Produced by MFR, Les Galloway and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) Transcriber’s Notes Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected, but repeated unconventional punctuation and accents remain. Italics are represented thus _italic_. 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 [Illustration] 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 PAGE INTRODUCTION vii LIST OF PLAYS BY GEORGE BRONSON-HOWARD x THE RED LIGHT OF MARS 1 INTRODUCTION There is to me something typically American about the life-story leading up to the play contained in this volume—a story in which the creation and publication of that play will undoubtedly represent only a temporary climax. I want to tell it, not only as a curiosity, but as something that has genuine significance to the world of letters. The meaning of this story, read in conjunction with the work that has grown out of it, is that the time when books were bred by books only is about gone now. The new literature will come straight out of life, apparently, and will in consequence have made a decided gain, even though it may have lost something else. As it springs forth, full-blooded and ready-tongued, we shall undoubtedly hear melancholy voices proclaim the _vulgarization_ of poetry. But if, on hearing such protests rising from some anæmic scholar’s cloistered cell, we look back through the ages and fix our gaze not only on the little followers but on the great leaders—on the Dantes and Shakespeares and Cervanteses and Molières—then we shall find that almost always the term of opprobrium quoted above has implied a _vitalization_ of the supposedly menaced art form.