As long as a dramatist is faithful to his task of depicting human life
as he sees it, it is of small consequence whether the victory, in the
dramatic conflict, goes to the one side or the other. In Pinero’s
play, “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,” the heroine loses her battle with
convention and her life pays the forfeit. In Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” the
contest ends with the destruction of all concerned; in Hauptmann’s
“Friedensfest” there is no conclusion at all, and in Sudermann’s
“Johnnisfeuer,” orthodox virtue triumphs. The dramatist, properly
speaking, is not concerned about the outcome of the struggle. All he is
required to do is to draw the two sides accurately and understandingly
and to show the conflict naturally. In other words, it is not his
business to decide the matter for his audience, but to make those who
see his play think it out for themselves.
“Here,” he says, as it were, “I have set down certain human
transactions and depicted certain human beings brought face to face
with definite conditions, and I have tried to show them meeting these
conditions as persons of their sort would meet them in real life.
I have endeavored, in brief, to exhibit a scene from life as real
people live it. Doubtless, there are lessons to be learned from this
scene--lessons that may benefit real men and women if they are ever
confronted with the conditions I have described. It is for you, my
friends, to work out these lessons for yourselves, each according to
his ideas of right and wrong.”
That Shaw makes such an invitation in each of his plays is very plain.
The proof lies in the fact that they have, as a matter of common
knowledge, caused the public to do more thinking than the dramas of
any other contemporary dramatist, with the sole exception of Ibsen.
Pick up any of the literary monthlies and you will find a disquisition
upon his technique, glance through the dramatic column of your favorite
newspaper and you will find some reference to his plays. Go to your
woman’s club, O gentle reader! and you will hear your neighbor, Mrs.
McGinnis, deliver her views upon “Candida.” Pass among any collection
of human beings accustomed to even rudimentary mental activity--and you
will hear some mention, direct or indirect, and some opinion, original
or cribbed, of or about the wild Irishman. All of this presupposes
thinking, somewhere and by somebody. Mrs. McGinnis’ analysis of
Candida’s soul may be plagiarized and in error, but it takes thinking
to make errors, and the existence of a plagiarist always proves the
existence of a plagiaree. Even the writers of reviews in the literary
monthlies, and the press agents who provide discourses upon “You Never
Can Tell” for the provincial dailies are thinkers, strange as the idea,
at first sight, may seem. And so we may take it for granted that Shaw
tries to make us think and that he succeeds.
V
“My task,” said Joseph Conrad the other day, in discussing the aims of
the novelist, “is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear,
to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you _see_. That--and no
more....”
“All that I have composed,” said Hendrik Ibsen, in an address to
the Ladies’ Club of Christiania, “has not proceeded from a conscious
tendency. I have been more the poet and less the social philosopher
than has been believed.... Not alone those who write, but also those
who read, compose, and very often they are more full of poetry than the
poet himself....”
“The poet,” said Schopenhauer, “brings pictures of life and human
character and situations before the imagination, sets everything in
motion and leaves it to everyone to think into these pictures as much
as his intellectual power will find for him therein.”
Let us suppose, for instance, that “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” is given
a performance and that 2000 average citizens pay to see it. Of the 2000
it is probable that 1900 will be persons who accept unquestioningly and
without even a passing doubt the legal and ecclesiastical maxim that
the Magdalen was a sinner, whom mercy might save from her punishment
but not from her sin. A thousand, perhaps, will sit through the
play without progressing any further; it will appeal to them merely
as an entertainment and those who are not vastly delighted by its
salaciousness, will condemn its immorality. But the 900, let us say,
will slowly awaken to the strange fact that there is something to be
said against as well as for the ancient maxim. Eight hundred of them,
perhaps, after debating the matter in their minds, will decide that the
arguments for it overwhelm those against it, and one hundred will leave
the playhouse convinced to the contrary or in more or less doubt. But
the eight hundred, though they have left harboring the same opinion
that was theirs before they came, will have made an infinite step
forward. Instead of being unthinking endorsers of a doctrine they have
never even examined, they will have become, in the true sense, original
thinkers. Thereafter, when they condemn the Magdalen, it will be, not
because a hundred popes did so before them, but because on hearing her
defense, they found it unconvincing.
In this will be seen the truth of the statement purposely reiterated:
that Shaw is in no sense a preacher. His private opinions, very
naturally, greatly color his plays, but his true purpose, like that of
every dramatist worth while, is to give a more or less accurate and
unbiased picture of some phase of human life, that persons observing
it may be led to speculate and meditate upon it. In “Widowers’ Houses”
he attempts, by setting forth a series of transactions between a given
group of familiar Englishmen, to show that capitalism, as a social
force, is responsible for the oppression that slum landlords heap
upon their tenants, and that, in consequence, every other man of the
capitalistic class, no matter what his own particular investments
and activities may be, shares, to a greater or less extent, in the
landlords’ offense. A capitalist reading this play may conclude with
some justice that the merit of husbanding money--or, as Adam Smith
calls it, the virtue of abstinence--outweighs his portion of the
burden of this sin, or that it is, in a sense, inevitable and so not
properly a sin at all; but whatever his conclusion, if he has honestly
come to it after a consideration of the facts, he is a far better man
than when he accepted the maxims of the majority unquestioningly and
without analysis.
A preacher necessarily endeavors to make all his hearers think exactly
as he does. A dramatist merely tries to make them think. The nature of
their conclusions is of minor consequence.