GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: HIS PLAYS

“MRS. WARREN’S PROFESSION.”

Mrs. “Kitty” Warren, the central character of Shaw’s most remarkable

play (and it is one of the most remarkable plays, in many ways, of

the time) is a successful practitioner of what Kipling calls the

oldest profession in the world. She is no betrayed milkmaid or cajoled

governess, this past mistress of the seventh unpardonable sin, but

a wide-awake and deliberate sinner, who has studied the problem

thoroughly and come to the conclusion, like Huckleberry Finn, that

it is better, by far, to sin and be damned than to remain virtuous

and suffer. The conflict in the play is between Mrs. Warren and her

daughter, and in developing it, Shaw exhibits his insight into the

undercurrents of human nature to a superlative degree. Mrs. Warren,

though she is a convention smasher, does not stand for heterodoxy.

In truth despite all her elaborate defense of herself and her bitter

arraignment of the social conditions that have made her what she is,

she is a worshiper of respectability and the only true believer, save

one, in the play. It is Vivie, her daughter, a virgin, who holds the

brief against orthodoxy.

“If I had been you, mother,” says Vivie, in the last scene, when the

two part forever, “I might have done as you did; but I should not have

lived one life and believed another. You are a conventional woman at

heart. That is why I am leaving you now.”

This complexity of character has puzzled a good many readers of the

play, but though there is a complexity, there is no real confusion.

Mrs. Warren, despite her ingenious reasoning, is a vulgar, ignorant

woman, little capable of analyzing her own motives. Vivie, on the other

hand, is a girl of quick intelligence and extraordinary education--a

Cambridge scholar, a mathematician and a student of the philosophies.

As the play opens Mrs. Warren seems to have all the best of it. She is

the rebel and Vivie is the slave. But in the course of the strangely

searching action, there is a readjustment. Convention overcomes the

mother and crushes her; her daughter, on the other hand, strikes off

her shackles and is free.

At the beginning Vivie is home from Cambridge, where she has tied with

the third wrangler--for and in consideration of a purse of $250 offered

by Mrs. Warren. For years she has seen very little of her mother, and

now, on the eve of a reunion, she is curious and inquisitive. They set

up housekeeping in a small cottage in the country, near the parsonage

of the Rev. Samuel Gardner, “a pretentious, booming, noisy person,”

and the friend of Mrs. Warren. There come, too, Sir George Crofts, “a

gentlemanly combination of the most brutal types of city man, sporting

man and man-about-town,” and one Praed, a sort of Greek chorus to the

drama. The Rev. Mr. Gardner’s son, Frank, “an entirely good-for-nothing

young fellow,” is attracted to Vivie, and so when Crofts casts his eye

upon her, there begins the action of a drama.

Vivie, beginning by wondering at her mother’s long absence from home,

ends by harboring a sickening sense of suspicion. The elder woman’s

unconscious vulgarities, her bizarre view-point, her championing of

Crofts--all add fuel to the flame of doubt. At first Mrs. Warren tries

browbeating, after the orthodox custom of parents, but to her horror

she finds that Vivie will not submit to such an exercise of authority.

And soon they are face to face in a mighty struggle and there is no

quarter on either side.

Finally Vivie demands to know the name of her father. Mrs. Warren

blusters, threatens, begs, evades, lies--and ends by breaking down

and telling the truth. Vivie is disgusted, horrified, appalled; Mrs.

Warren, at first in tears, returns to her browbeating.

“What right have you to set yourself above me like this?” she demands.

“You boast of what you are to me--to me who gave you the chance of

being what you are....”

“You attack me with the conventional authority of a mother,” replies

Vivie calmly. “I defend myself with the conventional superiority of a

respectable woman....”

But for the present, it is Mrs. Warren who triumphs. She has reasons,

arguments, causes, theories: Vivie’s shields are merely custom,

authority, the law. Mrs. Warren sees her advantage and hastens to

seize it. She tells Vivie all--of the squalor that she knew, of her

temptation, of the lure of comfort--“a lovely house, plenty of servants

and the choicest of eating and drinking”--and finally, of her strong

and resolute determination to yield and of the fruits of her yielding.

“Do you think,” she says, “that I was such a fool as to let other

people trade in my good looks by employing me as a shopgirl, a barmaid

or a waitress, when I could trade in them myself and get all the

profits, instead of starvation wages...?”

Vivie is visibly impressed, and herein Shaw shows his skill in laying

open the human animal. His iconoclasts sometimes go to mass and his

saints sometimes sin, exactly as saint and sinner sin and pray in real

life. Vivie, we learn in the end, is the real sham-smasher of the two,

but in this scene she seems to change places with her mother. Mrs.

Warren, alert to the slightest advantage, drives home her logic. It is

a scene that exhibits the play of mind upon mind as no other scene in a

contemporary play exhibits it, saving only that marvellous one between

Marikka and George in “Johnnisfeuer.” Mrs. Warren’s picture of the

forces that overcame her, her sturdy defense of her philosophy of life;

her contempt for those who fear to risk their all--it would take a girl

more than human to resist these things.

But the season of sentiment and pathos is destined to be brief.

Crofts, who is Mrs. Warren’s partner in her chain of brothels, resumes

his siege of Vivie. Even Mrs. Warren grows nauseated and Vivie’s

own disgust is undisguised. Then, for a moment, Crofts becomes the

conventional villain and hurls the sins of the mother into the

daughter’s teeth. It is all melodrama here--Crofts grows “black with

rage,” and Frank, bobbing up, rifle in hand, proposes to shoot him. And

then comes the climax.

“Allow me, Mister Frank,” says Crofts, “to introduce you to your

half-sister, the eldest daughter of the Reverend Samuel Gardner. Miss

Vivie: your half-brother. Good morning.”

As he turns on his heel, Frank raises the rifle and takes aim at his

back.

“You’ll testify before the coroner that it’s an accident?” he says to

Vivie.

She “seizes the muzzle and pulls it round against her breast.”

“Fire now,” she says. “You may.”

After that the play goes downhill to its inevitable conclusion. Vivie,

admitting her mother’s justification, revolts against her effort to

distort it into a grotesque sort of respectability. So there is a

parting and the daughter goes off to London, to begin life anew as

a public accountant and conveyancer. Mrs. Warren, now sunk to the

wailing, snivelling stage, follows her. The final scene between mother

and daughter is strangely impressive. Mrs. Warren pleads and begs and

screams. At the end of her rope she turns, and like an animal at bay

shows her teeth.

“From this time forth,” she shrieks, with the air of a tragedy queen,

“I’ll do wrong, and nothing but wrong! And I’ll prosper on it!”

“Yes,” said Vivie philosophically, “it’s better to choose your line and

go through with it. If I had been you, mother, I might have done as you

did; but I should not have lived one life and believed another.... That

is why I am bidding you good-bye now....”

And so ends the play of “Mrs. Warren’s Profession.” Posing as a

smasher of shams, Mrs. Warren is the most abject devotee in the whole

synagogue. Fenced within her virtue, Vivie is a true iconoclast--with

seasons of backsliding, it is true (for she is supremely human), but

with no permanent slacking of her unfaith.

William Archer, the translator of Ibsen, says that the play is

“intellectually and dramatically, one of the most remarkable of the

age,” and Cunninghame Graham calls it “the best that has been written

in English in our generation.” And yet James Huneker finds Mrs. Warren

“a bore” and Vivie “a chilly, waspish pig,” and Max Beerbohm, confused

by the fact that Vivie runs the whole gamut of passions, up and down

again, in the four acts, complains that the play exhibits no change in

the characters and that Vivie ends as she begins--“determined to go out

into the world to work.” Certainly it seems wellnigh incredible that a

man of Mr. Beerbohm’s discernment should be blind to the vast battles

that rage in the girl’s soul--her horror at the beginning, her yielding

to sentimentality and her declaration for sincerity and truth at the

close. Were the play ended with the extraordinary second act, his

objections would probably seem fatuous even to himself.

“Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” as a bit of theatrical mechanics, is

unsurpassed. Its events proceed with the inevitable air that marks

the work of a thoroughly capable journeyman: not a scene is out of

place; not a line is without its meaning and purpose. The characters

are sketched in rapidly and vividly and before the first act is half

over we have each of them clearly in our eye--Mrs. Warren and her

ancient profession, her vulgarities and her string of “private hotels”

from Brussels to Buda Pesth; the Rev. Samuel Gardner and his shallow,

commonplace hypocrisy; Frank Gardner and his utter worthlessness and

blasphemy; Crofts and his mellow lewdness; Vivie and her progress

from undergraduate cynicism and spectacular cigar-smoking to real

individualism; and Praed and his soft chanting in the background.

Taken as a play, the drama is wellnigh faultless. It might well serve,

indeed, as a model to all who aspire to place upon the stage plausible

records of human transactions.

“ARMS AND THE MAN”

“Arms and the man I sing.”

--_The Aeneid._

Arms and the Man,” on its face, is a military satire, not unrelated to

“A Milk White Flag,” and Shaw himself hints that he tried to keep it

within the sphere of popular comprehension, but under the burlesque

and surface wit there lies an idea that the author later elaborated

in “Man and Superman.” This idea concerns the relationship of the

sexes and particularly the matter of mating. Ninety-nine men in every

hundred, when they go a-courting, fancy that they are the aggressors

in the ancient game and rather pride themselves upon their enterprise

and their daring. Hence we find Don Juan a popular hero. As a matter

of fact, says Shaw, it is the woman that ordinarily makes the first

advances and the woman that lures, forces, or drags the man on to the

climax of marriage. You will find this theory set forth in detail in

the preface of “Man and Superman” and elaborated in the play itself. In

“Arms and the Man” it is overshadowed by the satire, but even a casual

study of the drama will reveal its outlines.

The scene of “Arms and the Man” is a small town in Bulgaria and the

time is the winter of the Balkan War, 1885–6. Captain Bluntschli,

the hero, is a Swiss soldier of fortune, who takes service with the

Servians because war is his trade and Servia happens to be nearer his

home than Bulgaria. A machine gun detachment under his command is

overwhelmed by a sudden and unscientific charge of blundering Bulgarian

horsemen, and he swiftly takes to the woods, being little desirous

of shedding his blood unnecessarily. He and his comrades are pursued

by Bulgarians bent upon finishing them, and, passing through a small

town at night at a gallop, he shins up a rainspout and takes refuge

in the bed-chamber of a young woman, Raina Petkoff, the daughter of a

Bulgarian officer.

The ensuing scene between the two is a masterpiece of comedy and

Richard Mansfield’s performances of the play have made it familiar

to most American theater-goers. Bluntschli, as Shaw depicts him, is

a soldier entirely devoid of the heroics associated in the popular

imagination with men of war. He has no yearning to die for his country

or any other country, and, after bullying his unwilling hostess with an

unloaded revolver, he frankly confesses that he is hungry and sleepy,

and that, as a general proposition, he prefers a good dinner to a

forlorn hope. She is a young woman suffering from much romanticism

and undigested French fiction, and very naturally she is tremendously

astonished. Her heavy-eyed intruder, as a matter of fact, fairly

appals her. His common-sense seems idiocy and his callous realism

sacrilege.

But, nevertheless, the theatricality of his appearance makes an

overwhelming appeal to her and she shelters him and conceals him from

his enemies--her countrymen--and when he goes away, she sends after him

a portrait of herself, just as any other romantic young woman might do.

