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.