THE WIVES.

“Jane Cowl,” said Belasco, “had been with me for several years, understudying many parts in different plays, acting ‘bits,’ and working hard. I felt that she had earned her chance, and I gave it to her in ‘Matrimony.’ Her performance was splendid and she has been successful ever since.”

“The Lily” is a play in four acts, adapted by Belasco from a French original, “Le Lys,” by MM. Pierre Wolff and Gaston Leroux. It was produced for the first time, December 6, 1909, at the Belasco Theatre, Washington, and was first acted in New York, at the Stuyvesant, December 23. The story of this play is one of domestic tyranny, possible in France but impossible in America, and one which, accordingly, inspired only tepid interest in the American public,—although the treatment and presentation of it were in a high degree theatrically effective. This is the substance of that story: The Comte de Maigny, a profligate Frenchman who is also a father and a widower, tyrannizes over his children. The eldest of those children, Odette, is “the lily,”—a woman of thirty-five who, in girlhood, has been parted by her father from the man she wished to marry and who has become a mere domestic convenience, dwelling in lonely celibacy as her father’s housekeeper and lavishing her affection upon her sister, who is ten years younger. That sister, Christiane, is destined by their father for the same barren existence, but she meets a strolling artist, who wins her love and with whom, because he cannot wed her,—being already married to an uncongenial woman who will not divorce him,—she enters into an illicit relation. De Maigny has contrived to arrange a loveless marriage between his son and the young daughter of a man of great wealth,—being intent thus to obtain money for libidinous self-indulgence. The relation of Christiane and her artist becoming known to that person, he breaks off the marriage of his daughter with Christiane’s brother, not explicitly stating his reason but with ambiguous givings out which intimate it. The chief scenes of the play then follow. The infuriated licentiate badgers his unfortunate daughter, who, at first, lies to protect herself, until, at last, he elicits from her a rebellious, exultant declaration of the truth. Then, in the fury of his disappointed cupidity, he is about to beat her, when the long-suppressed, meek-seeming but actually passionate Odette, opening her valves under an immense and rising pressure of emotional steam, intervenes, denouncing the conventions of society in general and the iniquities of de Maigny in particular, certifying to the propriety of her sister’s conduct in the wretched circumstances existing, and declaring her purpose to protect that sister in her natural desire for “love and happiness.” Christiane then departs with her lover and the expectation of deferred matrimony, and her disgruntled parent, practically ejected from his home, goes off to Paris, whining that a waiter will probably close his eyes in death,—a pious kindness which the spectator hopes may be performed at an early date.

The play, of course, was devised for the sake of the sudden, blistering outburst by the elderly spinster—which in representation is undeniably effective—and, in the French original, for the sake of emitting some specious special pleading in extenuation and justification of illicit conduct. As to the doctrine which Odette declares in this play and which Christiane and her unhappily married swain exemplify,—the doctrine, namely, that when two persons who love each other are held asunder by cruel chance of social circumstance they are warranted in setting aside convention in order to come together,—its utter fallacy is too obvious for detection. Practical application of it, however, has often provided variously dramatic results: pathetic exposition of some of its possible consequences, to helpless, innocent persons, is made in Collins’ great novel of “No Name.” Belasco, in presenting his modified version of “Le Lys,” sought to evade the ethical issue, but he added one more to his long list of plays perfectly environed and admirably acted. Miss Nance O’Neil, who appeared in it as Odette, has been designated as a “tragic actress” (which she is not) and has been extravagantly extolled. She possesses rough natural ability, animal strength, vocal capacity, some sensibility and considerable power of forceful simulation. Most of her performances have been monotonous: in this one, in which, practically, she had only one scene and in which, furthermore, she had the advice and assistance of a consummate stage manager, she was interesting and impressive,—uttering the verbal explosion

of voluble vehemence addressed to de Maigny with fine abandon, passionate intensity, and powerful effect.—The cast of “The Lily” is appended:

