(1889-1897)
For the next five years, when once The Tragic Muse was off his hands,
Henry James gave himself up with persevering determination to the
writing of plays. He speaks very plainly, in his letters of the time,
concerning the motives which urged him to the theatre, and there is no
doubt that the chief of them was the desire for a kind of success which
his fiction failed to achieve. He puts it simply that he wished to make
money, that his books did not sell, and that he regarded the theatre
solely as a much-needed pecuniary resource. But such belittling of his
own motives--out of a feeling that was partly pride and partly
shyness--was not unusual with him; and it seems impossible to take this
language quite literally. For a man of letters with moderate tastes and
no family, Henry James's circumstances were more than easy, even if his
writings should earn him nothing at all; and he had no reason to doubt
that his future was sufficiently assured. Moreover, though his work
might have no great popular vogue--it had had a measure of that too, at
the time of Daisy Miller--it still never wanted its own attentive
circle; so that he had not to complain of the utter indifference that
may wear upon the nerves of even the most disinterested artist. The
sense of solitude that began to weigh upon him was perhaps more a matter
of temperament than of fact; it never for a moment meant that he had
lost faith in himself and his powers, but there mingled with it his
inveterate habit of forecasting the future in the most ominous light. As
he looked forward, he saw the undoubted decline of his popularity
carrying him further and further away from recognition and its rewards;
and the prospect, once the thought of it had taken root in his
imagination, distressed and dismayed him. All would be righted, he felt,
by the successful conquest of the theatre; there lay the way, not only
to solid gains, but to the reassurance of vaguer, less formulated
anxieties. With such a tangible gage of having made his impression he
would be relieved for ever from the fear of working in vain and alone.
But from the moment when he began to write plays instead of novels, the
task laid hold upon him with other attractions; and it was these, no
doubt, which kept him at it through so many troubles and
disappointments. The dramatic form itself, in the first place, delighted
and tormented him with its difficulty; the artistic riddle of lucidity
in extreme compression, what he once characteristically described as the
"passionate economy" of the play as he wrote it, appealed to him and
drew him on to constantly renewed attempts. He admits that, but for this
perpetual challenge to his ingenuity, he could never have supported the
annoyances and irritations entailed by practical commerce with the
theatre. And yet it is easy to see that these too had a certain
fascination for him. He could not have been so eloquent in his
denunciation of all theatrical conditions, the "saw-dust and
orange-peel" of the trade, if he had not been enjoyably stimulated by
them; and indeed from his earliest youth his interest in the stage had
been keenly professional. The Tragic Muse herself, outcome of
innumerable sessions at the Theatre Francais, shews how intently he had
studied the art of acting--not as a spectacle only, but as a business
and a life. The world behind the theatrical scene, though in the end he
broke away from it with relief, closely occupied his mind during these
few years; and with his gift for turning all experience to imaginative
account he could scarcely look back on it afterwards as time wasted,
little as his heavy expenditure of spirit and toil had to shew for it.
His hope of finding fame and fortune in this direction failed
utterly--and failed, which was much to the good, with clearness and
precision at a given moment, so that he was able to make a clean cut and
return at once to his right line. But he took with him treasures of
observation lodged in a memory that to the end of his life always dwelt
upon the theatre with a curious mixture of exasperation and delight.
Of all the plays, seven or eight in number, that he wrote between 1889
and 1894, only two were actually seen upon the stage. The first of these
was a dramatic version of The American, produced by Edward Compton (who
played the principal part) at Southport in January 1891. The piece had a
fairly successful provincial life, but it failed to make good its hold
upon London, where it was given for the first time on September 26,
1891, at the Opera Comique, by the same company. It ran for about two
months, after which it was seen no more in London, though it continued
for some while longer to figure in Compton's provincial repertory. In
its later life it was played with a re-written last act, in which, much
against his will, Henry James conceded to popular taste a "happy ending"
for his hero and heroine. The other and much more elaborate production
was that of _Guy Domville_ at the St. James's Theatre on January 5,
1895, with George Alexander and Miss Marion Terry in the chief parts.
