It is too emphatic, it is meant
for artificial light. If Franz Stuck would paint for the stage, instead
of using his vigorous brush to paint nature without distinction and
nightmares without imagination on easel-canvases, he would do, perhaps
rather better, just what these scene-painters do, with so much skill and
taste. They have the sense of effective decoration; and German art, at
present, is almost wholly limited to that sense.
I listened, with the full consent of my eyes, to the lovely music, which
played round the story like light transfiguring a masquerade; and now,
by a lucky chance, I can brood over it here in Salzburg, where Mozart
was born, where he lived, where the house in which he wrote the opera is
to be seen, a little garden-house brought over from Vienna and set down
where it should always have been, high up among the pinewoods of the
Capuzinerberg. I find myself wondering how much Mozart took to himself,
how much went to his making, in this exquisite place, set in a hollow of
great hills, from which, if you look down upon it, it has the air of a
little toy town out of a Noah's Ark, set square in a clean, trim,
perfectly flat map of meadows, with its flat roofs, packed close
together on each side of a long, winding river, which trails across the
whole breadth of the plain.
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