Being an old manuscript with a new preface—the former dealing with a lost art, and the latter subtly suggesting who lost it.
The article that fills the following pages was written in 1905. Originally printed as a protest and a prophecy, it is reprinted here as history.
Melodrama is dead. It died of poor circulation and failure of the box office receipts. There were no flowers, and there need be no regrets. Neither is there reason to fear resuscitation.
I should like to think that popular priced melodrama had been killed by a general desire for better things. That, however, is not the case. The death blow was struck when the inventor of moving pictures supplied a form of entertainment that demanded even less of the spectator than had been demanded by such classics as "Through Death Valley" and "The Millionaire and the Policeman's Wife." The people who patronized these plays are not now patronizing worthier plays; they are attending performances that appeal to them wholly through the medium of the eye.
Of the seven theaters mentioned in this article at present three are devoted to moving pictures, two to burlesque, one to vaudeville, and one to drama in Yiddish. A few cheap companies are presenting melodrama in the provinces, but not a single place of amusement shelters it in New York. Requiescat in pace.
"Sitting in Judgment With the Gods" is republished as a contemporary opinion of a lost art. It was my intention to alter the wording somewhat, substituting more recent examples for those mentioned, but I found the result was apt to be like a history of Rome brought "up-to-date" by introducing gattling guns at the Battle of Pharsalius. So here is the story as it was set down in the beginning, and may you find amusement in reading it.
Melodrama, according to my dictionary, is "a dramatic performance, usually tragic, in which songs are introduced." The encyclopedia adds that the name was bestowed first upon "the opera by Rinuccini", and that it was derived from two Greek words meaning song and drama. This is extremely awesome and impressive, but I'm afraid I can't allow you to accept it as applying to offerings in our popular-priced places of amusement. Melodrama isn't a bit like that in New York.
It was the dictionary that started me on a tour of investigation which comprehended visits to all of the seven theaters in town that habitually present melodrama. There are so many classes of people in this big city, and each class has so many characteristic ways of working and playing, that no one hundredth of the population can be expected to know how any other one hundredth lives. The men and women who go to see "Man and Superman" don't go to see "No Mother to Guide Her", and I think I am quite safe in saying that most of the men and women who witness "No Mother to Guide Her" are conspicuous by their absence at "Man and Superman."
Sitting in judgment with the gods leaves me in doubt as to why the latter part of this statement should be true. The plays of the "No Mother to Guide Her" type are so hopelessly bad, so obviously false, so absolutely vicious, that it is hard to comprehend a mind that can prefer them, if not to "Man and Superman", at least to such better melodramas as "The Lion and the Mouse" or "The Squaw Man." The matter of money is no explanation at all. Harry and Harriet might have excellent seats in the balcony of the Lyceum or Wallack's for the price of orchestra chairs at the American, and, if it comes to pride, what choice is there between the gallery, politely disguised as "the second balcony," of the Belasco, and a box at the Thalia?