ful money-making sensational piece of late years was
written by a scene painter, and the poorest actors frequently write
very good pieces, while good actors who possess talent for scribbling,
almost always do well as playwrights. Only one fault do they all
exhibit, without any exception, so far as my experience has run: they
are all utterly oblivious of the meaning of the eighth commandment, and
seem to regard plagiarism not as theft, but as a favor to the author
whose literary property they steal. This is the worst that can be said
about actor-authors, and to the rule there are no exceptions that ever
I heard of. Actor-authors are unmitigated pirates of the most utterly
unscrupulous sort, who crib whole chapters out of novels, word for
word, without shame or acknowledgment, and write successful plays by
filching other men's ideas, making a patchwork. Perhaps the most
shameless of the whole raft of these actor-authors is Lester Wallack,
whose two plays, the "Veteran" and "Rose-dale," are marvels of
patchwork of this sort. In the first all the Arab characters and
several scenes, language and all, are taken straight out of Captain
James Grant's nearly forgotten novel of the, "Queen's Own," and in the
second most of the plot and the most successful comic scene of the play
come bodily from Colonel Hamley's "Lady Lee's Widowhood," another
military novel. The provoking part of all this thieving in Wallack is,
that other parts of his plays show that the man has talent enough to
write, if he were not too lazy to work; but this preference of theft to
labor is so common among actor-authors that nothing will ever check it
but an extension of the copyright law in the interests of justice; for
moral sense in the direction of the eighth commandment seems to be
utterly unknown among them. The truth of the old adage about "hawks
pikeing out hawks 'een" is, however, curiously exemplified in the
scruples which the same men display as managers toward appropriating a
play, no matter how much of a piracy in itself, without payment to the
playwright, unless he be a Frenchman, when the case at once becomes
altered. Novelists and foreign dramatists having no legal rights,
actor-authors appear to think they have also no moral rights entitled
to respect. This is the one stain on the character of actor-authors
from which not one of them is free, or ever has been free, no matter
what his time and nation. From Shakespeare to Brougham, from Moliere to