Life — April 26, 1894 — page 14: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

deals with a sin, a sin common in everyday life. But it surrounds it with no glamour of sentiment, no halo of romance, not even with the luxury in which most dramatists environ their erring creations. It presents the wrong in its nakedness and its misery. LIFE believes that the realism of the picture, the art- istic fidelity of the treatment and the absence of effort to make dra- matic capital by any falsification of effect justifies the choice of the subject. By those who hold that the sole mission of the stage is to interest of amuse, it must be admitted that this object is achieved by “ Margaret Flem- ing.” It is a human story told in the simplest dramatic form, There is no effort made for climaxes or situations. The action runs on evenly and the transition from act to act is like turning over the leaf of a book to begin a new chapter. Some one has said that the tremendous production of novels —a production that in volume exceeds all other forms of liter- ature put together—is based for AND ETHEL BLUSHED. the most part on human curios- Tommy: YES, CATS CAN SEEN THE DARK AND SO CAN ETHEL; ‘CAUSE WHEN MR, WRIGHT Be A novel may ie one WALKED 1870 THE PARLOR WIIEN SHE WAS SITTIN’ ALL ALONE 1 THE DARK, I'MEARD HER say Characteristics, but the mystifi 'T GET SHAVED TO-DAY.” cation concerning “how it is AN AMERICAN IBSEN. —~O much has been written and said about the propriety of putting on the stage such a story as is told in the play of “ Margaret Fleming,” that Lire may be taken to task for finding in it anything to commend, all the more as Lire has so frequently inveighed against the imported filth which has of late been brought to the notice of the theatre- going public. There are many who hold that it is no part of the stage’s work to instruct or to preach sermons. Those who maintain that the stage, besides amusing should educate and elevate, will find this play a moral lesson taught more frankly and more graphically than it could be from the pulpit. The play “UNCALLED FOR.” comicbooks.com