A PORTRAIT OF GEORGE BRONSON-HOWARD, BY FRANK C. BANGS, NEW YORK

UNTIL a few years ago, playwrights were permitted to make just two kinds of characters out of crooks. Either they must be tragic villains or comedy villains, and these two possible species could have just two possible fates: either they must die or they must reform.

      Recently, however, we have had a number of plays in which crooks were neither villains nor comedians, in which they neither died nor reformed. And these plays have been popular, so popular that everybody nowadays is not only writing a play but, withal, a crook play.

      Yet, only a few years ago, when Eugene W. Presbrey was about to dramatize "Raffles," he was assured that he could not make the hero of a popular play out of a crook. Apparently Mr. Presbrey did not try. His "Raffles" was not a hero: he was a light comedian not un-akin to a polite villain. The law, disguised as Virtue, triumphed; and Raffles, disgraced and detected, is last seen flying from the police, his days of honor and luxury gone forever. But this piece went a step farther than the old crook plays: Presbrey was not forced to kill Raffles as Stevenson and Henley killed Brodie, of whom Raffles was a direct descendant. But, for Raffles' disregard of the laws, it was necessary to give his story an unhappy ending.

      Why is all this changed to-day? It is a curious study in the workings of the public conscience, as fashions in morals generally are. The theatre is the heart of the body politic. In its popular plays you will find all that is good and bad in a nation's ethics and metaphysics. To explain the vogue of criminals as heroes is to explain the struggles of reformers for cleaner government. A queer result of reformation, you say? — what the learned writers call an oxymoron, the popular ones, a paradox.

      To explain: Except in the case of murderers, plays about lawbreakers, if written with any sort of skill, have been successful since the beginning of theatrical time — for the obvious reason that a play about a crook will be a play of action and excitement. Men hiding in the dark, police breaking down doors, convicts escaping from prison, detectives in peril of their lives — all situations not dependent upon any keen understanding of ethics, philosophy, wit, or drama, but communicated directly to the eye of the most ignorant spectator in the gallery — these are inevitable in the crook play. And when two men are at death-grips, the dialogue need not explain that one means to kill the other. A man climbing a prison-wall silently reveals to the veriest dullard that he is attempting to escape. Thereafter, in the darkness of a scene-change this same dullard is able to visualize a man in a tell-tale prison-suit scudding across meadows and looking for refuge, the police in hot pursuit. If the next scene shows a river, the dullard realizes that the river must be swum by the crook if he would make good his escape. The crook dives; again the scene closes. It requires no remarkable intelligence to picture an exhausted man breasting adverse tides in a turbulent stream. Did he drown or escape? The next scene will show.

      There you have the first reason for the popularity of the crook play. No knowledge of the nuances of wit and drama are required from its patron; he is carried from one event to another by curiosity and excitement. Passing from the illiterate to the average man, we find he loves to think of himself as the possessor of enormous reserve force. He dreams of the day when this force will be called into action. Then he sees himself swinging into adversaries, enduring desperate hardship, conquering manifold combinations of circumstances. The theatre-goer of some years back, belonging to a hierarchy of readers, could see himself victorious in knightly tournaments, in historical pageants. The theatre-goer of to-day, having no literary proclivities, and therefore no subconscious knowledge of the possibility of metempsychosis or reincarnation, demands that his future exciting career find possibilities in the lives of men of to-day.

      Hence, "The Prisoner of Zenda" opened up endless fields for the popular novelist. In Rudolf Rassendyl, the ordinary Englishman, — Everyman, — seeing himself, said: "Why I, John Smith, might save up money for a Continental trip, meet a Princess, and have just the same kind of adventures. Why not? These adventures in this book happened to-day to a fellow just like me."

      Anthony Hope, as a whimsical artist, wrote what pleased him of this country of his invention; then, indifferent to popular clamor, he turned to political novels. But those writers to whom writing is as cheese-making or egg-selling seized eagerly upon Ruritania, called it Graustark or Lugaria, and a whole school of popular novels began to pour from the press, and are still pouring. McCutcheon, McGrath, Brebner, John Reed Scott, any of those fourth-raters who could take another man's leavings and pretend they were a first-rate dinner, — without having one idea of their own, have become rich men. But despite the number of "Zenda" novels published, they were not enough to satisfy the public notion that every nicely-behaved little clerk, book-keeper, or haberdashery salesman is a Bayard in embryo; so would-be popular writers applied themselves, sedulously to the man of original ideas a second time.

