CHAPTER XII

_Man and Superman_ inaugurates another cycle of Shaw's theatre, and

first presents Shaw to the world as a conscious philosopher. By

reason of its bi-partite nature--it is sub-entitled _A Comedy and a

Philosophy_--this play furnishes the natural link between Shaw the

dramatist and Shaw the creator of a new form of stage entertainment.

It is worth recalling that at the time this play appeared Shaw had

not yet won the favour of the “great public” in England. He had,

however, won the attention and the enthusiastic, yet tempered, praise

of one of the ablest dramatic critics in England. Mr. William Archer

pronounced _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ a “masterpiece--yes, with all

reservations, a masterpiece,” and as each one of Shaw's plays appeared,

he discussed it in the fullest and most impartial way, bespoke for it

the attention of the British public, and roundly berated the managers

of the large West End theatres for letting slip through their fingers

the golden opportunities afforded by the brilliant works of the witty

Irishman.[181] For that matter, Shaw was not wanting in appreciative

students of his plays among the dramatic critics of the day; and even

Mr. Max Beerbohm and Mr. A. B. Walkley, though temperamentally Shaw's

opposites, took the liveliest interest in the Shavian drama.

Indeed, it was Mr. Walkley who asked Shaw to write a Don Juan play; and

the fulfilment of this request was _Man and Superman_. _Ab initio_,

Shaw realized that there are no modern English plays in which the

natural attraction of the sexes for one another is made the mainspring

of the action. The popular contemporary playwrights, thinking to

emulate Ibsen, had produced plays cut according to a certain pattern,

_i.e._, plays preoccupied with sex, yet really devoid of all sexual

interest. In plays, of which _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ is the type

illustration, the woman through indiscretion is brought in conflict

with the law which regulates the relation of the sexes, while the man

by marriage is brought in conflict with the social convention that

discountenances the woman. Such dramas, portraying merely the conflict

of the individual with society, Shaw had railed at in the preface to

his _Three Plays for Puritans_; such “senseless evasions” of the real

sex problem serve in part to explain Shaw's partial lack of sympathy

with Pinero during Shaw's _Saturday Review_ period. Shaw was in no mind

to treat his friend Walkley to a lurid play of identical import; nor

did the Don Juan of tradition, literature and opera, the libertine of a

thousand _bonnes fortunes_, suit his wants any better. The prototypic

Don Juan of sixteenth-century invention, Molière's persistently

impenitent type of impiety, and Mozart's ravishingly attractive enemy

of God had all served their turn; whilst in Byron's Don Juan, Shaw saw

only a vagabond libertine, a sailor with a wife in every port. Even

that spiritual cousin of Don Juan, Goethe's Faust, although he had

passed far beyond mere love-making to altruism and humanitarianism, was

still almost a century out of date.

This _reductio ad absurdum_ process finally gave Shaw the clue to the

mystery; the other types being perfected, and in a sense exhausted,

a Don Juan in the philosophic sense alone remained. The modern type

of Don Juan “no longer pretends to read Ovid, but does actually read

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, studies Westermarck, and is concerned

for the future of the race instead of for the freedom of his own

instincts.” Confronted with the stark problem of the duel of sex, Shaw

solved it with the striking conclusion that Man is no longer, like Don

Juan, the victor in that duel. Though sharing neither the prejudices

of the homoist nor the enthusiasms of the feminist, Shaw found it

easy to persuade himself that woman has become dangerous, aggressive,

powerful. The _rôles_ established by romantic convention, and evidenced

in the hackneyed phrase “Man is the hunter, woman the game,” are now

reversed: Woman takes the initiative in the selection of her mate. Thus

is Don Juan reincarnated; once the headlong huntsman, he is now the

helpless quarry. _Man and Superman_, in Shaw's own words, is “a stage

projection of the tragi-comic love chase of the man by the woman.”

[Illustration: =Program of _Man and Superman_.

Hudson Theatre, N. Y. May 21st, 1906. Second Season.=]

Shaw's solution of the problem was generally regarded as audaciously

novel and original. And yet, as Shaw points out in the Dedicatory

Epistle, and as I have indicated in a former chapter, the notion is

very far from novel. Beaumont and Fletcher's _The Wild Goose Chase_

furnishes the interesting analogy of Mirabell, a travelled Italianate

gentleman and cynical philanderer, pursued by Oriana, the “witty

follower of the chase,” who employs a number of more or less crude and

coarse artifices to entrap him; when the ingenuity of the dramatists

is exhausted, Mirabell succumbs to Oriana's wiles.[182] And those who

have a passion for attributing all Shaw's ideas to Nietzsche, might

find some support in that passage in _A Genealogy of Morals_: “The

philosopher abhors _wedlock_ and all that would fain persuade to this

state, as being an obstacle and fatality on his road to the _optimum_.

Who among the great philosophers is known to have been married?

Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer--they were

not; nay, we cannot even so much as _conceive_ them as married. A

married philosopher is a figure _of comedy_....”

The attitude toward woman exhibited by Shaw in _Man and Superman_ has

won for him the appellation, “the most ungallant of dramatists.” Mr.

Huneker has ventured to assert that Shaw is “practically the first

literary man who has achieved the feat of making his heroines genuinely

disagreeable persons.” Now to Wilde and to Strindberg, woman is an

inferior being, the history of woman being the history of tyranny in

its harshest form, _i.e._, the tyranny of the weak over the strong.

Shaw is quite as far from misogyny on the one hand as from gynolatry

on the other. From the beginning of his literary career, Shaw has

been imbued with the conviction that, to use his own words, “women are

human beings just like men, only worse brought up, and consequently

worse behaved.” In Shaw's plays it is a toss-up between the men and

the women as to which are the worse behaved. The women in Shaw's

plays seem always deliberately to challenge the conventional ideal of

the womanly Woman. As a dramatist, Shaw rebelled from the very first

against the long-established custom of making all heroines perfect, all

heroes chivalrous and gallant, all villains irretrievably wicked. Stock

characters, in Shaw's view, must be swept off from dramatic art along

with romance, the womanly woman, the ideal heroine, and all the other

useless lumber that so fatally cumbered the British stage. In Shaw's

first play, he confessedly “jilted _the_ ideal lady for _a_ real one,”

and predicted that he would probably do it again and again, even at the

risk of having the real ones mistaken for counter-ideals. Shaw has kept

his promise, and has been jilting the ideal lady ever since.

M. Filon finds Shaw's “_galerie de femmes_” nothing short of

astonishing in the veracity and vitality of the likenesses. Ann

Whitefield, whom Shaw once pronounced his “most gorgeous female,”

is really one of his least successful portraits. “As I sat watching

_Everyman_ at the Charterhouse,” says Shaw, “I said to myself, 'Why

not Everywoman?' Ann was the result; every woman is not Ann; but Ann

is Everywoman.” Thus the play takes on the character of a “morality,”

and purports to adumbrate a deep, underlying truth of nature.

Unfortunately, Shaw is not a flesh painter; Ann is not a successful

portrait of a woman who is “an unscrupulous user of her personal

fascination to make men give her what she wants.” She is deficient in

feminine subtlety--the obscurer instincts and emotions of sex. The

strong, heedless, unquestioning voice of fruitful nature voices its

command, not through the passion of a “mother woman,” but through

the medium of the comic loquacity of a laughing philosopher![183] In

the master works of that sovereign student of human nature, Thomas

Hardy, the Life Force holds full sway; Wedekind's _Erdgeist_ reveals

the omnivorous, man-eating monster, devouring her human prey with all

the ferocity of a she-lioness. Inability to portray sexual passion

convincingly is a limitation of Shaw's art. And yet in the present

instance we must not forget that, as Mr. Archer reminds us, “no doubt

the logic of allegory demanded that the case should be stated in its

extremest form, and that the crudest femineity should, in the end,

conquer the alertest and most open-eyed masculinity.” While concerned

with the problem of sex, _Man and Superman_ remains a drama of ideas.

And it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, had the Life Force

in Ann been supreme, Maeterlinck would have been vindicated by her in

his fine saying: “The first kiss of the betrothed is but the seal which

thousands of hands, craving for birth, have impressed upon the lips of

the mother they desire.”

_Man and Superman_ is the most pervasively brilliant of all Shaw's

comedies. And in spite of the fact that the idea-plot is intricate and

requires to be disengaged from the action-plot the comedy, as I saw it

produced in both New York and London, gave rise to an almost unbroken

burst of merriment on the part of the audience. It is customary to

identify Shaw with Tanner; and in the first production of _Man and

Superman_ at the Court Theatre, Tanner (Mr. Granville Barker) was “made

up” to represent Shaw. As a matter of fact, Mr. Shaw once told me that

in Tanner, with all his headlong loquacity, is satirized Mr. H. M.

Hyndman, the great Socialist orator. One other detail in the play is

noteworthy--the extrinsically irrelevant incident which leaves everyone

at the end of the first act “cowering before the wedding-ring.” It is

an illustration of a curious device once or twice employed by Shaw--a

sort of comic “sell” of the audience, appearing beside the mark

because its relation with the action is ideological, not dramatic. In

general, the effect of _Man and Superman_ is to make one wish that

Shaw would write a comedy of matrimony furnishing the lamentable

spectacle pictured by Nietzsche of the married philosopher. Mr. Robert

Loraine has actually written a clever sketch upon this theme, entitled

_The Reformer's Revenge; or, the Revolutionist's Reconciliation to

Reality_;[184] and Mr. William Archer publicly urged Shaw to complete

his “Morality” and (following the precedent of _Lord Dundreary Married

and Settled_) give us _John Tanner Married and Done For_.

The play just discussed is the society comedy, as it appears in the

printed book, with the omission of the Shavio-Socratic scene in hell,

and one or two alterations and omissions in the printed play itself.

The dream in hell--Act III. of the printed book--is the ultimate form

of Shaw's drama of discussion, and has actually been successfully

presented at the Court Theatre, London. When I saw it produced there,

I was surprised to note the favour with which it was received, the

brilliancy and wit of the dialogue compensating in great measure for

the absence of all action and the exceptional length of the speeches.

