In a letter to me Hiram Kelly Moderwell, whose book, “The Theatre of To-day,” is the best exposition yet published of the aims and results of the artists who are working in the theatre, writes as follows in regard to Appia: “Appia is now with Dalcroze at Hellerau and I believe has designed and perhaps produced all the things that have been done there in the last year or two. Previous to that I am almost certain he had done no actual stage work. Nobody else would give him free rein. But, as you know, he thought everything out carefully as though he were doing the actual practical stage work.... By this time he has hit his ‘third manner.’ It’s all cubes and parallelograms. It sounds like hell on paper but Maurice Browne told me it is very fine stuff. Browne says it is as much greater than Craig as Craig is greater than anybody else. All the recent Hellerau plays are in this third manner. They are lighted by Salzmann, indirect and diffused lighting, but not in the Fortuny style. I imagine the Hellerau stuff is rather too precious to go on the ordinary stage.” Mr. Moderwell’s description of Appia’s book is so completely illuminating that I feel I cannot do better than to quote the entire passage from “The Theatre of To-day”: “Before his (Gordon Craig’s) influence was felt, however, Adolphe Appia, probably the most powerful theorist of the new movement, had written his remarkable book, ‘Die Musik und die Inscenierung.’ In this, as an artist, he attempted to deduce from the content of the Wagner music dramas the proper stage settings for them. His conclusions anticipated much of the best work of recent years and his theories have been put into practice in more or less modified form on a great many stages--not so much (if at all) for the Wagner dramas themselves, which are under a rigid tradition (the ‘what the Master wished’ myth), but for operas and the more lyric plays where the producer has artistic ability and a free hand in applying it. “Appia started with the principle that the setting should make the actor the all-important fact on the stage. He saw the realistic impossibility of the realistic setting, and destructively analyzed the current modes of lighting and perspective effects. But, unlike the members of the more conventional modern school, he insisted that the stage is a three-dimension space and must be handled so as to make its depth living. He felt a contradiction between the living actor and the dead setting. He wished to bind them into one whole--the drama. How was this to be done?