There can be no new drama, as Mr. Stuart-Glennie has pointed out,
without a new philosophy. Drama can never be the same again since
Ibsen has lived. The drama of the future, in Shaw's view, can never be
anything more than the play of ideas.
Whether as yet accurately formulated in standard works of dramatic
criticism or not, the fact remains that a clear and demarcative line
of division runs across the drama of to-day. On one side of this line
falls that vast majority of plays--serious drama, comedy, melodrama,
farce--which accord more or less rigidly with the established canons
and authoritative traditions of dramatic art. On the other side falls
the persistently crescent minority of plays which break away from
the old conventions and set up new precedents for formulation by the
Freytag of the future. In the first class are found those works of art
which are founded upon emotion, live solely in and for the dramatic
moment, and treat of the universal themes of time and age, character
and destiny, life and death. They receive their impulse from eternal
and enduring, rather than from topical or transitory, aspects of
human life; and draw their inspiration as much--if not more--from the
literature of the past as from the human pageant of the present. In
the second class are found those works which start into life through
the quickening touch of the contemporary, which seek an interpretation
of society through the illuminative, transmutative intermediaries
of all that is newest, most vitally fecund, most prophetic in the
science, sociology, art and religion of to-day; and which endeavour,
through faithful portraiture of the present, to detect and reveal the
traits and qualities of human nature in its permanent and immutable
aspects. The authors of such works find their themes chiefly in the
crucial instances of to-day, the conflict of humanity with current
institutions, of human wills with existent circumstances, and they have
for their end a humanitarian ideal: the exposure of civic abuse, the
redress of social wrong, and the regeneration, redemption and reform
of society--not less than artistic fidelity to fact, satiric unmasking
of human folly, and veritistic embodiment of human passion. To the one
class belong Shakespeare, Calderon, Schiller, Rostand; to the other,
Charles Reade, Ibsen, Gorki, Brieux. It is a fundamental characteristic
of Bernard Shaw that he belongs to the second class--in this respect he
is sealed of the tribe of Rousseau, Dumas _fils_, Zola and Tolstoy.
Through the powerful social thrust of modern art there has forged to
the front a new and disquieting force. As an isolated phenomenon, this
has occasionally made its appearance in the past; but as a distinct
genus it may justly be regarded as a creation of the new social order.
To scoff at, rather than to study, to dismiss cavalierly rather than
to examine conscientiously, this new force, were as short-sighted
and senseless as to deny its existence. We are in duty bound to
consider and to weigh, carefully and critically, the claims of this
“dramatist of the future” as opposed to the classic virtues of the
dramatist working frankly in the manner of tradition. The dramatist
who conforms to popular and critical standards is an artist facile
in revealing either character in action or action in character,
invariable in interpreting life from the side of the emotions, and
resolute in imaging drama as a true conflict of wills--in a word,
the artist gifted with what the French so aptly term _la doigté du
dramaturge_. He recognizes the drama as the most impersonal of the
arts, and sedulously devotes himself to the realization of Victor
Hugo's dictum that dramatic art consists in being somebody else.
On the other hand, the new type of dramatist--the dramatist of the
future, if you will--is no less an artist than the other; his primal
distinction is his demand for that large independence of rules and
systems which Turgenev posited as the indispensable requisite of great
art. Just as Zola enlarged the conception of the function of the novel,
sublimating it into a powerful and far-reaching instrument for social
and moral propagandism, so this new dramaturgic iconoclast demands the
stage as an instrumentality for the exposition, diffusion, and wide
dissemination of his views and theories--upon standards of morality,
rules of conduct, codes of ethics, and philosophies of life. With him
there is no question of importing the methods of the Blue Book into the
drama; nor would he, in any broad sense, idly shirk what Walter Pater
terms the responsibility of the artist to his material. He accepts the
natural limitations, not the mechanical restrictions, of his art; he
does not seek to appropriate the privileges, while refusing to shoulder
the responsibilities, of his medium. His distinction arises from the
discovery of the hackneyed, but ever alarming and heretical truth, that
life is greater than art. For art's sake alone he refuses to exist,
with strange perversity insisting that he lives not for the sake of
art, but for the sake of humanity.
