Mr. Henry James, too, has tempted the stage, teased, yet fascinated, by the “insufferable little art”; and the result is a dramatized version of “Daisy Miller,” and two volumes of “Theatricals”: “Tenants” and “Disengaged” (1894); “The Album” and “The Reprobate” (1895). These last were written with a view to their being played at country theatres (an opportunity having seemingly presented itself), but they never got so far. In reading them, one feels that a single rehearsal would have decided their chances. Mr. James, in the preface to the printed plays, treats his failure with humorous resignation. He complains of “the hard meagreness inherent in the theatrical form,” and of his own conscientious effort to avoid supersubtlety and to cultivate an “anxious simplicity” and a “deadly directness”—to write “something elaborately plain.” It was to be expected that Mr. James’s habit of refined analysis would prove but a poor preparation for acted drama; and that his singular coldness or shyness or reticence would handicap him fatally in emotional crises. Whenever he is led squarely up to such, he bolts. Innuendo is not the language of passion. In vain he cries: “See me being popular: observe this play to the gallery.” The failure is so complete as to have the finality of a demonstration. What was less to be expected is the odd way in which this artist drops realism for melodrama and farce when he exchanges fiction for playwriting. Sir Ralph Damant, in “The Album,” is a farce or “humor” character in the Jonsonian sense, his particular obsession being a fixed idea that all the women in the play want to marry him. In “Disengaged,” Mrs. Wigmore, a campaigner with a trained daughter, is another farce character; and there are iterations of phrase and catchwords here and elsewhere, as in Dickens’s or Jonson’s humorists. In “The Reprobate,” Paul Doubleday and Pitt Brunt, M.P., have the accentuated contrast of the Surface brothers. In “The Album,” that innocent old stage trick is played again, whereby some article—a lace handkerchief, a scrap of paper, a necklace, or what not—is made the plot centre. In “Daisy Miller”—dramatized version—the famous little masterpiece is spoiled by the substitution of a conventional happy ending and the introduction of a blackmailing villain. All this insinuates a doubt as to the reality of a realism which turns into improbability and artificiality merely by a change in the method of presentation. But the doubt is unfair. No _reductio ad absurdum_ has occurred, but simply another instance of the law that every art has its own method, and that the method of the novel is not that of the play. Of course, there are clever things in the dialogue of these three-act comedies, for Mr. James is always Mr. James. But the only one of them that comes near to being a practicable theatre piece is “Tenants,” which has a good plot founded on a French story.