The Plays of Augustus Thomas
[In the following excerpt, Winter praises some of Thomas's major hits.]
It is the province of criticism to examine, analyze, classify, and expound, with praise for merit and censure for defect, the productions of artists, to maintain and apply the highest standard of taste, beauty, and morality, to advocate that which is right and to denounce that which is wrong. In the pursuit of that difficult and generally thankless vocation the great privilege sometimes comes to the critic of recognizing, honoring, and perhaps contributing to the advancement of genius. That privilege is afforded to the critic who is so fortunate as to examine the best plays of Augustus Thomas. The genius that is manifest in those plays is that which intuitively comprehends human nature, its strength and its weakness, its temptations and its trials; which sees the whole vast current of humanity, the diversified characters, pathetic or antipathetic; the blessings and the cruelties of condition; which discriminates between good and evil, being aware that those elements are strangely commingled in every human creature; and which can seize and reproduce those points and moments when circumstances long fluent in a hidden drift and feelings long intensifying themselves in concealment break suddenly into view and become motives and vehicles of action,—that being the one absolutely and imperatively essential constituent of drama. The fruits of that rich genius are known, and as time speeds onward they will be more and more prized and honored. Thomas is a born dramatist. His skill has been matured by study and practice. His motives are pure. His aspirations are high. He has accomplished much, and he will accomplish more.
ALABAMA.
For the purposes of a dramatic author human life is to be viewed as a river which, for the greater part, flows underground,—only at intervals breaking forth into the light. Every character has a background. Every condition of individualism and of circumstance is consequent on a long line of antecedent facts. The dramatic instinct perceives the points of contrast, the moments of upheaval, will-conflict, action,—and a true dramatist shows human beings and human life as Fate shows them. His talent is not that of the novelist, which must take note of every detail. It eliminates. The perfect play can be likened to the new moon,—a clear and brilliant crescent, with the rest of the orb, dark but perfectly defined, in its arms. Your gaze is riveted by the superb sickle of light, but at the same time you comprehend the whole planet. Thomas's lovely play of Alabama, first acted on April 1, 1891, at the Madison Square Theatre, New York, exemplifies that truth, the author being possessed of the rare faculty of depicting human life not in picture but in action. The dramatist,—purposing to tell a story about a gallant soldier whom the chances of war had separated from his wife, who subsequently had died in giving birth to their child, of whose birth he had long remained in ignorance,—wrought in such a way as to allow essential incidents to reveal themselves in the light of dramatic contrast, as they would naturally do in actual life. Probability was not scrupulously considered. It is not probable that the husband and wife, Henry Preston and Mildred Fairfax, true lovers and strong characters, would have submitted to be separated; nor that either of them, when they had been separated, would marry; nor that Henry Preston would have remained for eighteen years in ignorance of the birth of their child; nor that, loving his father, Henry Preston would have remained, all that time, in exile from that father's presence and from the old home, no matter what causes of estrangement might have existed: and yet,—so strangely is truth at variance with likelihood in human life,—all those things were possible. The dramatist deemed them essential to his purpose, assumed them to be facts, and built on them. His story is acted, not related. It is romantic, it commingles humor and pathos, and it imparts high ideals of character and conduct. The persons in it are distinctly individualized. The style of it is clear and crisp, and it possesses in a high degree the delightful quality of dramatic suggestiveness.
The South is the more picturesque part of the American Republic. The old social order at the South was more romantic, pictorial, and interesting than any social order at the North is now or ever has been. Thomas chose wisely in choosing a Southern plantation for the scene of his play. Much is dependent on climate, because climate affects character and manners as well as atmosphere and foliage. The investiture of the piece was delicious. You could see the large stars hanging in the deep, dark sky; the still streamers of gray moss, and the great fans of palm, and you could smell the scent of magnolia on the faint evening breeze. The persons charmed by languor of repose. The purpose was to set the easy, indolent, drifting temperament of the South in sharp contrast with the alert, expeditious, enterprising energy of the North. The social complexities, individual alienations, and changes and sorrows resultant on the Civil War were skilfully made a background for the picture. The haze of time has settled over that lamentable period in American history, and since it has grown more and more interesting in the retrospect it can be contemplated without rancor. The play of Alabama treats it fairly, indicating without either partisan motive or aggressive morality the community of interest that should bind all sections of the Republic into one nation. Colonel Preston and his son Henry represent the two divisions of the land, and when at last they are reconciled their union points an obvious moral. The play is ardent with feeling, deftly elicited by the simple expedient of placing its chief characters in circumstances credibly pathetic.
