The drama is the casual, not the inevitable, vehicle for the exposition
of Bernard Shaw's theories of conduct. This dramatist of “genuine
vocation,” as he once denominated himself, was literally “called” to
the post of dramatist for the New Movement. He was a “pressed” man, a
conscript in the service of the theatre. It is hardly an exaggeration
to say that Shaw entered the ranks and took up arms against a sea of
twaddle, not initially impelled by the inner, imperious necessity
for creative expression, but fired with the desire to prove that he
could write plays. According to his own statement, he proceeded to
manufacture the evidence. At one time or another throughout his varied
career he has employed almost every conceivable medium--novelistic,
journalistic, critical, artistic, propagandist--for the communication
of his unique and peculiar views. For the last eighteen years the drama
has afforded him the most popular instrument for the wide diffusion of
his brilliance. The drama has never been the supreme interest of his
career; nor, indeed, as he recently told me, has it played any very
absorbing part in his life until within the last nine or ten years. The
American “discovery” of Shaw as a “new” dramatist amused him immensely,
even awoke in him a sense of slight disappointment. He had rather hoped
that he would not be “found out” until some years after his death! At
last he saw that he must reconcile himself to the inevitable and make
the best of the matter, since it could not be helped! “To me,” he said
in a letter to me, after the _Candida_ furore in New York, “all the
fuss about Candida is only a remote ripple from the splashes I made in
the days of my warfare long ago.”
Whether or not the drama has played a very absorbing part in Shaw's
own life, it is certain that this is the field in which he has been
most strikingly successful in making a world-wide reputation. Until
_Candida_ created such a stir in New York, he was regarded in America
as a phenomenally clever dilettante in novelism, in art, music, and
dramatic criticism; in fact, as anything but a dramatist. He was all
but unheard of on the Continent until his plays gained admittance to
the broadly catholic repertory of the German Theatre.[210] To-day Georg
Brandes writes of him, not as a critic, a novelist, or a Socialist,
but as the leader of the most modern, most advanced drama in England.
Julius Bab pronounces Shaw the greatest spiritual phenomenon since
Nietzsche, the greatest literary success since Ibsen. The time has
come for a serious consideration of the question whether he is a
good dramatist, a bad dramatist, or, in fact, whether, in the last
analysis, he is a dramatist at all. Remarkable as it may appear, it is
the last question upon which some of the acutest dramatic critics are
divided. Moreover, it remains vivid that Shaw has made some distinct
and original contributions to dramatic theory and practice. If Shaw
were to paint a portrait or model a piece of sculpture, there is no
doubt that he would produce a work presenting evidence of a keen and
searching intelligence. Upon the drama, from the questions of prefaces,
stage-directions, and technique down to that of punctuation, Shaw has
left the marks of an adroit and sagacious ratiocinative faculty.
In his search for a field other than fiction and criticism for the
free play of his “abnormally normal vision,” Shaw's eye fell upon the
stage. He recognized that the existing popular drama of the day is
“quite out of the question for cultivated people who are accustomed to
use their brains.” Looking about him, he soon perceived that under
present conditions the modern theatre creates the drama, despite the
fact that the reverse is the ideal state of affairs. No one more than
the idealistic Shaw deplores the present vogue of the musical comedy,
the problem play which substitutes sensuous ecstasy for intellectual
validity, and the well-made piece in which the plot is hatched by the
stage-setting. To him, as to another, modern dramas may be classified
under a few heads: neurotic, erotic, Pinerotic, and tommyrotic. The
whole difficulty has arisen through the drama of the day being written
“for the theatre instead of from its own inner necessity.” The only
way to reform the theatre was by constructive effort. Realizing that
reformation and regeneration could come only from within, and more
especially from the man of abnormally normal vision, George Bernard
Shaw--he set to work to effect the needed reforms.
Piquancy was imparted to the situation by the fact that Shaw was one
of those restless modern spirits who are out of patience with the
existing status, not only in the drama, but in the world at large. By
his own confession, he ran counter to all conventional standards.[211]
An Irishman by birth, an Englishman by adoption, he pretended to
patriotism neither for the land of his nativity nor for the country
to which it owed its ruin. A humanitarian, he detested warfare of any
kind; a vegetarian, he abhorred the slaughter of animals, in sport or
in the butcher's yard. An enthusiastic Ibsenist, he paralleled the
Master in having no respect for popular morality, no admiration for
popular heroics, no belief in popular religion. An art critic, he
had no taste for popular art; a Socialist, profoundly imbued with an
enthusiasm for social truth as an instrument of social reform, he was
out of patience with the lagging snail-pace at which the world moved.