At last Shaw's dream of long speeches, Shavian rhetoric, and a pit

of philosophers was realized. Upon the average popular audience, the

effect would doubtless have been devastating; and even under the most

favourable circumstances, the audience was partially seduced into

appreciative interest by well-executed scenic effects, exquisite

costumes specially designed by Charles Ricketts, and a long synopsis of

_Don Juan in Hell_, especially prepared by the author.[185]

The year 1904 marks a turning-point in the career of Bernard Shaw. The

average age at which artists create their greatest work is forty-six

to forty-seven, according to Jastrow's table; and so, practically

speaking, _John Bull's Other Island_ is chronologically announced as

Shaw's _magnum opus_. In the technical, no less than in the popular

sense, this path-breaking play registers the inauguration of a new

epoch in Shaw's career. In this new phase we find him breaking squarely

with tradition, and finding artistic freedom in nonconformity. A true

drama of national character, _John Bull's Other Island_ portrays the

conflict of racial types and exhibits its author as a descendant of

Molière, a master of comic irony, and at heart a poet.

Originally designed for production by Mr. W. B. Yeats under the

auspices of the Irish Literary Theatre, this play was found unsuited

both to the resources of the new Abbey Theatre and to the temper of

the neo-Gaelic movement.[186] Temperamentally incapable of visionarily

imagining Ireland as “a little old woman called Kathleen ni Hoolihan,”

Shaw drew a bold and uncompromising picture of the real Ireland of

to-day; and the sequel was the production of the play, not at the

Abbey, but at the Royal Court Theatre, London. That interesting

experiment in dramatic production inaugurated by Messrs. J. E.

Vedrenne and H. Granville Barker at the Royal Court Theatre in 1904,

furnishes material for the most interesting chapter in the history

of the development of the contemporary English drama.[187] The

companies trained by Mr. Barker, an able actor and already a promising

dramatist, wrought something very like a revolution in the art of

dramatic production in England. The unity of tone, the subordination

of the individual, the general striving for totality of effect, the

constant changes of bill, the abolition of the “star” system--all

were noteworthy features of these productions. There were given nine

hundred and eighty-eight performances of thirty-two plays by seventeen

authors; seven hundred and one of these performances were of eleven

plays by one author--Bernard Shaw. Plays of other authors--notably of

Mr. Barker himself--were produced, and often with noticeable success.

But in the main the whole undertaking may be regarded as a monster Shaw

_Festspiel_, prolonged over three years. Mr. Barker, Mr. Galsworthy,

the late Mr. Hankin, Miss Elizabeth Robins and Mr. Masefield, all came

prominently into public notice as dramatists of the “new” school.

The Court was not, in the strict sense, a repertory theatre; rather

it furnished a tentative compromise between the _théâtre à coté_ and

the actor-managed theatre backed by a syndicate of capitalists. The

Vedrenne-Barker enterprise did the imperatively needed pioneer work of

breaking ground for the repertory theatre idea; created a public of

intelligent playgoers with literary tastes, who had long since lost

interest in the theatre of commerce; developed a whole “school” of

playwrights, with Mr. Barker at their head; and brought to the English

public at large a belated consciousness of the greatness of Bernard

Shaw.

[Illustration: =H. Granville Barker.=]

_Alvin Langdon Coburn._ From the original monochrome, made in 1908.

Coming at a political _Sturm und Drang_ period, _John Bull's Other

Island_ achieved an immediate and immense success. Leading figures

in public life, including Mr. Arthur Balfour and the late Sir Henry

Campbell-Bannerman, again and again heard the play with unmitigated

delight; and, finally, King Edward “commanded” a special

performance. The gods of English society, upon whose knees ever rests

the ultimate fate of the British artist, suddenly awoke at last to

the realization of the fact that a genius was living in their midst.

_John Bull's Other Island_ marked a new stage in Shaw's career; for

whilst the play itself is the _fine fleur_ of Shavian dramaturgy, the

characters are set firmly upon solid ground. In Shaw's former plays, as

a rule, the locality was not strikingly material, the characters often

supra-natural, and the ideas deftly bandied about at times, much as a

juggler manipulates glass balls. This new play exhibited nothing short

of a new type of drama. Emotion is subsidiary to idea, action is less

important than character, and conflict of ideas replaces the conflict

of wills of the dramatic formula.

In the Shavian _Anschauung_, the action and reaction of national types

inevitably takes precedence over the purely human problem of the love

story. The study in emotional psychology is the incidental underplot

to the larger study of England _versus_ Ireland; here we see the line

of cleavage between Shaw and the conventional dramatist. Shaw's hand,

so deft in the handling of national types, the portrayal of racial

traits, failed him in the delicate task of the exhibition of vital

emotion. “I do not accuse Mr. Shaw of dealing in symbols,” says Mr.

John Corbin, “but I shall not, I am sure, misinterpret him radically

in saying that _Nora_ is _Kathleen ni Hoolihan_--the embodiment of his

idea of Ireland. The real drama of the piece centres in the story of

how the Irishman loses Nora and the Briton wins her.... In his heart

Larry loves his countrywoman, as she has always loved him, and she has

no real affection for the Briton. Here lies the comic irony of the

_dénouement_, the very essence of Shaw's comment on his problem.”[188]

The “real drama,” one rather feels, is the death struggle of nations.

Ireland and England are the antagonist and protagonist, respectively,

of the drama; and the dramatic characters, in a broad sense, are both

individualized human beings and concrete impersonations of racial

traits. It seems to me quite improbable that _John Bull's Other

Island_ will “cross frontiers” as readily as many of Shaw's other

plays. For, despite the signal merits of the character-drawing, the

problem is essentially unique, and, as the title implies, peculiar to

the British Isles.

Roscullen, the scene of the play, is a segment of the living Ireland,

and here are encountered all those conflicting elements which have

made a hopeless enigma of the Irish question for so many generations.

In this miniature Ireland we find jostling each other the dreamer and

the bigot, the superstitious and the unilluded. Instead of the great

landowner, there is a group of small proprietors, who treat their

employees and tenants with a harshness and industrial cruelty that can

only result in the latter's ruin. Religion continues to be the dominant

force in the community; and the clergy exhibit that profound political

sagacity and that unscrupulousness in playing upon the superstition

of the credulous peasants which are such defining marks of the Roman

Catholic priesthood. Ireland's sense of her oppression and bitter

wrongs has not succeeded in destroying her sense of humour, her passion

for mysticism, and her native charm. These qualities we observe in

the ineffable merriment of the peasants over the comic spectacle of

Broadbent as an unconscious humorist; in the fascinating figure of the

Irish St. Francis, chatting amicably with the grasshopper and breaking

his heart over Ireland; and in Nora Reilly, quintessence of graceful

coquetry, _larmoyant_ piquancy and Celtic charm.

Thomas Broadbent, Shaw's conception of the typical Englishman,

approximates quite closely to Napoleon's description of the Englishman

in _The Man of Destiny_. To Mr. A. B. Walkley's characterization of

_John Bull's Other Island_ as a “Shavian farrago,” Shaw replied,

“Walkley is too thorough an Englishman to be dramatically conscious

of what an Englishman is, and too clever and individual a man to

identify himself with a typical averaged English figure. I delight in

Walkley: he has the courage of his _esprit_; and it gives me a sense

of power to be able to play with him as I have done in a few Broadbent

strokes which are taken straight from him.”[189] And in a letter to

Mr. James Huneker, of date January 4th, 1904, Shaw says, “I tell you,

you don't appreciate the vitality of the English.... Cromwell said

that no man goes farther than the man who doesn't know where he is

going.” In that you have the whole secret of the “typical averaged

English figure.” Endowed with the stolid density and exaggerated

self-confidence of the average Englishman, Broadbent resolves to

study the apparently insoluble Irish question “on the ground”; but

his incurable ignorance of Ireland's plight stands revealed in his

declared faith that the panacea for all of Ireland's ills is to be

found in the “great principles of the great Liberal party.” Ireland

irresistibly appeals to his sentimentalities through its traditional

charms--the Celtic melancholy, the Irish voice, the rich blarney, the

poetic brogue. “Of the evils you describe,” he says to Keegan, “some

are absolutely necessary for the preservation of society and others

are encouraged only when the Tories are in office.” ... “I see no

evils in the world--except, of course, natural evils--that cannot be

remedied by freedom, self-government, and English institutions. I think

so, not because I am an Englishman, but as a matter of common sense.”

With blundering shrewdness, Broadbent announces himself as a candidate

for the parliamentary seat, on the ground that he is a Home Ruler, a

Nationalist, and Ireland's truest friend and supporter. “Reform,” he

announces, “means maintaining these reforms which have already been

conferred on humanity by the Liberal party, and trusting for future

developments to the free activity of a free people on the basis of

these reforms.” In Shaw's description, he (Broadbent) is “a robust,

full-blooded, energetic man in the prime of life, sometimes eager and

credulous, sometimes shrewd and roguish, sometimes portentously solemn,

sometimes jolly and impetuous, always buoyant and irresistible, mostly

likable, and enormously absurd in his most earnest moments.”

Broadbent is a great comic figure, destined to take high rank in the

portrait-gallery of English letters. His foil, the Irishman, Larry

Doyle, without being less interesting, is less convincingly portrayed.

