Nevertheless, the only significance of the play lies outside of its artistic sphere, and belongs entirely to its effort to help in this great social reform. The only strong applause, which probably repeats itself every evening, broke out when the old, good-natured physician said that as soon as women have the vote the white slavers will be sent to the electric chair. But it is worth while to examine the sermon which a play of this type really preaches, and to become aware of the illusions with which the thoughtless public receives this message. All which we see there on the stage is taken by the masses as a remonstrance against the old, cowardly policy of silence, and the play is to work as a great proof that complete frankness and clear insight can help the daughters of the community.
The whole play contains the sad story of two girls. There is Nell. What happened to her? She is the daughter of a respectable banker in a small town. A scoundrel, a commercial white slaver, a typical Broadway “cadet” with luring manners, goes to the small town, finds access to the church parlours, is introduced to the girl, and after some courtship he elopes with her and makes her believe that they are correctly married. After the fraudulent marriage with a falsified license he brings her into a metropolitan disorderly house and holds her there by force. Of course this is brutal stage exaggeration, but even if this impossibility were true, what conclusion are we to draw, and what advice are we to give? Does it mean that in future a young girl who meets a nice chap in the church socials of her native town ought to keep away from him, because she ought all the time to think that he might be a delegate of a Broadway brothel? To fill a girl with suspicions in a case like that of Nell would be no wiser than to tell the ordinary man that he ought not to deposit his earnings in any bank, because the cashier might run away with it. To be sure, it would have been better if Nell had not eloped, but is there any knowledge of sexual questions which would have helped her to a wiser decision? On the contrary, she said she did elope because her life in the small town was so uninteresting, and she felt so lonely and was longing for the life of love. She knew all which was to be known then, and if there had been any power to hold her back from the foolish elopement it could have been only a kind of instinctive respect for the traditional demands of society, that kind of respect which grows up from the policy of silence and is trampled to the ground by the policy of loud talk.
The other girl in the play is Sylvia. Her fate is very different. She needs melodramatic money for her sick mother. Her earnings in the department store are not enough. The sly owner of a treacherous employment agency has given her a card over the counter, advising her to come there, when she needs extra employment. The agency keeps open in the evening. She tells her mother that she will seek some extra work there. The mother warns her that there are so many traps for decent girls, and she answers that she is not afraid and that she will be on the lookout. She goes there, and the skilful owner of the agency shows her how miserable the pay would be for any decent evening work, and how easily she can earn all the money she needs for her mother if she is willing to be paid by men. At first she refuses with pathos, but under the suggestive pressure of luring arguments she slowly weakens, and finally consents to exchange her street gown for a fantastic costume of half-nakedness. The feelings of the audience are saved by the detective who breaks in at the decisive moment, but the arguments of the advocates of sexual education cannot possibly be saved after that voluntary yielding. Sylvia knows what she has to expect, and no more intense perusal of literature on the subject of prostitution would have changed her mind. What else in the world could have helped her in such an hour but a still stronger feeling of instinctive repugnance? If Sylvia was actually to put her fate on a mere calculation, with a full knowledge of all the sociological facts involved, she probably reasoned wrongly in dealing with this particular employment agency, but was on the whole not so wrong in deciding that a frivolous life would be the most reasonable way out of her financial difficulties, as her sexual education would include, of course, a sufficient knowledge of all which is needed to avoid conception and infection. She would therefore know that after a little while of serving the lust of men she would be just as intact and just as attractive. If society has the wish to force Sylvia to a decision in the opposite direction, only one way is open: to make the belief in the sacred value of virtue so deep and powerful that any mere reasoning and calculation loses its strength. But that is possible only through an education which relies on the instinctive respect and mystical belief. Only a policy of silence could have saved Sylvia, because that alone would have implanted in her mind an ineffable idea of unknown horrors which would await her when she broke the sacred ring of chastity.
The climax of public discussions was reached when America had its season of Brieux' “Damaged Goods.” Its topic is entirely different, as it deals exclusively with the spreading of contagious diseases and the prevention of their destructive influence on the family. Yet the doubt whether such a dramatized medical lesson belongs on the metropolitan stage has here exactly the same justification. Nevertheless, it brings its new set of issues. Brieux' play does not deserve any interest as a drama. With complete sincerity the theatre programme announces, “The object of this play is a study of the disease of syphilis in its bearing on marriage.” The play was first produced in Paris in the year 1901. It began its great medical teaching in America in the spring of 1913. Even those who have only superficial contact with medicine know that the twelve years which lie between those dates have seen the greatest progress in the study of syphilis which has ever been made. It is sufficient to think of the Wassermann test, the Ehrlich treatment, the new discoveries concerning the relations of lues and brain disease, and many other details in order to understand that a clinical lesson about this disease written in the first year of the century must be utterly antiquated in its fourteenth year. We might just as well teach the fighting of tuberculosis with the clinical textbook of thirty years ago.
How misleading many of the claims of the play are ought to have struck even the unscientific audience. The real centre of the so-called drama is that the father and the grandmother of the diseased infant are willing to risk the health of the wet nurse rather than to allow the child to go over to artificial feeding. The whole play loses its chief point and its greatest pathetic speech if we do not accept the Parisian view that a sickly child must die if it has its milk from the bottle. The Boston audience wildly applauded the great speech of the grandmother who wants to poison the nurse rather than to sacrifice her grandchild to the drinking of sterilized milk, and yet it was an audience which surely was brought up on the bottle. It would be very easy to write another play in which quite different medical views are presented, and where will it lead us if the various treatments of tuberculosis, perhaps by the Friedmann cures, or of diphtheria, perhaps by chiropractice or osteopathy, are to be fought out on the stage until finally the editors of Life would write a play around their usual thesis that the physicians are destroying mankind and that our modern medicine is humbug. As long as the drama shows us human elements, every one can be a party and can take a stand for the motives of his heart. But if the stage presents arguments on scientific questions in which no public is able to examine the facts, the way is open for any one-sided propaganda.
Moreover, what, after all, are the lessons which the men are to learn from these three hours of talk on syphilis? To be sure, it is suggested that it would be best if every young man were to marry early and remain faithful to his wife and take care that she remain faithful to him. But this aphorism will make very little impression on the kind of listener whose tendency would naturally turn him in other directions. He hears in the play far more facts which encourage him in his selfish instincts. He hears the old doctor assuring his patient that not more than a negligible 10 per cent. of all men enter married life without having had sexual intercourse with women. He hears that the disease can be easily cured, that he may marry quite safely after three years, that the harm done to the child can be removed, and that no one ought to be blamed for acquiring the disease, as anybody may acquire it and that it is only a matter of good or bad luck. The president of the Medical Society in Boston drew the perfectly correct consequences when in a warm recommendation of the play he emphasized the importance of the knowledge about the disease, inasmuch as any one may acquire it in a hundred ways which have nothing to do with sexual life. He says anybody may get syphilis by wetting a lead pencil with his lips or from an infected towel or from a pipe or from a drinking glass or from a cigarette. This is medically entirely correct, and yet if Brieux had added this medical truth to all the other medical sayings of his doctor, he would have
