V
When the ‘Gilded Age’ was brought out in New York in the fall of 1874, Mark climbed the eighty steps which led to the editorial offices of the New York World, then in the control of Manton Marble. He asked for the city editor and he was shown into the cubicle occupied by William C. Brownell. He explained that he had come to ask the editor to puff his play; whereupon Brownell inquired if it was a good play. “No,” was Mark’s drawling answer, “it isn’t a good play. It’s a bad play, a damned bad play. I couldn’t write a good play. But it has a good character. I can write character; and that character is the best I can do. If it was a good play, I shouldn’t have had to climb up here to ask you to puff it.”
Here Mark was unconsciously revealing his agreement with Aristotle, the master of all who know. Aristotle declared that in a tragedy—and the remark is even more applicable to comedy—plot is more important than character, since you can have an appealing drama without character but you cannot have it without plot. Lowell said the same thing in more detail, in one of his lectures on the ‘Old English Dramatists.’
In a play we not only expect a succession of scenes, but that each scene should lead by a logic more or less stringent, if not to the next, at any rate to something that is to follow and that all should contribute their fraction of impulse to the inevitable catastrophe. That is to say, the structure should be organic, with a necessary and harmonious connection and relation of parts, and not merely mechanical with an arbitrary or haphazard joining of one part to another.
It was this constructive skill that Mark lacked. He could create characters; he could make them reveal themselves in appropriate situations; he could carry on a story which in the library would delight all of us, but which was without the compact directness demanded by us when we are in the theater. He possessed all the qualifications of the dramatist except the one thing needful, without which the rest are unavailing; he could not organize a structure with the necessary and harmonious connection and relation of its parts. In other words he was devoid of the engineering draftsmanship which plans the steel-frame, four-square to all the winds that blow.
He may have had—indeed, he did have—dramatic genius; but he never acquired the theatrical talent which would make his genius available. He could not cut and polish and set his own diamonds.
(1921)
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HENRY JAMES AND THE THEATER