Alabama was produced with a cast which included several of the ablest and most accomplished and interesting actors of the period,—James Huddart Stoddart, Edmund Milton Holland, Maurice Barrymore, Richard Fox, Charles L. Harris, and May Brookyn.
COLONEL CARTER OF CARTERSVILLE.
The character of Colonel Carter, which is deftly depicted in a story bearing that name, by F. Hopkinson Smith, published in 1891, possesses the blended charms of simplicity, sweetness, and eccentric humor,—a soft enchantment, such as long has endeared, and will always endear, the kindred characters of Parson Adams, Uncle Toby, Sir Roger de Coverley, and Colonel Newcome. To know such a man as Colonel Carter would be to possess the privilege of associations at once cheering and humorous. There are persons who never see objects precisely as they are,—persons to whose vision every fact becomes transfigured by fancy. Colonel Carter is not an adventurer, yet he undertakes to live a practical life in a world of dreams, or, which is the same thing, a dream life in a world of fact,—and he succeeds in doing so because, being a charming eccentricity, he is also true. The insincere man who should pursue Colonel Carter's course would speedily come to ruin. It is the fortunate prerogative of goodness to command the respect of both good and evil. Human nature is sufficiently defective, but it has gentleness for that which is gentle, and it has affection for that which is simple, noble, affectionate, and kind. Those epithets describe Colonel Carter.
The play that Thomas made, on the basis of Smith's story, was produced at Palmer's Theatre, March 22, 1892. That play is frail, but the piquancy of the original narrative is preserved, the incidents are adroitly utilized, the dialogue is simple and fluent, the sentiment is sincere and unobtrusive, the action is various and brisk, and the spirit is pure. Coming, as it did, at a time when the Stage was being freely used for the dissection of turpitude and disease, that play came like a breeze from the pine woods in a morning of spring. The dramatist slightly varied the scheme of the novelist by adroitly weaving into the fabric a slender thread of amatory romance. Colonel Carter, in the play, is provided with a young female ward, and is made to fall in love with her. Men who have become elderly do, sometimes, feel that wound, and when they feel it they suffer. The girl bestows her affections on a youth who loves her, and the Colonel's apprehension of the true state of the matter affords him an accession of the magnanimity which, in all such cases, is supposed to provide the sufferer an adequate consolation. May should not mate with December. The suspension of the love interest during two acts of the play is its chief weakness, and it is a little impeded by detail; but keen dramatic instinct is finely displayed in the general conduct of the plot and particularly in the expedient of opening and closing the action on the estate which, incidentally, is imperilled and redeemed.
Scott, who anticipated much modern reflection, has noticed the temptation besetting every seeker for novelty to become extravagant in order to avoid being trite. That temptation might well have assailed equally the author of Colonel Carter and the actors by whom the play was represented. The story of a dreamer whose dreams accidentally come true might readily be presumed to lack zest and to require acute emphasis; yet neither in the structure of the piece nor in the performance of it was there any exaggeration. Colonel Carter's cheerful poverty seems the flower of opulence; his unconscious bewitchment of the astonished and delighted tradesman who calls for payment and does not obtain it; his feudal attitude toward the negro, Chad; his railway project, apparently visionary, but strangely turned to unexpected substance; his preposterous duel; his garden in Virginia; his amazing and amusing Southern friends; his chivalrous spirit toward his patient, admirable sister,—unostentatious elements of a graceful fiction,—all are deftly blended in the play, and the acting was harmoniously simple and true.
