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its conventions is that human life, in all its twists and turns, must be made clear to an audience as it is never made clear to a mere spectator of life itself. The manner of doing this has changed. In the past we accepted long soliloquies as part of the convention, but the modern playwright has found that this particular convention, which made for an appearance of unreality, is unnecessary. He obtains the same result by more subtle means and by a more implicit reliance on the art of acting. But the main convention of drama remains. In its higher manifestations it seeks to bare human souls to our sympathy and understanding. Any device which helps towards that result is permissible as part of the illusion of drama, but the dramatis persona of a play must stand out in a relief stronger than life. Their scenic environment should therefore take the same place as the background in a fine portrait. Anything that too closely approaches reality detracts from the importance of the characters. I had an object-lesson in the truth of this theory when witnessing the Warwick Pageant last year. The historical figures had a background of reality-the beautiful grounds of Warwick Castle. The result was not drama, although some of the episodes were dramatic enough. The mood of the day did not fit in with the pageant. The background was separate from the figures, and they were dwarfed to unimportance. I had the same impression in witnessing the scenic splendors of Mr. Beerbohm

Tree's Antony and Cleopatra. So much color and magnificence of detail made Antony and Cleopatra seem accessories rather than principals, and it was a relief to the senses when a comparatively simple scene followed one of the stage pictures. Even with these scenes, however, the characters were not always in artistic proportion. Cæsar's house, for instance, was too vast in its vistas, and the immense columns seemed to dwarf the characters to the measure of reality, which is precisely what is not required in drama. Then, again, no greater artistic mistake was ever made than is comprised in the theory of the union of all the arts. Each appeals to a different sense, and I do not believe that human beings can exercise all their senses at once in an equal degree. That is the fundamental weakness of music-drama. If you are interested in the music the stage action passes as a dream, and the scenery does not exist; if you are impressed by the acting you hardly hear the music; and so on. In spoken drama the chief appeal should be to imagination and sympathy. Nothing should be allowed to interfere with the free play of these mental qualities. If you are not color-blind, a gorgeous mise-en-scène must make an effect on your visual senses and weaken concentration on the character. Indeed, so much is this the case with Mr. Tree's productions that a dramatic critic, to give a true idea of them, must become in part a descriptive reporter. We are made more interested in the environment of Antony and Cleopatra than in what they think and feel, which is the subject-matter of drama. Instead of being privileged to understand the inner life of the great member of the triumvirate and the passionate Empress of Egypt through the magic of the poet's verse and the art of acting, we see them as if we were only average

spectators of life. Possibly an actor and an actress of genius could pierce through this sensuous environment and make our souls vibrate with theirs. A Garrick, it is true, was able to hold his audience with a Macbeth attired in a Hanoverian military uniform, as you may see from Zoffany's picture, but it is not safe to order .matters for genius. Besides, the senses might easily accept a Hanoverian uniform without any but a first shock. Mr. Tree, on the other hand, hypnotizes or narcotizes the imagination by the splendor of his mounting and the brilliance of his costumes.

I am not advocating the shabby "adequate" scenery of third-rate Shakespearian productions, but a new kind of mounting in which the enviThe Nineteenth Century and After.

ronment of the characters would be conceived on the lines of impressionistic suggestion rather than inartistic reality. We do not want the essays in eccentric design which Mr. Gordon Craig gave us some time ago in his production of Handel's Acis and Galatea. He dehumanized drama for the sake of pictorial design. Color and light should play their part in the creation of atmosphere and mood, but scenery must be nothing but a suggestive background to the characters. The medium of dramatic impression is acting, again acting and always acting, and the mounting of a play should be managed so that it heightens and does not detract from the art of the actor.

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THE BILLINGSLEY ROSE.

"Never heard of it," a gardener will answer you, even in the roseries at Kew; for few are aware of the Billingsley rose. It buds on no standard, it adorns no florist's catalogue, and attar from it was never distilled. You may hunt it like the most precious of orchids, but the trail lies through Bloomsbury and the Kensingtons, and not in Amazonian forests or jungles of Mandalay. With patience and flair you may come upon it yet, though Glamorgan, Derbyshire, and the "sweet shire of Cardigan" have been scoured for it, Holland rifled of it, Cintra, Palermo, Montpellier, Tours, and all the haunts of the English resident abroad in the teens of last century meticulously searched for it, by keen-eyed votaries, illuminati, new Rosicrucians ready with gold for any disc of smooth and shining whiteness that bears the Billingsley rose.

It is a China rose, but it never bloomed in Cathay. Nippon nor Cash

mere ever knew it; the European mainland never grew it; it flouts the flowers from Saxony and the valley of the Seine. In the Peak it budded, a century and a quarter ago, but still it lives in beauty; still the petals seem to throb with the sap of life; still this rose, as one enthusiast sings, "has the soft bloom of youth and floats in being, as not by the agency of the brush but by the volition of the painter." For, yes, (perhaps you read the riddle at once?), a pencil of camel-hair produced the flower; it is upon saucers and cups and plates of old English porcelain that one finds the Billingsley rose.