To her the incident is epochal, but Bluntschli himself gives little

thought to it. As he says afterwards, a soldier soon forgets such

things: “He is always getting his life saved in all sorts of ways by

all sorts of people.” So he fights a bit, forages a bit, perspires a

bit, draws his pay, eats his meals, and waits, in patience, for the war

to end.

But Raina does not forget. Even when peace comes at last and her

betrothed, Major Sergius Saranoff, comes home, she still remembers

her “chocolate-cream soldier.” Sergius was the blundering ass whose

reckless charge sent Bluntschli flying through the night into Raina’s

chamber. He is a queer mixture of romanticist and realist, of

aristocrat and blackguard, with the ideals alternately of a Cæsar and a

potman. One moment he revels in a Byronic ecstacy with Raina, the next

moment he is making Mulvaney-like advances to Louka, her maid.

This Louka is one of Shaw’s peculiarly human characters--a sort

of refined and developed Regina, taken from “Ghosts” and given an

essentially Shavian cast. She has a soul above servility, though she

answers Raina’s bell, and when Saranoff, awakening to his own grotesque

hypocrisy, revolts against Raina’s idealization of his very tawdry

heroics, Louka is ready to enmesh him in her net. She will be a fine

lady, this superwoman in a maid’s cap, and like Raina she will go to

Belgrade for the opera and to Vienna for frocks and frills.

Bluntschli, returning, helps to set the stage for her. Raina’s father

and Sergius, her betrothed, have met the Swiss and invited him to the

Petkoff home, not connecting him with the intruder who invaded Raina’s

bed-chamber. They want him to give them aid in the prosaic business

of putting up the shutters of war--to show them how to get their men

home and feed them on the way. This is his true forte and he comes

to the domicile of the Petkoffs--and again meets Raina. She is now

twenty-three, and the usual physiological revulsion against Byronic

sentiment is beginning to stir her. She sees that Sergius, with all his

gallant cavalry charges and play-acting, is rather a cheap sort after

all, and in the same light she sees that Bluntschli, despite his frank

running away and his fondness for chocolate-creams, is the more honest

of the two. The Swiss himself still gives little thought to her. His

business is to show old Petkoff how to bring his regiments home, and

after that, to return to Switzerland and take over the management of

his deceased father’s chain of Alpine hotels.

But, as Shaw hints, the man in the case has little to do with the

ordering of such dramas. Raina and Louka, each with her prey in sight,

fall to the chase. Sergius wavers, holds himself together, essays a

flight, is dragged back, and capitulates. As Louka carries him into

camp, the innocent and romantic little Raina is left free to bag

Bluntschli. He walks into the net with eyes wide open and, as it were,

sword in hand. When he finds himself enmeshed he is surprised beyond

measure, but he is a good soldier, is Bluntschli, and this time it is

too late to run away.

“Major Petkoff,” he says to the old man, “I beg to propose formally to

become a suitor for your daughter’s hand.”

And that is the end of the drama.

A detailed description would spoil the charm of the play’s exuberant

and boundless humor. As a comedy it is capital, from the scene of

Bluntschli’s entrance into Raina’s chamber to the last scene of all,

wherein the Petkoffs cross-examine him as to his finances. Bluntschli

is no mere burlesque. In him Shaw has tried to depict a real soldier

as opposed to a soldier of the grand opera or Ivanhoe type. He has

succeeded, in his way, as admirably as Cervantes, albeit a great

many persons--like Raina herself--whose idea of soldierly bearing

is expressed in St. Louis and of heroism in the charge of the Light

Brigade, have been vastly puzzled by Bluntschli.

Raina is drawn boldly and with what artists call an open line, and

her revolt against romantic tomfoolery and humbug is shown with

excellent art. Sergius, with his surface civilization and complex

personality--“the half dozen Sergiuses who keep popping in and out

of this handsome figure of mine”--and his keen self-analysis, is

naturally a less obvious type, but even he is perfectly consistent in

his inconsistency. Louka is the female Don Juan--the Donna Anna of “Man

and Superman,”--to the life. Her deliberate ensnarement of Sergius, in

itself would make a drama well worth the writing. The Petkoffs, Raina’s

parents, are simple-minded barbarians, and Nicola, their man-servant,

who willingly resigns Louka to Sergius, is of a breed not peculiar to

Bulgaria.

The play, despite its abounding humor and excellent characterizations,

is not to be numbered among Shaw’s best. The second act, which should

be the strongest, is the weakest, and the remarkable originality

and humor of the first scene rather detract from those that follow.

Shaw describes the play as his first attempt at writing a drama

comprehensible to the general public. With this object in view, he

lavished upon it a wealth of wit, but it is to be doubted if the real,

inner humor of the action has ever gone home. Mansfield still has

it in his repertory, but he seldom presents it. Persons who admire

“Beaucaire” and “Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde” are not apt to demand it.

“THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLE”

In “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” we saw individuals battling against

the law and in “Arms and the Man” we observed romanticism in an

_opera-bouffe_ catch-as-catch-can struggle with realism. In “The

Devil’s Disciple” we have revealed religion bruising its fists upon the

hard head of impious doubt. Dick Dudgeon, the hero (and he is a hero of

the good old white-shirted, bare-necked, melodramatic sort) laughs at

the commandments and the beatitudes--and then puts the virtuous to rout

by an act of supreme nobility that few of them, with all their faith in

post-mortem reward, would dare to venture.

It is a problem in human motives that looks formidable. Why does Dick,

the excommunicated, brave Hell to save another? Why does he face death,

dishonor, shame and damnation, with no hope of earthly recompense and

less of glory in the beyond? For the same reason, in truth, that moved

Huckleberry Finn to save the nigger Jim at the cost of his immortal

soul. “I had no motive,” says Dick, in an attempt at self-analysis,

“and no interest. All I can tell you is that when it came to the point

whether I would take my neck out of the noose and put another man’s

into it, I couldn’t do it.” You will find the psychology of this

worked out in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, the mad German. If

you think well of your belief in the good and the beautiful, don’t read

them.

The scene of “The Devil’s Disciple” is a small town in New England

and the time is the first year of the Revolutionary War. Shaw set

the action back this far because he wanted to display Dick against

a background of peculiarly steadfast and rock-ribbed faith, and the

present, alackaday! has little of it that isn’t wobbly. Dick’s mother

is a Puritan of the Puritans--a fetich worshiper whose fetich is the

mortification of the flesh. She flays her body, her mind and her soul

and in the end essays to flay the souls of those about her. Against all

of this Dick revolts. He doesn’t know exactly why, for Darwin is unborn

and doubt is still indecent, but he revolts, nevertheless. And so he

becomes a disciple of the devil.

King George’s red-coats are abroad in the land, on the hunt for rebels,

and Dick’s uncle, a blasphemer and sinner like himself, is nabbed by

them and hanged for treason. Dick sees the hanging and enjoys it as a

spectacle, but it fails to make him a tory, and he comes home as much

an enemy of church and king as ever. Then the soldiers come nearer and

the rumor spreads that they propose to hang Dick as horrible example

the second. Anthony Anderson, the village pastor, undertakes to warn

him, and incidentally to counsel him against his sacrilege and his

sins. Dick, in turn, warns Anderson. King George’s men, he says, will

not choose the village heretic the next time. The uselessness of

such a course has been shown in the case of his late and unlamented

uncle. When they come to hang again, he points out, they will select a

patriot whose taking off will leave a profound impression and something

approaching regret--to wit, Anderson himself. The pastor laughs at

this. He is a holy man and a truly good one. He fears no military but

the hosts of darkness.

But Dick is right after all. One morning he goes to the Anderson home

and while he is there the pastor is called away to the bedside of his

(Dick’s) mother. Dick does not think it is worth while to go himself.

His mother has tortured and preached at him from birth and he frankly

hates her. During the pastor’s absence soldiers come to the door. They

have a warrant for the good dominie, charging him with treason. The

sergeant sees Dick, and--

“Anthony Anderson,” he says, “I arrest you in King George’s name as a

rebel.... Put on your coat and come along....”

And so Dick faces his Calvary, with no faith to lead him on. By all the

books he should seek shelter behind the truth and leave self-sacrifice

to the godly. But he is a man, this devil’s disciple, and he doesn’t.

“Yes,” he says, “I’ll come.”

The whole drama is played in this first act of the play and the rest

of it is chiefly rather commonplace melodrama. Judith, the pastor’s

wife, finds her anchors of faith and virtue swept away by Dick’s

stupendous sacrifice. At the beginning it seems her duty to hate

him. She ends by loving him. But Shaw complains pathetically of the

stupidity which made an actor account for Dick’s heroism by exhibiting

him as in love with her in turn. “From the moment that this fatally

plausible explanation was launched,” he says, “my play ... was not

mine.... But, then, where is the motive? On the stage, it appears,

people do things for reasons. Off the stage they don’t.”... Herein the

dramatist reads his orders aright. It is his business to set the stage

and give the show. The solution of its problems and the pointing of

its morals--these things are the business of those who pay to see it.

Let each work it out for himself--with such incidental help as he may

obtain from the aforesaid Friedrich Nietzsche.

Dick is by no means the only full-length figure in the drama. Anderson,

the parson, is, in many ways, a creation of equal subtlety and

interest. He is a true believer to the outward eye, and he plays his

part honestly and conscientiously, but when the supreme moment comes,

the man springs out from the cleric’s black coat and we have Captain

Anthony Anderson, of the Springtown Militia. The colonists, so far,

have fought the king’s red-coats with threats and curses. When Dick’s

sacrifice spurs him to hot endeavor, Anderson is found to be the

leader foreordained. Off come his sable trappings and out come his

pistols--and he leads his embattled farmers to Dick’s rescue and to

the war for freedom. It is a transformation supremely human, and in

addition, vociferously dramatic. A wary builder of scenes is this man

Shaw! A Sardou peeping from behind Ibsen’s whiskers!

One of the minor characters is General Burgoyne, that strange mixture

of medieval romance and modern common-sense who met his doom at the

hands of the Yankee farm-hands at Saratoga. Shaw pictures him as a

sort of aristocratic and foppish Captain Bluntschli and devotes seven

pages of a remarkably interesting appendix to defending the consequent

battering of tradition. “He is not a conventional stage soldier,” says

Shaw, “but as faithful a portrait as it is in the nature of stage

portraits to be.”

The same may be said of most of Shaw’s characters. Dick Dudgeon is

certainly not a conventional stage hero, despite his self-sacrifice,

his white shirt, his bare neck, and his melodramatic rescue in the nick

of time. But he is a living figure, for all that, because his humanity

is fundamental. As Shaw himself says, some enemy of the gods has always

been a popular hero, from the days of Prometheus. That such an enemy

may be truly heroic, and even godlike, is evident, but evident facts

are not always obvious ones, and it requires plays like “The Devil’s

Disciple” to remind us of them.

“Dick Dudgeon,” says Shaw in his preface, “is a Puritan of the

Puritans. He is brought up in a household where the Puritan religion

has died and become, in its corruption, an excuse for his mother’s

master-passion of hatred in all its phases of cruelty and envy. In

such a home he finds himself starved of religion, which is the most

clamorous need of his nature. With all his mother’s indomitable

selfishness, but with pity instead of hatred as his master-passion,

he pities the devil, takes his side, and champions him, like a true

Covenanter, against the world. He thus becomes, like all genuinely

religious men, a reprobate and an outcast. Once this is understood, the

play becomes straightforwardly simple.”