Edmund Milton Holland (one of the many actors whom it has been my pleasant fortune to observe from the moment of first appearance on the stage) impersonated Colonel Carter and entered completely into the soul of the character. Holland is an actor of the school of Joseph Jefferson. He can be fine as well as bold, and can make the condition of a personality as positive and effective as the most brilliant stroke of its action—a rare and valuable felicity of dramatic art. His ideal had been clearly formed, and his expression of it, alike facial, vocal, and locomotive, was vigorous, and it strikingly evinced the excellent quality of artistic repose. He held every “point” just long enough to be comprehended, and never reverted to an effect once caused. He manifested the precious resources of a fine mind and a good heart,—without which no actor will endure,—and the charm of a whimsical drollery, thinly veiled by a sweet, grave, demure composure. His success was decisive. The Colonel,—with his remarkable black coat that could be adjusted for all occasions by a judicious manipulation of the buttons, his frayed wristbands, his shining trousers, his unconsciously forlorn poverty, and his unquenchable spirit of hope, love, and honor,—was, in that remarkable performance, a picturesque, lovable reality.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
The most illuminative remark that has been preserved as to the character of Oliver Goldsmith is a remark made by himself, to the effect that when arguing alone he always got the better of the argument. He lived in a world of his own thoughts and feelings, and, although his company was liked by many persons, he was not a man for society, and he did not show for his actual worth in the companionship of other men. He was simple, awkward, almost clumsy, and he was acutely sensitive. Sir Joshua Reynolds thought that his extreme absurdity of behavior was to some extent intentional, but that is conjecture. He required an occasion, and, as a writer, he always rose to it. There are few things in the language more felicitous than his dedication of She Stoops to Conquer to Dr. Johnson. His Vicar of Wakefield and Deserted Village are classics. Boswell, who generally undervalues him, has, nevertheless, by mere record of incidents, shown him as one of the gentlest, most transparent, and most lovable of men. Dr. Johnson placed him in the first rank, whether as a poet, a writer of comedy, or an historian. His genius, said the Doctor, is great, but his knowledge is small. “Let not his frailties be remembered” (so wrote that same noble and tender friend); “he was a very great man.”
The droll comedian and gentle humorist Stuart Robson, who appeared at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, on March 19, 1900, in the character of Goldsmith, was naturally sympathetic with the part, and he possessed many qualifications for an adequate interpretation of it, not the least of which were sweetness of temperament, sincerity of purpose, intellectual and moral worth, the spirit of a gentleman,—born, not made,—and a quaint, homely eccentricity of demeanor. The comedy, ingeniously constructed and agreeably written by Augustus Thomas, presents Goldsmith as a lover of one of the two Horneck girls who are mentioned, in the biographies of the poet as having been prominent among his friends, and whom certainly he held in high esteem. One of those girls became Mrs. Bunbury and the other became Mrs. Gwyn. There is no evidence that Goldsmith was enamoured of Mary Horneck or of any woman. Mrs. Jameson, who bestowed much expert attention upon “the Loves of the Poets,” says that of the loves of Goldsmith we know nothing, and she conjectures that they, probably, were the reverse of poetical. When he was on his deathbed he said that his mind was not at ease, and it has been surmised that he was thinking of an unhappy attachment or a lost love. It may be so. Everything is possible. But, as he died poor and in debt, it seems probable that his distress was an honorable solicitude rather than an amatory grief. “He had raised money and squandered it,” said Dr. Johnson, “by every artifice of acquisition and folly of expense.” It was legitimate, however, that the dramatist should exercise his fancy in the treatment of his subject, and he did so to a good, practical purpose. The play may not be credible as history or biography, but it is a faithful and touching presentment of the ambitions, emotions, foibles, vicissitudes, and disappointments of a man of genius, and, incidentally, it suggests a picture of that fascinating literary group of which Johnson was the centre, with Burke, Gibbon, Sheridan, Garrick, Warton, Reynolds, Goldsmith, and Boswell ranged around him, giving lustre to the earlier period of King George the Third and leaving to posterity a legacy of imperishable beauty and renown.
