Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/307

George Ade; George M. Cohan 289 their plays, even though they saw what good results followed the publication of British and Continental drama. Rather iid they prefer to see their plays converted by some literary iggler into a novel, with the dialogue embedded in narrative id explanatory matter furnished by others. Long before any of the plays of Belasco, Broadhurst, Klein, Walter, and others wipre printed, they were thus "novelized" and read by a fiction public. But the custom is abating somewhat in favour of re- taining the integrity of the play form. The use of a college theme first undertaken by George Ade in The College Widow (20 September, 1904) was imitated by William De Mille in Strongheart (30 January, 1905) and by Rida Johnson Young in Brown of Harvard (26 February, 1906) ; and George Ade carried to the stage the newspaper humour which reflected so well the national characteristics celebrated by Eugene Field, Peter Finley Dunne, and Ade himself, the one humorist who builded in the theatre better than any of his brotherhood before him. For the kind of satirical fun one saw in The Sultan of Sulu (Wallack's Theatre, 29 December, 1902), The County Chairman (Wallack's Theatre, 24 November, 1903), The Sho-Gun (10 October, 1904), and The College Widow (20 September, 1904) had a national tang which transcended the local pride of the Indiana School. His humour bears the same relation toward social things that Mr. Dooley's political vein bears toward national politics. ' In his generous modesty, Ade has always maintained that George M. Cohan, the many-handed wonder of Yankee-doodle-flag farces and Over There music, was more typically American than he. Cohan is the type of manager- plajnvright who has his pulse on the moment ; he grows rich on local allusion. His Little Johnny Jones (7 November, 1904), George Washington, Jr. (12 February, 1906), Forty-five Minutes from Broadway (i^March., I9i2),and The Man Who Owns Broad- way (11 October, 1909) have the tang of the street about them. There is a quality to his music which has been brought nearer the psycho-state of a nervous crowd by Irving Berlin, with nis jazz noises and his syncopated songs. But as a producer, in the sense that Belasco is a dramatist-producer, Cohan shows a genius more serious. His adaptation of Earl Biggers's story, Seven Keys to Baldpate (22 September, 1913), illustrated ' See Book III, Chap. ix.