Belascan lighting. At one time, the producer "sent for fifty bolts of cloth" and wrapped Warfield successively in their folds. At another, "I kept Warfield in New York all summer, standing alone on the stage for hours at a stretch, while I threw various lights upon him." The star must have come through this ordeal wearing a well-defined halo. "It may be possible for others to copy my colours," Belasco admits, "but no one can get my feeling for them." Thus is all spurious incandescence cast into outer darkness.
Do not imagine, however, that the author of this volume has been any less exacting upon himself than upon those who serve him: Far from it. In working out The Return of Peter Grimm, he fortified himself by "studying with diligence such standard works as Prof. James H. Hyslop's Psychical Research and The Resurrection and Fremont-Rider's Are the Dead Alive?" He also had "several long talks with Professor James." Moreover, when preparing The Man Inside for the stage, he was personally conducted through Chinatown, and "even went down near the Tombs Prison at 2 A.M. to listen to sounds in the vicinity, such as the clocks striking the hours." Justification for such conversations and excursions is to be found in the conviction that "when art intrudes upon the domain of science, it should have authority for everything it appropriates."
In his selection of actors, Mr. Belasco is guided in his choice by "youth and temperament" rather than beauty, and he finds the humbler by-ways of life the stage's best recruiting ground. "I can deck my stage much better," he says, "with girls from the milliner shops than from the schools where polite deportment is taught."
Critics of the ritual of realism with which Mr. Belasco adorns his theatre will find themselves dogmatically answered in a sentence. "He who goes direct to nature for the effects he introduces on the stage can never be wrong, because nature itself is never wrong." With a fine gesture, half commercial and half artistic, the producer swings his censer, inhales the potent fumes, and proclaims his infallibility. We find the semi-clerical garb of Mr. Belasco's habitual pose thoroughly in harmony with the message of his book. In the theatre, he has done many things, and many of them exceedingly well; but in talking about it, he dons the vestments of a high-priest of hocus. And none of the Belascan lighting effects, be it remarked, is more skilfully stage-managed than the one which suffuses his own personality. We wonder if he went direct to nature for that.
