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[Illustration: DAVID BELASCO]
(Born, San Francisco, July 25, 1853)
The present Editor has had many opportunities of studying the theatre sideof David Belasco. He has been privileged to hear expressed, by this Edisonof our stage, diverse opinions about plays and players of the past, andabout insurgent experiments of the immediate hour. He has always found aman quickly responsive to the best memories of the past, an artist naivelychildlike in his love of the theatre, shaped by old conventions andmodified by new inventions. Belasco is the one individual manager to-daywho has a workshop of his own; he is pre-eminently a creator, whereas hiscontemporaries, like Charles Frohman, were emphatically manufacturers ofgoods in the amusement line.
Such a man is entitled to deep respect, for the "carry-on" spirit withwhich he holds aloft the banner used by Boucicault, Wallack, Palmer, andDaly. It is wrong to credit him with deafness to innovation, withblindness to new combinations. He is neither of these. It is difficult tofind a manager more willing to take infinite pains for effect, with noheed to the cost; it is impossible to place above him a director moresuccessful in creating atmosphere and in procuring unity of cooperationfrom his staff. No one, unless it be Winthrop Ames, gives more personalcare to a production than David Belasco. Considering that he was reared inthe commercial theatre, his position is unique and distinctive.
In the years to come, when students enter the Columbia University DramaticMuseum, founded by Professor Brander Matthews, they will be able to judge,from the model of the stage set for "Peter Grimm," exactly how far DavidBelasco's much-talked-of realism went; they will rightly regard it as thehigh point in accomplishment before the advent of the "new" scenery, whosephilosophy Belasco understands, but whose artistic spirit he cannotaccept. Maybe, by that time, there will be preserved for close examinationthe manuscripts of Belasco's plays—models of thoroughness, of managerialforesight. The present Editor had occasion once to go through thesetypewritten copies; and there remains impressed on the memory the detailedexposition in "The Darling of the Gods." Here was not only indicated everyshade of lighting, but the minute stage business for acting, revealing howwholly the manager gave himself over to the creation of atmosphere. Iexamined a mass of data—"boot plots," "light plots," "costume designs."Were the play ever published in this form, while it might confuse thegeneral reader, it would enlighten the specialist. It would be a key torealistic stage management, in which Belasco excels. Whether it be his ownplay, or that of some outsider, with whom, in the final product, Belascoalways collaborates, the manuscripts, constituting his producing library,are evidence of his instinctive eye for stage effect.
The details in the career of David Belasco are easily accessible. It ismost unfortunate that the stupendous record of his life's accomplishmentthus far, which, in two voluminous books, constituted the final labour ofthe late William Winter, is not more truly reflective of the man and hiswork. It fails to reproduce the flavour of the dramatic periods throughwhich Belasco passed, in his association with Dion Boucicault as privatesecretary, in his work with James A. Herne at Baldwin's Theatre, in SanFrancisco, in his pioneer realism at the old New York Madison SquareTheatre, whe