While resting from the over-exertions of the political campaign at the
time of the General Election in 1892, Shaw came upon the manuscript
of the partially finished play begun in 1885. “Tickled” by the play,
and urged by Mr. Grein, Shaw began work upon it anew. “But for Mr.
Grein and the Independent Theatre Society,” Shaw confessed, “it would
have gone back to its drawer and lain there another seven years, if
not for ever.”[134] With this play, _Widowers' Houses_, Shaw made his
_début_ upon the English stage as a problem dramatist with the avowed
purpose of exposing existent evils in the prevailing social order.
_Widowers' Houses_ is the first native play of the New School in
England consciously devoted to the exposure of the social guilt of the
community.
In 1885, shortly after the completion of the novels of his nonage,
Shaw began this play in collaboration with Mr. William Archer. After
learning to know Shaw by sight in the British Museum reading-room, as
a “young man of tawny complexion and attire,” studying alternately,
if not simultaneously, Karl Marx's _Das Kapital_ (in French), and an
orchestral score of _Tristan and Isolde_, Mr. Archer finally met him at
the house of a common acquaintance.
[Illustration: =Bernard Shaw.=]
_Joseph Simpson_
_Courtesy of the Artist._
From the original black and white wash-drawing.
Reproduced by permission of the owner, Mr. J. Murray Allison.
“I learned from himself that he was the author of several
unpublished masterpieces of fiction. Construction, he owned
with engaging modesty, was not his strong point, but his
dialogue was incomparable. Now, in those days I had still a
certain hankering after the rewards, if not the glories, of the
playwright. With a modesty in no way inferior to Mr. Shaw's,
I had realized that I could not write dialogue a bit; but I
still considered myself a born constructor. I proposed, and Mr.
Shaw agreed to, a collaboration. I was to provide him with one
of the numerous plots I kept in stock, and he was to write the
dialogue. So said, so done. I drew out, scene by scene, the
scheme of a twaddling cup-and-saucer comedy vaguely suggested
by Augier's _Ceinture Dorée_. The details I forget, but I know
it was to be called _Rhinegold_, was to open, as _Widowers'
Houses_ actually does, in an hotel garden on the Rhine, and was
to have two heroines, a sentimental and a comic one, according
to the accepted Robertson-Byron-Carton formula. I fancy the
hero was to propose to the sentimental heroine, believing
her to be the poor niece instead of the rich daughter of the
sweater, or slum-landlord, or whatever he may have been; and
I know he was to carry on in the most heroic fashion, and was
ultimately to succeed in throwing the tainted treasure of his
father-in-law, metaphorically speaking, into the Rhine. All
this I gravely propounded to Mr. Shaw, who listened with no
less admirable gravity. Then I thought the matter had dropped,
for I heard no more of it for many weeks. I used to see Mr.
Shaw at the Museum, laboriously writing page after page of the
most exquisitely neat shorthand at the rate of about three
words a minute, but it did not occur to me that this was our
play. After about six weeks he said to me: 'Look here: I've
written half the first act of that comedy, and I've used up
all your plot. Now I want some more to go on with.' I told him
that my plot was a rounded and perfect organic whole, and that
I could no more eke it out in this fashion than I could provide
him or myself with a set of supplementary arms and legs. I
begged him to extend his shorthand and let me see what he had
done; but this would have taken him far too long. He tried to
decipher some of it orally, but the process was too lingering
and painful for endurance. So he simply gave me an outline in
narrative of what he had done; and I saw that, so far from
using up my plot, he had not even touched it. There the matter
rested for months and years. Mr. Shaw would now and then
hold out vague threats of finishing 'our play,' but I felt no
serious alarm. I thought (judging from my own experience in
other cases) that when he came to read over in cold blood what
he had written, he would see what impossible stuff it was.
Perhaps my free utterance of this view piqued him; perhaps
he felt impelled to remove from the Independent Theatre the
reproach of dealing solely in foreign products. The fire of his
genius, at all events, was not to be quenched by my persistent
application of the wet blanket. He finished his play; Mr.
Grein, as in duty bound, accepted it; and the result was the
performance of Friday last at the Independent Theatre.”[135]
According to Shaw's account, he produced a horribly incongruous effect
by “laying violent hands on his (Archer's) thoroughly planned scheme
for a sympathetically romantic 'well-made play' of the type then in
vogue,” and perversely distorting it into a “grotesquely realistic
exposure of slum-landlordism, municipal jobbery, and the pecuniary and
matrimonial ties between it and the pleasant people of 'independent'
incomes who imagine that such sordid matters do not touch their own
lives.” Shortly before the production of _Widowers' Houses_, there
appeared an “Interview” with Shaw, purporting to give some idea of the
much-mooted play, but leaving the public in doubt as to the seriousness
with which this mock-solemn information was to be taken.[136] “Sir,”
said Shaw sternly to the interviewer (himself!), “it (my play) will
be nothing else than didactic. Do you suppose I have gone to all this
trouble to _amuse_ the public? No, if they want that, there is the
Criterion for them, the Comedy, the Garrick, and so on. My object
is to instruct them.” And to explain the allusion contained in the
title, concerning which speculation was rife, Shaw remarked to the
interviewer: “I have been assured that in one of the sections of the
Bible dealing with the land question there is a clause against the
destruction of widows' houses. There is no widow in my play; but there
is a widower who owns slum property. Hence the title. Perhaps you are
not familiar with the Bible.”[137]
After repeated calls from the audience Shaw made an impromptu speech
at the close of the first performance of _Widowers' Houses_. He said
that “he wished to assure his listeners that the greeting of the play
had been agreeable to him, for had the story been received lightly he
would have been disappointed. What he had submitted to their notice
was going on in actual life. The action of _Widowers' Houses_ depicted
the ordinary middle-class life of the day, but he heartily hoped the
time would come when the play he had written would be both utterly
impossible and utterly unintelligible. If anyone were to ask him where
the Socialism came in, he would say that it was in the love of their
art on Socialistic principles that had induced the performers to give
their services on that occasion. In conclusion, he trusted that, above
all, the critics would carefully discriminate between himself and the
actors who had so zealously striven to carry out his intentions.”
According to a contemporary account: “Warm cheers greeted the
playwright who thus candidly and gratefully acknowledged the excellent
work rendered by the players, whilst still proclaiming that his play
was in all particulars the faithful reflex of a sordid and unpitying
age.”
The play, a nine-days' wonder, was widely paragraphed in the
newspapers, and regarded in some quarters as a daring attack on
middle-class society. The storm of protest aroused by _Widowers'
Houses_ almost paralleled the howl of execration evoked by the
production of Ibsen's _Ghosts_ in England. _Widowers' Houses_ was
intended as neither a beautiful nor a lovable work. Shaw confessed
years afterwards that the play was entirely unreadable except for the
prefaces and appendices, which he rightly regarded as good. The art of
this play was confessedly the expression of the sense of intellectual
and moral perversity; for Shaw had passed most of his life in big
modern towns, where his sense of beauty had been starved, whilst
his intellect had been gorged with problems like that of the slums.
_Widowers' Houses_ is “saturated with the vulgarity of the life it
represents”; and, in the first edition of the play, Shaw confesses that
he is “not giving expression in pleasant fancies to the underlying
beauty and romance of happy life, but dragging up to the smooth surface
of 'respectability' a handful of the slime and foulness of its polluted
bed, and playing off your laughter at the scandal of the exposure
against your shudder at its blackness.”
Like Bulwer Lytton, Stevenson, and other nineteenth-century novelists
who turned to the writing of plays, Shaw approached the theatre lacking
due appreciation of the difficulties of dramatic art, the perfect
artistic sincerity it demands. Writing his play as a pastime, he
employed it as a means of shocking the sensibilities of his audience
as well as of winging a barbed shaft at its smug respectability.
Paying no heed to that golden mean of “average truth,” which Sainte
Beuve impressed with such high seriousness upon the youthful Zola,
Shaw indulges in that extreme form of depicting life, the mutilation
of humanity, which Brunetière pronounced to be the vital defect of
naturalism. A pair of lovers _dans cette galère_! As Mr. Archer said
at the time: “When they are not acting with a Gilbertian _naïveté_ of
cynicism, they are snapping and snarling at each other like a pair of
ill-conditioned curs.”
The accusation of indebtedness to Ibsen hurled at Shaw from all sides
as soon as his play was produced was promptly squelched by Shaw's
vigorous denial. It is worth remarking, however, that “tainted money,”
that bone of contention in America and the theme of Shaw's later
_Major Barbara_, is the abuse which serves as the mark for the satire,
both of Ibsen in _An Enemy of the People_, and of Shaw in _Widowers'
Houses_. The perverting effect of ill-gotten gains upon the moral sense
is the lesson of these two plays. Whereas Shaw was content to uncover
the social canker and expose its ravages in all directions, Ibsen,
through the instrumentality of Stockmann, holds out an ideal for the
regeneration of society.
