A VIEW
OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE
623
times, the unproven hypothesis that the opinion of the reading public
is a powerful independent factor which occasionally causes the party–
line to bend or halt in its predetennined course.
Isaiah Berlin
JAMES IN THE THEATER
THE COMPLETE PLAYS OF HENRY JAMES. Edited
by
Leon Edel.
LippincoH. $10.00.
"In this volume," Mr. Edel explains, "there appear, collected
for the first time, the complete plays of H enry James, together with the
unfinished scenario for an unwritten play and sundry prefaces and
notes relating to his playwrighting. So far as we know the novelist com–
pleted twelve plays in all. Five were published during his lifetime; the
remaining seven have never before appeared in public print." In an
introductory essay and in forewords to the plays Mr. Edel sketches the
theater for which James wrote, in London, and also in America and
in France; and he adds enough of James's biography, and enough
contemporary criticism of his plays-carefully culled from what must be
a vast store of material in letters, newspapers and memoirs-so that we
can follow the whole long story of James's assaults upon the theater
almost as though we were there in person. Mr. Edel has done a superb
job: he has used the scrupulous methods of scholarship to reveal a
pathetic and terrible part of James's story, and also many significant
aspects of the modern theater.
It has not been generally realized by critics of James's work that
playwrighting was a constant, and very important preoccupation of
his for forty years-nor that in his own view and that of a number of
experts he came very close to making the grade as a recognized play–
wright. His first play,
Pyramus and Thisbe,
was written in 1869; as
late as 1909 he wrote a monologue for Ruth Draper. Many managers on
both sides of the Atlantic asked him for plays, several were produced;
and Mr. Edel shows that his plays commanded at least the interest of
many theater-wise people. "So qualified an observer as Bernard Shaw,"
he writes, "has described the earlier plays as stageworthy, while rejecting
the later works as cast in a dialogue 'inhumanly literary'; while, on the
other hand, the equally authoritative Granville-Barker considered the
later works, particularly
The Outcry,
to
be
as manageable as a Restora–
tion
play or a play of Chekhov's.... Most critics have recognized the
