Dramatic criticism, like all of the other arts having to do with our theater, has changed, and like the others the change of the last few years has been for the better. When I first came to New York, William Winter was by far the outstanding critic, and his opinions were eagerly waited for and had great influence. I doubt if any critic of to-day is his equal in some ways, yet the best men of to-day have, I think, a far greater influence upon the actual writing of plays. In William Winter’s time the Shakespearian tradition was strong and the plays of modern writers were of secondary importance. Acting then was more important than play writing, while to-day the dramatist is the important figure in almost every production.

I do not in the least mean that acting to-day is any less vital than it used to be, but the standard of acting and of directing is very much higher. Very few first class producers who are fortunate enough to secure a good play are bunglers enough not to take full advantage of it and we have grown to expect adequate performances and take them quite as a matter of course. Even ten years ago there were a number of stars who were sure of some business no matter what play they might appear in, but I think it is a fair statement that to-day no actor alive can do any business at all unless the play is satisfactory. In any case it was the dramatist and not the actor who was responsible for the birth of the new type of drama in America, and when the writer threw into the discard the romantic, the heroic and the sentimental, the actor was forced to change his method. Booth and Jefferson could have played in a modern reticent play, because they were, in their day, outstanding in the quiet and normal method they used, but most of the great actors of our theater would have been lost if they had been deprived of their grand passions and their carefully developed heroics. Of course these men and women played in the accepted tradition of their time, and their talents would have been trained to-day in a different direction. We miss the diction of the good actor of the old school and his beautifully trained voice, and his thorough grasp of all the details of his business, but the characterizations of to-day are far nearer to real life and far less set and conventional than they were under the old system. When I first went into the theater, an actor would be handed a part and told that it was, let us say, “a Sir Francis Levinson.” He would play it that way, and usually play it very well, but frequently in a rather tryingly cut and dried manner.

Directing, too, has become very much more important than it used to be, at least in the sense that there are more good directors, although among the list of men whom I consider to have been the best directors I have ever known, several were of the theater of years ago. Augustin Daly was a master; no man of to-day is any better; for years his company was quite justly the pride of America. A. M. Palmer was a man of taste and shrewd knowledge of the theater. He was the first man I ever worked with and one of the best. Palmer was a man of great cultivation and in his appearance amazingly different from any of our managers to-day. He was a very dignified little man who wore a brand of whiskers now quite obsolete, and his manner always seemed to me to be more suited to the pulpit than to the stage. He was, I am sure, both a worthy and a deeply religious man, and it was his custom at the end of the last rehearsal to stand on the stage, surrounded by his company, and raise his hands in an attitude of benediction and say: “Ladies and gentlemen—now we are in the hands of God.” I recall an occasion when he rather spoiled the effect of this pious observation by turning to the stage electrician and continuing in the same breath: “And for God’s sake don’t you forget that first act light cue again.”

Charles Hoyt, probably the best farce writer the world has ever known, was a fine director. All of his plays were built at rehearsal and on the road before their first New York engagement. It was his custom to engage a cast of sure-fire comedians and fashion his play around them. He would call on Tim Murphy, Otis Harlan, May Irwin and actors of that standing, and start out with his central idea, always an ironic snapshot of some social or political absurdity. When his play first opened, it would run at the most about thirty minutes, and each of the performers would be called upon to sing two or three songs or do their specialty. Out they would go, usually into New England, in the early spring, and as the days passed there would be more and more dialogue and fewer and fewer songs, until in the end the farce would have been written and ready for its New York opening. Hoyt built in this way A TEXAS STEER, A TRIP TO CHINATOWN, A RAG BABY, A TIN SOLDIER and several others, all of them sound farces and all of them very successful.

David Belasco then, as now, was a master of the mechanics of the theater, and is a man who always has amazed me and won my very honest admiration. His love of the theater as an institution is, I am sure, as deep and as real as mine, and his skill and patience and perfection of detail had a great influence upon the growth of our theater.

Henry Miller was not only a great director, but I think the greatest teacher of acting I have ever known. Any young actor or actress who passed through his hands had something behind them. He died as he had lived, ready for his job—waiting for the curtain to go up—and although I have never wanted to exchange my own life for any other man’s, I must admit I am a little envious of Henry Miller’s death.