The times were out of joint; but, unlike Hamlet, as Mr. Norman Hapgood
suggests, he deemed it no cursed spite that he was born to set them
right.
It is not to be wondered at that the acutely individualized
Shaw should feel the necessity of outlining his unusual, almost
unparalleled frame of mind. As a public speaker, his aim had always
been, not to awake the primitive feelings of the mob, but to make
each individual in his audience think new thoughts: elucidation, not
oratory, was the keynote of his public speeches. As a critic he had
sought to speak out his whole thought without disguise: he dallied with
no professional phraseology. He addressed the man who knew nothing
of technique; accordingly, he wrote in the vernacular of every day.
Clarity, lucidity and wit were the standards at which he aimed. In
like manner, his sincere effort toward the constructive achievement
of the “New Drama” necessitated the most elaborate elucidation of his
views, aims and methods. As Mr. Walkley has pointed out, Bernard Shaw
is nothing if not explanatory. By prefaces, appendices and epilogues,
he endeavours to raise the intellectual standard of public opinion,
which to him represents the will of the ignorant majority as opposed
to that of the discerning few. It is matter for no surprise that such
a strange phenomenon as Shaw should have led the critics astray. Few
men in their lifetime have been so fundamentally misunderstood, so
farcically misrepresented: Beyle, Shelley, Wilde, naturally come to
mind. Shaw resolved to fight against misrepresentation with the many
effective weapons, the use of which, from long and arduous practice, he
had so well learned. The haughty aloofness of an Ibsen with his “_Quod
scripsi, scripsi_,” the unconscious self-forgetfulness of a Browning
in the oft-recorded anecdote of “_me und Gott_,” the lofty injunction
of a Goethe “_Bilde, Kunstler, rede nicht_,” weighed with him not at
all. The man who had first caught the ear of the British public on
a cart in Hyde Park, to the blaring of brass bands, was not the man
soon to forget his lesson. Shaw has never discarded the trumpet and
the cart-wheel declamation. This is not merely the device to attract
attention for the moment, but to win a hearing long enough to awaken
thought upon the views he so adroitly and wittily expounds. He writes
prefaces and appendices because he believes that an author should not
merely allow his works to speak for themselves, but should present
their claims to intelligent consideration with his utmost literary
skill. Shaw avers that, like Dryden, he writes prefaces because he can.
The crass ignorance, the unspeakable fatuity of his critics have driven
him to it. Shaw writes prefaces not only because he can: he writes them
because he must.
The rare and ancient custom of preface-writing is now almost a lost
art. Shaw is virtually the only modern dramatist who writes expository
and critical prefaces. His prefaces are little masterpieces of
essay-writing. After _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_, they measure the
high-water mark of Shaw's supreme talent as a polemist, a dialectician,
a gorgeous and extravagant paradoxer. “In finely polyglot style”
_j'en_ chortle, as chortled Stevenson over the admirable Bashville.
Inimitable, incomparable are these prefaces, vitally animate with the
fantastic humours of the prankish Max, the solemn absurdities of Mark
Twain, the mordant irony of Henry Becque. Shaw turns a paradox as
dexterously as Chesterton, bubbles with self-persiflage as delightfully
as Whistler, mocks the stolid British Philistine with an exasperating
acuity for which we have to go to Heine to find a parallel. William
Archer has said that one of the prefaces of Dumas _fils_ might have
been the product of collaboration between Isaiah, Tolstoy and Bernard
Shaw. Any of the prefaces of Bernard Shaw might have been the product
of a collaboration between Dumas _fils_, Friedrich Nietzsche, and that
great American showman, P. T. Barnum.
