150
DESERT MOON
a National Theatre at Westminster. The exaltation with which the old masters are received in a theatre situated in a slum caused you to forget Wagner and the wooded hillside overlooking a plain.
Moore: You are right, Barker. I have forgotten that the wooded hillside was chosen so that the ecstasy created in the theatre might be prolonged from act to act in the steep woods and afterwards till midnight and long after midnight in a restaurant. If we cannot have a wooded hillside overlooking an amphitheatrical landscape, let us have a river site where the ecstasy may be prolonged. Mean streets and a tangle of tramways from which we have to run for our lives like cats before pavement skaters, shatter our dreams. Whilst fleeing before them, many a time I regretted a restaurant, and many a time wondered how it was that groups of impassioned young men, inspired by a memory of the bust in the museum, did not gather about our President's motor, crying: Ave Faustina plena gratia immortalis ago tibi gratias!
Now I know; the mean streets stayed the words on their lips. Within the theatre we were as in Wagner's theatre, but the sights and sounds without the theatre killed the ecstasy and the value of the play as "an educational influence."
DESERT MOON
When the desert lies
Pulsating with heat
And even the rattlesnakes
Coil among the roots of the mesquite,
And the coyotes pant by the waterholes—
Far above,
Against the sky,
Shines the summit of San Jacinto,
Blue-white and cool as a hyacinth
With snow.
