“A good actor,” he declares, “whom I always regard as an original creator in art—­beginning at the point where the dramatist’s pen stops—­approaches a subject from such a radically different direction that we writers cannot study his impressions too carefully in revising our work.”  Sometimes, conventions seized the humourous side of Howard.  From England, around 1883, he wrote, “Methinks there is danger in the feeling expressed about ‘local colouring.’  English managers would put the Garden of Eden in Devonshire, if you adapted Paradise Lost for them—­and insist on giving Adam an eye-glass and a title.”

Howard was above all an American; he was always emphasizing his nationality; and this largely because the English managers changed “Saratoga” to “Brighton,” and “The Banker’s Daughter” to “The Old Love and the New.”  I doubt whether he relished William Archer’s inclusion of him in a volume of “English Dramatists of To-day,” even though that critic’s excuse was that he “may be said to occupy a place among English dramatists somewhat similar to that occupied by Mr. Henry James among English novelists.”  Howard was quick to assert his Americanism, and to his home town he wrote a letter from London, in 1884, disclaiming the accusation that he was hiding his local inheritance behind a French technique and a protracted stay abroad on business.  He married an English woman—­the sister of the late Sir Charles Wyndham—­and it was due to the latter that several of his plays were transplanted and that Howard planned collaboration with Sir Charles Young.  But Howard was part of American life—­born of the middle West, and shouldering a gun during the Civil War to guard the Canadian border near Detroit against a possible sympathetic uprising for the Confederacy.  Besides which—­a fact which makes the title of “Dean of the American Drama” a legitimate insignia,—­when, in 1870, he stood firm against the prejudices of A.M.  Palmer and Lester Wallack, shown toward “home industry,” he was maintaining the right of the American dramatist.  He was always preaching the American spirit, always analyzing American character, always watching and encouraging American thought.

Howard was a scholar, with a sense of the fitness of things, as a dramatist should have.  Evidently, during the collaboration with Professor Matthews on “Stuyvesant,” discussion must have arisen as to the form of English “New Amsterdamers,” under Knickerbocker rule, would use.  For it called forth one of Howard’s breezy but exact comments, as follows: 

A few more words about the “English” question:  As I said, it seems to me, academical correctness, among the higher characters, will give a prim, old-fashioned tone:  and you can look after this, as all my own work has been in the opposite direction in art.  I have given it no thought in writing this piece, so far.

I would suggest the following special points to be on the alert for, even in the best