Shaw's incorrigible practice of writing prefaces is the perfectly
logical outcome of his point of view. The direct corollary of this
practice is Shaw's distinctly original contribution to the technology
of modern realistic drama in the matter of ample elucidative and
descriptive stage directions. For reasons similar to those that
actuated Gerhart Hauptmann to draw plans and write pages of stage
directions to compel a clear visualization of the scenes of his
early social drama, _Vor Sonnenaufgang_, Shaw describes in lucid and
illuminating stage directions of considerable length the traits,
qualities and characteristics of the people and places that play
determining parts in his dramas. From the standpoint of the dramatic
critic, he long ago recognized the bankruptcy of the old school of
acting. Its technique was wholly inadequate for the interpretation of
the plays of Ibsen and the modern school of realistic dramatists. A new
fingering of the dramatic keyboard was demanded. The sophistication
of the actor's consciousness by romance could be obviated only by
the most cunning portraiture of each character. To aid the actor in
every possible way to realize unusual states of mind and apparently
aberrant views of ethical conceptions, Shaw drew the most tersely
descriptive character sketches of the sort of person he meant the
actor to incarnate. These little thumb-nail sketches are marvels
of character-drawing in miniature. The German Shaw, Hermann Bahr,
has paralleled, if not followed, Shaw in describing each personage,
as he appears, with photographic minuteness, but with nothing like
the piquancy and originality of his predecessor. Shaw has always
fulminated against the romancer's habit of announcing his hero as a
man of extraordinary genius, and yet totally failing to reinforce this
announcement in his subsequent speech and action. Shaw complains even
of Ibsen that he has left entirely too much to the reader's and the
actor's imagination and insight. Is Borkman a real Napoleon of Finance
or only an hallucinated impostor? What reason have we to believe,
barring the author's statement, that Lövborg was actually a creative
genius, that Allmers was in the least degree capable of a masterwork on
Human Responsibility, or that Solness was an architect of exceptional
original power? When interrogated as to his meaning, for example,
Ibsen haughtily replies: “What I have said, I have said.” But, as Shaw
pertinently indicates, what he hasn't said, he hasn't said. Whether
uniformly successful or not, Shaw, as practical playwright, has made
a definite contribution to modern realistic drama by conscientiously
seeking to remedy in his own plays the defect he has discovered in
Ibsen, the consummate craftsman of the age. Shaw's descriptions, not
only of the characters, but of the scenes in which these characters
are set, are little essays in social criticism. The description of the
dentist's operating-room in _You Never Can Tell_, or of Ramsden's study
in _Man and Superman_, is at once the epitome and the indictment of an
entire social era, of a phase of ethical or industrial evolution. It
intrigues the fancy, as Whistler used to say, to make the ludicrous,
if futile, inquiry whether the fate of heroes, the destiny of humanity,
depend upon the upholstery of the chairs, the ornaments upon the
mantel-shelf, or the pattern of the wall-paper!
Among contemporary dramatists, Bernard Shaw is an exponent of
that modern movement of which, as Mr. Chesterton has recently
reminded us, Robert Browning, among modern poets, was the fount and
origin--the school whose chief characteristic is the apotheosis of
the insignificant. Like Browning, Shaw has “ceased to believe certain
things to be important and the rest to be unimportant.” He has resolved
to distil the quintessence of the unessential. By the cultivation
of subjective intensity, Maurice Maeterlinck has opened our eyes
to the miracle of the commonplace, the treasure of the humble. By
examining the neglected, George Gissing has revealed the importance
of the trivial. With an imaginative insight that subsequently finds
verification in real life, Henrik Ibsen depicts a soul's tragedy in a
married woman's loss of her dolls. In conformity with the realistic
logic of his race, Paul Hervieu traces the finger of fate in the colour
of a woman's bonnet. Realizing those queer mental experiences that the
ordinary observer would not see or could not describe, George Meredith
illumines the obscurity of fugitive and subconscious sensations.
Bernard Shaw arraigns a social era in his description of a parlour
because he has learnt the supreme importance of detail, the mystery and
immensity of little things.
Shaw was driven to the expedients of preface and exhaustive
stage-direction not alone by the false critical interpretations of
his plays, by the actor's failure to divine the _rationale_ of his
characters, and by the evolutionary trend of modern realistic art.
He also felt the necessity of falling back upon his own literary
expertness in order to restore the English drama to anything like its
former level of estimation in English literature. In that barren period
of dramatic unproductivity, approximately speaking, from 1835 to 1885,
the habit of reading plays, which had obtained in England from the
time of Shakespeare to that of Sheridan Knowles, fell into “innocuous
desuetude.” Against the notion that plays are essentially unreadable,
a legacy of that period of England's abject servitude to France in the
realm of the drama, Shaw has justly and finely protested as an author,
as a dramatic critic, as a dramatist. With Fontenelle and the younger
Dumas, he was united in the belief that “the spectator can give only
success, it is the reader who confers renown.” He has employed his
powers of literary expression in all their vigour and vitality to make
his plays, as published and readable artistic productions, worthy of
competition with such elaborate fiction as that of Bourget, James, or
D'Annunzio. Shaw's discouraging experience in the effort to have his
own plays published brought the subject forcibly to his attention.
As late as 1896, every publisher who was approached with a view to
publishing a play, Shaw asserts, at once said: “No use: people won't
read plays in England.”
