of a sardonic humour; the love story was coloured by defeat and error and departure, and the hero’s final return “years later,” a lonely and nameless wanderer, battered by the world and the wreckage of his life, to the old ruined house in which already the rasping note of the wrecker’s crew was audible, was tempered by the romantic gallantry of Cyrano. The final meeting with the girl—the woman that he loved—their ultimate gallant resignation to fate and age and destiny—was wholly Cyranoic; and the final scene, in which the gigantic faithful negro slave—now an old man, almost blind, but with the savage loyalty and majesty of a race of African kings from whom he is descended—wraps his great arms around the rotting central column of the old ruined house, snaps it in two with a last convulsion of his dying strength, and brings the whole ruined temple thundering down to bury his beloved master, his hated “poor white” enemy the new owner, and himself, beneath its ruins—was obviously a product of the Samson legend.
In spite of this, there was good stuff in the play, dramatic conflict, moving pageantry. The character of the hard, grasping but immensely able materialist of “the lower class,” the newer South, was well realized—and had been derived from the character of the youth’s own uncle, William Pentland. The scenes between the hero and his father—the leonine and magnificently heroic “General”—were also good; as were those between the hero and Porter, the poor-white capitalist. Even in these romantic, grandly-mannered scenes he had already begun to use some of the powerful and inimitable materials of life itself and of his own experience: the speech of Porter was the plain, rich, pungent, earthly, strongly coloured speech of his mother, of his uncle William Pentland, and of the Pentland tribe.
But the scenes between the hero and the girl were less successful: the character of the girl was shadowy and uncertain—a kind of phantasmal combination of the characters of Roxane in Cyrano, and Ophelia—and her sweet romantic loveliness, the yearning tenderness of her pure love, did not provide a convincing foil and balance for the sardonic humour, the bad and almost brutal volume of wit, with which the hero marked his pain and love and bitterness and repulsed her advances. (This scene, by the way, was undoubtedly influenced a great deal by the Hamlet and Ophelia situation.)
Likewise—in various and interesting ways, what he had read and seen and actually experienced had shaped the tone and temper of his
