Nothing could be better than that, nothing could make clearer the immitigable fact that the full measure of the essential power of any drama can be gauged only in the actual theater, to the special conditions of which it has been scientifically adjusted. II In default as yet of a circumstantial biography which shall set before us the successive but perpetually unsuccessful efforts which Henry James made to establish himself as a dramatist, we must find what materials we may in his correspondence and in the explanatory prefaces which their editor prefixt to the several chronological sections into which he chose to distribute the letters. First and last, Henry James seems to have composed eight plays, three of which underwent the ordeal by fire before the footlights. His earliest attempt was an amplification of ‘Daisy Miller,’ a short-story which had attained an immediate vogue. This dramatization was made in 1882 on commission from the managers of the Madison Square Theater in New York. But it was not found acceptable to them; and the author took it over to London and read it to the managers of the St. James’s Theater, but without winning a more favorable opinion. Unable to arrange for performance, he resigned himself to publication; and it appeared as a book in 1883. Half-a-dozen years later he became discouraged at his inability to maintain the popularity which he had tasted earlier in his career as a novelist; and he persuaded himself that he might win a wider audience as a writer of plays than as a writer of novels. He asserted more than once that he was persuaded to playmaking by the patent fact that it was more immediately remunerative than story-telling; but this assertion seems to be the result of a certain self-deception, as one of his letters, written to his brother in 1891, proves that he was convinced of his richer endowment for the drama than for prose-fiction: The strange thing is that I have always known this (the drama) was my more characteristic form.... As for the form itself its honor and inspiration are its difficulty. If it were easy to write a good play I couldn’t and wouldn’t think of it; but it is in fact damnably hard. A little later, in a letter to Stevenson, he wrote that he was finding that the dramatic form opened out before him “as if there were a kingdom to conquer.... I feel as if I had at last found my form—my real one—that for which pale fiction is an ineffectual substitute.”