Shaw rightly lays the blame for the passing of the printed play as a
marketable commodity at the doors, not of the publisher, but of the
playwright, on account of the absurd jargon in which stage directions
are customarily couched. There is a sign-language, a scenic chirography
pertaining peculiarly to the stage; it is essential, as Mr. Brander
Matthews recently said, that the playwright who wishes his play to be
generally read “should translate it out of the special dialect of the
stage folk into the language of the people.” And a number of years ago
Shaw wrote: “I suggest that it is the fault of the playwrights who
deliberately make their plays unreadable by flinging repulsive stage
technicalities in the face of the public, and omitting from their
descriptions even that simplest common decency of literature, the
definite article? I wonder how many readers Charles Dickens would have
had, or deserved to have, if he had written in this manner:
(SYKES _lights pipe--calls dog--loads pistol with newspaper,
takes bludgeon from R. above fireplace and strikes_
NANCY.) NANCY: Oh, Lord, Bill! (_Dies._ SYKES _wipes
brow--shudders--takes hat from chair O. P.--sees ghost, not
visible to audience--and exit L. U. E._)”
In this sort of thing, “literary people trying their hand at the drama
for the first time revel as ludicrously as amateur actors revel in
flagrant false hair, misfitting tunics and tin spears.” The abuse, as
Mr. William Archer has pointed out, arose at the time when the drama
ceased to be regarded as literature. Plays designed for “intending
performers,” amateur and professional, were often printed from the
actual prompt-books used in the theatre. Even when this was not the
case, they were closely modelled after the prompt-books.
Shakespeare and Ibsen, to mention two obvious examples, suffer from
this very deficiency. “What would we not give,” asks Shaw, “for
the copy of _Hamlet_ used by Shakespeare at rehearsal, with the
original 'business' scrawled by the prompter's pencil?... It is for
want of this (realistic) process of elaboration that Shakespeare,
unsurpassed as poet, story-teller, character draughtsman, humorist
and rhetorician, has left us no intellectually coherent drama, and
could not afford to pursue a genuinely scientific method in his
studies of character and society....” The literary product of two
years of Ibsen's life, exhibiting exhaustive knowledge not only of the
character of the individuals represented, but also of their personal
history and antecedents, reads to the actor-manager, Shaw declares,
exactly like a specification for a gas-fitter! It is an “insult” to
an exceptionally susceptible, imaginative, fastidious person like
Shaw. Frankly speaking, Ibsen in this respect occupies a position
intermediate between Pinero, with his dry enumeration, and Shaw, with
his breezy loquacity. Shaw swings to the furthest extreme, making his
stage-directions piquant and facetious essays for the edification
of the reader--discursive, argumentative, polemical, historical,
psychological, or social essays, varying in length from two lines to
five pages. With characteristic adroitness, Shaw has defended one
of his own stage-directions which has been rebuked as a silly joke.
“It runs thus: '_So-and-So's complexion fades into stone-gray, and
all movement and expression desert his eyes._' This is the sort of
stage-direction an actor really wants. Of course, he can no more
actually change his complexion to stone-gray than Mr. Forbes Robertson
can actually die after saying, 'The rest is silence.' But he can
produce the impression suggested by the direction perfectly. _How_ he
produces it is his business, not mine. This distinction is important,
because, if I wrote such a stage-direction as '_turns his back to the
audience and furtively dabs vaseline on his eyelashes_,' instead of
'his eyes glisten with tears,' I should be guilty of an outrage on both
actor and reader. Yet we find almost all our inexperienced dramatic
authors taking the greatest pains to commit just such outrages.”
