Yet even in life the emotional tone may radiate beyond the body.

A person expresses his mourning by his black clothes and his joy by gay attire, or he may make the piano or violin ring forth in happiness or moan in sadness.

Even his whole room or house may be penetrated by his spirit of welcoming cordiality or his emotional setting of forbidding harshness.
The feeling of the soul emanates into the surroundings and the impression which we get of our neighbor's emotional attitude may be derived from this external frame of the personality as much as from the gestures and the face.
This effect of the surrounding surely can and must be much heightened in the artistic theater play.

All the stage settings of the scene ought to be in harmony with the fundamental emotions of the play, and many an act owes its success to the unity of emotional impression which results from the perfect painting of the background; it reverberates to the passions of the mind.

From the highest artistic color and form effects of the stage in the Reinhardt style down to the cheapest melodrama with soft blue lights and tender music for the closing scene, the stage arrangements tell the story of the intimate emotion.