It is the same with the French classic stage, whose meagreness of decoration is almost an offense to the American. The higher the intelligence of the audience, the less will scenery be valued in plays. In the case of children’s toys, we all know that a rag doll and a wooly dog speak a more eloquent language than a mechanical doll and a realistic dog that walks. But we dare not employ this philosophy in dressing our stage, because of the lack of imagination in grown people. I have no doubt that if you had, say, thirty new plays to produce, each of them as good as Hamlet, and if your audience were to consist of the most intelligent people in the world, and if your actors were all and each as good as David Garrick, I have no doubt, I say, that the most thrilling way you could produce those plays would be on a stage without scenery and with just such suggestion of costume as should lift the characters into the world of idea. Such was the Elizabethan method; at least it was the practice which the Elizabethans stumbled upon in their riotous career. The world of idea is what you are seeking, no matter how sure you may be that you want realism. The power of a play comes from this, that it makes people believe that the action on the stage is not merely a story, which has happened and is over--but is a thing which is going on, a truth, a spiritual, inward reality which has to do with the life and sentiments of the audience. This is what we want, what we always want, whether we are playing Lear, or Ibsen, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The different kinds of drama use different means of suggesting spiritual reality. Poetic images are one way, sideboards and furniture are another way. Now it must be confessed at once that realism does tend to convey spiritual truth to people who possess a low degree of reflective power. A reproduction in detail of something seen in real life--wax-works, for instance--impresses the unimaginative person more strongly than a sketch of the same thing done by Rembrandt; yet both the wax-works and the Rembrandt have the same end in view--to bring home an idea to the beholder. We may, then, measure the life in people’s fancy by the weight of suggestion which is requisite to awaken them--a feather of imagery or a cannon ball of actuality--and in this we shall not be dealing with several kinds of dramatic principle, but only with several conditions of education in the audience.