under the guise of giving away the show. If he does finally, after many pauses and passes, pull the rabbit out of the hat, you are asked not merely to applaud the elevation of the hare, but you must be awed by the artful manner in which the personality of the rabbit blends with the contours of the hat. Furthermore, you must realize the days and nights of untiring preparation and the long search for the exact rabbit for the rôle. You must picture Mr. Belasco going from hutch to hutch, from hatter to hatter, ere he discovered precisely the hare and precisely the headgear he wanted. Only in this manner is that precious realism attained.
If everything set down in these pages were to be taken in the solemn fashion in which it is stated, we fear that the theatre would wither amid the thin gases of its own self-importance, cut off from the oxygen of a saving humour. In his playhouses, Mr. Belasco has much traffic with comedy; in his revelations, he will have none of it. He cannot forget that he has been called a wizard of stagecraft, and—Midas-like—everything that he touches turns into mystery. Not even the curtain escapes. For, he says, "one who is not familiar with the little touches, apart from the play itself, which aid the general effect of a dramatic production may not realize how important it is to have the curtain work in harmony with the feeling of the scene upon which it rises and falls. I have sometimes experimented with a curtain fifty times, raising and lowering it rapidly, slowly, or at medium speed. The curtain men must be taught to feel the climaxes as keenly as the actors and to work in unison with them."
Baffling and elusive have been the difficult problems of lighting which have been mastered. As much as five thousand dollars has been spent in a single attempt to reproduce the delicate hues of a sunset, only to have the whole thing discarded in the end. "When I produced The Girl of the Golden West, I experimented three months to secure exactly the soft, changing colours of a Californian sunset over the Sierra Nevadas, and then turned to another method. It was a good sunset, but it was not Californian." Mr. Belasco puts a sunset upon such a high moral plane of exalted endeavour that the work of the Almighty in the same field appears hasty and slipshod by comparison.
Not alone the scenery but the actors as well have had to undergo this ordeal. David Warfield's experiences, for example, entitle him to be regarded as little less than a living sacrifice on the altar of
