Part 11

Notwithstanding his distaste for any other than a theoretic or hypothetic playhouse, Henry James in 1908, ten years after the publication of ‘Covering End,’ did not hesitate to disinter the one-act play upon which it had been founded and to authorize its performance. He even permitted it to be cut into three acts,—just as Scribe four-score years earlier had made a three-act comedy, ‘Valérie,’ out of a one-act comédie-vaudeville, by the simple expedient of excising the songs and of dropping the curtain twice during the course of the action. The new-old three-act piece was entitled the ‘High Bid’; it was performed a few times in the provinces and a few times more in London by the Forbes-Robertsons. But it did not make any definite impression on the playgoing public. It was not a disheartening failure like ‘Guy Domville,’ yet it could not be called a success. Still, its milder reception encouraged its author to resume work on two more plays, the ‘Other House’ and the ‘Outcry.’ There were even negotiations for the production of these pieces,—negotiations which came to nothing, chiefly because prolonged illness forced him to give up work on them.

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

XI

STAGE HUMOR

I

When we consider the antics indulged in by actors of the custard-pie comedies which make many of us guffaw violently as they succeed one another on the screen and when we analyze the witticisms which make many of us smile appreciatively as they cascade down the dialog of Sheridan’s ‘School for Scandal,’ we disclose that our laughter, gentle as it may be or boisterous as it is more often, can be aroused by two distinct factors, by the shock of surprize and by the reaction of an awakened sense of superiority. Wit delights us by its exploding unexpectedness; and humor awakens pity for its victims and also pride that we are not as weak as they are, not as short-sighted or as muddle-headed, not as prone to make fools of ourselves.

As the simplest and easiest form of wit is a play on words and as the simplest and easiest form of humor is a practical joke, we need not be surprized that the comedies and farces of ’prentice playwrights are likely to crackle with an arbitrary collocation of vocables so put together as to create at least the semblance of wit and also that these firstlings of the comic muse are likely to contain episodes of arbitrarily built up practical joking. These two characteristics are infallible witnesses to the juvenility of the author of any play in which they are abundant. Marlowe died young; and this may account for the dreary emptiness of the would-be comic scenes in ‘Doctor Faustus’ with their perverse practical jokery. If we needed internal evidence to corroborate the external proof that ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost’ is one of Shakspere’s earliest comedies we could find it in his obviously painstaking effort to achieve verbal brilliance and in the palpably artificial play-within-the-play lugged into the final act so that one group of characters can laugh at another group, created solely to serve as butts for the merriment of their associates.

As Shakspere was an Elizabethan Englishman he outgrew his relish for puns very slowly; and he retained his willingness to rely on the practical joke as a basis for comic situations even as late as the middle of his career, when he wrote the last and tenderest of his romantic comedies, ‘Twelfth Night.’ It is only fair to admit that the trick which Maria and Sir Toby play upon Malvolio is not an empty mechanism; it is just what those two delightful companions would devise to get even with the cross-gartered Puritan and to punish him for his paraded self-sufficiency. So the trick which Prince Hal and Poins play upon Falstaff and which prompts him to the noble narrative of his combat with the men in buckram,—this also is completely in accordance with the character of the fat knight and of the future king; and moreover it serves most admirably to reveal Falstaff’s superb imperturbability and his infinite resourcefulness in extricating himself from a morass wherein a slow-witted man would have sunk helpless.

With the mad Prince and Poins we laugh at Falstaff, no doubt; but we are ready also to laugh with him, because he is so humorously human. We like him even if we cannot have any respect for him; in fact, we like him so much that we are a little inclined to resent the way in which his creator has chosen to treat him in more than one episode of the ‘Merry Wives,’ especially his concealment in the buckbasket of foul linen and his subsequent upsetting into foul water. Shakspere, even tho his masterpieces may survive for all time, was himself a man of his own time; and at the end of the sixteenth century people were more callous than they are at the beginning of the twentieth, thicker of skin and stouter of stomach, more tolerant of needless pain and even of purposeless brutality. We cannot doubt that Shakspere must have been a spectator at “the whipping of the blind bear”; and to him as to other Elizabethans madness was comic rather than tragic. To-day we have for Malvolio, and even for Shylock, a sympathy which is born of a better understanding and which assuredly would astonish no one more than it would Shakspere.

