Notwithstanding his distaste for any other than a theoretic or hypothetic playhouse, Henry James in 1908, ten years after the publication of ‘Covering End,’ did not hesitate to disinter the one-act play upon which it had been founded and to authorize its performance. He even permitted it to be cut into three acts,—just as Scribe four-score years earlier had made a three-act comedy, ‘Valérie,’ out of a one-act comédie-vaudeville, by the simple expedient of excising the songs and of dropping the curtain twice during the course of the action. The new-old three-act piece was entitled the ‘High Bid’; it was performed a few times in the provinces and a few times more in London by the Forbes-Robertsons. But it did not make any definite impression on the playgoing public. It was not a disheartening failure like ‘Guy Domville,’ yet it could not be called a success. Still, its milder reception encouraged its author to resume work on two more plays, the ‘Other House’ and the ‘Outcry.’ There were even negotiations for the production of these pieces,—negotiations which came to nothing, chiefly because prolonged illness forced him to give up work on them. III In the deprecatory note which he prefixt to the second volume of ‘Theatricals,’ Henry James declared that the man who pretends to the drama has more to learn, in fine, than any other pretender; and his dog’s eared grammar comes at last to have the remarkable peculiarity of seeming a revelation he himself shall have made. Plainly enough he had the conviction that to him the revelation was complete and that he had his self-made grammar by heart. Why then did he fail after efforts so persistent and so strenuous? Why did disaster follow fast and follow faster? It was plainly not from any lapse in painstaking or any easy ignoring of the difficulties of the dangerous task. It was not because his primary motive was pecuniary, since he was soon seized with ardor in his adventures into a new art. What then was it? I think that we can find a key to the secret in his letters wherein he more than once exhibits his detestation of the audience he was aiming to amuse. He wrote to his brother in 1895: The thing fills me with horror for the abysmal vulgarity and brutality of the theater and its regular public, which God knows I have had intensely, even when working (from motives as pure as pecuniary motives can be) against it. What right had any man to hope that he might gain the suffrages of spectators he so totally detested and despised? Henry James here takes an attitude, he discloses a frame of mind, as dissimilar as may be from the mighty masters of the drama,—from Corneille’s or Molière’s, for example. In 1911 he wrote to a friend that