In reply to the question: “Should social problems be freely dealt
with in the drama?” Shaw characteristically said: “Suppose I say yes,
then, vaccination being a social question, and the Wagnerian music
drama being the one complete form of drama in the opinion of its
admirers, it will follow that I am in favour of the production of a
Jennerian tetralogy at Bayreuth. If I say no, then, marriage being a
social question, and also the theme of Ibsen's _A Doll's House_, I
shall be held to condemn that work as a violation of the canons of
art.” As a matter of fact, Shaw believes that every social question
furnishes material for drama--the conflict of human feeling with
circumstances--since institutions are themselves circumstances. On the
other hand, every drama by no means involves a social question, since
human feeling may be in conflict with circumstances which are not
institutions. The limitation of drama with a social question for motive
is that, ordinarily, it cannot outlive the solution of that question.
It is true that some of the best and most popular plays are dramatized
sermons, pamphlets, satires, or Blue Books: Gilbert's _Trial by Jury_,
a satire on breach of promise; Sheridan's _School for Scandal_, a
dramatic sermon; Reade's _Never Too Late to Mend_, a dramatic pamphlet;
and so on. The greatest dramatists, however, abjure political and
social themes, rooting their dramas in the firm soil of human nature
and elemental feeling. The reason for this is that, as a rule, social
questions are too temporal, too transient to move the great poet to
the mightiest efforts of his imagination. Shaw maintains that the
general preference of dramatists for subjects in which the conflict is
between man and his apparently inevitable and eternal, rather than his
political and temporal, circumstances, is due in the vast majority of
cases to the dramatist's political ignorance, and in a few--Goethe and
Wagner, for example--to the comprehensiveness of their philosophy.
The era of the drama of pure feeling, in Shaw's opinion, is now
past. Every great social question, owing to the huge size of modern
populations and the development of the Press, takes on the character
of a world-problem. _Les Misérables_ is the pure product of our epoch;
Zola is the colossal champion of social justice and social reform,
Ibsen the arch-enemy of social, as well as moral, abuse. William
Morris left house decoration for propagandism; Ruskin resigned _Modern
Painters_ for modern pamphleteering; Carlyle began by studying German
culture and ended with railing against English social crime. The poets
are following Shelley as political and social agitators, the drama is
becoming an arena for discussion, because the machinery of government
is becoming so criminally tardy in its settlement of the perpetually
increasing number of social questions: the poet must put his shoulder
to the wheel. “The hugeness and complexity of modern civilizations
and the development of our consciousness of them by means of the
Press,” Mr. Shaw maintains, “have the double effect of discrediting
comprehensive philosophies by revealing more facts than the ablest man
can generalize, and at the same time intensifying the urgency of social
reforms sufficiently to set even the poetic faculty in action on their
behalf. The resultant tendency to drive social questions on to the
stage, and into fiction and poetry, will eventually be counteracted
by improvements in social organization which will enable all prosaic
social questions to be dealt with satisfactorily long before they
become grave enough to absorb the energies which claim the devotion of
the dramatist, the story-teller, and the poet.”[217]
Shaw has placed on record his belief that subjects such as age,
love, death, accident, personality, abnormal greatness of character,
abnormal baseness of character give drama a permanent and universal
interest independent of period and place, and will keep a language
alive long after it has passed out of common use. It is not the drama
of profound and elemental human feeling against which Shaw rails, but
the drama designed solely for the obsession of the senses. His most
vehement attack is directed against plays pleasurably appealing to
animal passions and sensual appetites. To Bernard Shaw, as Benjamin de
Casseres has indelicately expressed it, romantic love is lust dressed
in Sunday clothes. The voluptuous appeal of the romantic drama is
utterly abhorrent to him. The flaccid sentimentalities, the diluted
sensualities of the modern plays which he dubs aphrodisiacs, totally
fail to impose on him. Sitting at such plays, he says, we do not
believe: we make believe. His own plays, he has spared no pains to tell
us, are built “to induce, not voluptuous reverie, but intellectual
interest, not romantic rhapsody but humane concern.... The drama of
pure feeling is no longer in the hands of the playwright; it has been
conquered by the musician, after whose enchantments all the verbal arts
seem cold and tame.... The attempt to produce a genus of opera without
music--and this absurdity is what our fashionable theatres have been
driving at for a long time past without knowing it--is far less hopeful
than my own determination to accept problem as the normal material of
the drama.”[218]
Cervantes abolished chivalry; let us have done with it, is Shaw's
insistent clamour. Romance died with Schopenhauer; let sentiment expire
with Shaw. “The thing that Mr. Shaw calls romance,” says Mr. Gilbert
Chesterton, “is simply the fullness of life, the boiling over of the
pot of existence. Things are so good in general that men have, in
order to keep pace with the great cataract of beneficence, to call them
good in particular. This great and ancient tide of exultation, which
makes the tree green, the sunset splendid, the woman beautiful, the
flag a thing to be saved at any cost, is, of course, a fact as square
and solid as a beefsteak or St. Paul's Cathedral.... But Mr. Bernard
Shaw has, for all practical purposes, denied the existence of this
elemental tendency, and it is not, therefore, strange that he finds the
world a moon-struck and half-witted place.”[219] In his plays, indeed,
Shaw does not sound these deep and eternal notes of the human symphony.