_Widowers' Houses_ abounds in flashes of insight, in passages of
trenchant dialogue, in sardonic exposure of human nature; the keen
intellect of the author is everywhere in evidence. Shaw's vigorous
Socialism is largely responsible for the clarity and succinctness
with which the economic point is driven home; and the discussions of
social problems are tense with a nervous vivacity almost dramatic
in quality. And yet the structural defect of the play is the loose
dramatic connection between the economic elucidations and the general
psychological processes of the action.
Before the production of _Widowers' Houses_, Shaw publicly stated that
the first two acts were written before he ever heard of Ibsen; and
afterwards he asserted that his critics “should have guessed this,
because there is not one idea in the play that cannot be more easily
referred to half a dozen English writers than to Ibsen; whilst of his
peculiar retrospective method, by which his plays are made to turn
upon events supposed to have happened before the rise of the curtain,
there is not a trace in my work.”[138] Shaw laughed incontinently at
those people who excitedly discussed the play as a daringly original
sermon, but who would not accept it as a play on any terms “because
its hero did not, when he learned that his income came from slum
property, at once relinquish it (_i.e._, make it a present to Sartorius
without benefiting the tenants), and go to the goldfields to dig out
nuggets with his strong right arm, so that he might return to wed his
Blanche after a shipwreck (witnessed by her in a vision), just in time
to rescue her from beggary, brought upon her by the discovery that
Lickcheese was the rightful heir to the property of Sartorius, who had
dispossessed and enslaved him by a series of forgeries unmasked by the
faithful Cokane!”
For the sake of its bearing upon Shaw's subsequent career, one
important contemporary impression deserves to be placed on record.
Five months after the production of _Widowers' Houses_, in a review
(published May 4th, 1893) of the Independent Theatre edition of that
play, Mr. William Archer earnestly endeavoured to dissuade Shaw from
turning dramatist.
“It is a pity that Mr. Shaw should labour under a delusion as
to the true bent of his talent, and, mistaking an amusing _jeu
d'esprit_ for a work of creative art, should perhaps be tempted
to devote further time and energy to a form of production
for which he has no special ability and some constitutional
disabilities. A man of his power of mind can do nothing that is
altogether contemptible. We may be quite sure that if he took
palette and 'commenced painter,' or set to work to manipulate
a lump of clay, he would produce a picture or a statue that
would bear the impress of a keen intelligence, and would be
well worth looking at. That is precisely the case of _Widowers'
Houses_. It is a curious example of what can be done in art by
sheer brain-power, apart from natural aptitude. For it does not
appear that Mr. Shaw has any more specific talent for the drama
than he has for painting or sculpture.”
Shaw's next play, _The Philanderer_, is distinctly a _pièce d'occasion_
and should be read in the light of the attitude of the British public
toward Ibsen and Ibsenism at the time of its writing. After Miss Janet
Achurch's performance as Nora Helmer in _A Doll's House_, in 1889,
Ibsen became the target of dramatic criticism; and Shaw's _Quintessence
of Ibsenism_, published in 1891, was the big gun, going off when the
controversy was at its height. Sir Edwin Arnold made an editorial
attack on Ibsen, Mr. Frederick Wedmore echoed his denunciation, and
Clement Scott exhausted his vocabulary of vituperation in an almost
hysterical outcry against the foulness and obscenity of the shameless
Norwegian. _The Philanderer_ was written just when the cult of Ibsen
had reached the pinnacle of fatuity. From Shaw's picture, one is led
to suppose that society, with reference to Ibsen, was roughly divided
into three classes: the conservatives of the old guard, regarding
Ibsen as a _monstrum horrendum_; the _soi-disant_ Ibsenites, glibly
conversant with Ibsen's ideas but profoundly ignorant of their
meaning; and, lastly, those who really understood Ibsen, this class
being made up of two sorts of individuals, those who really intended
to adopt Ibsen principles, and those who were keen and unscrupulous
enough to exploit Ibsenism solely for the sake of the sustenance it
afforded parasitic growths like themselves. The ideal of the “womanly
woman” still prevailed in English society. Shaw here readily perceived
the possibilities for satire and tragi-comedy, both in the clash of
old prejudices with new ideas, and in the mordant contrast discovered
by the conflict of the over-sexed, passionate “womanly woman” with the
under-sexed, pallidly intellectual philanderer of the Ibsen school.
Had Shaw's performance been as able as his perception was acute, _The
Philanderer_ would have been a genuine achievement instead of a grimly
promising failure.
_The Philanderer_ serves as a link between the plays of Shaw's earlier
and later manners. Present marriage laws really have very little to do
with this play, which concerns itself with a study of social types.
Julia is the _fine fleur_ of feral femininity; woman's practice of
employing her personal charms unscrupulously and man's practice of
treating woman as a mere plaything both have a share in the formation
of her character. Grace Tranfield is the best type of the advanced
woman; she demands equality of opportunity for women, rejects the
“lord and master” theory, and fights always for the integrity of
her self-respect. Between these two women stands Leonard Charteris,
holding the average young cub's cynical ideas about women, sharpened
to acuteness through the intellectual astuteness of Bernard Shaw.
Charteris, in his bloodless Don Juanism, is the type of the degenerate
male flirt--the pallid prey of the _maladie du siècle_. “C'est un
homme qui ne fait la cour aux femmes ni pour le bon ni pour le mauvais
motif,” says M. Filon. “Que veut-il? S'amuser. Seulement--comme on
l'a dit des Anglais en général--il s'amuse tristement; il y a dans
l'attitude de ce séducteur glacial et dégoûté quelque chose qui
n'est pas très viril. On dit la société anglaise infestée de ces
gens-là.”[139]
[Illustration: =Playbill of _The Philanderer_. Hebbel-Theater, Berlin.
January 3rd, 1909. Sixty-eighth performance.=]
[Illustration: =Playbill of _Mrs. Warren's Profession_. Last “Gastspiel”
by the players of the Deutsches Theater and the Kammerspiele in Berlin.
Schauspielhaus, Munich. July 31st, 1908. Ninth performance.=]
Upon the mind of any unprejudiced person, I think, _The Philanderer_
creates the impression that Shaw's attitude toward women in this play
must have been induced by unpleasant personal relations with women
prior to the time at which the play was written. Many people paid him
the insult of recognizing him in Charteris; and I have even been told
that Shaw was temperamentally not dissimilar to Charteris, at that
particular period. The play is marked by unnaturalness and immaturity
at every turn; but several scenes exhibit great nervous strength. Mr.
Robert Loraine once remarked to me that, in his opinion, the first act
of _The Philanderer_ was unparalleled in its verisimilitude, always
making him realize the truth of Ibsen's dictum that the modern stage
must be regarded as a room of which one wall has been removed. Mr.
Loraine's impression is fully justified by the fact that the scene is a
more or less accurate replica of a scene in Mr. Shaw's own life.
As a play, _The Philanderer_ is crude and amateurish, revolving upon
the pivot of Charteris's satire, and presenting various features in
turn--now extravaganza, now broad farce, now comedy, now tragi-comedy.
With all its brilliant mental vivisection, the conversation of
Charteris is never natural, but supra-natural; the utterly gross and
caddish indecency of his exposures would never be tolerated for an
instant in polite or even respectable society. And yet Mr. Shaw once
vehemently assured me: “Charteris is not passionless, not unscrupulous,
and a sincere, not a pseudo, Ibsenist”! Cuthbertson is a caricature of
Clement Scott; and, in virtually the same words used by Scott in his
attacks upon Ibsen, Cuthbertson avows that the whole modern movement
is abhorrent to him “because his life had been passed in witnessing
scenes of suffering nobly endured and sacrifice willingly rendered by
womanly women and manly men.” The mannerisms of Craven, “Now really”
in especial, are taken directly, Mr. Shaw once told me, from Mr. H. M.
Hyndman, the English Socialist leader. Dr. Paramore is the puppet of
broad farce, immune to all humane concern through inoculation with the
deadly germ of scientific research; while Sylvia is merely the pert
little _soubrette_. The inverted Gilbertism of Colonel Craven's: “Do
you mean to say that I am expected to treat my daughter the same as
I would any other girl? Well, dash me if I will!” faintly strikes the
note of Falsacappa, the brigand chief, in Meilhac and Halévy's _The
Brigands_: “Marry my daughter to an honest man! Never!”--a phrase with
which Mr. W. S. Gilbert afterwards did such execution in _The Pirates
of Penzance_.
