Playwrights on playmaking

by Brander Matthews

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:

The stage is to the prose drama (and Ibsen’s later manner is the 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.