George Eliot, with her shrewd insight into the recesses of human nature, declared that “a difference of taste in jests is a great strain on the affections”; and there is no doubt that our affection for Shakspere is now and again not a little strained by his eager pursuit of the obvious pun and by his persistent employment of the obvious practical joke. Our taste in jests is more restricted than his; and we labor in vain to excuse him by the plea that he descended to the pun and the practical joke only to gratify the ruder likings of the groundlings who stood restless in the unroofed yard of the Globe Theater. It is simpler, and it is honester, to admit frankly, first of all, that Shakspere was a right Elizabethan Englishman who shared the tastes of his contemporaries and his countrymen; and second, that the false glitter of dialog and the artificial practical joking are simply testimony to the immaturity of his genius at the time when he composed the comic dramas in which we discover these defects. Not only has our taste in jests changed in more than three centuries, but Shakspere’s own taste in jests changed in less than twenty years. In his later masterpieces, in the best plays of his best period, the wit is intellectual rather than verbal and the humor is sympathetically human.

II

George Eliot, to quote her again, makes one of her philosophic characters declare that a liking for Bellini’s music “indicates a puerile state of culture.” Certainly the liking for practical jokes is an even more certain indication of this condition. And “puerile” is an aptly chosen adjective, since the practical joke is boyish; and boys are pitiably uncivilized. Until they tame their native energy they are callous to the sufferings of others and they even enjoy cruelties they inflict in the spontaneous expression of their thereby demonstrated superiority. Just as the Clown in the pantomime butters the slide so that the Pantaloon shall slip and tumble down tumultuously, so the boy in real life delights in disguising the frozen pavement with scattered snow so that the unsuspecting gentleman in spectacles will make a violent and vain struggle to keep his balance. This evokes joyful shouts from the youthful perpetrators of the unkindly act. If a grown-up happens to witness the mishap he is not moved to laughter; his immediate impulse is to go to the aid of the elderly victim.

Yet this same grown-up when he is one of the audience at a pantomime reverts to the puerile stage of culture and becomes a child again; for the two hours’ traffic of the stage he is subdued to what he gazes at; and he may be moved to loud merriment by deeds which, seen in the street, would cause him instantly to summon the police. He laughingly approves of the unprovoked assassinations of Punch.

We are assured by scientific investigators that civilization is only a thin veneer at best and that beneath the courtesy of the most civilized society there lie dormant the archaic instincts of primitive man. However remote we may think ourselves from our probably arboreal ancestor, the beast within us is never dead; and he is ever ready to rouse himself from his long slumber and to put us to shame sometimes by his blood-lust and sometimes by his monkey-tricks.

The scientists also assert that every one of us, from his conception to his coming of age, passes through the successive stages of the evolution of mankind, slowly rising year by year from savagery to barbarism and from barbarism to civilization (supposing that he is lucky enough to progress so far). If this must be admitted, then we need not be surprized that the audiences in our theaters can be interested by wit which is juvenile and by humor which is primitive. These audiences are made up of all sorts and conditions of men, in every stage of development. Even if we assume that most of these spectators are civilized (perhaps a precarious assumption), we cannot doubt that only a few of them have attained to a high level of culture; and by this very attainment these more advanced members of the audience are separated from the main body, which has not progressed in its preferences so far away from its ruder and cruder progenitors.

The larger the theater itself, the more closely compacted the spectators, the more primitive is the comic effect which will provoke the swiftest and the most uproarious response; and the refined and delicate-minded minority finds itself conforming to the primitive tastes of the less particular majority, even if it does so only for the moment. While the curtain is up the high-brow has a fellow-feeling with his low-brow companions; and he is therefore willing not merely to smile deprecatingly but even to laugh heartily at mechanical dislocations of the vocabulary and at equally mechanical practical jokes. When he is a spectator of the passing show, the self-conscious Pharisee of culture will consent to fellowship with publicans and with sinners.

In one of his earlier philosophical inquiries, that in which he analyzed the sources of laughter, Bergson recalled the old story of the man in church who remained dry-eyed when the rest of the congregation were dissolved in tears by the pathos of the sermon and who explained his failure to be moved as due to the fact that he did not “belong to that parish.” And Bergson asserted that this explanation, absurd as it may seem, is not unsatisfactory or illogical, if applied to laughter rather than to tears. “However hearty a laugh may be,” the French philosopher declared, “it always conceals an afterthought of complicity with other laughters, real or imaginary.”

So it is that when the spectators refuse to become accomplices before the fact, there is no certainty that they will respond to the wit or to the humor of the play they are witnessing. Only when they have yielded themselves to a communal intimacy, so to call it, can the dramatist find an immediate appreciation of his merry jests. Shakspere spoke out of abundant experience as player and as playwright when he declared that “a jest’s prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it.” And Goethe was no less shrewd when he asserted that “nothing is more significant of men’s character than what they find laughable.”

