THE importance of scenery is the importance of a background. Without its appropriate background nothing can be wholly sensed or completely experienced. In the end Art beautifies life by deliberately decorating everything that in life is "up stage"the daily background of walls, furniture, balconies, gardens, streets, bridges and house fronts. And we are impelled to decorate the shifting backgrounds of the stage itself, the moment the stage becomes vital to us.

Perhaps because I am a decorator by instinct, nothing exists for me independently of its setting. The beauty of gothic tracery lived for me once in a hillside chapel in Brittany. I have seen far more important "examples" wedged in museums, and forgotten them. I can see no painting independently of the wall, or the other pictures near by. The physical appearance of a book affects my ability to read it. In a concert hall I long for a singer standing against a gold or flowered screen in order that I may surrender myself wholly to Schumann or Schubert. Wagner's Ring has always been an opera to me, never a legend, because of the dingy settings, slimy and dirty in color, dingy even when new, which the opera house of New York (and of Munich, for that matter) perennially offers. As the gods pick their way over sallow mounds, papier mâché rocks, so strangely stratified, I seem always to see a dreary corner of suburbia, as yet "undeveloped." At any moment a sign "Choice Lots for Sale" will gleam through the tree trunks, and the clang of a distant trolley rise above the dirge of Rhine-maidens. I have listened to Wagner's score. I have heard Fremstadt, or Goritz. But I have not been at the beginning of the world watching gods and heroes shape the destiny of men.

Now, it is this illusion of not being at a play, but in the domain of the play itself, which is the aim of all drama which pretends to express anything whatsoever. And in the matter of settings that will maintain this essential illusion, and not destroy it, there are only two alternatives: either the spectator's imagi

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nation must supply the background-and the Ring could be fitly sung against a gigantic curtain of blue, just as A Midsummer Night's Dream could be played against one of greenthe play must be acted before a background that is a piece with its intention. It was to preserve the essential illusion in the playhouse that every cult of what we call the modern scenic movement has arisen.

But

Unfortunately there is so little intention in current productions, let alone poetry and imagination, that our best talents, such as Robert Jones', are too often wasted in creating spacious backgrounds for polite farces. Scenery, to be sure, should heighten the mood of a play and dramatize its intention. what is there to heighten, or dramatize with line and composition, in the flimsy whimsicality and the tepid wit of Good Gracious Annabelle or A Successful Calamity? The last act of The Devil's Garden was another instance of the artistry of a setting dwarfing the feebler artistry of a play. In that act a murderer is to wrestle with his soul. The room rose above with couch and chairs, and a hearth in firelight loomed stately and mysterious. One waited for the play to fill the scene. But the play maundered, babbled sentimental platitudes, and stumbled to a mechanical end. And the room stood waiting, while the play literally expired in it, as a sick puppy might die whimpering in the aisle of a church. Give Jones richer material, such as Til Eulenspiegel or Ridgely Torrence's negro plays, and we have a hint of what Jones might do with The Misanthrope, Electra or Rosmersholm. The dilemma is unavoidable, and it will persist until we evoke an indigenous Reinhardt, a Barker or a Copeau, producing in his permanent theatre plays that demand an artist to create their backgrounds, and providing a technical staff capable of teaching the stage designer his craft, and a workshop where he can execute his ideas.

At present the only such centers are the little theatres, the art theatres and the community playhouses which have been endowed or built until they begin to dot the width of the country from one seaboard to the other. Some like Maurice Browne's theatre in Chicago have maintained a unique standard, others have lapsed into fads, been merely smart when they intended to be witty, or speculated in thrillers like any vaudeville broker. But they continue to produce Deirdre, The Life of Man, The Sea Gull, The Trojan Women or Bushido about as frequently as Broadway continues to produce trash. They have, on the whole, achieved organization in which intelligent coöperation between a producer and scene designer is possible. And for that reason

they will continue to breed scene designers faster than our chaotic "commercial theatres" can use them.

