Belasco was only twenty-nine years old when he brought his career in San Francisco to an end and embarked on the venture which was at last to establish him in the Theatre of New York. He had been eleven years on the stage. A brief retrospect and summary of his early achievement will be useful here. Throughout his life he had enjoyed the blessing of family affection, admiration, and sympathy, and he had received respectable schooling. Otherwise, his experience had been one of unremitting, strenuous, often anxious, toil; frequent hardship, injustice, disappointment,—in short, a painfully laborious struggle. He had been, in childhood, a circus rider, a newsboy, a messenger, a willing, helpful drudge, a shopboy in a cigar factory and in a bookstore; then, as he grew older, a scribbler for the newspapers, a salesman of haberdashery, an itinerant peddler, a strolling player, a reader and reciter, a mimic, a theatrical manager, an agent “in advance” of theatrical companies, a teacher of acting, a scene painter, a stage manager, and a playwright. He had seen much of the best acting of his period and had been intimately associated with many leaders of the Stage,—sometimes as student and assistant, sometimes as adviser and director. He had acted, in all sorts of circumstances and in all sorts of places, more than 170 parts,—ranging from mere bits to characters of the highest and most exacting order. He had altered, adapted, rewritten, or written more than 100 plays and he had been the responsible director in the production of more than three times that number. A catalogue is seldom interesting reading; nevertheless, students of the Theatre and of Belasco’s extraordinary career will do well to ponder the following significant though incomplete schedule of the plays set upon the stage under his direction prior to midsummer, 1882:

Minute exposition of all the early dramatic works of Belasco is not practicable; a succinct estimate of their quality will suffice here. Crudity is often obvious in them—as it is in the early works of almost all writers—and it sometimes is notably visible in the sentiment and the style. Nevertheless, they display the operation of a mind naturally prone to the dramatic form of expression, frequently animated by the vitality of its own experience, steadily if slowly growing in self-mastery of its faculties, and at once keenly observant of, and quickly sympathetic with, contrasted aspects of life. Along with defects,—namely, perverse preoccupation with non-essential details, occasional verbosity, extravagant premises, and involved construction,—they exhibit expert inventive ability, perspicacious sense of character, acute perception of strong dramatic climax, the faculty of humor, much tenderness of heart, wide knowledge of human misery and human joy, special sympathy with woman, and the skill to tell a story in action. Belasco’s dramatic works, before he left San Francisco, exceed not only in number but in merit and practical utility those of many other writers produced as the whole labor of a long lifetime, and the basis of reputation and respect: at least two of his early plays—“Hearts of Oak” and “La Belle Russe”—were, even before he came to the East, gaining fortunes—for other persons. And for a long, long while afterward other persons were to enjoy the chief profit of his labor: it was not until more than thirteen years later that he was able to launch a successful play,—“The Heart of Maryland,”—and retain personal control of it.

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