The Autobiography of a Play | Page 6

of the
child has been heard. If he had left the little girl in the care of others, it
is unknown to whom or where. So Lilian is a widow and childless. She
is fading, day by day, and is hardly expected to live. Her mind, tortured
by the suspense, which, worse than certainty, is gradually yielding to
hallucinations which keep her little one ever present to her fancy.
Harold Routledge was wounded seriously in the duel, but not killed; he
is near Lilian; seeing her every day; but he is her friend, rather than her
lover, now; she talks with him of her child, and he feels how utterly
hopeless his own passion is in the presence of an all-absorbing mother's
love. It is discovered that the child is living peacefully among kind
guardians in a French convent; and Routledge determines to cross the
ocean with the necessary evidence and bring the little one back to its
mother. He breaks the news to Lilian tenderly and gently. A gleam of
joy illuminates her face for the first time since the terrible night, two
years before, and Routledge feels that the only barrier to his own
happiness has been removed. But the sudden return and reappearance
of the husband falls like a stroke of fate upon both. As the curtain
descends on the fourth act, Lilian lies fainting on the floor, with Natalie
at her side, while the two men stand face to face above the unconscious
woman whom they both love. Three lives ruined--because Lilian's
father, having lost his wealth, in his old age, dared not, as he himself
expressed it, leave a tenderly nurtured daughter to a merciless world.
The world is merciless, perhaps, but it is not so utterly and hopelessly
merciless to any man or woman as one's heart may be.
Lilian comes back to consciousness on her deathbed. Her child had
returned to her only as a messenger from heaven, summoning her home.
But the message had been whispered in unconscious ears; for she had
not seen the little girl, who was removed before the mother had
recovered from her swoon. They dare not tell her now that Natalie is on
this side of the ocean and asleep in the next room. Mr. Strebelow had
heard in a distant land, travelling to distract his mind from the great
sorrow of his own life, of Lilian's condition, and he hastened back to
undo the wrong he felt that he had committed. She asks to see him; she
kisses his hand with tenderness and gratitude, when he tells her that

Natalie shall be her own hereafter; his manly tears are tears of
repentance, mingled with a now generous love. The stroke of death
comes suddenly; they have only a moment's time to arouse the little one
from its sleep; but they are not too late, and Lilian dies at last, a smile
of perfect happiness on her face, with her child in her arms.
The Mississippi darky, in Mark Twain's story, being told that his heroic
death on the field of battle would have made but little difference to the
nation at large, remarked, with deep philosophy; "It would have made a
great deal of difference to me, sah." The radical change made in the
story I have just related to you, before the production of the play in
New York, was this: Lilian lives, instead of dying, in the last act. It
would have made very little difference to the American nation what she
did; but it made a great deal of difference to her, as you will see, and to
the play also in nearly every part. My reasons for making the change
were based upon one of the most important principles of the dramatic
art, namely: A dramatist should deal, so far as possible, with subjects of
universal interest, instead of with such as appeal strongly to a part of
the public only. I do not mean that he may not appeal to certain classes
of people, and depend upon those classes for success; but, just so far as
he does this, he limits the possibilities of that success. I have said that
the love of offspring in woman has shown itself the strongest of all
human passions; and it is the most nearly allied to the boundless love of
Deity. But the one absolutely universal passion of the race--which
underlies all other passions--on which, indeed, the very existence of the
race depends--the very fountain of maternal love itself, is the love of
the sexes. The dramatist must remember that his work cannot, like that
of the novelist or the poet, pick out the hearts, here and there, that
happen to be in sympathy with its subject. He appeals to a thousand
hearts at the