In fact, up to now this has been the little theatres' most emphatic contribution to the American stage and their most certain success. In New York, at any rate, they have as yet developed no school of acting as the Abbey Players did, nor bred a producer whose instinct for theatrical values could for a moment challenge Arthur Hopkins' or Mrs. Hapgood's; nor inspired a school of native playwrights. But they have everywhere stimulated the art of scene designing until it has begun to display the continuity and the momentum of what we call a "school" or a

movement.

During the first year of the Washington Square Players at the Bandbox Theatre, Goodman and Moeller were, I imagine, often incensed at the frequent remark of critics and audiences, that the stage settings were better than the acting and the plays. They had a right to be incensed, for it is far easier to produce new stage settings than it is to achieve a new method of stage direction or write modern drama. Producers and actors bred upon Shaw's later plays are as bewildered by The Sea Gull or The Cherry Orchard, as conductors capable of successfully bringing their orchestras through Tristan once a week were bewildered by the first scores of Richard Strauss. Every tradition of acting, every trick of stage dialogue, every method of getting emphasis and "building up climaxes" is so completely ignored that an entirely new technique must be invented.

It is the one

But the art of stage scenery has no tradition. craft which has remained wholly untouched by any trace of æsthetic taste. While successive publics assimilated Beardsley, Whistler, Degas and Renoir, audiences, whether at Bowery melodrama or at the Metropolitan Opera House, witnessed scenery invariably painted like the panoramic landscapes of the English Academy in the year 1852. So to-day a designer has only to transfer to the stage an adaptation of Beardsley's massing of black and white, the tinted monochromes of a Whistler nocturne, the elements of a Japanese print, a poster, or even an architectural water-color, and he is greeted with ripples of applause by astonished audiences who view him as a daring innovator. Every innovation in stage-craft we have witnessed in America is based upon the æsthetic discoveries of twenty years ago. We continue to be amazed by the presence within the frame of a proscenium of the very things that even the trustees of art museums now take for granted within a picture frame. In fact, it is impossible

for any man capable of designing a poster, a piece of furniture, a book-cover, or any picture that would be rejected by the Academy, to design a stage setting that will not seem revolutionary. Given an instinct for decoration, the rudiments of good taste, an understanding of architectural form, and the sense of color which to-day any painter of twenty-five has inherited, a painter cannot avoid designing settings which in one way or another are significant.

We hear a great deal of a special "sense of the theatre," as though it were a separate intuition, developed only after a somewhat devout novitiate. Nothing is further from the truth. Precisely, because stage setting is but another form of decoration, a decorator can adapt himself as readily to the conditions of the stage as he adapts himself to the space allotted to him by an architect or determined by his own frame. So rarely is an American theatre equipped with a diffused lighting system, a dome or a "kuppelhorizont," a sliding stage or one capable of being raised and lowered in sections, that half a stage designer's energy is spent, not in designing, but in sacrificing the scale and scope of his original vision to devise something which the electrician can light with a row of footlights and one or two "spots," and a stage manager "fly," with a system designed for the wings and back drops of a Grand Opera House of thirty years ago. Craig, to be sure, banishes the painter from the theatre, along with the actor. But despite the prestige of this particular augur (pending the day when plays shall have become symbolic pantomimes), nothing is more patent than the fact that painters everywhere, though they have not changed the theatre's destiny, have been valuable recruits in its regeneration.

Maxime Dethomas, a French illustrator, at his first try designed settings for the Théâtre des Arts which achieved the most difficult of all things in stage setting,-stylistic realism,-the shop of a laundress, which had beauty of line, spacing and color. Fritz Erler, the Munich painter, designed the sets for one of Reinhardt's productions of Hamlet-a simpler and more intense background for a tragedy than Urban's stippled battlements, or his grandiose banquet hall for Hackett's recent production of Macbeth. Robert Lawson and I were painting when the Washington Square Players called upon us for scenery. Both of us, I think, had never been nearer the stage than an orchestra chair; within a season we had designed settings for every type of play,comedies, pantomimes, fantasies and farce. Rollo Peters abandoned painting for scene designing. Bakst is another instance