“Just a Wife” was written by Mr. E. Walter and was first acted at the Colonial Theatre, Cleveland, Ohio, January 17, 1910, and at the Belasco Theatre, New York, on the 31st of that month. As a playwright that writer has exhibited a persistent, morbid preoccupation with the subject of illicit sexual relations which suggests the possible utility of vigorous open-air exercise, the cold sitz-bath and potassium bromide. In this play a libertine named John Emerson, who has consorted with a widow named Lathrop until their relation has become a public scandal, by way of “keeping up appearances” marries an impecunious vestal from South Carolina, named Mary Ashby. As he immediately installs Mrs. Emerson in a luxurious rural habitation somewhere on Long Island and practically deserts her, this expedient would hardly seem to be of much social service. However, after neglecting his wife for about six years, Emerson grows weary of his mistress, quarrels with her and runs away from her to visit his wife. The mistress, much incensed, follows him, and a sort of three-cornered debate,—protracted, sophistical, and indelicate,—on the sexual relation is held at Mrs. Emerson’s country residence, in the course of which that lady manifests a sweet temper and admirable self-control. After it is over, Mrs. Lathrop (to whom it has been intimated that in men the ruling passion is sex impulse and that she is growing somewhat elderly) goes away in a peaceful and much chastened mood. Mrs. Emerson then snubs her neglectful spouse and signifies that he may not hope to possess her as his wife until he has recognized the supremacy of Love, which it is implied he will soon do. It is all very edifying, of course,—especially as the author of it, apparently, knows as much about love, as distinguished from carnal concupiscence, as a tomcat on the tiles does. This was the cast:

A CHANGE OF NAMES.—THE FARCE OF “THE CONCERT.”

Belasco’s management of the theatre in West Forty-second Street which was the first to bear his name extended over a period of twelve years. In the spring of 1910 he began to feel dubious as to whether he would,—perhaps as to whether he could,—renew his lease at the end of its term, two years later. He therefore determined to restore to that house its former name of the Republic, and thereafter to designate the Stuyvesant as the Belasco Theatre. That change, accordingly, was made, in July, 1910; and on August 22 the Republic Theatre was reopened under that name with a performance of a play made by Mr. Winchell Smith, on the basis of a clever and amusing story by Mr. George Randolph Chester, called “Bobby Burnitt”: that play was produced by Cohan & Harris. On October 10 the second Belasco Theatre was opened with a performance of “The Concert,” adapted by Leo Ditrichstein from a German original by Herman Bahr: it had been acted, for the first time, at the Nixon Theatre, Pittsburgh, September 19.

The theme of “The Concert” is an old one,—Woman’s infatuation relative to the Musical Performer. The intention is to satirize that foolish state of the female mind, and also to expose and ridicule a despicable combination of febrile sensuousness, splenetic temper, and insensate egotism, often, and unjustly, designated “the artistic temperament.” That intention is accomplished in a manner certainly ludicrous, though heavy-handed and cynical: it is characteristic that the Stage of the Present, reflecting some aspects of life in the Present, while from time to time it exhibits much that is clever, brilliant, hard, satirical, exhibits little—whether of writing or of acting—that is amiable, playful, engaging, pleasant, and therefore potent to make the spirit gentle and happy. The chief postulate of “The Concert” and the manipulation of it are strongly reminiscent of “Delicate Ground” and “Divorçons.” The musician, Gabor Arany, having lied to his wife as to a purposed excursion from his home, which he says is undertaken for the purpose of “giving a concert,”—goes to a secluded retreat in the mountains of New York with one of his pupils, the wife of another man, intending an amorous intrigue with her. The other man, in

company with the wife of the musician, pursues those fugitives, and, when the two couples are confronted, the insulted husband, after the manner of Citizen Sangfroid, blandly proposes that the complication of domestic affairs shall be solved and adjusted by an exchange of wives, sequent on the attainment of divorce. The silly woman who admires the musician is rescued by exposure of his selfishness and her folly, the musician is baffled and rebuked, and domestic peace is supposed to be restored.

