with the keenest appreciation of its histrionic possibilities; and
they were satisfied, even if the author was not. To us Americans the
character had a special appeal, because he represented at once our
ingenious inventiveness and our incurable optimism. We had never met
James Lampton, but we were all ready to accept Colonel Sellers as an
old friend. Raymond told me once that in town after town he would be
accosted by some man, who would say to him, “I saw you to-night—and I
recognized myself. Didn’t Mark ever tell you? Well, he took Sellers
from _me_! Why, all my friends knew me the first time they saw you!”
The plot of the play was melodramatic on the verge of burlesque;
it called for the wholly unnecessary explosion of a steamboat; it
culminated in the trial of the injured heroine for the murder of
the villain who had wronged her and insulted her. For the most part
Colonel Sellers had little to do with the main story; and it was only
when the sympathetic heroine was on trial for her life that Colonel
Sellers was integrally related to the main action. I have revived my
own fading memory of the bubbling humor of this final act by reading
again what Howells wrote about it at the time:
But the greatest scenes are in the last act, where Colonel Sellers
appears as a witness for the defence of Laura Hawkins. As he mounts
the stand he affably recognizes and shakes hands with several
acquaintances among the jury; he delivers his testimony in the
form of a stump speech; he helplessly overrides all the protests,
exceptions, and interruptions of the prosecution; from time to
time he irresistibly turns and addresses the jury and can scarcely
be silenced; while the attorneys are wrangling together he has
seized a juryman by the coat-lapel and is earnestly exhorting him
in whisper. The effect is irresistibly ludicrous. It is farce and
not farce, for, however extravagantly impossible the situation is,
the man in it is deliciously true to himself. There is one bit of
pathos, where Sellers tells how he knew Laura as a little girl, and
implies that, though she might have killed a man, she could _not_
have done _murder_.
The extravagantly impossible situation may have been taken over from
the Densmore perversion; but the handling of it, the expressing out
of it of all the humor it might be made to contain, that, we may be
sure, was the doing of Mark himself. No one else could have done it.
Forty years ago and more I pointed out, in an article on the
‘American on the Stage’ that in so far as Colonel Sellers was
a schemer, with an incessant activity in devising new methods
for making money, he had been anticipated by a character in Ben
Jonson’s the ‘Devil is an Ass’—added evidence of the kinship of the
descendants of the Puritans with the daring Elizabethan adventurers.
Where the American proposed a liniment for the sore eyes so
multitudinous in the Orient and saw “millions in it!” the Elizabethan
had advocated a device for making wine of raisins:
What hast thou there?
O, “Making wine of Raisins”; this is in hand now.
Yes, and as true a wine as the wines of France,
Or Spain or Italy: look of what grape
My raisin is, that wine I’ll render perfect,
As of the Muscatel grape, I’ll render Muscatel;
Of the Canary, his; the claret, his;
So of all kinds; and bate you of the prices
Of wine throughout the kingdom half in half.
When it is objected that this enterprise may put up the price of
raisins, the answer comes pat:
Why then I’ll make it out of blackberries,
And it shall do the same. ’Tis but more art,
And the charge less.
There is a significant kinship between Ben Jonson and Mark Twain in
the superb impossibility of their towering fantasies. But there is
no true likeness between Meercraft, whose very name libels him as an
unscrupulous exploiter of the eternal gullibility of mankind, and
Colonel Sellers, who may have deceived others but who did so only
because he had first deceived himself. Colonel Sellers was a man
without guile; he was as sincere as he was frank; and he made no
more profit out of his swift succession of vain imaginings than did
those who were carried away by his magnificent self-confidence. The
similarity between Ben Jonson’s crook and Mark’s enthusiast is only
superficial; yet it may be worth noting that frenzied speculation was
as characteristic of the golden age of England after the dispersal
of the Armada as it was in the gilded age of America which was the
aftermath of the Civil War. Moreover Ben Jonson and Mark Twain have
this in common also, that they were both of them humorists of soaring
exuberance and both of them realists of immitigable veracity.
IV
In the dramatization of the ‘Gilded Age’ Mark had a silent partner,
the otherwise unknown Densmore. In the two other plays of his he was
working in collaboration with associates of an assured fame, Howells
and Bret Harte. In neither case was he fortunate in the alliance, for
they were not experts in stage-craft, altho each of them had already
ventured himself in the drama. What Mark needed, if he was to trot
in double harness with a running mate, was an experienced playwright
with an instinctive knowledge of the theater. When Mark yoked himself
with Howells or with Harte, it was the blind leading the blind. The
author of ‘Out of the Question’ and the author of ‘Two Men of Sandy
Bar’ lacked just what the author of the ‘Gilded Age’ lacked,—practice
in the application of the principles of playmaking.