Doyle is cursed with the habitual self-questioning and disillusionment

of the self-expatriated Irishman. Realizing the charm of Ireland's

dreams and the brutality of English facts, Doyle longs discontentedly

for “a country to live in where the facts are not brutal and the dreams

not unreal.” His hope for a Greater Ireland is based on his own dream

of Irish intellectual lucidity mated with English push, the Irishman's

cleverness and power of facing facts grafted on the Englishman's

indomitable perseverance and high efficiency. And yet, he has absorbed

the English view of his own race; this “clear-headed, sane Irishman,”

so “hardily callous to the sentimentalities and susceptibilities and

credulities,” if we accept Shaw's estimate of the typical Irishman,

thus describes his own countrymen:

“Oh, the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding,

never-satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming! No

debauchery that ever coarsened and brutalized an Englishman can

take the worth and usefulness out of him like that dreaming. An

Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never convinces

him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can't

face reality, nor deal with it, nor handle it, nor conquer

it: he can only sneer at them that do, and be 'agreeable to

strangers,' like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets. It's

all dreaming, all imagination. He can't be religious. The

inspired churchman that teaches him the sanctity of life and

the importance of conduct is sent away empty, while the poor

village priest that gives him a miracle or a sentimental story

of a saint has cathedrals built for him out of the pennies of

the poor. He can't be intelligently political: he dreams of

what the Shan Van Vocht said in '98. If you want to interest

him in Ireland you've got to call the unfortunate island

Kathleen ni Hoolihan and pretend she's a little old woman. It

saves thinking. It saves working. It saves everything except

imagination, imagination, imagination; and imagination's such a

torture that you can't bear it without whiskey.”

A noticeable feature of the play's construction is its slow beginning;

the first act might more properly be called a prologue. The remainder

of the play, although it has little or no story worth recounting,

is constructed with unusual care; the interest inheres chiefly in

the dialogue and the traits of the principal characters. When Shaw

was charged with throwing all attempt at construction overboard, he

vehemently replied:

“I never achieved such a feat of construction in my life.

Just consider my subject--the destiny of nations! Consider my

characters--personages who stalk on the stage impersonating

millions of real, living, suffering men and women. Good

heavens! I have had to get all England and Ireland into three

hours and a quarter. I have shown the Englishman to the

Irishman and the Irishman to the Englishman, the Protestant to

the Catholic and the Catholic to the Protestant. I have taken

that panacea for all the misery and unrest of Ireland--your

Land Purchase Bill--as to the perfect blessedness of which all

your political parties and newspapers were for once unanimous;

and I have shown at one stroke its idiocy, its shallowness,

its cowardice, its utter and foredoomed futility. I have

shown the Irish saint shuddering at the humour of the Irish

blackguard--only to find, I regret to say, that the average

critic thought the blackguard very funny and the saint very

unpractical. I have shown that very interesting psychological

event, the wooing of an unsophisticated Irishwoman by an

Englishman, and made comedy of it without one lapse from

its pure science. I have even demonstrated the Trinity to

a generation which saw nothing in it but an arithmetical

absurdity. I have done all this and a dozen other things so

humanely and amusingly that an utterly exhausted audience,

like the wedding guest in the grip of the Ancient Mariner, has

waited for the last word before reeling out of the theatre as

we used to reel out of the Wagner Theatre at Bayreuth after

_Die Götterdämmerung_. And this they tell me is not a play.

This, if you please, is not constructed.”[190]

Not the least noticeable feature of the play is the omission of the

character which, in former plays, appeared as Shaw in disguise. The

characters are sharply individualized, each is a personality as well

as a type. Moreover, Shaw has seized the situation with the hand of a

master; we discern an Irish Molière revelling in the comic irony of

character-reactions, and observing the rigid impartiality of the true

dramatist. This very fairness allows Shaw a free play of intellect

that partisanship would have stifled; every situation is transfused

with the Shavian ironic consciousness. I once asked Mr. William Archer

which play he regarded as Shaw's _magnum opus_. “I suppose _Man and

Superman_ is Shaw's most popular play,” said Mr. Archer, “but I have

always regarded it, somehow, as beneath--unworthy of--Shaw. I should be

inclined to rate _John Bull's Other Island_ as Shaw's greatest dramatic

work.” I remember remarking to Mr. Shaw one day that _John Bull's

Other Island_ revealed greater solidity of workmanship and greater

self-restraint than any of his former plays. “Yes, that is quite true,”

replied Mr. Shaw; “my last plays, beginning with _John Bull_, are set

more firmly upon the earth. They have ceased to be fantastic, and tend

to grow more solid and more human.” The cleverest and truest remark

about _John Bull_ was made by W. B. Yeats: “_John Bull's Other Island_

is the first play of Bernard Shaw's that has a genuine geography.”

While no character in the play can be called essentially Shavian, it

is noteworthy that Keegan, the unfrocked parish priest, is the “ideal

spectator”; in his mouth Shaw places his own poignant criticisms

penetrating to the heart of the situation. At last the mystic in Shaw's

temperament utters his noble message. And the true poet, vaguely

shadowed forth in that essentially romantic figure Marchbanks, speaks

from the heart of Bernard Shaw in the accents of Keegan, the mystic:

“In my dreams heaven is a country where the State is the Church

and the Church the people: three in one and one in three. It is

a commonwealth in which work is play and play is life: three in

one and one in three. It is a temple in which the priest is the

worshipper and the worshipper the worshipped: three in one

and one in three. It is a godhead in which all life is human

and all humanity divine: three in one and one in three. It is,

in short, the dream of a madman.”

[Illustration: =Program of _Candida_. The Princess Theatre, New York,

Director: Arnold Daly. December 8th, 1903. The first professional

performance in the United States.=]

[Illustration]

In _Major Barbara_, Shaw's next play, we discover a reversion to

the earlier economic tone of _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ combined

with a more specific elaboration of the “Shavian dramaturgy.” This

“Discussion in three acts” has aroused so much discussion as to its

meaning and purpose that the story of its genesis may throw some light

upon its obscurities. Mr. Shaw once related to me the circumstances

under which the germ ideas of the play first took form in his mind.

It seems that, while spending some time at his county place, Ayot St.

Lawrence, in Hertfordshire, he formed an acquaintance with a young man

who was a near neighbour, Mr. Charles McEvoy, the author of a play

entitled _David Ballard_, produced under the auspices of the London

Stage Society. At the close of the War between the States in America,

Mr. McEvoy's father, who had fought on the side of the Confederacy,

and was a most gentle and humane man, established a factory for the

manufacture of torpedoes and various high-power explosives. The

idea of this grey-haired gentleman, of peculiarly gentle nature and

benignant appearance, manufacturing the most deadly instruments for

the destruction of his fellow-creatures appealed to Shaw as the

quintessence of ironic contrast. Here, of course, we have the germ

idea of Andrew Undershaft. The contrast of the mild-mannered professor

of Greek with the militant armourer occurred to Shaw as the result

of his acquaintance with a well-known scholar, Professor Gilbert

Murray, admirably kodaked by Shaw in the stage description: “Cusins

is a spectacled student, slight, thin-haired and sweet voiced.... His

sense of humour is intellectual and subtle, and is complicated by an

appalling temper. The lifelong struggle of a benevolent temperament

and a high conscience against impulses of inhuman ridicule and fierce

impatience has set up a chronic strain which has visibly wrecked

his constitution. He is a most implacable, determined, tenacious,

intolerant person, who, by mere force of character, presents himself

as--and actually is--considerate, gentle, explanatory, even mild

and apologetic, capable possibly of murder, but not of cruelty or

coarseness.”

In 1902, when _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ was produced in London,

Shaw said in the _Author's Apology_ affixed to the Stage Society

edition of that play, “So well have the rescuers (of fallen and social

outcasts) learnt that Mrs. Warren's defence of herself and indictment

of society is the thing that most needs saying, that those who know me

personally reproach me, not for writing this play, but for wasting my

energies on 'pleasant plays' for the amusement of frivolous people,

when I can build up such excellent stage sermons on their own work.”

_Major Barbara_ marks a return to Shaw's earlier preoccupation with

economic themes and is a profound study of some of the greatest social

and economic evils of the contemporary capitalistic _régime_. In

conversation, Mr. Shaw gave me the reasons which led him to write this

play.

“For a long time,” he said, “I had had the idea of the religious play

in mind; and I always saw it as a conflict between the economic and

religious views of life.

“You see, long ago, I wrote a novel called _Cashel Byron's Profession_,

in which I showed the strange anomaly of a profession which has the

poetry and romance of fighting about it reduced to a perfectly and

wholly commercial basis. Here we see the pressure of economics upon the

profession of prize-fighting.

“After a while, I wrote a play which I called _Mrs. Warren's

Profession_. I showed that women were driven to prostitution, not at

all as the result of excessive female concupiscence, but because the

economic conditions of modern capitalistic society forced them into a

life from which, in another state of society, they would have shrunk

with horror. Here we see the pressure of economics upon the profession

of prostitution.

“Finally, there came _Major Barbara_. Perhaps a more suitable title for

this play, save for the fact of repetition, would have been _Andrew

Undershaft's Profession_. Here we see the pressure of economics

upon the profession of dealing in death and destruction to one's

fellow-creatures. I have shown the conflict between the naturally

religious soul, Barbara, and Undershaft, with his gospel of money, of

force, of power and his doctrine not only that money controls morality,

but that it is a crime not to have money. The tragedy results from the

collision of Undershaft's philosophy with Barbara's.”

_Major Barbara_ is Shaw's presentment, as Socialist, of the problem

of social determinism. Undershaft began as an East Ender, moralizing

and starving, until he swore that he would be a full-fed free man

at all costs. “I said, 'Thou shalt starve ere I starve'; and with

that word I became free and great.” As in the case of Mrs. Warren,

“Undershaft is simply a man who, having grasped the fact that poverty

is a crime, knows that when society offered him the alternative of

poverty or a lucrative trade in death and destruction, it offered him

not a choice between opulent villainy and humble virtue, but between

energetic enterprise and cowardly infamy.” The doctrine of the direct

functionality of money and morality is no new doctrine. Colonel Sellers

maintained that every man has his price. Becky Sharp averred that any

woman can be virtuous on five thousand pounds a year. The penniless De

Rastignac on the heights of Montmartre, shaking his fist at the city

that never sleeps, bitterly exclaimed: “Money _is_ morality.” Shaw has

declared again and again in the public prints and on the platform, that

money controls morality, that money is the most important thing in the

world, and that all sound and successful personal and social morality

should have this fact for its basis. So Undershaft, asked if he calls

poverty a crime, replies:

“The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtue beside

it: all the other dishonours are chivalry itself by comparison.