Mr. Ditrichstein called his adaptation of Mr. Bahr’s play “a comedy.” The terms applied to plays, by way of classification, are somewhat indefinite at the best, but as to Comedy,—the general understanding is that it should be a dramatic composition which, in delineating character and manners, while piquant by virtue of delicate exaggeration and amusing by virtue of clever equivoke, moves within the limits of reason and probability. “The Concert” begins with farce and proceeds with violent absurdity. The persons implicated would not, in real life, act in a manner even approximate to that which is prescribed for them. The note that is struck, considered at its best, is that of burlesque. The play, in as far as it is a play,—the clash of character and the exposition of conduct,—begins in the Second Act. Sixteen persons are implicated in the action of the piece, but only seven of them are seen after the first curtain has fallen. The tone of the Second and Third acts, except at moments, is radically and extravagantly farcical. But toward the end an opportunity occurs, and it is duly improved,—perhaps in jest, perhaps in earnest,—of saying the magnanimous words that are usually attributed to philosophical lovers: “If you love a woman, and that woman happens to be your wife, you wish her to be happy, and if you discover that she thinks she can be happier with another man than she is with you your wish is that she should join him, if she can be sure of her feelings”; and so forth. At the close of this piece the wife of the genius affectionately assures him that she has all along understood his conduct, but is willing to pardon him if he will be faithful in future, and, by way of emphasizing her docile, charitable, and eminently tolerant spirit, she produces bottles of hair-dye and proceeds to rejuvenate his fading locks.—The scenic setting, the stage management, and the acting by which this farce were commended to public approbation were so appropriate, so resourceful and deft, so careful, zealous, spirited, and effective, that it gained immense popularity. This was the original cast of “The Concert”:

LOSS AND GRIEF.—“NO MAN BEARS SORROW BETTER.”

“Thanks for your kind sympathy, dear William Winter,” Belasco wrote to me, in July, 1911. “I have thought of you so often in my grief. I should be glad to come over to your island to see you, but I am not able.... I am trying to be resigned; and, though the pain is great, I must be. Nothing can ever be the same again, and it is all very, very hard. Yet I must go on, and I shall. There is nothing but our work....” He had, within less than two months of each other, lost his father and his dearly loved daughter Augusta,—Mrs. William Elliott. His father was stricken on April 6th, and he died on the 11th, at his home, No. 1704 Sutter Street, San Francisco. Belasco, however, was at that time in almost distracted attendance on his daughter, at Asheville, North Carolina, and could not leave her when he received news of his father’s illness; nor was he able to attend his funeral. Humphrey Abraham Belasco was buried beside his wife in Hills of Eternity Cemetery, San Mateo, California, April 12th.

The death of Belasco’s daughter,—“my little guardian,” as he has called her in talk with me,—was a bereavement more than usually bitter. She was a creature of extraordinary goodness and beauty, of exquisite sensibility, gentle and lovely in nature, childlike in disposition, the pitiful friend of all sorrowing and suffering persons, the special comrade and comfort of her father, and her death came within less than five months after her marriage—to the actor William Elliott. When Belasco was informed of his child’s attachment to Elliott (whom she had met when he was a member of the company supporting Miss Starr in “The Rose of the Rancho”) he, at first, opposed their marriage,—“Not,” as he has told me, “that I had any personal objection to ‘Billy,’—who is a dear fellow

and whom I always liked,—but because I had hoped she would choose a husband out of the theatrical profession, one who could live all his life with her,—which the inevitable travelling of theatrical life makes practically impossible. But when I saw that my little girl was pining for him, that a great love had come to her and that she could never be happy without him, I brushed all my own hopes and wishes away and urged their immediate marriage. I thought to keep her always near her mother and me, so as a wedding gift I had an apartment fitted up for them in the Marie Antoinette, where we live, and we were all going to be together and happy: but it was not to be.”