He has fallen into the curious error of confounding contempt for
romance with denial of its existence. It is all very well to deplore
the eternal idealization of the sexual instinct; it is a totally
different matter to represent life as devoid of the ecstasies and
raptures of lovers, the pangs of despised love, the tyranny of romantic
passion.
Temperamentally and philosophically, Shaw is the very antithesis of
the romantic. He has consistently sought to reveal and exalt the
creative forces in life and art; to awaken the individual to alerter
consciousness and to sharpen his preference for actuality over
illusion, for reality over appearance. To that romance which seeks to
mask the facts of life with the roseate mists of sentiment, the golden
halo of illusion, Shaw has proved an inveterate foe. Upon Nordau in
his philistine and romantic struggle to uphold a hypothetical standard
of normality and to pollute those clear streams of creative energy in
art to which we owe the masterpieces of our epoch--upon Nordau Shaw
retorted with such splendid force and energy that no one who realizes
the issues involved can withhold his gratitude for that triumphant
service to the creative spirit of art and of humanity.
One of Bernard Shaw's fundamental claims to attention consists in his
effort toward the destruction, not only of romance, but of all the
false ideals and illusions which obsess the soul of man. He has assumed
the function of tearing the mask of idealism from the face of fact.
And yet it is a mark of his catholicity of view, that in his attack
upon illusions he is neither so blind nor so narrow as not to realize
their far-reaching and oftentimes beneficent effect. Thus he says:
[Illustration: =George Bernard Shaw.=]
_From a photo by Histed & Co._
_42, Baker Street, W._
“Suppress that phase of human activity which consists in the
pursuit of illusions, and you suppress the greatest force in
the world. Do not suppose that the pursuit of illusions is a
vain pursuit: on the contrary, an illusion can no more exist
without reality than a shadow without an object. Unfortunately
the majority of men are so constituted that reality repels,
while illusions attract them.”
With acute psychologic insight, Shaw draws the distinction between
two classes of illusions: those which flatter and those which are
indispensable. By flattering illusions he understands those which
encourage us to make efforts to attain things which we do not know
how to appreciate in their simple reality; either they reconcile us
to our lot, or else to actions we are obliged to take contrary to the
dictates of conscience. These are, indeed, deplorable consequences
in the eyes of the humanitarian meliorist who believes that to be
reconciled to one's lot is the worst fate that can befall mankind, and
who once said that the one real tragedy in life is the being used by
personally-minded men for purposes which you yourself recognize to be
base.
The _métier_ of Bernard Shaw is the destruction, not of the
indispensable illusions which support the social structure and
ultimately make for the uplift of humanity, but of those treacherously
flattering illusions which ensnare men in the toils of an existence for
which they have not the requisite passion, courage, faith, endurance
and self-restraint. “In my plays,” Shaw wrote in the Vienna _Zeit_,
“you will not be teased and plagued with happiness, goodness and
virtue, or with crime and romance, or, indeed, with any senseless
thing of that sort. My plays have only one subject: life; and only
one attribute: interest in life.”[220] It is a mistake of the German
dramatic critic, Heinrich Stümcke, to aver that the quintessence of
Shaw is _nil admirari_. It would be far nearer the truth to say that he
wonders at everything in this demented, moon-struck world. The law of
contrasts is the _motif_ of his art. He is never so brilliant as in the
portrayal of opposites.
With the transcendent egotism of the genius, he unhesitatingly claims
to see more clearly than humanity at large, to have ever fought
illusion, denied the ideal, and scorned to call things by other than
their real names.[221] Thus we see him always in search of what Walter
Pater was fond of calling _la vraie vérité_, challenging the old
formulas with the new ideas, transvaluing moral values with Nietzschean
fervour, and bidding humanity stand from behind its artificial
barriers of custom, law, religion and morality, and dare to speak and
live the truth. In his capacity of realistic critic of contemporary
civilization, he is neither surprised nor confounded to encounter
scepticism on all hands. Indeed, he is wise enough to expect it, since
he has observed that, when reality at last presents itself to men
nourished on dramatic illusions, they have lost the power to recognize
it.
