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.