XHENRY JAMES AND THE THEATER

The publication of Henry James’s Letters must have drawn the attention of many readers to the fact that James took an interest in the drama as an art second only to his interest in the novel. It has also informed these readers as to his long-nursed ambition to make money by writing plays,—an ambition always frustrated by malign fate. Probably only a few of those who first became aware of his dramatic aspirations by the disclosures in this correspondence will recall the evidence in his published works which testifies to his always apt appreciation of the art of acting and his ever persistent inquisitiveness as to the principles of playmaking. He came forward as a dramatic critic more often than is generally remembered; and his dramatic criticism is more intelligent, that is to say, it shows a better understanding of the theater, than we had a right to expect from one who gave himself up to another art, that of prose-fiction, closely akin to the art of the drama and yet widely divergent from it.

So many were Henry James’s excursions into the field of dramatic criticism that there are enough of them to fill a volume; and perhaps the task of making the collection will yet be undertaken by one of his staunch admirers. The book will be more welcome since James rescued only a few of these papers from magazines for which they were originally written. It may be well to list here the major part of the contents of this future gathering, certain to have a cordial reception from all students of the stage. In 1874 Henry James anonymously contributed to theAtlantica discriminating (but somewhat chilly) consideration of the revival of the ‘School for Scandal’ by the competent company of comedians who were then making brilliant the stage of the Boston Museum. In 1875 he gave to theGalaxyan illuminating review of Tennyson’s ‘Queen Mary,’ effectively contrasting it with Victor Hugo’s more melodramatic treatment of the same enigmatic heroine in ‘Marie Tudor.’ In 1875 again he included in his ‘Transatlantic Sketches’ an earlier letter on the ‘Parisian Stage.’ In 1876 he wrote, again for theGalaxy, his enthusiastic appreciation of the actors and actresses of the Comédie-Française, which he reprinted in 1878 in his volume of essays on the ‘French Poets and Novelists.’ In these early days he prepared for one periodical or another articles on Ristori and on Salvini, on Henry Irvingas Macbeth and on Macready’s Diary (all duly catalogued in Phillips’s exhaustive bibliography).

For theGalaxyagain in 1877 he wrote a review of the ‘London Stage,’ and in 1887 he contributed to theCenturyhis glowing tribute to that most consummate comedian, Coquelin. He seems to have overlooked both of these papers when he was selecting material for his successive volumes of essays in criticism; and it is not easy to understand why it was that he forgot the study of Coquelin. It is one of the most luminous of histrionic portraits, worthy to hang beside the best of Colley Cibber’s and Charles Lamb’s. He was never more cordially enthusiastic about any artist than he was about the incomparable Coquelin, the most gifted and the most versatile comic actor of the last three decades of the nineteenth century. I recall that when I drew Coquelin’s attention to this superb testimony to his talent, the actor smiled with pleasure. “Henry James,” he said. “Yes, it appears that I have the privilege of throwing him into an ecstasy!” In 1915 Henry James was kind enough to revise this essay, so that it might serve as an introduction to Coquelin’s own analysis of ‘Art and the Actor’ when that was reprinted in the second series of the publications of the Dramatic Museum of Columbia University.

It remains to be recorded only that Henry James included among his ‘Essays in London and Elsewhere’ two papers on Ibsen’s plays, originally written in 1891 and 1893: and that in his ‘Notes on Novelists’ he preserved a paper on Alexandre Dumas fils, written in 1895. Quite probably there may be other articles on theatrical themes contributed to one or another of the newspapers for which he served now and again as correspondent from Paris or from London. And not to be omitted from this record is the long story called the ‘Tragic Muse,’ one of the most veracious of theatrical novels; it was published in 1890.

From one or another of his dramatic criticisms I could borrow not a few pregnant passages, revelations of his penetrating insight into the inexorable conditions under which the playwright must do his work. Here is an early remark, culled from a letter on the Parisian stage, written in 1872:

An acted play is a novel, intensified; it realizes what the novel suggests, and by paying a liberal tribute to the senses, anticipates your possible complaint that your entertainment is of the meager sort styled intellectual.

This does not pierce to the marrow of the matter; it does not detail all the difference betweenthe acted play and the novel; but it has its significance, none the less. In the same letter Henry James ventures to speak of the “colossal flimsiness” of the ‘Dame aux Camélias.’ Now Dumas’s pathetic play may be more or less false, but it is not flimsy; it must have had a solidity of its own, and even a certain sincerity of a kind, since it kept the stage for three score years and ten.