The play written in collaboration with Bret Harte was called ‘Ah
Sin,’ the name of the Heathen Chinee in ‘Plain Language from Truthful
Jones.’ It was undertaken to enable Charles Parsloe, an actor now
forgotten, to profit by the skill he had displayed in the small part
of a Chinaman in Bret Harte’s earlier play, ‘Two Men of Sandy Bar,’
written for Stuart Robson, brought out in 1876 and withdrawn after
a brief and inglorious career on the stage. Bret Harte did not know
enough about playmaking to perceive that its failure had been due
to its deficiency in that supporting skeleton of plot which is as
necessary to a drama as the equally invisible steel-frame is to a
skyscraper. But he was eager to try again, and he persuaded Mark
to join him. Probably he had no need to be persuasive, since Mark
had found his experience with the ‘Gilded Age’ exhilarating and
profitable. Mark invited Harte to Hartford and they set to work. As I
have always been curious about the secrets of collaboration, I asked
Mark many years afterward, how they had gone about it. “Well,” he
said, with his customary drawl, “Bret came to me at Hartford and we
talked the whole thing out. Then Bret wrote the piece while I played
billiards. Of course, I had to go over it and get the dialect right.
Bret never did know anything about dialect.”
Mr. Paine, to whom I transmitted this information, thinks that it
is “scarcely a fair statement of the case,” since “both authors
worked on the play and worked hard.” But while what Mark said to me
may have been an over-statement, I doubt if it was a misstatement.
The original suggestion had come from Harte; and the probability is
that the major part of the story was his also. The two partners may
have worked hard but I doubt if they worked as seriously at their
playmaking as they were wont to do at their story-telling. The man
of letters who is not primarily a man of theater, is prone to be
somewhat contemptuous in his condescending to the drama.
The play was produced in Washington in May, 1877, with Parsloe as Ah
Sin. I saw it when it was brought to New York in the fall of 1877.
From two of the foremost writers in America much was expected; and
the result of their combined efforts was lamentably disappointing. It
was unworthy of either of them, still more unworthy of both. All I
can replevin from my dim recollections is a trial before Judge Lynch,
which lit up the last act, and which I now recall as having more than
a little of the energy and the vigor which I found afterward in the
episode of the attempted lynching in ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ Mr. Paine
tells me that the manuscript is still extant. Sooner or later it
ought to be published, since nothing written by either Mark Twain or
Bret Harte is negligible.
Yet this flat failure of ‘Ah Sin’ did not quench Mark’s dramatic
ardor. Even before the ‘Gilded Age’ had been dramatized he had begun
on ‘Tom Sawyer’; and his first intention was to write it as a play.
Fortunately for us he soon perceived that Tom would have more
freedom if his adventures were narrated. After Mark had published
‘Tom Sawyer’ he was fired with another dramatic idea; and he wrote
Howells in the first flush of his enthusiasm, that he was deep in a
comedy with an old detective as the principal character:
I skeletoned the first act, and _wrote_ the second to-day, and am
dog-tired now. Fifty-four pages of ms. in seven hours.
A few days later he wrote again, telling his friend that he had
piled up one hundred and fifty-one pages. The first, second and
fourth acts are done, and done to my satisfaction too. Never had
so much fun over anything in my life—such consuming interest and
delight.
This piece was intended for Sol Smith Russell. But the theatrical
experts to whom it was submitted did not share its author’s consuming
interest. Dion Boucicault said that it was better than ‘Ah Sin’;
but to say this was saying little. John Brougham wrote that it
was “altogether too diffuse for dramatic representation.” In time
Mark’s own opinion of his play seems to have cooled, and he put
his manuscript aside. Possibly he utilized it more or less many
years later when he wrote ‘Tom Sawyer, Detective’; but this is mere
conjecture.
Then, after a longer interval he asked Howells to collaborate with
him in a sequel to Colonel Sellers; and in ‘My Mark Twain’ Howells
has given a detailed account of their conjoint misadventure. Mark had
a host of suggestions but no story, so Howells supplied one as best
he could; and the two friends spent a hilarious fortnight in writing
the play. Mark had quarrelled with Raymond and did not want to let
him reincarnate Sellers; and yet he had ultimately to recognize
that Raymond was the only actor the public would accept in the
character. So the piece was sent to Raymond, who accepted it, asking
for certain alterations; and then most unexpectedly he returned the
manuscript, refusing to have anything to do with it. After hawking
their play about, the authors arranged to produce it themselves with
Burbank (who was not an actor but an elocutionist-entertainer) as
Sellers,—Burbank playing the part in imitation of Raymond. At last
they had lost confidence in it so completely that they paid a forfeit
rather than undertake the risk of a production in New York. So it was
that the ‘American Claimant, or Mulberry Sellers Ten Years Later’ was
made visible in New York only at a special matinee in the fall of
1887. It had a few performances in unimportant out of town theaters;
and then it disappeared from the stage. Still, it had not lived in
vain since it supplied material for several chapters in Mark’s later
novel, to which he gave the same title, without the subtitle.
After this play had been withdrawn from the boards Mark’s ambition
to establish himself as a dramatist did not again manifest itself.