The issue, however, is not to be confused by any such defence, however
adroit. In fact, in this particular instance Shaw makes a valid defence
of a stage-direction with which no fault can be found save that of
literary over-accentuation. Shaw has followed one safe rule in his
stage-directions: “Write nothing in a play that you would not write in
a novel”; but the converse: “Write everything in a play that you would
in a novel,” would be fatal. The great fictionist does not write: “A
keen pang shot through the mother's heart; for she saw at a glance that
her child had not many more chapters to live.” Similarly the dramatic
author should not tell the public that “part of the stage is removed
to represent the entrance to a cellar.” Shaw is perfectly correct in
saying that “a dramatist's business is to make the reader forget the
stage and the actor forget the audience, not to remind them of both at
every turn, like an incompetent 'extra gentleman' who turns the wrong
side of his banner towards the footlights.” But Shaw's practice of
obtruding the refractory lens of his own temperament between the reader
and the characters of the drama is open to very serious objection. The
prime incident in the history of the production of _Candida_ in both
New York and Vienna was the animated discussion over the concluding
sentence, which Georg Brandes regarded as wholly superfluous:
“James and Candida embrace. But they do not know the secret in the
poet's heart.” Shaw was so much amused by the futile guesses of the
Candida-maniacs that he wrote to Mr. James Huneker a Shavian _exposé_
of the “secret in the poet's heart.” A spurious interest was thus
tacked on to the play on account of Shaw's proposition of a riddle
of which he alone claimed knowledge of the solution. Again, Shaw
goes to the length of explaining dubious and laconic remarks of his
characters, thus totally destroying the realistic illusion that this
conversation is actually taking place. The following illustration from
_The Devil's Disciple_ seems to be a sort of first aid to the actor:
“_Judith smiles, implying 'How stupid of me!'_ ...” At one point in the
trial of Dick Dudgeon, Burgoyne remarks: “By the way, since you are
not Mr. Anderson, do we still----eh, Major Swindon?” [_Meaning “do we
still hang him?”_] When the party breaks up at the close of the first
act of the same play, Shaw pauses to give us the following historical
and social reminder: “Mrs. Dudgeon, now an intruder in her own home,
stands erect, crushed by the weight of the law on women.... For at
this time, remember, Mary Wollstonecraft is as yet only a girl of
eighteen, and her Vindication of the Rights of Women is still fourteen
years off.” The vital defect of Shaw's method is epitomized in that
single word “remember.” He might just as well write “Gentle Reader”
and be done with it. And yet Shaw is not alone in this defect; Bahr
not infrequently strikes the personal note, and some of D'Annunzio's
stage directions are little poems in themselves--delightful, but not
strictly artistic. Shaw has done genuine service to the modern English
drama by his conscientious effort to make his plays readable, to write
not mere drama, but genuine literature. Through his long training as
dramatic critic, he learned to effect the complete visualization of the
painted sets of the stage, thus preserving intact, in that respect,
the illusion of reality. He has replaced the old stocks and stones
of _French's Acting Edition_ by personal and scenic descriptions,
imaginatively, vividly, humorously--in a word, artistically--rendered.
But he has not avoided the intrusion of the personality of the
dramatist; he has imported into the English drama that pleasant vice
of English fiction: imperfect objectivity. Mr. Archer states the
plain common-sense of the matter when he says that stage-directions
should be clear, adequate, and helpful, but that they should always be
_impersonal_.[212] With all Shaw's praiseworthy efforts to create the
realistic illusion of life by making us forget that his characters are
only fictions of the stage, he occasionally destroys that illusion by
making us remember that they are only the puppets of Bernard Shaw.
However original and iconoclastic Shaw may be in respect to
interpretative prefaces and artistically cast stage-directions,
in the matter of dramatic construction and technique he has been
notably rigorous, rather than careless, in his attempt at realistic
representation. In minor matters of punctuation, it is true, he has
freely gratified his own preferences and likings--using spaced letters
for emphasis, omitting commas and apostrophes whenever no doubt as to
the sense is involved, avoiding quotation marks for titles and, indeed,
in Biblical fashion, dispensing with punctuation on every possible
occasion. All these things are merely matters of taste. But the
conventional technique of the drama, the customs, tricks and devices
of stage-craft, he ordinarily accepts without question. In _Widowers'
Houses_ in its first form, he made the explicit division into scenes;
since that time, he has made each of his plays, as far as scenes go,
a continuous whole, unbroken save only by division into acts, and by
a succession of asterisks where a lapse of time is to be understood.
In this respect, he has carefully preserved his rule of writing down
nothing that might remind the reader of an actual stage or a theatric
representation.[213]
The incidents, plot, construction and technical details of drama
Bernard Shaw manipulates for his own purposes, giving them novelty,
piquancy, and charm by the essentially modern use he makes of them.
As for indebtedness to Ibsen for his technique, he vigorously scorns
the idea. “It is quite the customary thing to say, nowadays,” Mr.
Shaw once remarked to me, “that Ibsen revolutionized the technique of
English drama. I cannot, for the life of me, find the least evidence
of such a thing. The objective side of Ibsen's technique is a part
of the common stock of modern dramatic realism. The symbolic side of
Ibsen's technique is incommunicable--peculiar to Ibsen alone. The
technique of such a play as _John Gabriel Borkman_, for example, is
inextricably bound up with the dramatic genius which devised it.” Shaw
asserts that his own plays have all the latest mechanical improvements.
In his plays there are no “asides,” no impossible soliloquies, no
long-winded recitals in the second act of what has taken place in the
first, no senseless multiplication of doors and windows, no incessant
stream of letters and telegrams. Shaw revolted against many of the
technical practices of Ibsen. “Go back to Lady Inger,” he recently
wrote, “and you will be tempted to believe that Ibsen was deliberately
burlesquing the absurdities of Richardson's booth; for the action
is carried on mostly in impossible asides.” And he said to me, in
discussing the use of the soliloquy, “I do not in the least object to
the soliloquy provided it does not exceed the time-limit a rational
man might be supposed to observe in talking aloud. But if there is
anything that drives me wild, it is to hear Brown come down to the
footlights, and begin: 'I wonder where Jones can be! He promised to
meet me here at half-past four. Can it be possible that he is still
suffering from remorse for the murder of his father-in-law? etc., etc.'