“WIDOWERS’ HOUSES”

Just as Ibsen, when he set up shop as a dramatist, began by imitating

the great men of his time, so Shaw, when he abandoned novel-writing

for play-making, modeled his _opus_ upon the dramas then in fashion.

Ibsen’s first play was a one-act melodrama of the old school called

“Kiaempehöien” and it has been forgotten, happily, these fifty years.

Shaw’s bow was made in “Widowers’ Houses,” a three-act comedy. Begun in

1885, in collaboration with William Archer, the incompleted manuscript

was dusted, revamped and pushed to “finis” in 1892. It is not a

masterpiece, but its production by the Independent Theater Company

of London, served to introduce Shaw to the public, and thus it had a

respectable purpose. Admittedly modeled upon the early comedies of

Pinero and Jones, it shows plain evidences that it was produced during

the imitative stage of the author’s growth. It has scenes of orthodox

build, it has an “emotional” climax at the end and there are even

soliloquys--but the mark of Shaw is plainly upon every line of it.

The “grand” scene between the hero and the heroine might be from “Man

and Superman.” There is imitation in it, as there is in the earlier

works of most men of creative genius, but there is also a vast deal of

originality.

At the time the play was begun Shaw was engrossed in the propaganda

of the Fabian Society and so it was not unnatural that, when he set

out to write a play he made a social problem the foundation stone of

it. Harry Trench, a young Englishman but twice removed from the lesser

aristocracy and with the traditional ideals and ideas of his caste, is

the tortured Prince of this little “Hamlet.” Happening in his travels

upon two fellow Britishers--father and daughter--he falls in love with

the latter and in due course makes his honorable proposals. The father,

scenting the excellent joys of familiar association with Harry’s titled

relatives, gives his paternal blessing, and the affair bobs along in a

manner eminently commonplace and refined. The clan Sartorius has money;

the clan Trench has blood. An alliance between Harry and the fair Miss

Sartorius is one obviously desirable.

But before the wedding day is set, there comes trouble aplenty. By

accident Harry is led into an investigation of the manner in which

the Sartorius pounds, shillings and pence reach the wide pockets of

his _fiancée’s_ father. What he discovers fairly horrifies him. Papa

Sartorius wrings his thousands from the people of the gutter. Down in

the slums of St. Giles, of Marylebone and of Bethnal Green lie his

estates--rows upon rows of filthy, tumble-down tenements. The pound

saved on repairs kills a slum baby--and buys Blanche Sartorius a new

pair of gloves. The shillings dragged from reluctant costermongers and

washerwomen give Sartorius his excellent cigars. He is the worst slum

landlord in London--the most heartless, the most grasping, the most

murderous and the most prosperous. His millions pile up as his tenants

shuffle off to the potter’s field.

Harry’s disgust is unspeakable. He will have nothing of the Sartorius

hoard. Rather starve upon his miserable $3500 a year! He will work--he

has a license to practise upon his fellow-men as physician and

surgeon--and he and Blanche will face the world bravely. But Blanche,

unfortunately, does not see it in that light. Harry’s income is regular

and safe, but seven hundred pounds is no revenue for the daughter and

son-in-law of a millionaire. And when she discovers the reason for

Harry’s singular self-sacrifice and modesty, her pride rages high.

After all, Sartorius is her father. He may squeeze his tenants for the

last farthing, but he has been good to her. His money has been hers,

and even when she fathoms the depths of his heartlessness, her shame

does not break her loyalty. So she sends Harry about his business and

seeks consolation in maidenly tears. Thus they remain for a space--he

sacrificing his love to his ideals of honesty and honor, and she

offering her virtuous affection upon the altar of filial allegiance and

pride.

It is Sartorius who solves the problem. He is not shocked by Harry’s

revolt, by any means. The world, as he knows, is full of such silly

scruples and senseless ideas of altruism. And, at any rate, he is

willing to give his tenants as much as he can afford. He explains it

all to Blanche.

“I have made up my mind,” he says, “to improve the property and get in

a new class of tenants.... I am only waiting for the consent of the

ground landlord, Lady Roxdale.”

Lady Roxdale is Harry’s aristocratic aunt and Blanche’s face shows her

surprise.

“Lady Roxdale!” she exclaims.

“Yes,” replies her fond papa. “But I shall expect the mortgagee to take

his share of the risk.”

“The mortgagee!” says Blanche. “Do you mean----”

“Harry Trench,” says Sartorius blandly, finishing the sentence for her.

And so the melancholy fact is laid bare that Harry’s safe and honorable

$3500 a year, upon which he proposed to Blanche that they board and

lodge in lieu of her father’s tainted thousands, is just as dirty,

penny for penny, as the latter. Sartorius puts it before Harry, too,

and very plainly.

“When I,” he says, “to use your own words, screw and bully and drive

those people to pay what they have freely undertaken to pay me, I

cannot touch one penny of the money they give me until I have first

paid you your seven hundred pounds out of it....”

Of course, that puts a new face upon the situation. Thinking over

it calmly, Harry comes to the conclusion that the oppression of slum

dwellers is a thing regrettable and deplorable, but, on the whole,

inevitable and necessary. As Sartorius shows him, they would not

appreciate generosity if it were accorded them. Ethically, they are to

be pitied; practically, pity would do them no good. In matters of money

a man must make some sacrifice of his ideals and look out for himself.

And so Harry and Blanche are united with benefit of clergy and the

Sartorius money and the Trench blood enters upon an honorable and--let

us hope--happy and permanent alliance.

In incident and character-drawing the play is rather elemental.

Sartorius is the stock capitalist of drama--a figure as invariable as

the types in Jerome K. Jerome’s “Stageland.” And the other persons of

the play--Harry Trench, the altruist with reservations; William de

Burgh Cokane, his mentor in orthodox hypocrisy; Lickcheese, Sartorius’

rent-collector and rival, and Blanche herself--all rather impress us as

beings we have met before. Nevertheless, an occasional flash reveals

the fine Italian hand of Shaw--a hand albeit, but yet half trained.

That Blanche is a true daughter to Sartorius, psychologically as well

as physically, is shown in a brief scene wherein she and a serving

maid are the only players. And the “grand” scene at the close of the

play, between Blanche and Harry, smells of the latter-day Shaw to high

heaven. Harry has come to her father’s house to discuss their joint

affairs and she goes at him savagely:

“Well? So you have come back here. You have had the meanness to come

into this house again. (_He blushes and retreats a step._) What a

poor-spirited creature you must be! Why don’t you go? (_Red and

wincing, he starts huffily to get his hat from the table, but when he

turns to the door with it she deliberately gets in his way, so that he

has to stop._) _I_ don’t want you to stay. (_For a moment they stand

face to face, quite close to one another, she provocative, taunting,

half-defying, half-inviting him to advance, in a flush of undisguised

animal excitement. It suddenly flashes upon him that all this ferocity

is erotic--that she is making love to him. His eye lights up; a cunning

expression comes into the corner of his mouth; with a heavy assumption

of indifference he walks straight back to his chair and plants himself

in it with his arms folded. She comes down the room after him._)...”

It is too late for poor Harry to beat a retreat. He is lost as

hopelessly as John Tanner in “Man and Superman” and in the same way.

The scene savors strongly of Nietzsche, particularly in its frank

acceptance of the doctrine that, when all the poets have had their say,

plain physical desire is the chief basis of human mating. No doubt

Shaw’s interest in Marx and Schopenhauer led him to make a pretty

thorough acquaintance with all the German metaphysicians of the early

eighties. “Widowers’ Houses” was begun in 1885, four years before

Nietzsche was dragged off to an asylum. In 1892, when the play was

completed and the last scene written, the mad German’s theories of life

were just beginning to gain a firm foothold in England.

“THE PHILANDERER”

Shaw calls “The Philanderer” a topical comedy, which describes it

exactly. Written in 1893, at the height of the Ibsen craze, it served

a purpose like that of the excellent _revues_ which formerly adorned

the stage of the New York Casino. Frankly, a burlesque upon fads of the

moment, its interest now is chiefly archeological. For these many moons

we have ceased to regard Ibsen as a man of subterranean mystery--who

has heard any talk of “symbolic” plays for two years?--and have learned

to accept his dramas as dramas and his heroines as human beings. Those

Ibsenites of ’93 who haven’t grown civilized and cut their hair are now

buzzing about the head of Maeterlinck or D’Annunzio or some other new

god. To enjoy “A Doll’s House” is no longer a sign of extraordinary

intellectual muscularity. The stock companies of Peoria and Oil City

now present it as a matter of course, between “The Henrietta” and

“Camille.”

But when Shaw wrote “The Philanderer” a wave of groping individualism

was sweeping over Europe, the United States and other more or less

Christian lands. Overeducated young women of the middle class, with

fires of discontent raging within them, descended upon Nora Helmer with

a whoop and became fearsome Ibsenites. They formed clubs, they pleaded

for freedom, for a wider area of development, for an equal chance;

they demanded that the word “obey” be removed from their lines in the

marriage comedy; they wrote letters to the newspapers; they patronized

solemn pale-green matinées: some of them even smoked cigarettes.

Poor old Nietzsche had something to do with this uprising. His ideas

regarding the orthodox virtues, mangled in the mills of his disciples,

appeared on every hand. Iconoclasts, amateur and professional, grew as

common as policemen.

Very naturally, this series of phenomena vastly amused our friend from

Ireland. Himself a devoted student of Ibsen’s plays and a close friend

to William Archer, their translator, he saw the absurdity and pretense

in the popular excitement, and so set about making fun of it.

In “The Philanderer” he shows a pack of individualists at war with the

godly. Grace Tranfield and Julia Craven, young women of the period,

agree that marriage is degrading and enslaving, and so join an Ibsen

club, spout stale German paradoxes and prepare to lead the intellectual

life. But before long both fall in love, and with the same man, and

thereafter, in plain American, there is the devil to pay. Julia tracks

the man--his name is Leonard Charteris--to Grace’s home and fairly

drags him out of her arms, at the same time, yelling, shouting,

weeping, howling and gnashing her teeth. Charteris, barricading himself

behind furniture, politely points out the inconsistency of her conduct.

“As a woman of advanced views,” he says, “you determined to be free.

You regarded marriage as a degrading bargain, by which a woman sold

herself to a man for the social status of a wife and the right to be

supported and pensioned out of his income in her old age. That’s the

advanced view--our view....”

“I am too miserable to argue--to think,” wails Julia. “I only know that

I love you....”

And so a fine temple of philosophy, built of cards, comes fluttering

down.

As the struggle for Charteris’ battle-scarred heart rages, other

personages are drawn into the trenches, unwillingly and greatly to

their astonishment. Grace’s papa, a dramatic critic of the old school,

and Julia’s fond parent, a retired military man, find themselves members

of the Ibsen club and participants in the siege of their daughters’

reluctant Romeo. Percy Paramore, a highly respectable physician,

also becomes involved in the fray. In the end he serves the useful

peace-making purpose delegated to axmen and hangmen in the ancient

drama. Charteris, despairing of eluding the erotic Julia shunts her

off into Paramore’s arms. Then Grace, coming out of her dream, wisely

flings him the mitten and the curtain falls.

