James Alfred Herne (1839-1901) has been incorrectly and injudiciously vaunted as a great, original, representative American dramatist. The claim is preposterous. Herne was not a dramatist, he was a playwright (that is, a mechanic, a maker of plays, mechanically, from stock material, precisely as a wheelwright is a maker of wheels), and as a playwright he was less distinctive than as an actor. He adopted the latter vocation in youth, first as an amateur, then as a member of a stock company, making his first professional appearance at a theatre in Troy, New York. He obtained good training. He participated in performances of standard plays with some of the best actors who have graced the American Stage,—among them James Booth Roberts (1818-1901), Edward Loomis Davenport (1815-1877), and the younger James William Wallack (1818-1873). He did not possess a tithe of the power and versatility of Davenport, but he was deeply affected by the influence of that noble actor, and he played several parts in close imitation of him,—notably Sikes, in “Oliver Twist.” His dramatic instinct was keen, but his mind was not imaginative and the natural bent of it was toward prosy literalism. He was early, strongly, and continuously dominated by the literal methods and the humanitarian and reformatory spirit of the novels of Dickens. He liked the utilitarian and matter-of-fact embellishments with which some of those novels abound, and he was attracted by such characters as Peggotty, a part which he acted and of which his performance was creditable. As an actor he aimed to be photographic, he copied actual life in commonplace aspects as closely as he could, and often he was slow, dull, and tedious. As a playwright he was deficient in the faculty of invention and in the originality of characterization. He tinkered the plays of other writers, always with a view to the enhancement or introduction of graphic situations. The principal plays with which his name is associated are “Hearts of Oak,” “Drifting Apart,” “Sag Harbor,” “Margaret Fleming,” “Shore Acres,” and “The Rev. Griffith Davenport.” “Hearts of Oak” is Belasco’s revamp of “The Mariner’s Compass,” modified and expanded. The characters in it are not American: they are transformed English characters. It was not Herne’s plan, it was Belasco’s, to rehabilitate the earlier play by Leslie, shift the places of the action, shuffle the scenes, change the names of the persons, introduce incidents from other plays, add unusual “stage effects,” and so manufacture something that might pass for a novelty. In reply to a question of mine as to Herne’s share in the making of “Hearts of Oak,” Belasco said “he did a lot of good work on it,” and when I asked for specification of that work I was told “he introduced a lot of Rip Van Winkle stuff.” “Drifting Apart” is based on an earlier play, called “Mary, the Fisherman’s Daughter.” “Sag Harbor” is a variant of “Hearts of Oak.” “Margaret Fleming” is mainly the work of Mrs. Herne, and is one of those crude and completely ineffectual pieces of hysterical didacticism which are from time to time produced on the stage with a view to the dismay of libertines by an exhibition of some of the evil consequences of licentious conduct. In that play a righteously offended wife bares her bosom to the public gaze in order to suckle a famished infant, of which her dissolute husband is the father by a young woman whom he has seduced, betrayed, and abandoned to want and misery: libertines, of course, are always reformed by spectacles of that kind! (This incident, by the way, occurs, under other circumstances, in the fourth chapter of “Hide and Seek,” by Wilkie Collins, published in 1854.) “The Rev. Griffith Davenport” was deduced from a novel called “The Unofficial Patriot,” by Helen H. Gardner. “Shore Acres” is, in its one vital dramatic ingredient, derived from a play by Frank Murdoch, called “The Keepers of Lighthouse Cliff,”—in which Herne had acted years before “Shore Acres” was written. It incorporates, also, many of the real stage properties and much of the stage business,—the real supper, etc.,—used in “Hearts of Oak.” Its climax is the quarrel of the brothers Martin and Nathan’l Berry, the suddenly illumined beacon, kindled by Uncle Nat, and the hairbreadth escape of the imperilled ship,—taken, without credit, from Murdoch’s drama. Herne localized his plays in America and, to a certain extent, treated American subjects, but he made no addition to American Drama, and his treatment of the material that he “borrowed” or adapted never rose above respectable mediocrity. It was as an actor that he gained repute and merited commemoration. He was early impressed by the example of Joseph Jefferson and was emulative of him: he appeared in Jefferson’s most famous character, Rip Van Winkle, but he did not evince a particle of that innate charm, that imaginative, spiritual quality, which irradiated Jefferson’s impersonation of the pictorial vagabond and exalted it into the realm of the poetic ideal. Herne earnestly wished for a part in which he might win a popularity and opulence in some degree commensurate with those obtained by Jefferson as Rip Van Winkle: he eventually found it, or something like it, in Terry Dennison, in “Hearts of Oak,” which he acted, far and wide, for many years, and by which he accumulated a fortune of about $250,000. The influence of his acting, at its best, was humanitarian and in that respect highly commendable.—On April 3, 1878, Herne and Katherine Corcoran were wedded, in San Francisco,—that being Herne’s second marriage. His first wife was Helen Western. He was a native of Cohoes, New York. The true name of this actor was James Ahearn, which, when he adopted the profession of the Stage, he changed to James A. Herne. It is given in the great register of San Francisco as James Alfred Herne. His death occurred, June 2, 1901, at No. 79 Convent Avenue, near 145th Street, New York.