The San Francisco call., 1898-02-06

the old dramatic situation. Instead of woman betrayed by man and lett to expiate her compliance by marriage with the soft-hearted subhero in the last act, there Is in "The Tree or Knowledge" a man wronged by wo- man and made to suffer all the ills, or so many of them as his sex will per init, and married to a virtuous girl in the last act The bad Belle has wan tonly allured Nigel Stanyan and pluck ed the pearl of innocence from his youth. Then she has thrown him to the dogs, or to anybody else who may have wanted him, exactly as the black hearted gent of the parlor melodrama of a few years ago was wont to treat the truthful girl. MT. Carton gives us a man with a decollete past and a soft-hearted woman to marry him. And although this has been done before, 1t has not been done quite in the same way. Nigel does not retire from the gay world but he takes his throw down seriously to heart, and is almost as much of wreck as woman would be in similar circumstances, and sees to it that the virtuous girl knows just what kind of a man she is marrying. Whatever problem may be teasing MT. Carton is perhaps summarized in this speech of Nigers: "The world is hard, and justly hard, on the man who is dastard enough to tear from a trusting girl her robe of purity; but surely there is another side of the picture. What of the ruin that women sometimes bring on men? What of the wanton ! fa Ii 4n ol; 11 of knowledge, and as she glances down through the dank leaves, points with mocking finger to the foothold in the rotting branches that other feet have worn away. Science may be right; heaven may be a fable, but at least there is a hell. I know it. I have 1 found it in woman's arms.''
 Presumably this speech of Nigirs is not a sample of that bright tinpan cynicism which dazzled the critic of the Commercial Advertiser into the Os- car Wilde comparison. It seems more like the glittering tinware of Laura Jean Libby. However, Nigil is the vic tim rather than the exploiter of cyni- cism under the tree of Knowledge Belle is less banal. She says, with evil brilliancy, that virtue is a matter of temperament And Roupell, the calm, superior villain, fairly showers para doxes and back-action aphorisms. It is notable that his conquest of Belle Cor hers of him, whichever way it is to be regarded) is made without a sin gle indulgence of sentimentality. You are not deluding yourself with any idea that I care about you?" queries Belle We shall suit one another" he an- swers. we are not sentimental" There are no warm extenuating emo tions in the sins of The Tree of Knowledge"
 The fact that a play of this kind and the perhaps less excusable one of Mr. Potters are thriving at the two most respected theaters in New York-bar Augustin Daly's Theater, which, by the way, will devote its Lenten season | to cinematographic reproductions of the Cruciffxion of Christ-marks an important fuctuation in the taste and toleration of the play going public. It means. no doubt, that we are to have a return of the drama that is not fit for the young person.; for playwriters and managers are commonly prone to l fashioning their enterprises on those which have been most Immediately successful. It is difficult to foretell whether this will be of any real benefit to the stage. Many persons who hold the theater to be something better than the receptacle for cardboard romances, plush upholstered melodramas and other forms of optimistic but unlifelike pIaywriting, would welcome almost any license so long as it might include the chance of a real play now and then. But the difficulty is that so few of the public want anything that is real. .'The Tree of Knowledge" bids fair to pros per; 'The Conquerors," it is estimated by experts, will run all season; and Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman," great play that deals hardly at all in the superficial aspect of sexual deprav- ity, but mainly in the sea1ny side of the soul, achieved precisely one per formance, and that. to an accompani- ment of hoots and misses from almost