Setting for The Magical City as designed by Lee Simonson and produced by the Washington Square Players. The walls were of purple burlap, the doors gold, the furniture blue, the cushions, coverings, and lamp orange and yellow.

of a similar conversion. And in almost every case the stage settings of these painters have qualities of design, a pitch of style, never evinced in their painting. Dethomas' vigorous illustrations are far less significant æsthetically than his first stage set. Erler's portraits are competent and commonplace. The same holds true of Bakst's as compared with his work for the Russian Ballet, and of Orlik's canvases contrasted with his setting of A Winter's Tale at Reinhardt's Theatre. Dulac's masks and costumes for a play by Yeats escape just that element of prettiness which vitiates his successful illustrations. Hugo Ballin has recently staged "movies," and by all accounts his settings there are far more fundamentally decorative than his mural panels for which he has been thrice crowned by the Academy.

The catalogue is incomplete, but it will augment, because the stage to-day supplies the only opportunities for decoration capable of awakening a decorator's imagination and stimulating his creative energy. Mural painting is moribund as a result of the neo-classicism of American architects, who continue to turn Corinthian temples into post-offices, Roman baths into railway stations, and Doges' council chambers into the reading rooms of public libraries. In consequence, decorative painting in America is usually confined to the pages of a magazine or a picture frame. When I was installing a few stage-models at the first Independent Exhibition of Painters and Sculptors last year, Rockwell Kent admitted his eagerness to attempt scenery. To-day, a critic remarks of one of his Newfoundland landscapes: "A work which reaches force of statement through an appreciation of theatrical values." Why should the stage not profit by them? Jules Guerin, Henry McCarter and Maxfield Parrish are others who would gain stature on the stage. I hear of models for a production of Snow-White in Parrish's Cornish studio. Meanwhile we must read, in the program of A Kiss for Cinderella, Mr. Hewlett's acknowledgement that his most effective background is adapted from one of Parrish's pictures. And in the last act of Sheldon's The Garden of Paradise Urban transferred to the stage one of Parrish's covers for the "Ladies Home Journal," with the result that what we call a new era in the staging of musical comedy began. But Parrish himself is still without the theatre. Given a stage, adequately equipped and with a flexible lighting system, and I would set Kent designing The Tempest, Guerin Aida or Cæsar and Cleopatra, Parrish The Merchant of Venice, Dulac The Magic Flute, McCarter Rheingold, and using half a dozen more who had never staged plays before,

provide an amazingly beautiful series of productions. Such a season might not produce the synthesis for which the devotees of the new theatre are waiting, but its visions would provide the most fertile soil in which a "newer" art of the theatre might grow.

II

Once within the theatre the artist's first battle is with the great American god-Grey. The constant prejudice he will have to overcome is the antipathy of audiences and actors to color. For on the stage it is still a dogma that a background must be dark or grey in order to stay back-a theory which in painting is always discredited and is applied only in such art schools as Julian's, into which the ambient light of day never enters. Painting has after a century struggled free of the omnipotence of brown.

The scene designer will have to struggle with the omnipotence of grey. A generation ago the way to make a portrait head "live" was to pick out the high-lights, particularly on the forehead, in a taffy-like mixture of ochre and white-this was light-and place the whole against a syrupy mixture of brown. This was shadow. Cezanne, Van Gogh and Renoir have taught us otherwise. And just as light in painting is no longer a subtle or sentimental spotlight, the light of the stage must achieve the harmonious welding of color masses.

The outcry comes, "But you can't see the actor." I reply that the actor is always visible. Any moving body is more conspicuous than the body against which it moves. A monk in grey against the flaming walls of the Grand Cañon would present an excellent target for any artillery officer. The most deliberate attempt to disguise moving objects—camouflage— succeeds so long as a gun or a man stands still. But no system of color-spotting will render invisible a ship on the sea or a cannon moving across a hill. It is true that a spot of yellow the size of a button will be conspicuous on a sheet of grey cardboard. And it is on this principle that most designing for the modern stage is based-color in the actor's costumes, and subdued backgrounds. But it is also true that a spot of yellow is even more conspicuous on a purple cardboard-a psychological law proven by countless posters as well as by half a century of impressionism. The scene of Overtones was based on the costumes Mrs. Holley had chosen for the four women: vivid green for two, purple for the others. I made the walls of the room gold, emphasized only by black lines, the door spaces backed

with black velvet, the windows hung with orange silk. Nothing could have been more brilliant than this background, but the four women detached themselves completely and dominated the scene. They were, if anything, too visible. If Moors and Arabs can greet or stab each other against the vivid house-fronts of their Mediterranean towns, why cannot the actors of a Biblical farce such as The Sisters of Susannah be seen against the orange walls I set for them, in Locker's costumes of emerald, turquoise and amethyst? In The Magical City Miss Mower stood robed in jonquil yellow in a room hung with purple burlap; through the window showed a silhouette of skyscrapers in a peacock sky. Would she have dominated the scene more completely had the walls been grey, and the furniture not blue with yellow cushions, but a somber mahogony brown, upholstered in discreet lilac?

As a nation we are unaccustomed to use our eyes. A spot of color distracts most of us, as a glass of wine befuddles a teetotaller, and for the next half hour we are unable to concentrate upon anything. On every steamer there are a goodly number who cannot look at the Bay of Naples except through smoked glasses. And in every audience a majority expects the designer to provide smoked glasses for them.

In deference to them, and from a false sense of chivalry to the play itself, has arisen the doctrine of the playwright's necessary humility. Jones has expressed this most picturesquely in an interview attributed to him: "I give this present form of stagecraft one more year to live-for one more year we will have Art Nouveau with us, striding across our backgrounds-distracting our gaze from the actors, and murdering thought. . . . For one more year orange and green hoops of gold and wigs of crimson will stagger zigzagging to reportorial bliss. For one more year these over-accentuated and inanimate objects will scream across the footlights and then." One might retort: "For a few more years blank walls and towering draperies on which trickle blue or amber light will seem the only fitting background for poetry; for a few more years spewing floods of yellow from search-lights on a thousand figures prancing by night in a stadium will seem the acme of a beautiful festival—and then." It is a damning commentary on our plays if so many of them seem to require the discreet twilight of an invalid's room with the blinds drawn. Our thought in the theatre is not very vital if it so easily takes to cover at the sight of ornament, like a white rabbit scenting a hound. I long for plays in which we shall hear