Perhaps it would be unfair to suggest that when he was engaged in playwriting Henry James was unconsciously condescending; but it is not unfair to assert that he had no solidarity with the spectators he was hoping to attract and delight. What he gave them—the note prefixt to ‘Theatricals’ proves it amply—was as good as he thought they deserved or could understand; it was not his best. And even if he had designed to give them his best, he could not have done it, because a miniaturist cannot make himself over into a scene-painter. The two arts may demand an equal ability but the hand that works in either, soon subdued to what it works in, is incapacitated for the other. The supersubtleties in which Henry James excelled were impossible in the theater; they demand time to be taken in, an allowance impossible to the swiftness of the stage; they would not get across the footlights; and they might puzzle even the most enlightened spectators. It takes an immense experience and a marvelous skill “to paint in broad strokes, but so artfully that at a distance it appears as if we had painted in miniature,”—which, so the Spanish dramatist Benavente tells us, “is at once the problem and the art of the drama.” In his review of the ‘School for Scandal,’ Henry James confessed that he saw no reason to believe that the mass of mankind will ever be more artistic than is strikingly convenient, and we suspect that acute pleasure or pain, on this line, will remain the privilege of an initiated minority. The supreme leaders of the drama, Sophocles, Shakspere and Molière, were satisfied to rely on the “mass of mankind,” of whose sympathies they had an intuitive understanding. Henry James, all unwittingly it may be, was addressing himself only to the “initiated minority.” Where the leaders possessed robust straightforwardness and direct brevity, he was solitary, isolated, acutely fastidious. He must have read but he did not take to heart Joubert’s warning that we ought, “in writing, to remember that men of culture are present, but it is not to them that we should speak.” Henry James’s novels would have been more widely enjoyed if he had profited by this precept; and because he did not profit by it his plays are “all silent and all damned.” (1921) XI STAGE HUMOR XI STAGE HUMOR I