      "Where shall we go besides 'Zenda,' where find a set of conditions that will make of to-day's Everyman a hero to-morrow?"

      Hope tossed them that small volume, "A Man of Mark." Richard Harding Davis held it open with one hand and wrote "Soldiers of Fortune" with the other. Followed an avalanche of words concerning the broad-shouldered, intelligent Young American who leaves home wrongfully accused, or goes South as a clerk or an engineer, destined to end as Dictator of the Republic of Parazil or Ecuaguay. So common did such marked cards of destiny become that O. Henry came into notice through exposing Destiny's brace game, and after he had turned broadsides of exposure upon it, only the hardiest and most brazen-faced authors dared write such novels — just as the good-natured ridicule of such books as Frank Richardson's "Secret Kingdom" discouraged and put an end to most of the English imitators of "Zenda."

      I do not doubt that the subject which will take the place of these now moribund schools will be the subject of the crook, just as that subject is now engrossing the popular dramatists of to-day. For it provides just the same field of operations with the ordinary citizen as hero as did the imaginary "kingdom" and the "banana-republic."
 

II

      It is seldom that the pioneer reaps the big rewards. Anthony Hope was responsible for another fictional type besides these two: "The Dolly Dialogue" school — which he also abandoned after smiling through two thin books. An artist is ever in search of new fields. He can do nothing by formula or by rote. He himself must be interested in the problem he sets forth to solve. Delicious adventures must be the artist's before they can become the reader's, else he abandons his work unfinished — or needing cash, concludes it in an agony of disgust. Unless he received it from other men's dramatizations of his novels, Anthony Hope possesses no such fortune as does his crudest imitator, the author of "Graustark," "Beverly of Graustark," "Truxton King" (of Graustark), ad infinitum et ad nauseam or even as does the author of "Arms and the Woman," "The Puppet Crown," "The Goose-Girl," and others, slightly superior to his brother-copyist's.

      So much for conscious imitation. Even when we come to unconscious imitation, the result is the same. Anthony Hope's fortune, undoubtedly, was greater than R. L. Stevenson's. And R. L. Stevenson was, indirectly, responsible for "Zenda." For, although Prince Otto was far from being either spiritually or physically the progenitor of The Red Elphberg, he was the first of the princes of mythical kingdoms — unless we count such burlesques as Thackeray's "Rose and King" and Andrew Lang's sequel, "Ricardo of Pantouflia."

      Prince Otto, however, had no brisk young Englishman showing him how to conduct his kingdom and foil plotters — no daughter with which to reward some Hawthorne of the U. S. A. And so "Prince Otto," despite his famous chronicler, had no great popularity. Nor did "Deacon Brodie," the first near relative of the crook-play of to-day. Written over thirty years ago, "Deacon Brodie," by Robert Louis Stevenson and William Ernest Henley, — two of the leading literary lights of their time, was frowned off the boards by the serious-minded middle-class critics and play-goers of that generation. Yet, as such plays are understood to-day, in which psychological sympathy is excited for the criminal, and the upholders of the law are derided, it was the first of its kind. I am perfectly aware of "The Ticket-of-Leave-Man," of "Jim, the Penman," of others of this variety, many of which were prior to the Stevenson play. But they were mere conventional, creaky melodramas.

      In them, there was little pretense at character-drawing and that little, bad-witness Hawkshaw, the Detective, and Captain Bedford. If merely to write plays with thieves for characters were to write "crook" plays, then we must go back to "Oliver Twist" and call Dickens the father of the "crook play." But Dickens wrote of degraded out-casts, not "crooks" in the terms of to-day. Fagin, Bill Sikes, Claypole and the remainder of that unsavory crew were to crime what the lunch-room cashier is to high finance. Yet it had not been long before "Oliver's" day that the great swindler John Law had blown up the South Sea Bubble while living in a palace, the nobility of three kingdoms his bosom-friends or acquaintances.

      But Dickens was right. "Oliver Twist" was a needful protest. There had been too much light and harmful literature about the Claude Duvals, Dick Turpins, and Jack Sheppards — Macheaths of "Beggars' Operas," — creatures of paint and powder, lace and ruffles, stock-figures in little relation to life. The highwaymen of that incorrigible teller of modern fairy-tales, Harrison Ainsworth, at this time, were heroes not because they were heroes, but because they were highwaymen — an unhealthy viewpoint. Nor was Ainsworth familiar in the least with their habits or habitat. He was only a mistakenly romantic man writing "twopence colored" street legends with neither instinctive nor actual knowledge. Doubtless, had he met one of his own highwaymen he would have run like a rabbit; whereas Stevenson would have gracefully yielded watch and money as the price of an instructive and pleasant evening in a romantic rascal's company. Readers of Stevensonia will remember that in his early life "Velvet-Jacket," as crooks called him, was a welcome visitor among them.