When _The Philanderer_ was published in 1898, the public was puzzled
and astounded to read an “attack” on Ibsen by Ibsen's most valiant
champion in England! So shocked was Mr. Archer by this “outrage upon
art and decency” that he wanted to “cut” his colleague and friend
in the street. _The Philanderer_ thus laid the foundation of Shaw's
reputation as a cynic and a paradoxer. It is chiefly interesting to-day
as a foreshadowing and promise of the lines of development of the
later dramatist. Superficially, this play mirrors the glaring, even
tragic contrast between faddist idealization of Ibsen, and sincere
realization of Ibsenism. But, in the light of subsequent events, the
play rather teaches that Charteris as male flirt is the model for the
sketchy Valentine, that Julia is the Ann Whitefield of a more natural
and less self-conscious phase. Throughout the play we are reminded of
the brutal laughter of Wedekind, the sardonic humour of Becque, and,
in places, even of the dark levity of Ibsen himself. The portrayal of
Julia is remarkable, in spite of the damaging error of representing her
as fit subject for the police court--mentally arrested in development,
victim of violent “brain-storms,” unscrupulous, treacherous, deceitful,
feline. And yet, by some marvellous trick of subtle art, the author has
caused this creature to win our profound sympathy in the end. After
all, her love for Charteris is genuine and sincere; and the scene
between Grace and Julia, after the latter has accepted Dr. Paramore, is
profoundly touching:
GRACE (_speaking in a low voice to Julia alone_): So you
have shown him that you can do without him! Now I take back
everything I said. Will you shake hands with me? (_Julia gives
her hand painfully, with her face averted._) They think this a
happy ending, Julia--these men--our lords and masters! (_The
two stand silent, hand in hand._)
The human drama of this play, merely sketched though it be, is the
conflict in Julia's soul between her violent passion for Charteris
and her true impulse toward self-respect. The quintessence of her
tragedy is expressed in her last tilt with Charteris. He walks up to
congratulate her, proffering his hand.
JULIA (_exhausted, allowing herself to take it_): You are
right. I am a worthless woman.
CHARTERIS (_triumphant, and gaily remonstrating_): Oh, why?
JULIA: Because I am not brave enough to kill you.
Shaw's next play, _Mrs. Warren's Profession_, completed his first cycle
of economic studies in dramatic form; and at one stroke demonstrated
Shaw to be a dramatist of marked powers and ability. Shaw's account of
the genesis of this play is an important link in its history. In regard
to the title, Shaw says: “The tremendously effective scene--which a
baby could write if its sight were normal--in which she (Mrs. Warren)
justifies herself, is only a paraphrase of a scene in a novel of my
own, 'Cashel Byron's Profession' (hence the title, _Mrs. Warren's
Profession_), in which a prize-fighter shows how he was driven into the
ring exactly as Mrs. Warren was driven on the streets.” Shaw met the
charge of indebtedness to Ibsen and De Maupassant with the statement
that, if a dramatist living in the world of multifarious interests,
duties and experiences in which he lived has to go to books for his
ideas and his inspiration, he must be both blind and deaf. “Most
dramatists are,” he laconically added. So _Mrs. Warren's Profession_
came about in this way:
“Miss Janet Achurch mentioned to me a novel by some French
writer as having a dramatizable story in it. It being hopeless
to get me to read anything, she told me the story, which was
ultra-romantic. I said, 'Oh, I will work out the real truth
about that mother some day.' In the following autumn I was
the guest of a lady of very distinguished ability--one whose
knowledge of English social types is as remarkable as her
command of industrial and political questions. She suggested
that I should put on the stage a real modern lady of the
governing class--not the sort of thing that theatrical and
critical authorities imagine such a lady to be. I did so; and
the result was Miss Vivie Warren, who has laid the intellect
of Mr. William Archer in ruins.... I finally persuaded Miss
Achurch, who is clever with her pen, to dramatize the story
herself on the original romantic lines. Her version is called
_Mrs. Daintry's Daughter_. That is the history of _Mrs.
Warren's Profession_. I never dreamt of Ibsen or De Maupassant,
any more than a blacksmith shoeing a horse thinks of the
blacksmith in the next county.”[140]
Of course, one blacksmith cannot possibly know what another blacksmith
in the next county is doing. But Shaw was not only aware of what Ibsen
was doing and had done: he had actually written a remarkable analysis
of Ibsen's plays and, with his utmost critical skill, defended Ibsen's
art and philosophy, on the platform and in the press, against the
ablest critics in England. As clearly as _Ghosts_ does _Mrs. Warren's
Profession_ reveal the truth of George Eliot's dictum that consequences
are unpitying; a true drama of catastrophe, employing Ibsen's peculiar
retrospective method, Shaw's play exemplifies, in Amiel's words, the
fatality of the consequences which follow every human act. Nora as
daughter, instead of Nora as wife, Vivie leaves her home under the same
profound conviction of her duty to herself as a human being--a duty
infinitely more obligatory than any she may be conventionally imagined
to owe to a Magdalen mother, who has educated and purposes to support
her out of the profits of a profession which has its roots in the most
hideous of all social evils.[141]
_Mrs. Warren's Profession_ towers high above his first two plays, and
places Shaw in the front rank of contemporary dramatic craftsmen. Its
strength proceeds from the depth displayed in the consideration of the
motives which prompt to action, the intellectual and emotional crises
eventuating from the fierce clash of personalities and the sardonically
unconscious self-scourging of the characters themselves. The scenes
are so admirably ordered, the procedure so swift, the situations so
charged with significance that one can find little to wonder at in Mr.
Cunninghame Graham's characterization of _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ as
“the best that has been written in English in our generation.” Tense,
nervous, vigorous, the great scenes are full of “that suppleness, that
undulation of emotional process,” which Mr. Archer pronounces one of
the unmistakable tokens of dramatic mastery. The tremendous dramatic
power of the specious logic with which Mrs. Warren defends her course;
the sardonic irony of the parting between mother and daughter! Goethe
said of Molière that he chastises men by drawing them just as they
are. True descendant of Molière, whom he once declared to be worth a
thousand Shakespeares, Shaw wields upon vice the shrieking scourge,
not of the preacher, but of the dramatist. Out of the mouths of the
characters themselves proceeds their own condemnation. Devastating in
its consummate irony is the passage in which Mrs. Warren, conventional
to her heart's core, lauds her own respectability; and that in which
Crofts propounds his own code of honour:
CROFTS: My code is a simple one, and, I think, a good one:
Honour between man and man; fidelity between man and woman;
and no cant about this or that religion, but an honest belief
that things are making for good on the whole.
VIVIE (_with biting irony_): “A power, not ourselves, that
makes for righteousness,” eh?
CROFTS (_taking her seriously_): Oh, certainly, not ourselves,
of course. _You_ understand what I mean.
Dr. Brandes called Ibsen's _Ghosts_, if not the greatest achievement,
at any rate the noblest action of the poet's career. _Mrs. Warren's
Profession_ is not only what Brunetière would call a work of combat: it
is an act--an act of declared hostility against capitalistic society,
the inertia of public opinion, the lethargy of the public conscience,
and the criminality of a social order which begets such appalling
social conditions. Into this play Shaw has poured all his Socialistic
passion for a more just and humane social order.
As an arraignment of social conditions, the play is tremendous. As a
work of art, it presents marked deficiencies. Shaw sought to dispose of
one charge--that Vivie is merely Shaw in petticoats--in these words:
“One of my female characters, who drinks whisky and smokes cigars and
reads detective stories and regards the fine arts, especially music, as
an insufferable and unintelligible waste of time, has been declared by
my friend, Mr. William Archer, to be an exact and authentic portrait of
myself, on no other grounds in the world except that she is a woman of
business and not a creature of romantic impulse.” It is clear that this
is not a satisfactory answer to Mr. Archer's charge; but even in more
minor details, the play is open to criticism: the futility of Praed,
save as a barefaced confidant; the cheap melodrama of Frank and the
rifle; the series of coincidences culminating in the Rev. Mr. Gardner's
miserably confused “Miss Vavasour, I believe!” at the end of the first
act. More important still, as Mr. Archer once pointed out,[142] there
is nothing of the inevitable in the meeting of Frank and Vivie,
despite Shaw's assertion that “the children of any polyandrous group
will, when they grow up, inevitably be confronted with the insoluble
problem of their own possible consanguinity.” Had Vivie not happened
to take lodgings at that particular farmhouse in Surrey, she would
never have seen or heard of Frank, and the “inevitable” would never
have happened. But this single lapse of logic, together with the
other defects mentioned, are comparatively venial faults--which Shaw
probably classes among those “relapses into staginess” betraying, as
he confessed, “the young playwright and the old playgoer in this early
work of mine.”
It is the predominance of a certain hard, sheer rationalism, and a
defiant, irresponsible levity in places, which mars the artistic unity
of the play, and denies it the exalted rank to which it well-nigh
attains. At the fundamental morality of the play there is no cause to
cavil. Instead of maintaining an association in the imagination of
the spectators between prostitution and fashionable beauty, luxury
and refinement, as do _La Dame aux Caméllias_, _The Second Mrs.
Tanqueray_, _Iris_, _Zaza_ and countless other modern plays, _Mrs.
Warren's Profession_ exhibits the life of the courtesan in all its
arid actuality, and inculcates a lesson of the sternest morality. It
is because she is what she is that Mrs. Warren loses her daughter
irrevocably. In general, the logic of the play is unimpeachable;
but the rationalist character imparted to the conversations of the
principal characters by their persistence in arguing everything out
logically gives the play a sort of glacial rigidity. The principal
defect of the play is the discrepancy between the tragic seriousness
of the theme and the occasional depressing levity of its treatment.