Poverty blights whole cities: spreads horrible pestilences;

strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound

or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here

and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they

matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life:

there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London.

But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty

people, ill-fed, ill-clothed people. They poison us morally

and physically: they kill the happiness of society; they force

us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural

cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us

down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear

poverty. Pah! you talk of your half-saved ruffian in West Ham;

you accuse me of dragging his soul back to perdition. Well,

bring him to me here; and I will drag his soul back again to

salvation for you. Not by words and dreams; but by thirty-eight

shillings a week, a sound house in a handsome street, and a

permanent job. In three weeks he will have a fancy waistcoat;

in three months a tall hat and a chapel sitting; before the end

of the year he will shake hands with a duchess at a Primrose

League meeting, and join the Conservative party.... It is cheap

work converting starving men with a Bible in one hand and a

slice of bread-and-butter in the other. I will undertake to

convert West Ham to Mahommedanism on the same terms.... I had

rather be a thief than a pauper. I had rather be a murderer

than a slave. I don't want to be either; but if you force the

alternative on me, then, by Heaven! I'll choose the braver

and more moral one. I hate poverty and slavery worse than any

other crime whatsoever. And let me tell you this. Poverty and

slavery have stood up for centuries to your sermons and leading

articles: they will not stand up to my machine guns. Don't

preach at them: don't reason with them. Kill them.”

Now it is patent on reflection that poverty _per se_ is not a crime,

but frequently an incentive to crime; poverty is an evil that must

be remedied by social reforms.[191] The casuistry of Undershaft's

arguments lies in the assumption that good ends justify the worst

of crimes; but the very strongest case can be made out against this

materialist Socialism, inasmuch as it leaves out of consideration all

sense of individual integrity and personal honour. The implication

of _Major Barbara_ is that the _summum bonum vitæ_ is not virtue,

or honour, or goodness, or personal worth, but material well-being,

if not worldly prosperity. Undershaft expresses the doctrine of

those industrial captains of the predatory rich class whom Mr.

Roosevelt has entitled “malefactors of great wealth.” Mr. John D.

Rockefeller is publicly quoted as preaching to his Sunday School

class that it is every man's _religious_ duty to make as much money

as he possibly can--adding the sardonic parenthesis, “honestly, of

course.” Undershaft, whose motto is “Unashamed,” finds the parenthesis

superfluous--his expressed doctrine is to acquire money at all

hazards--_recte si possit, si non, quocumque modo rem_. He would

displace the Christian doctrine of submission with the Shavian doctrine

of self-assertion. If the present practice of the Christian religion

is found inadequate to modern social conditions, Undershaft asserts,

why, scrap the Christian morality, and try another--the Undershaft

morality, say, _faute de mieux_. But with that comic irony which never

deserts Shaw even in treating the characters most akin to himself in

temperament, he betrays the discrepancy in Undershaft's position: the

lack of connection between his “tall talk” and his perfectly legitimate

actions. There is no evidence that Undershaft employed dishonest

means in the acquisition of his wealth, or committed any violence in

the furtherance of his commercial ambition. Lady Britomart acutely

pricks the bubble in the assertion that she could not get along with

Undershaft because he gave the most immoral reasons for the most moral

conduct!

Shaw suffered the customary fate of the dramatist in having

Undershaft's Nietzschean doctrine of the “will to power” laid at

his own door. It is an historic fact that Shaw once dissuaded a mob

from going on another window-smashing excursion in the West End, by

convincing them of its futility: and yet in the preface to _Major

Barbara_ he says, “The problem being to make heroes out of cowards,

we paper apostles and artist magicians have succeeded only in giving

cowards all the sensations of heroes whilst they tolerate every

domination, accept every plunder, and submit to every oppression.” As

a Fabian, Shaw is a strict advocate of procedure by constitutional

means; he constitutionally agitated for Old Age Pensions, threatening

the Liberal Party all the while with speedy dissolution if this measure

were not carried into effect. It is quite evident that in _Major

Barbara_, Shaw is endeavouring to awake public thought and arouse

public sentiment in England upon the momentous problems of poverty

and the unemployed. To rich and poor alike, he quite consistently and

impartially preaches Socialism, finding this to be most effectively

accomplished by putting in the mouths of his dramatic characters

extremes of opinion expressed in the extremest ways. Shaw advises

the malefactor of great wealth, after acquiring a swollen fortune,

to turn Socialist and, emulating the examples of Carnegie and Rhodes

in educational and other fields, to employ his wealth in improving

the conditions of life for the working classes.[192] To the poor,

Shaw points out the inadequacy of the “paper apostles and artist

magicians,” and the imperative necessity of militant opposition to

oppression, revolt against subjection and poverty. In speaking of

Undershaft's “hideous gospel,” Sir Oliver Lodge pertinently says,

“Perhaps, after all, it is only the wealthy cannon-maker's gospel that

is being preached to us; why should we take it as the gospel of Shaw

himself? Shaw must have a better gospel than that in the future, and

some day he will tell it us, but not yet. As yet, perhaps, it has not

dawned clearly on him.... In nearly all Bernard Shaw's writings ...

the background of strenuous labour, of poverty and overwork, which

constitutes the foundation of modern society, is kept present to the

consciousness all the time, is borne in upon the mind even of the most

thoughtless: it is not possible to overlook it, and that is why his

writings are so instructive and so welcome.”[193]

From the dramatic standpoint, _Major Barbara_ is the most remarkable

demonstration yet given by Shaw of the vitality of a type of

entertainment in complete contradistinction to the classical model.

Shaw has created a form of stage representation, not differing

externally from the conventional form of drama, in which material

action attains its irreducible minimum, and the conflict takes place

absolutely within the minds and souls of the characters. _Major

Barbara_ consists in a succession of logical demonstrations, flowing

from conflicting reactions set up in the souls of the leading

characters by the simplest actions, externally trivial but subjectively

of vital significance. In this play Shaw fully justifies his cardinal

tenet of dramatic criticism that _illumination of life_ is the prime

function of the dramatist, and that the life of drama is not merely

the passion of sexual excitement, but the social, _religious and

humanitarian passions_. The drama of the future will concern itself

with the passion of humanity for all great ends.

_Major Barbara_ is epoch-making in virtue of its theme: the evolutional

struggle of the religious consciousness in a single personality. The

stage upon which the drama is enacted is the soul of the Salvation

Army devotee. “Since I saw the Passion Play at Oberammergau,” said Mr.

W. T. Stead in writing of _Major Barbara_, “I have not seen any play

which represented so vividly the pathos of Gethsemane, the tragedy

of Calvary.”[194] I do not see how anyone can read this story of a

soul's tragedy, or see the play upon the stage, without a quickening

of the nobler emotions, and a realization that Bernard Shaw is a man

of profound feeling and of sentiment, in the best sense. The second

act is the acme of great art, alike in the validity of its emotive

power and the marvellous portraiture of true practical Christianity in

the character of Major Barbara. The sanity and sweetness of her noble

nature, the positive divination of her religious sense which inspires

her to sink self and go straight to the heart of the religious problem,

are revelations in the art of character-portrayal. Her loss of faith

appears insufficiently motived in the play; her conversion in the last

act is even less convincing. Undershaft's intellectuality dominates

Barbara's emotionality; slight reflection might well have convinced

her that the Salvation Army accepted Undershaft's and Bodger's

“tainted money” without explicit or tacit obligation of any sort

whatsoever.[195] But perhaps she saw--as Shaw intends us to see--that

the Salvation Army is foredoomed to failure so long as its chief means

of support is derived from the very class against which it animadverts.

If the Salvation Army goes so far as actually to threaten the incomes

of the predatory rich, it will at once discover that its means of

support derived from that quarter, will be forthcoming no longer.

Not without its significance is the fact that, in _Major Barbara_,

leading dramatic critics found fantastic and absurd what leading

publicists found momentous and profound. To Mr. Walkley, _Major

Barbara_ was a “farrago,” to Mr. Archer, a play in which there are

“no human beings.” On the other hand, Sir Oliver Lodge and Mr. W. T.

Stead were immensely impressed with this play as a vital study of

contemporary religious and social manifestations. These contrasted

views tend to emphasize the facts that the plot of _Major Barbara_ is

quite obviously fantastic, and Undershaft a mystic whose ideas are

dangerously unpractical. And yet the separate characters in the play,

with the exception of Undershaft--and even in his case, we should

remember that no character is impossible in a world which holds a

Bernard Shaw--are all perfectly natural and perfectly comprehensible.

Shaw's practically unlimited acquaintance with all ranks of society

enables him to exhibit characters so diametrically diverse as Bill

Walker and Major Barbara, Lady Britomart and Mrs. Baines, Undershaft

and Cusins, Lomax and “Snobby” Price. The play's greatest faults

are the fantastic plot, the exaggerated discursiveness degenerating

toward the close into rather wearisome prolixity, and the lack of

conviction inspired by Barbara's “conversion” to Undershaftism at the

close. The seriousness of the theme is everywhere lightened by the

brilliancy of the dialogue, the deadly accuracy of the paradoxes,

and the satiric portraiture of social types. But Shaw's incorrigible

dialecticism leaves something to be desired; and we feel toward Shaw

the playwright much as Lady Britomart felt towards Undershaft. “Stop

making speeches, Andrew,” she says. “This is not the place for them”;

to which Undershaft (_punctured_) replies: “My dear, I have no other

way of conveying my ideas.”

Shaw recently asserted that the “way to get the real English public

into the theatre was to give them plenty of politics, to suffuse the

politics with religion, and have as many long speeches as possible.

I knew this because I was in the habit of delivering long speeches

to British audiences myself.” At the Court Theatre, and later at

the Savoy, Shaw drew the real English public to the theatre with

the politics of _John Bull's Other Island_, the religion of _Major

Barbara_, and the long speeches of these two and _Man and Superman_.