Charles Frohman knew what he wanted of his company and how to get it, and Daniel Frohman’s company was always guided by his good taste and honesty. Daniel Frohman is no longer active as a producer, but he holds, I think, the first place in the hearts of all of us who work in the theater. In saying this I am not thinking alone of his work for the Actors’ Fund, although his work there has been enormously important. But aside from that his sympathy and his appreciation of all the good work done by any of us, actor or dramatist, have given courage and joy to a lot of hard workers who at times were in sore need of both. I know that among my treasures I have a letter he wrote me just after the production of ICEBOUND that I value above the Pulitzer Prize that soon followed it. We of the theater are a close corporation, and we value the praise of our own people more than we do any opinion from the outside.

Erlanger, the business head of the theater for many years, had a lot to do with the production of his own plays, and although not a director, he made his influence felt.

William A. Brady at his best is a truly inspired director, and I have seen him do work that was fine and true; his ear is almost perfect, and his sense of the pulse and rhythm of melodrama is absolutely unfailing. He has faults to offset these virtues, but when he is right, when the scene he is directing is the kind of scene he knows about, he is a hard man to beat.

I could go on writing for hours of the many adventures I had with Mr. Brady, grave and gay, absurd and thrilling, but in all of them there was at least the virtue of novelty. In all the years I worked with him he never by any chance did what I expected him to do, and he never did the same thing twice. After I was through with the popular-priced drama and was making an effort to get started as a Broadway writer, he was the first man who had any confidence in me, and he gave me my first chance.

Picking in my mind at random for a story in which Mr. Brady figures, I am suddenly swamped by the recollection of a hundred. I recall, for instance, how he and John Cranwell and I worked for five days and six nights at a dress rehearsal of THE WORLD WE LIVE IN without a break, living on ham sandwiches and milk and sleeping for half an hour at a time on a pile of discarded drapery. Our first important play together was THE FAMILY CUPBOARD. The big scene was a conflict between a son and his father, in which the boy strikes the father, then, overcome by horror and remorse, falls sobbing at the father’s feet. Forrest Wynant was the boy and William Morris the father. Neither Mr. Brady nor I was satisfied with the progress of the scene, and at length Mr. Brady jumped up on the stage and brushed Mr. Wynant aside and played the long and very dramatic scene for him, and ended by falling sobbing at William Morris’s feet, absolutely all in from the terrific effort he had made. As he ended there was a silence—we were all thrilled—Brady lay there panting and perspiring. Mr. Wynant alone seemed to be unmoved. He looked down at Mr. Brady’s heaving figure and said earnestly—“Mr. Brady—would you mind doing that again?”

Some years later, at the dress rehearsal of a mystery play of mine, AT 9.45, John Cranwell and I were alone in the front of the theater. Mr. Brady was ill at home. The rehearsal was dreadful; there was no pace at all; it was dead and flat, and I knew that unless some miracle happened we faced a failure. We had been told not to bother Mr. Brady, but I was desperate, and without a word to John Cranwell I ran out of the theater and drove to Mr. Brady’s house, where I dragged him out, almost by force, sick and surly. He arrived at the theater protesting that he was a dying man and couldn’t possibly be of any help to me even if he wanted to, and that he was remarkably sure he didn’t, or words to that effect. Still grumbling, he stepped through the front door and as he did so his ear caught the flat note in the performance that had so alarmed me. In ten seconds he was at the footlights with the entire company following his tone as an orchestra follows the hand of their conductor, and in two hours he had set the tempo of the play.

This same AT 9.45 was the only play not closed by the actors’ strike of eleven years ago; we kept it open—I am sure I don’t know why—and I doubt if Mr. Brady does. It was, I suppose, because we both of us love a fight and we had a perfectly grand time in doing a thing that no one else was able to do. As most of our actors left us at the first demand of their union, we would have been sunk at once if Mr. Brady had not called for help, and we built up a cast from some very important actors who were not in sympathy with the Equity Society. There were, however, very few of these, and it became necessary for Mr. Brady himself to play the most difficult part, a butler with a big scene. He played him—big scene and all—plus the most amazing stage side-whiskers I had seen in many years. Mr. Brady loved it, whiskers and all, and had the time of his life. I truly think he was sorry when the strike was ended.

