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