Like every rare and peerless thing. it happened happily; the date of its blooming was fortunate. A little later there would have been no soft porcelain to paint on, a little earlier there was no English porcelain at all. The Billingsley rose is the very triumph and coronal of the efforts of English potters against invasions from the

Orient, from Saxony and France. The illuminati know with their hearts the strange tale of that strife-how the Honorable East India Company kept pouring "china" in from the East; how Dresden and Sèvres imposed upon us their splendid wares; how crowds of merchants and collectors awaited the ships and fought with their moneybags at the ports; how "Why should not we make porcelain?" said English potters, and how they began. Romance encircles the record of their doings; against royal subsidies and patronage by kings of Saxony and France they pitted private enterprise and petty capital; lacking the true material, they invented substitutes, composts, imitative amalgams; and at last they came upon a kind of china that differed as much from the wares of Meissen and late Sèvres as a lyric of Shelley's contrasts with a page of Racine's.

This English soft china was not true porcelain, I know. It was "an ingenious and beautiful counterfeit," says Professor Church; but he does not rate the real thing the higher. No, it was something better than "true" porcelain; It was something unique and apart, something delicate and ephemeral, dainty and fragile, fit compeer for the Louis Seize fan, a pastel of Vigée Lebrun's, or a Cosway miniature. It has left the china cupboard and the kitchen rack, to dwell in the realm of lost arts. The paste and the glaze of it, delightful in themselves, to the painter furnished a "canvas" opulently white, softly firm, and gently smooth, shot through with light, receptive, better than ivory; and upon such pleasant surfaces the pencil of William Billingsley began to play and create, at Derby, circa 1775.

The man was blest in the ware on which he wrought, for the glassy and chalky amalgams which made up the paste and glaze of the old English

porcelains gave them tenderness and translucency beyond compare. Light, transpiercing light, the glass-painter's ally, came to his aid. Held to the light, the form and tinting of any flowers he painted in Wales can be seen through and through. Take even a plate of his painting at Derby. Though the chemical action of air and sunlight by now may have veined the glaze with a fine network of brown, it once was white and virginal, pregnable to the colors and wooing the brush. At Meissen and Sèvres the artists worked on kaolinic stuff, like that of the Orient-stuff that was dure, refractory to pigments, almost impossible to stain with gentle tints; so that the picture rests upon the surface wholly, kept hard in outline and not interfused with the glaze, just as even the most deftly barbered peruke declines to blend with the nape and the temples. But the English "soft" porcelains had a subsoil, so to speak; the surfaces were sympathetic and amorous of the brush, the paste and glaze were receptive and absorbent, and the colors became filtered and refined as they sank richly in. It is this quality in the ware which causes the French illuminati, tired of the hard mechanical perfection of "Sèvres," to rifle the shops of Paris of every piece of pâte tendre anglaise to-day.

Yet tools and materials count for little in art, after all. Plenty of clever brushes had played upon English china before Billingsley's began-reluctant French limners had been bribed to cross the Channel-but none had ever painted the rose so well as he was to come to do. By the time he started off on his dramatic wanderings, the pilgrim of perfection in porcelain, his flowers had become almost famous, and his style had begun to found a school. He was a deviser and inventor. All his days he showed himself a restless seeker and innovator, never content with the usual and accepted.

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Perhaps the tragedy reer arose from that. just the man to reverse a tradition, and he upset-in England at least-the rules of flower-painting on china which had come down from Royal fabrik and établissement abroad to humble potteries here. Billingsley forsook the convention; he painted flowers as he saw them, and not as by the older masters in his art they had been seen. In his way and scope he too repudiated the white horse and the brown tree. England in him may claim the first Impressionist. He worked in the small and upon still-life subjects, it is true; but all the same he was the first, I think, to "bring the picture out of the blur" to the momentary glance.

The outline of the Billingsley rose, and its lights and shadows too, are imprecise. Under the momentary glance the flower seems to float and quiver, almost to form itself and move, and the richly enamelled deep heart of it, like the drooping and blowing petals, makes a rounding contrast with the high light upon the swell.

By older china-paint

ers "the lights were simply left untouched," writes Mr. John Ward, keeper of the Billingsley china at Cardiff-that is, the "lights" were parts of the white uncolored glaze. But by the Billingsley method "the whole surface of the flower was covered with color, and the lights were then swept out with a half-charged brush." No great discovery, perhaps-simply an artist's device; but it was Billingsley's first, and it is this, together with a special "feeling" for flowers and a knack in grouping them, which makes it just to say, as a votary does, that "no other man in all the history of porcelain painted roses as this man did"; for upon the most fitting of material his brushes played in the most natural and liberated of styles.