Winthrop Ames was one of the fine stage directors, and although never especially active in the theater, every production he made was almost perfect in its detail.

Winchell Smith, the best of the dramatist-directors, knows more theater than any of us, and has been responsible for a lot of fine work.

James Forbes, Rachel Crothers, George Kelly, Elmer Rice and Frank Craven are all first rate directors of their own plays. I myself have had a lot of experience in this work but I am sorry to say that I have one rather annoying trait as a director. It is so much easier for me to make up a new play than it is to be bothered by following a manuscript that I am quite likely to get my company a trifle mixed.

Among the professional directors, Robert Milton is a first class man and Sam Forrest has skill and great experience. Hugh Ford, who worked with George Tyler for many years, had probably the longest unbroken string of successes.

George Abbott, both as a writer, actor and director, brings sanity and good judgment to every job he undertakes and deserves every bit of his very unusual success.

Aside from the dramatists who direct their own plays and the free lance stage directors, there is, of course, Arthur Hopkins, in many ways a better man than any of us. He does a play because he likes it; it doesn’t in the least matter to him whether you or I like it or not; he is absolutely untouched by any man’s opinion but his own, and surely no one man in our theater has done so much fine work or done it with a higher motive. He saw beauty in it—no other reason ever did or ever will make him produce a play.

George Tyler, John Golden and Sam Harris are managers who are constructive in their attitude to authors and many of their successes have been due to their sympathetic attitude toward the authors with whom they work.

George Cohan is a great director and a remarkable play-doctor, but of late his own plays have taken most of his time.

Jed Harris seems to me to be a truly remarkable editor. I have never seen him direct a play, but I have talked plays with him, and if I am any judge of plays he knows a lot about them. He has gone far already for so young a man, but he will go further.

Reuben Marmoulain and Chester Erskine are among the new men. Both of them have something.

There are other good directors, of course. Just at present I have been writing only of the men I knew.

The theater of the nineties, even the first class theater, was very different from what it is to-day and the difference, of course, was due to the difference in our audiences. The stage always reflects the times and one could easily enough get a mental picture of any period or of any civilization by a careful study of ten or a dozen successful dramas and comedies of the day.

America during these years was still dominated by a Puritan tradition and its drama was based upon a stern Puritan creed and an almost equally uncomfortable sentimentality. It must be remembered also that at this time our “melting pot” joke was at its very funniest and every year hundreds of thousands of foreign born flung themselves upon our hospitable, if somewhat undiscriminating, shores and each year a good number of these were joined to our audiences.

The demand was for good acting also rather than for good plays, just as it is now in the “talkies.” It is, I think, only when the drama has grown to maturity that the focus shifts from the player to the play.

Bronson Howard was the favorite playwright of New York when I arrived there, although the growing success of young Augustus Thomas threatened his supremacy. Edward Harrigan was very popular, both as an actor and a writer, and deservedly so. The spirit of America has always seemed to me to have been best reflected by three men, who followed one another and kept alive a true spirit of the folk play, writing of men and women, of happenings and emotions of the everyday life around them: William Harrigan, Charles Hoyt and George Cohan. These three have left very deep footprints and in the case of George Cohan at least much more than that. The peculiar comedy style of all of our American playwrights of to-day was directly founded on his droll staccato and even the very modern wise-crack has descended from his careless impudence.

To me it has always been of great interest to watch how the type of writer, and the type of play changed and progressed with the change in the character and the standards of our audiences. Only the superficial observer will claim superiority in the plays of 1890 to the plays of 1910, and since 1910 we have had an almost steady growth in the art of the serious dramatist, a growth so important that beside it the smudges of filth spilled by a few unimportant scribblers may very easily be forgotten. The question of dirt in the theater in any case is no longer of any real importance. The extreme frankness of modern society, the freedom with which all sorts of questions are discussed in the home and in all walks of life, has acted as a complete disinfectant. It was an extremely easy thing to shock small coins out of a Puritan community but the man who has skill enough to successfully pander to an over-sophisticated audience usually has sense enough to use that skill to better advantage. The censor in the end will disappear, not wholly because he is no longer needed but because he will be no longer understood.

