Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE ELECTRICIAN. LIGHT is the heart of the stage picture. In the hands of the artist it is more important than the brush. Light can make drama in a void. And light has been the last discovery of our theatre. In The Theatre of Today Hiram K. Moderwell has admirably sensed and expressed the importance of light and the reason for its importance. "There is a living principle in lighting," he says, "second only to that of the actor himself." Fundamentally, I feel, it is akin to the power that turned primitive man to sun- worship; light fructifies the stage as the sun fructifies nature. There may be a spiritual quality in the line of a column or the pose of an actor's body; there is always a spiritual quality in light, even when it is only illumination. Moderwell got close to the basic appeal of light in the playhouse when he wrote: "Put a man in a dark room and make him fix his gaze for a certain length of time on a bright spot and you centre his attention to a focal point, deadening the merely logical factors of his brain and sensitizing him many times over to sensuous impressions—a state ofpartial hypnosis. Now these, within certain limits, are exactly the conditions of the theatre—a spectator in a dark room looking at a bright spot. And a state of partial hypnosis, at least to the extent of deadening the logical faculties and heightening the sensuous ones, is precisely that desirable for the complete reception of a work of art." It is also, unfortunately, the state for the reception of a work of specious art—at least, until the subject of this hypnosis becomes a little more accustomed to the arts of the stage electrician than he is at present. Actors and plays beautifully lighted can take on an extraordinarily deceptive quality. I have been conscious of e...