would be ashamed of himself if he referred to them otherwise than as 'outside cars'). The city neighed in those days; it snorted and whinnied; it champed on its bit; it jingled brazen harness; it tossed its nose-bag in the air to shake the last oat from the southernest recess of the bag; about its ears were birds innumerable; birds popped and hopped under its legs, winning the easiest existence that fate has vouchsafed to feathers. There were jehus in charge of the gorgeous monsters and they were marvelous as their own horses; purple-chapped, spiky-jowled, wide-smiled, hard-eyed, imperturbable ancients; caparisoned, not clothed, in frieze many-caped coats, balancing hard shiny hats on one side of their heads and with huge hairy chilblainy hands. They chewed tobacco, their mouths were all to one side and they had great yellow teeth, two of which wobbled. A nose-red city half as old as time. In the fanlight over every door there were small plaster horses with one leg up, with both ears cocked, with interrogative manes. The city was on tiptoe, it was alert, vivid, it was a sparkling eye, it was a hoof! But conversation languished under the menace of those thudding, deeply-whiskered fetlocks. Dublin was a silence in a tempest, as it is now a solitude in a multitude.

The electric trams came and a new era: that Dublin is as remote as the Stone Age. The horses disappeared, the birds are searching vainly elsewhere for a like city of nose-bags, a city of dream. Only here and there will you now see a plaster horse in a fanlight; and Dublin, silent under the dashing of those hoofs, has not yet recovered from the silence they had forced upon it. The streets then were thronged, men and women went out then to look at the horses, to drown themselves in the uproar and menace

of the horses, and to this day the Dublin people do not speak in the streets, but they talk much in private and are the most voluble race of silent people that the world has ever known.

Professor Macallister considers that the prehistoric Irish totem was a horse, and perhaps Dublin is yet mourning her vanished steeds, for to this day her people do not use the streets for any social purpose except funerals.

It is a haunted city also. The ear of a stranger, halted at midnight in those deserted ways, will catch a sound driving toward him which never comes near; he will hear a rumble which will not materialize. He will stand, waiting for the vehicle that will never come. It will be long ere he realizes, as all Dublin people do, that at midnight the ghosts of long-dead horse trams revisit the phases of the moon. If a finger should touch his eye he would see again a spanking city and hear once more the thunder of the hoofs. The stranger steals to his hotel with his overcoat padded protectively about him and his umbrella at the ready. He is glad to get back to London where the streets are full, and away from empty Dublin where the streets are too full.

The mountains are near in Dublin, the sea is next door, and the clouds hang so low that they must be reckoned with the town; pre-war clouds they are, and the colors last and are forever delightful. In this street when the eye scans forward it lights, and with what joy, on the eternal hills; from this window you may smell backward to the ocean, and out of this one you may clutch a fistful of cloud and put it in your pocket. Sea and hill and skythat is Dublin; and a silence, compacted of their essence, is Dublin also. For if perfection is possible in this world, Dublin should be the perfect city; the model, the unique civic and

architectural achievement of man. Nature herself has lent every aid she possesses to that end, and if even she is thwarted what a notable cause there must be! An effect is often difficult to determine, but a cause never: so the woes of any man can be traced back to two sources the thing he has and the thing he has n't; and it is so with a city, and it is so with Dublin. There are two things she has which she does n't want, and two things she wants which she hasn't got. If some benevolent insurrection could but rid Dublin of her tramway system and her Paving Committee what a future would open before her! Neither of these things fits her streets, and, after its inhabitants, what is a city but its streets? And if, in lieu of these, she could but procure a Parliament and a 'bus system, then Dublin would come from underground; she would blossom like the rose, and all the other cities would recognize their queen.

mind this is never sufficiently realized by the play-loving public. To the ordinary theatre-goer it is either 'sweetly pretty' or non-existent, except in the case of some stupendous 'commercial' production, cunningly advertised on the score of its 'series of magnificent stage pictures,' and giving full publicity to the lavish expenditure on the part of a philanthropic management in order to keep faith with the public' -a foul phrase, and fraught with hypocrisy. To the manager it presents exactly the same aspect, therefore, its

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field of appreciation is necessarily limited.

It would be difficult to divide scenery into categories, such as - good scenery, indifferent, and bad, for the following reason: The object of good scenery is to give the right atmosphere to what is taking place in its ambience; therefore, what might be considered a frankly bad scene from the point of view of artistic (pictorial) value (such as a 'concert cloth' in a music hall representing a public house and a cathedral, or an immense vista of marble halls with palms in pots) is precisely what is wanted to create the correct atmosphere for the work of the comedian juggler, or ballad singer. Thus then, by an inversion, it becomes really good scenery.