My grandfather and his family walked to church every Sunday because to drive on the Lord’s Day was a sin. I walk four miles around a golf course every Sunday, and it is probable that my moral standards are as high as his were.

If I am sure of anything at all, I am sure that I am not my brother’s keeper, and, deeply as I resent dirt for dirt’s sake in the theater, I know that the way to end it is not by allowing some one person or some group of persons to set up their own moral or ethical standard and compel the rest of the world to abide by it. The professional moralist soon standardizes his own beliefs just as the professional politician does, and he never has and never can properly represent the shifting taste of the majority. Just what may properly be discussed on the stage or in society varies so greatly with the passing moods of the times that any fixed and rigid rules soon become fixed and rigid absurdities. I distinctly recall the extraordinary difficulty my mother had some forty odd years ago in delicately conveying to us the news that our old dog was soon to have an increase in her family, and in those days a female dog was called a female dog, economized speech being at that time considered to be of less importance than elegance.

I have studied plays all my life and I am sure I don’t know enough about them to be qualified to act as a censor. I am equally sure that it would be very difficult to find any man who knows more about them than I do who would consent to act in that capacity. The temper of our people is further away to-day than it ever was before from all these laws that try to compel us all to live according to the beliefs of a handful of persons who still cling frantically to the old Puritan notion that all one has to do to abolish sin is to forbid it. The thing that should be unlawful in the theater is bad taste, and good taste is the result of education, not of restriction.

Every tendency of our American drama to-day is toward drawing a more cultivated and more sophisticated audience. The demand of this audience is for plays that mean something, and as soon as all the dramatists and all the managers who still seem to be blind to this fact are snugly relegated to the poor house we shall have no more talk of censorship. I have never in my life seen a dirty play that has had one-tenth as much effect upon an audience as many a fine play I could name has had, partly because the mass reaction of every audience is always healthy, and partly because fine plays are written by fine dramatists, and dirty plays are written by incompetent scribblers. The instinctive feeling that it is a fine thing to be a gentleman that comes from sitting through one performance of JOURNEY’S END will go much deeper under any normal skin than any dirty joke heard in an off-color musical show. If I for one moment thought that the theater had anything at all to do with forming the moral tone of a nation, I might have more patience with all this talk of political and national censorship, but I know better. The theater reflects that tone, it does not guide it.

I have the masculine man’s contempt for dirty plays, arising, I suppose, from the fact that masculine men never write them. Dirty plays are always written either by women or by effeminate men, and always have been. There is, of course, a pathological reason for this, but the fact remains that the normal and healthy male is not especially interested in the eavesdropping of the servants’ hall, and, although he may offend by bluntness and lack of taste, he is seldom downright nasty.

I hope that no one who reads these rather rambling notes of mine will think that I have any desire to deny the woman playwright any particle of credit, but I use the word playwright as I use the word actor, to describe any one who devotes themselves to these arts, either man or woman. Sex seems rather unimportant to me beside the fact that one can act or write. Of course some of our fine plays have been written by women, and many of the greatest actors the world has ever known have been of the feminine sex. It would be difficult to name three men who ranked as actors beside Bernhardt, Duse and Charlotte Cushman, and in the theater of to-day I dare any one to make a list of five men who could stand comparison with Mrs. Fiske, Jane Cowl, Pauline Lord, Helen Hayes and Ethel Barrymore.

Through the nineties Charles Frohman produced a long line of well-made English dramas, and the Pinero school of expert craftsmen took the place of the writers of polite melodrama. Charles Kline brought his skill in bringing forward controversial subjects of timely interest and Clyde Fitch arrived with his box of parlor tricks. Edward Sheldon came down from Harvard with about the first authentic message and in him I have always felt the spark of the true dramatist. Eugene Walter in THE EASIEST WAY produced the first important American play unless some of the less widely known of the James A. Hearn plays deserve that rating. Personally I thought MARGUERITE FLEMING a very fine thing. But THE EASIEST WAY was a little after the time I have been writing of and my problem at that moment was to learn a simpler trade.