Bernard Shaw, as Alfred Kerr has put it, is a distinct ethical gain
for our generation. His prime characteristic as a propagandist--and
his deficiency as a dramatist--is found in his assertion that the
quintessential function of comedy is the destruction of old-established
morals. Hence it is that his plays are conceived in a militant
spirit--in the Molièresque key of _Les Précieuses Ridicules_, or the
Ibsenic key of _An Enemy of the People_. His drama may roughly be
defined as the conflict of the Shavian _Ausschauung_ with conventional
dogma. Like Brieux, he has ingeniously employed the drama as a means
of giving lectures. He frankly confesses that his object is to make
people uncomfortable, to make them thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
“Molière and I are much alike,” he once remarked to me; “we both attack
pedantry.”[222] Shaw does not wish to drain the drama of all feeling;
he merely wishes to make feeling subsidiary to logic. He regards the
portrayal of emotion, not as an end in itself, but as an incentive to
thought. “You cannot witness _A Doll's House_ without _feeling_,” he
once said, “and, as an inevitable consequence, thinking.” He wishes
to set up, in the minds of his audience, a train of reflections and
meditations which may alter their own lives, which may influence the
whole world. For, as Emerson says, “To think is to act.” Shaw's object
is to create a true drama of ideas, having for its normal material
“problem, with its remorseless logic and iron framework of fact.” He
would have intellect predominate over sentiment; will engineered by
idea, and not unreasoning passion, the controlling factor. Bernard
Shaw is frequently charged with being devoid of feeling. Shaw is less
influenced by or concerned with mere personal feeling than anyone I
have ever known; but his whole being is vibrant with passion for the
welfare of society. If social pity is the underlying motive of the
later Russian novelists, social indignation seems to be the guiding
principle of Bernard Shaw. To him, social thought has become a genuine
passion.
The quintessence of the Shavian drama is the Shavian philosophy.
Shaw's theatre may be defined as an effort to depict naked instincts
upon the stage; this is the meaning of his “scientific natural
history.” He has sought to project instinctive temperaments, alive
and potent, before our very eyes. The inspiring words of Zola at the
funeral of Edmond de Goncourt might well have served as the motto for
his principal figures: “Ah! to have intellectual courage! To tell the
truth and the whole truth, even if it cost one peace and friends;
never to consider any convention, to go to the end of one's thought,
careless of consequence. Nothing is rarer, nothing is finer, nothing
is grander.” Unhampered by such scrupulousness as that of Mark Twain,
who declared that it was immodest to tell the naked truth in the
presence of ladies, Shaw's leading characters are ever in quest of
truth and freedom. They seek truth in unflinching recognition of facts,
freedom in emancipation from slavery to the false idealism of romantic
convention. They are libertines, in the original and not the perverted
sense of the word, with judgment unbiased by traditional influence or
contemporary prejudice. They are natural, not so much in the sense of
being perfect replicas of contemporary men and women--for they are
often little more than personified aspects of Shavianism--as in the
sense of being in a state of nature in regard to whim, eccentricity,
fancy, impulse, passion. There is a sort of complex and advanced
juvenility about Shaw's characters; they are the _enfants gâtés_ of
modern drama. In them are concretely delineated the outlines of the
Shavian philosophy: “Duty is the thing one should never do,” “Virtue
consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it,”
“Sentimentality is the error of supposing that quarter can be given
or taken in moral conflicts.” The difference between moral and right,
for these Shavians, is the difference between doing what you ought to
do and what you want to do. Shakespeare's “To thine own self be true”
is insufficient; the modern sociologist knows that it is imperative to
realize, not only what you are, but where you are. After studying the
possibilities, not the restrictions, of their environment, the Shavian
characters go straight ahead and do what they choose. Shaw outranks
Ibsen himself in the individualistic injunction “Live your own life.”
In his own admirable way, Shaw has given us a succinct exposition of
his conception of the Shavian drama. Asked if he wrote plays to make
fun of people, Shaw replied, more in sorrow than in anger:
“People talk all this nonsense about my plays because they
have been to the theatre so much that they have lost their
sense of the unreality and insincerity of the romantic drama.
