younger and more hopeful one saw in it its great elements of popularity,
and encouraged him to rewrite it.

Mr. William H. Crane, in a recent felicitous talk to the Society of
American Dramatists, said that the 'Henrietta' was played exactly as its
author had delivered it to the actors, without the change or the need of
change in a single word, and with only the repetition late in the play
of a line that had been spoken in an early act. That fact does not
exclude the possibility of rewritings before the manuscript came to the
company, but rather, in view of Bronson Howard's thoroness as a workman
and his masterly sense of proportion, makes such rewritings the more
probable. The effect, however, of his rewriting, wherever it may have
been, and the slow additions of his daily contributions, was that of
spontaneity.

Some philosopher tells us that a factor of greatness in any field is the
power to generalize, the ability to discover the principle underlying
apparently discordant facts. Bronson Howard's plays are notable for
their evidence of this power. He saw causes, tendencies, results. His
plays are expositions of this chemistry. 'Shenandoah' dealt broadly with
the forces and feelings behind the Civil War; the 'Henrietta' with the
American passion for speculation--the money-madness that was dividing
families. 'Aristocracy' was a very accurate, altho satirical, seizure of
the disposition, then in its strongest manifestation, of a newly-rich
and Western family of native force to break into the exclusive social
set of New York and to do so thru a preparatory European alliance.

He has a human story in every instance. There is always dramatic
conflict between interesting characters, of course, but behind them is
always the background of some considerable social tendency--some