It is frankly burlesque and in places it is Weberfieldian in its

extravagance. It was not presented in London in 1893 because no actors

able to understand it could be found. When it was published it made a

great many honest folk marvel that a man who admired Ibsen as warmly

as Shaw could write such a lampoon on the Ibsenites. This was the

foundation of Shaw’s present reputation as a most puzzling manufacturer

of paradoxes. The simple fact that the more a man understood and

admired Ibsen the more he would laugh at the grotesqueries of the

so-called Ibsenites did not occur to the majority, for the reason

that an obvious thing of that sort always strikes the majority as

unintellectual and childish and, in consequence, unthinkable. So Shaw

got fame as a paradoxical sleight-of-hand man, as Ibsen did with “The

Wild Duck” in 1884, and it has clung to him ever since. At present

every time he rises to utterances a section of the public quite frankly

takes it for granted that he means exactly the opposite of what he says.

It is unlikely that “The Philanderer” will ever take the place of “East

Lynne” or “Charley’s Aunt” in the popular repertoire. In the first

place, as has been mentioned, it is archaic and, in the second place,

it is not a play at all, but a comic opera libretto in prose, savoring

much of “Patience” and “The Princess Ida.” In the whole drama there is

scarcely a scene even remotely possible.

Every line is vastly amusing,--even including the sermonizing

of which Mr. Huneker complains,--but all remind one of the

“I-am-going-away-from-here” colloquy between “Willie” Collier and Miss

Louise Allen in a certain memorable entertainment of Messrs. Weber and

Fields.

“CAPTAIN BRASSBOUND’S CONVERSION”

Captain Brassbound’s Conversion” is a fantastic comedy, written with

no very ponderous ulterior purpose and without the undercurrents that

course through some of Shaw’s plays, but nevertheless, it is by no

means a bit of mere foolery. The play of character upon character is

shown with excellent skill, and if the drama has never attracted much

attention from aspiring comedians it is because the humor is fine-spun,

and not because it is weak.

The scene is the coast of Morocco and the hero, Captain Brassbound, is

a sort of refined, latter-day pirate, who has a working arrangement

with the wild natives of the interior and prospers in many ventures.

To his field of endeavor come two jaded English tourists--Sir Howard

Hallam, a judge of the criminal bench, and Lady Cicely Waynflete, his

sister-in-law. Lady Cicely is a queer product of her sex’s unrest. She

has traveled often and afar; she has held converse with cannibal kings;

she has crossed Africa alone. Hearing that it is well-nigh suicidal

to venture into the Atlas Mountains, which rear their ancient peaks

from the eastern skyline, she is seized by a yearning to explore them.

Sir Howard expostulates, pleads, argues, and storms--and in the end

consents to go with her.

It is here that Brassbound enters upon the scene--in the capacity of

guide and commander of the expedition. He is a strange being, this

gentleman pirate, a person of “olive complexion, dark southern eyes ...

grim mouth ... and face set to one tragic purpose....” A man of blood

and iron. A hero of scarlet romance, red-handed and in league with the

devil.

And so the little caravan starts off--Sir Howard, Lady Cicely,

Brassbound and half a dozen of Brassbound’s thugs and thieves. They

have little adventures and big adventures and finally they reach an

ancient Moorish castle in the mountains, heavy with romance and an

ideal scene for a tragedy. And here Brassbound reveals his true colors.

Pirate no longer, he becomes traitor--and betrays his charges to a wild

Moroccan chieftain.

But it is not gold that leads him into this crime, nor anything else so

prosaic or unworthy. Revenge is his motive--dark, red-handed revenge

of the sort that went out of fashion with shirts of mail. He has been

seeking a plan for Sir Howard’s destruction for years and years, and

now, at last, providence has delivered his enemy into his hands.

To see the why and wherefore of all this, it is necessary to know

that Sir Howard, before reaching his present eminence, had a brother

who fared upon the sea to the West Indies and there acquired a sugar

estate and a yellow Brazilian wife. When he died the estate was seized

by his manager and his widow took to drink. With her little son she

proceeded to England, to seek Sir Howard’s aid in her fight for

justice. Disgusted by her ill-favored person and unladylike habits,

he turned her out of doors and she, having no philosophy, straightway

drank herself to death. And then, after many years, Sir Howard himself,

grown rich and influential, used his riches and his influence to

dispossess the aforesaid dishonest manager of his brother’s estate.

Of the bibulous widow’s son he knew nothing, but this son, growing

up, remembered. In the play he bobs into view again. He is Captain

Brassbound, pirate.

Brassbound has cherished his elaborate scheme of vengeance for so

many years that it has become his other self. Awake and sleeping he

thinks of little else, and when, at last, the opportunity to execute

it arrives, he goes half mad with exultation. That such revenges have

come to seem ridiculous to civilized men, he does not know. His life

has been cast along barren coasts and among savages and outcasts, and

ethically he is a brother to the crusaders. His creed still puts the

strong arm above the law, and here is his chance to make it destroy one

of the law’s most eminent ornaments. Viewed from his standpoint the

stage is set for a stupendous and overpowering drama.

But the saturnine captain reckons without the fair Lady Cicely. In all

his essentials, he is a half-savage hairy-armed knight of the early

thirteenth century. Lady Cicely, calm, determined and cool, is of the

late nineteenth. The conflict begins furiously and rages furiously to

the climax. When the end comes Brassbound feels his heroics grow wabbly

and pitiful; he sees himself mean and ridiculous.

“Damn you!” he cries in a final burst of rage. “You have belittled my

whole life to me!”

There is something pathetic in the figure of the pirate as his ideals

come crashing down about his head and he blindly gropes in the dark.

“It was vulgar--vulgar,” he says. “I see that now; for you have opened

my eyes to the past; but what good is that for the future? What am I to

do? Where am I to go?”

It is not enough that he undoes his treason and helps to save Sir

Howard. What he wants is some rule of life to take the place of the

smashed ideals of his wasted years. He gropes in vain and ends, like

many another man, by idealizing a woman.

“You seem to be able to make me do pretty well what you like,” he says

to Lady Cicely, “but you cannot make me marry anybody but yourself.”

“Do you really want a wife?” asks Cicely archly.

“I want a commander,” replies the reformed Brassbound. “I am a good man

when I have a good leader.”

He is not the first man that has fallen beneath the spell of her

dominating and masterful ego, to mistake his obedience for love, and

she bluntly tells him so. And thus they part--Brassbound to return to

his ship and his smuggling, and Cicely to go home to England.

As will be observed, this is no ordinary farce, but a play of

considerable depth and beam. Shaw is a master of the art of depicting

such conflicts as that here outlined, and Brassbound and Cicely are by

no means the least of his creations. With all the extravagance of the

play, there is something real and human about each, and the same may

be said of the lesser characters--Sir Howard; the Rev. Leslie Rankin,

missionary and philosopher; Drinkwater, Brassbound’s recruit from the

slums of London; the Moorish chiefs; Captain Hamlin Kearney of the

U. S. S. _Santiago_, who comes to Sir Howard’s rescue, and the others.

The chief fault of the play is the fact that the exposition, in the

first act, requires an immense amount of talk without action. The whole

act, in truth, might be played with all of the characters standing

still. Later on, there is plenty of movement, but the play as a whole

is decidedly inferior to the majority of the Shaw dramas. The dialogue

lacks the surface brilliancy of “You Never Can Tell” and “Candida”

and the humor, in places, is too delicate, almost, for the theme.

The piece, in fact, is a satirical melodrama disguised as a farce--a

melodrama of the true Shaw brand, in which the play of mind upon mind

overshadows the play of club upon skull.

“CÆSAR AND CLEOPATRA”

Because he put it forth as a rival to “Julius Cæsar” and “Anthony and

Cleopatra,” Shaw’s “Cæsar and Cleopatra” has been the football in an

immense number of sanguinary critical rushes. His preface to it is

headed “Better than Shakespeare?” and he frankly says that he thinks

it _is_ better. But that he means thereby to elbow himself into the

exalted position occupied by William of Avon for 300 years does not

follow. “In manner and art,” he said, in a recent letter to the London

_Daily News_, “nobody can write better than Shakespeare, because,

carelessness apart, he did the thing as well as it can be done within

the limits of human faculty.” Shaw, in other words, by no means lacks

a true appreciation of Shakespeare’s genius. What he endeavors to

maintain is simply the claim that, to modern audiences, _his_ Cæsar

and _his_ Cleopatra should seem more human and more logical than

Shakespeare’s. That this is a thesis susceptible of argument no one who

has read “Cæsar and Cleopatra” will deny.

“The sun do move,” said the Rev. Mr. Jasper. Shaw says the same thing

of the world. In Shakespeare’s day knighthood was still in flower and

the popular ideals of military perfection were medieval. A hero was

esteemed in proportion as he approached Richard Cœur de Lion. Chivalry

was yet a very real thing and the masses of the people were still

influenced by the transcendentalism of the Crusades. And so, when

Shakespeare set out to draw a conqueror and hero of the first rank, he

evolved an incarnation of these far-fetched and rather grotesque ideals

and called it Julius Cæsar.

To-day men have very different notions. In these piping times of

common-sense, were a Joan of Arc to arise, she would be packed off to a

home for feeble-minded children. People admire, not Chevalier Bayard,

but Lord Kitchener and U. S. Grant; not so much lofty purposes as

tangible achievements; not so much rhetoric as accomplishment. For a

man to occupy to-day the position held by Cæsar at the beginning of the

year 44 B.C. he would have to possess traits far different from those

Shakespeare gave his hero. Shaw endeavors to draw a Cæsar with just

such modern marks of heroism--to create a Roman with the attributes

that might exalt a man, in this prosaic twentieth century, to the

eminence attained by the immortal Julius 1900 years ago. In other

words, Shaw tries to reconstruct Shakespeare’s Cæsar (and incidentally,

of course, his Cleopatra) just as a latter-day stage manager must

reconstruct the scenes and language of Shakespeare to make them

understandable to-day. That his own Cæsar, in consequence, is a more

comprehensible, a more human and, on the whole, a more possible hero

than Shakespeare’s is the substance of his argument.

The period of the play is the year 48 B.C., when Cleopatra was a girl

of sixteen and Cæsar an oldster of fifty-two, with a widening bald

spot beneath his laurel and a gradually lessening interest in the

romantic side of life. Shaw depicts the young queen as an adolescent

savage: ignorant, cruel, passionate, animal, impulsive, selfish and

blood-thirsty. She is monarch in name only and spends her time as

any child might. Egypt is torn by the feud that finally leads to the

Alexandrine war, and, Cleopatra, perforce, is the nominal head of

one of the two parties. But she knows little of the wire-pulling and

intriguing, and the death of her brother and rival, Ptolemy Dionysius,

interests her merely as an artistic example of murder. The health of

a sacred cat seems of far more consequence to her than the welfare of

Asia Minor.

Cæsar comes to Alexandria to take a hand in the affairs of Egypt and,

incidentally, to collect certain moneys due him for past services as a

professional conqueror. Cleopatra fears him at first, as a most potent

and evil bogey-man, and is so vastly surprised when she finds him quite

human, and even commonplace, that she straightway falls in love with

him. Cæsar, in return, regards her with a mild and cynical interest.