Deliver me from the soliloquy used solely as a first aid to ignorant
audiences.” In his _Saturday Review_ period, Shaw insisted that, “What
most of our critics mean by mastery of stage-craft is recklessness in
the substitution of dead machinery and lay figures for vital action
and real characters.” And in his notable essay on Ibsen, in 1906, he
clearly sets forth his dramatic ideal.
“What we might have learned from Ibsen was that our fashionable
dramatic material was worn out as far as cultivated modern
people are concerned, that what really interests such people on
the stage is not what we call action--meaning two well-known
and rather short-sighted actors pretending to fight a duel
without their glasses, or a handsome leading man chasing
a beauteous leading lady round the stage with threats,
obviously not feasible, of immediate rapine--but stories of
lives, discussion of conduct, unveiling of motives, conflict
of characters in talk, laying bare of souls, discovery of
pitfalls--in short, illumination of life....”[214]
“All this talk about the dramatist proceeding according to rule and
only making a coherent story which begins at the beginning of the
play,” Mr. Shaw remarked to me one day, “is the most mistaken and
harmful notion in the world. A dramatist finds himself in the grip of
a situation or a complex of character of which he must make the most
and the best that he can. Take Ibsen, for example. Not infrequently he
finds himself compelled, for the sake of giving coherence and validity
to his characters, to introduce a long recital by some character,
without which the play would lack a vital part of the dramatic
structure. Not that I defend such technique. I instance it merely to
show that even a craftsman like Ibsen is driven occasionally to such
expedients.”
“It seems to me,” I remarked, “that, whereas some of your plays are
notable for their first acts--_The Philanderer_ and _Arms and the Man_,
for instance--because you seem to be concerned chiefly with exposition
of the plot and not with brilliant Shavian divagations, in certain
others you wholly concern yourself in the first act with the careful
setting-up of a complex _milieu_, the elaboration of an environment
out of which the principal character emerges. In certain other plays,
the method is somewhat the same, but the purpose and the result quite
different. The first act of _The Devil's Disciple_, for instance, is
like a picture of Hogarth. By minutely delineated portrayal of Dick's
home, his training and environment--all the influences and surroundings
of his youth, you explain and thus justify his revolt. The first act
isn't a part of the plot--it is, however, an indispensable phase
of the situation. From the first act there emerges one remarkable
character, Dick Dudgeon; this act makes him comprehensible--that is
its fundamental purpose. But in _The Doctor's Dilemma_ the case is
quite different; the hour-long first act is vital only in the sense of
acquainting us with the single fact that, to turn a patient over to
Bloomfield-Bonington for treatment is to commit murder.”
“Yes, you are quite right about _The Devil's Disciple_,” replied Mr.
Shaw. “You have stated precisely the significance of that first act.
Unquestionably, the drama is the art of preparation and this method is
as legitimate a means of preparation as many others, and certainly much
more effective. There is no reason in the world why the drama should be
debarred as a medium for the painting of _genre_ pictures.”
[Illustration: =Shaw's Country House at Ayot St. Lawrence.=]
“As for the first act of _The Doctor's Dilemma_,” he continued, “it is
true, as you say, that the story really doesn't begin until nearly the
end of the long first act. But you must remember that the hero of my
play is no one single character, but modern medical science. You see,
I have been absolutely modern in my treatment of medicine, and I have
devoted this first act to a complete exposition of the present state of
modern medicine.”
“The real truth of the matter,” he went on to explain, greatly
interested in his subject, “is that in my first acts I have often
put many things I can't afford to waste my time with later on. When
an audience first enters a theatre, it comes absolutely fresh and is
prepared to stand a great deal from the dramatic author--a great deal
which is not, strictly speaking, germane to the carrying-on of the plot
of the 'story'--provided it is cast in a sufficiently entertaining
and diverting form. The average audience is so accustomed to the
conventional, wearisome piling up of one detail upon another--mere
mechanical exposition until the middle of the second act--that my
method, by which I furnish forth a complete social and psychological
_milieu_ in as entertaining a fashion as I can, is quite a relief.”
