After a while we began to get anxious about the scenery. We kept asking and asking and asking as to time of completion; but without result. Finally I paid a visit of inspection to Covent Garden and to my surprise and horror found the acres of white untouched even to the extent of a charcoal outline.
The superb painter of pictures, untutored in stage art and perspective, had found himself powerless before those vast solitudes. He had been unable even to begin his task!
The work was then undertaken by Hawes Craven, J. Harker, T. W. Hall, W. Hann, and Perkins and Caney, with magnificent result.
Macbeth is a play that really requires the aid of artistic completeness. Its diction is so lordly, so poetical, so searching in its introspective power that it lifts the mind to an altitude which requires and expects some corresponding elevation of the senses.
Here, by the way, a certain incident comes back to my memory. In the Queen’s Theatre, Dublin, some forty years ago the tragedy was being given, and when the actor who played Lennox came to the lines
“The night has been unruly: where we lay,
Our chimneys were blown down....”
he spoke them, in the very worst of Dublin accents, as follows:
“The night hath been rumbunctious where we slep,
Our chimbleys was blew down.”