Consonance between theme and tone is the prime requisite of a work of
art. This remarkable play falls just short of real greatness because
its whimsical, facetious, irrepressible author was unable to discipline
himself to artistic self-restraint. _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ is
calculated to produce an almost unendurable effect because, as Mr.
Archer wisely says, Bernard Shaw is “the slave of his sense of the
ridiculous.”
The close of the year 1893 marks the beginning of a new phase in
the evolution of Shaw's art as a dramatist. As Brunetière said to
the Symbolists, so the English public said to Mr. Grein and his
supporters of the Independent Theatre Society: “Gentlemen, produce your
masterpieces!” Shaw eagerly took up the case; and rather than let it
collapse, he “manufactured the evidence.” His first play met with a
_succès de scandale_; his second failed of production; and his third,
the expected “masterpiece,” was debarred by the censorship. The union
of economics and Socialism in thesis-plays met with no favour at the
hands of the British public. Shaw was forced to relinquish for the time
being his purpose of reforming the public through the medium of the
stage. His original disavowal of any intent to amuse the public went
for naught in default of a platform from which to deliver instruction.
Shaw's social determinism, as M. Auguste Hamon once expressed it to
me, is “absolute”: his fundamental Socialism throws the blame, not
upon Trench, Charteris, Crofts and Mrs. Warren, as _individuals_, but
upon the _prevailing social order_, the capitalistic _régime_, which
offers them as alternatives, not morality and immorality, but two sorts
of immorality.[143] Upon each individual in his audience, whether in
the study or in the theatre, Shaw threw the burden of responsibility
for defective social organization, and for those social horrors which
can only be mitigated, and, perhaps, ultimately abolished, by public
opinion, public action and public contribution. Mr. Shaw once described
this play to me as a faithful presentment of the “economic basis of
modern commercial prostitution.” But the managers well knew that the
public was averse to being forced to face the unpleasant facts set
forth in Shaw's three “unpleasant” plays. The rigour of the censorship
and prevailing theatrical conditions in London were hostile to Shaw's
initial efforts.
“You cannot write three plays and then stop,” Shaw has explained.
Accordingly, for obvious reasons, social determinism ceased to be the
motive force of Shaw's dramas; and he began to write plays concerned
more particularly with the comedy and tragedy of individual life and
destiny. Shaw did not cease to be a satirist, did not desist from his
effort to startle the public out of its bland complacency: he merely
diverted for the time being the current of his satire from social
abuses to the shams, pretences, illusions and self-deceptions of
individual life. Having learned to beware of solemnity, Shaw makes the
satiric jest his point of departure. From this time forward he occupies
and operates upon a new plane. He has ceased to be purely the social
scavenger. Bernard Shaw's comedy of manners and of character now enters
into the history of British drama.
_Arms and the Man_--obviously deriving its title from the _Arma
virumque cano_ of the opening line of Virgil's _Æneid_--is one of
Shaw's most delightful comedies--a genuine comedy of character and yet
_theatrical_ in the true sense, Dr. Brandes has called it. Not the
least of its virtues is the implicitness of its philosophy; perhaps
this is one reason why Mr. Shaw (as he lately remarked to me) now
considers it a very slight and immature production! From one point of
view, this play may be regarded as a study of the psychology of the
military profession.[144] From another point of view--the standpoint
of the regular playgoer--the play has for its dramatic essence the
collision of romantic illusion with prosaic reality.
[Illustration: =Playbill of _Arms and the Man_. Avenue Theatre, London.
April 21st, 1894. First production on any stage.=]
To many people the play appeared as a “damning sneer at military
courage,” an attempted demonstration of the astounding thesis
that heroism is merely a sublimated form of cowardice! When King
Edward--then Prince of Wales--witnessed a performance of the play, he
could not be induced to smile even once; and afterwards it was reported
that “his Royal Highness regretted that the play should have shown so
disrespectful an attitude toward the Army as was betrayed by the
character of the chocolate-cream soldier.”[145] Bluntschli is a natural
realist, to whom long military service has taught the salutary lesson
that bullets are to be avoided, not sought; that the main object of the
efficient soldier is not the bubble reputation at the cannon's mouth,
but practical success and the preservation of life. Shaw had never seen
service, never participated in a battle--save the battle of Trafalgar
Square. But he happened to be a modern realist with a tremendous fund
of satire and fantasy. And although he had to get his data at second
hand, he experienced no difficulty in finding abundant material, to
authenticate his presentment of the common-sense soldier, in great
realistic fiction such as Zola's _La Débâcle_, in classic autobiography
such as Marbot's _Memoirs_, and in the recorded experiences of English
and American generals, notably Lord Wolseley and General Horace Porter.
People were inclined to laugh Shaw's play out of court as an exercise
no more serious than that of a “mowing down military ideals with
volleys of chocolate creams.” Yet Shaw knew a man who lived for two
days in the Shipka Pass on chocolate; while some years later, during
the Boer war, Queen Victoria presented every soldier in the British
army with a ration of chocolate--chocolate which Liebig pronounced
the most perfect food in the world. The idea of an officer carrying
an empty pistol! And yet Lord Wolseley mentions two officers who
seldom carried any weapons, and one of them was Gordon. Bluntschli's
hysterical condition in the first act finds its analogue in General
Porter's account describing the condition of his troops after a battle.
And Bluntschli's delightful description of a cavalry charge finds its
analogue, not in the Tennysonian _Charge of the Light Brigade_, but in
the account of this charge as given by the popular historian Kinglake;
and, as a matter of fact, Shaw's description was taken almost verbatim
from an account given privately to a friend of Shaw's by an officer
who served in the Franco-Prussian war. The catalogue might easily
be extended; suffice it to say that, _irrespective of the totality
of impression_, there can be no question of the credibility of the
separate incidents in the play, which furnished such ready targets for
critical marksmanship.[146]
From the dramatic side, _Arms and the Man_ is far less a “realistic”
comedy than a satiric exposure of the illusions of warfare, of love,
of romantic idealism. Of course, Shaw imparts an air of pleasing
likelihood to the racial traits or characters, and the local colour of
the scenes; and, as Dr. Brandes has remarked, in Bernard Shaw's choice
of themes one feels the mental suppleness of the modern critic, with
his ability to throw himself sympathetically into different historic
periods and into the minds of different races. In _Arms and the Man_,
“the whole environment is characteristic, the people of most refinement
being proud of washing themselves 'almost every day,' and of owning
a 'library,' the only one in the district. Everything smacks of the
Balkan Peninsula, even to the waiting-maid and the man-servant, with
their half-Asiatic mingling of forwardness and servility.”[147] To
be accurate, Shaw sketches in his _milieu_ with the very lightest of
strokes. Bluntschli might just as well have served in a war between
Peru and Chili, or Greece and Turkey; while for all practical purposes,
the scene might just as well have been laid along the coasts of
Bohemia. I have long contended that _Arms and the Man_ was not a play,
but a light opera; and now comes Oscar Straus to compose the music for
the libretto adapted from Shaw's Bulgarian fantasy.
Mr. Shaw once told me that his two friends, Sidney Webb, the solid and
the practical, and Cunninghame Graham, the hidalgesque and fantastic,
suggested the contrast between Bluntschli and Saranoff. “The identity,”
he explained, “only lies on the surface, of course. But the true
dramatist must always find his contrasts in real life.” And it will
be recalled that the rodomontade placed with such ludicrous effect
in the mouth of the Bulgarian braggadocio, had actually been used,
with equally telling effect, by Mr. Cunninghame Graham in a speech
in the House of Commons. Shaw promptly stole the potent phrase, “I
never withdraw,” for the sake of its perfect style, and used it as a
cockade for Sergius the Sublime. The great charm of the play consists
in the disillusionment of the romantic Raina and the sham-idealist
Saranoff by the practical realism of the common-sense Bluntschli. A
Bulgarian Byron, Sergius is perpetually mocked by the disparity between
his imaginative ideals and the disillusions which continually sting
his sensitive nature. And the true tragedy of the idealist, in the
Shavian frame of mind, is summed up in his words, “Damnation! mockery
everywhere! Everything that I think is mocked by everything that I do.”
And Shaw himself has said:
“My Bulgarian hero, quite as much as Helmer in _A Doll's
House_, was a hero shown from the modern woman's point of
view. I complicated the psychology by making him catch glimpse
after glimpse of his own aspect and conduct from this point
of view himself, as all men are beginning to do more or less
now, the result, of course, being the most horrible dubiety on
his part as to whether he was really a brave and chivalrous
gentleman, or a humbug and a moral coward. His actions,
equally of course, were hopelessly irreconcilable with either
theory. Need I add that if the straightforward Helmer, a very
honest and ordinary middle-class man misled by false ideals of
womanhood, bewildered the public and was finally set down as a
selfish cad by all the Helmers in the audience, _a fortiori_ my
introspective Bulgarian never had a chance, and was dismissed,
with but moderately spontaneous laughter, as a swaggering
impostor of the species for which contemporary slang has
invented the term 'bounder'?”[148]
_Arms and the Man_ has laid its hold upon the modern imagination, and
has been produced all over the world. What more delightful than to
have seen Bluntschli interpreted by the actors of our generation--by
Mansfield, with his quaintly dry cynicism, by Jarno, with a humour racy
of the soil, by Mantzius, with scholarly accuracy, by Sommerstorff,
with a touch of romance!--by Loraine, Nhil, Stephens, Daly. It is quite
true that the play is loose in form, oscillating between comedy and
fantastic farce, and that even now it is already beginning to “date.”
