Sarcey, the great French critic, has shown us that the essence of
dramatic action is conflict. Every principal character in a play must
have a complement, or as it is commonly expressed, a foil. In the most
primitive type of melodrama, there is a villain to battle with the hero
and a comic servant to stand in contrast with the tearful heroine. As
we go up the scale, the types are less strongly marked, but in every
play that, in the true sense, is dramatic, there is this same balancing
of characters and action. Comic scenes are contrasted with serious ones
and for every Hamlet you will find a gravedigger.
In the dramas of George Bernard Shaw, which deal almost wholly with the
current conflict between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, it is but natural
that the characters should fall broadly into two general classes--the
ordinary folks who represent the great majority, and the iconoclasts,
or idol-smashers. Darwin made this war between the faithful and the
scoffers the chief concern of the time, and the sham-smashing that is
now going on, in all the fields of human inquiry, might be compared to
the crusades that engrossed the world in the middle ages. Everyone,
consciously or unconsciously, is more or less directly engaged in it,
and so, when Shaw chooses conspicuous fighters in this war as the chief
characters of his plays, he is but demonstrating his comprehension of
human nature as it is manifested to-day. In “Man and Superman,” for
instance, he makes John Tanner, the chief personage of the drama, a
rabid adherent of certain very advanced theories in social philosophy,
and to accentuate these theories and contrast them strongly with the
more old-fashioned ideas of the majority of persons, he places Tanner
among men and women who belong to this majority. The effect of this is
that the old notions and the new--orthodoxy and heterodoxy--are brought
sharply face to face, and there is much opportunity for what theater
goers call “scenes”--_i. e._ clashes of purpose and will.
In all of the Shaw plays--including even the farces, though here to
a less degree--this conflict between the worshipers of old idols and
the iconoclasts, or idol-smashers, is the author’s chief concern. In
“The Devil’s Disciple” he puts the scene back a century and a half
because he wants to exhibit his hero’s doings against a background of
particularly rigid and uncompromising orthodoxy, and the world has
moved so fast since Darwin’s time that such orthodoxy scarcely exists
to-day. Were it pictured as actually so existing the public would
think the picture false and the playwright would fail in the first
business of a maker of plays, which is to give an air of reality to
his creations. So Dick Dudgeon, in “The Devil’s Disciple” is made a
contemporary of George Washington, and the tradition against which he
struggles seems fairly real.
In each of the Shaw plays you will find a sham-smasher like Dick.
In “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” there are three of them--Mrs. Warren
herself, her daughter Vivie and Frank Gardner. In “You Never Can Tell”
there are the Clandons; in “Arms and the Man” there is Bluntschli, and
in “Man and Superman” there are John Tanner and Mendoza, the brigand
chief, who appears in the Hell scene as the Devil. In “Candida” and
certain other of the plays it is somewhat difficult to label each
character distinctly, because there is less definition in the outlines
and the people of the play are first on one side and then on the other,
much after the fashion of people in real life. But in all of the Shaw
plays the necessary conflict is essentially one between old notions of
conduct and new ones.
Dramatists of other days, before the world became engaged in its
crusade against error and sham, depicted battles of other sorts. In
“Hamlet” Shakespeare showed the prince in conflict with himself, and
in “The Merchant of Venice” he showed Shylock combatting Antonio, or,
in other words, the ideals of the Jew at strife with Christian ideals
of charity and mercy. Of late, the most important plays have much
resembled those of Shaw. Ibsen, except in his early poetical dramas,
deals chiefly with the war between new schemes of human happiness
and old rules of conduct. Nora Helmer fights the ancient idea that a
married woman should love, honor and obey her husband, no matter what
the provocation to do otherwise, just as Mrs. Warren defies the mandate
that a woman should preserve her virtue, no matter how much she may
suffer thereby. Sudermann, in “Magda,” shows his heroine in revolt
against the patriarchal German doctrine that a father’s authority over
his children is without limit, and Hauptmann, another German of rare
talents, depicts his chief characters in similar situations. Shaw is
frankly a disciple of Ibsen, but he is far more than a mere imitator.
In some things, indeed--such, for instance, as in fertility of wit and
invention--he very greatly exceeds the Norwegian.