William Elliott and Augusta Belasco were wedded, at the home of her parents, January 27, 1911: as they were about to start on their honeymoon, the bride, while bidding good-bye to her father, was stricken with sudden illness and collapsed. At first it was believed that her illness was merely a transient disorder, which would soon yield to treatment. For a few weeks her condition fluctuated, but seemed, on the whole, to improve: then, at the end of March, she began rapidly to decline, and Belasco was informed that she was afflicted with an acute form of tuberculosis, which must soon cause her death. That was an issue which her father could not and would not accept without a bitter struggle. “I had seen so many desperate cases of consumption saved, for years,” he said, “that I could not believe my little girl, who had always seemed so strong and well, who was so young and lovely, on the threshold of her new life, with everything to live for, must die. I gathered her up, overnight, and fled with her to Asheville.” There Belasco leased Witchwood, a fine residence,—the home of the late Colonel Charles W. Woolsey,—and installed his daughter in it. Her fatal malady could not, however, be stayed, though every expedient was tried that love could prompt or wealth employ, and she grew rapidly worse. On May 1, in a forlorn hope that the climate of Colorado might prove beneficial, Belasco chartered a special train and removed her to Broadmoor, a beautiful place in the environs of Colorado Springs,—where, on the afternoon of June 5, after great suffering borne with patience and fortitude, she died. Her body was taken to New York; funeral services were held there, at the Temple Ahawath Chesed, on June 9, and late on that day she was laid in her grave in Ahawath Chesed Cemetery, at Linden Hills, Long Island.

Belasco’s elder daughter, Reina Victoria, was married to the theatrical manager Morris Gest, of New York, at Sherry’s, in that city, on June 1, 1909.

A DRAMA OF SPIRITUALISM.

(Fragmentary Notes, Not Revised.)

setting, and it is a significant testimony at once to Belasco’s managerial perspicacity and to his skill as a writer and a stage manager that his play of “Grimm” achieved unusual success....

In the days of my youth, when I was a student at the Dane Law School of Harvard College, it was my good fortune to gain the friendship of the erudite lawyer Theophilus Parsons, who was a preceptor there, and to listen to much interesting and instructive discourse by him on many subjects—among them, the Swedenborgian faith, to which he was an absolute and happy adherent. “Death,” he remarked, in expounding to me the tenets of that faith, “is no more than walking from one room into another.” The same thought (which has, of course, been cherished by many persons) seems to have been predominant in the mind of Belasco when he was writing “The Return of Peter Grimm.”...

BELASCO’S “THE RETURN OF PETER GRIMM.”

In drama, whether prose or verse, the device has frequently been used of bringing back to our material world the spirits of persons who have passed out of mortal life, and causing them to pervade the scenes with which they were associated in the body. That device is employed in Belasco’s “The Return of Peter Grimm,” in which David Warfield made his first and, thus far, his only approach to the realm of Imagination [since this passage was written Warfield has appeared, 1915-’16, as Van Der Decken, in a drama by Belasco on the subject of “The Flying Dutchman.”—J. W.]. Peter Grimm, a prosperous, self-willed, kind, good old man, who in the government of his family and the arrangement of his worldly affairs has made serious errors,—the most deplorable of them being the separation of his ward, a docile, affectionate girl named Kathrien, from a youth who loves her and whom she loves, and her betrothal to his nephew, Frederik Grimm, a hypocrite and a scoundrel,—is suddenly stricken dead, of heart disease, and, after a little time his spirit returns to the place which was his earthly home, intent on retrieving those errors, discomfiting the rascal by whom he has been deceived, and making his foster-child happy. Warfield, personating Peter Grimm, first presented him as a mortal, afterward as a spirit. The character,—honest, sturdy, opinionated, worldly-wise, somewhat rough and imperious, yet intrinsically genial,—was correctly assumed and expressed, but the actor’s denotement of spiritual being was neither

imaginative nor sympathetic, and it did not create even the slightest illusion.

The purpose of the dramatist seems to have been to intimate a notion, comfortable to the general mind, that spiritual existence of beings once mundane is merely a continuation of their everyday condition in this world. In the absence of knowledge on the subject that assumption is as tenable as any other. Persons who are commonplace in what we call Time may reasonably be held to remain commonplace in what we call Eternity. No one knows. The Book of Destiny has not been opened. But the rationality of assumption which makes of “that undiscovered country” only a prolongation of this earthly scene at once dissipates, especially for dramatic purpose and effect, all atmosphere of spirituality, all glamour of the ideal, which happily might be superinduced by imaginative treatment of a mysterious subject. However prosaic the quality of a disembodied spirit may remain, it seems reasonable to assume that there must be some essential difference between the material body and the spiritual body, and the person undertaking to represent a spirit could succeed, if at all, in denoting that difference not by stage tricks but only by mental power and affluence of emotion, by weird strangeness of individuality, by exquisite sensibility, by magnetism, and by the artistic skill to liberate those forces and so elicit and control the sympathy of his auditors. Warfield’s personation of Grimm gave not the faintest intimation of spirituality, and there was not one gleam of imagination in his presentment of the spirit.

