e of the influence of imaginative work. And as regards a bad
play, have we not all seen large audiences lured by the loveliness of
scenic effect into listening to rhetoric posing as poetry, and to
vulgarity doing duty for realism? Whether this be good or evil for the
public I will not here discuss, but it is evident that the playwright, at
any rate, never suffers.

Indeed, the artist who really has suffered through the modern mounting of
plays is not the dramatist at all, but the scene-painter proper. He is
rapidly being displaced by the stage-carpenter. Now and then, at Drury
Lane, I have seen beautiful old front cloths let down, as perfect as
pictures some of them, and pure painter's work, and there are many which
we all remember at other theatres, in front of which some dialogue was
reduced to graceful dumb-show through the hammer and tin-tacks behind.
But as a rule the stage is overcrowded with enormous properties, which
are not merely far more expensive and cumbersome than scene-paintings,
but far less beautiful, and far less true. Properties kill perspective.
A painted door is more like a real door than a real door is itself, for
the proper conditions of light and shade can be given to it; and the
excessive use of built up structures always makes the stage too glaring,
for as they have to be lit from behind, as well as from the front, the
gas-jets become the absolute light of the scene instead of the means
merely by which we perceive the conditions of light and shadow which the
painter has desired to show us.

So, instead of bemoaning the position of the playwright, it were better
for the critics to exert whatever influence they may possess towards
restoring the scene-painter to his proper position as an artist, and not
allowing him to be built over by the property man, or hammered to death
by the carpenter. I have never seen any reason myself why such artists
as Mr. Beverley, Mr. Walter Hann, and Mr. Telbin should not be entitled
to become Academicians. They have certainly as good a claim as have many
of those R.A.'s whose total inability to paint we can see every May for a
shilling.

And lastly, let those critics who hold up for our admiration the
simplicity of the Elizabethan Stage, remember that they are lauding a
condition of things against which Shakespeare himself, in the spirit of a
true artist, always strongly protested.

A BEVY OF POETS

(Pall Mall Gazette, March 27, 1885.)

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