      To return to Dickens! He too was as familiar with criminals as Stevenson, but in a different way. As a stenographic reporter for a newspaper, he spent much time at the Old Bailey; previously, he had personal acquaintance with the ways of criminal lawyers. To make crime as unattractive as possible (which he plainly asserts he endeavored to do), he recalled from life only such incidents and characters as would be helpful to his purpose. Save where he needed characters to express his good-humor (making these comedians boys who might be reformed, later), he chose journeyman criminals of the lowest description — the brutal Sykes, half bull-dog; the cowardly Fagin, half-hyena. In the whole book, there is not one offense which might not have been committed by a veritable amateur: the picking of Brownlow's pocket for a handkerchief, the kidnaping of a helpless child, the clumsy burglary at Chertsey — this last where Sykes and Toby risk the gallows by putting their lives and liberty into the hands of an unwilling child. Skillful burglars like Deacon Brodie could get into houses with picklocks and center-bits; why must Sykes, a professional house-worker, "boost" Oliver through the scullery-window to unfasten a door? Yet this is the highest flight to which the criminals in "Oliver Twist" aspire. By which it may be seen they are no relatives of Jimmy Valentine or of Mary Turner, our favorite crooks of to-day, whom nothing daunts — neither time-lock safes nor the majesty of the law.

      Abating nothing of my reverence for Dickens' genius, nevertheless I think "Oliver Twist" is qualified better as a study of low life than as a study of "crooks." For, even though we dismiss great criminals of the type of John Law (beside whom Wallingford was a clumsy tyro), there were, long before Dickens' time, "crooks" who frequented Covent Garden and Drury Lane and made friends with the aristocracy of White's and of the coffee-houses. There is nothing to suggest Nancy Sykes in her actual prototype Jenny Diver, executed in 1741 — than whom no greater artist in thieving could have existed in romance; Jenny was to be seen at all fashionable playhouses in the season, attired like a ladyship. Witness the eighteenth century playwright Gay regarding her: "My pretty Jenny Diver, prim and demure as ever. No prude, though ever so high bred, hath a more sanctified look with a more mischievious heart — thou dear, artful hypocrite!" What of Thomas Dun, expert in false fingers that concealed the pocket-picking activities of his real digits? Dun was a comrade of Miss Diver. What of Teresia Constantia Phillips and Mary Anne Clarke? — blackmailers extraordinary, and addicted to other nefarious pursuits. They flourished before the writing of "Oliver Twist," and Mrs. Clarke was alive when it was published.

      But thieves of brains and cunning have been with us always; nor did they expiate their crimes always, generally possessing too nimble a wit to die otherwise than natural deaths. The reign of Elizabeth and immediately thereafter held as many strange mock-gallant figures as there were writers to record them. Any student of the drama of those "spacious times" has but to examine that precious folio, Middleton's "Roaring Girl," to read of the cunning exploits of Mary Frith, alias Moll Cutpurse, whose life in prose was detailed by John Day, and who was mentioned by John Taylor, the "Water Poet," Brome in the "Court Beggar," Thomas Shipman in "Carolina," Shakespeare in "Twelfth Night" (Act I, Scene III), and by the author of the "Feigned Astrologer." Moll's "led-captain" (protector, friend, souteneur, as you will) was Captain Hind, the highwayman, who lived like any duke. Another accomplice, the celebrated Crowder, passed along the highway in a Bishop's vestments and with six servants clerically attired; another "Hack and Blade of the Road" who worked with Moll was Richard Hannam, "the Great Robber of England," who had all the outward signs of a member of the nobility.

