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These are placed in the hands of a "producer," corresponding to a stage-director, generally an actor or theatrical man of experience, with a highly developed dramatic instinct. The various actors are selected, parts are assigned, and the scene-painters are set to work on the production of the desired scenery.
And the theatre, with all its actors and scene-painters and costumers and carpenters and musicians, is only an army on a different scale. The forces of the stage answer to the generals and colonels, the marshals and privates, all marching and working and fighting for the same end.
I have always been friendly with the scene-painters, perhaps because I have always taken pains about my dresses, and consulted them beforehand about the color, so that I should not look wrong in their scenes, nor their scenes wrong with my dresses.
There were reams and reams of letters; there were scores and scores of contracts with managers, and actors, and actresses, and upholsterers, and scene-painters, and printers, and bill-posters, and Darco one organized mass of effort at the centre of all the business hurly-burly, doing three men's work, and tearing into fibre the nerves of all men who came near him.
If Franz Stuck would paint for the stage, instead of using his vigorous brush to paint nature without distinction and nightmares without imagination on easel-canvases, he would do, perhaps rather better, just what these scene-painters do, with so much skill and taste. They have the sense of effective decoration; and German art, at present, is almost wholly limited to that sense.
There was enough scenery rejected in "Faust" to have furnished three productions, and what was finally used for the famous Brocken scene cost next to nothing. Even the best scene-painters sometimes think more of their pictures than of scenic effects. Henry would never accept anything that was not right theatrically as well as pictorially beautiful.
However this may be, the fact remains that a trompe-l'oeil has been achieved, and four inches of any one of these pictures looked at separately would be mistaken by sight and touch for a piece of stonework. In another picture, in a haystack with the sun shining on it, the trompe-l'oeil has again been as cleverly achieved as by the most cunning of scene-painters.
I had the means of getting an admission for myself and a friend to the pit by applying to one of the scene-painters attached to the theatre, with whom I had been well acquainted in past times.
I had to act as stage manager in this case, and was even obliged to help the scene-painters and the mechanicians over the smallest details.
How lightly does the mere clown, the idle school-girl, build a private theatre in the fancy, and laugh or weep with Falstaff and Macbeth: with how entire an oblivion of the artificial nature of the whole contrivance, which thus compels them to be their own architects, machinists, scene-painters, and actors!
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