JAMES IN THE THEATER
625
him when he was pushed on stage after the final curtain of
Guy
Dam–
ville.
We also get a fine picture of the actual performance of that play,
a£ it affected the audience: the well-wishers in the good seats, admiring
the fine points, the bored and hostile crowd in the gallery, the break–
down of the actors' authority. The picture one gets of James as stage–
struck, as hopelessly wooing a public that wanted none of him, is
pathetic and even silly. But Mr. Edel shows, also, that James spared
himself none of the flavor of these bewilderments and humiliations.
If
James suffered so much from the theater, why did he keep re–
turning to the assault, time and again, for forty years? On the basis of
Mr. Edel's evidence, it appears that it is James's long and loving cult
of the French Theater, especially the Comedie
Fran~aise,
which ex–
plains both his infatuation with the stage itself, and the sober con–
viction, which never left him, that he was a born dramatist. It was in
Paris that he developed his fine taste in acting. He perceived the won–
derful possibilities in the actor's art when there is rigorous training for
the actor, standards, an audience of connoisseurs. He thought the
Comedie
Fran~aise
a "school of manners," a sign and an agent of the
continuing public life of the national spirit, an institution as important
in France as Parliament was in England. He could never get out of his
mind the notion of such a theater in English, in spite of his accurate
sense of the state of the theater in London when he began to write
for it, and in spite of his own repeated failures. Mr. Edel gives enough
quotations from James's letters and theatrical criticisms to make all
this clear. He also refers the reader to
The Scenic Art,
Alan Wade's
collection of James's writings on the theater, a very useful companion to
Mr. Edel's book.
James's French upbringing in the theater helps to explain his
plays and their failure in England. He wanted to write plays for actors
who had the conventional and self-conscious art, the glamour, and the
snap of the best French acting, and he proceeded to construct well–
made "vehicles" like those of Scribe, Dumas and Augier. The well–
made play of this school, developed by Sardou and Scribe, canonized by
Sarcey, is a light, firm, all-purpose machine: a concatenation of crystal–
clear "situations," in itself nearly empty of human content, but a fine
framework for good acting of a certain kind. But James did not find
this acting in England, and he never ceased to complain of the ama–
teurishness and stupidity of his actors.
If
you remove the human vitality
and intelligence of actors like Coquelin, the poverty of an intrigue
Ii
la
Fran~aise
is pathetically evident: you get something almost as thin
and blithery as James's own plays. When to this artificial plot James
