In this pleasant remission of the active imagination lies one of the secrets of the charm of the theatre. Nor is the theatre alone in this. On even the higher plane of the authentic arts a measure of the same phenomenon assists in what may perhaps not too far-fetchedly be termed the negative stimulation of the spectator’s fancy. For all the pretty and winning words to the contrary, no person capable of sound introspection will admit that a beautiful painting like Giorgione’s “The Concert” or a beautiful piece of sculpture like Pisano’s Perugian fountain actually and literally stirs his imagination, and sets it a-sail across hitherto uncharted æsthetic seas. What such a painting or piece of sculpture does is to reach out and, with its overpowering beauty, encompass and æsthetically fence in the antecedent wandering and uncertain imagination of its spectator. As in the instance of drama, it does not so much awaken a dormant imagination as soothe an imagination already awake. Of all the arts, music alone remains a telegrapher of unborn dreams. The theatre brings to the art of drama concrete movement, concrete colour, and concrete final effectiveness: this, in all save a few minor particulars. The art of drama suffers, true enough, when the theatre, even at its finest, is challenged by it to produce the values intrinsic in its ghost of a dead king, or in its battle on Bosworth Field, or in its ship torn by the tempest, or in its fairy wood on midsummer night, or in its approaching tread of doom of the gods of the mountain. But for each such defeat it prospers doubly in the gifts that the theatre brings to it. Such gifts as the leader Craig has brought to the furtherance of the beauty of “Electra” and “Hamlet,” as Reinhardt and his aides have brought to “Ariadne” and “Julius Cæsar,” as Golovine and Appia and Bakst and Linnebach and half a dozen others have brought to the classics that have called to them, are not small ones. They have crystallized the glory of drama, have taken so many loose jewels and given them substantial and appropriate settings which have fittingly posed their radiance. To say that the reading imagination of the average cultured man is superior in power of suggestion and depiction to the imagination of the theatre is idiotically to say that the reading imagination of every average cultured man is superior in these powers to the combined theatrical imaginations of Gordon Craig, Max Reinhardt and Eleanora Duse operating jointly upon the same play. Even a commonplace imagination can successfully conjure up a landscape more beautiful than any painted by Poussin or Gainsborough, or jewels more opalescent than any painted by Rembrandt, or a woman’s dress more luminous than any painted by Fortuny, or nymphs more beguiling than any of Rubens’, yet who so foolish to say--as they are wont foolishly to say of reading imagination and the drama--that such an imagination is therefore superior to that of the artists? This, in essence, is