SCENE I.
THE INDIAN DRAMA.
“Do you put tricks upon ’s with savages and men of Inde?”
The Tempest, Act ii. Sc. 2.
The American play is yet to be written. Such is the unanimous verdict of the guild of dramatic critics of America, the gentlemen whom Mr. Phœbus, in Lothair, would describe as having failed to write the American play themselves. Unanimity of any kind among critics is remarkable, but in this instance the critics are probably right. In all of its forms, except the dramatic form, we have a literature which is American, distinctive, and a credit to us. The histories of Motley and of Parkman are standard works throughout the literary world. Washington Irving and Hawthorne are as well known to all English readers, and as dearly loved, as are Thackeray and Charles Lamb. Poems like Longfellow’s Hiawatha, Whittier’s Snow-Bound, Lowell’s The Courtin’, and Bret Harte’s Cicely belong as decidedly to America as do Gray’s Elegy to England, The Cotter’s Saturday Night to Scotland, or the songs of the Minnesingers to the German Fatherland, and they are perhaps to be as enduring as any of these. Mr. Emerson, Mr. Lowell, and Professor John Fiske are essayists and philosophers who reason as well and as clearly, and with as much originality, as do any of the sages of other lands. In our negro melodies we have a national music that has charms to soothe the savage and the civilized breast in both hemispheres. American humor and American humorists are so peculiarly American that they are sui generis, and belong to a distinct school of their own; while in fiction Cooper’s Indian novels, Holmes’s Elsie Venner, Mrs. Stowe’s Oldtown Folk, Howells’s Silas Lapham, and Cable’s Old Creole Days are purely characteristic of the land in which they were written, and of the people and manners and customs of which they treat, and are as charming in their way as are any of the romances of the Old World. Freely acknowledging all this, the dramatic critics are still unable to explain the absence of anything like a standard American drama and the non-existence of a single immortal American play.
The Americans are a theatre-going people. More journals devoted to dramatic affairs are published in New York than in any European capital. Our native actors in many instances are unexcelled on any stage of the world; we have sent to England, to meet with unqualified favor from English audiences, J. H. Hackett, Miss Charlotte Cushman, Joseph Jefferson, Edwin Booth, John S. Clarke, Lawrence Barrett, Edwin Forrest, Miss Mary Anderson, Miss Kate Bateman, Augustin Daly’s entire company of comedians, Mr. and Mrs. Florence, Richard Mansfield, and many more; while, with the exception of certain of Bronson Howard’s comedies, “localized” and renamed, how many original American plays are known favorably, or at all, to our British cousins? Rip Van Winkle, although its scenes are American, is not an original American play by any means; it is an adaptation of Irving’s familiar legend; its central figure is a Dutchman whose English is broken, and its adapter is an Irishman. Yet Rip Van Winkle, Joseph K. Emmett’s Fritz, and The Danites are the most popular of the American plays in England, and are considered, no doubt, correct pictures of American life.
That the American dramatists are trying very hard to produce American dramas all theatrical managers on this side of the Atlantic know too well, for shelves and waste-paper baskets are full of them to overflowing. Frequent rejection and evident want of demand have no effect whatever upon the continuous supply. How few of these are successful, or are likely to live beyond one week or one season, all habitual theatre-goers can say. During the single century of the American stage not twoscore plays of any description have appeared which have been truly American, and which at the same time are of any value to dramatic literature or of any credit to the American name.
By an original American play is here meant one which is the original work of an American author, the incidents and scenes and characters of which are purely and entirely American. In this category cannot be included dramas like Mr. Daly’s Pique, or The Big Bonanza, for the one is from an English novel and the other from a German play; nor Mr. Boucicault’s Belle Lamar, or The Octoroon, which are native here, but from the pen of an alien; nor plays like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which are not original, but are drawn largely, if not wholly, from American tales; nor plays like A Brass Monkey or A Bunch of Keys, which are not plays at all.