The story of this unfortunate venture is to be read in the letters that
follow. The play (which has never been published) was enthusiastically
received by the few and roughly rejected by the many; it ran for exactly
a month and then disappeared for good. It was the most ambitious, and no
doubt the best, piece of dramatic work that Henry James had produced,
and he immediately accepted its failure as the end, for the present, of
his play-writing. The first night of Guy Domville had been marked by an
incident which wounded him so deeply that he could never afterwards bear
the least reference to it; after the fall of the curtain he had been
exposed, apparently by a misunderstanding, to the hostility of the
grosser part of the audience, and the affront, the shock to his
sensitive taste, was extreme and enduring. There had been various plans
and projects in connection with his other plays, but by this time they
had all come to nothing. To the relief of those friends who knew what an
intolerable strain the whole agitated time had thrown upon his nerves,
he went back to the work and the life which were so evidently the right
scope for his genius. But before doing so he published four of his plays
in two volumes of _Theatricals_ (1894, 1895,) to the second of which he
prefixed an introduction which sums up, with great candour and dignity,
a part of the lesson he had learnt from his discouraging experience.
Outside the theatre his life proceeded as usual, and his yearly visits
to Paris or Italy are almost the only events to be recorded. He was in
Paris in the autumn of 1889 and in Italy, chiefly at Florence and
Venice, for the following summer. But both these centres of attraction
were beginning to lose their hold on him a little, though for different
reasons: Paris for something in its artistic self-sufficiency that he
found increasingly unsympathetic--and Italy as it became more and more
a field of social claims, English and American, irresistible on the spot
but destructive of quiet work. He began to feel the need of some settled
country-home of his own in England, though for some years yet he took no
practical steps to find one. He was in Paris again, early in 1891. At
the end of the same year he was called to Dresden by the sudden death in
hospital there of a gifted young American friend with whom he had
latterly been much associated--Wolcott Balestier, whose short but
remarkable career, as a writer and still more as a "literary agent" for
other writers (including Henry James), has been commemorated by Mr.
Gosse in his _Portraits and Sketches_. From this distressing excursion
Henry James returned home to face another and greater sorrow which had
begun to threaten him for some time past. For two years his sister had
been growing steadily weaker; she had moved to London, and lived near
her brother in Kensington, but her seclusion was so rigid that only
those who knew him well understood how great a part she played in his
life. Her vigour of mind and imagination was as keen as ever, and though
the number of people she was able to see and know in England was very
small she lived ardently in the interest, highly critical for the most
part, that she took in public affairs. Her death in March 1892 meant for
Henry James not only the end of a companionship that was very dear to
him, but the breaking of the only family tie that he had had or was ever
to have in England. So long as his sister was near him there was one
person who shared his old memories and with whom he was in his own home;
and when it is recalled how intensely he always clung to his distant
kindred, and what a sense of support he drew from them even in his long
separation, it is possible to measure the loss that befell him
now--exactly at a time when such familiar and natural sympathy was most
precious to him.
He spent the summer of 1892 again in Italy, avoiding the tourist-stream
by settling at Siena, after it had subsided, in the company of M. and
Mme. Paul Bourget, by this time his intimate friends. William James and
his family were now in Europe for a year of Switzerland and Italy, and
Henry joined them at Lausanne on his way home. The next two years of
London were given up, almost without intermission, to the hopes and
anxieties of his theatrical affairs, in which he was now completely
immersed--so much so, indeed, as to test his very remarkable powers of
physical endurance, which seem in middle life to have thrown off the
early troubles of his health. When this time of fevered agitation was
over he was able to compose himself at once to happier work, without
apparently feeling even the need of a day's holiday. In 1893 he was in
Paris in the spring, and again for a short while in Switzerland with his
brother; but these excursions were never real holidays--he was quickly
uneasy if he had not work of some kind on hand. He projected another
summer in Italy for the following year, and spent it chiefly in Venice
and Rome. This was the last of Italy, however, for some time; there were
too many friends everywhere--"the most disastrous attempt I have ever
made," he writes, "to come abroad for privacy and quiet." Still the only
alternative seemed to be sea-side lodgings in England; and for the
summer of 1895, escaping from the London season as usual, he went to
Torquay. By this time Guy Domville had failed and he was free again; he
had the happiest winter of work in London that he had known for five
years. After finishing some short stories he began The Spoils of
Poynton, and with it the series of his works that belong definitely to
his "later manner." At last, in 1896, instead of his usual esplanade,
he settled for a while upon an English country-side, making an
accidental choice that was to prove momentous. He took a small house for
the summer on the hill of Playden, in Sussex, where for the first time
in his life, and after twenty years of England, he enjoyed a solitude of
his own among trees and fields. From his terrace, where he sat under an
ash-tree working at his novel, he looked across a wide valley to the
beautiful old red-roofed town of Rye, climbing the opposite hill and
crowned with its church-tower. The charm and tranquillity of the place
were perfect, and when he had to give up the house at Playden he moved
for the autumn into the old Rye vicarage. Exploring the steep cobbled
streets round the church he came upon a singularly delightful old house,
of the early eighteenth century, with a large walled garden behind it,
which attracted him to the point of enquiring whether he might hope to
possess it. There appeared to be no prospect of this; but he went back
to London with a vivid sense that Lamb House was exactly the place he
needed, if it should ever fall to him.
