Henry James and The Outcry

HENRY JAMES AND THE OUTCRY1 LEON EDEL EARLY in 1909 the American producer, Charles Frohman, began to la,y plans for a repertory season in London at the Duke of York's Theatre. The moving spirit behind the plan was J. M. Barrie. He enlisted the aid of those men who had contributed to the success of the repertory movement in England which, even before .the turn of the century, had begun to breathe new life into the British stage.2 Harley Granville-Barker, whose management with John E. Vedrenne of the Court Theatre had played an eminent role in establishing the reputation of Bernard Shaw and had introduced several new playwrights to the British public (including Granville-Barker himself), joined their ranks. They engaged the discrimi-·nating services of Allan Wade, who had worked with Granville-Barker and, at the moment, was in ·charge of the Abbey Theatre's season in . London. Shaw, John Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham, John Masefield, and Henry James were invited to write plays. Shaw wrote Misalliance, Galsworthy justice, Henry James The Outcry, while Granville~Barker contributed The Madras House. Barrie wrote two one-act plays, The TwelvePound Look and Old Friends, and arranged George Meredith's unfinished comedy, The Sentimentalists, for the stage. Frohman, in announcing the season, said that "whatever 'it accomplishes , it will represent the combined resources of actor and playwright, working with each other, a combination that seems to me to represent the most necessary foundation of any theatrical success." James had tried to succeed as a dramatist during the eighteennineties , devoting five years to writing for the stage, and then in 1895, upon the failure of Guy Domville, had returned to his novelist's study. He emerged now to find conditions in the theatre considerably changed. He was dealing, this time, not with a "managerial abyss, as he had complained during his earlier ventures, but with "fellow-craftsmen who appreciated his work and who were imbued with the s~e high ideals as his own for the British stage. He had met Harley Granville-Barker at the home of H. G. \Veils and had been captivated by the personality of the young actor-manager, who, with all his histrionic gifts, was also a skilled director· and playwright. Barrie, Galsworthy, and Shaw were by this time well established on the stage. They drew James into their fellowship. He moved now, for the first time, in a veritable fraternity of dramatists and he found lThis article has been expanded from prefatory material in The Complete Plays of Henry ]ames, edited by Leon Edel, to be published October, 1949 by J. B. Lippincott Company. The Outcry was never published during James's lifetime as a play, and will be published in this v.olume for the first time. 2P. P. Howe has told the story of the rise of repertory in The Repertory Theatre (London, 1910). See also Irving Zucker, Le Court Theatre (1904- 1914) etl'evolution du theatre an.glais contemPorain (-Paris, 1931), and Charles Frohman: .Manager and Man, by Isaac F. Marcosson and Daniel Frohman (London, 1926). 340 HENRY JAMES AND THE OUTCRY 341 himself drawn; at this moment, into a very special "outcry" which these playwrights were raising over the British censorship of plays. James joined in .this outcry with spirit. There was sitting, during the summer of 1909, a Joint Select Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Commons, hearing evidence of playwrights, men of letters, actors, and managers, as well as critics, in connection with the activities of the Lord .Chamberlain, whose authority to license plays gave him full authority to judge-and to suppress-works of art. James had been one of the signers of a protest in 1907 against the refusal of the Lord Chamberlain to license one of Edward Garnett's plays, The Breaking Point. Earlier, Shaw's Mrs. WarrenJs Profession had fallen under the censor's axe, and now Granville-Barker's Waste had suffered a similar fate, together with two other Shaw plays, The Showing up of Blanco Posnet and Press Cuttings. There is a rare newspaper photograph of James,S in top hat, a massive figure beside the diminutive Barrie...