Criticism of "The Nigger"

There is a very real interest, and a great deal of pride among undergraduates in Mr. Sheldon's career. To have had Mrs. Fiske produce his first play and the New Theatre his second, is not only an enviable achievement for the author, but a hopeful forecast of that national drama towards which so much aspiration points.

"The Nigger" fulfills the promise of "Salvation Nell,"--both good and bad. It is a play full of emotional variation; it thrills the audience and leaves it tired. Excitement is added to horror, and despair to feverish action. Mr. Sheldon exhibits racial hatreds, sinister politics fierce love, and pathetic optimism against a background of a tragic past. It is the story of a Southern governor who discovers that his grandmother was a negress, through the unsolicited investigation of the anti-prohibition interests. Mr. Sheldon has staged the consequences of that discovery with a skiff that is certain, and big with the sense of the blind inevitability of the facts.

The disappointment of the play is that its central theme,--the influence of a dead love on a living one,--is obscured again and again by the most obvious kind of an attempt to furnish thrills, and "sustain the interest." There is a bloodcurdling lynching in the first act, the sensationalism of which is in contrast to its trivial significance in the tragedy. It is a symptom of the danger that Mr. Sheldon's peculiar talent carries with it.

That danger is that Mr. Sheldon will go the way of popular Broadway playwrights in exploiting the emotions of his audience to no purpose. If he does, he will probably do so with much greater daring, and with decided success. But he will be following the lead of his surprising technical facility, instead of that of his insight into human tragedy. "The Nigger" is a mixture of sharp vision and professional callousness. Perhaps it is the parting of the ways.