All these conventions and settings of which we have been speaking are but the accessories, the servants of the stage; and, like insolent lackeys, they sometimes thrust themselves vulgarly forward. The wardrobe of Louis XIV might easily make the claim that the monarchy could not be carried on without it. And yet, on the stage, it is not quite so. On the stage, no particular set of accessories is ever so important as it thinks itself. The multiplicity of the forces at work saves us from such shameful subjection to detail. We can always, at a pinch, get on without any of the accessories. Have you ever, when charades were being acted, seen some talented person enter the room, wearing an old hat and having a shawl or perhaps a window curtain drawn across his shoulders? For some brief moments of inspiration he manages to make you see Hector of Troy, or The Man that broke the Bank at Monte Carlo. You cannot tell how it was done, it was so rapid. Yet you have had a glimpse of an idea. You have been transported somehow and somewhere. Perhaps the actor cannot do it again; for amateurs strike sparks and call up spirits by accident. Nevertheless, the thing you have seen is the essence of drama. An idea has been conveyed; and all the means that conveyed it have been lost--consumed like gunpowder in the explosion. We can all remember various amateur performances and revivals of old plays, in which the accessories were of the simplest; and in which the suppression of scenery and the focusing of the audience’s whole attention upon the actors had a wonderfully stimulating effect upon the talents of the actors. The means were at a minimum; the idea, the thought was at a maximum. In this amateur spark we have the key to the real theatre.