626
PARTISAN REVIEW
adds "the breadsauce of the happy ending," in the hope of hitting the
British taste, the effect is sickly indeed.
"Celestial, soothing, sanctifying process" H enry James called his
fumbling-out of the dramatic action of his late novels. Upon which Mr.
Edel remarks, "The dramatic years-the sacred years-had yielded their
full harvest, and not so much in the plays .. . as in the consequences
for his fiction arising from their creation." I have believed for many
years that the place to study James's drama and its form is the late
novels, and not the plays. James himself made a distinction between the
"Theatrical," which can only live on a particular stage before a par–
ticular audience, and the dramatic, which may come alive in the
imaginations of scattered readers, each alone under his quiet lamp. In
our time the dramas of the late novels have begun to come alive in this
way, justifying James's faith in his own gifts as a dramatist, and also
confirming the lesson he learned from the theater itself- that to succeed
there he had to try to throw his cargo of meaning, of moral content,
overboard.
The nature of the drama in
The Golden Bowl,
or
The Ambassadors,
or
The Wings of the Dove,
cannot be understood through a study of
James's plays. But one may get a clue to it through studying James's
interest in the theater, and especially the French Theater. He tried to see
through Augier and Dumas to Moliere and Racine, by way of the
fine actors who performed the whole repertory, very much as he tried
to see through the Edwardian drawingroom to the traditional moral,
social, human order of which it was the unconscious heir. But I do not
elaborate on these points here-I have tried to do so in essays on
The
Golden Bowl
and James's conception of dramatic form.
Though Mr. Edel suggests these problems of interpretation and
criticism, he does not explore them in this book. His purpose was to
make James's plays, and the actual history of James's struggle with the
stage, available at last. He has succeeded admirably, through his very
rare combination of scholarship, sympathy, and literary acumen. He is
now working on a full-length biography of James. In James's long,
lonely life of exploration, the struggle with the theater was only one
strand, though an important one. Mr. Edel seems to have both the
knowledge and the abilities to give us the whole picture.
Francis Fergusson
