A Long Intermission Followed, Devoted To Putting Babies To Sleep, - For
There Were Hundreds Of Them, Wide-Eyed And Strong-Lunged, - To Smoking
The Hasty Cigarette, To Discussing The Next Combination Of Prim Or The
Last Scandal In The Gay World.
The carpenters were busy behind the
scenes building the mountain.
When the curtain rose, it was worth
waiting for. It was an admirable scene. A genuine Spanish mountain,
great humpy undulations of rock and sand, gigantic cacti for all
vegetation, a lurid sky behind, but not over-colored. A group of Roman
soldiers in the foreground, in the rear the hill, and the executioners
busily employed in nailing the three victims to their crosses. Demas was
fastened first; then Gestas, who, when undressed for execution, was a
superb model of a youthful Hercules. But the third cross still lay on
the ground; the hammering and disputing and coming and going were
horribly lifelike and real.
At last the victim is securely nailed to the wood, and the cross is
slowly and clumsily lifted and falls with a shock into its socket. The
soldiers huzza., the fiend in the tin barrel and another in a tin hat
come down to the footlights and throw dice for the raiment. "Caramba!
curse my luck!" says our friend in the tin case, and the other walks off
with the vestment.
The Passion begins, and lasts an interminable time. The grouping is
admirable, every shifting of the crowd in the foreground produces a new
and finished picture, with always the same background of the three high
crosses and their agonizing burdens against that lurid sky. The
impenitent Gestas curses and dies; the penitent Demas believes and
receives eternal rest. The Holy Women come in and group themselves in
picturesque despair at the foot of the cross. The awful drama goes on
with no detail omitted, - the thirst the sponge dipped in vinegar, the
cry of desolation, the spear-thrust, the giving up of the ghost. The
stage-lights are lowered. A thick darkness - of crape - comes down over
the sky. Horror falls on the impious multitude, and the scene is
deserted save by the faithful.
The closing act opens with a fine effect of moon and stars. "Que linda
luna!" sighed a young woman beside me, drying her tears, comforted by
the beauty of the scene. The central cross is bathed in the full
splendor that is denied the others. Joseph of Abarimathea (as he is here
called) comes in with ladders and winding-sheets, and the dead Christ is
taken from the cross. The Descent is managed with singular skill and
genuine artistic feeling. The principal actor, who has been suspended
for an hour in a most painful and constrained posture, has a corpse-like
rigidity and numbness. There is one moment when you can almost imagine
yourself in Antwerp, looking at that sublimest work of Rubens. The
Entombment ends, and the last tableau is of the Mater Dolorosa in the
Solitude. I have rarely seen an effect so simple, and yet so
striking, - the darkened stage, the softened moonlight, the now Holy Rood
spectral and tall against the starry sky, and the Dolorous Mother, alone
in her sublime sorrow, as she will be worshipped and revered for coming
aeons.
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