After a consultation, Mr. Justice Wadsworth said:
’Several of us have arrived at the conclusion,
your Excellency, that it would be an error to hang
the prisoner for killing Szczepanik, instead of for
killing the other man, since it is proven that he did
not kill Szczepanik.’
’On the contrary, it is proven that he did kill
Szczepanik. By the French precedent, it is plain
that we must abide by the finding of the court.’
‘But Szczepanik is still alive.’
In the end it was found impossible to ignore or get
around the French precedent. There could be
but one result: Clayton was delivered over for
the execution. It made an immense excitement;
the State rose as one man and clamored for Clayton’s
pardon and retrial. The governor issued the
pardon, but the Supreme Court was in duty bound to
annul it, and did so, and poor Clayton was hanged
yesterday. The city is draped in black, and,
indeed, the like may be said of the State. All
America is vocal with scorn of ‘French justice,’
and of the malignant little soldiers who invented
it and inflicted it upon the other Christian lands.
[1] Pronounced (approximately) Shepannik.
I have a project to suggest. But first I will
write a chapter of introduction.
I have just been witnessing a remarkable play, here
at the Burg Theatre in Vienna. I do not know
of any play that much resembles it. In fact,
it is such a departure from the common laws of the
drama that the name ‘play’ doesn’t
seem to fit it quite snugly. However, whatever
else it may be, it is in any case a great and stately
metaphysical poem, and deeply fascinating. ‘Deeply
fascinating’ is the right term: for the
audience sat four hours and five minutes without thrice
breaking into applause, except at the close of each
act; sat rapt and silent —fascinated.
This piece is ‘The Master of Palmyra.’
It is twenty years old; yet I doubt if you have ever
heard of it. It is by Wilbrandt, and is his
masterpiece and the work which is to make his name
permanent in German literature. It has never
been played anywhere except in Berlin and in the great
Burg Theatre in Vienna. Yet whenever it is put
on the stage it packs the house, and the free list
is suspended. I know people who have seem it
ten times; they know the most of it by heart; they
do not tire of it; and they say they shall still be
quite willing to go and sit under its spell whenever
they get the opportunity.
There is a dash of metempsychosis in it—and
it is the strength of the piece. The play gave
me the sense of the passage of a dimly connected procession
of dream-pictures. The scene of it is Palmyra
in Roman times. It covers a wide stretch of time—I
don’t know how many years—and in the
course of it the chief actress is reincarnated several
times: four times she is a more or less young
woman, and once she is a lad. In the first act
she is Zoe—a Christian girl who has wandered
across the desert from Damascus to try to Christianise
the Zeus-worshipping pagans of Palmyra. In this
character she is wholly spiritual, a religious enthusiast,
a devotee who covets martyrdom—and gets
it.