In England and France, to name only two countries, the public evinces a tremendous interest in theatrical matters. But it may be said roughly that this interest boils down to either listening to a play, or seeing a show. Generations of managers, culminating in the present 'apotheosis' of the commercial theatre, are responsible for having trained the public to this false view of the art of the theatre. At the same time, those of the public who would have willingly taken an interest in the more serious kind of entertainment, so wrongly alluded to by the high-brows as the 'higher form of the drama,' have been frightened away by the willful gloom or nagging neuroticism of the works presented, no less than by the pretentious simplicity of their settings.

These people, then, fall back upon the commercial entertainments (very often submitted to the public in quite good faith by ignorant entrepreneurs, as being works of art), while art itself gets a bad name. I do not see why a musical comedy should not be as interesting in every sense of the word as

the most serious literary work. Young Guardsmen with big cigars are as much in evidence at the performances of the Russian ballet as the pale, thinking gentlemen (perhaps I was wrong in putting a comma between pale and thinking), dressed as for 'salmon shooting' in Harris tweeds. But these latter never frequented the ballets at the Empire and the Alhambra in the old days.

One cannot treat of scenery without equally touching on lighting. It is as much a part of the art of the theatre as acting. Immense pains are taken to build, say, a drawing room or an office, and to present them in the most actual form, while through the windows monstrous visions of field and furrow, buildings and banana groves, palaces of kings and palaces of gin, are revealed to the rapt gaze of the 'earnest student of the drama.' Days are spent in perfecting an inflection of the voice, hours with the eminent Clarkson to give a realistic twist to a whisker, or an amorous brilliance to an otherwise fishy eye, while the producer is content to allow the sun's rays to quiver upward through the floor, or downward from the ceiling, from those jolly little 'battens.'

'Bring up your floats; whites full up in all battens; give me deep ambers in the perches'--so runs the would-be technical jargon of a producer trying to impress an electrician. All this means nothing if not properly applied. In realistic productions, such as are generally to be met with in the average theatre, why should not an attempt be made to get the light to look as if it were coming from where it actually might come?—and, take my word for it, this can be done without obscuring the faces of the performers, although there is a rooted belief in the minds of most actors to the contrary. "They can't see my face!' howls the star (in

many cases there is no reason why one should); but, seriously, this dread is greatly exaggerated. Situation and atmosphere are the things that tell in a play, apart from the fact that it is perfectly possible, notwithstanding the lamentable electrical installations in English theatres, to light intelligently, and yet allow every change of expression to be plainly visible. The staff and entourage of the actor are often greatly to blame. An example of this occurred on the first night of a production by a very distinguished actor-manager.

In this particular case the designer of the scenery and dresses had been given a free hand as to the lighting. The first act represented a moonlit and starlit garden, which he had carefully illuminated so as not to obliterate the faces of the principal performers. After the fall of the curtain the technical expert usually employed, but who in this instance had, like Othello, found his occupation gone, rushed on to the stage, sobbing bitterly and exclaimed, 'Sir 'Erbert, this 'ere acting in a coal-'ole may suit your fancy, but it's jolly well going to ruin my reputation. So 'ere's my fortnight's notice!' Such is the fetish of footlights.

Costume is the Siamese triplet of acting and scenery. I have always held that insufficient attention is paid to this branch. It is not properly understood that shape and cut in historical costume go to the creation of correct atmosphere, and if adapted to modern conceptions of beauty and fashion, are capable of ruining it. I once heard of a manager who was mounting an historical play, the action of which took place in a town distant not more than a two-hours' journey from London. Great importance had been attached to the reconstitution of the dresses and manners of the period. Nevertheless, the manager in question did not think it worth his while to take

even so short a journey, although much of an instructive and possibly remunerative character might have resulted from it. It was, however, his proud boast that he had once traveled seventeen thousand real books all over a great continent for one library scene. Cut and shape are everything, but the tradition of the costumier is ironbound, and he has his set cliché for every period.

There are many admirable artists now working for the theatre. It is unfortunate that a large proportion of them are studio painters, without any real knowledge of the technical workings of the stage, which are full of pit

falls. A most beautiful design is handed over to the scenic artist charged with its execution, who merely cuts it up into a backcloth, and a number of borders and wings, according to his own judgment. The beauty and meaning of the design are thus completely nullified. An ideal condition would be for young painters to undergo a course of rigorous training in the theatre and the wardrobe room. I firmly believe that the results would prove both farreaching and useful, and of a kind to lead eventually to an immense improvement alike in the theory and the practice of scenic art.

The Telegraph

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