Few actors have ever succeeded in conveying to an audience any really convincing, absorbing sense of spiritual presence. The dramatist of “Peter Grimm” probably did not intend that any such sense should be conveyed. Warfield, apparently, did not attempt to convey it, and if, as appears true, it was the actor’s purpose to present Grimm as essentially the same person after death as before, then his personation, undoubtedly, was the rounded result of a definite plan, and was, as such, entirely successful.

The part of Peter Grimm has been described as one of great difficulty. It is, on the contrary, very easy. Its requirement is sincerity. Grimm, as a spirit, clothed as in mortal life, must move among persons who were his friends, unseen by them, unheard when he speaks, eagerly desirous to influence their conduct, but practically helpless to do so, except at moments when accession of extreme sensibility on the part of one or another of them provides occasion, until, at last, force of circumstances and the impelling guidance of the dead man achieve his purpose. Acted in the spirit precisely as in the flesh, as a good old man, the part makes no draft upon the resources of mind or feeling or upon the faculty of expression that any good actor might not easily satisfy. The situations wherein Grimm, ostensibly, is ignored by the other persons on the stage in fact revolve around him and are dependent on his presence; he engages the sympathy of the audience practically to the exclusion of all the other characters, and the almost universal interest—whether assenting or dissenting—in anything relating directly to the theme of spiritual survival after death, together with the novelty of a ghost displayed in the environment of every-day, centres observation on Grimm and his personator.

Warfield’s performance, notwithstanding the prosaic atmosphere of it, was interesting, and his excursion into the realm of the occult was, at least, calculated to stimulate thought on a serious subject. In this, as in many other matters, the degree of approval gained by the play and its performance will ever be variably accordant to taste. To some persons, no doubt, the ideal of a newly dead child being borne away on his spirit-uncle’s shoulders, singing about “Uncle Rat has gone to town to buy his niece a wedding gown,” and musically inquiring, “What shall the wedding breakfast be? Hard-boiled eggs and a cup of tea?” will be delightful. Others, equally without doubt, will fail to find it impressive.

“The Return of Peter Grimm” was acted for the first time, January 2, 1911, at the Hollis Street Theatre, Boston; and for the first time in New York, October 18, the same year, at the present Belasco Theatre. This was the original cast of that play:

CONCERNING THE EUNUCHS OF CRITICASTERISM.

answerers of books, who take upon themselves to watch the republic of letters and distribute reputation by the sheet: they somewhat resemble the eunuchs in a seraglio, who are incapable of giving pleasure themselves and hinder those that would.” Such emasculated perverters of the function of criticism,—scribblers bloated with envy engendered by conscious intellectual impotence,—flourish more or less in all periods; they are peculiarly prosperous in this one, and their envious malice is employed with at least as much industry in the “answering” and defaming of dramatists and actors as in the “answering” of books. Before Belasco had produced “Peter Grimm” in New York and almost in the hour of his personal bereavement, a representative specimen of that wretched brotherhood, itching to detract from the achievement of an author whom he could not hope ever to approach, published the false statement that Belasco was only part author of that play. Among the papers loaned to me by Belasco is a copy of the following letter, which I print here because the misrepresentation alluded to has been several times iterated and the refutation of it should be placed on record:

(Belasco to a Quidnunc.)

“THE WOMAN”—AND MR. ABRAHAM GOLDKNOPF.