      I mention so many of these land pirates merely to prove that before Dickens' time there existed an upper class of social rebels, similar to the sort dramatists are glorifying to-day. These, as now, lived upon the fat of the land; and squalor, dirt, and illiteracy were never sterling-silver marks by which you might identify them. For they were the leaders, the people of brains and vast expedients, who had command over minor folk — "horners," "bulks," "whipsters," "culleys" and "rubs" — just as to-day the champion wire-tapper has his "stalls," the gambler his "steerers," the gang-leader his "dips," "moll-buzzers," and "stand-up women," or another kind of organizer his "creepers," and "panel-girls." But the high-class crook to-day, as ever, walks the lighted streets unruffled, patronizes the best restaurants and theatres, often wears evening clothes, and, if not book-educated, has picked up sufficient knowledge to be interested in those things dear to the man of ordinary culture. Such a man is Edward Guerin, an American crook now resident in London, whose life reads like a picaresque novel. Recently wanted by France for his escape from deportation, he invoked international law so correctly that England dared not surrender him, despite the fact that he had been sent by France for highway robbery to a place contiguous, and very similar, to the Dreyfus Devil's Island, and had escaped to the South American coast. After getting the better of a tribe of aborigines, he boldly made his way back to civilization and defied the law of France to touch him. He may be seen, seen, any day, in or near that London inn called The Three Nuns.

      Such men as this bear no relation to the stupid thieves of "Oliver Twist," children in crime, for whom the police have only to reach blindly to catch, to guess wildly to convict — so silly are their crimes, so senseless their lack of protective ability. Nor does the Guerin type of man need the gaudy trappings of the Harrison Ainsworth type of writer to be interesting to the public; for unusual characters require only a touch of exaggeration to become unreal. Perhaps Fielding in "Jonathan Wild" would have been nearer to depicting such fellows had he not been intent upon creating a masterpiece of perfect irony and ferocious satire rather than a human document. Certainly this first of the great English novelists had sympathy with those social injustices that often drove honest men to thievery in preference to starvation; and it was Fielding's very sympathy that yielded him the information necessary to break up a gang of notorious cutthroats, the information being furnished by other and more seemly outlaws out of pure good-will to him as a kindly magistrate.

      But it was not until Stevenson came to the fore that we were presented with real thieves in literature; professional lawbreakers as human beings, neither fiends in human form nor prancing heroes pranked out with sentimental virtues. Hitherto, the Robin Hood legend had dominated literature, where it was not prejudiced already by that severe judicial outlook which, confounding law with justice, necessarily mistakes offenses against law for offenses against morality. As a matter of fact there have been many troublous times in history when justice was on one side, law on the other, when outlaws robbed less than the king's collectors of taxes. The line between brigandage and war, rebellion and revolution, is often hard to define, and political morality is often a question of geography and of chronology. In English history, Francis Drake is a patriot and John Paul Jones a pirate: the Spanish version calls Drake a pirate; in the American one Jones is a patriot. There have been many respectable folk who scared their babies by painting both gentlemen in the devil's colors. It is upon such nuances of morality that the "crook" drama has been built.
 

III

      "Deacon Brodie" was a compromise between the old drama and the new. It was built along safe and conventional melodramatic lines. But it differed from the Ainsworth or Tom Taylor brand by having human beings for characters instead of blank-verse puppets and comic-opera comedians.

      Stevenson gave us his first study of an intellectual outlaw in that little masterpiece, "A Lodging for the Night," which first presented R. L. Stevenson as a great fictionist and François Villon as a great character to the English reading public. Here Stevenson put unanswerable arguments into the mouth of the historical rogue, but the character was unlovely in all save dialectics. My surprise is that Stevenson could have reconciled, with one so mean, Villon's undoubted achievements as one of the greatest of the earlier poets, undoubtedly the father of the French school. However, Stevenson did, and backed up his paradox with an essay. "Deacon Brodie" came soon after.

      The play, unfortunately, has had almost as small a circulation in book-form as its run was short. Arthur Wing Pinero, in the cocksureness of his early dramatic successes, explained just why it had failed. Doubtless Pinero is ashamed of his remarks in these, his more enlightened days, but, practically, he blamed "Deacon Brodie" for dramatic faults which were literary virtues, faults which, since, Pinero has endeavored to put into his own plays. In the '80's Pinero was merely a literary concoction of H. J. Byron and Tom Robertson: when he was not a sentimental comedian, he was a comic sentimentalist. His plays were ultraconventional, and, if produced to-day, would ruin his carefully built reputation for intellectuality.

      Briefly, Pinero complained that the "heroic" characters of "Deacon Brodie" had villainous traits, that the villains had "heroic" ones, that the black characters were not black enough, the white ones not sufficiently white. In other words, Stevenson failed as a dramatist because he employed human figures instead of the theatrical puppets Pinero was using at this time — a view shared by many of Stevenson's friends, notably his biographer, Alexander H. Japp, and almost all of his critics. The first praise of the Stevenson-Henley dramas came (like most good things to the English-speaking stage of to-day) from Bernard Shaw. These were the days when the Pineros and such — to avoid the Irishman's arrows — were running to cover, there to cogitate over their dramatic sins and to adopt methods previously condemned. But this was years later, when Stevenson was dead.