In his next play, which he told me he regarded as his most human and

most rational drama, Shaw's active and long-continued interest in

modern medicine found full vent. “The theme of my new play is modern

serumpathy; and the hero is a doctor,” he wrote me while engaged upon

the first act of _The Doctor's Dilemma_.

One day in the summer of 1906, during a visit to the Shaws at

Mevagissey on the seacoast of Cornwall, Mr. Granville Barker told

Mrs. Shaw about a friend of his, a Dr. W----, who had recently been

treated for tuberculosis at a London hospital. Mrs. Shaw was struck

by the recital, which prompted the consideration of the vast pains

often taken by medical scientists to preserve the lives of people who,

unlike Dr. W----, were quite useless to the world. Such people, whose

constitutions were hopelessly undermined, should not be dabbled over

for endless time to no purpose: it was agreed that they ought to be put

into the lethal chamber.

“Why, yes,” exclaimed Mrs. Shaw in a moment of inspiration, “there's a

play in that!”

Mr. Shaw replied: “Sure enough, I believe you are right. Hand me my

tablet and I will go to work on it at once.” The necessary writing

materials were immediately handed him; this was the beginning of _The

Doctor's Dilemma_.

Upon the leading motive of the play hinges the principal criticism

which might be directed against Shaw as a realist. Almost everyone is

inclined to maintain that, whereas problems of the most serious ethical

significance confront even the most ordinary practitioner, the dilemma

in which Ridgeon finds himself placed is one that would never arise in

actual experience. The truth of the matter is that the play is based

upon an actual incident; and Mr. Shaw once related the story to me in

detail. One day he was at St. M----'s Hospital, London, visiting a

famous physician, Sir A---- W----. The size of the hospital admitted

of only a few patients for treatment, say fifteen all told. In the

course of the conversation, an assistant came in to report to the head

of the hospital that some unknown man had made an urgent request to

be taken in as a patient at the hospital. “Is he worth it?” asked the

eminent physician. “This gave me the clue to _The Doctor's Dilemma_,

you see,” explained Mr. Shaw. “A choice between those worthy and those

unworthy to be treated, and presumably saved, was an ethical question

inevitably arising in virtue of the cramped facilities of the hospital.

The question whether the patient was physically worthless or not was in

no sense an inhuman question; and my own treatment, you see, is in no

sense either freakish or inhuman.”

After Ibsen's death Shaw wrote a critical appreciation of Ibsen's work,

in the course of which he said: “Ibsen seems to have succumbed without

a struggle to the old notion that a play is not really a play unless

it contains a murder, a suicide, or something else out of the _Police

Gazette_.... The Brand infant and Little Eyolf are as tremendously

effective as a blow below the belt; but they are dishonourable as

artistic devices, because they depend on a morbid horror of death

and a morbid enjoyment of horror.”[196] Loyally championing Ibsen and

the fundamental principles of drama--for the above quotation appeared

to be nothing short of an attack upon tragedy--Mr. William Archer

characterized Shaw's charge as “the æstheticism of the fox without a

tail ... the instinctive self-justification of the dramatist fatally at

the mercy of his impish sense of humour.” In a challenging tone he went

on to aver that Shaw “eschews those profounder revelations of character

which come only in crises of tragic circumstance. He shrinks from that

affirmation and consummation of destiny which only death can bring.

Death is, after all, one of the most important incidents of life, not

only to him or her who dies, but to those who survive.... If, in Mr.

Shaw's own phrase, 'the illumination of life' is the main purpose of

drama, what illuminant, we may ask, can be more powerful than death?...

It is not the glory but the limitation of Mr. Shaw's theatre that it is

peopled by immortals.”[197]

A few weeks later--as Mr. Archer himself has recorded[198]--a paragraph

appeared in the _Tribune_, “from an unexceptionable source,” announcing

the practical completion of _The Doctor's Dilemma_. This was its

substance:

“Mr. Bernard Shaw has been taking advantage of his seaside

holidays in Cornwall to write a new play.... It is the outcome

of the article in which Mr. William Archer penned a remarkable

dithyramb to Death, and denied that Mr. Shaw could claim the

highest rank as a dramatist until he had faced the King of

Terrors on the stage. Stung by this reproach from his old

friend, Mr. Shaw is writing a play all about death.... He has

not evaded the challenge by a quip; the play is in five acts,

with the fatal situation in the correct position--at the end

of the fourth. The death scene will be unlike any ever before

represented.”

The conversation at Mevagissey and the incident at the hospital in

London prior thereto were the real clues to the creation of _The

Doctor's Dilemma_. Mr. Archer's “challenge,” as Mr. Shaw assured me,

happened to fit in conveniently with his already formulated dramatic

plan. When the play was actually produced, Mr. Archer triumphantly

declared that Shaw had ingeniously evaded his challenge to “keep a

straight face long enough to write a scene of pathos or of tragedy.”

He explained that “death, of all things, requires to be approached

in humility of spirit, and that humility has been omitted from Mr.

Shaw's moral equipment. He must always be superior to every character,

every emotion, every situation he portrays.... If the 'King of

Terrors' thinks he can perturb or overawe the cool, clear, quizzical

intelligence of G. B. S., his majesty is very much mistaken.... As

he (Mr. Shaw) is superior to life, there is no reason in the world

why he should not be superior to death.”[199] In a later article Mr.

Archer maintained that Shaw had “doctored” the situation of Dubedat's

death. Moreover, Mr. Archer gave his case away in the words: “He has

not treated death soberly, seriously, naturally, or, in a word, with

a straight face. He has chosen an extremely exceptional case, and

has treated it realistically in outward detail; ironically in spirit

and effect. It was not realism I demanded--it was poetry!”[200] Now,

to expect a man quintessentially an ironic and comedic dramatist to

throw around death a halo of imaginative poetry is to commit the

critical blunder of complaining of one author that he does not write

like another--say, that Shaw does not write like Shakespeare. If

there is anything that Shaw abhors, it is the spectacle of death made

stage-sublime. And it is quite unreasonable not to expect a man who

does not believe in personal immortality to be “superior to death”; and

Shaw once said, as I have remarked elsewhere, that he was looking for

a race of men who were not afraid to die. Death is approached in _The

Doctor's Dilemma_ with neither awe nor humility; not by the doctors

who are professionally callous, or by the amoral atheist, Dubedat. We

are made to realize Jennifer's anguish during Dubedat's dissolution;

her action following Dubedat's death--the action of a Ouida or a

Laurence Hope--is both logical and psychological. It is quite true that

Shaw has not complied with Mr. Archer's unreasonable and extravagant

request; but he has treated the scene, allowing for the indispensable

“heightening for dramatic effect,” with acute psychological

penetration, with wonderful art, and with absolute consistency to his

own view of life--an eminently honest and square course to pursue.

Various other incidents in the play, branded unqualifiedly by numerous

critics as impish, in execrable taste, or frankly impossible, are

based upon actual occurrences; the names of the parties concerned and

the details are quite well known to others besides Shaw himself. For

example, Dubedat's disgraceful suggestion about the worthless cheque,

which of necessity must eventually be paid by Jennifer to avert

Dubedat's disgrace, is an exact record of a similar proposal once made

to Shaw himself by a man whose name, because of its association with

that of one of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century, is

known all over the world. Dubedat's lack of any sense of obligation to

finish pictures paid for before execution is paralleled in an episode

in the life of a well-known sculptor. The incident of the reporter's

suggestion to interview the artist's widow five minutes after

bereavement on “How it feels to be a widow,” is founded on fact. “A few

years ago,” Shaw recounts, “when Mrs. Patrick Campbell's husband died

in South Africa, a leading London paper sent a man up on the instant

to interview her. Of course, she didn't see him, and next morning

the editor of the paper in his story of the death actually expressed

grieved surprise at her lack of hospitality.” There is a scene in the

play in which Dubedat attempts to justify his conduct on the ground

that he is a disciple of Bernard Shaw, whom he calls “the most

advanced man now living.” To remove any misapprehension in the public

mind on the subject, Shaw recently told the following story:

“Some people have thought that by allowing the immoral artist

to say he was my disciple, I have virtually admitted that

all my disciples die immoral and that immorality is what my

teachings amount to. Of course, that is not what I meant. The

incident, as I say, was founded on fact. About six months ago

a scampish youth tried to blackmail his own father, and the

old gentleman, a most respectable person, was actually forced

to prosecute him. At his trial the youth excused himself just

as the dying artist in my play attempted to excuse himself--by

asserting that he was a 'follower of Bernard Shaw.' Then the

youth said some irreligious things that scandalized the judge,

and finally got sent to prison, where he actually expected me

to go to visit him and act as a sort of chaplain to him.”[201]

Lastly, there is the creed of the dying artist, beginning

with the words: “I believe in Michelangelo, Velásquez, and

Rembrandt”--universally deplored as impossible, to say nothing of

its being in execrable taste. “This creed of the dying artist,” Shaw

found himself forced to explain, “which has been reprobated on all

hands as a sally of which only the bad taste of a Bernard Shaw could

be capable, is openly borrowed with gratitude and admiration by me

from one of the best known prose writings of the most famous man of

the nineteenth century. In Richard Wagner's well-known story, dated

1841, and translated under the title, _An End in Paris_, by Mr. Ashton

Ellis (Vol. VII. of his translation of Wagner's prose works), the

dying musician begins his creed with 'I believe in God, Mozart and

Beethoven.'”[202]

In _The Doctor's Dilemma_ medical quackery and humbug are portrayed

with a satiric verve truly Molièresque. The long first act does little

to further the action beyond indicating that “to put a tube of serum

into Bloomfield-Bonington's hands is murder--simple murder,” and

suggesting that Ridgeon has a temporary “idiosyncrasy” to fall in love

with the first pretty woman that comes along. The real purpose of

the first act is to portray the state of modern medical science; the

quackeries of M. Purgon and Mr. Diafoirus come at once to mind, and

one feels that the picture drawn by Shaw is done much as Molière would

have done it, had he been alive to-day. In Dubedat Mr. Max Beerbohm has

discovered a strong resemblance to the Roderick Hudson of Henry James.

