For theatre historian Arthur Hornblow, writing in 1919, American drama had virtually ceased to exist by 1870. In its place, he insisted, had come foreign imports, a characteristic lament of American critics from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Nor, according to Henry James, did the theatre have a direct and organic relationship to American society in the way that, for example, the novel did. It was the source of distraction, entertainment, and amusement but not of a cogent engagement with the values and experiences of a nation in other respects so concerned with its own exceptionalism. Writing in 1875, he remarked that: