Playwrights on playmaking

by Brander Matthews

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HENRY JAMES AND THE THEATER

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HENRY JAMES AND THE THEATER

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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.