in _The Tempest_. But Shakespeare has fled England; they are left
with their properties, out of which the spirit of Shakespeare will not
rise. It is significant that the most distinguished dramaturg of
Germany, Dingelstedt, planned a few years before to go to London with
some of the best actors in Germany to teach Englishmen how to play
Shakespeare once more.

Bjornson closes this general discussion of scenery and properties
with a word about the supreme importance of imagination to the playgoer.
"I cannot refrain from saying that the imagination that delights in the
familiar is stronger and healthier than that which loses itself in
longings for the impossible. To visualize on the basis of a few and
simple suggestions--that is to possess imagination; to allow the images
to dissolve and dissipate--that is to have no imagination at all. Every
allusion has a definite relation to the familiar, and if our playgoers
cannot, after all that has been given here for years, feel the least
illusion in the presence of the properties in _A Midsummer Night's
Dream_, then it simply means that bad critics have broken the spell."
Why should Norwegians require an elaborate wood-scene to be transported
to the living woods? A boulevardier of Paris, indeed, might have need of
it, but not a Norwegian with the great forests at his very doors. And
what real illusion is there in a waterfall tumbling over a painted
curtain, or a ship tossing about on rollers? Does not such apparatus
rather destroy the illusion? "The new inventions of stage mechanicians
are far from being under such perfect control that they do not often
ruin art. We are in a period of transition. Why should we here, who are
obliged to wait a long time for what is admittedly satisfactory, commit
all the blunders which mark the way to acknowledged perfection?"

It would probably be difficult to find definite and tangible evidence
of Shakespeare's influence in Bjornson's work, and we are, therefore,
doubly glad to have his own eloquent acknowledgement of his debt
to Shakespeare. The closing passus of Bjornson's article deserves
quotation for this reason alone. Unfortunately I cannot convey its warm,
illuminating style: "Of all the poetry I have ever read, Shakespeare's
_A Midsummer Night's Dream_ has, unquestionably, had the greatest
influence upon me. It is his most delicate and most imaginative work,
appealing quite as much through its intellectual significance as through
its nob