BRONSON HOWARD
In considering the present standing of the American drama, compared with the time when there was little or nothing worthy of the name, the one significant fact has been the gradual growth of a body of men engaged in writing plays. Up to the time I started in 1870, American plays had been written only sporadically here and there by men and women who never met each other, who had no personal acquaintance of any kind, no sympathies, no exchange of views; in fact, no means of building up such a body of thought in connection with their art as is necessary to form what is called a school.
In what we now style Broadway productions the late Augustin Daly stood absolutely alone, seeing no other future for his own dramatic works except by his own presentation of them. Except for Daly, I was practically alone; but he offered me the same opportunity and promise for the future that he had given to himself. From him developed a school of managers willing and eager to produce American plays on American subjects. Other writers began to drop into the profession; but still they seldom met, and it was not until about 1890 that they suddenly discovered themselves as a body of dramatists. This was at a private supper given at the Lotos Club to the veteran playwright Charles Gaylor, who far antedated Daly himself. To the astonishment of those making the list of guests for that supper, upward of fifty men writing in America who produced plays were professionally entitled to invitations, and thirty-five were actually present at the supper. A toast to seven women writers not present was also honoured.
This was the origin of the American Dramatists Club. The moment these men began to know each other personally, the process of intellectual attrition began, which will probably result eventually in a strong school. That supper took place only sixteen years ago; so we are yet only in the beginning of the great movement. Incidentally, it is also necessarily the beginning of a school of dramatic criticism of that art. It is difficult to suppose that a body of critics, merely learned in the dramatic art of Europe, can be regarded as forming a school of America.
To go to Paris to finish your education in dramatic art, and return to New York and make comments on what you see in the theatre, is not to be an American dramatic critic, nor does it tend in any way to found a school of American dramatic criticism. The same is true of the man who remains in New York and gets his knowledge of the drama from reading foreign newspapers and books.
I stated in a former article in this magazine, "First Nights in London and New York," that is was only within the last twenty-five or thirty years that a comparison between the cities and the conditions had become possible, for the reason that prior to that time there was really no American drama. There were a few American plays, and their first productions did not assume the least importance as social events. As far as any comparison is possible between the early American dramatists (I mean the first of the dramatists who were the starting point in the later '60's and early '70's) and those of the present day, I think of only two important points. There was one advantage in each case. The earlier dramatists had their choice of many great typical American characters, such as represented in Solon Shingle, Colonel Sellers, Joshua Whitcomb, Bardwell Slote, Mose, Davy Crockett, Pudd'nhead Wilson, and many others.
This advantage was similar in a small way to the tremendous advantage that the earliest Greek dramatists had in treating the elemental emotions; on the other hand, we earlier writers in America were liable to many errors, some of them actually childish, which the young dramatist of to-day, in constant association with his fellow playwrights, and placing his work almost in daily comparison with theirs, could not commit. To do so a man would have to be a much greater fool than were any of us; and the general improvement in the technical work of plays by young dramatists now, even plays that are essentially weak and which fail, is decided encouragement and satisfaction to one of my age who can look back over the whole movement.
The American dramatist of to-day, without those great and specially prominent American characters who stood, as it were, ready to go on the stage, has come to make a closer study of American society than his predecessors did. They are keen also in seizing strikingly marked new types in American life as they developed before the public from decade to decade.
A notable instance is the exploitation by Charles Klein of the present-day captain of industry in "The Lion and the Mouse." The leading character in the play is differentiated on the stage, as in life, from the Wall Street giant of about 1890, as illustrated in one of my own plays, "The Henrietta." Mr. Klein's character of the financial magnate has developed in this country since my active days of playwriting, and the younger dramatist was lying in wait, ready for him, and ready to seize his peculiarities for stage purposes.
Another thing is the fact that our dramatists are doing what our literary men have done, namely, availing themselves of the striking local peculiarities in various parts of the country. A marked illustration of this now before the public is Edward Milton Royle's "Squawman," recently at Wallack's Theatre. The dramatist has caught his picture just in the nick of time, just before the facts of life in the Indian Territory are passing away. He has preserved the picture for us as George W. Cable, the novelist, preserved pictures of Creole life of old New Orleans, made at the last possible moment.
I could go on mentioning many other plays illustrating phases of life and society in America, and there could be no better or more positive proof that a school of American dramatists already exists. This school will undoubtedly continue to improve in the technical quality of its work, exactly as it has done in the past, and probably with more rapidity.
The question has been discussed as to whether we are ever likely to produce an Ibsen or a Shaw, and under what conditions he would be received. As far as concerns what may happen in the future in the way of producing absolutely great dramatists and great plays, using the word 'great' in the international and historical sense, the opinion of anyone on that subject is mere guesswork and absolutely valueless.