He had already finished The Spoils of Poynton and had immediately set to
work on What Maisie Knew, deeply reconciled now to the indifference of
the general public, which indeed became more and more confirmed. The
only question by this time was whether London was any longer the right
place for the determined concentration upon fiction that he decided was
to fill the rest of his life. The country would hardly have drawn him
thither for its own sake; there could not have been such a lack of it in
his existence, for more than fifty years, if it had strongly appealed to
him in itself. But London had long ago given him all it could, and his
great desire now was for peace and quiet and freedom from interruption.
In 1897, after a summer of the usual kind, at Bournemouth and Dunwich,
he suddenly learned that a tenant was being sought for Lamb House, and
he signed the lease within a few days. It was the most punctual and
appropriate stroke of fortune that could have been devised.
_To Robert Louis Stevenson._
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
April 29th, 1889.
This is really dreadful news, my dear Louis, odious news to one who had
neatly arranged that his coming August should be spent gobbling down
your yarns--by some garden-window of Skerryvore--as the Neapolitan
lazzarone puts away the lubricating filaments of the vermicelli. And
yet, with my hideous capacity to understand it, I am strong enough,
superior enough, to say _anything_, for conversation, later. It's in the
light of unlimited conversation that I see the future years, and my
honoured chair by the ingleside will require a succession of new
cushions. I miss you shockingly--for, my dear fellow, there is no
one--literally no one; and I don't in the least follow you--I can't go
with you (I mean in conceptive faculty and the "realising sense,") and
you are for the time absolutely as if you were dead to me--I mean to my
imagination of course--not to my affection or my prayers. And so I shall
keep humble that you may pump into me--and make me stare and sigh and
look simple and be quite out of it--for ever and ever. It's the best
thing that can happen to one to see it written in your very hand that
you have been so uplifted in health and cheer, and if another year will
screw you up so tight that you won't "come undone" again, I will try and
hold on through the barren months. I will go to Mrs. Sitwell, to hear
what has made you blush--it must be something very radical. Your
chieftains are dim to me--why shouldn't they be when you yourself are?
_Va_ for another year--but don't stay away longer, for we should really,
for self-defence, have to outlive [?] you.... I myself do little but sit
at home and write little tales--and even long ones--you shall see them
when you come back. Nothing would induce me, by sending them to you, to
expose myself to damaging Polynesian comparisons. For the rest, there is
nothing in this land but the eternal Irish strife--the place is all
gashed and gory with it. I can't tell you of it--I am too sick of
it--more than to say that two or three of the most interesting days I
ever passed were lately in the crowded, throbbing, thrilling little
court of the Special Commission, over the astounding drama of the forged
_Times_ letters.
I have a hope, a dream, that your mother may be coming home and that one
may go and drink deep of her narrations. But it's idle and improbable. A
wonderful, beautiful letter from your wife to Colvin seemed, a few
months ago, to make it clear that _she_ has no quarrel with your wild
and wayward life. I hope it agrees with her a little too--I mean that it
renews her youth and strength. It is a woeful time to wait--for your
prose as for your person--especially as the prose can't be better though
the person may.
Your very faithful
HENRY JAMES.
_To William James._
Hotel de Hollande, Paris.
Nov. 28th, '89.
My dear William,
...I send you this from Paris, where I have been for the last five
weeks. Toward the end I relented in regard to the exhibition and came
over in time for the last fortnight of it. It was despoiled of its
freshness and invaded by hordes of furious Franks and fiery Huns--but it
was a great impression and I'm glad I sacrificed to it. So I've remained
on. I go back Dec. 1st. It happens that I have been working very hard
all this month--almost harder than ever in my life before--having on top
of other pressing and unfinished tasks undertaken, for the bribe of
large lucre, to translate Daudet's new _Tartarin_ novel for the
Harpers.... I had a talk of one hour and a half with him the other
day--about "our work" (!!) and his own queer, deplorable condition,
which he intensely converts into art, profession, success, copy,
etc.--taking perpetual notes about his constant suffering (terrible in
degree,) which are to make a book called _La Douleur_, the most detailed
and pessimistic notation of pain _qui fut jamais_. He is doing, in the
midst of this, his new, gay, lovely "Tartarin" for the Harpers _en
premier lieu_; that is, they are to publish it serially with wonderfully
"processed" drawings before it comes out as a book in France--and I am
to represent him, in English (a difficult, but with ingenuity a pleasant
and amusing task,) while this serial period lasts. I have seen a good
deal of Bourget, and as I have breakfasted with Coppee and twice dined
in company with Meilhac, Sarcey, Albert Wolff, Goncourt, Ganderax,
Blowitz, etc., you will judge that I am pretty well saturated and ought
to have the last word about ces gens-ci. That last word hasn't a grain
of subjection or of mystery left in it: it is simply, "Chinese, Chinese,
Chinese!" They are finished, besotted mandarins, and their Paris is
their celestial Empire. With that, such a Paris as it sometimes seems!
