Owen Davis

“ It’s the writer’s business to meet the mood of the hour, and all he has to do to meet this mood is to learn to sympathize with it. Just so long as I feel myself a part of the life around me there is no reason why I shouldn’t keep on writing, and at present I most decidedly do feel that. If the time ever comes when I find myself bewildered and afraid of a strange world that I no longer understand, I’ll stop—or rather, on second thought—perhaps I’ll write a play about how hard it is to understand it! ”

“ It is not any man’s to give more than once. If I were you I should try to be worthy of the love that, on your part at least, was a very sacred thing. Any scandal you bring upon her now, any act of selfish revenge for your very real wrongs, is just going to become the darkest shadow on your memory of her. If I could do it, my boy, I should forget the woman, and only remember the love you had for her, for in all your life you will never know a finer thing.”
“You are a good man, Doctor, and I am ashamed for having spoken as I did,” replied John earnestly. ”

“ What need she care for wealth with beauty like hers? Dick Fenway was probably the lucky man. Damned young loafer. Good God! How gladly he would give all he had to be that age again! To be thirty and back in the lumber country with his axe, and his youth, and his girl! Strong desires, fought down and smothered out of respect for a dead wife and a living daughter, blazed up again, fired by a spark from this young woman’s eye. There was something in her look that seemed to tell him that to her he was not old, not rich, not past all chance of woman’s love or hope of romance. ”

“ HENRY
We don’t aim to be hard, and we don’t want it said we was mean about it; you can stay on here, if you want to, until after the funeral, maybe a little longer, and I don’t know but what between us, we’d be willing to help you till you found a place somewheres.
JANE
You can’t help me, any of you. Of course now she’s dead, I’ll go. I’ll be glad to go.
ELLA
Glad!
JANE (turns on them)
I hate you, the whole raft of you. I’ll be glad to get away from you. She was the only one of you worth loving, and she didn’t want it. ”

“ As a practical man, born of a practical line of hard-headed Yanks, I have studied my own small talents and developed them and tried to make up for a lack of the real fires of genius by an honest admission of that lack and a true enthusiasm for the work that at the moment came nearest to expressing my attitude. The true genius, the true artist, is very rare, but Augustin Duncan is distinctly of that number. He is quite as incapable of doing any work that doesn’t seem fine to him as I am of writing anything at all unless I am going to be paid for it, and he is as firm in his refusals as I am. ”

“ We know her. She is a good girl. We love her. There is no more to say.”
“If it is money she wants,” exclaimed Dr. Barnhelm bitterly, “I will make it for her. It isn’t that I think anything money can buy too good for her, but for her to be selfish.”
“Hush,” said Paul very tenderly. “She has no mother; we must remember that. We are men, and we stand helpless before her womanhood, like children in the dark. Now! We will say no more. We will go to the bank to-day, while there is time. We will get that money, and to-morrow night, before the Medical Society, you shall make your name big, famous. ”

“ If no names in our theater to-day stand quite so high as these, I think it is the writer’s fault rather than the actors’, or possibly the fault of the audiences who have turned away from the romantic play to the grim and reticent drabness of the naturalistic drama. The glamor and the sweep of the old declamatory school naturally furnished the actor with a better chance to score than he has to-day. Then, of course, the great passions of the romances of thirty years ago find no response in our audiences. Life is quite as amazing as it ever was but by no means as mysterious. ”

“ He was too wise, too experienced; his very look put her on her guard against him. What a fortunate thing it was that men were such obvious creatures, good or bad; how silly to be afraid of either sort; one only had to be a little prudent, a little clever, and perhaps a little pretty. She laughed softly to herself. She was all of these, she knew, and more. She had no fear of the world; she was not afraid; she was eager to match her strength against it. She felt perfectly safe when, a few moments later, they shot out of the side street, in Dick’s big car, and turned up Broadway. ”

“ A forgetful actor, a careless stage hand, or the blowing of an electric fuse can and has spoiled many a good play, and all that he can do is suffer.
There is no second chance for a play; if its first night in New York is a failure it is dead forever. Luckily the first night audience, supposed to be so hard boiled and over critical, is the easiest audience in the world to sweep off its feet and the most generous in their real joy in the discovery of a good play. ”

“ Modern as he was in his practice of medicine, advanced as he was in his psychological studies, at heart he was an old-fashioned man, with all of the old-fashioned man’s ideas of love and marriage. For a moment he felt a feeling of repulsion, almost of horror, and he looked coldly at this young girl, who seemed to be so greatly changed by a few short weeks of luxury, but as he looked he thought of the day, only so lately passed, when she had been brought to them, white and lifeless, and as he saw her now, defiant, rebellious, in all the vigor of her splendid health, he smiled at her tenderly. ”

“ Keep in mind that no part of a play, and this is especially true of farce, is effective when it is not convincing. The more belief you create in your characters and situations, the greater your success. Truth in play writing is quite as valuable as it is in life, but, just as in life, there is a limit to the extent to which simple truth telling may safely be indulged in. When Hamlet told the players to “hold the mirror up to nature” he was quite aware that when they looked in that mirror they would see a reflection, not nature itself. In the arts, truth is art, but it isn’t always true. ”

