New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1919-02-09

SPeCulal1nS away the ReQ cross tund
Entrusted to her. and, when detection
approaches, making an adventuress's
bargain with the villain for his check
Then when the villain becomes too
much for her and, having taken hor-
rible advantage of her one honest i'm
pulse, tries to send her husband to
prison on false charge, we at last
offer her our-what? Our sympathy,
no less.
For this dilapidated little rat of
very human being when asked to suffer
too much even for her faults puts up a
magnlticently game fight against cruel
odds, and human being putting up
game fight against odds always gets the
sympathy, always will and always must
we heard our romantic acquaintance
when he capitulated with nudging
whisper: "Oh, well, I'm for realism,
too, when it's really Interestingly" But
the unmollited stare of the realistic
wife was just then following the vii
lain, and we feared her wrath, for there
is no concealing the fact that the viz
lam is a romantic figure
To start with, he is--for no par
ticular reason but that he may have
sliding paper doors to his study-not
only a villain, but Japanese. He has
therefore the advantage over common
villains in morning coats that he may
go swathed in kimono as in some
gorgeous crime and is thus indeed first
shown to US, amid the most beautiful
of sombre lightings, doing something
graphically wicked in that study with
the sliding paper doors. Why it should
show a more decetful nature to con-
coct villany behind transparent doors
than opaque ones we do not know
but we accept the suggestion with hyp-
Noticed greed even when his worst
habit turns out to be collecting curios
and we discover that the wickedness
he is perpetrating is merely the stamp
ing of some new acquisitions with a
branding iron, the design of which he
has tossed off as lesser men do book
plates, We are not misled. We know
that in the drama collecting curios has
ever been a habit leading to strange
crimes, and we have only to look at
him, with the smoke from the brand
ing iron rising as from the Pit about
his head like the halo of lost angel
to recognize him as belonging to the
great old race of demon-heroes now al
from Harlem or Chicago; Lucifers of
malign magnifcence rising here on the
screen again to prove themselves one
of the eternal pipe dreams Of the hu-
man heart. 1t is true that when we
see our Lucifer later away from home
in American clothes and quite simply
young gentleman among other young
gentlemen we have a blank moment.
But no, he isn't trailing those clouds
of glory and emblazoned kimonos even
around the house unless there is going
to be trouble. And there is.
We must be greedy indeed if we are
not satisfied by the fuss Lucifer makes
when the little Cheat refuses to pay
up by the scorn with which he offers
her his revolver when she threatens to
kill herself and by the glance of
righteous, of awful Indignation which
he gives her when she tries to kill
him instead, after he has branded her
on the shoulder with that smoking iron
of his. This terrible and frozen scorn
continues to rebuke us till, after the
picture, we begin to ask ourselves what,
after all, he has to be so scornful
about?
Surely something besides the posses
sion of pair Of paper doors and the
not necessarily graceful tendency to
brand ladies with hot irons is noces-
sary before a gentleman may assume
the attitude Of a god among wild
heastsl Yet what else does he do? He
triumphs over no one, he acccmplishes
rothing, he doesn't even take advan-
tage of his wound and die harrowngly.
and yet he makes his case a Lucifer
and demon-hero; he simply leaves it
TO Mr.. Hayakawa to make him appear
an extremely superior person and thus,
indeed, he does appear. In fact,
we never see "The Cheat" without feel
ing socially, not to say racially,
snubbed. We have even vowed to fol-
low the next Japanese we meet out
walking till we see him miss a trolley
or spit on the street or otherwise fall
TO the level of our inelegance--wh where,
alas, we should still cut no particu-
larly luciferesque figure working a
branding iron. We are afraid it takes
superiority after all, especially when
our realistic acquaintance comes down
TO earth and speaks. "Of course, you
have to let yourself 60 little when
they're romantic--like that!"
We all looked at each other. the ro
manifest who had been thrilled by the
little Cheat because she was human
and the realist who had been enchanted
by Lucifer because he wasn't: then
they both looked at us, considering our
condemnation OF pictures that were
Ike plays and plays that were only
theatrical. They said, "But you've
seen it every chance you got!"
And we did not hang our head. We
said: ave been reading in The New
| Republic we weren't brappinp. we