Here, however, is a long paragraph from the paper on Tennyson’s ‘Queen Mary’ (written in 1875), which discloses an indisputable insight into the difficulties of the dramatist’s art:

The fine thing in a real drama, generally speaking, is that, more than any other work of literary art, it needs a masterly structure. It needs to be shaped and fashioned and laid together, and this process makes a demand upon an artist’s rarest gifts. He must combine and arrange, interpolate and eliminate, play the joiner with the most attentive skill; and yet at the end effectually bury his tools and his sawdust, and invest his elaborate skeleton with the smoothest and most polished integument. The five-act drama—serious or humorous, poetic or prosaic—is like a box of fixt dimensions and inelastic material, into which a mass of precious things are to be packed away. The precious things in question seem out of all proportion to the compass of the receptacle; but the artist has an assurance that with patience and skill a place may be made for each, and that nothing need be clipped or crumpled, squeezed or damaged. The false dramatist eitherknocks out the sides of his box or plays the deuce with the contents; the real one gets down on his knees, disposes of his goods tentatively, this, that, and the other way, loses his temper but keeps his ideal, and at last rises in triumph, having packed his coffer in the one way that is mathematically right. It closes perfectly, and the lock turns with a click; between one object and another you cannot insert the point of a penknife.

It will be enough to risk only one more quotation,—this time from the paper evoked by the first performance of Ibsen’s ‘Hedda Gabler’ in London in 1891:

The stage is to the prose drama (and Ibsen’s later manner is the very prose of prose) what the tune is to the song or the concrete case to the general law. It immediately becomes apparent that he needs the test to show his strength and the frame to show his picture. An extraordinary process of vivification takes place; the conditions seem essentially enlarged. Those of the stage in general strike us for the most part as small enough, so that the game played in them is often not more inspiring than a successful sack-race. But Ibsen reminds us that if they did not in themselves confer life, they can at least receive it when the infusion is artfully administered. Yet how much of it they were doomed to receive from ‘Hedda Gabler’ was not to be divined till we had seen ‘Hedda Gabler’ in the frame. The play, on perusal, left us comparatively muddled and mystified, fascinated but—in one’s intellectual sympathy—snubbed. Acted, it leads that sympathy over the straightest of roads with all the exhilaration of a superior pace.

Nothing could be better than that, nothing could make clearer the immitigable fact that the full measure of the essential power of any drama can be gauged only in the actual theater, to the special conditions of which it has been scientifically adjusted.

In default as yet of a circumstantial biography which shall set before us the successive but perpetually unsuccessful efforts which Henry James made to establish himself as a dramatist, we must find what materials we may in his correspondence and in the explanatory prefaces which their editor prefixt to the several chronological sections into which he chose to distribute the letters. First and last, Henry James seems to have composed eight plays, three of which underwent the ordeal by fire before the footlights.

His earliest attempt was an amplification of ‘Daisy Miller,’ a short-story which had attained an immediate vogue. This dramatization was made in 1882 on commission from the managers of the Madison Square Theater in New York. But it was not found acceptable to them; and the author took it over to London and read it to the managers of the St. James’s Theater, but without winning a more favorable opinion. Unable to arrange for performance, he resignedhimself to publication; and it appeared as a book in 1883.

Half-a-dozen years later he became discouraged at his inability to maintain the popularity which he had tasted earlier in his career as a novelist; and he persuaded himself that he might win a wider audience as a writer of plays than as a writer of novels. He asserted more than once that he was persuaded to playmaking by the patent fact that it was more immediately remunerative than story-telling; but this assertion seems to be the result of a certain self-deception, as one of his letters, written to his brother in 1891, proves that he was convinced of his richer endowment for the drama than for prose-fiction:

The strange thing is that I have always known this (the drama) was my more characteristic form.... As for the form itself its honor and inspiration are its difficulty. If it were easy to write a good play I couldn’t and wouldn’t think of it; but it is in fact damnably hard.

A little later, in a letter to Stevenson, he wrote that he was finding that the dramatic form opened out before him “as if there were a kingdom to conquer.... I feel as if I had at last found my form—my real one—that for which pale fiction is an ineffectual substitute.”

When he turned to the theater he was not exploring an unknown country. He had been a constant playgoer, ever inquisitive about all manifestations of the twin arts of the stage, the histrionic and the dramaturgic. Whenever he was in Paris he sat night after night absorbing the best that the Comédie-Française could give him; and Sunday he profited by the sane solidity of the dramatic criticisms of Francisque Sarcey, from whom few of the secrets of the art of the stage were hidden. As early as 1878 he had written to his brother: “My inspection of the French theater will fructify. I have thoroly mastered Dumas, Augier and Sardou; and I know all they know and a great deal more besides.” And in another letter (also to his brother) in 1895, he dwelt on the double difficulty of the novelist who turns dramatist, the question of method and the question of subject:

If he is really in earnest, as I have been, he surmounts the former difficulty before he surmounts the latter. I have worked like a horse—far harder than any one will ever know—over the whole stiff mystery of technic. I have run it to earth, and I don’t in the least hesitate to say that, for the comparatively poor and meager, the piteously simplified, purposes of the English stage, I have made it absolutely my own, put it in my pocket.