One catches here and there, too, a suggestion of the Oscar Wilde who

said: “If one love art at all, one must love it beyond all things in

the world, and against such love the reason, if one listened to it,

would cry out. There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It

is something entirely too splendid to be sane. Those of whose lives

it forms the dominant note will always seem to the world to be pure

visionaries.” This figure of a clever young artist, of rare charm of

temperament and phenomenal executive skill, who came to an early,

untimely end through disease had several prototypes in actual life; but

on the whole Dubedat must be regarded as a composite picture, and not a

portrait.” Dubedat raises the eternal question as to how far genius is

a morbid symptom.[203] The most notable passage in the play is the

discussion between Sir Colenso Ridgeon and Sir Patrick Cullen as to the

worthlessness of Dubedat, and the value of Blenkinsop.

“Well, Mr. Saviour of Lives,” asks Sir Patrick, “which is it to

be--that honest man, Blenkinsop, or that rotten blackguard of an

artist, eh?”

[Illustration: =Playbill of _The Doctor's Dilemma_. Schauspielhaus,

Cologne. January 23d, 1910. One hundred and sixty-first performance.=]

[Illustration: =Playbill of _Arms and the Man_. Schauspielhaus,

Frankfurt. October 6th, 1906. First performance at this theatre.=]

“It's not an easy case to judge, is it?” queries Ridgeon. “Blenkinsop's

an honest, decent man; but is he any use? Dubedat's a rotten

blackguard; but he's a genuine source of pretty and pleasant and good

things.”

“What will he be a source of for that poor innocent wife of his, when

she finds him out?”

“That's true. Her life is a hell.”

“And tell me this: Suppose you had this choice put before you: Either

to go through life and find all the pictures bad, but all the men and

women good, or to go through life and find all the pictures good and

the men and women rotten. Which would you choose?”

“That's a devilish difficult question, Paddy. The pictures are

so agreeable, and the good people so infernally disagreeable and

mischievous, that I really can't undertake to say off-hand which I

should prefer to do without.”

“Come, come! none of your cleverness with me: I'm too old for it.

Blenkinsop isn't that sort of good man; and you know it.”

“It would be simpler if Blenkinsop could paint Dubedat's pictures.”

“It would be simpler still if Dubedat had some of Blenkinsop's honesty.

The world isn't going to be made simpler for you, my lad: you must take

it as it is.”

After further discussion, Sir Patrick finally poses the issue in

clear-cut terms:

“It's a plain choice between men and pictures.”

“It's easier to replace a dead man than a good picture,” parries

Ridgeon.

“Colly, when you live in an age that runs to pictures and statues and

plays and brass bands, because its men and women are not good enough

to comfort its poor aching soul, you should thank Providence that you

belong to a high and great profession, because its business is to heal

and mend men and women.”

“In short, as a member of a high and great profession, I am to kill my

patient.”

“Don't talk wicked nonsense. You can't kill him. But you can leave him

in other hands.”

“In B. B.'s, for instance, eh?” queries Ridgeon, looking at Sir Patrick

significantly.

“Sir Ralph Bloomfield-Bonington is a very eminent physician.”

“He is,” accedes Ridgeon.

“I'm going for my hat,” adds Sir Patrick, with conclusive finality.

Whilst all the characters are admirably drawn and sharply

individualized, Shaw's inspiration is singularly displayed in making

of Jennifer a native of Cornwall, that land of rhapsodic faith and

splendid religious enthusiasm. She is a true child of nature, impulsive

and romantic, to whom belief in Dubedat's genius, much more than love

for his personality, has become nothing short of a religion. To engarb

herself in the “purple pall of tragedy,” the instant Dubedat is dead,

is a perfectly characteristic action. “Jennifer is an impossible person

to live with, I grant you,” Mr. Shaw once remarked to me, “but it is

clear to me that her impulsiveness and her unquestioning fidelity to

Dubedat's memory must find immediate expression in fulfilment of the

dying injunction of her King of Men. Even if I had been writing a

novel, in which the treatment is more leisurely”--this in answer to my

question--“I should have made her act precisely as she did.”

The first three acts of _The Doctor's Dilemma_ are as able in treatment

and solid in workmanship as anything Shaw has ever achieved. The

pervasive comic irony is tremendous; and if in the latter part of the

play there is a regrettable drop into farce-comedy, one should remember

that this is a fault shared in by the plays of Sheridan and Molière.

The anti-climax of the epilogue is banal--“a sell” of the true Shavian

brand. It is exceedingly amusing to the dispassionate onlooker to note

the discomfiture of the dismayed audience over the discovery that the

enigmatic author regards the identity of Jennifer's second husband as a

quite pointless secret between Jennifer and Bernard Shaw![204]

“I have just finished a crude melodrama in one act--the crudity and

melodrama both intentional,” Mr. Shaw wrote me on March 15th, 1909,

“which I should say will be played by Tree if it were not that my

plays have such an extraordinary power of getting played by anybody

in the world rather than by the people for whom they were originally

intended.” Even then, it seems, Mr. Shaw dimly foresaw the banning of

his play by the King's Reader of Plays, and the enforced alteration

of plans for its production entailed by that decision. Promised

initial production by Sir (then Mr.) H. Beerbohm Tree, “the first of

our successful West End managers to step into the gap left by the

retirement of Messrs. Vedrenne and Barker from what may be called

National Theatre work with his Afternoon Theatre,” _Blanco Posnet_

was driven away to far-off Dublin, where it first saw the light of

production. Upon no play of Shaw's, with the single exception of _Mrs.

Warren's Profession_, are we so fully “documented”--primarily due in

both cases to the interdict of the Censorship. Fortunately a letter

which Shaw wrote to Tolstoy in the autumn of 1909 gives a detailed

account of the genesis of the play. Tolstoy had been reading Shaw's

plays, and evinced much interest in the plot of _Blanco Posnet_ as it

had come to his ears. He expressed a wish to read the play, says Mr.

Aylmer Maude in his biography of Tolstoy, “because, as he said, to

many people the working of man's conscience is the only proof of the

existence of a God.”[205] When Mr. Maude repeated this conversation to

Mr. Shaw, the latter sent Tolstoy a copy of the play with the following

letter (quoted in part):

“MY DEAR COUNT TOLSTOY,--I send you herewith, through our

friend, Aylmer Maude, a copy of a little play called _The

Showing Up of Blanco Posnet_. 'Showing up' is American

slang for unmasking a hypocrite. In form it is a very crude

melodrama, which might be played in a mining camp to the

roughest audience.

“It is, if I may say so, the sort of play you do

extraordinarily well. I remember nothing in the whole range

of drama that fascinated me more than the old soldier in your

_Power of Darkness_. One of the things that struck me in that

play was the feeling that the preaching of the old man, right

as he was, could never be of any use--that it could only anger

his son and rub the last grains of self-respect out of him. But

what the pious and good father could not do, the old rascal of

a soldier did as if he was the voice of God. To me that scene

where the two drunkards are wallowing in the straw, and the

older rascal lifts the younger one above his cowardice and his

selfishness, has an intensity of effect that no merely romantic

scene could possibly attain; and in _Blanco Posnet_ I have

exploited in my own fashion this mine of dramatic material

which you were the first to open up to modern playwrights.

“I will not pretend that its mere theatrical effectiveness

was the beginning and end of its attraction for me. I am not

an 'Art-for-Art's sake' man, and would not lift my finger to

produce a work of art if I thought there was nothing more than

that in it. It has always been clear to me that the ordinary

methods of inculcating honourable conduct are not merely

failures, but--still worse--they actually drive generous and

imaginative persons into a dare-devil defiance of them. We

are ashamed to be good boys at school, ashamed to be gentle

and sympathetic instead of violent and revengeful, ashamed to

confess that we are very timid animals instead of reckless

idiots, in short, ashamed of everything that ought to be

the basis of our self-respect. All this is the fault of the

teaching which tells men to be good without giving them any

better reason for it than the opinion of men who are neither

attractive to them, nor respectful to them, and who, being much

older, are to a great extent not only incomprehensible to them,

but ridiculous. Elder Daniels will never convert Blanco Posnet:

on the contrary, he perverts him, because Blanco does not want

to be like his brother; and I think the root reason why we do

not do as our fathers advise us to do is that we none of us

want to be like our fathers, the intention of the Universe

being that we should be like God.”

It is inconceivable that this play should have been banned by the

Censorship.[206] It is a story of religious conversion, told with

sincerity and depth of conviction. So far is it from being irreverent

that it may, with truth, be described as the most sincerely religious

of all of Shaw's plays. “Like flies to wanton boys are we to the

Gods,” says Shakespeare: “they kill us for their sport.” Like pawns

in the great game of life are we to God, says Shaw; He uses us for

His own great purpose. “There's no good and bad,” says Posnet in his

puncheon-bench sermon; “but by Jiminy, gents, there's a rotten game,

and there's a great game. I played the rotten game; but the great game

was played on me; and now I'm for the great game every time. Amen.”

It is the final expression in Shaw of that neo-Protestantism which

had already found more or less adequate expression in _The Devil's

Disciple_ and _Major Barbara_. It needs no exposition here--especially

after Shaw's expository letter to Tolstoy.[207] One word only as to

the play's “crudity.” To an American, familiar with the scenes and

conditions described, its pseudo-realism is grotesque in its unreality.

Fortunately the import of the play is in no wise impaired by the fact

that Shaw has been unsuccessful in assimilating Bret Harte.

During the latter part of March, and the month of April, 1909, Mr.

