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.
II
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 resigned himself 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 to grasp 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, the _tension_, in a word of seeing; and which means that
the whole thing shows an attack upon _oppositions_—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 in two 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 other than 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.
III
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 making
any 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)
XI
STAGE HUMOR
XI
STAGE HUMOR
I
When we consider the antics indulged in by actors of the custard-pie
comedies which make many of us guffaw violently as they succeed one
another on the screen and when we analyze the witticisms which make
many of us smile appreciatively as they cascade down the dialog of
Sheridan’s ‘School for Scandal,’ we disclose that our laughter,
gentle as it may be or boisterous as it is more often, can be aroused
by two distinct factors, by the shock of surprize and by the reaction
of an awakened sense of superiority. Wit delights us by its exploding
unexpectedness; and humor awakens pity for its victims and also pride
that we are not as weak as they are, not as short-sighted or as
muddle-headed, not as prone to make fools of ourselves.
As the simplest and easiest form of wit is a play on words and as the
simplest and easiest form of humor is a practical joke, we need not
be surprized that the comedies and farces of ’prentice playwrights
are likely to crackle with an arbitrary collocation of vocables so
put together as to create at least the semblance of wit and also that
these firstlings of the comic muse are likely to contain episodes of
arbitrarily built up practical joking. These two characteristics are
infallible witnesses to the juvenility of the author of any play in
which they are abundant. Marlowe died young; and this may account for
the dreary emptiness of the would-be comic scenes in ‘Doctor Faustus’
with their perverse practical jokery. If we needed internal evidence
to corroborate the external proof that ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost’ is one
of Shakspere’s earliest comedies we could find it in his obviously
painstaking effort to achieve verbal brilliance and in the palpably
artificial play-within-the-play lugged into the final act so that one
group of characters can laugh at another group, created solely to
serve as butts for the merriment of their associates.
As Shakspere was an Elizabethan Englishman he outgrew his relish
for puns very slowly; and he retained his willingness to rely on
the practical joke as a basis for comic situations even as late as
the middle of his career, when he wrote the last and tenderest of
his romantic comedies, ‘Twelfth Night.’ It is only fair to admit
that the trick which Maria and Sir Toby play upon Malvolio is not
an empty mechanism; it is just what those two delightful companions
would devise to get even with the cross-gartered Puritan and to
punish him for his paraded self-sufficiency. So the trick which
Prince Hal and Poins play upon Falstaff and which prompts him to the
noble narrative of his combat with the men in buckram,—this also is
completely in accordance with the character of the fat knight and
of the future king; and moreover it serves most admirably to reveal
Falstaff’s superb imperturbability and his infinite resourcefulness
in extricating himself from a morass wherein a slow-witted man would
have sunk helpless.
With the mad Prince and Poins we laugh at Falstaff, no doubt; but we
are ready also to laugh with him, because he is so humorously human.
We like him even if we cannot have any respect for him; in fact, we
like him so much that we are a little inclined to resent the way in
which his creator has chosen to treat him in more than one episode of
the ‘Merry Wives,’ especially his concealment in the buckbasket of
foul linen and his subsequent upsetting into foul water. Shakspere,
even tho his masterpieces may survive for all time, was himself a
man of his own time; and at the end of the sixteenth century people
were more callous than they are at the beginning of the twentieth,
thicker of skin and stouter of stomach, more tolerant of needless
pain and even of purposeless brutality. We cannot doubt that
Shakspere must have been a spectator at “the whipping of the blind
bear”; and to him as to other Elizabethans madness was comic rather
than tragic. To-day we have for Malvolio, and even for Shylock, a
sympathy which is born of a better understanding and which assuredly
would astonish no one more than it would Shakspere.