If it be true, as said by Dr. Johnson, that the great end of comedy is to make an audience merry, Thomas attained to the great end of comedy in this play. It interests the mind and it touches the heart. Robson was more effective in the show of droll eccentricity than in the expression of tenderness, but, knowing that true love is always reverent, he expressed, with pathetic fidelity, the piteous endurance of a noble gentleman who must conceal his love and reject his happiness, because he thinks himself ungainly and unattractive, unfortunate and poor, and because he knows himself foredoomed to an early death. That is the pivotal idea of the play. In Act First Goldsmith, flying from the image of Mary Horneck, blunders into the country house of a London citizen,—mistaking it for an inn,—where Mary is a guest, and where Johnson, Burke, Garrick, and others are also participants in the owner's hospitality. In Act Second he conducts a rehearsal of the comedy that he has written around this incident of his personal experience,—the comedy which is then and there named She Stoops to Conquer,—and he strikes down the libellous scribbler Kenrick, who has vilified Mary Horneck and himself in one of the dirty journals of the day. In Act Third he is arrested for debt, summoned to fight a duel in Mary's cause, vindicated against calumny, and, at least momentarily, blessed with the open approval of the woman whom he loves.
The incidents are simple. It is the sweet spirit with which the theme is treated that invests the play with charm, and that ought to endear it to everybody who cares for beautiful things. The great literary men of the Johnson period are treated with familiarity, perhaps distorted; but something has been preserved of the feeling of the Johnson era, and something has been suggested of the style of its gentry and its domestic life. Indications abound in Thomas's text of familiarity with Boswell's Life, with Moore's Sheridan, with Washington Irving's Biography of Oliver Goldsmith, and with the plays of the eighteenth century, and in an episode relative to a cabman and a bailiff there is a reminiscence of a pretty little story, published about 1899, called “The Jessamy Bride.” The play is diffuse in the last act, by reason of too much trivial incident,—retarding the climax and tending to submerge the pathos of the close in a rising tide of farcical nonsense; but it is a pure, lovely, ingenuous, clever, interesting play.
THE WITCHING HOUR
Superlatives, generally, defeat their purpose. The word “great,” for example, has been misused to such a degree, in relation to the Stage and its professors, that it has almost lost its meaning. The writer who uses that word should feel sure of the propriety of its application. Thomas's play of The Witching Hour, which was first acted in New York on November 18, 1907, at the Hackett Theatre (now, 1912, the Harris), is a great play. It is not a “lesson,” a sermon, a treatise, a discourse, a debate, or a clinical diagnosis; it is a drama. The word “drama” (of which the significance often seems to have been forgotten or ignored) means something done, something that occurs in action. Thomas, in writing this play, distinctly and brilliantly exemplified that meaning. The action of The Witching Hour begins with its first word and ends only with its last one, so that, in its chiefly significant passages, it could be comprehended almost without the help of words. The subject is the esoteric influence of mind upon mind, an influence independent of the usually recognized means of communication. That subject was not new, but the treatment of it by Thomas was novel, and that treatment framed a drama of engrossing interest. The period of The Witching Hour is contemporary (about 1906): the action passes in two rooms, one in Louisville, Kentucky, the other in Washington. The characters are distinct, individual, and veritable. The pivotal incident is an unpremediated, unintentional homicide. The situations are essentially dramatic, occurring in a sequence, each arising as a natural result of its predecessor, and the exposition of them is exceptionally skilful. The treatment applies the fact of mental communication and influence,—the fact of telepathy,—to probable persons and incidents, and the result is a delightful comedy, touched with romance, which, in the right method of dramatic art,—that, namely, of suggestion, not of monition or precept,—imparts ethical significance and intellectual pleasure, while deeply affecting the feelings.