The greatest drama in history was produced by Greece about four or five centuries before Christ, and for a few generations afterward. Since Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, Greece has scarcely given us anything. Aristophanes and Menander are of course remembered, but the writers who endeavoured to follow in the footsteps of the masters were of far inferior merit. The Roman Empire existed for nearly two thousand years without producing any drama of its own worthy of the name. The Romans were not a dramatic people. The works of the so-called Latin dramatists, such as those of Plautus and Terence, were mere imitations of the Greek.
France and England had sudden bursts of greatness followed by general mediocrity, with occasional great writers whose advent could not possibly have been predicted by anything in art preceding them. Even the exception to this in France, in the middle of the nineteenth century, was apparently a flash of light that disappeared almost as suddenly as it came. What is the use of posing as a prophet with such a record of the past? Anyone else is at liberty to do so. I would as soon act as harlequin. Was there any wise man in England who, twenty-four hours before that momentous event in April, 1564, could predict that a baby named William Shakespeare would be born the next day? To say that an American dramatist is to appear this year or in a thousand years who will make an epoch is simply ridiculous.
That Ibsen exercised and will exercise great influence on American dramatists there can be little doubt. His skill was no mere accident. He was the most finished development of the French school of the nineteenth century, as well as the most highly artificial individual dramatist of that school. I call it the strictly logical school of dramatic construction. I use the word 'artificial' in its more artistic sense, as opposed to the so-called natural school. His subjects of course were national, and not French. Whether his pessimism was national or personal, I have not been able to discover. It seemed to me that he was a pessimistic man dealing with a nation inclined to pessimism, but that had nothing to do with the technical qualities of the man any more than the national peculiarities of Denmark had to do with Thorvaldsen as a follower of Greek sculpture.
As to the policy of our theatre managers, I confess that they do follow each other; but it is simply because they think the leader they happen to be following has discovered a current of temporary popular taste. The authors have the same interest as the managers, and you will always find them watching the public taste in the same manner.
Occasionally an individual dramatist, and not always the best from a technical point of view, will develop such a strong personal bias as to write on subjects suggested by his own tastes, without any regard to the current of popular wishes. If he is a strong enough man he will become a leader of the public in his dramatic tastes. Sometimes in rare instances he will influence the public so decidedly that he compels the contemporary school of writers to follow him. This has been the case in all periods. I need not mention Shakespeare, as everything said about him is a matter of course.
Take the vile dramatic era of Charles II. Wycherley led the brutes, but Congreve came up and combatted with his brilliant comedies the vileness of the Restoration school, and Hallam says of him that he introduced decency to the stage that afterward drove his own comedies off it. A little after Congreve, the school, so to speak, for we have nothing but the school, was so stupid that it brought forth no great writers, and produced weak, sentimental plays. Then came Goldsmith, who wrote "She Stoops to Conquer" actually as a protest against the feeble sentimentality I have referred to. Richard Brinsley Sheridan was made possible by Goldsmith. We went on after that with a school of old comedies. When we speak of the "old comedies," I am not talking about Beaumont and Fletcher, nor Wycherley, nor Vanbrugh, nor even Congreve, but of the comedy of Goldsmith in the third quarter of the eighteenth century down to Bulwer Lytton's "Money" and Boucicault's "London Assurance," bringing us to about 1840. Then there swung a school of what we call the palmy days of old comedy, and in the '40's it dwindled to nothing, and England and America waited until the early '60's. Then came Tom Robertson with his so-called "tea-cup and saucer" school, which consisted of sententious dialogue, simple situations, conventional characterizations, and threads of plots, until Pinero and Jones put a stop to the Robertson fad.
This proves in my judgment that the school always starts by being shown what the popular taste is, and follows that, until some individual discovery that the popular taste is changed. The tendency of the school is always to become academic and fixed in its ideas—it is the individual who points to the necessary changes. Schools and these special individuals are interdependent.
As to the present comedies in America: in the first place, it is impossible as a rule to decide fully what are the tendencies of a school when one is living in the midst of its activities. There is no marked tendency now; and as far as I can see it is only the occasional man who discovers the tendency of the times. Pinero undoubtedly saw that the public was tired of the "tea-cup and saucer." Probably had he not thought so, he would have gone on in that school.
Undoubtedly more plays are written to order than are written on the mere impulse of authors, independently of popular demand. The "order" play simply represents the popular demand as understood by managers, and the meeting of that demand in each age produces the great mass of any nation's drama. So far from lowering the standard of dramatic writing, it is a necessary impulse in the development of any drama. It is only when the school goes on blindly without seeing a change in the popular taste that the occasional man I have spoken of comes on. When the work of the school is legitimately in line with the public taste, the merely eccentric dramatist is like Lord Dundreary's bird with a single feather that goes in a corner and flocks all by itself. He may be a strong enough man to attract attention to his individuality, and his plays may be really great in themselves, but his work has little influence on the development of the art. In fact, there is no development of the art except in the line of popular taste. The specially great men mentioned have simply discovered the changes in the popular taste, and to a certain extent perhaps guided it.[A]
[Footnote A: Originally published in "The Sunday Magazine" (New York) for October 7, 1906.]