They take stage human nature for real human nature, whereas,
of course, real human nature is the bitterest satire on stage
human nature. The result is that when I try to put real human
nature on the stage they think that I am laughing at them. They
flatter themselves enormously, for I am not thinking of them
at all. I am simply writing natural history very carefully
and laboriously; and they are expecting something else. I
can imagine a Japanese who had ordered a family portrait of
himself, and expected it to be in the Japanese convention as
to design, being exceedingly annoyed if the artist handed him
a photograph, however artistic, because it was like him in a
natural way. He would accuse the photographer of making fun of
him and of having his tongue in his cheek.
“But there is a deeper reason for this attitude of mind.
People imagine that actions and feelings are dictated by
moral systems, by religious systems, by codes of honour and
conventions of conduct which lie outside the real human will.
Now it is a part of my gift as a dramatist that I know that
these conventions do not supply them with their motives. They
make very plausible _ex post facto_ excuses for their conduct;
but the real motives are deep down in the will itself.
“And so an infinite comedy arises in everyday life from the
contrast between the real motives and the alleged artificial
motives; and when the dramatist refuses to be imposed upon, and
forces his audience to laugh at the imposture, there is always
a desperate effort to cover up the scandal and save the face
of the conventional by the new convention that whoever refuses
to play the conventional game is a cynic and a satirist, a
_farceur_, a person whom no one takes seriously.”[223]
The supreme difficulty in any criticism of Bernard Shaw as dramatist is
to draw the many fine distinctions between his critical expositions of
his dramatic system and the actual qualities of the dramas themselves.
It is primarily incumbent upon the interpreter of Shaw to indicate
with sufficient clearness the discrepancy between theory and practice,
between purpose and performance. No objection need be raised to Shaw's
definitions. “Drama is no mere setting up of the camera to Nature,”
he says: “it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between
Man's will and his environment: in a word, of problem.” But what is
one to make of Sir Charles Wyndham's assertion that Shaw's dramatic
works are wonderful intellectual studies, but not plays? The dramas are
undoubtedly manufactured after the usual pattern, with divisions called
acts; figures like people walk back and forth and engage each other in
conversation; the mechanical illusion is complete. What is it, then,
that gives an air of unreality to all this mimic show?
Bernard Shaw possesses in rich measure the genius of the
stage-director, the pliability and suppleness of the critic of modern
civilization. The effects he produces, quite often, are tremendous. But
capitally and congenitally, Shaw is lacking in that quality ordinarily
recognized as natural dramatic genius. In his plays we look almost
in vain for those crucial emotional conjunctures, those climacteric
soul-crises, which dramatic critics announce to be the criteria of
authentic drama--the _scène à faire_ of a Sarcey. Just as Oscar Wilde
may be said to have invented the comedy of conversation, so Bernard
Shaw may be said to have invented the drama of discussion. The tendency
to prolixity and discursiveness has steadily grown upon him; at last
he has thrown off all disguise and deliberately set to work to create
a dramatic system based on dialectic. Two noteworthy features of
his career are his attacks upon conventional cant and Shakespearean
rhetoric. And all the time, he has been creating, for his own part,
both a Shavian cant and a Shavian rhetoric. “I find that the surest way
to startle the world with daring innovations and originalities,” he
recently said, “is to do exactly what playwrights have been doing for
thousands of years; to revive the ancient attraction of long rhetorical
speeches; to stick closely to the methods of Molière; and to lift
characters bodily out of the pages of Charles Dickens.” The defining
characteristic of his plays is their argumentative and controversial
character. They are expository lectures, in dramatic form, on the
Shavian philosophy. Mr. Archer once said that Shaw's keen and subtle
intellect has built for itself a world of its own, in which it sits
apart, inaccessible; this world is not the real earth, but
“Composed just as he is inclined to conjecture her,
Namely, one part pure earth, ninety-nine parts pure lecturer.”
Instead of the indispensable conflict of wills, we often seem to
have merely a war of wits, in which the cleverest dialectician wins.
Aristophanes and Shaw have certainly one point in common: the plays
of both are dramatized debates. Instead of touching each other's
emotions, Shaw's characters often seem merely to arouse each other's
combative interest. Just as Victor Hugo gives a passion apiece to
each of his characters and lets them fight it out, so Shaw gives a
philosophy apiece to each of his characters and lets them argue it
out. His comedies exhibit with tremendous comic irony the exposure of
non-Shavians by Shavians. One day Huxley in jest described Herbert
Spencer's idea of a tragedy as “a deduction killed by a fact.” In a
moderate, a partial, sense, this might serve as a just criticism of the
theatre of Bernard Shaw.
