Shenandoah | Page 5

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