Jack Brookfield is a “gentleman gambler.” His sister and his niece, to whom he is devotedly attached, disapprove of his vocation. More than twenty years before the opening of the play the woman whom Brookfield loves has refused to marry him, because of his propensity for gambling, and has married another suitor. She has a son and, being now a widow, by name Mrs. Whipple, she returns to her native city, Louisville, Kentucky. Her boy loves Brookfield's niece, and is by her beloved. Brookfield favors their union, and he looks with disapproval on the suit of an acquaintance of his, a political office-holder, named Frank Hardmuth, who also is a gambler. Young Whipple has inherited an hysterical loathing and insane fear of the jewel called “cat's-eye.” At Brookfield's house a tipsy youth forces one of those jewels on Whipple's attention, and persists in that wanton annoyance until, in blind, furious terror, the boy strikes at his tormentor with the first thing his hand touches,—a paper-cutter, made from a heavy ivory tusk, which has been left on a table. The victim is tipsy; the blows, struck heavily and wildly, fall upon his head, and he is killed. Whipple, within a few moments of his acceptance by the young woman whom he loves, is arrested for murder, and subsequently he is tried for that crime, convicted, and sentenced to death. The hereditary fear of the cat's-eye jewel is known to the boy's mother and to his friends, but it is not effective as a defence against the accusation. After the conviction a point of constitutional law is raised, on behalf of the condemned boy; the trial has not been held “in public,”—admission having been restricted to those holding tickets, and the tickets having been solely at the disposal of the prosecution, conducted by the disappointed rival, Hardmuth. The point is carried to the Supreme Court of the United States. One of the members of that tribunal, Judge Prentice, had been a rejected suitor for the hand of Mrs. Whipple's mother. In his youth he had fought a duel because of her, and he is aware of the truth affirmed in extenuation of young Whipple,—temporary insanity, caused by crazy horror of the “cat's-eye” jewel. Judge Prentice's devotion to his lost love has never ceased: he has remained a bachelor because of it; a personal appeal is made to him; at first, mistakenly supposing that an improper attempt is being made to influence his decision, he will not listen; then the circumstances are truthfully set before him; the point of constitutional law, upon which the Court has been evenly divided, except for Prentice, whose vote has not been cast, is then decided in favor of young Whipple. Judge Prentice gives his testimony as to the hereditary peculiarity of the accused, and, after intense suspense, an acquittal is obtained.
Concurrent with that story there is a dramatic portrayal of the operation of mental force without the usually recognized means of communication. In the First Act Judge Prentice calls on Brookfield, with the desire to purchase a painting in possession of the latter. In an extremely clever, interesting scene the possession, to an extraordinary degree, of clairvoyant, or telepathic, faculty by both Judge Prentice and Brookfield is disclosed,—a faculty of which Brookfield has been ignorant. Hardmuth, having become the Prosecuting Attorney, has pursued his favored rival, Whipple, with vindictive animosity. Brookfield has learned that Hardmuth is the murderer of a former Governor-elect of Kentucky: the infamous Goebel case is, unmistakably, indicated, the name, indeed, only being changed to Scoebel. During the second trial of Whipple, at the supreme moment, while awaiting the verdict of the jury, Brookfield has published in The Louisville Courier-Journal his accusation against Hardmuth, which he possesses evidence to prove. His double purpose is to influence the minds of the jury by means of the force of thousands of minds simultaneously turned against Hardmuth by this accusation, and to prevent the nomination, which, without the disclosure of the murder, would practically mean the election of Hardmuth as Governor of Kentucky. The jury acquits the youth. The climax of the Third Act is a situation in which Hardmuth, desperate with defeat and rage, attempts to kill Brookfield, rushing into his presence and placing a pistol against his side, but being prevented from firing, and compelled to drop his weapon, by the sudden exertion of Brookfield's superior mental force.
The success of Brookfield as a gambler is indicated to him as the result of his power to read the minds of other players—he having believed his success to be the result of honest skill or the ability to make, as he expresses it, “a lucky guess.” There are passages in this play which, for loveliness of feeling, have not been surpassed in the modern drama. One of those, in particular, is that which ends the Second Act, when old Judge Prentice is left alone and, his mind directed to the past by the appeal which has been made to him, wonders whether it is possible for a living human being to be influenced and guided by the spirit of a dearly loved person passed away, and, so wondering, murmurs the gentle lines of Bret Harte:
The delicate odor of mignonette,
The ghost of a dead and gone bouquet,
Is all that tells of her story; yet
Could she think of a sweeter way?
There must be great delicacy, rare perception, intrinsic goodness, and deep sympathy with beauty in the mind that can so truly see and so delicately portray such deep and fine feeling as is revealed in The Witching Hour. Some of the incidents and devices used by Thomas, since they deal with facts and theories not generally studied, were received with the scepticism and disparagement usual in such cases,—but much of the objection was the protest of ignorance against truth that is new or not understood. As to the subject of mental influence and communication, independent of the recognized channels of intercourse,—there is nothing supernatural in it, much that seems strange being only something as yet not comprehended. One of the chief elements of power in this play is the steadily dramatic and effective presentation of the story, regardless of the belief or disbelief, approval or disapproval, of the auditory as to the suggested premises on which it rests.