But its fantasy, its satire, and its genial philosophy will amply
suffice to give it a long lease on life.[149] Shaw's own confidence in
his power as a dramatist and in the future of the play is humorously
expressed in characteristic style in the following letter written in
response to an apologetic note from his American agent, Miss Elisabeth
Marbury, accompanying a meagre remittance for royalties on _Arms and
the Man_:
“RAPACIOUS ELISABETH MARBURY,
“What do you want me to make a fortune for? Don't you know
that the draft you sent me will permit me to live and preach
Socialism for six months? The next time you have so large an
amount to remit, please send it to me by instalments, or you
will put me to the inconvenience of having a bank account. What
do you mean by giving me advice about writing a play with a
view to the box-office receipts? I shall continue writing just
as I do now for the next ten years. After that we can wallow
in the gold poured at our feet by a dramatically regenerated
public.”
_Arms and the Man_ is an injunction to found our institutions, in
Shaw's little-understood phrase, not on “the ideals suggested to our
imagination by our half-satisfied passions,” but on a “genuinely
scientific natural history.”
A distinguished dramatic critic once said to me that he regarded all of
Shaw's works as derivative literature. Shaw's first three plays were
traced to Ibsen, to De Maupassant, to Strindberg; and won for him the
flattering title of the “second-hand Brummagem Ibsen” (William Winter)!
And after witnessing two acts of _Arms and the Man_ at the Avenue
Theatre, Mr. Archer began to have a misgiving that he had wandered by
mistake into The Palace of Truth. The relation of the art of Bernard
Shaw to the art of W. S. Gilbert is one of much delicate intricacy; and
deserves more than casual mention. Shaw has declared that those who
regard the function of a writer as “creative” are the most illiterate
of dupes, that in his business he knows _me_ and _te_, not _meum_ and
_tuum_, and that he himself is “a crow who has followed many plows.” In
a vein of mocking acknowledgment, Shaw once spoke of the seriousness
with which he had pondered the jests of W. S. Gilbert. A careful
critical examination of the methods of Shaw and Gilbert reveals the
undoubted resemblance, as well as the fundamental dissimilarity, of
these two satiric interpreters of human nature.[150]
One particular incident in _Arms and the Man_ seems to derive directly
from an incident in Gilbert's _Engaged_. The scene in which Nicola
advises Louka, his betrothed, to gain a hold over Sergius, marry him
ultimately, and so “come to be one of my grandest customers, instead
of only being my wife and costing me money,” is but a paraphrase and
inversion of that ludicrous scene in _Engaged_, in which “puir little
Maggie Macfarlane” advises her lover, Angus Macalister, to resign her
to Cheviot-Hill for the princely consideration of two pounds. Aside
from this one minor similarity, _Arms and the Man_ is very different
from a Gilbert play. For purposes of general comparison, turn once
more to _Engaged_--which will serve as well as any of the works of
Gilbert--for this passage:
CHEVIOT-HILL (_suddenly seeing her_): Maggie, come here. Angus,
do take your arm from around that girl's waist. Stand back,
and don't you listen. Maggie, three months ago I told you I
loved you passionately; to-day I tell you that I love you as
passionately as ever; I may add that I am still a rich man. Can
you blige me with a postage-stamp?
Here, not only is the comic note struck by the juxtaposition of two
essential incongruities: in addition, the farcicality of the idea
stamps it as impossible. It is an admirable illustration of that
exquisite sense of quaint unexpectedness, evoked by the plays of both
Gilbert and Shaw. Take now a scene of somewhat cognate appeal in _Arms
and the Man_. In both scenes the bid is for sudden laughter, through
the startle of surprise. Bluntschli flatly tells Raina to her face that
he finds it impossible to believe a single thing she says.
RAINA (_gasping_): I! I!!! (_She points to herself
incredulously, meaning, “I, Raina Petkoff, tell lies!” He meets
her gaze unflinchingly. She suddenly sits down beside him, and
adds, with a complete change of manner from the heroic to the
familiar._) How did you find me out?
BLUNTSCHLI (_promptly_): Instinct, dear young lady. Instinct,
and experience of the world.
RAINA (_wonderingly_): Do you know, you are the first man I
ever met who did not take me seriously?
BLUNTSCHLI: You mean, don't you, that I am the first man that
has ever taken you quite seriously?
RAINA: Yes, I suppose I do mean that. (_Cosily, quite at her
ease with him._) How strange it is to be talked to in such a
way!...
Gilbert employs a device of the simplest mechanism, giving merely
the shock of unexpected contrast. Shaw's spiritual adventure is an
excogitated bit of psychology, of intellectual content and rational
crescendo. It is the Shavian trick of putting into dialogue the
revealing, accusatory words seldom spoken in real life.
This calls to mind a resemblance--with a difference--between Shaw and
Gilbert. In Gilbert's _The Palace of Truth_ each character indulges in
frank self-revelation. Enchanted by the spell of a certain locality,
everyone is compelled to speak his whole thought without disguise,
under the delusion that he is only indulging in the usual polite
insincerities. All this self-analysis and self-exposure goes for naught
but to evoke laughter; for, lacking either profound insight into
human nature or cynical distrust of humanity, Gilbert is incapable of
trenchant generalization. In Shaw's plays, people play the game of
“Truth” for all there is in it; and perhaps Shaw's greatest capacity
is the capacity for generalization. Shaw's incomparable superiority to
Gilbert consists in his acute perception and subtle delineation of the
comic, and often tragic, inconsistencies of genuine human character.
Shaw has succeeded in revealing certain subconscious sides of human
nature that usually remain hidden because dramatists fail to put into
the mouths of their creations the real thoughts that clamour for
expression. One almost always hears their superficial selves speaking
solely through the voluble medium of society or the reticent medium of
self.
Not only in philosophic grasp, but also in imagination, does Shaw excel
Gilbert; an incident will suffice to explain. Mr. John Corbin once told
me that in comparing Shaw and Gilbert, he had instanced to Mr. Henry
Arthur Jones the play of _Pygmalion and Galatea_, as showing that,
after all, Gilbert had a heart and an imagination for beauty. “Ah,
yes!” replied Mr. Jones. “But Gilbert never could have written that
line in _Cæsar and Cleopatra_:
CÆSAR: What has Rome to show me that I have not seen already?
One year of Rome is like another, except that I grow older,
whilst the crowd in the Appian way is always the same age.”
Philosophically speaking, Gilbert's characters accept without question
the current ideals of life and conduct; and make ludicrous spectacles
of themselves in the effort to live up to them. Shaw's creations
discover the hollowness and vanity of these same current ideals, and
gain freedom in escape from their obsession. As Mr. Walkley once put
it: “Gilbertism consists in the ironic humour to be got out of the
spectacle of a number of people hypocritically pretending, or naïvely
failing, to act up to ideals which Mr. Gilbert and his people hold to
be valid.... Shavianism consists in the ironic humour to be got out of
the spectacle of a number of people trying to apply the current ideas
only to find in the end that they won't work.”[151] Let us have done
with rating of Shaw as a cheap imitator of Gilbert. It is quite true
that Gilbert anticipated Shaw by many years in the use of the device
of open confession--the characters naïvely “making a clean breast”
of things; but the device was handed on to Shaw for legitimate use
instead of for farcical misuse. In any deep sense, Shaw owes nothing
to Gilbert; and his paradoxes, unlike Gilbert's, are the outcome of
a profound study of human nature and of contemporary civilization.
“Gilbert would have anticipated me,” Mr. Shaw once assured me, “if
he had taken his paradoxes seriously. But it does not seem to have
occurred to him that he had found any real flaw in conventional
morality--only that he had found out how to make logical quips at
its expense. His serious plays are all conventional. Most of the
revolutionary ideas have come up first as jests; and Gilbert did not
get deeper than this stage.”
_Arms and the Man_ is the first of four plays which I class in a
category by themselves--the plays constructed in the loose and
variegated comedic form, presumably designed to be “popular” and
to amuse the public, fantastically treated, and imbued with a mild
philosophy held strictly implicit.[152] These four plays are _Arms
and the Man_, _You Never Can Tell_, _How He Lied to Her Husband_
and _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_. In _You Never Can Tell_ Shaw
deliberately made concessions to that coy monster, the British public.
Thitherto he had in large measure disdained the task of complying with
the demands of London audiences for a popular comedy, combining his
oft-praised cynical brilliancy and his talent for “giving furiously to
think,” with his unquestioned ability to amuse. Shaw's realization of
the truth of Molière's words: “_C'est une étrange entreprise que celle
de faire rire les honnêtes gens_,” did not in the least deter him from
embarking upon this perilous undertaking. In _You Never Can Tell_ he
gave himself up wholly to the hazardous task, tentatively inaugurated
in _Arms and the Man_, of attempting to amuse that public which had so
persistently refused, so defiantly scorned, his instruction. _You Never
Can Tell_ was Shaw's propitiatory sacrifice to recalcitrant London.
