Now if all this can be done in the key of tragedy and philosophic
comedy, it can, I have always contended, be done in the key of farcical
comedy; and Overruled is a trifling experiment in that manner.
Conventional farcical comedies are always finally tedious because the
heart of them, the inevitable conjugal infidelity, is always evaded.
Even its consequences are evaded. Mr. Granville Barker has pointed out
rightly that if the third acts of our farcical comedies dared to
describe the consequences that would follow from the first and second
in real life, they would end as squalid tragedies; and in my opinion
they would be greatly improved thereby even as entertainments; for I
have never seen a three-act farcical comedy without being bored and
tired by the third act, and observing that the rest of the audience
were in the same condition, though they were not vigilantly
introspective enough to find that out, and were apt to blame one
another, especially the husbands and wives, for their crossness. But it
is happily by no means true that conjugal infidelities always produce
tragic consequences, or that they need produce even the unhappiness
which they often do produce. Besides, the more momentous the
consequences, the more interesting become the impulses and imaginations
and reasonings, if any, of the people who disregard them. If I had an
opportunity of conversing with the ghost of an executed murderer, I
have no doubt he would begin to tell me eagerly about his trial, with
the names of the distinguished ladies and gentlemen who honored him
with their presence on that occasion, and then about his execution. All
of which would bore me exceedingly. I should say, "My dear sir: such
manufactured ceremonies do not interest me in the least. I know how a
man is tried, and how he is hanged. I should have had you killed in a
much less disgusting, hypocritical, and unfriendly manner if the matter
had been in my hands. What I want to know about is the murder. How did
you feel when you committed it? Why did you do it? What did you say to
yourself about it? If, like most murderers, you had not been hanged,
would you have committed other murders? Did you really dislike the
victim, or did you want his money, or did you murder a person whom you
did not dislike, and from whose death you had nothing to gain, merely
for the sake of murdering? If so, can you describe the charm to me?
Does it come upon you periodically; or is it chronic? Has curiosity
anything to do with it?" I would ply him with all manner of questions
to find out what murder is really like; and I should not be satisfied
until I had realized that I, too, might commit a murder, or else that
there is some specific quality present in a murderer and lacking in me.
And, if so, what that quality is.
In just the same way, I want the unfaithful husband or the unfaithful
wife in a farcical comedy not to bother me with their divorce cases or
the stratagems they employ to avoid a divorce case, but to tell me how
and why married couples are unfaithful. I don't want to hear the lies
they tell one another to conceal what they have done, but the truths
they tell one another when they have to face what they have done
without concealment or excuse. No doubt prudent and considerate people
conceal such adventures, when they can, from those who are most likely
to be wounded by them; but it is not to be presumed that, when found
out, they necessarily disgrace themselves by irritating lies and
transparent subterfuges.
My playlet, which I offer as a model to all future writers of farcical
comedy, may now, I hope, be read without shock. I may just add that Mr.
Sibthorpe Juno's view that morality demands, not that we should behave
morally (an impossibility to our sinful nature) but that we shall not
attempt to defend our immoralities, is a standard view in England, and
was advanced in all seriousness by an earnest and distinguished British
moralist shortly after the first performance of Overruled. My objection
to that aspect of the doctrine of original sin is that no necessary and
inevitable operation of human nature can reasonably be regarded as
sinful at all, and that a morality which assumes the contrary is an
absurd morality, and can be kept in countenance only by hypocrisy. When
people were ashamed of sanitary problems, and refused to face them,
leaving them to solve themselves clandestinely in dirt and secrecy, the
solution arrived at was the Black Death. A similar policy as to sex
problems has solved itself by an even worse plague than the Black
Death; and the remedy for that is not Salvarsan, but sound moral
hygiene, the first foundation of which is the discontinuance of our
habit of telling not only the comparatively harmless lies that we know
we ought not to tell, but the ruinous lies that we foolishly think we
ought to tell.