Shaw, accompanied by Mrs. Shaw, went for his health on a motoring

tour through Algeria. His next play, which he had been requested to

write on the chosen subject by Mr. Forbes Robertson, was written at

odd moments during this trip. The play, described by Mr. Shaw as an

“ordinary skit,” was aptly entitled _Press Cuttings: A Topical Sketch

compiled from the Editorial and Correspondence Columns of the Daily

Papers_. In form, it is very like, though superior in characterization,

to a Paris _revue_; Julius Bab has pronounced it vastly above the

contemporary German _Witzblatt_. Its appearance just at the time when

the activities of the “militant” suffragettes were at their height,

was peculiarly _à propos_. Once again, the Censorship intervened to

ban one of Shaw's plays--this time on the ground that Mr. Shaw was

guilty, not of blasphemy, but of employing “personalities, expressed

or implied.” The Civic and Dramatic Guild was immediately created

to evade the interdict of the Censorship, and the play was produced

for the first time at the Royal Court Theatre, London, on July 9th,

1909.[208] The indignation aroused among dramatic authors and critics

by the banning of two of Mr. Shaw's plays in succession at last

focussed the opposition to the Censorship; and the dissatisfaction with

its operation, which had made itself felt vigorously, but more or less

intermittently, for a number of years thitherto, finally crystallized.

A special committee, from both Houses, was appointed by Parliament,

to examine into and report on the operation of the Censorship, and,

if necessary, to make recommendations as to its powers and functions

for the future. Many sittings were held, and a large number of the

leading men of letters in Great Britain, including Mr. Shaw himself,

actors, theatre-managers, bishops, men of various shades of opinion,

gave evidence before the committee. One result of the sittings of

that committee[209] has been the establishment of an advisory

board in connection with the Censorship. In many quarters hopes are

expressed that a Bill will be passed by Parliament for the purpose

of ameliorating the hardships of dramatic authors under the present

operation of the Censorship, and of giving greater encouragement to the

free development of a national English drama in the future.

[Illustration: =Playbill of _Press Cuttings_. The Kingsway Theatre,

London. June 21st, 1910. National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies.

Direction of Actresses' Franchise League.=]

_Press Cuttings_ is the most perfectly amusing thing Shaw has written

in many years. It recalls the days of delightful irresponsibility,

which seemed to have passed for ever--the days of _Arms and

the Man_ and _You Never Can Tell_. The adverse decision of the

Censorship is inconceivable, in the light of the sanction of Mr.

Barrie's _Josephine_, in which Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Balfour were

“caricatured,” and even a number of their public utterances put in

the mouths of the characters obviously impersonating them. Mr. Shaw's

Balsquith (Balfour-Asquith) and Mitchener (Milner-Kitchener) bear not

the faintest resemblance to any of the personages suggested by their

names--representing merely, in a light of broadly farcical-comedy, a

prime minister and a head of the army. From the situation arising from

reversing the _rôles_ of man and woman, due to the agitation of the

“militant suffragettes”--woman developing all the “manly” qualities

of pugnacity and overbearing insolence, man developing the “womanly”

qualities of timidity and indecision--Shaw has extracted a comedy that

is breezily, devastatingly comical. But, even in a topical sketch, Shaw

from time to time “puts away childish things” and shows us the serious

sides of several subjects. Those who indulge in the futile claim that

men are more useful to the world than women will find food for serious

reflection in the passage in Shaw's play in which General Mitchener

tries to excuse himself for giving way to profanity. He is sternly

reproved by the Irish charwoman, Mrs. Farrell--admirably played by that

remarkable character-actress, Miss Agnes Thomas.

“When a man has risked his life on eight battlefields, Mrs. Farrell,”

pleads the General in extenuation, “he has given sufficient proof of

his self-control to be excused a little strong language.”

“Would you put up with strong language from me,” queries Mrs. Farrell

pertinently, “because I've risked me life eight times in childbed?”

“My dear Mrs. Farrell,” expostulates the General, “you surely would

not compare a risk of that harmless kind to the fearful risks of the

battlefield?”

“I wouldn't compare risks run to bear livin' people into the world to

risks run to blow them out of it,” replies Mrs. Farrell conclusively.

“A mother's risk is jooty; a soldier's is nothin' but divilment.”

The popular hysteria in the fear of German invasion is reflected with

great cleverness in the discussions between Mitchener and Balsquith,

and Mitchener's vigorous asseveration caps the climax.

“Let me tell you, Balsquith, that in these days of aeroplanes and

Zeppelin airships the question of the moon is becoming one of the

greatest importance. It will be reached at no very distant date. Can

you, as an Englishman, tamely contemplate the possibility of having to

live under a German moon?”

Shaw's admirable art in character-creation is portrayed in the figure

of the orderly, a very minor part. In a brief scene or two, he shows us

a definite, clear-cut character, full of humour, consistency and point.

The orderly, with the sharpened vision of common sense, has penetrated

the great drawback to military service in England. The National Service

League might well ponder Shaw's words: “With regard to military

service, the only real objection to it in this country is the fact

that at present the man who enlists as a soldier loses all his civil

rights and becomes simply an abject slave. Sooner than submit to such

conditions, which are wholly unnecessary and mischievous, the country,

I consider, would be perfectly justified in resisting any such measure

by violent revolution.

“On the other hand, there is no reason why a man should not be

compelled to do military service just as he is compelled to serve

on a jury or to pay his taxes, provided that his civil rights are

unimpaired.”

FOOTNOTES:

[181] In a subsequent volume will be indicated in detail Mr. Archer's

intimate relation to the growth of popular interest in Shaw's plays.

[182] This parallel was called to my attention by Professor William

Lyon Phelps, of Yale University. Compare, for example, Tanner's long

outburst against the chains of wedlock with Mirabell's, “I must not

lose my liberty, dear lady, and like a wanton slave cry for more

shackles,” etc., etc. In reply to a question of mine in regard to

indebtedness, Mr. Shaw replied: “Why, I never thought of such a thing!

As a matter of fact, the old English comedies are so artificial and

mechanical, that I always forget them before I have finished reading

them.”

[183] Compare the novel, _The Confounding of Camellia_, by Anne Douglas

Sedgwick, concretely imaging the thesis of Shaw's play. The pursuit

of man is portrayed in its natural colours, the pursuer and temptress

being a seductive siren who exploits all the intricate wiles and

complex arts of personal fascination to ensnare her struggling prey.

[184] _The Actor's Society Monthly Bulletin_, Christmas, 1905.

[185] “As this scene may prove puzzling at a first hearing,” reads

the leaflet, “to those who are not to some extent skilled in modern

theology, the Management have asked the Author to offer the Court

audience the same assistance that concert-goers are accustomed to

receive in the form of an analytical programme.” Follows the synopsis:

“The scene, an abysmal void, represents hell; and the persons of

the drama speak of hell, heaven and earth, as if they were separate

localities, like 'the heavens above, the earth beneath, and the waters

under the earth.' It must be remembered that such localizations are

purely figurative, like our fashion of calling a treble voice 'high'

and the bass voice 'low.' Modern theology conceives heaven and hell,

not as places, but as states of the soul; and by the soul it means, not

an organ like the liver, but the divine element common to all life,

which causes us 'to do the will of God' in addition to looking after

our individual interests, and to honour one another solely for our

divine activities and not at all for our selfish activities.

“Hell is popularly conceived not only as a place, but as a place of

cruelty and punishment, and heaven as a paradise of idle pleasure.

These legends are discarded by the higher theology, which holds that

this world, or any other, may be made a hell by a society in a state

of damnation: that is, a society so lacking in the higher orders of

energy that it is given wholly to the pursuit of immediate individual

pleasure, and cannot even conceive the passion of the divine will. Also

that any world can be made a heaven by a society of persons in whom

that passion is the master passion--a 'communion of saints' in fact.

“In the scene represented to-day hell is this state of damnation. It is

personified in the traditional manner by the devil, who differs from

the modern plutocratic voluptuary only in being 'true to himself'; that

is, he does not disguise his damnation either from himself or others,

but boldly embraces it as the true law of life, and organizes his

kingdom frankly on a basis of idle pleasure seeking, and worships love,

beauty, sentiment, youth, romance, etc., etc.

“Upon this conception of heaven and hell the author has fantastically

grafted the seventeenth century legend of Don Juan Tenorio, Don

Gonzalo, of Ulloa, Commandant of Calatrava, and the Commandant's

daughter, Dona Ana, as told in the famous drama by Tirso de Molina and

in Mozart's opera. Don Gonzalo, having, as he says, 'always done what

it was customary for a gentleman to do,' until he died defending his

daughter's honour, went to heaven. Don Juan, having slain him, and

become infamous by his failure to find any permanent satisfaction in

his love affairs, was cast into hell by the ghost of Don Gonzalo, whose

statue he had whimsically invited to supper.

“The ancient melodrama becomes the philosophic comedy presented to-day,

by postulating that Don Gonzalo was a simple-minded officer and

gentleman who cared for nothing but fashionable amusement, whilst Don

Juan was consumed with a passion for divine contemplation and creative

activity, this being the secret of the failure of love to interest him

permanently. Consequently we find Don Gonzalo, unable to share the

divine ecstasy, bored to distraction in heaven; and Don Juan suffering

amid the pleasures of hell an agony of tedium.

“At last Don Gonzalo, after paying several reconnoitring visits to

hell under colour of urging Don Juan to repent, determines to settle

there permanently. At this moment his daughter, Ana, now full of years,

piety, and worldly honours, dies, and finds herself with Don Juan in

hell, where she is presently the amazed witness of the arrival of her

sainted father. The devil hastens to welcome both to his realm. As Ana

is no theologian, and believes the popular legends as to heaven and

hell, all this bewilders her extremely.

“The devil, eager as ever to reinforce his kingdom by adding souls

to it, is delighted at the accession of Don Gonzalo, and desirous to

retain Dona Ana. But he is equally ready to get rid of Don Juan, with

whom he is on terms of forced civility, the antipathy between them

being fundamental. A discussion arises between them as to the merits

of the heavenly and hellish states, and the future of the world. The

discussion lasts more than an hour, as the parties, with eternity

before them, are in no hurry. Finally, Don Juan shakes the dust of hell

from his feet, and goes to heaven.

