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Updated: July 11, 2025
The sinister passages seem but developments of moments in "Der Freischütz"; the grand melodic style, the romantic orchestra with its sighing horns and chivalry and flourishes, seem to come directly out of "Euryanthe"; the orchestral scene-painting from the sunrise and other original effects in "Oberon."
He insists on the hopelessness of the stage, unless men prepared themselves at every part for a grand return to nature. We have seen what is his counsel to the actor. He preaches in the same key to the scene-painter and the maker of costumes. Scene-painting ought to be more rigorously true than any other kind of picture.
We were thrown together a great deal in attending on poor old Sewis, who would lie on his pillows recounting for hours my father's midnight summons of the inhabitants of Riversley, and his little Harry's infant expedition into the world. Temple and Heriot came to stay at the Grange, and assisted in some rough scene-painting torrid colours representing the island of Jamaica.
Is this great hurricane a piece of scene-painting after all? Monsieur Hugo may say what he will, but we know better; we know very well that they did not; a thing like that raises up a despairing spirit of opposition in a man's readers; they give him the lie fiercely as they read.
Even the climax of the piece, the trial scene, I should call, as far as Portia is concerned, rather grand and impressive than strikingly or startlingly effective; and with the exception of that, the whole character is so delicate, so nicely blended, so true, and so free from all exaggeration, that it seems to me hardly fit for a theater, much less one of our immense houses, which require acting almost as splashy and coarse in color and outline as the scene-painting of the stage is obliged to be.
Tragedy advanced by slow degrees; each new element that showed itself was in turn developed. Having passed through many changes, it found its natural form, and there it stopped. Aeschylus first introduced a second actor; he diminished the importance of the Chorus, and assigned the leading part to the dialogue. Sophocles raised the number of actors to three, and added scene-painting.
The shabby little theater on South Street was no longer relegated to opprobrium, but put in some repair and made a place of fashionable entertainment; the versatile Englishmen turning their hands and their wits to almost anything in that line, from scene-painting to acting in comedy, farce, or tragedy.
The ladies were dressed and jeweled with a kind of broad effectiveness, which was to the ordinary style of society what scene-painting is to painting, and might have borne close inspection no better. They seemed the best-humored people in the world, and on the kindliest terms with each other.
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