III

The French, who have an armory of critical terms both more exact and more abundant than ours, distinguish between three different kinds of stage humor. There is, first of all, the mere witticism, the sentence laughable in itself, the so-called epigram; and this they term the _mot d’esprit_. Second, there is the phrase which derives its comic effect not from itself but from its utterance at a given moment in the movement of the story; and this they speak of as the _mot de situation_. Thirdly, there is the word or the sentence whereby a character expresses himself unexpectedly, unconsciously turning the flashlight on the unexplored recesses of his own soul; and they are wont to call this the _mot de caractère_.

It is the first of these, the witticism existing for its own sake and sufficient with itself, detachable from the dialog, not integrated with either character or situation, merely a merry jest at large, it is verbal glitter of this sort which is essentially juvenile, which we may expect in the piece of ’prentice playwrights and which we find in the early comedies of Shakspere; more especially in ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost.’

Thomas Moore, in his brilliant biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, called attention to the fact that English comedy, from the ‘Way of the World’ to the ‘School for Scandal,’ was the work of young men, who either died before they attained intellectual maturity or abandoned the theater; and in the juvenility of these comic playwrights, from Congreve to Sheridan, we can see the explanation and the excuse for the verbal fireworks which explode all down their dialog. So the younger Dumas was under thirty when he wrote the ‘Demi-Monde’ with its elaborately paraded epigram; and he was over fifty when he composed ‘Françillon’ with its dialog bathed in wit and yet devoid of detachable dewdrops. So Oscar Wilde left us only the comedies composed when he was comparatively youthful; and he had perforce to give up playwriting before he had attained to artistic sincerity. His epigrams, often amusing in themselves, are half of them taken out of his note-book to be tacked arbitrarily into his dialog. They may glitter like spangles but they are only sewed on. The built up repartees and the manufactured retorts of Wilde’s characters are sometimes too rude to be probable in the polite society which the author took a snobbish pride in putting into his plays; but at least they lacked the bare brutality of the rejoinders we find in Congreve’s comedies and more particularly in Wycherly’s, rejoinders which recall Goldsmith’s criticism of Johnson as a conversationalist, that “whenever the doctor’s pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt.”

Even Sir Arthur Pinero in his juvenile pieces fell victim to a prevailing epidemic of epigram. At least, I can adduce one specimen of his youthful effort in his very youthful play, ‘Imprudence.’ As it was unsuccessful it has remained unpublished, and I must therefore rely on my memory. The lovers have quarreled and parted forever. This is at an afternoon tea; and when the time comes for the young lady to go home, the young gentleman approaches her with the courteously formal query, “Shall I call you a hansom?” To which she retorts, “You are mean enough to call me anything!” Many things, no doubt, must be pardoned to a young lady who is desperately in love and who has just broken with her devoted lover; but this impossible repartee is not one of them. Sir Arthur Pinero’s dialog in his later social dramas is nervous, tense, highly individual, and totally devoid of these outgrown artificialities; and in them he evokes laughter by the clash of character on character. His piercing sayings are the product of essential wisdom and not of external wit.

It is evidence of Molière’s early maturity that there are no _mots d’esprit_ even in his most brilliant comedies. He eschewed the empty witticism; and in his ‘Criticism of the School for Wives’ he explained with conscious pride that the jokes in his dialog were not put there for their own sake; they were meant to illustrate situation and character. Molière has his clever sayings, his epigrams and his aphorisms, but they are always germane; they are _mots de situation_ and _mots de caractère_, and never merely _mots d’esprit_. More than any other comic dramatist does Molière deserve the praise that William Archer once bestowed on Bronson Howard, that his good things grow out of his story, “like blossoms on a laburnum,” and are not “stuck on like candles on a Christmas tree.”

The same commendation may be given to Sir James Barrie, who has now come into his own and has conquered his juvenile tendency to get his laugh by whimsicalities lugged in by main strength,—like the husband’s amputation of the excrescences of his wife’s hat, in the ‘Professor’s Love Story.’ In the later ‘Dear Brutus’ the whole fabric of the story is whimsical and fantastic, fanciful and delightful. To a play like this we may apply Goethe’s characterization of Claude Lorraine’s faery palaces, that it was “absolute truth—without a sign of reality.” At its performance little ripples of intimate laughter ran around the audience, never breaking into a unanimous guffaw. The humor of the dialog may be, as indeed it must be, the humor of Barrie himself; but it seems to us the spontaneous utterance of the character from whose mouth it comes.

IV