Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/288

 270 The Drama, 1860-1918 to mind that the American theatre of that time was rich in comedians — all of them of the old school which looked for character parts to suit the old comedy style of acting. It was I unfortunate for the American drama which began to develop after i860 that it started just when the old-time stock com- pany tradition passed from Burton and Brougham and Laura Keene to Mrs. John Drew (i 820-1 897), who assumed control of the Philadelphia Arch Street Theatre on 3 August, 1861: — I inaugurating a brilliant record which began to fade in 1877,/ just as Bronson Howard was gaining in his pioneer fight 'fori the American dramatist, and just as the modern business of the theatre began to challenge consideration. ' The reasons for the poverty of American plays in the decade 1 860-1 870 are thus readily suggested. Our modern native drama did not grow out of literature, as it did in England and in Prance; it grew out of the theatre, and so it had to bide its time until the theatre found a need for it. Tradition, on the whole, is the element which most handi- capped the American drama. Daly scanned the German horizon for adaptations, as Dunlap had done before him; A. M. Palmer was as eager for the French play as were the English managers abroad, who would complacently have kept T. W. Robertson and Tom Taylor literary hacks at ten pounds a play, if they had not rebelled. When one puts down the titles of dramas which Augustin Daly (i 838-1 899) actually had a literary hand in, it is surprising how far afield from the Ameri- can spirit he could get; with him adaptation meant change of locality only, and though one can imagine what the scenic artist might do with his "flats" in picturing New York during the time opera reigned on Fourteenth Street, one can but re- servedly call Boucicault's The Poor of New York (Wallack's Theatre, 8 December, 1857) or Daly's Under the Gaslight (The New York Theatre, 12 August, 1867) native dramas; they were domestic perversions of the same French source. The I fact of the matter is that Bronson Howard, who came under the direct influence of the French drama of the time, felt, when he began to write such a comedy as Saratoga (Fifth Avenue Theatre, 21 December, 1870) that he must follow French con- vention; and when he reconstructed The Banker's Daughter on the ground-plan of Lillian's Last Love his originality was