      Bernard Shaw gave Stevenson and Henley further praise as dramatists when Henry Irving was reviving "Robert Macaire." This is a French legend of peculiar fascination to dramatists, and no less than ten or twelve dramatic versions exist; while, as "Erminie," it is familiar to the patrons of musical shows. Shaw was hot with wrath against Irving for preferring an antiquated, conventional version of "Macaire" to that one by these two literary men, which was far more artistic yet sufficiently entertaining. But Irving knew his public. So long as Macaire and Bertrand were farcical and unreal, moral conventions allowed the audience to laugh; but, in this play, again, Stevenson had used his personal knowledge and sympathy and Henley his mordant poetical genius and acquaintance with historical picaroons. So it was not desired by those middle-class enthusiasts who raved over the "art" of the knightly manager of the Lyceum Theatre.
 

IV

      However, apart from the literary quality of the character delineation, neither "Brodie" nor "Macaire" would stand the critical test of the "crook" drama of to-day. True, there is no living dramatizer of criminals who could equal such characters as Andrew, the Candle-Worm, Jingling Geordie, Badger Moore, Macaire, or Bertrand; still, no twentieth-century playwright would dare use such obvious theatrical machinery as the plots of these plays. Bit the plots are only danger-signals of greater dramatic dangers for students and would-be playwrights. For, plots aside, there is a stronger objection to their classification as first-class plays. It is their fragmentary philosophy, their illapses into puerile pessimism, which comes from disallowing the evolution of their chief protagonists toward a higher spirituality.

      Pinero, thirty years ago, practically blamed these authors for giving their thieves so many redeeming traits. To-day we blame them because they gave them so few. In this Stevenson would heartily agree with us, but he was shackled by mid-Victorian conventions. Like all great authors, he was a prophet. Like all great authors, he had a wholesome contempt for bourgeois morality — morality which is really unmorality, meaning, as it does, generally, the taking of precautions against being discovered in dereliction.

      Great authors are rebels by instinct, reformers when they get the chance. Stevenson's ailing body, the wolverine within him, prevented any participation in the great protest against sinful respectability going on when for the first time he sailed for America, a reformation in apogee when he departed for Samoa leaving a warring world behind forever. Thus, since to him the average law-abiding man was either a dullard or a hypocrite, he was never happy in picturing such men. In his heart he had a contempt for the law, a love for justice. All his best figures — those by which he will be remembered — are what the world calls scamps.

      Had Stevenson lived longer, or had a chance to meet the world in battle, his scamps might have evolved into rebels against false ethics and hypocrisy, and ended as real heroes. As it was, he put all his loving care into the delineation of men most of whom even revolutionary writers like Shaw and Galsworthy would stamp as scoundrels. Therefore, reluctantly, Stevenson acceded to the critic in him, and criticised after creating. Thus it happens that though Brodie, Macaire, and Villon are driven by contempt of the world's hypocrisy to cynicism and crime, they are never given the chance to complete their revolutionary orbit and become militant warriors of the common good — as, say, John Bunyan was.

      "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," says the man whom the eighteenth century called insane, the twentieth a genius. And in another place, this same William Blake remarks: "If the fool would only persist in his folly, he would become wise."

      A rebel is almost always a superior man. The very instinct that made cynics of these Stevenson characters, that led them into crime, more as a manifestation of rebellion against injustice than as a means of gain — eventually would have led them to Blake's palace of wisdom. The logical end of them would have been Dissenting parsons, Swedenborgian philosophers, reformers of the same sort that Bunyan was. But they had been guilty of a greater crime than theft: their exploits had aroused in many bourgeois readers a guilty interest and a pleasurable sense of participation. For this the bourgeoisie demanded blood so that they might continue to feel that the world was in safe hands, that no literature was in circulation to encourage the children of their loins toward a life of crime. Death might not check adolescent admiration, but it would discourage adult emulation.

      So at the second stage of their evolution Stevenson committed charactericide upon the persons of Brodie and Macaire, and would have spared Villon neither had not the poet's fate been in the hands of history — which is uninfluenced by bourgeois opinion. Had the wolverine spared Stevenson for another ten years, we should have found the further developments of these interesting rogues far more to our liking.

