phases of life. Besides the lyrics he had to his credit the verse dramas, and the prose plays with which his widest public notice came. The Fire Bringer, which celebrated the sacrifice of Prometheus in bringing fire to mankind; The Masque of Judgment, which had for its theme the conquest of all things by the serpent; and the incomplete fragment, The Death of Eve, were to have formed a trilogy in which the relations of God and man were to have been developed dramatically, according to the modern doctrine of revolt. The plays in verse show the influence of the Greek drama, and, as is the case with all Mr. Moody's work, the influence of Puritanism and the reaction against it. The Fire Bringer was written with the idea of actual stage production.
As early as 1898 Mr. Moody had begun to think of the theme of a faith healer as a fit subject for a play, which at first he planned to write in verse. He put aside this theme for a time, however, to write The Great Divide, which was performed first under the title of The Sabine Woman by Miss Margaret Anglin in Chicago, March, 1906. It was afterward played at the Princess Theatre, New York, in October, 1906, by Mr. Henry Miller and Miss Anglin and had a long run there and throughout the United States. In September, 1909, it was produced for a short run at the Adelphi Theatre in London. The Great Divide portrayed the conflict of the ideals of Puritanism, with its capacity of self-torture, and the freer conceptions of life prevalent in the West.
The Faith Healer was first played in St. Louis on March 15, 1909. It was put on at the Savoy Theatre, New York, January 19, 1910, and was played at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on January 24, 1910. It was not a popular success but it is a significant play. The situation is dramatic and the handling convincing, while the native quality of the play is apparent. The struggle which is the essential part of every drama occurs here between human love and the dedication to a purpose and is only incidentally associated with the religious type. The obvious means of ending the struggle would have been to have "The Healer" either renounce love for his dedicated purpose or renounce the purpose in favor of his love. Mr. Moody with a finer art shows in the play that love and work are not necessarily irreconcilable interests and that by substituting for the selfishness of a personal claim the more impersonal and unselfish type of love, the hero could make a resolution of his problem which included every aspect of a man's life.
The most convenient form in which to read Mr. Moody's work is in the complete edition, the Poems and Plays of William Vaughn Moody, in two volumes, published by the Houghton, Mifflin Company in 1912. This edition contains a study of Mr. Moody's work and a brief biography by Professor John M. Manly, to whom the present editor acknowledges his indebtedness. The separate publications of Mr. Moody include The Masque of Judgment (1900), Poems (1902),
