Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/443

Rh pertinacity of the impression which it produced. For the costumes and decorations an artist had been secured who, long known as an original graphic artist, has only recently begun employing his imagination and his taste in the service of the theatre: Emil Preetorius, a native of Darmstadt who is living in Munich. What he gave us to look at was, in its gradation from the idyllic and the heroic through the bourgeois and the elegant to the humoristic and the popular, extraordinarily delicate and felicitous. And since Walter had given the whole of his industry and love to the study of the musical part, and furthermore since the best resources of our theatre were brought forward, a truly glorious evening resulted. I should like especially to say something about Acis and Galatea, this splendid work which one hardly ever met with in the theatre, and which Walter has restored to it by this production of his. For all the tenderness and sorrow with which it is filled is aroused in me again as I think back on it; and the tragic humanness which it represents has, in my mind, much to say to our feelings of the present day. But if I am to tell anything at all about our drama this time, I must take account of my space.

The popular power which overshadows and threatens to stifle the theatre of the spoken word is the cinema. With the prodigality of a parvenu, it can attract the mimetic talent. It breaks up the ensembles. Indeed, art communities such as played Ibsen and Hauptmann twenty years ago in the Berlin Lessingtheater, or even such as I found as a young man in Munich when Possart developed his drastic virtuosity, his highly amusing art of speech, in the Hoftheater—such a stylistically fixed and disciplined body of players really no longer exists in Germany. Berlin, the leading theatrical city of Europe a quarter of a century ago, has suffered great losses; it is not only since Max Reinhardt retired to his castle near Salzburg that it has deteriorated in the attractiveness of its theatre. (I hear that you are receiving a visit from him in America. Oh, he will undoubtedly show you very remarkable things!) The Reinhardt-Theater! I do not forget how I first became acquainted with it. Gorki's Night Lodging, the comedies of Shakespeare, Schiller's Die Riuber! Those were rousing evenings, full of a charm which lost none of its intensity despite a certain intellectual, or shall we say artistic-moralistic, distrust which we brought to them; performances which dealt a radical blow to the Protestant temperance, the strenuous inwardness of Brahmsian naturalism with its poverty of