When the play was first acted in New York the author, speaking from the stage, said that he would agree with those who considered that in statement of the fact of telepathy in dramatic form he had been “fairly redundant.” It seemed a singular attitude. There is nothing redundant in his play. Whether or not he had “a lesson” to “teach,”—and it has been said that he had,—he did not mar his play by precept. Ethical purpose was not obtruded. Ethical meaning can be deduced from the play,—and so it can from the fading of a rose or the setting of the sun. But the ethical meaning is implied, not asserted; it does not impede the action. It is possible to portray character without writing drama, but it is not possible to write drama without portraying character, and the character portrayal in The Witching Hour is exceptionally fine.
The acting of that play, when first produced, was well nigh perfect. John Mason's acting of Brookfield was impressive with the authority of intellectual character, repose, and consistency, admirable with distinction, extraordinarily fertile in suggestion of wide, often painful, experience of life and of the faculty of close observation, delightful with artistic finish, and deeply sympathetic because of absolute sincerity and innate refinement. Russ Whytal as Judge Prentice,—manly, tender, fervent, distinguished, with an occasional flicker of the fiery spirit of youth,—added a veritable gem of impersonation to the galaxy of theatrical triumphs which will always be treasured in memory. George Nash's personation of Hardmuth was wonderfully effective, possessing the merit of conveying a something of amiability along with the violent weakness and repulsiveness of that character, and thus making credible anything like friendship between Hardmuth and Brookfield, who is a man of unusual intellect. The contrast of that which is serious, even tragic, with that which is comic, even trivial, is well made and its effect is profound. It will be interesting and instructive to see whether The Witching Hour will stand the test of Time, because it is, in many passages, written in dialogue, here and there colored with slang, strongly characteristic of its period.
AS A MAN THINKS
By the writing of his play entitled As a Man Thinks,—a great comedy which, in many respects, was greatly acted, in its presentation at the Thirty-ninth Street Theatre, March 13, 1911,—Thomas provided an occasion for earnest, thoughtful, grateful praise. The play is a permanent addition to the practical resources of the Stage, whether it be considered as a fabric of action or a fabric of thoughts and words, and the influence of the play is a potent, decisive, far-reaching benefit to society. The purpose of the dramatist,—a purpose clearly shown and completely and brilliantly accomplished in this comedy,—was to tell an interesting and significant story, involving persons and scenes probable and representative in contemporary social life; to set in a strong light the folly of a maintenance of racial antagonisms, and to reiterate, by felicitous dramatic example and by the vital and tremendous power of suggestion, the true doctrine,—to which he had more than once before expressed devoted adherence,—that the welfare of humanity depends on the diffusion of gentleness, refinement, a forgiving spirit, benevolence, and good thoughts, between man and man. As a man thinks so does he find his environment fashioned and colored, and therefore it is of the first importance to him that he should think rightly, kindly, charitably, and well. The comedy is not a sermon, not in the least dreary with moral platitudes, and it does not contain any cant, either that of virtue or that of vice: it teaches,—but its teaching is like that of Nature, insinuative, subtly influential,—and the spectator of it is not only charmed and buoyed by the spell of continuous interest, but made seriously thoughtful, prompted to a kindlier disposition, touched at the heart and elevated in the mind. There is, in the mechanism of the play, some slight enforcement of the occurrence of incidents, causing them to happen fortunately for the safe conduct of the plot, but such enforcement is, and always has been, essential in a work of dramatic art,—a work that, for the purpose of brief representation, must condense within a narrow compass feelings, experiences, deeds, and events which, in actual life, are, almost invariably, diffused over a considerable extent of time. It would be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to name a better example of expert and felicitous dramatic construction than is provided by this comedy.
