laws are being passed which are unjust and oppressive, or which are enacted through the influence of interested parties for private or personal profit. Another reason for the decadence in respect for law is found in the discriminations that are made when the offenders are powerful; when they have social or monetary prestige. When a people lose confidence in their judiciary and other officers who are elected or appointed to secure justice, and when the public lethargy is so great that no general reform movement can gain sufficient momentum to crush all opposition, a government is in the presence of a danger far greater than the armies or navies of hostile lands.

THE ARENA.

No. XII.

NOVEMBER, 1890.

THE FUTURE AMERICAN DRAMA.

BY DION BOUCICAULT.

THERE is not, and there never has been, a literary institution, which could be called the American Drama. We have produced no dramatists essentially American to rival such workers as Fenimore Cooper, Bret Harte, Hawthorne, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, and others of world-wide reputation in the realms of narrative fiction. So long as our stage could be supplied from the English or French theatres, there appeared no necessity for home-made material. The public cares little from whence it derives its amusement, and the managers of theatres saw no reason why they should pay the American author for a new piece, the success of which was always uncertain, when they could take the cream of the London and Paris theatres, after the success and fame of such works had been publicly assured, and for the use of which they paid nothing. This condition of affairs had already operated on the English theatre; its production had been paralyzed, since 1840, by the influx of French plays. The sources of Gallic invention and contrivance have recently dried up; so the British author appears again, timidly, in plays of modest pretensions. The poor material recently imported from Europe to supply the American market, has encouraged New York managers and authors to adventure; some, like the late Mr. Lester Wallack, adhered to the belief that anything coming from London must be acceptable here, and they fell victims to their fidelity to the past. What is good enough for London is no longer good enough for New York. Theodora, Tosca, Roger La Honte, the Gondoliers, left no favorable impression on the American public;

Copyright 1890, by The Arena Publishing Co.

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Captain Swift and Aunt Jack were tolerated; London and Paris are no longer names to conjure with now and here in 1890, as they were in 1870. But, on the other hand and meanwhile, we find the "Old Homestead," "The Wife," "Held by the Enemy," the "Charity Ball," "Shenandoah," "The Henrietta," the "County Fair," the "Senator," "Pau. Kauvar," and other native American productions have eclipsed their European rivals. Thus within the last two or three years our home-made plays have asserted their value: partly because our playwrights have improved and advanced in their craft, but mainly because the French and English dramatic authors are played out, and so we are thrown. upon our own resources. May this attitude so suddenly assumed be regarded as the small beginning of a declaration of dramatic independence on the part of our people? Is it the baby drama of the future? If so, do these works, or any of them, present new features or new form giving promise of a new issue?

Let us look briefly into the past. The Greek Drama was, so far as we know, an entirely original growth. We can trace its infancy under Thespis to its maturity under Sophocles and Menander. The Romans had no native drama, the Latin plays were modelled on the Greek, when they were not merely translations from that language. Skip we fifteen centuries of nothingness to discover the English Drama of the Elizabethan period. We can trace its infancy in the miracle plays, and its native growth to maturity under Shakespere and his fellows. This romantic and Gothic creation has nothing of the classic Greek form or design. It was the outcome of the new Teutonic world, weird, wild, and irregular as Gothic architecture. The French have had like the Romans no native drama; theirs was modelled on the ancient classic, of which it was a poor bastard. Racine, Corneille, and Molière were subjects of the ancient dramatic dynasty. While Greek declamatory drama was adopted in France, the drama of action was invented by the English playwrights.

Here let us correct a false impression that is thoughtlessly entertained, that the English stage has been mainly dependent on the French, that our dramatists had little invention or originality. This state of things has indeed existed but within the last few years only; in fact, within the present