One may say in general that, not without reason does Shaw claim to have
cast his plays always in the ordinary practical comedy form in use at
all the theatres. There are, however, two marked features in which
his dramas, as tone pictures and as realistic transcripts of life,
are strikingly unique and distinctive. In the first place, Shaw runs
counter to the conventional standpoint of the emotion-racked critic
by refusing to preserve the medium in which plays are customarily
cast. Most of his plays deserve a twin appellation: tragi-comedy,
farce-comedy, burlesque-extravaganza, and the like. In some of them the
key is transposed so frequently as to defy brief classification. Shaw
is intent upon opening our eyes to points of view, not accidentally
variant, but purposely divergent from the conventional form. He scorns
the attitude of the romance-riddled melodramatist, and is utterly
impatient of the Fitch mood or the Belasco sentimentalism. If you
have tears, Mr. Fitch seems to say, prepare to shed them now. Holding
the blunderbuss of sentimentality and emotionalism to our heads, Mr.
Belasco bids us stand and deliver. In Shaw's hands, the play is now
comedy, now tragedy, now audacious satire--everything by turns and
nothing long. Once catch the distinction between the vital spirit of
Shaw and the demoralizing rant of the sentimentalists, and you have
gained an insight into Shaw's philosophy of will that clarifies and
illumines the motive and purpose of those creations of his that are
customarily classed as eccentrics, perverts, madmen, bounders, or
cads.[215]
We must, however, take account not only of the virtues, but also of
the defects of Shaw's qualities. His ability to play the _rôles_
of the acrobat, the trapeze-performer, the clown, even the stern
ringmaster, has occasionally seduced him from the strait and narrow
path of true drama. The statement that Shaw's serious plays are
exceedingly good _pastiches_ of Ibsen is perhaps an exaggeration of
Mr. Max Beerbohm in his _rôle_ of licensed jester. In reality there is
no doubt that the strict compression demanded by the Ibsenic form gave
Shaw no legitimate opportunity for the free play of his irresponsible
humour. His appearance as jester was often a manifest intrusion. _Mrs.
Warren's Profession_ just missed being a masterpiece because Shaw was
incapable of artistic self-sacrifice. The occasional lapse from tragic
seriousness to a tone of almost revolting levity robbed the play of its
dignity as a tragedy. Mr. Archer was severely shocked by _Mrs. Warren's
Profession_ when he saw it on the stage; in the study he had called it
“a masterpiece--yes, with all reservations, a masterpiece.” Mr. Grein,
who wished to produce the play in the Independent Theatre series,
sternly renounced Shaw after seeing it played by the Stage Society. It
is clear, then, why such plays as _Arms and the Man_ and _You Never Can
Tell_ are genuine successes, theatric as well as dramatic. They are
least disturbed by rapid transitions, their large and loose comedic
form giving considerable room for Shaw's kaleidoscopic changes. Shaw's
farce-comedies are the natural and spontaneous expressions of Shaw's
peculiar comedic talent, the sports of his own humorous imagination.
Shaw's compositions are chameleons which are always most interesting
and attractive when they take the changing colours of his own
temperament.
In any classification according to form, Shaw's plays are very
difficult to catalogue. We have seen in the first place that Shaw
purposely runs counter to the conventional standpoint of the dramatic
critic. In _Widowers' Houses_ he jilts the ideal heroine; in _The
Philanderer_ he blasts the womanly woman; in _Arms and the Man_ he
knocks the romantic notion of war, and of the stage, so to speak, into
a cocked hat. In _You Never Can Tell_ he tilts against the Old Man and
the New Woman; in _The Devil's Disciple_ he reduces the melodramatic
formula to absurdity; in _John Bull's Other Island_ he explodes that
outworn fiction, the stage Irishman; in _Major Barbara_ he exposes
the evils of charity; in _The Doctor's Dilemma_ medical quackery is
the target for his ridicule. All this he does in the most fantastic
and variable forms--farce, melodrama, burlesque, extravaganza,
comedy, allegory--any one, but usually a diverting combination and
succession of these forms. In fact, he has almost succeeded in
inventing a new form of drama. This second characteristic of Shaw's
plays, as Professor Hale has remarked, is almost a note of Shaw's
dramaturgy.[216] His plays are frequently fantastic criticisms of
life, cast in the most photographically realistic form. In the guise
of severely natural transcripts of life, many of his plays, at bottom,
are critical judgments of humanity on a satiric plane of pure fantasy.
If neo-realism is “merely the presentation of the ultimate facts of
life in any way you like,” then Bernard Shaw is the high-priest of
neo-realism. In him we discern the marvellous versatility of the modern
critic, capable of making himself at home in any nationality and in any
age. But whether he is giving us an Offenbachian Egypt, a comic-opera
Bulgaria, a melodramatic America, or an imaginary Morocco, the result
is the same: a portrayal of human nature, a criticism of life,
penetrating, engaging, true. As Dr. Max Meyerfeld, the German champion
of Wilde, has tersely put it, Bernard Shaw possesses the supreme
faculty of the critic: “_in fremden Seelengehäuse hineinzuschlupfen_.”