Strange to say, this deliberate concession to popular demand even his
most lenient censors refused to validate.[153] London, matching Shaw
for whimsicality, was no whit propitiated by his proposal of a _mariage
de convenance_ with that doubtful character, public opinion. Shaw
has taken Shakespeare himself to task for pandering to public taste
in a play coolly entitled _As You Like It_. When the “Dramatist of
Donnybrook Fair,” as Mr. Corbin calls him, sets out to write _As You
Like It_, what is the result? “You Never Can Tell!” It was nine years
before Shaw was able to change his tentative and dubious, “You Never
Can Tell!” into a triumphant, “I told you so!”
“I think it must have been in the year 1895,” one reads in some
reminiscences by Mr. Cyril Maude, the well-known English actor,
“that the devil put it into the mind of a friend of mine to tempt
me with news of a play called _Candida_, by a writer named Bernard
Shaw, of whom until then I had never heard.”[154] Mr. Maude wrote to
Shaw, suggesting that he be allowed to see the play in question. In
characteristic vein, the author replied that the play would not suit
the needs of the Haymarket Theatre, offering, however, to write a new
play instead; which Mr. Maude protests he never asked Shaw to do, yet
to which he interposed no objection. Whereupon Shaw took a chair in
Regent's Park for the whole season, and sat there, in the public eye,
we are told, writing the threatened play.
It was not until the winter of 1897 that this play, _You Never Can
Tell_, came into Mr. Maude's hands. It was accepted, and actually put
into rehearsal. From that very moment things began to go wrong. Shaw
proposed impossible casts, dictated to each actor in turn, equalled
his own John Tanner in endless and torrential talk. Actor after actor,
led by the genial Jack Barnes, withdrew in fatigue and disgust. One
day Shaw insulted the entire cast and the entire profession by wanting
a large table on the stage, on the ground that the company would fall
over it unless they behaved as if they were coming into a real room
instead of, as he coarsely observed, “rushing to the float to pick up
the band at the beginning of a comic song.”
After a first reading of the manuscript, Mr. Maude's misgivings had
been aroused to such an extent that he went to Shaw and plainly told
him that certain lines would have to be cut out.
“Oh, no!” replied Shaw. “I really can't permit that.”
“But in this shape,” protested the alarmed actor-manager, “the play can
never be produced.”
“My dear fellow, you delight me,” was the truly Shavian reply.
It was unbearable to the cast to be lectured and grilled unmercifully
by a red-headed Mephistopheles dressed like a “fairly respectable
carpenter” in a suit of clothes that looked as though it had originally
been made of brown wrapping paper. The rehearsals continued, however,
with the entire cast in a state of the most profound dejection.
“The end came suddenly and unexpectedly. We had made a special effort
to fulfil our unfortunate contract.... We were honestly anxious to
retrieve the situation by a great effort, and save our dear little
theatre from the disgrace of a failure.
“Suddenly the author entered, _in a new suit of clothes_!!” Nobody
who had seen Shaw sitting there day after day in a costume which the
least self-respecting plasterer would have discarded months before
could possibly have understood the devastating effect of the new suit
upon the minds of the spectators. “That this was a calculated _coup
de théâtre_ I have not the slightest doubt.” Shaw played the part of
benevolent rescuer, and the play was withdrawn. “I met him in Garrick
Street not long ago and noticed that he still wore the suit which he
had purchased in 1897 in anticipation of the royalties on _You Never
Can Tell_!”
“The only thanks that people give me for not 'boring them,'” Shaw
once said, “is that they laugh delightedly for three hours at the play
that has cost many months of hard labour, and then turn round and say
that it is no play at all and accuse me of talking with my tongue in
my cheek. And then they expect me to take them seriously!” No one can
accuse Shaw of taking the world seriously in _You Never Can Tell_.
Never was more playful play, more irresponsible fun. It is all a pure
game of cross-purposes, a contest of intellectual motives, a conflict
of ideas and sentiments.
This play is especially interesting to me because it was the first of
Shaw's plays I saw produced, and led me to a study of his works. And
yet I should be the last to deny that it is a farce, in which fun as a
motive takes precedence over delineation of character. The characters
are no more faithful to actuality than is the dialogue to ordinary
conversation. Indeed, the play is almost a new _genre_, differing from
the ordinary farce, in which action predominates over thought, in the
respect that here thought, or rather vivacious mentalization, takes
precedence over everything--the antics are psychical, not physical.
Shaw maintains, not that the play is a comedy, but that it is cast in
the ordinary practical comedy form. I take this to mean that Shaw has
utilized the stock characters and devices of ordinary comedy--not to
mention those of farce, burlesque and extravaganza!--purely for his own
ends, giving them a fresh and unique interest by animating them with
the infectious mirth of his own personality. At last Shaw has found
that loose, variegated, kaleidoscopic comedic form which freely admits
of the intrusive antics of the Shavian whimsicality.
There is not a single play of Shaw's that starts nowhere and never
arrives; and here the fault is not that the play has no meaning, but
that it has too many meanings. And it is perhaps just as well that
there is no clear line of thought-filiation running through the play.
It is quite possible, as Hervieu would say, to “disengage” one, or even
several motives, inter-linked with one another, from the play. Shaw,
however, seems content to put everyone on the defensive, to search out
the weak points in their armour, and to give to each in turn the _coup
de grâce_.
The play is notable in two respects--for its treatment of the emotions
and for the figure of William. Valentine is the imperfect prototype of
John Tanner. His sole equipment is his tongue; instead of a conscience
and a heart, he has only a brain. George Ade would have called him
“Gabby Val, the conversational dentist.” Gloria succumbs to the
scientific wooing of the new “duellist of sex”; her armour of frigid
reserve, the heritage of twentieth-century precepts, melts before the
calculated warmth of Valentine's advances. After allowing her to belong
to herself for years, Nature now seizes her and uses her for Nature's
own large purposes. And Valentine, but now the triumphant victor in
the duel of sex, realizes when it is too late that, after all, he is
only the victimized captive. All comedies end with a wedding, because
it is then that the tragedy begins! The real distinction of the play
consists in Shaw's portrayal of his conception of love as it exhibits
itself in the contemporary human being. As Mr. Walkley has put it,
love, in Shaw's view, is not, as with Chamfort, the _échange de deux
fantaisies_, but the _échange de deux explications_. With Shaw, the
symbol of love is not a Cupid blindfold, but the alertest of Arguses.
His intellectual reflection of the erotic illusion exhibits neither
tender sentiment, emotive abandon, nor sexual passion. Shaw's lovers,
as Mr. Desmond MacCarthy has pertinently put it, “instead of using the
language of admiration and affection, in which this sexual passion
is so often cloaked, simply convey by their words the kind of mental
tumult they are in. Sexual infatuation is stripped bare of all the
accessories of poetry and sympathy. It is represented as it is by
itself, with its own peculiar romance, but with none of the feelings
which may, and often do, accompany it.”[155]
The one really admirable figure in the play is the immortal William. A
master figure of classic, rather than modern, comedy, he suggests, with
exquisite subtlety, the graceful unobtrusiveness that dignifies his
calling. Whenever he loses sight of his menial position long enough to
utter one of his kindly bits of philosophy, it is always to fade back
again into the waiter attitude with such deference and such celerity
as to accentuate the pathos of the contrast between his station and the
rare humanity of his genial philosophy.
_You Never Can Tell_, which Mr. Archer found to be a “formless and
empty farce,” achieved immense popular success in New York and
London, has been produced with gratifying results throughout German
Europe, as well as all over Great Britain, and justifies Mr. Norman
Hapgood's characterization: “The best farce that has been upon the
English-speaking stage in many years.”
Before turning to the last of the fantastic farce-comedies, I would
mention very briefly the three little topical pieces which exhibit
the joker Shaw at his Shawest. First, there is that _petite comédie
rosse_, so slight as to be dubbed by Shaw himself a “comediettina,”
_How He Lied to Her Husband_--written in 1905 to eke out Mr. Arnold
Daly's bill in New York. “I began by asking Mr. Shaw to write me a play
about Cromwell,” relates Mr. Daly. “The idea appealed to him in his
own way. He said he thought it good, but then he raced on to suggest
that we might have Charles the First come on with his head under his
arm. I pointed out to Shaw that it would be highly inconvenient for
a man to come on the stage with his head under his arm, even if he
were an acrobat. Shaw, however, said he thought it could be done. In
the end, he said he would compromise. 'Write the first thirty-five
minutes of that play yourself,' said he, 'and let me write the last
five minutes.'”[156] What a convenient recipe for Shaw's formula of
anti-climax! The point of the little topsy-turvy, knockabout farce
is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the “Candidamaniacs”; but the
penny-a-liners usually paragraphed it as a travesty on Shaw's own play
of _Candida_. Shaw finally cabled: “Need I say that anyone who imagines
that _How He Lied to Her Husband_ retracts _Candida_, or satirizes it,
or travesties it, or belittles it in any way, understands neither the
one nor the other?” This comediettina is a bright little skit, but it
is no more amusing than it is untrue to the _intellectuels_ who made
_Candida_ a success in New York and laid the foundations of Shaw's--and
Daly's--success in America.