That this was not empty vaunting, and that his keen and cool critical insight had led him tograsp the chief of the essential qualities of the drama, as distinguished from prose-fiction, is proved by a passage in a letter written in 1909 to a friend who had sent him a published piece of hers, which seemed to him undramatic in that it lacked “an action, a progression,” whereby it was deprived of the needful tenseness:

A play appears to me of necessity to involve a struggle, a question of whether and how, will it or won’t it happen? And if so, or not so, how and why?—which we have the suspense, the curiosity, the anxiety, thetension, in a word of seeing; and which means that the whole thing shows an attack uponoppositions—with the victory or the failure on one side or the other, and each wavering and shifting from point to point.

Here Henry James is at one with Ferdinand Brunetière, when the French critic laid down what he called the Law of the Drama,—that if a play is to arouse and retain the interest of audiences it must present a struggle, a clash of contending desires; it must exhibit the stark assertion of the human will.

Henry James’s second play was like his first, a dramatization of one of his own stories, a stage-version of the ‘American.’ It was more fortunate than the stage-version of ‘Daisy Miller,’ in that it did thrust itself into the theater, where it lived only a brief life. It was produced in 1891 by Edward Compton in England,at first in the provinces and then for a few performances in London. When he commenced playwriting Henry James did not appreciate that it is a more difficult task to dramatize a novel than to compose an original play, since the author is necessarily unable to deal with his material as freely as he could if it were still molten and had not already been run into the mold of a narrative. Seemingly he made this discovery in due course; and he did not again attempt to turn any of his stories into plays.

His third effort was an original piece, ‘Guy Domville,’ brought out by Sir George Alexander at the St. James’s Theater in 1895. That it failed to be favorably received and that it had to be withdrawn at the end of a month, was a grievous disappointment to the author,—a disappointment made more poignant by the gross discourtesy, not to call it wanton brutality, with which he was received by a portion of the audience when he was called before the curtain at the end of the first performance. It was perhaps due to this indignity that he did not publish the play which had failed on the stage in the natural expectation that it might please in the study, appealing from the noisy verdict of its spectators to the quieter judgment of its possible readers.

He had already, the year before, printed intwo volumes, entitled ‘Theatricals,’ four other comedies which he had vainly proffered to the managers,—‘Tenants,’ ‘Disengaged,’ the ‘Album,’ and the ‘Reprobate.’ One other play he turned into a tale, called ‘Covering End,’ published in 1898. Here he was not contending with any insuperable difficulty in transposition, since the novel may very well be dramatic, whereas the play shrinks in abhorrence from any tincture of the epic.

The drama never lost its attraction for Henry James, but he was repelled, as well as repulsed, by the theater, wherein it has its domicile. In 1893 he wrote to his brother:

The whole odiousness of the thing lies in the connection between the drama and the theater; the one is admirable in its interest and its difficulty, the other loathsome in its conditions. If the drama could only be theoretically or hypothetically acted, the fascination resident in its all but unconquerable form would be unimpaired, and one would be able to have the exquisite exercise without the horrid sacrifice.

This was a suggestion natural enough in a retiring and fastidious artist in letters, but inconceivable in the mouth of any born playwright, Shakspere or Molière, Sheridan or Beaumarchais, in whom the pain was physicked by the labor they delighted in.

Notwithstanding his distaste for any otherthan a theoretic or hypothetic playhouse, Henry James in 1908, ten years after the publication of ‘Covering End,’ did not hesitate to disinter the one-act play upon which it had been founded and to authorize its performance. He even permitted it to be cut into three acts,—just as Scribe four-score years earlier had made a three-act comedy, ‘Valérie,’ out of a one-act comédie-vaudeville, by the simple expedient of excising the songs and of dropping the curtain twice during the course of the action. The new-old three-act piece was entitled the ‘High Bid’; it was performed a few times in the provinces and a few times more in London by the Forbes-Robertsons. But it did not make any definite impression on the playgoing public. It was not a disheartening failure like ‘Guy Domville,’ yet it could not be called a success. Still, its milder reception encouraged its author to resume work on two more plays, the ‘Other House’ and the ‘Outcry.’ There were even negotiations for the production of these pieces,—negotiations which came to nothing, chiefly because prolonged illness forced him to give up work on them.

In the deprecatory note which he prefixt to the second volume of ‘Theatricals,’ Henry James declared that

the man who pretends to the drama has more to learn, in fine, than any other pretender; and his dog’s eared grammar comes at last to have the remarkable peculiarity of seeming a revelation he himself shall have made.