However, it is pleasant to believe that the pain of his own failure
may have been more or less assuaged by the better fortune of
dramatizations of two of his novels.
I have already noted that not long after the publication of the
‘Prince and the Pauper’ Mrs. Clemens had arranged scenes from it to
be acted by members of the family and by their young friends, and
that Mark himself had undertaken the part of Miles Hendon. A little
later a dramatization of the whole story was made by Abby Sage
Richardson; and this was produced in New York in January, 1890. It
achieved instant popularity, as well it might, since the story is
indisputably dramatic and since it has a more direct action than any
other of Mark’s novels. This version, revised by Amélie Rives, was
revived in 1920 by William Faversham, who appeared as Miles Hendon.
The revival met with a reception as warm as that which had greeted
the original production.
In one respect this professional dramatization was inferior to Mrs.
Clemens’s amateur arrangement; it was so devised that one performer
should assume two characters, the little Prince and the little
Pauper; and this necessitated the omission of the culminating moment
in the tale when the Prince and the Pauper stand face to face. And
in both the amateur and the professional performances these two lads
were impersonated by girls. This may have been necessary, since it is
almost impossible to find competent boy actors, while there are girl
actors aplenty; but none the less was it unfortunate, since a girl
is never entirely satisfactory in boy’s clothes. Very rarely can she
conceal from us the fact that she is a girl, doing her best to be a
boy. Curiously enough, boys can act girls’ parts and make us forget
for the moment that they are not what they seem.
Five years after Mrs. Richardson had dramatized the ‘Prince and the
Pauper,’ Frank Mayo made a most effective play out of ‘Pudd’nhead
Wilson.’ He arranged the title-part for his own vigorous and
impressive acting. He simplified Mark’s story and he amplified it;
he condensed it and he heightened it; he preserved the ingenious
incidents and the veracious characters; he made his profit out of the
telling dialog; and he was skilful in disentangling the essentially
dramatic elements of Mark’s rather rambling story. He produced it in
New York in the spring of 1895. Mark was then in Europe; but when
he returned he made haste to see the piece. He was discovered by the
audience and called upon for a speech, in which he congratulated
the player-playwright on a “delightful play.” He ended by saying,
“Confidentially I have always had an idea that I was well equipt to
write plays, but I have never encountered a manager who has agreed
with me”—which was not strictly accurate since two different managers
had accepted the ‘Gilded Age’ and ‘Ah Sin.’
V
When the ‘Gilded Age’ was brought out in New York in the fall of
1874, Mark climbed the eighty steps which led to the editorial
offices of the New York _World_, then in the control of Manton
Marble. He asked for the city editor and he was shown into the
cubicle occupied by William C. Brownell. He explained that he had
come to ask the editor to puff his play; whereupon Brownell inquired
if it was a good play. “No,” was Mark’s drawling answer, “it isn’t
a good play. It’s a bad play, a damned bad play. I couldn’t write
a good play. But it has a good character. I can write character;
and that character is the best I can do. If it was a good play, I
shouldn’t have had to climb up here to ask you to puff it.”
Here Mark was unconsciously revealing his agreement with Aristotle,
the master of all who know. Aristotle declared that in a tragedy—and
the remark is even more applicable to comedy—plot is more important
than character, since you can have an appealing drama without
character but you cannot have it without plot. Lowell said the same
thing in more detail, in one of his lectures on the ‘Old English
Dramatists.’
In a play we not only expect a succession of scenes, but that
each scene should lead by a logic more or less stringent, if not
to the next, at any rate to something that is to follow and that
all should contribute their fraction of impulse to the inevitable
catastrophe. That is to say, the structure should be organic, with
a necessary and harmonious connection and relation of parts, and
not merely mechanical with an arbitrary or haphazard joining of one
part to another.
It was this constructive skill that Mark lacked. He could create
characters; he could make them reveal themselves in appropriate
situations; he could carry on a story which in the library would
delight all of us, but which was without the compact directness
demanded by us when we are in the theater. He possessed all the
qualifications of the dramatist except the one thing needful, without
which the rest are unavailing; he could not organize a structure
with the necessary and harmonious connection and relation of its
parts. In other words he was devoid of the engineering draftsmanship
which plans the steel-frame, four-square to all the winds that blow.
He may have had—indeed, he did have—dramatic genius; but he never
acquired the theatrical talent which would make his genius available.
He could not cut and polish and set his own diamonds.
(1921)
X
HENRY JAMES AND THE THEATER
X
HENRY JAMES AND THE THEATER
I
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 the _Atlantic_ a 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 the _Galaxy_ an 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 the _Galaxy_,
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 Irving as Macbeth and on Macready’s Diary (all duly catalogued
in Phillips’s exhaustive bibliography).
For the _Galaxy_ again in 1877 he wrote a review of the ‘London
Stage,’ and in 1887 he contributed to the _Century_ his 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 between the 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 either knocks 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: