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To-day, the everyday relationships of men are largely with great impersonal concerns, with organizations, not with other individual men. Now this is nothing short of a new social age, a new era of human relationships, a new stage-setting for the drama of life.
The attempt to reconstruct the life of one, two, or three hundred years ago has always appealed to me, especially amidst very familiar scenes. The stage-setting, so to speak, is much as it must have appeared to our predecessors, but the actual drama played on the stage must have been so very different.
And he knew how to arrange a rather crude stage-setting; the room, with all air and sound excluded, seemed tense and breathless; the one dim candle on the table lent a certain solemnity to the scene. "Look here, Mr. Bayne," he began bluffly, "last time you spoke to me you told me to Well, we'll let bygones by bygones; I guess you remember what you said.
For a moment she dreamed of all the wonderful things that lay on the other side of that silver streak. She saw inside the crowded Opera House. She felt the tense hush, the thrill of excitement. She heard the low sobbing of the violins, she saw the stage-setting, she heard the low notes of music creeping and growing till every pulse in her body thrilled with her one great enthusiasm.
Tragedy, as we know, does not do this, for it can be developed only with considerable difficulty when the stage is crowded with actors. On the contrary, opera, which is free in its movements and can fill a vast stage, seeks for pomp, display and haloes in which gods and goddesses appear, in fact all that can be put into a stage-setting.
There, in that confined space, all the heroes of his play had appeared to the poet, like familiar sprites falling through the roof or riding on the moonbeams, and with them the high-warp tapestries, the gleaming chandeliers, the vast parks with gateways flooded with light, all the usual magnificence of stage-setting, as well as the glorious uproar of the first performance, the applause being represented by the rain beating on the windows and the signs flapping against the door, while the wind, whistling through the melancholy lumber-yard below with a vague murmur of voices brought from afar and carried far, resembled the murmur from the boxes opening into the lobby, allowing his triumph to circulate amid the chattering and confusion of the audience.
Curious, too, it is to observe how the strange world-destiny that shapes our ends gave to it a stage-setting in keeping with its dramatic significance.
Such are some of the more august impressions made upon us by the pictures in the cosmic picture-book; but there are also times and places when Nature seems to wear a look less mystic than dramatic in its suggestiveness, as though she were a stage-setting for some portentous human happening past or to come the fall of kings or the tragic clash of empires.
A long dialogue ensues between him and Walter, and then as Eva, David, Magdalena, and Beckmesser successively enter, the scene develops into a magnificent quintet, which is one of the most charming numbers in the opera. The situation then suddenly changes. The stage-setting represents an open meadow on the banks of the Pegnitz. The river is crowded with boats.
Nancy was loud in her praises of the quaintness of the stage-setting, and Judith, feeling delightfully superior and important, enjoyed herself enormously showing Nancy how they had contrived this and that to better the effect.
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