The sun. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1833-1916, 1906-12-23

Ibat oo1eI IN bcr demands an unusuh'
knowledge ofsthe binder workings OF the
feminine heart, an unusual faculty for
divining the wellsprings OF passion.
A POSSIBLE device has occurred 10 me,
though ! hesitate 70 mention il for fear
OF a descent into the Tit OF the obvious
and the pathetic. Ruth is In a mood 20 be
enamored Of rough masculinity; what she
wants, as she says, is an unfinished man.
There is nothing at all strange in that.
Very young girls dote on mastifis for pt Is,
n even aspire to the shaggiest lion in She
zoo. Jane Eyre, governess, tanned her
Rochester. Why should not Boston Ruth
tame her hell-bent frontiersmanl The
difficulty is only that their fret encounter
eeems too sudden, too bru tally revolt
ing. SUPP Csc now that her mood Of the
opening of the play, her vague and roman
tic abandonment TO the spell OF the -un-
finished West, centred in some specific
figure, some actual event. Sup. ose she
had seen a rough miner do a deed Of cour-
age and generosity. SUPP ose even that
the miner was Stephen GheRt himself, raised
for a m out Of a moral slough TO his
true stature. 1t would not then be so
strange that she appealed to him TO save
her from the Dago and the white trash,
promising to go with hm-ironlc outcrop-
ping OF ancestral puritanism-"under the
law Perhaps MIR. Moody at first intended
this sort of thing, IL is a curious fact that
both Ruth's brother and his wife seem con-
WINGED that her dreams of the new life have
some concrete origin and centre.
There can be no doubt that the change
would make the play more convincing
roInantically, but | cannot help feeling hat
it would make il at the same lime less signtft-
cant. The meaning. IL l may venture TO
express in concrete phrase a conception
which is essentially and necessarily elusive,
is that the sins of natural impulse, II they
are big enough, free enough and brave
enoug h, are a~ntiseptic and hea their
moral wounds. Tn bigness OF the situa-
ton lies in its very brutality.
By the creed Of her inbred puritanism,
subsequently voiced by her own mother,
Ruth should nave preferred death to such
a bargain with such ID man. But when
Client had placed the revolver before her.
giving her leave to shoot herself-or him
she nc neither. Too honest TO murder the
man to whom she had pledged her word,
she was too much in love with life to sacri-
fee it TO a puritan instinct.
II Ene nau~ f6cORnlLeO ueT lHpulo as TlBub
and played the game all would have gone
we'll. But she would have been i~nhumanly
wise--and there would have been no play.
The simple, uncasuistical Client too his
happiness as he found 1t, but h suffered
many q throe before her soul was purged Of
n ritanism and raised to the height of
taking in the actual-what In the ideal she
had longed for-her unfinished man.
The alternative she faced was the same
as in The Statue and the Bust" and the
implicit moral Us sound as the moral Brown
ing hammers out at us-more sound, II we
grant q am far from granting this) that a
sin gainst ones own native Instincts is
less grave than sin against the established
moral law.
-For their end was crime oh, a crime
will do
As well, | reply. to serve as a test
As a virtue golden through and through
SUFFICIENT to vindioate itself
And prove its worth at a moments view.
II you choose to play. is my principle.
Let a man contend to the uttermost
For his hfe's set prize. be il what It ~ll.
Though the end in sight was a vice. I say.
You Of the virtue tive issue join.
How strive youy DE te fdbuiG!
Like Browning's poem, Mr.. Moody's
PLAY brings us face to face with the problem
Of the function of evil. 1t is not strange
that even the intelligent ~pavgoer finds
himAH hafied. George Santayana, pagan
poet and Harvard professor Of philosophy,
once threw the Boston Browning Society
into connirtions by accusing their honored,
IL misunderstood, Pre- phet Of immortality
- - IL 49, .uskI kh- Isroa sN,aS
quoted. His contention, l take it, was as
much against morality, as Boston under
stands II, as it was against Browning.
But>he was the only one there who could
have see0 that. Only a part OF MIR. Moody's
critics have succeeded any better.
Unlike Browning. MIR. Moodv does not
give us any Hoe fdbuid docet. He leaves US
TO our own reading of Ruth and III hidden
m meanings of her fate. In this he seems To
me more fortunate. He has lately been
quote it is true, as speaking in dis
arrangement OF his play as compared
with even his own poems. His verses in
the Christmas Century on The Death Of
Eve,' in which he makes the first woman
with a past expire beneath her own apple
tree declaring to God the triumph of her
sin, offers a most interesting comparison;
but the point does not fall within my baili-
wick. 1t is enough to argue that his play
is better than THE Statue and the Bust
II is its splendid virtue that it brings us
TO tho ragged edge Of the s-ca. mystery
of sin, ami it is its more s0len id vi tue
that it does not attempt TO go beyond it.
The philosor hic poet may dogniatize on
all the dark Problems of life, death and
eternity-heaven, hell and the intermediate
world of spirits, as Swedenborg called it.
The more they talk the less we know
except that they are as much IN the dark
as we are. The business of the dramatist
is to show us how variou concrete beings
like ourselves meet the practical problems
Of existence, and what the result is. In
so far as the dramatist IL also a poet, the
result is a sense of something above and
beyond, which we powerfully if vaguely
feel but cannot know. Always in life
there is the steep shore of the known. be-
yond which is the soundless sea OF the
unknown able The dramatist is true in 80
far as he makes men what they are. He
is a poet in 80 far as he fills us with the