Plainly enough he had the conviction that to him the revelation was complete and that he had his self-made grammar by heart. Why then did he fail after efforts so persistent and so strenuous? Why did disaster follow fast and follow faster? It was plainly not from any lapse in painstaking or any easy ignoring of the difficulties of the dangerous task. It was not because his primary motive was pecuniary, since he was soon seized with ardor in his adventures into a new art. What then was it?

I think that we can find a key to the secret in his letters wherein he more than once exhibits his detestation of the audience he was aiming to amuse. He wrote to his brother in 1895:

The thing fills me with horror for the abysmal vulgarity and brutality of the theater and its regular public,which God knows I have had intensely, even when working (from motives as pure as pecuniary motives can be) against it.

What right had any man to hope that he might gain the suffrages of spectators he so totally detested and despised? Henry James here takes an attitude, he discloses a frame of mind, as dissimilar as may be from the mighty masters of the drama,—from Corneille’s or Molière’s, for example.

In 1911 he wrote to a friend that

the conditions—the theater-question generally—in this country (England) are horrific and unspeakable. Utter, and as far as I can see, irreclaimable barbarism reigns. The anomalous fact is that the theater, so called, can flourish in barbarism, but that any drama worth speaking of can develop but in the air of civilization.

That assertion implies a belief that England was less civilized in the opening years of the twentieth century than it had been in the opening years of the seventeenth. Many things may be said against the present age, but hardly that it is less civilized than that of James I.

We may dismiss these two opinions as the petulances of a man of delicate sensibilities abraded to exacerbation by gross contacts with the vulgar herd. None the less are contacts with the herd inherent in the playwright’s trade.He cannot retire into any ivory tower; he must come down to the market place; only at his peril can he shrink from meeting his fellow man. He is disqualified for the drama which appeals, has always appealed and always will appeal, to the mass, to the common herd, if he holds himself aloof, if his sympathy is not sufficient to make him for the moment one of the throng, to feel as the mass feels, even if he feels more acutely, to think as the plain people think, even if he thinks more wisely. At bottom the drama must be fundamentally democratic, since it depends upon the majority.

The great dramatists did not succeed by writing down to the mob, but by writing broad to humanity. They did not have to deliberate and to quest about for the things to which the many-headed public would respond; they knew, for they themselves thrilled with the same passions, the same desires and the same ideals. They had an assured solidarity with their fellow-citizens, whom they faced on the plane of equality and whom they did not look down on from any altitude of conscious superiority. They never condescended; they were never even tempted to condescension. They gave to the throng, made up of all manner of men, literate and illiterate, the best they had in them, the very best. Nor did they feel that in so doing they were makingany sacrifice. They were stout of heart and strong of stomach, with no drooping tendrils of exquisite delicacy.

Perhaps it would be unfair to suggest that when he was engaged in playwriting Henry James was unconsciously condescending; but it is not unfair to assert that he had no solidarity with the spectators he was hoping to attract and delight. What he gave them—the note prefixt to ‘Theatricals’ proves it amply—was as good as he thought they deserved or could understand; it was not his best. And even if he had designed to give them his best, he could not have done it, because a miniaturist cannot make himself over into a scene-painter. The two arts may demand an equal ability but the hand that works in either, soon subdued to what it works in, is incapacitated for the other. The supersubtleties in which Henry James excelled were impossible in the theater; they demand time to be taken in, an allowance impossible to the swiftness of the stage; they would not get across the footlights; and they might puzzle even the most enlightened spectators. It takes an immense experience and a marvelous skill “to paint in broad strokes, but so artfully that at a distance it appears as if we had painted in miniature,”—which, so the Spanish dramatist Benavente tells us, “is at once the problem and the art of the drama.”

In his review of the ‘School for Scandal,’ Henry James confessed that he saw

no reason to believe that the mass of mankind will ever be more artistic than is strikingly convenient, and we suspect that acute pleasure or pain, on this line, will remain the privilege of an initiated minority.

The supreme leaders of the drama, Sophocles, Shakspere and Molière, were satisfied to rely on the “mass of mankind,” of whose sympathies they had an intuitive understanding. Henry James, all unwittingly it may be, was addressing himself only to the “initiated minority.” Where the leaders possessed robust straightforwardness and direct brevity, he was solitary, isolated, acutely fastidious. He must have read but he did not take to heart Joubert’s warning that we ought, “in writing, to remember that men of culture are present, but it is not to them that we should speak.” Henry James’s novels would have been more widely enjoyed if he had profited by this precept; and because he did not profit by it his plays are “all silent and all damned.”

(1921)

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