The picture is one of troubles in domestic life, and the central theme is the terrible passion of jealousy. The place is New York City and the time is the present. Thirteen persons,—eight of them prominent, the others incidental,—are involved in the action. Four of the eight persons are Jews, the others, theoretically, it can be assumed, Christians, and much forcible effect is obtained by the adroit use, respectively, of intercurrence and contrariety between members of the different races. The dominant character is Dr. Samuel Seelig, a Jew, and it is upon this character that the dramatist, while not neglecting any of the subsidiary parts, has expended the utmost wealth of his thought and feeling and laid the chief weight of emphasis. The domestic troubles are represented as sequent on the marital infidelity of an American husband, Frank Clayton, and on the dishonorable conduct of a slippery Jew bachelor, Benjamin de Lota, and the four acts of the comedy,—which are tersely and pungently written,—portray the progress of those troubles and therewithal the gradual mitigation and ultimate effacement of them, through the wisdom, authority, and charity of the manly, prudent, magnanimous, and splendidly balanced character of Dr. Seelig.
The jealous anger of Mrs. Clayton impels her, foolishly but not criminally, to place herself in a compromising position with the Jew De Lota. The jealous anger of Frank Clayton, when that fact has been made known to him,—the medium of the impartment, ingeniously contrived, being a fortuitous relation by his wife's father,—causes him to denounce and repudiate her, so that she leaves his house, with their son, a child eight years old, and, temporarily, finds a refuge in the home of their friends, Dr. and Mrs. Seelig. Clayton subsequently learns that De Lota was a suitor to his wife in her girlhood, and he foolishly grasps at the maddening belief that she has been false to him from the first, that De Lota has been her paramour, and, in fact, is the father of her child. In a scene contrived with splendid skill and conducted with such fidelity to nature as to create a perfect illusion and cause the theatre to be forgotten Dr. Seelig is enabled to cause Clayton's mind to be disabused of all his wrong, wretched, monstrous suspicions, and is successful in reuniting the alienated husband and wife. Meanwhile Vedah Seelig, the Doctor's daughter, who has been betrothed to De Lota but has never entirely trusted him, breaks her engagement and privily weds a young Christian American, Julian Burrill, an artist, and the noble Jew, her father, is thus subjected to a trial (the marriage of his daughter outside the Hebrew race) which he cannot sustain without deep suffering, but to which, finally, he is indicated as submissive, in that sweet sincerity of benevolence of which he is an incarnate image. It is not by novelty of thought that Thomas charms in this remarkable play, but by the exceedingly happy and powerful dramatic expression of it. The simplicity of the story is not only matched but exceeded by the elementary truth of the principles which it suggests for the conduct of life. “As a man thinketh,” says Dr. Seelig, remembering the precept of the founder of the Christian faith. “There's nothing either good or bad,” says Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” “Yesterday is dead,” says the wise and kind Hebrew; “look forward.” “Let us not burthen our remembrance with a heaviness that's gone,” says Prospero. “Let the dead Past bury its dead,” said the poet Longfellow, and his exquisite romance of “Hyperion” was written around that admonition. The whole philosophy of Emerson, which revolutionized religious thought in New England and more or less broadened the mind of the country throughout its extent, is grounded,—in as far as it is grounded anywhere,—on the central idea of emancipation of the Present from the burdens of the Past. There is nothing new in this teaching, and Thomas's fine play, in the ethical import of it,—even in the bearing it has upon the institution of marriage and the relation of the sexes,—only echoes truths that have long been reverberant through the backward arches of Time; nor does it pretend to do anything else. John Mason, the principal actor in it (whose performance of the Jew has not been matched, in many a year, for power of feeling and beauty of artistic finish), seemed, indeed, to think otherwise, for, in a newspaper interview, he said: “Dr. Seelig makes a point that has never been made before, which is that the whole structure of modern society rests on man's faith in woman's virtue.” The speech in the comedy in which that declaration is made is an exceedingly eloquent and fine one, controverting the impulsive assertion of an excited woman, naturally and rightly resentful of the injustice often shown toward her sex, that “this is a man's world,” and declaring the essential fact that, in our society at any rate, this is a woman's world. But the thought, among English-speaking races, is very old, nor would it, perhaps, be too much to say that it is as old as civilized society. It is not in novelty of ethical ideas, right and good though his ideas are, that Thomas gained his magnificent stage victory, but it is as a dramatist, making a grand use of representative types of human nature to enforce the ascertained principles of true philosophy and instill them into the public heart.