“He is an important public man,” says Max Beerbohm, “who knows that a

little chit of a girl-queen has taken a fancy to him and is tickled

by the knowledge, and behaves very kindly to her and rather wishes

he were young enough to love her.” He needs 1600 talents in cash and

tries to collect the money. In truth, he has little time to waste

in listening to her sighs. Pothinus, of the palace--an early Roman

Polonius--is appalled.

“Is it possible,” he gasps, “that Cæsar, the conqueror of the world,

has time to occupy himself with such a trifle as our taxes?”

“My friend,” replies Cæsar affably, “taxes are the chief business of a

conqueror of the world.”

And so there comes fighting and the burning of the Alexandrine library

and the historic heaving of Cleopatra into the sea and other incidents

more or less familiar. Through it all the figure of Cæsar looms calm

and unromantic. To him this business of war has become a pretty dull

trade: he longs for the time when he may retire and nurse his weary

bones. He fishes Cleopatra out of the water--and complains of a touch

of rheumatism. He sits down to a gorgeous banquet of peacock’s brains

and nightingale’s tongues--and asks for oysters and barley water. Now

and then Cleopatra’s blandishments tire him. Again, her frank savagery

startles and enrages him. In the end, when his work is done and his fee

pocketed, when Cleopatra’s throne is safe, with Roman soldiers on guard

about it, he goes home.

“I will send you a beautiful present from Rome,” he tells the volcanic

girl-queen.

She demands to know what Rome can offer Egypt.

“I will send you a man,” says Cæsar, “Roman from head to heel and Roman

of the noblest; not old and ripe for the knife; not lean in the arms

and cold in the heart; not hiding a bald head under his conqueror’s

laurels; not stooped with the weight of the world on his shoulders;

but brisk and fresh, strong and young, hoping in the morning, fighting

in the day and revelling in the evening. Will you take such an one in

exchange for Cæsar?”

“His name? His name?” breathes the palpitating Cleopatra.

“Shall it be Mark Anthony?” says Cæsar.

And the erotic little Cleopatra, who has a vivid remembrance of

Anthony’s manly charms, born of a fleeting glimpse of him, falls into

her elderly friend’s arms, speechless with gratitude.

Unlike most of Shaw’s plays, “Cæsar and Cleopatra” is modelled

upon sweeping and spectacular lines. In its five acts there are

countless scenes that recall Sardou at his most magnificent--scenes

that would make “Ben Hur” seem pale and “The Darling of the Gods” a

parlor play. And so, too, there is plenty of the more exciting sort

of action--stabbings, rows, bugle-calls, shouts and tumults. What

opportunity it would give to the riotous, purple fancy of Klaw and

Erlanger or the pomp and pageantry of David Belasco!

Shaw makes Cleopatra a much more human character than Cæsar. In the

latter there appears rather too much of the icy _sang froid_ we have

grown accustomed to encounter in the heroes of the brigade commanded

by “The Prisoner of Zenda.” Some of Cæsar’s witticisms are just a bit

too redolent of the professional epigrammatist. Reading the play we

fancy him in choker collar and silk hat, with his feet hoisted upon

a club window-sill and an Havana cigar in his mouth,--the cynical

man-of-the-world of the women novelists. In other words, Shaw, in

attempting to bring the great conqueror down to date, has rather

expatriated him. He is scarcely a Roman.

Cleopatra, on the contrary, is admirable. Shaw very frankly makes her

an animal and her passion for Cæsar is the backbone of the play. She is

fiery, lustful and murderous; a veritable she-devil; and all the while

an impressionable, superstitious, shadow-fearing child. In his masterly

gallery of women’s portraits--Mrs. Warren, Blanche Sartorius, Candida,

Ann Whitefield and their company--Cleopatra is by no means the least.

The lesser characters--Brittanus, the primitive Briton (a parody of

the latter-day Britisher); Apollodorus, the Sicilian dilletante;

Ftatateeta, Cleopatra’s menial and mistress; Rufio, the Roman general

(a sort of Tiber-bred William Dobbin); and the boy Ptolemy--all remain

in the memory as personages clearly and certainly drawn.

In view of the chances that the play affords the player and the stage

manager it seems curious that it was so long neglected by the Frohmans

of the day. Between Shaw’s Cæsar and Shakespeare’s Cæsar there is a

difference wide enough to make a choice necessary. That a great many

persons, pondering the matter calmly, would cast their ballots for

the former is a prophecy not altogether absurd. Just as the world

has outgrown, in succession, the fairy tale, the morality play, the

story in verse, the epic and the ode, so it has outgrown many ideas

and ideals regarding humanity that once appeared as universal truths.

Shakespeare, says Shaw, was far ahead of his time. This is shown by

his Lear. But the need for earning his living made him write down to

its level. As a result those of his characters that best pleased his

contemporaries--Cæsar, Rosalind, Brutus, etc.--now seem obviously and

somewhat painfully Elizabethan.

“A MAN OF DESTINY”

That characteristic tendency to look at the under side of things and

to explore the depths beneath the obvious surface markings, which

Shaw displays in “Cæsar and Cleopatra,” “Arms and the Man” and “The

Devil’s Disciple,” is shown at the full in “The Man of Destiny.”

The play is in one act and in intent it is a mere bravura piece,

written, as the author says, “to display the virtuosity of the two

principal performers.” But its picture of Napoleon Bonaparte, the

principal character, is a startlingly novel one, and the little drama

is remarkable alike for its fantastic character drawing, its cameo

craftsmanship, its ingenious incident and its fairly dazzling dialogue.

There is more of the quality called “brilliancy” in its one scene than

in most three-act society comedies of the day. Some of its episodes are

positive gems.

The Napoleon of the play is not the emperor of popular legend and

Meissonier’s painting, but the young general of 1796, but recently

come to opportunity and still far from immortality. The scene is the

parlor of a little inn on the road from Lodi to Milan and the young

general--he is but twenty-seven--is waiting impatiently for a packet

of despatches. He has defeated the Austrians at Lodi, but they are yet

foes to be feared and he is very eager to know whether General Massena

will make his next stand at Mantua or at Peschiera. A blundering

jackass of a lieutenant, the bearer of the expected despatches, comes

staggering in with the information that he has been met on the road and

outwitted and robbed of them by a boyish young officer of the enemy’s.

Napoleon flies into a rage, very naturally, but after all it is an

incident of the wars and, the papers being lost, he resigns himself to

doing without them.

Almost simultaneously there appears from upstairs a handsome young

woman. The lieutenant, seeing her, is instantly struck with her

remarkable resemblance to the youthful officer who cajoled and robbed

him. Napoleon pricks up his ears and orders the half-witted lieutenant

out of the room. And then begins a struggle of wits. The young woman

and the young officer are one person. Bonaparte knows it and demands

the dispatches. But she is a nimble one, this patriot in skirts, and

it seems for a while that he will have to play the dragoon and tear

them from her bodice. Even when she yields and he has the papers in his

hands, she is the victor. There is one letter that he dare not read. It

is a _billet-doux_ from a woman to a man who is not her husband and it

has been sent from Paris by a well-meaning blunderer that the husband

may read it and learn. Josephine is the woman, the director Barras is

the other man--and Napoleon himself is the husband.

Here we have Bonaparte the man, facing a crisis in his affairs more

appalling than any he has ever encountered on the field of war. There

is no gleam of a crown ahead to cheer him on and no crash of artillery

to hearten him. It is a situation far more terrifying than the fight

about the bridge at Lodi, but he meets it squarely and resolutely. And

in the end he outplays and vanquishes his fair conqueror.

She tells the blundering lieutenant that the officer boy who outwitted

him was her brother.

“If I undertake to place him in your hands, a prisoner,” she says,

“will you promise me on your honor as an officer and a gentleman not to

fight with him or treat him unkindly in any way?”

The simple-minded lieutenant promises--and the young woman slips out

and once more discards her skirts for the uniform of a young officer.

Then she reappears and surrenders.

“Where are the dispatches?” demands Napoleon, with heavy dissembling.

“My sister has bewitched the general,” says the protean stranger.

“General: open your coat; you will find the dispatches in the breast of

it....”

And lo! they are even there--and all agree that as papers bearing the

gristly finger-prints of a witch, they must be burnt. Cæsar’s wife must

be above suspicion.

“I read them the first thing....” whispers the witch’s alter ego; “So

you see I know what’s in them; and you don’t.”

“Excuse me,” replies Napoleon blandly. “I read them when I was out

there in the vineyard ten minutes ago.”

It would be impossible to exaggerate the humor and delicacy of this

little play. Napoleon, it must be remembered, is still a youngster,

who has scarcely dared to confess to himself the sublime scope of his

ambitions. But the man of Austerlitz and St. Helena peeps out, now

and then, from the young general’s flashing eyes, and the portrait,

in every detail, is an admirable one. Like Thackeray, Shaw is fond of

considering great men in their ordinary everyday aspects. He knows

that Marengo was but a day, and that there were thousands of other

days in the Little Corporal’s life. It is such week-days of existence

that interest him, and in their light he has given us plays that offer

amazingly searching studies of Cæsar and of Bonaparte, not to speak of

General Sir John Burgoyne.

“THE ADMIRABLE BASHVILLE”

The Admirable Bashville, or Constancy Rewarded,” a blank verse farce

in two tableaux, is a dramatization by Shaw of certain incidents in

his novel, “Cashel Byron’s Profession.” Cashel Byron, the hero of the

novel, is a prize-fighter who wins his way to the hand and heart of

Lydia Carew, a young woman of money, education and what Mulvaney calls

“theouries.” Cashel sees in Lydia a remarkably fine girl; Lydia sees in

Cashel an idealist and a philosopher as well as a bruiser. The race of

Carew, she decides, needs an infusion of healthy red blood. And so she

marries Byron--and they live happily ever after.

Bashville is Lydia’s footman and factotum, and he commits the

unpardonable solecism of falling in love with her. Very frankly he

confesses his passion and resigns his menial portfolio.

“If it is to be my last word,” he says, “I’ll tell you that the

ribbon round your neck is more to me,” etc., etc.... “I am sorry

to inconvenience you by a short notice, but I should take it as a

particular favor if I might go this evening.”

“You had better,” says Lydia, rising quite calmly and keeping

resolutely away from her the strange emotional result of being

astonished, outraged and loved at one unlooked-for stroke. “It is not

advisable that you should stay after what you have just----”

“I knew that when I said it,” interposes Bashville, hastily and

doggedly.

“In going away,” continues Lydia, “you will be taking precisely the

course that would be adopted by any gentleman who had spoken to the

same effect. I am not offended by your declaration; I recognize your

right to make it. If you need my testimony to further your future

arrangements, I shall be happy to say that I believe you to be a man of

honor.”

An American pugilist-actor, struck by the possibilities of the story,

engaged a journeyman playwright to make a play of it, and Shaw, to

protect his rights, put together “The Admirable Bashville.” The one

performance required by the English copyright law was given by the

Stage Society at the Imperial Theater, London, in the summer of 1903.

“It was funny,” says James Huneker, who witnessed the performance. “It

gibed at Shakespeare, at the modern drama, at Parliament, at social

snobbery, at Shaw himself, and at almost everything else within reach.