[Illustration: =Playbill of _You Never Can Tell_. Vasa-Theater,
Stockholm. Director: Albert Ranft. February 27th, 1908. Thirty-seventh
performance.=]
[Illustration: =Playbill of _The Man of Destiny_. Schauspielhaus,
Frankfurt. April 20th, 1903. First performance in the German language.=]
On July 14th, 1905, in a booth in Regent's Park, London, for the
benefit of the Actors' Orphanage, was “performed repeatedly, with
colossal success,” a “tragedy,” entitled _Passion, Poison and
Petrifaction; or The Fatal Gazogene_, written by Shaw at the request of
Mr. Cyril Maude. It is an extravagant burlesque on popular melodrama,
and the main incident of the “tragedy” is the petrifaction of the
hero caused by swallowing a lot of lime as an antidote to the poison
administered to him by the jealous husband of his _inamorata_, Lady
Magnesia Fitztollemache. “The play has a funny little history,” Mr.
Shaw told me, “having its origin in a story I once made up for one of
the Archer children. In the early days of William Archer's married life
I was down there one night, and one of the children asked me to tell
him a story. 'What about?' I asked. 'A story about a cat,' was the
eager reply. It seems that at one time my aunt was interested in making
little plaster-of-paris figures; and one day the cat came along, and,
thinking it was milk, lapped up some of the moist plaster-of-paris.
And so the sad result, as I told the Archer children, was that the
poor cat petrified inside. 'And what did they do with the cat?' one
of the children asked. 'Well, you see,' I replied, 'one of the doors
of the house would never stay shut, so my mother kept the cat there
ever afterwards to hold the door shut.' The funny part of it all was
that Mrs. Archer said that she had caught me in a lie--and to her own
children at that. To this day she never believes a single thing I say!”
“_Passion, Poison and Petrifaction_ is, of course, the most utter
nonsense,” Shaw continued. “But, would you believe it,”--with a
chuckle--“it was recently successfully produced in Vienna, and
seriously praised as a characteristic play of the brilliant Irish
dramatist and Socialist, Bernard Shaw!”[157]
Slightest of all three is _The Interlude at The Playhouse_, written
for Mr. and Mrs. Cyril Maude, and delivered by them at the opening
of The Playhouse, Mr. Maude's new theatre, on Monday, January 28th,
1907.[158] The little piece extracts all the comedy to be got out of
the embarrassment of an actor-manager over having to deliver a certain
speech, and the solicitude of his wife in making an appeal to the
audience on his behalf, but without his knowledge, for sympathy and
encouragement. The genuine delicacy and lightness of touch with which
the situation is handled, and the absence of Shavian intrusiveness,
unite in making of the interlude a little gem, quite perfect of its
kind.
The last of the comedies of character is _Captain Brassbound's
Conversion_, classified by Shaw as one of the _Three Plays for
Puritans_. This play might never have been written, but for the fact
that Ellen Terry made no secret of the fact that she was born in 1848.
When her son, Gordon Craig, became a father, Ellen Terry, according to
Shaw, said that now no one would ever write plays for a grandmother!
Shaw immediately wrote _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_ to prove the
contrary. And seven years later Ellen Terry portrayed Lady Cicely
Waynflete with a charm, a waywardness, and a grace that gave pleasure
to thousands in England and America.
Just as, in _The Devil's Disciple_, Shaw reduces the melodramatic form
to absurdity, so in _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_ does he reduce to
absurdity the melodramatic view of life. The scene of the play is an
imaginary Morocco, a second-hand, fantastic image vicariously caught
for Shaw by Mr. Cunninghame Graham. Not only did Shaw want to write
a good part for Ellen Terry: he also wanted to write a good play.
So he wrote a whimsical fantasy, half melodrama, half extravaganza,
conditioned only by his own mildly philosophic bent and the need for
developing Lady Cicely's character. The result, as he is fond of
saying, is simply a story of conversion--a Christian tract!
The protagonist, the pirate Brassbound, orders his life upon the
principle that, as Bacon puts it, “revenge is a sort of wild justice.”
He is imbued with mediæval concepts of right and wrong. In opposition
to him, he discovers his opposite--a cool, tactful, unsentimental
woman of the world, disarming all opposition through her Tolstoyism.
With sympathetic interest, she soon wins from Brassbound the secret
of his life, and with quiet and delicious satire, opens his eyes to
the pettiness of his mock-heroics, the absurdity of the melodramatic
view-point--the code of the Kentucky feud, the Italian vendetta. The
revulsion in Brassbound is instant and complete: he is wholly disarmed
by the discovery that, instead of being the chosen instrument for the
wild justice of lynch-law, he is only a ridiculous twopence coloured
villain.
“My uncle was no worse than myself--better, most likely,” is his final
confession to Lady Cicely. “Well, I took him for a villain out of a
story-book. My mother would have opened anybody else's eyes: she shut
mine. I'm a stupider man than Brandyfaced Jack even; for he got his
romantic nonsense out of his penny numbers and such-like trash; but I
got just the same nonsense out of life and experience.”
Lady Cicely Waynflete is the most charming woman that Shaw has ever
drawn. Shaw has intimated that he found in the friendship of Ellen
Terry, who served as the model for Lady Cicely, the “best return which
could be expected from a gifted, brilliant and beautiful woman, whose
love had already been given elsewhere, and whose heart had witnessed
thousands of temptations.”[159] In speaking of the character of Lady
Cicely Waynflete, Miss Florence Farr once said: “As a sex, women must
be for ever grateful to Miss Ellen Terry for teaching Mr. Shaw that
lesson about woman.” Nothing could be simpler or more effective than
the secret of command possessed by this charming woman. She knows that
to go straight up to people, with hand outstretched and a frank “How
d'ye do?” is all that is needed to win their confidence. The dastardly
sheikh, into whose hands she is about to be delivered, is stupefied and
“almost persuaded,” when she assures her friends that he will treat her
like one of Nature's gentlemen: “Look at his perfectly splendid face!”
Combining as she does the temperament of Ellen Terry with the genial
_esprit_ of Bernard Shaw, Lady Cicely is a thoroughly delightful and
unique type of the eternal feminine. She is just at the “age of charm,”
her actions are unhampered by sentiment, and her chief attractions
are frank _naïveté_, the trait of attributing the best of qualities
to other people, and an innocent assumption of authority that quietly
pinions all opposition. She always manages to do just what she likes
because she is bound by no ties to her fellow-creatures, save the bonds
of sympathy and innate human kindness. In one respect is she a true
Shavienne: toward law, convention, propriety, prejudice, she takes an
attitude of quaintly humorous scepticism. What a delicious touch is
that when Sir Howard protests that she has made him her accomplice in
defeating justice! “Yes,” is her delightfully feminine reply: “aren't
you glad it's been defeated for once?”
The moral of this charming but very slight and superficially fantastic
play is that revenge is not wild justice, but childish melodrama,
and that the justice of the courts of law, enforced by melodramatic
sentences of punishment, is often little else than a very base sort of
organized revenge. The fable is rather trivial; and the long arm of
coincidence puts its finger into the pie more than once, playing that
part of timely intervention at which Shaw is so fond of railing. The
mixture of Shavian satire with Tolstoyan principles is both novel and
piquant; and the mildly Ibsenic ending is a good “curtain”--Brassbound
discovering at last the secret of command, _i.e._, selflessness and
disinterested sympathy, and Lady Cicely ecstatically felicitating
herself upon her escape from--the bonds of love and matrimony.
One other feature of the play is the hideous language of the cockney,
Felix Drinkwater, _alias_ Brandyfaced Jack. It takes quite an effort,
even with the aid of the key which Shaw has considerately appended,
to decipher the jargon of this unhappy hooligan, “a nime giv' us pore
thortless lads baw a gint on the _Dily Chronicle_.” In Drinkwater, Shaw
sought to fix on paper the dialect of the London cockney, and he once
told me that he regarded this as the only accurate effort of the kind
in modern fiction. Interested in the study of phonetics through his
acquaintance and friendship with that “revolutionary don” and academic
authority, Henry Sweet of Oxford, Shaw put his knowledge to work to
represent phonetically the lingo of the Board-School-educated cockney.
“All that the conventional spelling has done,” Shaw once said in one
of his numerous journalistic controversies, “is to conceal the one
change that a phonetic spelling might have checked; namely, the changes
in pronunciation, including the waves of debasement that produced the
half-rural cockney of Sam Weller, and the modern metropolitan cockney
of Drinkwater in _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_.... Refuse to teach
the Board School legions your pronunciation, and they will force theirs
on you by mere force of numbers. And serve you right!”