As it happens, I have lived my personal life rather away from my fellow workers of the theater, not because I haven’t always valued the friendship of actors but because I have been a miser of my time. I have never been much of a club man and nothing at all of a social butterfly. I am sure that the sight of me, pushed into evening clothes by a stern wife and perspiring copiously in an effort to conceal my rage and rebellion, is enough to cast a pall over any social gathering. Even in Hollywood, where dinner guests may be more readily hired than anywhere else on earth, I, if I should lose my credit at my hotel, would undoubtedly starve to death. I have never even been a member of the Lambs Club and, for no other reason than that by not allowing myself to get into the habit of having anything to do but my work, I have naturally gained a good many hours.

During my time as a dramatist, during which I have written between two and three hundred plays, I have had, if we figure twelve characters to a play, somewhere around three thousand actors to play these parts. Naturally I have known all these men and women well and, as I have seen practically every drama, farce and comedy of any importance at all that has been produced during all these thirty-five years, I may claim fairly enough an acquaintance with our American players.

To me there have been a lot of good actors in the world and one mighty one—unfortunately not an American and more unfortunately already an old woman when I first saw her—but Sarah Bernhardt had the power to do something to me that no one else could ever do. I had no critical judgment of her at all. She spoke, and I listened and believed. Edwin Booth still seems to me to be the greatest of the others, although a long way behind the “Divine Sarah.” I saw Booth first as Hamlet during my second year at Harvard in the winter of 1890. I saw him later with Modjeska and Otis Skinner in several plays and with Lawrence Barrett the following year in OTHELLO. He was as simple and as true in his acting as any of our fine actors of to-day, although the method of his time was declamatory and artificial. I dimly recall the elder Salvini in some version of Dr. Bird’s THE GLADIATOR, but I was too young at the time to carry away any more definite impression than that he had the loudest voice I had ever heard. Jefferson had great skill and a wonderful personality and his “Rip,” the model for the Lightnin’ Bills, the Old Soaks and all of their lovable disreputable brotherhood, remains towering above them all.

Richard Mansfield I thought very like the little girl who had a little curl—when he was bad he was awful. In some of her parts, especially in THE TAMING OF THE SHREW and in a lightweight, imported comedy called THE LOVE CHASE, I have never seen Ada Rehan’s equal. Janauschek had a real tragic power, and at her best Modjeska was superb. Just how to place Maude Adams I have never known, but I do know that she has charmed and fascinated me so often that I think it only fair to give her the credit of listing her with the great.

If no names in our theater to-day stand quite so high as these, I think it is the writer’s fault rather than the actors’, or possibly the fault of the audiences who have turned away from the romantic play to the grim and reticent drabness of the naturalistic drama. The glamor and the sweep of the old declamatory school naturally furnished the actor with a better chance to score than he has to-day. Then, of course, the great passions of the romances of thirty years ago find no response in our audiences. Life is quite as amazing as it ever was but by no means as mysterious. We have dissected and psychoanalyzed ourselves and one another past the point where we stand in awe of any one’s “darkened soul” and advise calomel. Then too our audiences are different; even thirty years ago thousands of our people thought the theater a place of evil and were convinced that anything that represented romance or the glamorous was sinful. The death of this notion was a very healthy symptom and the start toward a sane understanding of life.

As any man of the world knows, the diversions usually listed as sins gained their following very largely from the free spirits who searched for forbidden things, the prescribed pleasures being of rather dubious enchantment. The fact that these stock sins are usually shabby, ugly and dull was kept a profound secret. If we could convince our young people that as a usual thing it is more fun to be decent than it is to go poking about in dark places we would make as great a step forward in our morals as we have in our drama. After all in both it’s simply a case of frankness and honesty.

These were the years of the complete control of the theater by the famous syndicate, Klaw and Erlanger, the Frohmans, Rich and Harris, Hayman, Nixon and Zimmerman. No longer were we vagabonds and strolling players. The out of town manager who used to spend his summer standing on a corner on Fourteenth Street, where his shabby silk hat was his only office, now had his attractions booked for him by the Klaw and Erlanger Agency. The syndicate, successful from the first, soon secured control of practically all of the first class houses in the country and a once careless, slipshod business became regulated. Thanks to the syndicate and to Lee Shubert, who alone and unaided challenged this great organization to battle and fought them so stiff a draw that for years the spoils were divided between them, authors now began to eat as regularly as ordinary mortals, and the high-powered motor cars so common to playwrights to-day can trace their being to this source.

