Popular opinion and himself to the contrary notwithstanding, Shaw is
not a mere preacher. The function of the dramatist is not that of the
village pastor. He has no need to exhort, nor to call upon his hearers
to come to the mourners’ bench. All the world expects him to do is to
picture human life as he sees it, as accurately and effectively as he
can. Like the artist in color, form, or tone, his business is with
impressions. A man painting an Alpine scene endeavors to produce, not a
mere record of each rock and tree, but an impression upon the observer
like that he would experience were he to stand in the artist’s place
and look upon the snow-capped crags. In music it is the same. Beethoven
set out, with melody and harmony, to arouse the emotions that stir us
upon pondering the triumphs of a great conqueror. Hence the Eroica
Symphony. Likewise, with curves and color, Millet tried to awaken the
soft content that falls upon us when we gaze across the fields at
eventide and hear the distant vesper-bell--and we have “The Angelus.”
The purpose of the dramatist is identical. If he shows us a drunken man
on the stage it is because he wants us to experience the disgust or
amusement or envy that wells up in us on contemplating such a person
in real life. He concerns himself, in brief, with things as he sees
them. The preacher deals with things as he thinks they ought to be.
Sometimes the line of demarcation between the two purposes may be but
dimly seen, but it is there all the same. If a play has what is known
as a moral, it is the audience and not the playwright that formulates
and voices it. A sermon without an obvious moral, well rubbed in, would
be no sermon at all.
And so, if we divest ourselves of the idea that Shaw is trying to
preach some rock-ribbed doctrine in each of his plays, instead of
merely setting forth human events as he sees them, we may find his
dramas much easier of comprehension. True enough, in his prefaces
and stage directions, he delivers himself of many wise saws and
elaborate theories. But upon the stage, fortunately, prefaces and
stage directions are no longer read to audiences, as they were in
Shakespeare’s time, and so, if they are ever to discharge their natural
functions, the Shaw dramas must stand as simple plays. Some of them,
alackaday! bear this test rather badly. Others, such as “Mrs. Warren’s
Profession” and “Candida,” bear it supremely well.
It is the dramatist’s business, then, to record the facts of life as
he sees them, that philosophers and moralists (by which is meant the
public in meditative mood) may deduce therefrom new rules of human
conduct, or observe and analyze old rules as they are exhibited in the
light of practice. That the average playwright does not always do so
with absolute accuracy is due to the fact that he is merely a human
being. No two men see the same thing in exactly the same way, and
there are no fixed standards whereby we may decide whether one or the
other or neither is right.
Herein we find the element of individual color, which makes one man’s
play differ from another man’s, just as one artist’s picture of a
stretch of beach would differ from another’s. A romancist, essaying
to draw a soldier, gave the world Don Cesar de Bazan. George Bernard
Shaw, at the same task, produced Captain Bluntschli. Don Cesar is an
idealist and a hero; Bluntschli is a sort of refined day laborer,
bent upon earning his pay at the least possible expenditure of blood
and perspiration. Inasmuch as no mere man--not even the soldier under
analysis himself--could ever hope to pry into a fighting man’s mind
and define and label his innermost shadows of thought and motive with
absolute accuracy, there is no reason why we should hold Don Cesar
to be a more natural figure than Captain Bluntschli. All that we can
demand of a dramatist is that he make his creation consistent and
logical and, as far as he can see to it, true. If we examine Bluntschli
we will find that he answers these requirements. There may be a good
deal of Shaw in him, but there is also some of Kitchener and more of
Tommy Atkins.
This is one of the chief things to remember in studying the characters
in the Shaw plays. Some of them are not obvious types, but a little
inspection will show that most of them are old friends, simply viewed
from a new angle. This personal angle is the possession that makes one
dramatist differ from all others.