Many dramatists, from Shakespeare onward, have, occasionally, made the error of marring objective art by the impulsive interjection of subjective speeches. Thus, in Macbeth's soliloquy, beginning, “She should have died hereafter,” the poet suddenly takes the place of the character and deftly illustrates the evanescence of human life by the figurative example of “a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more,”—a simile characteristic of Shakespeare, but not at all characteristic of Macbeth. Thus, again, in Rip Van Winkle,—sometimes ignorantly disparaged as a bad play, whereas it contains many of the most essential elements of drama, and is an exceedingly good one,—the wistful, half-dazed vagrant, when confronting the phantoms, in the Ghost Scene, is made to ask the chieftain of the spectral group: “Have you any dumb girls?” and to make the wholly inappropriate and jarring comment, “If you had some dumb girls, what wives they would make!”—the paltry gibe of Dion Boucicault, but when spoken by the awed and forlorn Rip, trying to be brave, entirely out of place in that scene of tremulous mystery,—a scene almost as weird as that of Hamlet's visitation, at midnight, on the ramparts of the castle of Elsinore. And thus, finally, in this comedy of As a Man Thinks, the pure, sweet, gentle Vedah Seelig, half an hour after her marriage to the man whom she loves and who loves her, and in his presence and in that of her mother, being reproached for not having delayed her wedding, is made to reply: “What? Trust a sculptor alone, in Paris, for a year!” It causes a laugh, of course: “some quantity of barren spectators” would laugh if the girl were caused actually to flout her mother: but really it is a jeer of the author, in a momentary mood of flippant cynicism, not the answer natural to the lovely girl whom he has, otherwise delineated so well. Such blemishes are, however, only specks on the marble, made the more visible by the surrounding whiteness.
In John Mason's embodiment of Dr. Seelig the observer was aware of a man who is presented to contemplation not as acting but as living—which is the perfection of an actor's art. Dr. Seelig is past middle age, and his experience of life has been ample. He knows mankind and he is fully acquainted with the ways of the world: he has been superbly educated: he has the wonderful experience of human nature which comes to a great surgeon, and which only a great character can possess without sinking into cynicism and disgust. Mr. Mason completely identified himself with this character, and there was, in his demeanor and speech, the noble dignity of inherent virtue, the solidity and poise that only long experience of life can bestow, the restful calm of conscious power, the readiness to meet every exigency of circumstance, the suggested capacity to endure, the wide, multi-colored background of what a man has passed through and learned and been. The personality was rich, calm, sympathetic, not demonstrative, but such as gains respect without effort, obtains obedience without severity, and prompts reliance without question. The reposeful manner of a physician who has been long in practice was wonderfully well assumed and consistently maintained, and with that manner was deftly blended the ease of an accomplished man of the world. The natural, seemingly involuntary modifications of bearing toward different persons,—toward the beloved wife, the petted daughter, the young artist, the elderly Judge Hoover (who loathes Jews, though a little inclined to make an exception in the case of the Doctor), and the unhappy Clayton, both as friend and patient,—were made with a perfect sense of fitness and with indescribable propriety and grace. The level speaking was diversified by fine inflections of tone, sometimes whimsical, sometimes playful, sometimes mildly satiric, always correct and appropriate, while in what may be called impassioned moments, when injustice and vice are to be rebuked and virtue is to be defended, the actor's vocalism rose with his emotion and became touchingly impressive. In Mr. Mason's embodiment of Dr. Seelig,—because all the attributes of the character were comprehended and made concentric, and because the free and fine expression of that character was made inevitable,—the audience saw a perfect performance. Also it saw a brilliant and delightful example of a style of acting that was existent in a former period, when yet the traditions of comedy survived which had been handed down by such actors as Henry Placide, James E. Murdoch, James W. Wallack, John Gilbert, and William Warren. That was the period in which John Mason's professional life began; while his style in his own,—as that of every artist becomes, when fully developed,—he showed, distinctly and unmistakably, the fine influence of those old traditions. He gained great success, and he made a mark which will long endure.
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