as monstrous a group of villains as ever
walked the earth. Black Will and Shakbag belong to the darkest cesspool
of London iniquity. Clarke the Painter has no individuality beyond a
readiness to poison all and sundry for a reward. Michael would be a
murderer were he not a coward. Greene is a revengeful sleuth-hound,
tracking his victim down relentlessly from place to place. Arden is a
miser in business, and a weak, gullible fool at home, alternately raging
with jealous suspicion, and fawning with fatuous trustfulness upon the
man who is wronging him. Mosbie is a cold-blooded, underhand villain
whose pious resolutions and protestations of love could only deceive
those blinded by fate, and whose preference for crooked, left-handed
methods is in tune with his vile intention of murdering the woman who
loves him. Alice, the representative of womankind among these beast-men,
the wife, the passionately loving mistress, is an arch-deceiver, an
absolutely brazen liar and murderess, unblushing and tireless in
soliciting the affection of a man who hardly cares for her, desperately
enamoured. Alone in the group Franklin is endowed with the ordinary
human revulsion from folly and wickedness, but his character is sketched
too lightly to relieve the darkness. Such creatures may fascinate us by
their defiance of the laws that bind us. Alice, particularly, does so.
She possesses--as Michael does, to a less degree--at least a few natural
traits; her conscience is not quite dead, and her love is strong,
although even this is represented as a huge deformity, driving her to
the negation of that womanhood to which it should belong. Single scenes,
too, if seen or read in isolation from the main body of the play, have a
certain individual strength, giving us glimpses of the workings of a
human heart. But the play as a whole offers no inspiration, presents no
aspects of beauty, holds up no mirror to ourselves. One lesson it
teaches, that happiness cannot be won by crime. Alice and Mosbie are
never permitted to escape from the consequences of their sin, in the
form of anxiety, suspicion, remorse, fear, mutual recrimination, and
death. But, throughout, the dramatist's purpose is not art. He is the
apostle of realism, coarsened by a love of the horrible and unclean. The
power of his realism is undeniable. His two protagonists are line for
line portraits of the beings they are intended to represent. The
silhouettes of Black Will and Shakbag are almo