Yet Billingsley would never speak of himself as an artist, one may be sure.

He was a workman, a craftsman, one of the good old kind of steady, rather silent, dour English artisans, better paid than most workmen at that date, but painting stolidly for daily bread, and drawing his thirty-five or forty shillings a week in quite a non-romantic and businesslike way. Romance was to come as a "high light" upon him, however, and his career, his mysterious law-breaking, his flight and exile, the pride of his achievements and the pathos of his failures were to afford a topic for biographers and novelists in the end. For in the first year of the nineteenth century he ceased to be the steady artisan of the pot-works at Derby. He took to the road, and became a Romany of art; he wandered in Sherwood Forest and Cannock Chase, Salop, Worcestershire, and Wales; and wherever he went he drew, or taught to draw, the Billingsley rose.

He left peace and comfort behind him at Derby, but he went towards renown. In his way he was famous already, and in his own country. "To be painted with Billingsley's flowers" is written on many pages of the patternbooks which used to be kept in the Derby China Works until a generation ago. His "prentice-plate" is treasured in the Derby Art Gallery, though somewhat the worse for wear. It is described as "bordered with roses in every conceivable position. The stems are wonderfully graceful and elastic, and suggest that they are alive, the weight of the flower giving a curve which one can fancy changing with the flutter of the breeze." It was by examples such as this that the craftsman taught at the Derby, Pinxton, Worcester, Nantgarw, Swansea, and Coalport potteries the art and mystery of painting flowers to the life.

Not every Billingsley rose is by Billingsley, therefore, and he seldom signed his work, though the figure "7” on the back of a piece of "old Derby"

is said to authenticate the painting as his own. But his work is signed all over to the instructed eye. Always the lights are "swept out with a halfcharged brush." But that is not all; he could group flowers more harmoniously and set them in truer perspective than his copiers. Not only did he blot them in more masterly, but he treated the shadows and developed values in an inimitable way. If you find these qualities in a flower-piece painted on "soft" English china, look again. What are the flowers? What are the prevalent hues? For Billingsley loved the auricula and the tulip, as well as the rose; he had a fondness for yellows and purples, and would bind in each nosegay at least one flower of a dovecolor gray. Then, also, his bouquets throw out loose sprays, and the leaves are darkish, little-veined, often vaguely washed-in.

"Make a bargain with Mr. Billingsley for him to continue with you," the London agent of the Derby China Works wrote to the proprietor of them urgently, in 1796. "For it will be a great loss to lose such a hand, and not only that, but his going into another factory will put them into the way of doing flowers in the same way, which they at present are entirely ignorant of." I daresay Mr. Duesbury would offer as much as fifty shillings a week for his "hand" to remain, but he offered in vain. Billingsley quitted Derby to become a master-man. But that was not his chief motive; he had a stronger incentive and a higher aim.

He was potter as well as painter, and he longed to produce a perfect porcelain. Mr. Duesbury's rules prohibited the painters from entering the potters' rooms at Derby, and the potters from visiting the painting-rooms; but he failed to limit Billingsley's technical knowledge, just as he did to retain the advantages of his brush. The painter-potter had experimented in the

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mixing-room and the kilns at Derby; he sought after a ware which should possess the translucency and porousness of "soft" china, be exquisitely thin, and yet be durably "hard" like the porcelain from Dresden-perhaps an impossible ideal. The "hand" was no chemist, and had been only scantily schooled, but he was tireless and inventive, and he came at last, after heart-breaking failure, to something like achievement; for in Wales he produced from his recipes "a porcelain which, as an artificial felspar, approaches the nearest to real felspar" of any imitative china ever concocted. This was the famous ware of Nantgarw. But it did not wholly realize the aim, for it was brittle, not "hard." Billingsley never quite saw

success.

He began his search for the perfect porcelain in 1796 at Pinxton. A certain Mr. Coke, who had lived at Dresden and knew the qualities of the Saxon ware, undertook to build and equip a small pottery if Billingsley would act as managing partner in the concern. The thick white Pinxton china was the result, but it seldom flowered with the Billingsley rose; the potter had absorbed the painter, the artist had become a man of affairs. Yet the partnership lasted no longer than four years. Billingsley's wife used to say of him that he was "never satisfied with what he did, always wishing to produce something better." Probably Mr. Coke had curbed experiment with his purse-strings. At any rate, in 1800, the inveterate experimenter carried away his recipes, and left the Pinxton pottery to fumble with inferior ware. Adversity drove the "hand" to his art again, and then befell a period of painting other people's china and of scheming for new capital. Then something mysterious and catastrophical occurred. In the winter of 1808 we see him scurrying south, escaping, a scared and quaking fugitive,

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