The Autobiography of a Play | Page 8

merciful
to it, and puts it out of its misery by death. Routledge was wounded in a
duel. Strebelow was supposed to be lost in the wreck of a steamer. It
was easy enough to kill either of them, but which? We argued this
question for three weeks. Mere romance was on the side of the young
artist. But to have had him live would have robbed the play of all its
meaning. Its moral, in the original form, is this: It is a dangerous thing
to marry, for any reason, without the safeguard of love, even when the
person one marries is worthy of one's love in every possible way. If we
had decided in favor of Routledge, the play would have had no moral at
all, or rather a very bad one. If a girl marries the wrong man, she need
only wait for him to die; and if her lover waits, too, it'll be all right. If,
on the other hand, we so reconstruct the whole play that the husband
and wife may at last come together with true affection, we shall have
the moral: Even if a young girl makes the worst of all mistakes, and
accepts the hand of one man when her heart belongs to another, fidelity
to the duty of a wife on her side, and a manly, generous confidence on

the part of her husband, may, in the end, correct even such a mistake.
The dignity of this moral saved John Strebelow's life, and Harold
Routledge was killed in the duel with the Count de Carojac.
All that was needed to affect this first change in the play was to instruct
the actor who played Routledge to lie still when the curtain fell at the
end of the third act, and to go home afterward. But there are a number
of problems under the laws of dramatic construction which we must
solve before the play can now be made to reach the hearts of an
audience as it did before. Let us see what they are.
The love of Lilian for Harold Routledge cannot now be the one grand
passion of her life. It must be the love of a young girl, however sincere
and intense, which yields, afterward, to the stronger and deeper love of
a woman for her husband. The next great change, therefore, which the
laws of dramatic construction forced upon us was this: Lilian must now
control her own passion, and when she meets her lover in the second
act she must not depend for her moral safety on the awakening of a
mother's love by the appearance of her child. Her love for Harold is no
longer such an all-controlling force as will justify a woman--justify her
dramatically, I mean--yielding to it. For her to depend on an outside
influence would be to show a weakness of character that would make
her uninteresting. Instead, therefore, of receiving her former lover with
dangerous pent-up fires, Lilian now feels pity for him. She hardly yet
knows her own feelings toward her husband; but his manhood and
kindness are gradually forcing their way to her heart. Routledge, in his
own passion, forgets himself, and she now repels him. She even
threatens to strike the bell, when the Count de Carojac appears, and
warns his rival to desist. This is now the end of the second act, a very
different end, you see, from the other version, where the little girl runs
in, and, in her innocence, saves the mother from herself.
Here let me tell a curious experience, which illustrates how stubbornly
persistent the dramatic laws are, in having their own way. We were all
three of us--manager, literary attaché, and author--so pleased with the
original ending of the second act the picture of the little girl in her
mother's arms, and the lover bowing his head in its presence of

innocence, that we retained it. The little girl ran on the stage at every
rehearsal at the usual place. But no one knew what to do with her. The
actress who played the part of Lilian caught her in her arms, in various
attitudes; but none of them seemed right. The actor who played
Routledge tried to drop his head, according to instructions, but he
looked uncomfortable, not reverential. The next day we had the little
girl run on from another entrance. She stopped in the center of the stage.
Lilian stared at her a moment and then exclaimed: "Mr. Howard, what
shall I do with this child?" Routledge, who had put his hands in his
pocket, called out: "What's the girl doing here, anyway, Howard?" I
could only answer: "She used to be all right; I don't know what's the
matter with her now." And I remember seeing an anxious