Arts and Letters

Bronson Howard died in August of 1908 in his sixty-sixth year. He was at that time, and had been for thirty years, the foremost dramatist of America. He was a vice-president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, which be helped to organize, and he was a member of this Academy.

He was the son of a prominent merchant of Detroit, and the great-grandson of an English ensign who fought under General Wolfe at the capture of Quebec and who in later manhood died in the sight of George Washington, whom he followed at Monmouth. Behind that Revolutionary soldier the family traced itself directly to the Howards of Norfolk, premier dukes of England.

At the usual age Bronson Howard prepared for admission to Yale University, but, owing to a serious trouble with his eyes, did not enter. As a later writer has said of himself, he was forced to choose between journalism and an education. He turned his attention to humorous writing for the Detroit Free Press.

In 1865 he came to New York City to work as a reporter on the Tribune under the direction of Horace Greeley. Mr. Howard was then twenty-three years old. He worked for the Tribune and later for the Evening Post. On these two papers, before he left them to embark altogether upon play-writing as his profession, he labored seven years, the historic time of service that Jacob agreed upon with Laban.

Between the years 1870 and 1899 he was the author of seventeen plays, the greater part of which were successful. In a profession that has no curriculum but sympathetic living and understanding, and no diploma but the smiles and tears of his fellow-men, he won a first distinction.

Very soon after he began to write for the stage his accurate observation, his fine apprehension of motive, his delicate measurement of effect, his truthful transcription and vivid presentation of life, placed him in a class by himself among American playwrights. In an epoch of hurried and commercial and very conventional production his careful, lifelike, and unhackneyed offerings were in the main artistic masterpieces, valuable not only for the refreshing qualities that they served to the public of that time, but as examples of considered workmanship, and as models to men already in his profession and to those preparing to join it. This is especially true of the work of his matured and ripened years. His painstaking amounted almost to genius, and its effect upon a play was a finish less enamel than it was bloom. The body of the play was solid, too. It gave an impression of life. The happenings seemed not only true, but intimate and inevitable. The people were like ourselves; like us not only in their better and heroic moments, when we hoped they were our very kindred, but like us in their shortcomings, their failings, and their meannesses, when we knew they were.

The blue pencil of the city editor had taught Bronson Howard the unpardonableness of being dull. He had learned our general incapacity for sustained attention, our thirst for variety, our delight in surprise, our readiness to laugh, and our blindness to the ambush of the pathetic. He knew that skilful counterpoint was the way to keep us rocking and susceptible, and he could sit at his table and dramatize not only the people of his play, but those dim gatherings beyond the barrier of the footlights that should lean and listen, gasp and inhale and laugh, frown and be tender, weep and clap hands, like reflected moods invoked in a magic, but shadowed, mirror.

The older theater-goers will remember with respect and affection his great successes, The Banker's Daughter and Young Mrs. Winthrop, Shenandoah, and The Henrietta; and while his reputation will probably rest upon these four fine plays, his other work was of wide range and high merit.

Mr. Brander Matthews, the writer most qualified by acquaintance with the man and his epoch and with the theater to write of them all, has called our attention to the fact that Bronson Howard's career as a dramatist covered the transition period of the modern drama, when it was changing from the platform stage to the picture-frame stage; that period that was dismissing "the rhetorical emphasis, confidential soliloquies to the audience, and frequent change of scene in the course of an act." And almost as though he were being guided by the wisdom of Polonius on fashions, he was

…not the first by whom the new is tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

He moved with his time, and so discreetly that men working under the tacit acceptance of his leadership suffered neither martyrdom nor neglect.

His associates were the leading managers and the foremost actors of the time. His material circumstances changed from the embarrassing lack of an overcoat during his reportorial adventure in New York to a life of comfort and the means to make an endowment to the American Dramatists' Club, with substantial bequests in other directions.

The Dramatists' Club was an outgrowth of the unusual modesty that was a Bronson Howard characteristic. He had had some success in England, and our insular brethren there insisted on regarding him not only as an American playwright of prominence, but as the only one existing. With the avowed purpose to answer and inform and correct this attitude, he got together in 1890 fifty men in America who had professionally produced their plays. A society was formed that still exists, and includes in its membership the principal dramatists of the United States. Mr. Howard was its first president, and held that office until his death. He left to the society his dramatic library, one of the largest in the country, and also left a fund to maintain and to increase it. He so arranged his affairs that upon the death of Mrs. Howard a sustaining endowment came to the society itself, together with the valuable rights to his plays.

But if Bronson Howard had never written a play or delivered a lecture upon that art, or established and endowed a society of dramatists, he would still be a notable figure in the history of the drama in America, as it was owing to his initiative and persistence, his advocacy and persuasion, that dramatic compositions finally obtained proper protection under the United States copyright law, and in the various States similar protection under the common law for plays that had not been copyrighted. This achievement was the work of many years, embracing repeated trips to Washington, many appearances and contests before committees, and volumes of correspondence with authors, journalists, attorneys, and legislators. This monument to the man is the finer from the fact that for many years before its accomplishment he personally had virtually retired from the field.

To commemorate only this professional side of his life, however, would be to neglect the larger and the finer part of the man. Play-writing seemed rather the avocation of a full and broad and deep and vibrant soul, the chief expression of which was life itself. His understanding was so complete, his sympathy so general, his patience so detached and yet so fraternal, his justice of such even balance, his humor so lubricant and healing, that any business he might have chosen would have seemed an equal abdication of his larger' rights. He looked like a successful general who had quit the arts of war to practise medicine. He smiled like a righteous judge who hesitated to convict because he understood the promising humanity of the offense. He listened like a father who had been a playmate, and all who knew him remember, and many have commented in some fashion upon, his singularly blue eyes, and the steadiness of their gaze, encouraging, not disconcerting, and which seemed not to pierce, but to infiltrate. He was an adequate and noticeable factor of any assembly, the most delightful associate in the ideal companionship of two, and perfectly sufficient to himself in the longest hours of self-chosen solitude.

I remember visiting him for two or three short consultations during a winter in the middle nineties, when it was his daily custom to leave New York in the morning with his lunch in a paper, and spend the day in a little, eight-by-ten-foot wooden cabin built in the corner of the back yard of a cottage he had owned at New Rochelle. The furniture of this cabin was two wooden chairs, a deal table, a little cannon stove, a coal-hod, and a brierwood pipe. He found there the isolation and the quiet that his work required, and traveled in a virtually empty train both ways, as the commuting tide was opposite to his direction at this hour. This was at the period of his greatest artistic and financial success. His home in New York at that time was a comfortable, but unpretentious, apartment in a quarter not fashionable. Both the apartment and the cabin could be closed and left at the shortest notice, and their owner was free to follow where his whim invited. He knew that real happiness did not attach to things, and Fortune in her most enticing moods could deceive him no more than she had frightened him with her frowns. We must record him a man equipped with the emotional power of an artist, the generosity of a cavalier, and the temperance of a gentleman.