Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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[286] Him so (16 January, 1899), both of which showed the quickness of his farce spirit, one should judge him by the tenseness of his Civil War pieces, Held by the enemy (16 August, 1886) and Secret service (5 October, 1896); and by the refined melodrama of his Sherlock Holmes dramatization (6 November, 1899), which, for its success, was so dependent on the nervous quiet of his acting. As an actor, Gillette requires peculiar opportunities of hesitant firmness; only one dramatist outside of himself has recognized his special needs—J. M. Barrie in The admirable Crichton (17 November, 1903). Gillette himself did not rightly estimate them when he wrote the sentimental comedy Clarice (16 October, 1906), nor did he, either as a technician or as a psychologist, create aright in such a piece as Electricity (31 October, 1910). As a dramatist he has remained undisturbed by the interest in modern ideas; his social conscience has not ruffled the even amusement tenor of his plays, which always arouse the observer to moods romantically tense, and depend on thoroughly legitimate situations rather than on ideas.

The American drama now began to show a greater sensitiveness to the social forces of the times. Herne's realism was not one of social condition, but expressed itself in human psychology. Charles Klein, however, tried to give newspaper crispness to business condition, which Bronson Howard had suggested in The Henrietta. In fact, the Dean of American Drama once said that in order to see how far American taste had advanced since his day, one had only to contrast the moral attitude of the heroine in Rachel Crothers's The three of us (Madison Square Theatre, 17 October, 1906) and the social fervour of the heroine in Klein's The lion and the Mouse (20 November, 1905) with any of his own plays. The fact is that Charles Klein (1867-1915), from the moment he stopped writing librettos like El Capitan, had a strongly developed reportorial sense which was more theatrical than profound. None of his plays could bear close logical analysis; all of his plays had situations that were ‘actor-proof’ and sure to get across on the emotional force of the moment. But his social and economic knowledge was incomplete. One feels this in contrasting his Daughters of men (19 November, 1906) with George Bernard Shaw's Widowers' houses. The fact is, Klein