Shenandoah | Page 2

of the play, while you were expressing your anxiety about the 2nd act--which never bothered me. There must be 2nd acts and there must be last acts--audiences resign themselves to them; but 3rd acts--in 4 and 5 act plays--they insist on, and will have them good. The only exception is where you astonish them with a good 2nd act--then they'll take their siesta in the 3rd--and wake up for the 4th.
This psychological time-table shows how calculating the dramatist has to be, how precise in his framework, how sparing of his number of words. In another note, Howard says:
This would leave the acts squeezed "dry", about as follows:--Act I, 35 minutes; Act 2, 30; Act 3, 45; Act 4, 20--total, 130--2 hrs., 10 min., curtain up: entr'acts, 25 min. Total--2 hrs., 35 min.--8:20 to 10:55.
There are a thousand extraneous considerations bothering a play that never enter into the evolution of any other form of art. After seeing W.H. Crane, who played "Peter Stuyvesant" when it was given, Howard writes Matthews of the wisdom shown by the actor in his criticism of "points" to be changed and strengthened in the manuscript.
"A good actor," he declares, "whom I always regard as an original creator in art--beginning at the point where the dramatist's pen stops--approaches a subject from such a radically different direction that we writers cannot study his impressions too carefully in revising our work." Sometimes, conventions seized the humourous side of Howard. From England, around 1883, he wrote, "Methinks there is danger in the feeling expressed about 'local colouring.' English managers would put the Garden of Eden in Devonshire, if you adapted Paradise Lost for them--and insist on giving Adam an eye-glass and a title."
Howard was above all an American; he was always emphasizing his nationality; and this largely because the English managers changed "Saratoga" to "Brighton," and "The Banker's Daughter" to "The Old Love and the New." I doubt whether he relished William Archer's inclusion of him in a volume of "English Dramatists of To-day," even though that critic's excuse was that he "may be said to occupy a place among English dramatists somewhat similar to that occupied by Mr. Henry James among English novelists." Howard was quick to assert his Americanism, and to his home town he wrote a letter from London, in 1884, disclaiming the accusation that he was hiding his local inheritance behind a French technique and a protracted stay abroad on business. He married an English woman--the sister of the late Sir Charles Wyndham--and it was due to the latter that several of his plays were transplanted and that Howard planned collaboration with Sir Charles Young. But Howard was part of American life--born of the middle West, and shouldering a gun during the Civil War to guard the Canadian border near Detroit against a possible sympathetic uprising for the Confederacy. Besides which--a fact which makes the title of "Dean of the American Drama" a legitimate insignia,--when, in 1870, he stood firm against the prejudices of A.M. Palmer and Lester Wallack, shown toward "home industry," he was maintaining the right of the American dramatist. He was always preaching the American spirit, always analyzing American character, always watching and encouraging American thought.
Howard was a scholar, with a sense of the fitness of things, as a dramatist should have. Evidently, during the collaboration with Professor Matthews on "Stuyvesant," discussion must have arisen as to the form of English "New Amsterdamers," under Knickerbocker rule, would use. For it called forth one of Howard's breezy but exact comments, as follows:
A few more words about the "English" question: As I said, it seems to me, academical correctness, among the higher characters, will give a prim, old-fashioned tone: and you can look after this, as all my own work has been in the opposite direction in art. I have given it no thought in writing this piece, so far.
I would suggest the following special points to be on the alert for, even in the best present-day use of English:--some words are absolutely correct, now, yet based on events or movements in history since 1660. An evident illustration is the word "boulevard" for a wide street or road; so "avenue," in same sense, is New Yorkese and London imitation--even imitated from us, I imagine, in Paris: this would give a nineteenth century tone; while an "avenue lined with trees in a bowery" would not. Don't understand that I am telling you things. I'm only illustrating--to let you know what especial things in language I hope you will keep your eye on. Of course Anneke couldn't be "electrified"--but you may find many less evident blunders than that would be. She might be shocked, but couldn't "receive a shock." We need free colloquial slang and common expressions; but while "get out" seems all right from Stuyvesant to