Howells and Herne

OWELLS'S FIRST NOTICE of dramas of James A. 1l1iHerne was in Editor's Study of Harper's for June, I890. It was a rather extensive article on state of American drama, and it had occasioned by Howells's having seen a performance of Herne's Drifting Apart. Howells opened his article with a severe criticism of American dramatic critics for insistence that American plays must conform to artificial technique of French well-made plays, with their extremely neat carpentry, and carefully adjusted and brilliantly varnished sections. The American critics, Howells said, had been struck with ingenious regularity of design in these contrivances and had formed dramatic theories upon them to such an extent that they unanimously undervalued whatever was native or novel in efforts of our playwrights. The result was, he continued, that American dramatists who wished to portray American life realistically on stage had unnerved and had afraid to do more than with unreality.1 But while he felt that this tendency to compromise was undoubtedly present in Drifting Apart, Howells went on to bestow highest praise on Herne that he had ever given an American dramatist up to this time: . . but upon whole he has produced a play fresh in motive, pure in tone, high in purpose, and very simple and honest in method. He is one of whom much better things may reasonably be expected, and do not think he will disappoint even a great expectation.2 Not only had Howells spoken more enthusiastically of Herne than he had ever before spoken of an American dramatist, but twice in article he had used phrase the nascent American drama. All through seventies and early eighties, as editor of Atlantic, he had ignored American theater as something beneath critical contempt, and as late as I887 he had written that we have no drama, and only faintest promise of a drama.3 The faint

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