Representative American Plays/The Faith Healer

by William Vaughn Moody

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THE FAITH HEALER
BY
William Vaughn Moody

Copyright, 1909, 1910, by William Vaughn Moody

All Rights Reserved

Reprinted by permission of Mrs. Harriet C. Moody and by special arrangement with the Houghton Mifflin Company.

 

THE FAITH HEALER

The Faith Healer represents the drama of revolt, in which the protest of the individual is made against the controlling power of social law and custom. Only as long as the "Faith Healer" has confidence in himself does his power survive the ever-present disbelief of the world. This drama of revolt found its most powerful expression in the work of a group of dramatists to which Mr. Moody, Mr. George Cabot Lodge, and, to a certain extent, Mr. Percy MacKaye, belonged.

William Vaughn Moody was born at Spencer, Indiana, July 8, 1869, the son of Francis Burdette Moody, a steamboat captain, and Henrietta Stoy, to whom he pays such an exquisite tribute in "The Daguerreotype". He was brought up in the town of New Albany, Indiana, and after teaching in a neighboring school, came east to Riverside Academy, New York, where he also taught while preparing to enter Harvard College, from which he graduated in 1893. Having already completed his work for the bachelor's degree in 1892 he travelled in Europe for a year and then returning to the Graduate School at Harvard University he took his master's degree in 1894. After being a member of the Department of English at Harvard for a year, he became Instructor in English at the University of Chicago in 1895 and remained there, as Instructor and Assistant Professor, until 1903. Two European trips occurred during this period and Mr. Moody's poems, especially the lyrics and the verse plays, show the result of the experiences encountered in his wanderings. Notwithstanding his success as a teacher and lecturer, he gave up active work at the University of Chicago after 1902, retaining merely a nominal connection with the English department. He felt that his best work was to be done as a poet and to do that work well he must have freedom from academic drudgery. His History of English Literature written in collaboration with Robert M. Lovett, and the publications of which he was editor, served simply to provide him with the means to devote himself to poetry. Already he had become recognized through his poems on public affairs, such as the "Ode in Time of Hesitation," as one of the foremost of American poets, and though his first volume, published in 1902, contained only a small number of poems, this was due to his capacity for selection rather than to lack of inspiration.

Mr. Moody's early death, which occurred at Colorado Springs, October 17, 1910, cut short his career just as his work was reaching its best development. His lyrics are exquisite and at times magnificent in their phrasing. In the poems on public affairs he expresses true patriotism and concern for his country's fidelity to her ideals. In his love poetry he shows deep insight into the emotional 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), The Fire Bringer (1904), The Great Divide (1909), and The Faith Healer (1909) and (1910). An interesting volume entitled Some Letters of William Vaughn Moody, edited by Daniel E. Mason, was published in 1913. For general criticism of Moody's work, see articles by N. O. Barr, The Lyrist and Lyric Dramatist, and by C. H. Caffin, The Dramatist, in The Drama, No. 2, May, 1911. For criticism of The Faith Healer see The Nation, vol. 88, pp. 175-76, Feb., 1909, Hampton's Magazine, Vol. 24, pp. 561-65, April, 1910. Criticism of The Great Divide is found in The Nation, Vol. 89, p. 387, October, 1909, and by B. R. Hertz in The Forum, vol. 43, pp. 90-92, Jan., 1910.

Mrs. Moody has kindly revised the text of the edition of 1912 for the present editor, who gratefully acknowledges her courtesy in obtaining for him the right to reprint the play and for valuable biographical information.