FOOTNOTES:
[134] Compare the account of Mr. Eden Greville, one of Mr. Grein's
associates in the Independent Theatre Society, in _Munsey's Magazine_,
March, 1906, entitled, _Bernard Shaw and His Plays_.
[135] Mr. William Archer, writing in the _World_ (London), for
Wednesday, December 14th, 1892.
[136] The _Star_, November 29th, 1892. Mr. Archer once told me that
there was little doubt that Shaw wrote the “Interview” _in toto_.
[137] Matthew xxiii., 14; Mark xii., 38-40; Luke xx., 46-47.
[138] Appendix I., _Widowers' Houses_; Independent Theatre edition.
Henry and Co., London, 1893.
[139] _M. Bernard Shaw et son Théâtre_, by Augustin Filon. _Revue des
Deux Mondes_, November 15th, 1905; p. 424.
[140] _Mr. Shaw's Method and Secret_, letter to the editor of the
_Daily Chronicle_, April 30th, 1898, signed G. Bernard Shaw. In the
first draft, the play was entitled _Mrs. Jarman's Profession_.
[141] It should be clearly pointed out that Shaw is in no sense
indebted to Ibsen for dissatisfaction with the existent social order.
The facts of Shaw's life disprove the statement of Dr. Georg Brandes
(_Bernard Shaw's Teater_, in _Politikken_, Copenhagen, December 29th,
1902): “What Shaw chiefly owes to Ibsen, whose harbinger he was,
seems to be a tendency towards rebellion against commonly recognized
prejudices, dramatic as well as social.” Shaw's attacks upon modern
capitalistic society, both in _Widowers' Houses_ and in _Mrs. Warren's
Profession_, are the immediate fruits of his Socialism and his economic
studies.
[142] _Study and Stage_, by William Archer, in the _Daily News_, June
21st, 1902.
[143] Compare _The Author's Apology_, the preface to the Stage Society
edition of _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ (Grant Richards, London, 1902),
pp. xxvii. and xxviii. in especial; and also _Mainly About Myself_, the
preface to Vol. I. of _Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant_, pp. xxix-xxxi.
in the American edition (H. S. Stone and Co., Chicago, 1902).
[144] Compare _La Psychologie du Militaire Professionel_, by Auguste
Hamon, which appeared in November, 1893. I have no reason to believe
that Shaw was under any indebtedness to this book in writing _Arms and
the Man_.
[145] Compare the reminiscences on the Avenue Theatre production, by
Mr. Yorke Stephens, who played the part of Bluntschli; _Music and the
Drama_, in the _Daily Chronicle_, November 6th, 1906. It was at the
_première_ at the Avenue Theatre that Shaw, called before the audience,
found himself disarmed by lack of opposition. A solitary malcontent in
the gallery began to boo: Bernard was himself again. Looking up at the
belligerent oppositionist, he said with an engaging smile: “My friend,
I quite agree with you--but what are we two against so many?”
[146] Compare Shaw's brilliant article, _A Dramatic Realist to His
Critics_, in the _New Review_, September, 1894, appearing two months
after the close of the run of _Arms and the Man_ at the Avenue Theatre.
In _A Word about Stepniak_, in _To-Morrow_, February, 1896, Mr. Shaw
says: “He (Stepniak) studiously encouraged me to think well of my own
work, and went into the questions of Bulgarian manners and customs
for me when I was preparing my play _Arms and the Man_ for the stage
as if the emancipation of Russia was a matter of comparatively little
importance.... To him I owe the assistance I received from that
Bulgarian admiral in whose existence the public, regarding Bulgaria as
an inland State, positively declined to believe.”
[147] _Der Dramatiker Bernard Shaw_: in _Gestalten und Gedanken_, by
Georg Brandes, München-Langen, 1903. “Human nature is very much the
same, always and everywhere,” Shaw explained. “And when I go over my
play to put the details right I find there is surprisingly little to
alter. _Arms and the Man_, for example, was finished before I had
decided where to set the scene, and then it only wanted a word here and
there to put matters straight. You see, I know human nature”!
[148] From Shaw's preface to Mr. Archer's _The Theatrical World of
1894_, pp. xxvii-xxviii. In view of the interest manifested in _Arms
and the Man_ at the time of its first production in 1894, Mr. Archer
requested Mr. Shaw to say something about it in this preface.
[149] _Arms and the Man_ has, most appropriately, furnished the “book”
for a comic opera, entitled _The Chocolate Soldier_, written by
Bernauer and Jacobson, music by Oscar Straus, the popular composer.
It was to be expected that there would be many “comic” attractions in
the adaptation of Mr. Shaw's play. Of course, all the complications,
such as the incident of the incriminating photograph, are multiplied
by three: Nicola disappears and Louka makes way for Mascha, now the
cousin of Raina. In the end all are happily mated. In consequence of
the “comic variations” from the original play, Mr. Shaw insisted that
the programme contain a frank apology for this “unauthorized parody of
one of Mr. Bernard Shaw's comedies.” First successfully produced at the
Theater des Westens, Berlin, 1909, _The Chocolate Soldier_, both for
the borrowed, if parodied, cleverness, and the delightful music, has
since won great popularity through the productions of Mr. F. C. Whitney
(English version by Mr. Stanislaus Stange), in New York (May, 1910) and
London (September, 1910).
[150] Shaw has been charged with indebtedness, not only to W. S.
Gilbert, but to earlier topsy-turvyists. In April, 1906, there appeared
in the _New York Tribune_ a “deadly parallel” between _Arms and the
Man_ and _Used Up_, adapted from the French by Charles Mathews in 1845.
As a matter of fact, the passage cited--Bluntschli's proposal for the
hand of Raina (compared with Sir Charles Coldstream's for the hand of
Lady Clutterbuck)--is neither an imitation of Mathews, nor a triumph of
eccentric invention, but a paraphrase, Shaw unqualifiedly asserts, of
an actual proposal made by an Austrian hotel proprietor for the hand of
a member of Mr. Shaw's own family.
[151] _Mr. Bernard Shaw's Plays_, in _Frames of Mind_ (Grant Richards,
London, 1889), p. 47.
[152] By this method of treatment, chronology is of necessity
sacrificed to logic.
[153] Preferring to see Shaw fail seriously rather than succeed
farcically, Mr. Archer sternly admonished him to “quit his
foolishness”; and Mr. Shaw's former champion of Independent Theatre
days, Mr. J. T. Grein, gently but firmly advised him never again to
send up any more such _ballons d'essai_.
[154] _The Haymarket Theatre_ (Grant Richards, London, 1903). Chapter
XIV. (from which the above and following quotations are taken), Mr.
Maude says, “was sent to me as an aid to the completion of this work.
It professes to deal with that period of our management when we
rehearsed a piece by the brilliant Mr. Bernard Shaw. The writer, I am
assured, is well fitted to deal with that period. I leave it to the
reader to judge, and to guess its authorship.” Needless to say that the
author was Bernard Shaw himself!
[155] _The Court Theatre, 1904-1907_, by Desmond MacCarthy (A. H.
Bullen, London, 1907), p. 57.
[156] _Post-Express_ (Rochester, N. Y.), December 3d, 1904.
[157] _Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction; or the Fatal Gazogene_;
originally appeared in _Harry Furniss's Christmas Annual_ for 1905
(Arthur Treherne and Co. Ltd., Adelphi, London), pp. 11-24, with
illustrations by Mr. Harry Furniss.
[158] The text of this dainty little interlude is to be found in the
_Daily Mail_, January 29th, 1907. Mr. and Mrs. Maude were playing in
_Toddles_ at the time.
[159] The figure of Lady Cicely Waynflete possesses an unique interest
in view of the fact conveyed in the following record of Ellen Terry's:
“At this time (1897), Mr. Shaw and I frequently corresponded. It
began by my writing to ask him, as musical critic of the _Saturday
Review_ (!), to tell me frankly what he thought of the chances of a
composer-singer friend of mine. He answered 'characteristically,' and
we developed a perfect fury for writing to each other. Sometimes the
letters were on business, sometimes they were not, but always his were
entertaining, and mine were, I suppose, 'good copy,' as he drew the
character of Lady Cicely Waynflete in _Brassbound_ entirely from my
letters. He never met me until after the play was written.” _From Lewis
Carroll to Bernard Shaw_, in _McClure's Magazine_, September, 1908.
THE PLAYWRIGHT--II
“I have, I think, always been a Puritan in my attitude towards
Art. I am as fond of fine music and handsome buildings as
Milton was, or Cromwell, or Bunyan; but if I found that they
were becoming the instruments of a systematic idolatry of
sensuousness, I would hold it good statesmanship to blow every
cathedral in the world to pieces with dynamite, organ and all,
without the least heed to the screams of the art critics and
cultured voluptuaries.”--_Why for Puritans?_ Preface to _Three
Plays for Puritans_, p. xix.
“I do not satirize types. I draw individuals as they are. When
I describe a tub, Archer and Walkley say it is a satire on a
tub.”--Conversation with the author.