Explanatory prefaces and elaborate revisions, short stories and long
memories, were far from being the complete tale of literary labour
during the last eight years of Henry James's life. A new era for English
drama was prophesied in 1907. Led by Miss Horniman, advocates of the
repertory system were marching forward, capturing one by one the
intellectual centres of the provinces. In London, repertory seasons were
announced in two West-end theatres. Actor-managers began to ask for
"non-commercial" plays and when their appeal reached Henry James it met
with a quick response. The theatre had both allured and repelled him for
many years, and he had already been the victim of a theatrical
misadventure. His assertions that he wrote plays solely in the hope of
making money should not, I think, be taken as the complete explanation
of his dramas. It is pretty clear that he wrote plays because he wanted
to write them, because he was convinced that his instinct for dramatic
situations could find a happy outlet in plays, because writing for the
stage is a game rich in precise rules and he delighted in the
multiplication of technical difficulties, and because he lived in
circles more addicted to the intelligent criticism of plays than to the
intelligent criticism of novels. The plays he wrote in the early
'nineties are very careful exercises in technique. They are derived
straight from the light comedies of the Parisian stage, with the
difference that in the 'nineties, for all their advertised naughtiness,
there were even stricter limits to the free representation of Parisian
situations on English stages than there are to-day. In _The Reprobate_,
a play successfully produced a few years ago by the Stage Society, the
lady whose hair has changed from black to red and from red to gold is
the centre of the drama, she holds the key to the position, but all her
complicating effect depends upon the past--pasts being allowed on every
stage comparative license of reference. The compromising evidence is all
a matter of old photographs and letters, and the play loses in vividness
whatever it may gain in respectability. Nobody knew better than the
author that _The Reprobate_ was not a good play. Terror of being cut
forbade him to work on a subject of intrinsic importance. With another
hour guaranteed, a playwright might attempt anything, but "he does not
get his hour, and he will probably begin by missing his subjects. He
takes, in his dread of complication, a minor one, and it's heavy odds
that the minor one, with the habit of small natures, will prove
thankless."
Other early plays had been converted into novels or tales and so
published. One of these, written originally for Miss Ellen Terry but
never produced by her, had appeared as an incongruous companion to _The
Turn of the Screw_ in the volume entitled _The Two Magics._ A few
attentive readers had seen the dramatic possibilities of _Covering End_,
and when it was suggested to Henry James that he should convert it into
a three-act comedy for production by Mr. Forbes Robertson (as he was
then) and Miss Gertrude Elliot, he willingly consented. Flying under a
new flag, as _The High Bid_, the play was produced in London in
February, 1909, but only for a series of matinées, the prodigious
success of _The Passing of the Third Floor Back_ precluding the
possibility of an evening for any other production under the same
management. Under the inspiration of the repertory movement, other
material was re-cast for acting. _The Other House_ was re-dictated as a
tragedy. _Owen Wingrave_ became _The Saloon_, a one-act play produced by
Miss Gertrude Kingston in 1910. Finally an entirely new three-act
comedy, _The Outcry_, was written round the highly topical subject of
the sale of art treasures to rich Americans. It was not produced during
Henry James's life. At the time when it should have been rehearsed he
was ill and the production was postponed. On his recovery, he went to
the United States for a year, and when he came back the day of repertory
performances had died in a fresh night of stars.
When _The Outcry_ was given by the Stage Society in 1917, it was evident
that the actors were embarrassed by their lines, for by 1909, when the
play was written, the men and women of Henry James could talk only in
the manner of their creator. His own speech, assisted by the practice of
dictating, had by that time become so inveterately characteristic that
his questions to a railway clerk about a ticket or to a fishmonger about
a lobster, might easily be recognized as coined in the same mint as his
addresses to the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature.
Apart from this difficulty of enunciating the lines, _The Outcry_ has
all the advantages over the earlier plays. The characters are real and
they act from adequate motives. The solution of the presented problem,
which requires, like most of the author's solutions, a change of heart,
is worked out with admirable art, without any use of the mechanical
shifts and stage properties needed in _The Reprobate._ It is not very
difficult to believe that if Henry James had been encouraged twenty
years earlier to go on writing plays he might have made a name as a
dramatist, but the faithful may be forgiven for rejoicing that the
playwright was sacrificed to the novelist and critic.