624
PARTISAN REVIEW
high dramatic qualities residing
in
the plays, as indeed in all the work,
of James."
It may be that Shaw and Granville-Barker could judge the theatrical
viability of the plays better than we can now. Some of their artificiality
and elaborate
politesse
is just old-fashioned. But I must report that I
found them-800 double-columned pages of them-unpleasing reading.
There are certainly passages of beautifully-built dialogue, wherein the
characters make play with the felicitous phrase, delicately distinguish–
ing the finer shades of motive, as
in
the novels. Once in a while, notably
in
Daisy M iller,
a dramatization of the story, one can feel some of
James's own themes and sympathies. Sometimes, especially in
The
R eprobate,
there is a bit of good farce ; and it may be that in farce
James could have found a way to make contact between his humanity
and that of his audience. But, in general, the plays do not come alive.
They are abstract machines without the vital spark; James himself is
not in them. His
OWH
diagnosis seems to me to be the right one: he
"threw the cargo overboard to save the ship."
It
is too easy to feel
the accuracy of a criticism, which Mr. Edel quotes, of a bad production
of
The R eprobate
in Boston in 1923 : "Blither
in
a Void."
If
the
dramatist has no respect fo r his themes and his characters, how can he
do anything but blither, and how can the audience do anything but
surround the pathetic effort with a void of indifference and incom–
prehension? James as playwright was at the opposite pole from the
miraculous hero of
Once in a Lifetime.
That ex-hoofer had the same
reflexes as those of the mythic average man, and therefore he had
natural authority on the stage. Whether he wept with
sentimen~ality,
dozed, roared with laughter, or ate nuts, his every gesture was im–
mediately clear, he was nature and art at once. But J ames was pain–
fully conscious of alienation from his audience: he felt invisible and
unwanted. He could not charm them with art alone ; his efforts to
imitate their sentimentalities turned out, too often, to be cold tours de
force. In reading his plays one feels, very strongly, the failure of his
make-believe, the frightening breakdown of communications.
From the point of view of J ames himself, and his difficult career
as an artist, this failure has all the human drama which the plays them–
selves lack. Mr. Edel has brought this whole story to light. For instance
his
narrative of the opening night of
Guy Domuille
is a masterpiece of the
scholar's art. H e shows us J ames, in flight, attending a performance of
Oscar Wilde's
An Ideal Husband,
while the most distinguished audience
in London assembled to see his play. In the success of Wilde, James
read his own doom
i
he had a premonition of the hisses which greeted