There is a certain fanciful sort of resemblance between a play of
Shaw's and a meeting of his own Borough Council: the meeting is
called to order, there is argument and discussion _pro_ and _con_, a
resolution is moved, seconded, carried. Shaw is positively judicial in
his fairness, even to the extent of creating the impression that his
characters are vocalized points of view. With consummate shrewdness,
Shaw has fully realized that if the dramatist take sides in a dramatic
wrangle, he is lost. A sense of the most absolute fairness and
impartiality pervades and dominates his plays. Every character has
his say without let or hindrance; and the whole play is signalized by
the “honesty of its dialectic.” Shaw does not disclaim the fullest
responsibility for the opinions of all his characters, pleasant and
unpleasant. “They are all right from their several points of view;
and their points of view are, for the dramatic moment, mine also.
This may puzzle the people who believe that there is such a thing as
an absolutely right point of view, usually their own. It may seem to
them that nobody who doubts this can be in a state of grace. However
that may be, it is certainly true that nobody who argues with them can
possibly be a dramatist, or, indeed, anything else that turns upon a
knowledge of mankind. Hence it has been pointed out that Shakespeare
had no conscience. Neither have I, in that sense.”[224]
This quality of anxious self-explanation in his characters, this
“Let me make clear to you my philosophy of life,” produces upon the
reader and spectator two distinct impressions: first an “overwhelming
impression of coldness and inhuman rationalism”; and, second, the
impression that the characters are replicas or mouthpieces of Shaw
himself. The resemblance is still further enhanced through the
instrumentality of one of Shaw's most diverting traits as a humorist:
his idiosyncrasy for self-mockery and self-puffery. There is nothing,
not even himself, about which Shaw will not jest; for, to use an
Oscarism, he respects life too deeply to discuss it seriously. He
is a master of that art of burlesque which, in Brunetière's harsh
characterization, consists “in the expansion of the ego in the joyous
satisfaction of its own vulgarity.” One of the truest words, spoken in
jest, is Shaw's confession that the main obstacle to the performance of
his plays has been--himself!
In contradistinction to the classic formula--that the drama should
be the most impersonal of the arts--Shaw's drama may be defined as a
revelation of the personality of Bernard Shaw. “We must agree with
him,” concludes M. Filon, “and accept--or reject--the dramatic work of
Mr. Shaw as it is, namely, as the expression of the ideas, sentiments
and fantasies of Mr. Shaw.”[225]
In fine, I should say that Bernard Shaw is a striking instance of the
unusual combination of critical and creative faculties. Sometimes the
dramatist, he is always the critic. While Shaw can make one laugh,
it is seldom that he can make one weep. He unites within himself the
power both to construct and to dissect. With Shaw--the _Richter und
Dichter_ of German characterization--rationality precedes creation.
His richly constructive fancy seldom imagines what his cooler reason
has not already perceived. In his plays, there is scarcely a hint of
what he himself somewhere described as “the stirring of the blood, the
bristling of the fibres, the transcendent, fearless fury which makes
romance so delightful.” Shaw is always perfectly aware of himself;
Coventry Patmore would have denied him the title of true genius. As
someone has cleverly said: “Shaw's eye has never yet in a fine frenzy
rolled.” If he had ever listened to the horns of elfland faintly
blowing, he would doubtless have said afterwards that Kosleck of Berlin
could have done it better. If he had ever heard the morning stars
sing together and the sons of God shout for joy, the experience would
probably have elicited the coolly critical remark that the _ensemble_
effect was not as good as at Bayreuth, and that the shouting was not as
ear-splitting as the “wilful bawling” of the De Reszkes.
This coolly critical attitude, which Shaw manages to transfer to
his characters, gives them the appearance of beings peculiarly
rationalistic and bloodless. In their veins, as Mr. Archer once said
of the leading characters in _Widowers' Houses_, there seems to flow
a sort of sour whey. Shaw has almost succeeded in eliminating the Red
Corpuscle from Art.
His characters seem to be devoid of animal passions; their pallid
ratiocinations can more aptly be described as vegetable passions.