      For, about the time Stevenson died, social criticism, which had languished during the Victorian era, broke out fiercely, and this kind of lethal logomachy ceased.
 

V

      William Ewart Gladstone, the moving force in latter-day Victorian politics, the representative of the opinions (or lack of them) popular among the ignorant, was a man of most harmful tendencies to the progress of humanity. He was an ignorant idealist, a good-natured tyrant, a benevolent murderer. Such men do more harm than the Neroes and Caligulas; for bestial autocrats arouse hate, and, subsequently, rebellion. But the Gladstones, who are doing their righteous but mistaken best to make people happy, convince desperate, unthinking men that their best job, if they find life unsupportable, is not to rebel but to commit suicide. America, which is always behind the times in everything except money-making devices, came to the Gladstonian period of ignorant idealism under William McKinley, who, as High Priest of High Tariff and the respectable tool of respectable tyrants, was unwittingly responsible, more than any other American, for most of the capital and labor evils which now threaten to disembowel the republic. To trace back the iniquitous public wrongs that he fostered and encouraged would be to place him alongside Alexander Borgia as a force for evil — a collation never attempted because of the prevailing sentimentalities which were caused by the circumstances of his tragic death.

      English economists and metaphysicians rebelled finally against the mischievous idealist of the Gladstone-McKinley type. Ignorance was put on a par with malevolence. Plutocratic respectability was stripped of its vestments and called the blood-thirsty Minotaur that it is. A thousand Perseii fiercely challenged its right to human sacrifices. It is difficult to apprehend just who was responsible for this rebellion against accepted morals: it was the result of many men working in many countries — LaSalle in France; Marx in Germany; Tolstoi, Dostoievski, and Gorki in Russia; Strindberg in Sweden; William Morris, Samuel Butler and the long-forgotten William Blake in England; Ibsen in Norway; and many others. The work of all these men was distilled and presented for the first time in words of easy understanding through that thin volume "The Quintessence of Ibsenism," George Bernard Shaw representing the sane side of the new reformation.

      But, before the Morrises and Shaws became effective, the fanatics of the new faith had broken out in violence. The Jacobins were thrust aside for infuriated sans-culottes; for the guillotine, these Robespierres and Marats substituted bombs. Gladstone went in fear of his life. There were the Fenian outrages, Parnell riots, general insurrection among the working-classes. Chicago became a battle-field for police and strikers: the execution of Spics and Parsons followed, and the suicide of Ling, all working anarchists. But anarchy did not die: it only smoldered; one of its embers was the assassination of McKinley; others were the several tragedies which have come to be called the McNamara dynamitings.

      To escape further violence from physical rebels, the English thought it might be sensible to examine the contentions of the mental rebels. The result was that those represented by Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and, in general, the Fabian society, ceased to be rebels and became the representatives of thoughtful governmental opinion. Old ideals of respectability were tossed into the discard. A man was judged by his character, not his cloak. The final result is that, to-day, Lloyd-George has imposed a tremendous income-tax upon the rich, so that, in England, for millionaires to found a money-power dynasty is practically impossible. This income-tax helps give pensions to the old, and to writers and teachers who are worthy. There are, besides, any number of existing English reforms which America should have had long ago if she wishes to believe she is (as claimed) the freest country in the world-which England undoubtedly is to-day, for there almost impartial justice is served to rich and poor alike, and the proletarian's vote counts for much more than it does here. Also he is protected against himself.

      These things the English have done because they scented another French Revolution some twenty years ago. But, at the time when England began to improve economically, America began steadily to go down hill. The execution of the Chicago anarchists, added to the terrible harm they had done to innocent non-combatants, was sufficient to bury even those truths conceded before their revolt. Rebellion became highly unpopular. Socialists, confused with Anarchists, were shunned and abhorred. By the violence of a few Reds, the working-people of America were deprived of their Davids. Meanwhile Goliaths — aided by the McKinley tariff and favorable laws to monopolies — grew amain, until, about ten years ago, America found herself sadly in need of protest, and imported that literature of revolt which had served England a decade before. Immediately Shaw, who had been only a name to all except the advanced, became a champion; and those of his school leaped into favor with him. Even playwrights, hitherto only popular panderers, like Charles Klein, imitated his rebellion, which thus gained more hearers in words of one-syllable. Editorial staffs of magazines, in toto, took up the battle in particularities. Rich but democratic citizens like Spreckels spent fortunes to prove corruption, employing such integrities as William J. Burns. Senatorial and millionaire members of church-vestries were proved to be thieves and traitors. Mayors, governors, police-commissioners, even presidents, were shown with the greedy eye and grasping hand; in general, the powers of law, order, and respectability were indicted as unscrupulous — as law-breakers, than which no members of the rogues' gallery could have worse private characters.

