deep greenish purple bordering upon black.
Ollyett, who, of course, knew the place specially well, made the most of it to us. Bat, who had employed it as a back-cloth to one of his own dramas, dismissed it as a thing used and emptied, but Woodhouse expressed my feelings when he said: 'Is that all after all we've done? 'I know, said Ollyett soothingly. "Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing: When Ilion like a mist rose into towers."
Yet, like the room in the doorway of which he still lingered, like the man standing on the terrace walk to whose tall figure the serene immensities of sea and sky acted as back-cloth and setting she imposed herself. Whether she was pretty or plain, Tom was just now incapable of judging. He only knew that her eyes were wonderful.
It was not only a singer who had sung, but an individual one called Sylvia Falbe. She took her place, at present a most inconspicuous one, on the back-cloth before which Michael's life was acted, towards which, when no action, so to speak, was taking place, his eyes naturally turned themselves.
Some, I heard, got drowned in the surf; but whether they did or not, nobody seemed particularly to care. They were just flung out there, and on we went. Every day the coast looked the same, as though we had not moved; but we passed various places trading places with names like Gran' Bassam, Little Popo; names that seemed to belong to some sordid farce acted in front of a sinister back-cloth.
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