“Appia’s answer to this question is his chief claim to greatness--genius almost. His answer was--‘By means of the lighting.’ He saw the deadliness of the contemporary methods of lighting, and previsaged with a sort of inspiration the possibilities of new methods which have since become common. This was at a time when he had at his disposal none of the modern lighting systems. His foreseeing of modern practice by means of rigid Teutonic logic in the service of the artist’s intuition makes him one of the two or three foremost theorists of the modern movement. “The lighting, for Appia, is the spiritual core, the soul of the drama. The whole action should be contained in it, somewhat as we feel the physical body of a friend to be contained in his personality. Appia’s second great principle is closely connected with this. While the setting is obviously inanimate, the actor must in every way be emphasized and made living. And this can be accomplished, he says, only by a wise use of lighting, since it is the lights and shadows on a human body which reveal to our eyes the fact that the body is ‘plastic’--that is, a flexible body of three dimensions. Appia would make the setting suggest only the atmosphere, not the reality of the thing it stands for, and would soften and beautify it with the lights. The actor he would throw constantly into prominence while keeping him always a part of the scene. All the elements and all the action of the drama he would bind together by the lights and shadows. “With the most minute care each detail of lighting, each position of each character, in Appia’s productions is studied out so that the dramatic meaning shall always be evident. Hence any setting of his contains vastly more thought than is visible at a glance. It is designed to serve for every exigency of the scene--so that a character here shall be in full light at a certain point, while talking directly to a character who must be quite in the dark, or that the light shall just touch the fringe of one character’s robe as she dies, or that the action shall all take place unimpeded, and so on. At the same time, needless to say, Appia’s stage pictures are of the highest artistic beauty.”[1] In Appia’s design for the third act of _Die Walküre_, so enthusiastically praised by Loomis Taylor, the rock of the valkyries juts like a huge promontory of black across the front of the scene, silhouetted against a clouded sky. So all the figures of the valkyries stand high on the rock and are entirely silhouetted, while Sieglinde below in front of the rock in the blackness, is hidden from the rage of the approaching Wotan. Any one who has seen this scene as it is ordinarily staged, without any reference to beauty or reason, will appreciate even this meagre description of an artist’s intention, which has not yet been carried out in any theatre with which I have acquaintance.