The stage setting was a mockery of the Elizabethan stage, with two

venerable beef-eaters in Tower costume, who hung up placards bearing

the legend, ‘A Glade in Wiltstoken Park,’ etc. Ben Webster as Cashel

Byron and James Hearn as the Zulu King (whom Cashel entertains by an

exhibition of his fistic prowess) carried off the honors. Aubrey Smith,

made up as Mr. Shaw in the costume of a policeman with a brogue, caused

merriment, especially at the close, when he informed his audience that

the author had left the house. And so he had. He was standing at the

corner when I accosted him.”

Shaw explains that he wrote the extravaganza in blank verse because

he had to hurry over it and “hadn’t time to write it in the usual

prose.” To anyone “with the requisite ear and command of words,” he

says in another place, “blank verse, written under the amazingly loose

conditions which Shakespeare claimed, with full liberty to use all

sorts of words, colloquial, technical, rhetorical and even obscurely

technical, to indulge in the most far-fetched ellipses, and to

impress ignorant people with every possible extremity of fantasy and

affectation, is the easiest of all known modes of literary expression,

and this is why whole oceans of dull bombast and drivel have been

emptied on the head of England since Shakespeare’s time in this form by

people who could not have written ‘Box and Cox’ to save their lives.”

“The Admirable Bashville” may be seen in the United States before long.

Not long ago the London _Daily Mail_ reported that the eminent comedian

and gladiator, Mr. James J. Corbett, was casting eager eyes upon it and

that Shaw rather liked the idea of his appearing in it.

“He is a man who has made a success in one profession,” the dramatist

is reported to have said, “and will therefore understand that there are

difficulties to be encountered in making a success in another. Look

at the books written to-day, and then consider which you would rather

have--a man who can do nothing or a really capable prize-fighter.”

All of which you will find, much elaborated, in “Cashel Byron’s

Profession,” which was written in 1882.

“CANDIDA”

Candida” is a latter-day essay in feminine psychology after the fashion

of “A Doll’s House,” “Monna Vanna” and “Hedda Gabler.” Candida Morell,

the heroine, is a clergyman’s wife, who, lacking an acquaintance

with the philosophies and face to face with the problem of earning

her daily bread, might have gone the muddy way of Mrs. Warren. As it

is, she exercises her fascinations upon a moony poet, arouses him

to the mad-dog stage of passion, drives her husband to the verge of

suicide--and then, with bland complacency and unanswerable logic, reads

both an excellent lecture, turns the poet out of doors, and falls into

her husband’s arms, still chemically pure. It is an edifying example of

the influence of mind over matter.

Arnold Daly’s heroic production of the play, at the little Berkeley

Lyceum, in New York City, served as the foundation of the present vogue

of Shaw in the United States, and in consequence “Candida” has been the

theme of many metropolitan and provincial philosophers and critics.

At the start the vast majority of them muddled the play hopelessly.

Candida, they decided, was a sublime type of the virtuous wife and

mother--a good woman whose thoughts were as innocent as her acts. It

remained for Shaw--and he is usually his own best critic--to set them

right. Candida, he explained, was a “very immoral female ... who,

without brains and strength of mind ... would be a wretched slattern or

voluptuary.” In other words (as he tried to make clear) she remained

virtuous, not because there was aught of the vestal or altruist about

her, but because she had discovered that it was possible to enjoy all

of the ecstatic excitement of a fall from grace, and still, by holding

back at the actual brink of the precipice, to retain, in full measure,

her reputation as a pattern of fidelity and virtue. She solved the

problem of being immoral and respectable at the same time.

The play is well built and thoroughly balanced and mature. Its every

scene shows that it is the work of a dramatist whose genius has been

mellowed and whose hand has been made sure by experience. The action

moves with that certain, natural air peculiar to many of Ibsen’s plays.

The characters are not sketches, but definitive, finished portraits.

They are not obvious types, perhaps, but even the poet, with all his

extravagances, is strangely human.

The Rev. James Morell, Candida’s husband, is a Christian-socialist of

a sort not uncommon on either side of the Atlantic. He has a parish in

an unfashionable part of London, and beside the usual futilities of

a conscientious clergyman’s daily labor, finds time to make frequent

addresses to the masses and classes upon the problems of the hour. In

his make-up, there is much of the unconscious make-believe of the actor

off the stage, though his own belief in himself is unshaken. Public

speaking seems to have this uncanny effect upon many men. Beginning in

all sincerity, they gradually lay stress upon the manner of saying a

thing at the expense of the matter. Their aim is to make an effect by

means of the spoken word and in the end, without realizing it, they

become stagey and unnatural. Such a man is Morell. By no means, it will

be observed, is he to be mistaken for a hypocrite.

Into his home, by some mad, altruistic impulse, he brings Eugene

Marchbanks, a moon-struck young man with the romantic ideals and day

dreams of a medieval Edgar Allan Poe and the practical common-sense of

an infant. Eugene is eighteen. He inhabits a world a mile or so above

the pink clouds of the sunset and writes vague, immaterial verses of

the sort that all of us invent and some of us set down in pen-and-ink

when we are young. At the start, in all probability, Candida regards

him as a nuisance. But by the time the play opens she has already lured

him on to the rocks. It is pleasant to sit by the fire and listen to

his hazy verses. He is a relief from the honest beefiness of Morell.

And so Candida has her entertainment and Eugene, poor boy! falls in

love with her.

Now, loving another man’s wife, since the beginning of written history,

has always presupposed or developed a rather ungenial attitude toward

that other man, and Eugene, studying Morell, comes to the conclusion

that he is a mere vaporish windbag--a silly bundle of stale platitudes,

trite ponderosities and pulpit puerilities. Having the valor of youth,

he makes open confession.

“I love your wife,” he says to Morell, “... a woman with a great soul

craving reality, truth, freedom, and being fed on metaphors, sermons,

stale perorations, mere rhetoric. Do you think a woman’s soul can live

on your talent for preaching?...”

Morell is staggered, not by Eugene’s frank avowal of his love for

Candida, but by the other things he has said. What if it is true that

she is stifled by the atmosphere of the Morell home? What if it is

true that she has tired of being shadow and drudge to an obscure,

over-earnest clergyman in a semi-slum and has turned her fancy toward

the poet?

“It is easy, terribly easy,” he says pathetically, “to break a man’s

faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man’s spirit is

devil’s work. Take care of what you are doing. Take care....”

It is a time of torment for the preacher and he sees his house of cards

trembling as if for a fall. Eugene, all the while, is defiant and

belligerent. He adds the virtue of rescuing Candida to the pleasure of

possessing her, and the two together work his swift undoing.

“Send for her!” he roars. “Send for her and let her choose between us!”

Aha, my masters! what a scene is this!--what a scene of mad passion for

the gallery to linger over breathlessly, for the orchestra to greet

with stares and for the critics to belabor and dissect in the morning!

Candida comes in and the two bid for her heart and helping hand.

“I have nothing to offer you,” says Morell, with proud humility, “but

my strength for your defense, my honesty of purpose for your surety, my

ability and industry for your livelihood, and my authority and position

for your dignity. That is all it becomes a man to offer a woman.”

“And you, Eugene?” asks Candida quietly. “What do you offer?”

“My weakness!” exclaims the poet passionately. “My desolation! My

heart’s need!”

“That’s a good bid,” says Candida judicially. “Now I know how to make

my choice.”

Then she pauses and looks curiously from one to the other, as if

weighing them. Morell, whose lofty confidence has once more changed

into heart-breaking dread, loses all power over himself and in

a suffocating voice--the appeal bursting from the depths of his

anguish--cries “Candida!”

“Coward!” shrieks Eugene, divining the victory in the surrender. And

Candida--O most virtuous of wives!--says blandly, “I give myself to the

weaker of the two” and falls into her husband’s arms. It is a situation

that struck the first night audience at the Berkeley Lyceum as one

eminently agreeable and refined.

As Shaw explains, the poet, despite the fact that “his face whitens

like steel in a furnace that cannot melt it,” is a gainer by Candida’s

choice. He enters the Morell home a sentimental boy yearning for an

emotional outlet. He leaves it a man who has shouldered his cross and

felt the unutterable stimulus of sacrifice. Candida makes a man of him,

says Shaw, by showing him his strength. David finds that he must do

without Uriah’s wife.

The dramatist makes Candida essay a most remarkable analysis of her

own motives. It is after Morell has reproached her, sick at heart and

consumed by a nameless fear, to learn if Eugene’s fiery onslaught has

been born of any unrest that may be stirring within her. She explains

freely and frankly, with more genuine honesty and self-revelation,

perhaps, than she knows. Eugene, she says, is like a shivering beggar

asking for her shawl. He needs love but scarcely knows it, and she

conceives it her duty to teach him the value of love, that no worse

woman may teach him its pains later on.

“Will he forgive me,” she says, “for not teaching him myself? For

abandoning him to the bad women for the sake of my goodness--my purity,

as you call it? Ah, James, how little you understand me, to talk of

your confidence in my goodness and purity. _I would give them both to

Eugene as willingly as I would give my shawl to a beggar dying of

cold_, if there was nothing else to restrain me....”

“Here,” says Huneker, “is one of the most audacious speeches in

any modern play. It has been passed over by most critics who saw

in ‘Candida’ merely an attempt to make a clergyman ridiculous, not

realizing that the theme is profound and far-reaching, the question put

being no more or no less than: Shall a married man expect his wife’s

love without working for it, without deserving it?” To this may be

added another and more familiar question: May not the woman who lives

in the odor of sanctity be more thoroughly immoral, at heart, than the

worst of her erring sisters?

The play has a number of extremely exciting “grand” scenes and in

general is admirably suitable for public performance. The minor

characters are but three in number--Candida’s wine-buying vulgarian of

a father, Morell’s curate and Proserpine, his typewriter. Proserpine is

admirable, and her hopeless love for Morell--a complaint not uncommon

among the women he knows--gives the play a note of homely sentiment

that keeps it to earth.

As a piece of workmanship “Candida” is Shaw at his best; as a study in

the workings of the feminine mind it deserves to rank with some of the

best plays the modern stage has to offer.

“HOW HE LIED TO HER HUSBAND”

How He Lied to Her Husband” is a one-act bit of foolery that Shaw wrote

for Arnold Daly after “Candida” had made a success in New York. It was

presented for the first time on the evening of Sept. 26, 1904, and

during the ensuing week was more vociferously discussed than any other

one-act play that ever graced the boards of an American theater.

As he made fun of the vaporing Ibsenites of the early ’90’s in “The

Philanderer,” just so Shaw got his joke at the expense of his own

ecstatic followers in this little appendix to “Candida.” The latter had

been presented with huge profit, and thousands of honest playgoers,

alert for mysterious “symbolism” and subtle “purposes” had seen

in its heroine a great many of the qualities they formerly sought

and discovered in the much-mauled Ibsen women. Candida, in brief,

became the high priestess of the advanced cult, in all its warring

denominational variety. It became a sign of intellectual vigor to go to

the Berkeley Lyceum and compare her with Nora Helmer, Hedda Gabler and

their company. And so Shaw indited “How He Lied to Her Husband.”

The characters in the little farce are a fashionable young poet named

Henry Upjohn, an untamed American husband named Bumpus, and his wife,

Aurora Bumpus, a young woman with yearnings. Aurora and Henry have

seen a performance of “Candida” and have come away with a feeling that

an intrigue after the fashion of Candida and Eugene, is one of those

things that no really advanced poet or modern wife should be without.