[Illustration: =Shaw's Present Home in London,
10, Adelphi Terrace, W.C.=]
_Alvin Langdon Coburn._
In the case of Shaw, I often receive the impression that inspiration
is replaced by excogitation, imagination by what Rossetti called
fundamental brain-work. Lessing's phrase, “dramatic algebra,” is not a
wholly inappropriate term for his plays. A partial explanation of this
phenomenon may perhaps be found in the speech I heard him deliver at
the Vedrenne-Barker dinner. “One hears a lot of talk these days about
the New School of Shavian playwrights--Granville Barker, St. John
Hankin, and the rest. I sincerely hope they will not try to imitate
my style and method. There is only one Bernard Shaw, and that one is
quite sufficient. I find a striking analogy between the case of the old
Italian masters and myself. When they began to work, they found that
the human form had been neglected and ignored. Forthwith they began
to paint works which appeared to be anatomical studies, so emphasized
was the figure. I found myself in much the same situation when I first
began to write for the stage. I found that the one thing which had been
neglected and ignored by British dramatists was human nature. So I
began to put human nature barely and nakedly upon the stage, which so
startled the public that they declared that my characters were utterly
unnatural and untrue to life. But I have gone on and on exposing human
nature, more and more in each succeeding play. If my imitators continue
to reveal human nature so ruthlessly, I am afraid I shall have done
more harm than good.”[226] The greatest artist, according to Shaw's own
definition, is “he who goes a step beyond the demand, and, by supplying
works of a higher beauty and a higher interest than have yet been
perceived, succeeds, after a brief struggle with its strangeness, in
adding this fresh extension of sense to the heritage of the race.” It
is a mark of Shaw's high purpose, of the sociologic significance of the
man, that he employs art merely as one of a number of means by which
he can put his ideas into effect. Doubtless because of his belief that
philosophic content is the touchstone of real greatness in art--that
Bunyan is greater than Shakespeare, Blake than Lamb, Ibsen than
Swinburne, Shaw than Pinero--his plays have something of the rigidity
of theses. Shaw's plays not infrequently suffer from the malady of the
_à priori_. Sometimes they are even stricken down with what Wagner
called the incurable disease of thought.
Shakespeare created a drama of human nature in which the actions of the
characters are their own commentary. Maeterlinck created a drama of
shadow in which the characters are most articulate in their silence.
Shaw has created a drama of discussion in which his characters have
not the strength to hold their tongues. Shakespeare's characters are
self-unconscious characters; Maeterlinck's, subconscious; Shaw's,
self-conscious. Mr. Holbrook Jackson remarks that “Shaw's drama is
the only consistently religious drama of the day--it is as relentless
in its pursuit of an exalted idea as were the ancient Moralities and
Mysteries.” But Mr. Jackson fails to draw the conclusion that, for
this reason, Shaw's characters often take on the guise of intellectual
abstractions. The Frenchman calls them _hommes-idées_; the German,
_Gedankenpuppen_. Shaw's plays are pitched on a plane of transcendental
realism. His supreme gift as a dramatist, someone has wisely said,
is to produce an impression of life more real than reality itself.
His power of penetrative insight at times appears to be something
almost like divination. The soul of his wit is laconic brevity and
marvellous astuteness in character exposure. His dialogue is the most
entertaining, the most diverting, that has been written since the days
of Sheridan. He has succeeded in interpreting life with so precise
and so illuminating a medium that he frequently transcends the bounds
of plausibility, probability, or even possibility, without the lapse
being noted. Many, perhaps the majority, of his leading characters,
operate upon a plane of fantasy; the psychological impossibility of
their actions is concealed by the intellectual credibility of their
ideas. They appear as the mouthpieces of his theories, as replicas
of his personality, or as changing aspects of his own temperament.
Or else, in the later plays, they appear as embodied forces of
Nature, as allegorical personifications of modern Moralities. Shaw
is constitutionally opposed to “holding the kodak up to Nature”; he
believes in making the chaos of Nature intelligible by intelligent
choice of material. His _métier_, then, is interpretation, not
observation. As a consequence, he gives us life interpreted in strict
accordance with Shavian sophistication. In large part, he depicts human
beings not as they really are, but as they might be supposed to be if
animated by the Shavian philosophy modified to suit the needs of their
individual temperaments.
