Belasco devoted most of the summer of 1911 to work on William C. De Mille’s play entitled “The Woman,” which he produced for the first time in New York, September 19, that year, at the Republic Theatre: a trial production of that play had been effected, April 17 preceding, at the New National Theatre, Washington, D. C. It is a highly effective melodrama, of the “contemporaneous interest” type, and it implicates twelve persons, nine of whom are germane to its action. It is neat in construction; it skilfully utilizes the invaluable element of suspense, and interest in its progress is cumulative to the dramatic climax. This, in brief, is its story:
A corrupt politician, the Honorable “Jim” Blake, a member of the national legislature, is scheming to get a specious bill enacted into law, whereby over-capitalization of railroad corporations and wholesale swindling of the public can be perpetrated in the guise of legality. Another member of the legislature, the Honorable Matthew Standish, perceptive of the latent iniquity of that measure and of the predatory intent of Blake, has so vigorously opposed the enactment of it and so bitterly assailed its sponsors that Blake and his associates fear to force its passage. They determine, therefore, to divert attention of the people from the opposition of Standish to their corrupt measure and purposed malfeasance by blasting his personal reputation with social scandal. In their effort to do this they ascertain that several years previous the Honorable Matthew, inflexible before Plutus, has succumbed before Venus—has, in short, registered at an hotel with a woman not his wife. The name of that woman is not known to their informant, and it is the despicable task of Blake and his adherents to ascertain her identity in order to ruin his public career by convicting him of private misconduct. That task they attempt to perform by endeavoring to extort from a young woman, Wanda Kelly, the operator in charge of a telephone exchange desk, a telephone number in New York which Standish, in Washington, has called for, immediately after being apprised of the dastardly purpose of Blake and his associates. The identity of the concealed and errant she as Blake’s daughter, the wife of one of his chief supporters, the Honorable Mark Robertson, is deftly discovered to the audience by the device of a second telephone message to her, by her husband, immediately after the close of the warning of impending disclosure by Standish. The sympathetic Miss Kelly resolutely persists in her protective secrecy as to The Woman at the other end of the wire, and the climax is then attained when Standish refuses to be driven from his public duty by the threatened assault on his private character and when Mrs. Robertson, having in an agony of dread listened to the unsuccessful coaxing and badgering of Miss Kelly, with sudden and desperate courage terminates the anxious situation by avowal of her delinquency, thus providing her corrupt parent and spouse with considerably more information than they desire to publish as to the amatory weaknesses of the obdurate Standish. This was the cast with which that play was first presented in New York:
| The Hon. Jim Blake | John W. Cope. |
| Tom Blake | Harold Vosburgh. |
| The Hon. Mark Robertson | Edwin Holt. |
| Grace, Mrs. Robertson | Jane Peyton. |
| The Hon. Matthew Standish | Cuyler Hastings. |
| Ralph Van Dyke | Carleton Macy. |
| The Hon. Silas Gregg | Stephen Fitzpatrick. |
| The Hon. Tim Neligan | William Holden. |
| A Guest | Langdon West. |
| A Page | George Van Blake. |
| A Waiter | José Rossi. |
| Wanda Kelly | Mary Nash. |
The exceptional success of Belasco’s production of “The Woman” prompted a genius thitherto unknown to fame, a certain inspired and amiable barber of New York, Mr. Abraham Goldknopf, to assert that it was stolen from a sublime drama indited by himself in the intervals of tonsorial exercise and entitled “Tainted Philanthropy.” Belasco, in defending himself against this preposterous claim, resorted to a unique and costly though conclusive expedient. But before describing the trial of Mr. Goldknopf’s allegations, it is convenient here to examine with some particularity the general subject of
BELASCO AND PLAGIARISM.
“FOLLY LOVES THE MARTYRDOM OF FAME.”
No person rises to eminence without exciting antagonism and incurring detraction. Malice is quick to perceive any possibility, however trivial, of tarnishing a distinguished character, and hatred is ingenious in devising specious means of disparagement. The slightest appearance of weakness in any talented person favorably conspicuous in the public eye is eagerly seized as a ground of condemnation. Every close student of biography must have observed, relative to almost every eminent person commemorated, that there is always some one particular form of reproach which, by diligent, persistent iteration, is made to adhere to that person’s name, so that at last the one is seldom mentioned without association with the other. Eminent actors of the Past have been particularly singled out for defamation in this way. Barton Booth, for example, scholar and poet as well as actor, is stigmatized, on no competent authority, as a gross voluptuary; Garrick, because he was prudent, especially while he was poor, is styled an avaricious niggard; Kemble, an opium sot; Edwin Booth, a drunkard, which is a specially contemptible slander. Henry Irving was one of the greatest of actors, but, because he happened to be a person of many peculiarities, perfectly natural to him, we are forever hearing that he had “affected mannerisms”—which is distinctly untrue. Every department of biography furnishes examples of this form of aspersion. In the case of Belasco the customary disparagement takes the shape of an iterated charge of Plagiarism. In this work an examination of that charge is essential.
“It is an old trick of Detraction,” says Moore, in his “Life of Sheridan,” “and one of which it never tires, to father the works of eminent writers upon others; or, at least, while it kindly leaves an author the credit for his worst performances, to find some one in the background to ease him of the fame of his best.... Indeed, if mankind were to be influenced by those Qui tam critics... Aristotle must refund to one Ocellus Lucanus, Virgil must make a cessio bonorum in favor of Pisander, the Metamorphoses of Ovid must be credited to the account of Parthenius of Nicæa, and Sheridan... must surrender the glory of having written ‘The School for Scandal’ to a certain anonymous young lady who died of a consumption in Thames Street.... Sheridan had, in addition to the resources of his own wit, a quick apprehension of what suited his purpose in the wit of others, and a power of enriching whatever he adopted from them with such new graces as gave him a sort of claim of paternity over it and made it all his own. ‘C’est mon bien,’ said Molière, when accused of borrowing, ‘et je le reprens partout où je le trouve.’”
THE “TRICK” AS APPLIED.
“Plagiarism,” says The Dictionary, is “the act of appropriating the ideas or the language of another and passing them for one’s [sic!] own; literary theft.” It would not be very difficult, testing Belasco’s plays by that definition, and excluding all other considerations, to invest the charge of plagiarism against him, in some instances, with validity. The last part of “Hearts of Oak” is borrowed from Leslie’s “The Mariner’s Compass”; “La Belle Russe” is based on situations taken from “Forget Me Not” and “The New Magdalen”; the thrilling situation in the Third Act of “The Girl I Left Behind Me” is based on a similar situation in Boucicault’s “Jessie Brown; or, the Relief of Lucknow”; the agonizing situation in the Third Act of “The Darling of the Gods,” in which a military despot extorts information from a woman by forcing her to gaze on her lover subjected to torture, is derived (and bettered) from Sardou’s “La Tosca.” Other instances of similarity could be specified. It would, however, be a manifest injustice to stigmatize Belasco, and only Belasco, as a plagiarist on the