      To climax this came the violent writers, the neo-anarchists of the W. L. George type. They said (in effect): "Life is a battle. There aren't any rules. If you poverty-stricken idiots observe the law, you are just the kind of sheep that your natural enemies can shear easily, and then throw to the North Pole. Fight! Don't fight fair (i.e. by law). Fight any way you can until you get what every worker is entitled to: decent food, clean lodgings, and a chance for your children. If they wont pay you enough for hard work, the law is wrong: break it."

      George practically said this in "A Bed of Roses," going many steps farther than Shaw in "Mrs. Warren." And Frank Harris said in "The Bomb:"

      "Unless you steal, you will be eaten alive."

      These, then, were the violent agitators of whom a pale reflection is shown in the "crook" plays of to-day. Such opinions were in the air, and, though a certain pair of young writers had never heard then of George or Harris, they shared some of their convictions, and so sat down to play criminologists to the American public. So was born the first American "crook" drama of the new — that is, sociological — type, "The Only Law;" one of its authors was he who now addresses you.
 

VI

      As has been explained in a previous article, "The Only Law" was intended, primarily, to dispose of what the underworld called "the sucker viewpoint" of "The Easiest Way." I had sat through Walter's play, admiring it as drama, but burning with indignation at its mistaken morality. Helpless girl; rich man deliberately using wealth and power to prevent her getting work that would keep her from his arms; weak and hungry, the girl succumbs to the inevitable. And for this the hero blames her — speaking as the author's mouthpiece, as if there was not sufficient accusation in the play's title.

      Therefore, I sought out one in sympathy with my indignation and we set to work to prove that, between such men and such girls, there was waged an unending battle. That, as such men made such girls poor, it was right that such girls should take all they could get from such men and give no more in return than Wall Street bears and bulls give to the lambs they shear. Why should brokers battle with superior weapons in Wall Street and soubrettes be denied similar weapons when the enemy invaded the soubrette stronghold?

      "Being on the square with a pal is the only law we know." So said our heroine. And it was our play's contention that she was right. By a laughable error in logic, even favorable criticisms claimed our heroine violated "The Only Law" by deceiving "her best friend, the broker." The syllogism upon which such a statement could be made would be interesting as a petitio principii. The average moralist claimed we were utterly unprincipled writers, thus missing altogether the point of our revolutionary drama, as exemplified by sentiments such as those that follow — exchanges of confidence between two people of the underworld:

      GIRL: I can see the worry lots of times under that game smile of yours. Everything aint funny that you laugh at, old pal.

      MAN: There's no room for tears in the Tenderloin. You've got to laugh to draw cards in the Broadway game.

      GIRL: Yes, and it's the hardest work in the world, too, when you don't feel like it. The stage-door Johnny's willing to pay you by the yard for your laugh, though. Goes home thinking he's a great entertainer even if his bank-roll is a little short.

      MAN: Takes some ability as an actress to laugh at them. If you don't get star-wages, you're cheated.

      The man who is speaking, a platonic friend, finally manages to entrap the broker into a marriage with the girl — solely that she may be provided with a livelihood, and be free from poverty forever after. This ending incensed many. But apparently it did not incense them when the girl of "The Easiest Way" was entrapped into dishonor by her broker. His warfare, being conventional, was disapproved, but tolerated. But when our broker was entrapped into marriage, this was unconventional and "shameful."

      We suffered the fate of all pioneers: we were unpopular; but we paved the way for other dramatists. We had presented crooks not as willful lawbreakers, but as desperate common folk making war against their oppressors. Our example was speedily followed by Charles Kenyon in "Kindling." In his play a mother becomes a thief in order that her unborn child may have the fighting chance that its father and mother were denied. By this time, the critics were educated to revolutionary drama and approved; but the great majority of the public showed it was still outraged, by staying away. "Kindling," a play worthy to take rank with English revolutionary dramas like Galsworthy's "Justice," was also a financial failure. Slowly, however, the people were becoming educated; so, finally, "Within the Law," the third of the American revolutionary trilogy, came into the success that was denied its predecessors. Although not so good a play as either of them, it has what both those plays possessed: sound humanitarian arguments and human characters. "The Only Law," "Kindling," and "Within the Law" are the three plays that have made it possible for ordinary intellects to write of crooks, sometimes without philosophy at all, yet gain public sympathy and attention. For the crooks' justification has been made evident in these three plays, and the public supplies some of their arguments to plays that have none.
 

