Modern Drama

-THEORY AND PRACTICE INTHE PLAYS OF HENRY JAMES IF THE PLAYS OF HENRY JAMES HAV~ BEEN IGNORED, it is largely because his critiCs consider James's theatrical ventures unworthy in themselves and justifiable only as lessons in dramatic technique advantageously applied to his later novels. Leon Edel, in particular, makes much of James's inability to collaborate with ,actors, producers and stage managers; and he says that unlike the successful playwright Wilde, James "could not be indifferent to his public."1 Though he referred to Wilde as the "unspeakable one," James envied Wilde's success and debased his own art to appeal to the latter's audiences. Such defects are serious and deserve the investigations they have received, but they are the results, not the cause of James's fundamental problem in the theater. Maxwell Geismar has suggested that James was only able to depict "the experience of the mind itself, or the mind of the artist,"2 rather than general human experience. Since a playwright is primarily concerned with the presentation of actual experience James's failure as a playwright was, according to Geismar's theory, a foregone conclusion. Yet the presence of very moving human experience in several of James's novels has led to such Broadway, and even Hollywood successes as The Heiress and The Innocents. James's plays contain interesting experiences and situations, but he was unable to manipulate them convincingly on stage. He had abandoned the artistic principles which made his earlier fiction great and had substituted the values he believed the contemporary theater-goer held. When James published his reply to Walter Besant's pamphlet "The Art of Fiction" under the same title, he not only stated his theory of the novel but a universally applicable theory of art. He wrote that art should represent life, that a work of art should have an organic unity, and that an artistically rendered experience consists of mental and emotional, rather than physical action. 1£ James had applied these theories to his plays he might have been more successful. The best examples of James's dichotomized approach to the play 1 Leon Edel, "Introduction," The Complete Plays of Henry James (Cambridge , Mass., 1949), p. 55. 2 Maxwell Geismar, Henry James and the Jacobites (New York, 1963). p. 101. 24 1%7 THEORY AND PRACTICE IN JAMES 25 and the novel are found in Daisy Miller and The American, good novels made into bad plays. As James said art must be, these novels are personal, direct impressions of life. They share a similar theme" one which James described in his preface to the New York edition of The American: I found myself, of a sudd~n, considering with enthusiasm, as the theme of a 'story,' the situation, in another country and an aristocratic society, of some robust but insidiously beguiled and betrayed, some cruelly wronged compatriot: the point being in especial that he should suffer at the hands of persons pretending to represent the highest possible civilization and to be of an order in every way superior to his own.3 . Daisy Miller and Christopher Newman are sympathetic protagonists of their respective novels, but James indicates that Daisy's defiance of accepted social practices deserves censure and that Newman is, in fact, not ready for an alliance with the aristocratic de Bellegarde family. This objective approach to character is typical of James's realism. Strangely, he abandons it in his plays. Newman in the play has a rasping "American" accent (dictated by James's stage directions), gangling posture, .and oppressive tactlessness. But Madame de Bellegarde rejects him not because she abhors his lack of cultivation but because she has found someone richer for her daughter Claire. In the· novel we loathe Madame de Bellegarde but admire her strict adherence·to the social code of the' Faubourg St. Germain. Similarly in the stage version of Daisy Miller the ingenuous 4eroine is made to contrast favorably in every act with the viciousness of her social superiors so that James's original impression of life is blunted and romanticized. ' The nouvelle, Daisy Miller, is told through the central consciousness of the sophisticated and somewhat jaded Winterbourne as he recollects Daisy's...