Matilda Heron was one of the most remarkable actresses our stage has ever produced. With an intensity and passion in her performances which, at times, were magnificent and carried everything before them, she displayed professional shortcomings and infirmities which were often glaring and unpardonable; but she made and held, by the force of her own genius—and genius she certainly possessed—a position which few modern actresses have ever reached. Her personal faults were of the head rather than of the heart, and may they now rest lightly on her!
Miss Heron’s immediate successors as native playwrights of society dramas were Miss Olive Logan, with Surf; or, Summer Scenes at Long Branch, at Daly’s Theatre in 1870; Bronson Howard, with Saratoga in 1870-71, with Diamonds in 1873, and with Moorcroft in 1874; James Steele Mackaye, with Marriage in 1873; and Andrew C. Wheeler, with Twins, and Mr. Marsden, with Clouds, in 1876.
Anything like an enumeration of the original American society plays written and produced here during the last ten or fifteen years is not possible within the limits of a single chapter. They have been very many, and of all degrees of merit, the best and most creditable perhaps being Young Mrs. Winthrop, Old Love Letters, A Gold Mine, Esmeralda, Conscience, and The Charity Ball; but how long these are to live, and how they are to be regarded by the next generation—if the next generation has ever a chance to regard them at all—of course remains to be seen. Fashion, the first of the lot, survives only in its printed form, and the shell of the locust gives but a faint dry rattle, while the locust itself is as much alive as when The School for Scandal was first seen in America over a century ago. Have we a Sheridan among us? or is he still twenty years away?