Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/290

 272 The Drama, 1860-1918 up to the time I started in 1870 [wrote Bronson Howard in 1906], American plays had been written only sporadically here and there by men and women who never met each other. . . . Except for Daly, I was practically alone; but he offered me the same oppor- tunity and promise for the future that he gave to himself. From him developed a school of managers willing and eager to produce American plays on American subjects. ... It was not until about 1890 that they [the writers] suddenly discovered themselves as a body of dramatists. This was at a private supper given ... to the veteran playwright, Charles Gaylor. It was on this occasion that Howard founded the American Dramatists Club. At the same time other forces were preparing the way for the American drama, and these, viewed from a distance, are significant when one knows what actually followed them. In San Francisco, David Belasco was serving his novitiate as an actor, a playwright, a manager, and was coming into direct con- tact with the actors of the East, who travelled West for regular seasons. He was writing mining-camp melodrama, which was afterwards to flower into The Girl of the Golden West, and he was experimenting in all the subterfuges of stagecraft. The Frohman brothers were in their rough-and-tumble days, when Tony Pastor, Harrigan and Hart, the "Black Crook," and the Callender Minstrels were the ideals of managerial success. Close upon Charles and Daniel Frohman came David Belasco ^ to New York in the later seventies. They arrived at a moment which was propitious, for Bronson Howard, rightly designated the Dean of American Drama, as Dunlap is called the Father of the American Theatre, had insisted on A. M. Palmer's ad- j vertising his play, The Banker's Daughter, as an American Comedy, and he stood for the rights of the native dramatist I as opposed to the foreigner. It was a long time in the mana- gerial careers of either Daniel or Charles Frohman before they could be brought to think that the word "American" was of commercial advantage; and this attitude of theirs is the first suggestion of the future estimate of the theatre as a commer- cial enterprise, against which all later native art has had to contend. These days of the theatre have been chronicled by three critics: Laurence Hutton, Brander Matthews, and William