Volume 1 — “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.’”