HENRY JAMES AND THE THEATRE
Are not the friends of Henry James inclined to be a little too solemn when they write about him, perhaps feeling that they must rise to the occasion and put on their best style, as though he had his eye on them and would be “down” on any lapses? An admirable reviewer of the Letters in theLiterary Supplementseemed, indeed, so overcome by his subject as to have fallen into one of Henry James’s least amiable mannerisms—his introduction of elaborate “figures,” relentlessly worked out and at last lagging superfluous. And the editor of the Letters, admirably, too, as he has done his work, is just a little bleak, isn’t he?—wearing the grave face of the historian and mindful never to become familiar. “Thank Heaven!” one seems to hear these writers saying to themselves; “evenhecould never have called this vulgar.” Such is the posthumous influence of the fastidious “master”! I daresay I am captious. One is never quite satisfied with what one sees in print about people one loved. One always thinks—it is, at any rate, a pleasing illusion—that one has one’s own key to thatparticular cipher, and to see the thing not merely given away but authoritatively expounded in print is rather a nuisance. Look at the number of fair ladies to whom Henry James wrote letters rich in intimate charm (oh! and, as he would have said, of a decorum!)—perhaps each of them thought she had the best corner of his heart. The most immaculate of women, young and old, matrons and maidens,willsentimentalize their men friends in this way. How could Henry James have escaped? Well, if any one of these ladies had edited the Letters or reviewed them, wouldn’t each of the others have said: “No, that isn’tmyHenry James—shenever understood him, poor dear”? I apologize for this flippant way of putting it to the two refined writers I began by mentioning. But, as the lady says inThe Spoils of Poynton, “I’m quite coarse, thank God!”
Henry James, unfortunately for his theatrical ambitions, never was. You must not only be coarse in grain, but tough in hide, for success in the theatre. Everybody knows that Henry James achieved only failure there, either crushing failure amid hootings and yells, as withGuy Domville, or that very significant failure which is called a success of “esteem,” as with his stage versions ofThe AmericanandCovering End. But not everybody knows how he positively yearned for the big popular success, and for that biggest, loudest, most brazen-trumpeted of successes, success in the theatre. He talks in his letters as though he actually needed the money,but it was really not so. He looked round the world and found it teeming with “best sellers,” idols of the multitude, who by any standards of his simply couldn’t “write,” didn’t artistically “exist.” And the most pathetic thing in his letters is their evidence that he began, aye! and went on, with the illusion that he, such as he was, the absolute artist, might some day become a “best seller.” Even so late as the days of his Collected Edition it came as a shock to him that the great public wouldn’t buy.
It is evident that he had good hopes, beforehand, ofGuy Domville. And yet he hated the actual process of production. The rehearsal, he says, is “as amazing as anything can be, for a man of taste and sensibility, in the odious process of practical dramatic production. I may have been meant for the Drama—God knows!—but I certainly wasn’t meant for the Theatre.” And when dire failure came, it wasn’t, he says, from any defect of technique. “I have worked like a horse—far harder than any one will ever know—over the whole stiff mystery of ‘technique’—I have run it to earth, and I don’t in the least hesitate to say that, for the comparatively poor and meagre, the piteously simplified purposes of the English stage, I have made it absolutely my own, put it into my pocket.” No, the fault must be in his choice of subject. “The question of realizing how different is the attitude of the theatre-goer toward the quality of things which might be a story in a book from his attitude towardthe quality of thing that is given to him as a story in a play is another matter altogether.Thatdifficulty is portentous, for any writer who doesn’t approach it naïvely, as only a very limited and simple-minded writer can. One has tomakeoneself so limited and simple to conceive a subject, see a subject, simply enough, and that, in a nutshell, is where I have stumbled.” “And yet,” he adds, pathetically enough (writing to his brother), “if you were to have seen my play!” He knew he had done good work, in his own way, and the plain fact that his way was a way which the gross theatre public would not understand or sympathize with was a terrible blow to him.
The process of turning himself into a simple-minded writer—that is, of making a sow’s ear out of a silk purse, was, of course, impossible. One doesn’t want to wallow in the obvious. But doesn’t it leap at the eyes that an artist who seeks to abandon his own temperament and point of view for another’s will forfeit all chance of that spontaneous joy without which there is no artistic creation? Fortunately, this theatrical malady of Henry James’s (though he had one or two recurrent twinges of it) never became chronic. The history of his real work is a history not of self-renunciation, but of self-development, of abounding, as the French say, in his own sense. As to the theatrical technique which he had put into his pocket he certainly kept it there. Like most laboriously acquired, alien techniques it was tootechnical, too “architectooralooral”—as any one can see who dips into his two forgotten volumes of “Theatricals.” His own proper technique was a very different thing, an entirely individual thing, and no reader of his books can have failed to notice how he gradually perfected it as he went along. It reached its highest point, to my thinking, inThe Ambassadors, surely the greatest of his books (though over this question the fierce tribe of Jacobites will fight to their last gasp), when everything, absolutely everything, is shown as seen through the eyes of Strether. To see a thing so “done” as he would have said, an artistic difficulty so triumphantly mastered, is among the rarest and most exquisite pleasures of life. That was Henry James’s function, to give us rare and exquisite pleasures, of a quality never to be had in the modern theatre. He was no theatrical man, but he could, when he chose, be the most delicate of dramatic critics. Read what he says in these Letters about Rostand’sL’Aiglon(“the man really has talent like an attack of small-pox”), about Bernstein’sLe Secretas a “case,” about Ibsen, “bottomlessly bourgeois ... and yet of his art he’s a master—and I feel in him, to the pitch of almost intolerable boredom, the presence and the insistence of life.”