Nevertheless I've enjoyed it, and though I am very tired, too tired to
write to you properly, I shall have been much refreshed by my stay here,
and have taken aboard some light and heat for the black London
winter.... I hope that above house and college and life and everything
you still hold up an undemented head, and are not in a seedy way.
Ever your affectionate
HENRY.
_To Robert Louis Stevenson._
Stevenson was now beginning to break to his friends at home the
possibility that he might settle permanently in the South Seas; but
he still projected a preliminary visit to England, or at least to
Europe.
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
March 21st, 1890.
My dear Louis and my dear Mrs. Louis,
It comes over me with horror and shame that, within the next very few
months, your return to England may become such a reality that I shall
before long stand face to face with you branded with the almost
blood-guilt of my long silence. Let me break that silence then, before
the bliss of meeting you again (heaven speed the day) is qualified, in
prospect, by the apprehension of your disdain. I despatch these
incoherent words to Sydney, in the hope they may catch you before you
embark for our palpitating England. My despicable dumbness has been a
vile accident--I needn't assure you that it doesn't pretend to the
smallest backbone of system or sense. I have simply had the busiest year
of my life and have been so drained of the fluid of expression--so
tapped into the public pitcher--that my whole correspondence has dried
up and died of thirst. Then, somehow, you had become inaccessible to the
mind as well as to the body, and I had the feeling that, in the midst of
such desperate larks, any news of mine would be mere irrelevant drivel
to you. Now, however, you _must_ take it, such as it is. It won't, of
course, be news to you at all that the idea of your return has become
altogether the question of the day. The other two questions (the eternal
Irish and Rudyard Kipling) aren't in it. (We'll tell you all about
Rudyard Kipling--your nascent rival; he has killed one immortal--Rider
Haggard; the star of the hour, aged 24 and author of remarkable
Anglo-Indian and extraordinarily observed barrack life--Tommy
Atkins--tales.) What I am pledged to do at the present moment (pledged
to Colvin) is to plead with you passionately on the question of Samoa
and expatriation. But somehow, when it comes to the point, I can't do
it--partly because I can't really believe in anything so dreadful (a
long howl of horror has gone up from all your friends), and partly
because before any step so fatal is irretrievably taken we are to have a
chance to see you and bind you with flowery chains. When you tell me
with your own melodious lips that you're committed, I'll see what's to
be done; but I won't take a single plank of the house or a single hour
of the flight for granted. Colvin has given me instantly all your recent
unspeakable news--I mean the voyage to Samoa and everything preceding,
and your mother has kindly communicated to me her own wonderful
documents. Therefore my silence has been filled with sound--sound
infinitely fearful sometimes. But the joy of your health, my dear
Louis, has been to me as an imparted sensation--making me far more glad
than anything that I could originate with myself. I shall never be as
well as I am glad that you are well. We are poor tame, terrified
products of the tailor and the parlour-maid; but we have a fine
sentiment or two, all the same.... I, thank God, am in better form than
when you first took ship. I have lately finished the longest and most
careful novel I have ever written (it has gone 16 months in a
periodical) and the last, in that form, I shall ever do--it will come
out as a book in May. Also other things too flat to be bawled through an
Australasian tube. But the intensest throb of my literary life, as of
that of many others, has been the Master of Ballantrae--a pure hard
crystal, my boy, a work of ineffable and exquisite art. It makes us all
as proud of you as you can possibly be of _it_. Lead him on blushing,
lead him back blooming, by the hand, dear Mrs. Louis, and we will talk
over everything, as we used to lang syne at Skerryvore. When we _have_
talked over everything and when all your tales are told, then you may
paddle back to Samoa. But we shall call time. My heartiest greeting to
the young Lloyd--grizzled, I fear, before his day. I have been very
sorry to hear of your son-in-law's bad case. May all that tension be
over now. _Do_ receive this before you sail--_don't_ sail till you get
it. But then bound straight across. I send a volume of the Rising Star
to goad you all hither with jealousy. He has quite done for your
neglected even though neglectful friend,