Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected, but repeatedunconventional punctuation and accents remain.
The cover was created by the transcriber by adding the title to theoriginal cover and is placed in the public domain.
THE MODERN DRAMA SERIES
EDITED BY EDWIN BJÖRKMAN
THE RED LIGHT OF MARS
GEORGE BRONSON-HOWARD
THE RED LIGHT OF MARS
OR
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF THE DEVIL
A PHILOSOPHICAL COMEDY BY
GEORGE BRONSON-HOWARD
NEW YORK
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
MCMXIII
COPYRIGHT 1913 THE JOHN W. RUMSEY CO.
COPYRIGHT 1913 MITCHELL KENNERLEY
THE·PLIMPTON·PRESS
NORWOOD·MASS·U·S·A
CONTENTS
vii
INTRODUCTION
There is to me something typically Americanabout the life-story leading up to the play containedin this volume—a story in which the creationand publication of that play will undoubtedly representonly a temporary climax. I want to tell it, not only asa curiosity, but as something that has genuine significanceto the world of letters. The meaning of thisstory, read in conjunction with the work that hasgrown out of it, is that the time when books werebred by books only is about gone now. The newliterature will come straight out of life, apparently,and will in consequence have made a decided gain, eventhough it may have lost something else. As it springsforth, full-blooded and ready-tongued, we shall undoubtedlyhear melancholy voices proclaim the vulgarizationof poetry. But if, on hearing such protestsrising from some anæmic scholar’s cloistered cell, welook back through the ages and fix our gaze not onlyon the little followers but on the great leaders—onthe Dantes and Shakespeares and Cervanteses andMolières—then we shall find that almost always theterm of opprobrium quoted above has implied a vitalizationof the supposedly menaced art form.
The author of “The Red Light of Mars” is nowin his thirtieth year, having been born on January 7,1884, in Howard County, Maryland. His father wasa Baltimore merchant and insurance broker, who, inhis turn, had a Confederate blockade runner for fatherand an officer in the English army for grandfather.viiiHis mothe