VII

      There was recently on Broadway a farce, "Stop Thief," in which two thieves steal without any justification. They pursue their criminal way unpunished and, presumably, live happy ever afterward. Now it was never the intention of Frank Harris that people should throw bombs simply because they chose. Nor was it the intention of Shaw or W. L. George to urge anyone to adopt Mrs. Warren's profession in preference to a decent life. Yet again, it was not my intention, nor Kenyon's, nor that of the author of "Within the Law" to urge that it was commendable as well as profitable to steal. Here is where the authors of contemporary crook-plays miss the honor of being reformers. It is enough for them that since thieves are now tolerated as heroes, their adventures make exciting melodramas or funny farces. Such playwrights, like all copyists, miss the spirit of their originals. Just as McCutcheon and McGrath fail to reproduce the satire of Hope in their imitation "Zenda" stories; or Davis — and Hudson Douglas, say — lose in their South American bravuras the ironical flavor of Hope's "Man of Mark;" just as Hope missed the spirituality of Stevenson when he unconsciously took a hint from "Prince Otto," — so do the McHughs, Moores, Armstrongs, Tottens, Smiths, and other purveyors of "crook" literature fail to put into their work any high feeling which will make for better humanity and, hence, better government. Bernard Shaw makes even his slightest plays engines of social reform. It is this purpose and this alone which can cause a play about a crook to be a commendable dramatic performance.

      To illustrate: Soon after "The Only Law," I took up the sociological side of "crookdom" very thoroughly, incorporating in a novel all that was to be said for and against crooks as opposed to dishonest police officials, corrupt civic governments, and their masters, the franchise-grabbing millionaires. My novel reversed ordinary procedure: in it the honest man was opposed to his son, who had been kidnaped in infancy and brought up by crooks, who thus revenged themselves, the father having ruined one of their number by the corrupt use of power. The "crook" son works for honesty in city politics, the father — the "honest man" — for civic corruption. This sort of paradox is useful and reformative, in that it shows the public how far away from decency modern respectability is when the crook can teach the "honest" man. This novel, "An Enemy to Society," after serial and book publication in three countries, I made into a play, which a manager was about to produce, when the flood of "crook" plays broke upon the city's shore. So I hold my play until the innate falsity of these imitations shall be made manifest, for there is no more relation between "Stop Thief" and "Within the Law" than there is between a farce pornographic and Mr. Parker's recent dramatization of a Bible story.

      In a word, then, "crook" plays of to-day are best compared to the picaresque novels of Harrison Ainsworth, and my criticism of him in an earlier part of this essay stands for the author of "Officer 666" and kindred plays: their crooks are heroes, not because they are heroes, but because they are crooks. So the thoughtful Socialist or Fabian unwittingly begets the bomb-throwing anarchist, and the great general public makes no distinction between them. But the distinction exists to a far greater extent for the very reason that it is not understood. The revolutionary dramatist sacrifices his royalties for increased morality; his imitator sacrifices his morality for increased royalties. The destruction of laws does not mean that laws are bad, only that bad laws are bad; but, unfortunately, the weak-minded, or the youthful, and the seeker after reasons for doing evil, will often quote revolutionary moralists as excuses for license, debauchery, and lawlessness. Ibsen satirized such undesired disciples in "The Wild Duck," Shaw in "The Philanderer," and the mistaken followers of his own "Candida" in "How He Lied to Her Husband." The public could not understand in any one of the three cases. It seemed as though Ibsen and Shaw were being simply contradictory, willfully and perversely paradoxical. As a matter of fact, a revolutionary writer suffers less from denouncers and enemies than from so-called friends and advocates: friends who read their master wrongly and advocates who use doctrines for their own selfish ends.

      No matter under what Utopian government we live, crooks will exist; and many crooks are crooks because it is the desire of their distorted nature. To glorify such as these is to do mischief and an injustice to law-abiding citizens who obey laws not from cowardice but for the common good. That is what the "crook" drama is doing to-day. And it is quite different from criticising corrupt government by pointing out the harm of its existence in forcing crookedness upon would-be honest men.