"Experienced professional stage-managers, with all the tricks and methods
of the theatre at their fingers' ends, find it impossible, out of a body
of men and women born and bred in the atmosphere of the playhouse, to
construct a crowd that looks like anything else except a nervous group of
broken-down paupers waiting for soup.

"At Ober-Ammergau a few village priests and representative householders,
who have probably never, any one of them, been inside the walls of a
theatre in their lives, dealing with peasants who have walked straight
upon the stage from their carving benches and milking-stools, produce
swaying multitudes and clamouring mobs and dignified assemblages, so
natural and truthful, so realistic of the originals they represent, that
you feel you want to leap upon the stage and strangle them.

"It shows that earnestness and effort can very easily overtake and pass
mere training and technical skill. The object of the Ober-Ammergau
'super' is, not to get outside and have a drink, but to help forward the
success of the drama.

"The groupings, both in the scenes of the play itself and in the various
tableaux that precede each act, are such as I doubt if any artist could
improve upon. The tableau showing the life of Adam and Eve after their
expulsion from Eden makes a beautiful picture. Father Adam, stalwart and
sunbrowned, clad in sheepskins, rests for a moment from his delving, to
wipe the sweat from his brow. Eve, still looking fair and happy--though
I suppose she ought not to,--sits spinning and watching the children
playing at 'helping father.' The chorus from each side of the stage
explained to us that this represented a scene of woe, the result of sin;
but it seemed to me that the Adam family were very contented, and I found
myself wondering, in my common, earthly way, whether, with a little
trouble to draw them closer together, and some honest work to keep them
from getting into mischief, Adam and Eve were not almost better off than
they would have been mooning about Paradise with nothing to do but talk.

"In the tableau representing the return of the spies from Canaan, some
four or five hundred men, women and children are most effectively massed.
The feature of the foreground is the sample bunch of grapes, borne on the
shoulders of two men, which the spies have brought back with them from
the promised land. The sight of this bunch of grapes, we are told,
astonished the children of Israel. I ca