SOURCE: "Scribe," in Still More Prejudice, Alfred A. Knopf, 1925, pp. 44-8.

Walkley attacks Scribe's plays as the productions of a hack pandering to the tastes of a bourgeois audience.

Scribe, the greatest of all theatrical purveyors, died so long ago (1861), and is so completely forgotten, that it is high time to have a book about him. A Professor in the University of California, Dr. Neil Cole Arvin, obliges with one—Eugène Scribe and the French Theatre, written from that distance which lends enchantment to the view as well as some errors in perspective. Was Scribe really so important in the history of the theatre? Did he so markedly influence his successors? "Practically every innovation, every reform, every novelty found in the drama of the nineteenth century," says Dr. Arvin, "originated with Scribe, and the highest point in the development of the main genres of dramatic literature was...