Page:Diary of a Pilgrimage (1891).pdf/135

 "It shows that earnestness and effort can very easily overtake and pass mere training and technical skill. The object of the Ober-Ammergau 'super' is, not to get outside and have a drink, but to help forward the success of the drama.

"The groupings, both in the scenes of the play itself and in the various tableaux that precede each act, are such as I doubt if any artist could improve upon. The tableau showing the life of Adam and Eve after their expulsion from Eden makes a beautiful picture. Father Adam, stalwart and sunbrowned, clad in sheepskins, rests for a moment from his delving, to wipe the sweat from his brow. Eve, still looking fair and happy—though I suppose she ought not to,—sits spinning and watching the children playing at 'helping father.' The chorus from each side of the stage explained to us that this represented a scene of woe, the result of sin; but it seemed to me that the Adam family were very contented, and I found myself wondering, in my common, earthly way, whether, with a little trouble to draw them closer together, and some honest work to keep them from getting into mischief, Adam and Eve were not almost better off than they would have been mooning about Paradise with nothing to do but talk.

"In the tableau representing the return of the spies from Canaan, some four or five hundred men, women, and children are most effectively massed. The feature of the foreground is the sample bunch of grapes, borne on the shoulders of two men, which the spies have brought back with them from the promised land. The sight of this bunch of grapes, we are told, astonished the children of Israel. I can quite understand its doing so. The picture of it used to astonish me, too, when I was a child.