Chapter 10 of 16 · 3989 words · ~20 min read

Part 10

Then, after a longer interval he asked Howells to collaborate with him in a sequel to Colonel Sellers; and in ‘My Mark Twain’ Howells has given a detailed account of their conjoint misadventure. Mark had a host of suggestions but no story, so Howells supplied one as best he could; and the two friends spent a hilarious fortnight in writing the play. Mark had quarrelled with Raymond and did not want to let him reincarnate Sellers; and yet he had ultimately to recognize that Raymond was the only actor the public would accept in the character. So the piece was sent to Raymond, who accepted it, asking for certain alterations; and then most unexpectedly he returned the manuscript, refusing to have anything to do with it. After hawking their play about, the authors arranged to produce it themselves with Burbank (who was not an actor but an elocutionist-entertainer) as Sellers,—Burbank playing the part in imitation of Raymond. At last they had lost confidence in it so completely that they paid a forfeit rather than undertake the risk of a production in New York. So it was that the ‘American Claimant, or Mulberry Sellers Ten Years Later’ was made visible in New York only at a special matinee in the fall of 1887. It had a few performances in unimportant out of town theaters; and then it disappeared from the stage. Still, it had not lived in vain since it supplied material for several chapters in Mark’s later novel, to which he gave the same title, without the subtitle.

After this play had been withdrawn from the boards Mark’s ambition to establish himself as a dramatist did not again manifest itself. However, it is pleasant to believe that the pain of his own failure may have been more or less assuaged by the better fortune of dramatizations of two of his novels.

I have already noted that not long after the publication of the ‘Prince and the Pauper’ Mrs. Clemens had arranged scenes from it to be acted by members of the family and by their young friends, and that Mark himself had undertaken the part of Miles Hendon. A little later a dramatization of the whole story was made by Abby Sage Richardson; and this was produced in New York in January, 1890. It achieved instant popularity, as well it might, since the story is indisputably dramatic and since it has a more direct action than any other of Mark’s novels. This version, revised by Amélie Rives, was revived in 1920 by William Faversham, who appeared as Miles Hendon. The revival met with a reception as warm as that which had greeted the original production.

In one respect this professional dramatization was inferior to Mrs. Clemens’s amateur arrangement; it was so devised that one performer should assume two characters, the little Prince and the little Pauper; and this necessitated the omission of the culminating moment in the tale when the Prince and the Pauper stand face to face. And in both the amateur and the professional performances these two lads were impersonated by girls. This may have been necessary, since it is almost impossible to find competent boy actors, while there are girl actors aplenty; but none the less was it unfortunate, since a girl is never entirely satisfactory in boy’s clothes. Very rarely can she conceal from us the fact that she is a girl, doing her best to be a boy. Curiously enough, boys can act girls’ parts and make us forget for the moment that they are not what they seem.

Five years after Mrs. Richardson had dramatized the ‘Prince and the Pauper,’ Frank Mayo made a most effective play out of ‘Pudd’nhead Wilson.’ He arranged the title-part for his own vigorous and impressive acting. He simplified Mark’s story and he amplified it; he condensed it and he heightened it; he preserved the ingenious incidents and the veracious characters; he made his profit out of the telling dialog; and he was skilful in disentangling the essentially dramatic elements of Mark’s rather rambling story. He produced it in New York in the spring of 1895. Mark was then in Europe; but when he returned he made haste to see the piece. He was discovered by the audience and called upon for a speech, in which he congratulated the player-playwright on a “delightful play.” He ended by saying, “Confidentially I have always had an idea that I was well equipt to write plays, but I have never encountered a manager who has agreed with me”—which was not strictly accurate since two different managers had accepted the ‘Gilded Age’ and ‘Ah Sin.’

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)

HENRY JAMES AND THE THEATER

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.

It remains to be recorded only that Henry James included among his ‘Essays in London and Elsewhere’ two papers on Ibsen’s plays, originally written in 1891 and 1893: and that in his ‘Notes on Novelists’ he preserved a paper on Alexandre Dumas fils, written in 1895. Quite probably there may be other articles on theatrical themes contributed to one or another of the newspapers for which he served now and again as correspondent from Paris or from London. And not to be omitted from this record is the long story called the ‘Tragic Muse,’ one of the most veracious of theatrical novels; it was published in 1890.

From one or another of his dramatic criticisms I could borrow not a few pregnant passages, revelations of his penetrating insight into the inexorable conditions under which the playwright must do his work. Here is an early remark, culled from a letter on the Parisian stage, written in 1872:

An acted play is a novel, intensified; it realizes what the novel suggests, and by paying a liberal tribute to the senses, anticipates your possible complaint that your entertainment is of the meager sort styled intellectual.

This does not pierce to the marrow of the matter; it does not detail all the difference between the acted play and the novel; but it has its significance, none the less. In the same letter Henry James ventures to speak of the “colossal flimsiness” of the ‘Dame aux Camélias.’ Now Dumas’s pathetic play may be more or less false, but it is not flimsy; it must have had a solidity of its own, and even a certain sincerity of a kind, since it kept the stage for three score years and ten.

Here, however, is a long paragraph from the paper on Tennyson’s ‘Queen Mary’ (written in 1875), which discloses an indisputable insight into the difficulties of the dramatist’s art:

The fine thing in a real drama, generally speaking, is that, more than any other work of literary art, it needs a masterly structure. It needs to be shaped and fashioned and laid together, and this process makes a demand upon an artist’s rarest gifts. He must combine and arrange, interpolate and eliminate, play the joiner with the most attentive skill; and yet at the end effectually bury his tools and his sawdust, and invest his elaborate skeleton with the smoothest and most polished integument. The five-act drama—serious or humorous, poetic or prosaic—is like a box of fixt dimensions and inelastic material, into which a mass of precious things are to be packed away. The precious things in question seem out of all proportion to the compass of the receptacle; but the artist has an assurance that with patience and skill a place may be made for each, and that nothing need be clipped or crumpled, squeezed or damaged. The false dramatist either knocks out the sides of his box or plays the deuce with the contents; the real one gets down on his knees, disposes of his goods tentatively, this, that, and the other way, loses his temper but keeps his ideal, and at last rises in triumph, having packed his coffer in the one way that is mathematically right. It closes perfectly, and the lock turns with a click; between one object and another you cannot insert the point of a penknife.

It will be enough to risk only one more quotation,—this time from the paper evoked by the first performance of Ibsen’s ‘Hedda Gabler’ in London in 1891:

The stage is to the prose drama (and Ibsen’s later manner is the very prose of prose) what the tune is to the song or the concrete case to the general law. It immediately becomes apparent that he needs the test to show his strength and the frame to show his picture. An extraordinary process of vivification takes place; the conditions seem essentially enlarged. Those of the stage in general strike us for the most part as small enough, so that the game played in them is often not more inspiring than a successful sack-race. But Ibsen reminds us that if they did not in themselves confer life, they can at least receive it when the infusion is artfully administered. Yet how much of it they were doomed to receive from ‘Hedda Gabler’ was not to be divined till we had seen ‘Hedda Gabler’ in the frame. The play, on perusal, left us comparatively muddled and mystified, fascinated but—in one’s intellectual sympathy—snubbed. Acted, it leads that sympathy over the straightest of roads with all the exhilaration of a superior pace.

Nothing could be better than that, nothing could make clearer the immitigable fact that the full measure of the essential power of any drama can be gauged only in the actual theater, to the special conditions of which it has been scientifically adjusted.

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.