Belasco devoted most of the summer of 1911 to work on William C. De Mille’s play entitled “The Woman,” which he produced for the first time in New York, September 19, that year, at the Republic Theatre: a trial production of that play had been effected, April 17 preceding, at the New National Theatre, Washington, D. C. It is a highly effective melodrama, of the “contemporaneous interest” type, and it implicates twelve persons, nine of whom are germane to its action. It is neat in construction; it skilfully utilizes the invaluable element of suspense, and interest in its progress is cumulative to the dramatic climax. This, in brief, is its story:

A corrupt politician, the Honorable “Jim” Blake, a member of the national legislature, is scheming to get a specious bill enacted into law, whereby over-capitalization of railroad corporations and wholesale swindling of the public can be perpetrated in the guise of legality. Another member of the legislature, the Honorable Matthew Standish, perceptive of the latent iniquity of that measure and of the predatory intent of Blake, has so vigorously opposed the enactment of it and so bitterly assailed its sponsors that Blake and his associates fear to force its passage. They determine, therefore, to divert attention of the people from the opposition of Standish to their corrupt measure and purposed malfeasance by blasting his personal reputation with social scandal. In their effort to do this they ascertain that several years previous the Honorable Matthew, inflexible before Plutus, has succumbed before Venus—has, in short, registered at an hotel with a woman not his wife. The name of that woman is not known to their informant, and it is the despicable task of Blake and his adherents to ascertain her identity in order to ruin his public career by convicting him of private misconduct. That task they attempt to perform by endeavoring to extort from a young woman, Wanda Kelly, the operator in charge of a telephone exchange desk, a telephone number in New York which Standish, in Washington, has called for, immediately after being apprised of the dastardly purpose of Blake and his associates. The identity of the concealed and errant she as Blake’s daughter, the wife of one of his chief supporters, the Honorable Mark Robertson, is deftly discovered to the audience by the device of a second telephone message to her, by her husband, immediately after the close of the warning of impending disclosure by Standish. The sympathetic Miss Kelly resolutely persists in her protective secrecy as to The Woman at the other end of the wire, and the climax is then attained when Standish refuses to be driven from his public duty by the threatened assault on his private character and when Mrs. Robertson, having in an agony of dread listened to the unsuccessful coaxing and badgering of Miss Kelly, with sudden and desperate courage terminates the anxious situation by avowal of her delinquency, thus providing her corrupt parent and spouse with considerably more information than they desire to publish as to the amatory weaknesses of the obdurate Standish. This was the cast with which that play was first presented in New York:

The exceptional success of Belasco’s production of “The Woman” prompted a genius thitherto unknown to fame, a certain inspired and amiable barber of New York, Mr. Abraham Goldknopf, to assert that it was stolen from a sublime drama indited by himself in the intervals of tonsorial exercise and entitled “Tainted Philanthropy.” Belasco, in defending himself against this preposterous claim, resorted to a unique and costly though conclusive expedient. But before describing the trial of Mr. Goldknopf’s allegations, it is convenient here to examine with some particularity the general subject of

BELASCO AND PLAGIARISM.

“FOLLY LOVES THE MARTYRDOM OF FAME.”

No person rises to eminence without exciting antagonism and incurring detraction. Malice is quick to perceive any possibility, however trivial, of tarnishing a distinguished character, and hatred is ingenious in devising specious means of disparagement. The slightest appearance of weakness in any talented person favorably conspicuous in the public eye is eagerly seized as a ground of condemnation. Every close student of biography must have observed, relative to almost every eminent person commemorated, that there is always some one particular form of reproach which, by diligent, persistent iteration, is made to adhere to that person’s name, so that at last the one is seldom mentioned without association with the other. Eminent actors of the Past have been particularly singled out for defamation in this way. Barton Booth, for example, scholar and poet as well as actor, is stigmatized, on no competent authority, as a gross voluptuary; Garrick, because he was prudent, especially while he was poor, is styled an avaricious niggard; Kemble, an opium sot; Edwin Booth, a drunkard, which is a specially contemptible slander. Henry Irving was one of the greatest of actors, but, because he happened to be a person of many peculiarities, perfectly natural to him, we are forever hearing that he had “affected mannerisms”—which is distinctly untrue. Every department of biography furnishes examples of this form of aspersion. In the case of Belasco the customary disparagement takes the shape of an iterated charge of Plagiarism. In this work an examination of that charge is essential.

THE “TRICK” AS APPLIED.