Are not the friends of Henry James inclined to be a little too solemn
when they write about him, perhaps feeling that they must rise to the
occasion and put on their best style, as though he had his eye on them
and would be “down” on any lapses? An admirable reviewer of the Letters
in the _Literary Supplement_ seemed, indeed, so overcome by his subject
as to have fallen into one of Henry James’s least amiable mannerisms—his
introduction of elaborate “figures,” relentlessly worked out and at last
lagging superfluous. And the editor of the Letters, admirably, too, as
he has done his work, is just a little bleak, isn’t he?—wearing the
grave face of the historian and mindful never to become familiar. “Thank
Heaven!” one seems to hear these writers saying to themselves; “even _he_
could never have called this vulgar.” Such is the posthumous influence
of the fastidious “master”! I daresay I am captious. One is never quite
satisfied with what one sees in print about people one loved. One always
thinks—it is, at any rate, a pleasing illusion—that one has one’s own key
to that particular cipher, and to see the thing not merely given away
but authoritatively expounded in print is rather a nuisance. Look at the
number of fair ladies to whom Henry James wrote letters rich in intimate
charm (oh! and, as he would have said, of a decorum!)—perhaps each of
them thought she had the best corner of his heart. The most immaculate of
women, young and old, matrons and maidens, _will_ sentimentalize their
men friends in this way. How could Henry James have escaped? Well, if any
one of these ladies had edited the Letters or reviewed them, wouldn’t
each of the others have said: “No, that isn’t _my_ Henry James—_she_
never understood him, poor dear”? I apologize for this flippant way of
putting it to the two refined writers I began by mentioning. But, as the
lady says in _The Spoils of Poynton_, “I’m quite coarse, thank God!”
Henry James, unfortunately for his theatrical ambitions, never was. You
must not only be coarse in grain, but tough in hide, for success in the
theatre. Everybody knows that Henry James achieved only failure there,
either crushing failure amid hootings and yells, as with _Guy Domville_,
or that very significant failure which is called a success of “esteem,”
as with his stage versions of _The American_ and _Covering End_. But not
everybody knows how he positively yearned for the big popular success,
and for that biggest, loudest, most brazen-trumpeted of successes,
success in the theatre. He talks in his letters as though he actually
needed the money, but it was really not so. He looked round the world
and found it teeming with “best sellers,” idols of the multitude, who
by any standards of his simply couldn’t “write,” didn’t artistically
“exist.” And the most pathetic thing in his letters is their evidence
that he began, aye! and went on, with the illusion that he, such as he
was, the absolute artist, might some day become a “best seller.” Even so
late as the days of his Collected Edition it came as a shock to him that
the great public wouldn’t buy.
It is evident that he had good hopes, beforehand, of _Guy Domville_. And
yet he hated the actual process of production. The rehearsal, he says,
is “as amazing as anything can be, for a man of taste and sensibility,
in the odious process of practical dramatic production. I may have
been meant for the Drama—God knows!—but I certainly wasn’t meant for
the Theatre.” And when dire failure came, it wasn’t, he says, from any
defect of technique. “I have worked like a horse—far harder than any
one will ever know—over the whole stiff mystery of ‘technique’—I have
run it to earth, and I don’t in the least hesitate to say that, for
the comparatively poor and meagre, the piteously simplified purposes
of the English stage, I have made it absolutely my own, put it into my
pocket.” No, the fault must be in his choice of subject. “The question
of realizing how different is the attitude of the theatre-goer toward
the quality of things which might be a story in a book from his attitude
toward the quality of thing that is given to him as a story in a play
is another matter altogether. _That_ difficulty is portentous, for any
writer who doesn’t approach it naïvely, as only a very limited and
simple-minded writer can. One has to _make_ oneself so limited and simple
to conceive a subject, see a subject, simply enough, and that, in a
nutshell, is where I have stumbled.” “And yet,” he adds, pathetically
enough (writing to his brother), “if you were to have seen my play!” He
knew he had done good work, in his own way, and the plain fact that his
way was a way which the gross theatre public would not understand or
sympathize with was a terrible blow to him.
The process of turning himself into a simple-minded writer—that is, of
making a sow’s ear out of a silk purse, was, of course, impossible.
One doesn’t want to wallow in the obvious. But doesn’t it leap at the
eyes that an artist who seeks to abandon his own temperament and point
of view for another’s will forfeit all chance of that spontaneous
joy without which there is no artistic creation? Fortunately, this
theatrical malady of Henry James’s (though he had one or two recurrent
twinges of it) never became chronic. The history of his real work is a
history not of self-renunciation, but of self-development, of abounding,
as the French say, in his own sense. As to the theatrical technique
which he had put into his pocket he certainly kept it there. Like most
laboriously acquired, alien techniques it was too technical, too
“architectooralooral”—as any one can see who dips into his two forgotten
volumes of “Theatricals.” His own proper technique was a very different
thing, an entirely individual thing, and no reader of his books can have
failed to notice how he gradually perfected it as he went along. It
reached its highest point, to my thinking, in _The Ambassadors_, surely
the greatest of his books (though over this question the fierce tribe of
Jacobites will fight to their last gasp), when everything, absolutely
everything, is shown as seen through the eyes of Strether. To see a thing
so “done” as he would have said, an artistic difficulty so triumphantly
mastered, is among the rarest and most exquisite pleasures of life. That
was Henry James’s function, to give us rare and exquisite pleasures, of a
quality never to be had in the modern theatre. He was no theatrical man,
but he could, when he chose, be the most delicate of dramatic critics.
Read what he says in these Letters about Rostand’s _L’Aiglon_ (“the
man really has talent like an attack of small-pox”), about Bernstein’s
_Le Secret_ as a “case,” about Ibsen, “bottomlessly bourgeois ... and
yet of his art he’s a master—and I feel in him, to the pitch of almost
intolerable boredom, the presence and the insistence of life.”