There is no doubt at all that these two great forces in the theater are responsible for making a business of what had before their time been a sort of gypsy’s occupation, but unfortunately the fates are rarely prodigal and the men gifted with the ability to organize an art have never yet known what to do with it after it is organized. They always remind me of the cowboy who fought the bear and after getting him down had to call for help because he was afraid to let go. As a matter of fact I have wondered of late if there wasn’t such a thing as being too successful in organization. I have given a lot of time to the welding together of our Dramatists’ Guild, just as many other playwrights have, and now we are extremely well organized, with nobody to fight.

The Actors’ Equity is all powerful after years of honest effort, but more actors are out of work than ever before. It’s a fine thing for the actor and the writer to be able to enforce fair conditions of employment, but unfortunately we can’t force the employment itself. A good job under fair conditions is a great thing, but no job at all isn’t so good. It may be worth a thought in passing that if we of the two creative groups in the theater had been as active in working for the theater itself as we were in fighting for the power of our individual groups, we might at this writing be better off. Even yet we might, by a sacrifice of some of the power we have gained, help to bring back strength to the business that must flourish if we are to flourish. We need have no fear of the old tyrannies; they have gone forever. When actors and authors meet their old antagonists, the managers, to-day, they meet on equal ground and, as my old comrade Gene Buck puts it: “All false whiskers are off, and everybody comes out from behind the bushes.”

The complete control of the drama in America by the business men of the theater started at about the time I entered the lists and continued for about twenty years. Under their rule prosperity came to us and lasted up to the time when the public became tired of a drama that soon became a factory product, as was the natural result of a system that put the business man in control of the creative artist. I have seen this happen so many times, in so many forms of the amusement business, that it has grown to be an old story to me.

I am old enough to remember the group of managers who were the leading producers just before the time of the “syndicate” and I know the difference in their methods and ideals. Daly, A. M. Palmer, Daniel and Charles Frohman, and the great stars like Booth, Jefferson, Modjeska, Fannie Davenport and a few others had a real following both in New York and on the road; each one of them represented something. The public knew what to expect if they went to Daly’s Theatre, or to Daniel Frohman’s Lyceum on Fourth Avenue, just as they knew what to expect of Edwin Booth or Joe Jefferson. If A. M. Palmer made a production one knew very well the sort of entertainment that would be offered. From Hoyt or from Harrigan you knew the type of play that would be presented and took it or left it as your taste decided.

After the rise to power of the “syndicate” Charles Frohman kept close to a definite standard, but Booth, Jefferson, Hoyt, Palmer, Harrigan and Daly were gone, and in their places rose up a new crop of managers, men of my time, most of them friends of mine, who were more or less timidly knocking at the door at about the time I was trying to break in. Sam Harris, when I first knew him, was Terry McGovern’s manager; Al Woods was an advance agent ahead of a sensational melodrama and known as the best man in the show business to draw a big opening to a bad play. Archie Selwyn was an office boy for a firm of play-brokers. Edgar Selwyn was trying to get a start as an actor and often reminds me of the fact that when I was casting my first play he came to me for a job and was met by a very cold reception. If Mr. Selwyn is telling the truth about this, as he probably is, although I can’t in the least recall the incident, it goes to show that I still had a lot to learn, because he was a very good actor, much better, I am sure, than any one I chose above him.

These young men came into the theater and took important places in it and rode to fortune on the wave of prosperity that was at its height during these years. They were joined in time by a younger group, the Theatre Guild, Arthur Hopkins, and later still Jed Harris, all of whom had as definite a thing to say as the old group of managers a full generation before them. In saying it they started the change in popular taste that meant the end of the commercial theater, and the birth of what before long will be a theater of taste and intelligence. Men like George Tyler, Dillingham, Winthrop Ames, Ziegfeld and William A. Brady had gone on producing their particular type of play and keeping a little apart from the rest. Way back, however, in 1898, all managers were mighty men in my eyes, and the least of them was sacred.