“ He, himself, was a handsome, good-natured, easily managed young fellow. To the physical side of her, which as yet had only been aroused for one moment when she had thrown herself into John’s arms, Dick made absolutely no appeal, and twenty years of purity of thought and action had provided her with a defence against the casual promptings of instinctive desires too strong to be easily broken down. Of late a restless, nervous condition of mind and body might have warned her of a growing longing to solve for herself some of the depths of the world’s knowledge. ”

“ Experience has taught me that any manager who wants a play never lets an author out of his office until he has signed a contract, and he is crazy if he does. I have been roused from my bed at four o’clock in the morning and forced to promise a play to an excited manager before he allowed me to crawl back under the bedclothes, and any less ardent expression of willingness has grown to be very suspicious in my eyes. ”

“ There are and always have been two sorts of writers, the writer who tells what he sees, or has read or thought or been told, and the writer whose mind is a sort of old-fashioned kaleidoscope that forms little mental pictures quite without conscious effort. In other words, one writer uses trained observation, and the other has the gift of spontaneous creation. I have on several occasions seen the story line of an entire play laid out before me in one flash at a time when I, to the best of my knowledge, was not thinking of any such thing at all. ”

“ It is always so; a young man prays for fame, and when it comes he finds that it is an empty word. Another prays for money, and when his prayer is granted he finds that his happiness is gone. The woman prays for love; it comes, and she finds the bitterness of it. The mother prays for the life of her child, and the child grows up and breaks her heart.”
“This will not do, Martin.” Paul Crossett rose and put his hands kindly but firmly on the other’s shoulder. “You are worn out; you are not yourself; tell me, do you sleep?”
“Not when I can help it,” answered Dr. Barnhelm, with a shudder. ”

“ She often thought of him, more often than of her father or of John. The Doctor had loved her; she knew that; not as a father loves, through instinct, or as a lover, from desire, but because he had put her in the place of the one woman who had represented the idea of love in his life. He was a rich man, Dr. Crossett; what fun they could have together in Paris! If anything ever went wrong with her, she was going to him; she had quite made up her mind to that, but, after all, what could go wrong? Dick would always give her what she wanted, and if not Dick, there were plenty of others. ”

“ It is an absurdity to say that they ever make or break a play. A good play is a very sturdy and very important force in itself, of far more importance than the opinion of any critic, and in the end it lives or dies because it’s good or because it isn’t. Critics can, and have, made a bad play live for a short time, but they never killed a good one—and what’s more, they never wanted to. I have never been an especial pet of dramatic critics, my somewhat spectacular career not exactly fitting with their idea of the proper dignity of a dramatist. ”

“ Dick was going to be very good to her, she was sure of that, quite sure of her power over him. He was a good fellow; he had never thrilled her as John had done, for a moment, that very afternoon, but John was a prude; she never would have been able to endure life with him.
How silly of her to have hesitated. She should have left home long ago. She had supposed that it would almost break her heart, but she did not seem to care at all. She must remember that. Nothing ever really mattered, after all, if one had the courage to do as one pleased. Something always happened to make things all right. ”

“ This is natural enough when a writer has just finished a play or a novel, because, of course, he has put all he had into it and his mind feels empty. But this mood often comes at other times, and the best cure for it is to hang around doing nothing until you happen to read a fine novel that has just been published or see a really good play—the right play always sends me out of the theater walking on air, and I go to bed tingling all over to wake up the next morning with a new hope and a new determination. ”

“ He stopped as Dick Fenway entered, so pale and wild, that Dr. Crossett, to whom he was a stranger, stepped forward, as though to offer to support him, but stopped suddenly as Fenway cried out: “I did it! It was my fault! As she crossed the Avenue I turned my car, thinking she would stop, but she hated me, and she wouldn’t stop, and—and—I killed her.”
There was silence for a moment in the room, broken only by Fenway’s sobs and by a low moan of anguish from the father. Then came a sound of stumbling footsteps, slowly, very slowly advancing up the stairs. The sound of men carrying a heavy burden. ”

“ To me the thing that helps the theater most is a good show, no matter who writes it or who produces it or where it comes from; and to me a well-written, well-played play, produced by the commercial theater, is far more stimulating than an equally fine performance inspired by some art group. I have always admired Augustus Thomas; when I first came to New York in the early nineties he was the outstanding dramatist, and in fact as a writer of the better type of melodrama no man of my time has equaled him. ”

“ As most of our actors left us at the first demand of their union, we would have been sunk at once if Mr. Brady had not called for help, and we built up a cast from some very important actors who were not in sympathy with the Equity Society. There were, however, very few of these, and it became necessary for Mr. Brady himself to play the most difficult part, a butler with a big scene. He played him—big scene and all—plus the most amazing stage side-whiskers I had seen in many years. Mr. Brady loved it, whiskers and all, and had the time of his life. ”

“ Would you have spoken of her at all if you had not known that I saw you with her?”
“If she is such a terrible person, how is it that you know her so well?”
“Lola! I am a man. Men are different! Surely you must see that?”
“Why are they different? I am not a child. I am a woman! Why shouldn’t I have a little fun once in a while? Why should men have everything?”
“Do you call it fun to live the life that woman lives? You don’t know what she is; if you did you would rather stay shut up in this room as long as you were alive than call yourself a friend of hers.”
“John! You are absurd.” ”