Shaw spent nearly four years of his life continuously in saying to
British dramatists, “That's not the way to do it.” He has spent a
considerable part of his life in the last eighteen years in saying
to the world, by concrete and constructive achievement, “This is the
way to do it.” Bernard Shaw is to be reckoned as one of the most
suggestive and certainly the most brilliant of all the critics of the
modern British stage, understanding the word critic in its broadest
sense. His prime distinction consists not only in the cleverness of
his critical attacks upon the stage, past and present, but also in the
notable effort he has made, by actually writing plays, to elevate its
plane. Every phase of his activities as dramatic critic and dramatic
author has been vital with the force of powerful originality. His
_feuilletons_ in the _Saturday Review_ easily won him the title of
the most brilliant of contemporary British journalistic critics. If
he did not set a precedent, he almost rediscovered a lost art in
writing those masterpieces of egotistical, combative, polemical,
controversial criticism, the prefaces, appendices and epilogues to his
plays. A genuine contribution to dramaturgy is his innovation of ample
stage-directions so-called: penetrating character sketches of places
as well as people, revelative hints to the actor, brief clarifying
essays to elucidate each dramatic situation. His effort to make plays
readable, to write literature instead of specifications, is worthy
of emulation, and eventually his method, in certain modified forms,
will doubtless be generally adopted. His practice of casting fantastic
situations in rigidly realistic form strikes quite a novel note in
dramaturgy despite Shaw's oft-repeated assertion that, after all, he is
a very old-fashioned playwright.
FOOTNOTES:
[210] Almost all of Bernard Shaw's plays have been produced at the
most distinguished and artistic theatres of German Europe. In gaining
the German stage, he won a leading position in world-drama. Compare,
for example, the statement of Herr Carl Hagemann in his recent book
_Aufgaben des Modernen Theaters_: “Neben den anerkannten Vertretern
der Bühne der Lebenden (Ibsen, Hauptmann, Schnitzler und andere--im
Musikdrama: Wagner), müssen auch die Jüngeren und Jüngsten erschienen
(alle die Wedekind, Hoffmannsthal, Vollmoeller, Eulenberg, Wilde,
Shaw, Strindberg--im Musikdrama Strauss, Schillings, Humperdinck,
Weingartner, Pfitzner, Blech, Siegfried Wagner).” Hermann Bahr recently
said that a Shaw _première_ is as great an event in Berlin as a
Hauptmann _première_.
[211] The following characterization closely follows his own words in
_Mainly about Myself_, preface to _Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant_,
Vol. I.
[212] Cf. _Shaw on Stage Directions_, by William Archer, in the _Daily
News_, December 28th, 1901.
[213] In Herr Siegfried Trebitsch's translations of Shaw's plays into
German is found the explicit division into scenes.
[214] _Ibsen_, by G. Bernard Shaw, in the _Clarion_, June 1st, 1906.
Also published in _Die Neue Rundschau_, December, 1906.
[215] “About the plays of Shaw,” writes Hermann Bahr, “we are never
quite sure in what category they belong, whether they are farces,
comedies, or plays: for they summon death and the devil, threaten the
hero's life and happiness, and, in the midst of the greatest danger,
indulge in such audacious wit that we are not always sure whether
to shudder or to laugh. By degrees, however, it dawns upon us that
this has happened to us once before, namely, in life itself, which
so intermingles hope and despair, the previsions of destiny and the
absurdities of chance, necessity and free will, law and whim, favour
and spite, that it is peculiarly the experience of our time to question
whether our existence be tragic, against which view our daily life
warns us; or a senseless jest, to which our pride will never submit; or
a pleasant, disturbed dream, which, again, is too weighty, too terrible
a burden for our consciousness. This very uncertainty in the elements
of our primitive feelings, Shaw expresses with a mad, malicious joy.
Indeed, one might say, first and foremost, that Shaw is the poet of our
uncertainty.” _Rezensionen. Wiener Theater, 1901-3_, by Hermann Bahr:
article, _Bernard Shaw_.
[216] _Dramatists of To-Day_, by E. E. Hale, Jr.: article, _Bernard
Shaw_.
THE DRAMATIST
“The function of comedy is nothing less than the destruction of
old-established morals.”--_Meredith on Comedy_, by G. B. Shaw,
in the _Saturday Review_, March 27th, 1897.