“Dona Ana, being a woman, is incapable both of the devil's utter

damnation and of Don Juan's complete supersensuality. As the mother

of many children, she has shared in the divine travail, and with care

and labour and suffering renewed the harvest of eternal life; but the

honour and divinity of her work have been jealously hidden from her

by man, who, dreading her domination, has offered her for reward only

the satisfaction of her senses and affections. She cannot, like the

male devil, use love as mere sentiment and pleasure; nor can she, like

the male saint, put love aside when it has once done its work as a

developing and enlightening experience. Love is neither her pleasure

nor her study: it is her business. So she, in the end, neither goes

with Don Juan to heaven nor with the devil and her father to the palace

of pleasure, but declares that her work is not yet finished. For though

by her death she is done with the bearing of men to mortal fathers, she

may yet, as Woman immortal, bear the Superman to the Eternal Father.”

[186] In W. B. Yeats's Collected Works, Vol. IV., p. 109 (London:

Chapman and Hall, 1908), appears a statement (dated 1903), with

reference to “the play which Mr. Bernard Shaw has promised us.” The

appended footnote reads: “This play was _John Bull's Other Island_.

When it came out in the spring of 1905, we felt ourselves unable to

cast it without wronging Mr. Shaw. We had no Broadbent, or money to get

one.”

[187] In a subsequent volume, dealing with the dramatic movement

inaugurated by Mr. Shaw, the production of his plays at the Court

Theatre will be fully discussed.

[188] _Bernard Shaw and His Mannikins_, in the _New York Sun_, October

15th, 1905.

[189] _George Bernard Shaw: A Conversation_, in _The Tatler_, November

16th, 1904.

[190] _George Bernard Shaw: A Conversation_, in _The Tatler_, November

16th, 1904.

[191] Several years ago, in a public address, Mr. Andrew Carnegie

made the remarkable statement: “You hear a good deal these days about

poverty. People wish it abolished. The saddest day civilization will

ever see will be that in which poverty does not prevail. Fortunately we

are assured that the poor are always to be with us. It is upon the evil

of poverty that virtue springs!”

[192] In the Fabian tract, _Socialism for Millionaires_, Shaw preaches

much the same gospel to the millionaire. This paper was first published

in the _Contemporary Review_, February, 1896.

[193] _'Major Barbara,' G. B. S., and Robert Blatchford_, by Sir Oliver

Lodge; in the _Clarion_ (London), December 29th, 1905.

[194] _Impressions of the Theatre.--XIV. Mr. Bernard Shaw's 'Major

Barbara,'_ in the _Review of Reviews_ (London), January 27th, 1906.

[195] Commissioner Nicol, of the Salvation Army, has pointed out

that a “real” Barbara, before sending in her resignation, would have

consulted General Booth as to the Army's policy in the matter of

accepting “tainted money.” He relates (the _Star_, November 29th,

1905), that General Booth accepted one hundred pounds from the Marquess

of Queensberry for his “Darkest England” project. A Christian friend

was astonished that he took the “dirty money.” Said the General: “We'll

wash it clean in the tears of the widow and orphan, and consecrate it

on the altar of humanity for Humanity's good.” It is quite clear that

Shaw's “Barbara” prefers to do her own thinking; if she had let General

Booth do it for her, there would have been no play.

[196] _Ibsen_, by G. Bernard Shaw; in the _Clarion_, June, 1906.

[197] _About the Theatre_, by William Archer; in the _Tribune_

(London), July 14th, 1906.

[198] _About the Theatre: 'The Doctor's Dilemma'_ by William Archer; in

the _Tribune_ (London), December 29th, 1906.

[199] This very able and profound discussion, in which Mr. Archer gave

the very fairest exposition of his real opinion of Shaw as personality

and dramatist, revealed the fundamental issues of the vexed question at

issue without in the least settling them.

[200] _About the Theatre: The Dissolution of Dubedat_, by William

Archer; in the _Tribune_ (London), January 19th, 1907.

[201] The _New York Times_, December 30th, 1906.

[202] '_The Doctor's Dilemma_,' in the _Standard_ (London), November

22d, 1906. Shaw's comment is characteristic: “It is a curious instance

of the enormous Philistinism of English criticism that this passage

should not only be unknown among us, but that a repetition of its

thought and imagery sixty-five years later should still find us with a

conception of creative force so narrow that the association of Art with

Religion conveys nothing to us but a sense of far-fetched impropriety.”

It is needless to remark that Dubedat omits God's name for the obvious

reason that he does not believe in God.

[203] Shaw recently said: “I do not see how any observant student of

genius from the life can deny that the Arts have their criminals and

lunatics as well as their sane and honest men ... and that the notion

that the great poet and artist can do no wrong is as mischievously

erroneous as the notion that the King can do no wrong, or that

the Pope is infallible, or that the power which created all three

did not do its own best for them. In my last play, _The Doctor's

Dilemma_, I recognized this by dramatizing a rascally genius, with

the disquieting result that several highly intelligent and sensitive

persons passionately defended him, on the ground, apparently, that high

artistic faculty and an ardent artistic imagination entitled a man

to be recklessly dishonest about money, and recklessly selfish about

women, just as kingship in an African tribe entitles a man to kill whom

he pleases on the most trifling provocation. I know no harder practical

question than how much selfishness one ought to stand from a gifted

person for the sake of his gifts or the chance of his being right in

the long run.”--_The Sanity of Art: An Exposure of the Current Nonsense

about Artists being Degenerate_, by Bernard Shaw, pp. 11-12; _The New

Age Press_ (London), 1908. This brochure is also published by Benjamin

R. Tucker, New York.

[204] I have had the privilege of reading Mr. Shaw's copy of _The

Doctor's Dilemma_. Consideration of _Getting Married_, _Misalliance_

and _The Dark Lady of the Sonnets_, all unpublished in English at this

time (November, 1910), is postponed for a subsequent edition of the

present work.

[205] _The Life of Tolstoy: Later Years_, by Aylmer Maude; Constable

and Co., 1910.

[206] The Censor objected to two passages; the second passage Mr. Shaw

was perfectly willing to alter, but not so the first--Blanco's story

of his conversion, so reminiscent of the style of Job, in which he

describes how God “caught him out at last.” This first passage, which

Mr. Shaw rightly considered to embody the crux and central meaning of

the play, he refused point-blank to alter. The play was next promised

production by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. A certain passage which was

subject to misinterpretation was willingly altered by Mr. Shaw at the

suggestion of Lady Gregory; and the phrase, “Dearly beloved brethren,”

and the use of the word “immoral” in description of Feemy's relations

with the men of the village, were omitted in deference to the wishes of

the Lord-Lieutenant. The directors of the Abbey Theatre, Lady Gregory

and Mr. W. B. Yeats, were warned by the Lord-Lieutenant that their

patent for the theatre might be withdrawn in case the play offended

popular and religious sentiment in Ireland. Despite these warnings, the

play was successfully produced on August 25th, 1909. “The audience took

it in a very friendly manner,” wrote the dramatic critic of the _Times_

(London), “laughing heartily at its humours, passing over its dangerous

passages with attentive silence, calling loudly but in vain for the

author at the close.” There was no sensation and no excitement--and no

cause for any. The _Irish Times_ said that if ridicule were as deadly

in England and Ireland as it is in France, the Censorship would be

“blown away in the shouts of laughter that greeted _Blanco Posnet_.” In

September, 1909, the play was once again presented to the Censor for

consideration--in the meantime the author having rewritten an important

passage after it had been tested in rehearsal. Miss Horniman wished to

produce it at her Repertory Theatre in Manchester. “What the Censorship

has actually done,” said Mr. Shaw in comment on the decision, “exceeds

the utmost hopes of those who, like myself, have devoted themselves to

its destruction. It has licensed the play, and endorsed on the licence

specific orders that all its redeeming passages shall be omitted in

representation. I may have my insolent prostitute, my bloodthirsty,

profane backwoodsmen, my atmosphere of coarseness, of savagery, of

mockery, and all the foul darkness which I devised to make the light

visible; but the light must be left out. I may wallow in filth,

ferocity and sensuality, provided I do not hint that there is any force

in Nature higher and stronger than these.” Subsequently the play was

successfully produced under the auspices of the Incorporated Stage

Society, at the Aldwych Theatre, London, December 5th and 6th, 1909, by

the Irish National Theatre Society's Company from the Abbey Theatre,

Dublin.

[207] For detailed and excellent expositions of the purport of

the play--particularly helpful at the time of the banning by the

Censorship--compare _The Incorrigible Censorship_, in the _Nation_,

July 29th, 1909; and an open letter to the _Spectator_ of September

4th, 1909, by George A. Birmingham.

[208] The play was subsequently produced successfully at the Gaiety

Theatre, Manchester, October 18th, 1909, and at the Kingsway

Theatre, London, June 21st, 1910, at a benefit _matinée_ organized

by the Actresses' Franchise League. The Reader of Plays allowed the

production of the play after the change of the names of “Balsquith” and

“Mitchener” to “Johnson” and “Bones,” respectively.

[209] _Report of the Joint Select Committee of the House of Lords

and the House of Commons on the Stage Plays (Censorship), together

with the Proceedings of the Committee, and Minutes of Evidence_; Eyre

and Spottiswoode, 1909. The many questions which intimately concern

the free development of the national drama in England, arising in

connection with the investigation of the Censorship, fall outside the

scope of the present work. They will be considered in detail in a

subsequent volume dealing with the movements in dramatic art associated

with Mr. Shaw's name. Mr. Shaw, desiring to have his full views on the

Censorship included in the printed report, had a volume printed at his

own expense which he filed with the committee. The committee decided by

vote not to allow this printed evidence to be printed in their report.

This volume, entitled _Statement of the Evidence in Chief of George

Bernard Shaw before the Joint Committee on Stage Plays (Censorship

and Theatre Licensing)_, printed privately and marked “Confidential,”

constitutes a remarkable indictment against the Censorship, and an

elaborate exposition of grounds for the abolition of the Censorship as

at present constituted.

THE TECHNICIAN

“Like all dramatists and mimes of genuine vocation, I am a

natural-born mountebank.”--_On Diabolonian Ethics._ Preface to

_Three Plays for Puritans_.