Shakespeare is for the stage. But what stage? We were cut off for ever from the Shakesperian tradition in the very generation after Shakespeare died, and have not acquired a sound new tradition even yet. The device of substituting drapery for scenery and relying exclusively on the gorgeous flow of words for decorative purposes fails to satisfy us, and we fall back on the foolish trick of submerging Shakespeare in upholstery and limelight.
It seems to me that we may discern the beginning of a more rational tradition in Granville Barker's staging of _Twelfth Night_ at the Savoy. There is something here of the romantic suggestion and the easy freedom which are of the essence of the Shakesperian drama. The creamy walls, possibly an approximation to the courtyard-like theatre of the Elizabethans, are a perfect background for the play of brilliant figures; the light curtains furnish precisely the desired suggestion of scenery; and when at last all the figures wander up the stairway in the background as the Fool sings his inconsequent song, "With hey ho the wind and the rain," the whole gracious dream melts away deliriously, as it seemed to Prospero, and surely to Shakespeare himself, the dream of life in the end melts away in the wind or the rain of the grave.
Thus conceived, the Shakesperian drama has surely as good a right to exist on the stage as the drama of Molière. There cannot be the same perfection of finish and detail, for this is only an experiment, and there is inevitably a total difference of method. Yet, as thus presented, _Twelfth Night_ lingers in my mind with _Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme_ as presented at the Comedie Française, so presented that, by force of tradition wrought with faultless art, a play becomes an embodied symphony, a visible manifestation of gracious music.
_March_ 13.--I passed in the village street the exotic figure of a fat man in a flat cap and a dark blue costume, with very wide baggy trousers down to the ground. He was reading a newspaper as he walked with an easy slouch. His fat shaven face was large and round and wrinkled, yet not flabby. Altogether there was something irresistibly Chinese about him. Strange that this curious figure should be the typical English sailor, the legendary Hero of the British People, and the person on whose existence that of the English nation is held to depend.