Why not write a history of the drama from Shakespeare to George M. Cohan? a witty man recently asked in a tone of raillery. "Yes, why not?" remarks Joseph Bernard Rethy in the International. The world is beginning to take Cohan seriously as a playwright. Once upon a time, as Peter Clark MacFarlane maintains in McClure's, Broadway unhesitatingly would have pronounced Cohan a joke. Today many people are questioning whether he is not a genius. When we remember that George Cohan did not see the inside of a schoolroom after he was eight years old, nor often enough before to remember now how to set a stage for one; that he has never looked a private tutor in the eye; that since his childish days when he made his first début upon a donkey in a Wild West parade he has been lammed about from corner to corner of the country in the itinerant show business; and that, in spite of all, he is what he is, we agree that his career does exhibit elements explainable upon no other hypothesis than a superendowment of birthday gifts.

Cohan came up from Fourteenth Street ten years ago with Little Johnny Jones with bells and the thump of the big brass drum. But Broadway refused to be diverted. While the folks in front were looking him over, he was, in turn, looking them over. He noticed what made them laugh and what made them grave. After two short weeks, Cohan took his play to the one-night stands, where, each midnight, after the performance, he sat down to rewrite it, and on each morrow tried the new version on the next town. In a fortnight he came back and took Broadway by storm. He had found its funny-bones and was tickling them all at once.

Successful innocence, reciprocated love, impugned honor, triumphant vindication—old, old, old!—were the elements of the story. But there was an accident in the play—its appeal to patriotic sentiments: American jockey winning English money—loving American maiden—English guile plotting ruin of American lover and incidentally breaking heart of American girl.

The dramatic value of this set of sentiments was a great surprise to Cohan, but its lesson was not lost. It led him to create situations in which national feeling was aroused to the highest pitch, when at the proper moment he rushed the flag upon the stage and stood beneath it singing, cheering, waving, with such an unctuous, infectious enthusiasm that his audiences invariably joined in the chorus and were often swept to their feet, drowning the stage with cheers.

And, never missing a cue from an audience, George met this very evident desire for debauches of patriotic enthusiasm by designing flag songs and flag ballets and flag choruses, and indeed whole flag plays—George Washington. Jr., The American Idea, and The Yankee Prince—in all of which, no matter what else happened, George or somebody else was there waving the flag.

Cohan appeared deliberately to capitalize patriotism. He made it bring him dollars. He alluded to himself as the Yankee Doodle Boy, and it began to be humorously remarked that the whole Cohan family was eating off the American flag.

Immediately thereafter, Cohan's biographer goes on to say, the young playwright's self-confidence slipped upon a banana peel. He wrote a straight, non-musical farce called Popularity, which entirely failed to live up to its name.

This failure, however, may have been one of the best things that happened to Cohan, for the trouble with the piece was in danger of becoming the trouble with Cohan. In Popularity the hero was an impossible upstart, of whom the public would have none. Cohan heroes had all been of this smart-Aleck type. Cohan himself, with his sudden riches, his loud clothes and his cocksureness of bearing, gave evidence of developing an ego as overweening as that of his hero.

He seemed to lack refinement. True, he pleased his down stairs audience as well as his gallery; but his down stairs audience had an up stairs heart in it. The people who laughed with Cohan were not quite the same people who were pleased by John Drew or moved by Mrs. Fiske or delighted by Maude Adams.

No doubt Cohan saw all this. Perhaps the failure of Popularity helped him to see it more clearly. Perhaps it struck in and tutored somewhat those personal tastes which, according to his critics, stood sadly in need of schooling.

Anyway, from about this time forward his clothes became less noisy, his manner of life less ostentatious, and his performances showed here and there eliminations that marked an awakening sense of those eternal fitnesses which are the essence of good taste.

Cohan rewrote Popularity, sandwiched it with songs, studded the stage with chorus girls, stuck Raymond Hitchcock in the center, and called it The Man Who Owns Broadway. This time the piece scored an uproarious success. Then came Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford.

Wallingford as a series of sketches presented pitfalls. It involved difficulties of selection and construction, it required niceties of adjustment to keep this pungent creation of George Randolph Chester's entertaining without becoming insufferable. It went upon the boards as straight, well-constructed satire. It was neither a work of creative genius nor a jumble of showman's tricks, but mere intelligent application of the principles of stage technique and an intimate knowledge of the public tastes. And it was not to be carried by Cohan's stage presence—he was not in the cast.

Get-Rich-Quick Wailingford and Broadway Jones were followed by Seven Keys to Baldpate. With this latest play in mind, the writer goes on to say, we are forced to conclude that behind the mask of the farceur and under the spots of the harlequin, Mr. Cohan has been hiding something we did not see, harboring designs of which we were not aware, and nurturing ambitions which are worthy of our high respect. If we look, with Mr. MacFarlane, into Cohan's past, we find that his life, with its obscure beginning in music-halls, has never been entirely without the hint of a worthy future.