George Eliot, with her shrewd insight into the recesses of human
nature, declared that “a difference of taste in jests is a great
strain on the affections”; and there is no doubt that our affection
for Shakspere is now and again not a little strained by his eager
pursuit of the obvious pun and by his persistent employment of the
obvious practical joke. Our taste in jests is more restricted than
his; and we labor in vain to excuse him by the plea that he descended
to the pun and the practical joke only to gratify the ruder likings
of the groundlings who stood restless in the unroofed yard of the
Globe Theater. It is simpler, and it is honester, to admit frankly,
first of all, that Shakspere was a right Elizabethan Englishman
who shared the tastes of his contemporaries and his countrymen;
and second, that the false glitter of dialog and the artificial
practical joking are simply testimony to the immaturity of his genius
at the time when he composed the comic dramas in which we discover
these defects. Not only has our taste in jests changed in more than
three centuries, but Shakspere’s own taste in jests changed in less
than twenty years. In his later masterpieces, in the best plays of
his best period, the wit is intellectual rather than verbal and the
humor is sympathetically human.
II
George Eliot, to quote her again, makes one of her philosophic
characters declare that a liking for Bellini’s music “indicates a
puerile state of culture.” Certainly the liking for practical jokes
is an even more certain indication of this condition. And “puerile”
is an aptly chosen adjective, since the practical joke is boyish;
and boys are pitiably uncivilized. Until they tame their native
energy they are callous to the sufferings of others and they even
enjoy cruelties they inflict in the spontaneous expression of their
thereby demonstrated superiority. Just as the Clown in the pantomime
butters the slide so that the Pantaloon shall slip and tumble
down tumultuously, so the boy in real life delights in disguising
the frozen pavement with scattered snow so that the unsuspecting
gentleman in spectacles will make a violent and vain struggle
to keep his balance. This evokes joyful shouts from the youthful
perpetrators of the unkindly act. If a grown-up happens to witness
the mishap he is not moved to laughter; his immediate impulse is to
go to the aid of the elderly victim.
Yet this same grown-up when he is one of the audience at a pantomime
reverts to the puerile stage of culture and becomes a child again;
for the two hours’ traffic of the stage he is subdued to what he
gazes at; and he may be moved to loud merriment by deeds which, seen
in the street, would cause him instantly to summon the police. He
laughingly approves of the unprovoked assassinations of Punch.
We are assured by scientific investigators that civilization is
only a thin veneer at best and that beneath the courtesy of the
most civilized society there lie dormant the archaic instincts
of primitive man. However remote we may think ourselves from our
probably arboreal ancestor, the beast within us is never dead; and he
is ever ready to rouse himself from his long slumber and to put us to
shame sometimes by his blood-lust and sometimes by his monkey-tricks.
The scientists also assert that every one of us, from his conception
to his coming of age, passes through the successive stages of the
evolution of mankind, slowly rising year by year from savagery to
barbarism and from barbarism to civilization (supposing that he is
lucky enough to progress so far). If this must be admitted, then
we need not be surprized that the audiences in our theaters can be
interested by wit which is juvenile and by humor which is primitive.
These audiences are made up of all sorts and conditions of men, in
every stage of development. Even if we assume that most of these
spectators are civilized (perhaps a precarious assumption), we
cannot doubt that only a few of them have attained to a high level
of culture; and by this very attainment these more advanced members
of the audience are separated from the main body, which has not
progressed in its preferences so far away from its ruder and cruder
progenitors.
The larger the theater itself, the more closely compacted the
spectators, the more primitive is the comic effect which will
provoke the swiftest and the most uproarious response; and the
refined and delicate-minded minority finds itself conforming to
the primitive tastes of the less particular majority, even if it
does so only for the moment. While the curtain is up the high-brow
has a fellow-feeling with his low-brow companions; and he is
therefore willing not merely to smile deprecatingly but even to
laugh heartily at mechanical dislocations of the vocabulary and at
equally mechanical practical jokes. When he is a spectator of the
passing show, the self-conscious Pharisee of culture will consent to
fellowship with publicans and with sinners.