Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Paul Kauvar; or, Anarchy | Page 3

Judge Conrad had selected "Jack Cade." He wished to measure the danger of liberty, but he did so indirectly, for the play does not abound in long philosophical flights of definition and warning. He himself confessed that the subject was defined only once, in these words, spoken by the hero to the woman he loves, when she is pleading with him to flee from France. He silences her by saying:
"I must stay to war with beasts who bring disgrace upon our noble cause. The torch of liberty, which should light mankind to progress, when left in madmen's hands, kindles that blaze of anarchy whose only end is ashes."
This indicates very distinctly that Mackaye's stand for the Chicago anarchists was not due to sympathy with their political monomania, but rather championed justice which, only when rightly used, will stem the tide of overwrought minds. With the execution of these men, he believed the cause of anarchy would be strengthened by the general impression gained of their martyrdom. His attitude was widely discussed, and "Paul Kauvar" became a visible demonstration of anarchy gone mad.
Of the component elements in his play, Mackaye left a full record. It is worth preserving as indication of his motive. In an interview he said:
For many years I have devoted myself to the mechanical, as well as the artistic side of the theatre, in the hope that by improving stage mechanism I might help to develop the artistic ensemble essential to high art results in the theatre. To this end I have made numerous inventions, and designed and built several theatres. [The Madison Square and the Lyceum Theatres.]
In this work I have been almost daily in contact with labourers and mechanics of every kind, and this contact stirred in me a very deep and sincere sympathy with these classes of men. I was led to realize the greatness of obligation under which the whole world is placed by the industry, ability and devotion to duty which characterizes by far the larger portion of the working classes.
At the same time, through relations intimate and confidential, I became conscious that certain foreign ideas--the natural outgrowth of excessive poverty and despotism in the Old World--were insinuating themselves into the hearts and minds of American labourers to an extent perilous to their own prosperity and to the very life of the republic.
In this country political corruption and the grasping spirit of corporations are constantly affording the demagogue or the dreamer opportunity to preach the destruction of civil order with great plausibility, giving scope to reckless theorists who have so often, in the world's history, baffled the endeavours of the rational and patient liberalists of their day.
This excited in me an ardent desire to do what little I could as a dramatist to counteract what seemed to me the poisonous influences of these hidden forces: to write a play which might throw some light on the goal of destruction to which these influences inevitably lead, whenever the agitation between capital and labour accepts the leadership of anarchism.
The time chosen by me was that of the Terror in France, 1793-94, during which the noble fruits of the French Revolution came near to annihilation, thanks to the supremacy, for a time, of a small band of anarchical men who, in the name of liberty, invoked the tyranny of terror.
The hero of my play, _Paul Kauvar_, has for his prototype Camille Desmoulins, one of the most conspicuous and sincere sons of liberty of his day, who--in spite of his magnificent devotion to freedom--when he dared oppose the Jacobins, was beheaded at the guillotine--a martyr to national, as distinct from personal, liberty.
The typical anarchist in my play is portrayed in _Carrac_, whose prototype was Thomas Carier, sent into La Vend��e as a representative of the Jacobin convention. It was this man who, without process of law, guillotined or destroyed most horribly over one hundred thousand innocent men, women, and children--in the name of liberty. He it was who invented the "republican marriage"--the drowned bodies of whose naked victims dammed the river Loire, and rendered its water pestilential.
The Duc de Beaumont portrays a type of the true noblesse of France--proud, fearless, often unjust, never ignoble.
Gouroc depicts the intriguing type of noblesse whose egotism and cruelty engendered the tyranny of the monarchy, and justified its destruction.
The prototype of General Delaroche was the brave and generous _Henri de la Rochejacquelin_, young leader of the royalists in La Vend��e.
By the interplay of these types, I have sought to emphasize what is truly heroic in the struggle which must ensue in all times between men and classes possessed of differing ideas. Especially it is the purpose of my play to remind the American masses, by the history of the past, not to assist foreign influences to repeat that history on this continent