So Henry writes a sheaf of sonnets to Aurora and being determined

to play the game according to the rules, proposes that they run off

together. They are about to depart, conscientiously leaving the Bumpus

diamonds behind, when Aurora, at the brink of the precipice, draws back.

Meanwhile Bumpus happens upon Henry’s sonnets and confronts the poet

with the charge of having written them. Henry, determined to save

Aurora, “lies like a gentleman”--and incidentally overdoes it. Bumpus,

mistaking his well-meant prevarication for impolite indifference to

Aurora’s beauty, or denial of it, flies into a passion, and is on the

point of soundly thrashing the amorous bard when Aurora stays his hand.

Then Henry confesses, and Bumpus is so much pleased by the manner in

which the sonnets celebrate his wife’s charms that he offers to print

them for private circulation among connoisseurs with broad margins and

_de luxe_ binding.

The play is built upon the lines of broad farce, and in New York it

made an uproarious success. The encounter between Bumpus and Henry is

extraordinarily ludicrous. Aurora throughout is the typical enthusiast

of the women’s clubs--filled with vague longings and ambitions, but

intensely practical and commonplace at bottom. Henry, during one of

their tumultuous exchanges, is about to break her fan. She shrieks the

warning that it cost a dollar. He ventures upon a dark, melodramatic

oath. “How dare you swear in my presence?” she demands. “One would

think you were my husband!”

A pretty bit of fooling, _à la_ “The Wild Duck,” “The Philanderer” and

“Alice-Sit-by-the Fire.” Shaw calls it “a warning to theater-goers.” It

is.

“YOU NEVER CAN TELL”

You Never Can Tell,” like many of the dramas of Shakespeare, was

made to order. Shaw wrote it in 1896 and he calls it “an attempt to

comply with many requests for a play in which the much paragraphed

“brilliancy” of “Arms and the Man” should be tempered by some

consideration for the requirements of managers, in search of

fashionable comedies for West End theaters.” And so he laid the scene

in England, and made all his characters English and kept as close

to the earth as he could. But for all that, he failed to make a

conventional parlor drama of it. Shaw is Shaw, and when he set out to

build a comedy _à la mode_ he evolved instead a tragedy covered with a

sugar-coating of farce. On its face it is uproariously and irresistibly

funny; beneath the surface there is as nasty an undercurrent as that of

“Widowers’ Houses.”

Fergus Crampton, a wealthy English yacht builder, and his most

marvellous family are the chief characters of the play. Years before

the curtain rises Crampton and his wife agree to disagree and she

packs off to Madeira with their three babies--two girls and a boy.

Subscribing to the heterodox doctrine that a married woman is entitled

to her own home, her own pocket-book and her own name, Mrs. Crampton

assumes the cognomen of Clandon, bestows it upon her offspring

and brings them up in complete ignorance of the existence of their

paternal progenitor. Also she rears them in strict accordance with

her ultra-advanced ideas of independence and individualism. In all

matters concerning the emotions and intellect, they have freedom. And

so they become unconscionable egotists, disrespectful to their elders,

self-willed and obstinate, and nuisances in general.

As the curtain rises we find the Clandons back in England. Happening

into a small seaside town, Phil and Dolly, the younger of the three

children, scrape an acquaintance with one Valentine, a struggling young

dentist (and also a being with advanced views of human events), and

Dolly has the honor of paying him his first fee. Through him they meet

his landlord, an irascible old gentleman in a semi-nautical coat and an

habitual frown. They invite both dentist and landlord to luncheon, and

at the meal the discovery is made that the latter is none other than

the long-lost Mr. Crampton. Like the leading comedian of a burlesque

show afterpiece, Crampton is in consternation and shrieks “My wife!” in

a hoarse stage whisper.

“You are very greatly changed,” observes Mrs. Clandon-Crampton.

“I daresay,” replies the wretched husband and father. “A man does

change in eighteen years.”

This much of the prologue being accomplished, the personages proceed

to the real business of the action. Crampton, outraged and disgusted

beyond measure by the manners and dress of his progeny, demands that

Phil and Dolly be given over to his care and custody on the ground

that their mother is an unfit person to have the charge of them.

Meanwhile Valentine, the dentist, has felt a yearning towards Gloria,

the elder daughter, and Gloria, after surviving five previous sieges

of her heart, looks upon him not unkindly. One brief interview, in

fact, serves to advance him to a point whereat he may safely offer her

a chaste caress. Her mother, greatly astonished by his easy victory

over Gloria’s battalions of modern principles, seeks an explanation.

Valentine very blandly discusses the situation.

The duel of sex, he says, is much like the contest between the makers

of guns and the makers of ship’s armor. One year one is ahead and the

next year the other. In the old days, he says, mothers taught their

daughters old-fashioned methods of resisting the wiles of old-fashioned

Romeos, and for a space this method of defense was successful. But

by-and-by the Romeos learned its weak points, and the fond mammas

of England had to devise some new armor. They hit upon scientific

education, and for awhile it, too, was successful. But in the end the

old story was repeated.

“What did the man do?” says Valentine. “Just what the artilleryman

does--went one better than the woman--educated himself scientifically

and beat her at that game just as he had beaten her at the old one.

I learned how to circumvent the Woman’s Rights’ woman before I was

twenty-three....”

But before the play is done the philosophical duellist of sex finds

himself the vanquished rather than the victor. He begins to have doubts

about his preparedness for the marriage state and essays a polite

withdrawal. But Gloria, weighted with the wisdom of five previous

amorous encounters, is no easy adversary to lose.

“Be sensible,” says the valiant Valentine. “It’s no use. I haven’t a

penny in the world.”

“Can’t you earn one?” demands Gloria. “Other people do.”

Valentine, scenting a chance to flee, is half-delighted,

half-frightened.

“I never could!” he declares. “You’d be unhappy.... My dearest love, I

should be the merest fortune-hunting adventurer if----”

She grips his arm and kisses him.

“Oh, Lord!” he gasps. “O, I----”

The trap has sprung and he is caught fast.

“I don’t know anything about women,” wails the duellist of sex,

pathetically. “Twelve years’ experience is not enough.”

William, the waiter at the hotel, reads the moral.

“You never can tell, sir,” he says, “You never can tell.”

So much for the love making, which you will find, in slightly

different form in “Widowers’ Houses” and “Man and Superman.” The battle

between the Cramptons, husband and wife, is a more serious thing. In

some mysterious way the dramatist manages to keep the spectator from

sympathizing with either, but Crampton, nevertheless, is a character in

a tragedy and not in a comedy. It is all a ghastly horror to him--the

flight of his wife, the cynical, worldwise impudence and grotesque

individualism of his children, the perversity and topsy-turveyness

of the whole domestic drama. He is no martyr, by any means, for life

in his company, it is evident, would be an excellent imitation of

existence in a cage with a tiger, but if he is not lovable, he at

least has a great capacity for loving. He and Gloria have a memorable

encounter, in which she explains her theory of conduct in detail.

“You see,” she says triumphantly, at the end, “everything comes right

if we only _think_ it resolutely out.”

“No,” says Crampton sullenly, “I don’t think. I want you to feel:

that’s the only thing that can help us....”

In the end he succumbs to the inevitable senilely.

“Ho! ho! He! he! he!” he laughs, as Gloria bears Valentine away. And

then, say the stage directions, “he goes into the garden, chuckling at

the fun.”

Somehow the boundless humor of the play is forgotten long before this

undercurrent of ironic pathos.

William, the waiter, is one of Shaw’s most delightful characters.

He is, in truth, the chorus to the drama, and a man of deep

philosophies. To everyone’s consternation it is discovered that the

eminent Mr. Bohun, Q. C., who is called in as legal adviser to the

Clandon-Cramptons is William’s son.

“I’ve often wished he was a potman,” he says. “Would have had him off

my hands ever so much sooner, sir. Yes, sir, had to support him until

he was thirty-seven, sir....”

William reads Schopenhauer, but he has no intellectual yearnings.

“My name is Boon, sir,” he says, “though I am best known down here as

Balmy Walters, sir. By rights I should spell it with the aitch you,

sir, but I think it best not to take that liberty, sir. There is Norman

blood in it, sir, and Norman blood is not a recommendation to a waiter.”

Bohun, the son, is a blustering, roaring legal whale of the low

comedy type. The last act of the play is made a screaming farce by

his elephantine efforts to smooth out the family tangles of the

Clandon-Cramptons. In the end he reaches a decision worthy of Solomon.

“You can do nothing,” he says to Crampton, “but make a friendly

arrangement. If you want your family more than they want you, you’ll

get the worst of the arrangement; if they want you more than you want

them, you’ll get the better of it. The strength of their position lies

in their being very agreeable personally. The strength of your position

lies in your income....”

And that is the nearest approach to a solution of the difficulty that

the play offers.

“MAN AND SUPERMAN”

Measured with rule, plumb-line or hay-scales, “Man and Superman”

is easily Shaw’s _magnum opus_. In bulk it is brobdignagian; in

scope it is stupendous; in purpose it is one with the Odyssey. Like

a full-rigged ship before a spanking breeze, it cleaves deep into

the waves, sending ripples far to port and starboard, and its giant

canvases rise half way to the clouds, with resplendent jibs, sky-sails,

staysails and studdingsails standing out like quills upon the fretful

porcupine. It has a preface as long as a campaign speech; an interlude

in three scenes, with music and red fire; and a complete digest of the

German philosophers as an appendix. With all its rings and satellites

it fills a tome of 281 closely-printed pages. Its epigrams, quips,

jests, and quirks are multitudinous; it preaches treason to all the

schools; its hero has one speech of 350 words. No one but a circus

press agent could rise to an adequate description of its innumerable

marvels. It is a three-ring circus, with Ibsen doing running high

jumps; Schopenhauer playing the calliope and Nietzsche selling peanuts

in the reserved seats. And all the while it is the most entertaining

play of its generation.

Maybe Shaw wrote it in a vain effort to rid himself at one fell swoop

of all the disquieting doctrines that infested his innards. Into it he

unloaded Kropotkin, Noyes, Bakounin, Wilde, Marx, Proudhon, Nietzsche,

Netschajew, Wagner, Bunyan, Mozart, Shelley, Ibsen, Morris, Tolstoi,

Goethe, Schopenhauer, Plato--seized them by the heels and heaved them

in, with a sort of relieved “God help you!” The result is 281 pages of

most diverting farce--farce that only half hides the tumultuous uproar

of the two-and-seventy jarring sects beneath it. It is a tract cast

in an encyclopedic and epic mold--a stupendous, magnificent colossal

effort to make a dent in the cosmos with a slapstick.

Why, all the saints and sages who discuss’d

Of the Two Worlds so learnedly, are thrust

Like foolish Prophets forth: their Words to Scorn

Are scatter’d, and their Mouths are stopt with Dust.

Shaw explains that he wrote the play in response to a suggestion by

A. B. Walkley, the dramatic critic of the London _Times_ that he should

tackle the subject of Don Juan. In his 37-page preface he traces, at

length, the process of reasoning which led him to the conclusion that

Juan, as he was depicted by the fathers, was a fraud and an impostor.

In the business of mating, he says (after Schopenhauer) it is not the

man but the woman that does the pursuing. Man’s function in life is

that of food-getting. Woman’s is that of perpetuating the race. Hence

man’s ordinary occupation is making money, and woman’s is getting

married. To protect himself against “a too aggressive prosecution

of woman’s business,” he says, man has “set up a feeble romantic

convention that the initiative in sex business must always come from

him.” But the pretense is so shallow “that even in the theater, that

last sanctuary of unreality, it imposes only on the inexperienced.

In Shakespeare’s plays the woman always takes the initiative. In his

problem plays and his popular plays alike the love interest is the

interest of seeing the woman hunt the man down.”

And so, the hero of this new play, John Tanner (our old friend Juan

Tenorio) is the pursued, and Doña Ana (Miss Ann Whitefield) is the

pursuer. John is a being of most advanced and startling ideas. He

writes a volume called “The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket

Companion,” full of all sorts of strange doctrines, from praise

of the Oneida Community to speculations regarding the probable

characteristics of the Superman. He laughs at honor, titles, the law,

property, marriage, liberty, democracy, the golden rule and everything

else that God-fearing folks hold sacred; he has a good word for

Czolgosz; he gives directions for beating children; he curls his lip

at civilization; he ventures the view that “every man over forty is a

scoundrel.” And then, with all this cargo of nonconformity afloat in

his hold, fate sends him sailing into a haven of staunch orthodoxy.

He and Roebuck Ramsden, a gentleman who hangs Herbert Spencer’s

portrait on his library wall as a sort of banner of his intellectual

modernity, are appointed guardians for Ann, whose papa has just passed

away, and John, to protect himself against being caught in ambush by

the Life Force, as represented in his ward, endeavors to marry her off

to Octavius Robinson, a harmless young man who has lived beneath her

father’s roof since his childhood. John is aware of the faults of Ann

and has no yearning to be enmeshed in her web. He notices that she is

a liar and politely calls her attention to the fact; he observes her

pursuit of him and makes open preparations for flight. Finally, in full

cry, he runs away in an automobile across Europe. But the Life Force

is more powerful than gasoline, and Ann, yielding to its irresistible

impulse, follows him--across the English channel, to Dover, and across

France toward the Mediterranean. In the Sierra Nevada mountains she

brings her game to bay and in old Grenada poor John receives his _coup

de grace_. Thus he sinks to earth:

_Tanner._ ... The trap was laid from the beginning.

_Ann_ (_concentrating all her magic_). From the beginning--from

our childhood--for both of us--by the Life Force.

_Tanner._ I will not marry you. I will not marry you.

_Ann._ Oh, you will, you will.

_Tanner._ I tell you, no, no, no.

_Ann._ I tell you, yes, yes, yes.

_Tanner._ No.

_Ann_ (_coaxing--imploring--almost exhausted_). Yes. Before it is

too late for repentance. Yes.

_Tanner_ (_struck by an echo from the past_). When did all this

happen to me before? Are we two dreaming?

_Ann_ (_suddenly losing her courage, with an anguish that she

does not conceal_). No. We are awake and you have said no: that

is all.

_Tanner_ (_brutally_). Well?

_Ann._ Well, I made a mistake, you do not love me.

_Tanner_ (_seizing her in his arms_). It is false: I love you.

The Life Force enchants me: I have the whole world in my arms

when I clasp you....

And this is the story upon which Shaw hangs his 175 pages of play--it

would take seven hours to perform it in its entirety--his thirty-seven

pages of introduction, and his sixty-nine pages of appendix.

The conflict between Tanner and the ethics and traditions represented

by Ramsden is riotously and irresistibly humorous. The first act of the

play, indeed, is the most gorgeously grotesque in all Shaw. Better fun

is scarcely imaginable. The famous Hell scene, which forms a sort of

movable third act, is also a masterpiece of comedy. Tanner during his

flight from Ann, is captured by a band of social-anarchist brigands,

led by one Capt. Mendoza, a sentimental Anglo-Hebrew. Mendoza’s story

of his unrequited love for an English lass sends Tanner to dreamland,

and he dreams that he is in Hell. And then an elaborately comic play

within a play is performed. Mendoza appears as the Devil; Tanner as

Don Juan; and Ann as Doña Ana de Ulloa. It is long, this episode,

and beyond all hope of boiling down, but the persons who see “Man

and Superman” without it miss two-thirds of the drama. An excellent

exposition by the Devil of the superiority of Hell over Heaven forms

part of it. During the rest of the action the characters discuss every

imaginable subject, from love to the higher morality.

“Whatever they say of me in churches on earth,” says the Devil, “I know

that it is universally admitted in good society that the Prince of

Darkness is a gentleman; and that is enough for me....”

In the first act Violet Robinson, Octavius’ sister, gives her family

an overwhelming shock by passing to that moral bourne whence no

feminine traveler returns. Her maiden aunt is for turning her out of

doors. Ramsden is apoplectic. Octavius is speechless. The scandal is

appalling. And here comes Tanner’s chance. He has preached against

marriage and now he will follow his preaching with practise. Virtuous

or unvirtuous, what are the odds? The Life Force is at it again,

and he, John Tanner, is its champion. So he goes to Violet’s rescue

grandly--a hero, every inch of him.

“They think to blame you,” he says loftily, “by their silly

superstitions about morality and propriety and so forth. But I know,

and the whole world really knows, that you are right to follow your

instinct; that vitality and bravery are the greatest qualities a woman

can have, and motherhood her solemn initiation into womanhood, and

that the fact of your not being legally married matters not one scrap

either to your own worth or to our real regard for you.”

The limelight flashes here, but suddenly it goes out and Violet’s eyes

flash instead.

“Oh!” she exclaims, “you think me a wicked woman, like the rest!

You think that I am not only vile, but that I share your abominable

opinions.... I won’t bear such a horrible insult.... I have kept my

marriage secret for my husband’s sake. But now I claim my right as a

married woman not to be insulted....”

And as Tanner wilts his fine theories come crashing down about his head.

The play is such a gigantic, ponderous thing that any effort to

summarize it is difficult. The central idea--that, in mating, the

man is pursued by the woman--is one that we have seen Shaw employ in

“Arms and the Man,” “The Philanderer,” and other plays. As he himself

says, it is not a new conception. Shakespeare had it, though maybe

unconsciously, and its rudiments appear in the works of other men.

Schopenhauer made it classical. In “Man and Superman” Shaw uses it

as an excuse for airing practically every radical doctrine in the

modern repertoire. “The general impression of the book,” says Huneker,

“causes us to believe there is a rift in the writer’s lute; not in

his mentality, but in his own beliefs, or scepticisms. Perhaps Shaw

no longer pins his faith to Shaw.” Herein the critic makes the common

mistake of confusing the dramatist and the theorist. Shaw borrows part

of the title from Nietzsche and makes sad sport of the mad German in

many a scene, but that is no evidence that he is insincere when, in his

introduction, he classes Nietzsche with those writers “whose peculiar

sense of the world I recognize as more or less akin to my own.” “The

Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion” at the end of the play

is given, he says, merely to prove that John Tanner, its author, is

really the revolutionist and genius the drama makes him out to be. Too

often, says Shaw, a playwright is content to say that his hero is a man

of parts without offering any tangible evidence of the fact.

All in all, “Man and Superman” is a work worth the two years of effort

the title page hints it cost the author. But it is a pity that Shaw

didn’t divide it into two plays, a volume of essays, two dozen magazine

articles and a book of epigrams. The age of the epic is past. To-day we

sacrifice Fortinbras to get “Hamlet” into two hours and a half.

“JOHN BULL’S OTHER ISLAND”

This is a political satire in Shaw’s most amusing manner and, as its

title indicates, deals with the eternal Irish question--a problem

that, in England, rivals in perennial interest the dispute between

capital and labor in the United States. The author, with characteristic

impartiality, gives all sides a fair hearing, and “though in the end,”

says A. B. Walkley, “all parties are dismissed with costs, we have a

conviction that justice has been done.”

Two London engineers--Broadbent, an Englishman, and Larry Doyle,

an anglicized Irishman--are the central characters. Broadbent is a

political radical and insatiable reformer of a very familiar sort.

Yearning to lend a hand in the uplifting of humanity, he turns to the

martyred Irish and proposes to be their champion, without in the least

understanding them. Doyle, on the other hand, looks upon all reform as

so much moonshine. As far as he is concerned, Ireland may go hang. He

is neither a patriot nor an altruist.

Nevertheless, when Broadbent decides to go to Ireland to study the

problem of saving the Irish on the ground, Doyle consents to go with

him, and together they arrive at a primitive sort of Irish village.

There they make acquaintance with the folks who constitute suffering

Ireland--an unfrocked priest whose mysticism has given him the

local character of a lunatic, a peasant fairly savage in his simple

superstitions, the fanatical parish priest and other types more or

less familiar. To Doyle they are commonplace bores. To Broadbent they

constitute a People yearning for a Moses.

When Doyle refuses to stand for Parliament for the district, Broadbent

willingly steps into the breach, and in the ensuing campaign all the

multitudinous facets of the Irish question are revealed. The honest

electors, misunderstanding Broadbent’s altruistic efforts for their

welfare, get a great deal of innocent enjoyment out of his orations

and a great deal more out of his honest efforts to deal with them as

freeman to freeman. He offers to take a farmer’s pig home in his motor

car. The car runs over the pig and, in addition, knocks out the window

of the village china shop. “There is a jest in every line,” says the

critic of the London _Daily Mail_. “The play exists for and by the

comic spirit alone.”

In the end, after many farcical situations and excellent quips, the

canny Irish yeomanry accept Broadbent as a profitable acquaintance,

and as the novelty of his misunderstood good intentions dies, come

to regard him more or less seriously. As the curtain falls they are

looking forward with interest to certain very material boons he

promises to confer upon them--a big hotel in the village, a new tower

for the village landmark and links for the village golfers. Meanwhile

he has fallen in love with an old sweetheart of Doyle’s and, after

an uphill wooing, has supplanted the latter in the fair charmer’s

affections.

The play is a characteristically Shavian _reductio ad absurdum_ of

the vast ocean of hair-raising schemes and startling theories that

has so long deluged the Irish question. Shaw himself is an Irishman,

and no doubt the troubles of his native land are of some interest to

him, despite his vigorous denial that he is a patriot. Probably the

play indicates his subscription to the idea of many an Irishman whose

emotionalism has been tempered by English common-sense: that Ireland

must cease looking for relief without and seek it within. In so far as

this is true, the play is dialectic. But first of all it is a farce by

the dramatist whom one London critic, at least, calls “the best living

writer of comedy.”

“It’s all rot,” says Broadbent, the Englishman in the play, of some

speech made by Doyle. “It’s all rot, but it’s so brilliant, you know.”

“Here, no doubt,” observed Mr. Walkley of the _Times_, “Shaw is slyly

taking a side glance at the usual English verdict on his own works.

The verdict will need some slight modification in the case of ‘John

Bull’s Other Island.’ For, in the first place, the play is not _all_

rot. Further, it has some other qualities than mere brilliancy. It

is at once a delight and a disappointment.... Shaw takes up the

empty bladders of life, the current commonplaces, the cant phrases,

the windbags of rodomontade, the hollow conventions, and the sham

sentiments; quietly he inserts his pin; and the thing collapses with a

pop.”

The play was given six special matinée performances at the London Court

Theater in the latter part of 1904, and Arnold Daly has since presented

it in America.