Quite a number of Shaw's leading characters, and the majority of the
subsidiary characters, are marvellously natural studies in contemporary
psychology. Unhampered by the _impedimenta_ of Shavianism, they move
freely and naturally along the beaten paths of humanity. Now and then,
we are whisked away to the realm of fantasy; or else we have only
to shut our eyes and open our ears to hear Shaw's ironical laughter
echo through their speeches. But, on the whole, we are not deceived
in believing that Bernard Shaw's plays are all stages in his search
for the essential reality of things. Along the pathway, he has left
many vivid, many brilliant, many comprehensible, some complex, and all
essentially modern figures. Sartorius, kind-hearted and inhumane; the
unwomanly “womanly woman,” Julia; Mrs. Warren, reptilianly fascinating
and repulsive, her mother-love slain by the relentless sword of her
profession; Crofts, upholding a hideously immoral standard of honour
before our sickened gaze; Bluntschli, genial, droll expositor of
the prose and common sense of life; Marchbanks, anæmic, asthenic--a
visionary penetrating to the truth beneath all disguises and learning
the lesson of life in the black hour of disillusionment; Morell, the
stupid, good-natured, self-centred parson; Candida, the maternal
_clairvoyante_; Dudgeon, the fascinating dare-devil, resolute in
fulfilment of the law of his own nature; Judith, the sentimental and
_larmoyante_; Lady Cicely, ingenuous, tactful, feline, irresistible;
Cleopatra, subtly evolving from a kittenish minx into a tigerish and
vengeful tyrant; the boyish, energetic, humane Cæsar, large in humour
and in comic perception; Broadbent, the typical, stolid Englishman,
blunderingly successful because he doesn't know where he is going;
Keegan, the gentle and the bitter, _vox clamantis in deserto_,
interpreting a new trinity for the worship of the coming age; Sir
Patrick Cullen, quintessence of gruff and kindly common sense; the
immortal William, deferential and urbane; and how many more!--a group
of finely imagined, subtly conceived, _essentially_ real, if not always
credibly human, beings.
Shaw is a marvellous portrait painter, a Sargent in his insight into
human nature and into contemporary life. He is a wit of the very
first rank, a satirist to be classed with Voltaire, Renan and Anatole
France. The static drama he has created enlarges our conception of the
function of the drama. The new dramatic system of Shaw's creation, in
the words of M. Filon, subordinates the development of the sentimental
action to the painting of characters and the discussion of ideas. Like
Molière, Shaw has stamped his characters in the idea, and made of them
the necessary exponents of contemporary philosophy, the inevitable
interpreters of contemporary life.
Capitally and fundamentally, Bernard Shaw's drama is socially
deterministic. His characters are what they are, become what they
become, far less on account of heredity or ancestral influence than
on account of the social structure of the environment through which
their fate is moulded. Economist as well as moralist, Shaw attributes
paramount importance to the economic and political conditions of the
_régime_ in which his characters live and move and have their being.
His drama has its true origin in the conflict between the wills of his
characters and the social determinism perpetually at work to destroy
the freedom of their wills. The germ idea of his philosophy is rooted
in the effort to supplant modern social organization by Socialism
through the intermediary of the free operation of the will of humanity.
FOOTNOTES:
[217] _The Problem Play: A Symposium (V.)_, by G. Bernard Shaw, in the
_Humanitarian_, May, 1895.
[218] _The Author's Apology_, Preface to the Stage Society's edition of
_Mrs. Warren's Profession_, p. xxii.
[219] _The Meaning of Mr. Bernard Shaw_, by G. K. Chesterton, in the
_Daily News_, October 30th, 1901.
[220] Prospectus of the Schiller-Theater, Berlin. _Vornehmlich über
mich selbst_, von Bernard Shaw. This “Plauderei” appeared in the
Vienna _Zeit_ in February, 1903, shortly before the production of
_Teufelskerl_ (_The Devil's Disciple_) in Vienna.
[221] The celebrated account Shaw once gave of his visit to an
ophthalmic surgeon clearly sets before us his conception of the
nature and value of his critical faculty: “He tested my eyesight
one evening, and informed me that it was quite uninteresting to him
because it was 'normal.' I naturally took this to mean that it was like
everybody else's; but he rejected this construction as paradoxical,
and hastened to explain to me that I was an exceptional and highly
fortunate person optically, 'normal' sight conferring the power of
seeing things accurately, and being enjoyed by only about ten per cent.
of the population, the remaining ninety per cent. being abnormal. I
immediately perceived the explanation of my want of success in fiction.
My mind's eye, like my body's, was 'normal'; it saw things differently
from other people's eyes, and saw them better.”--_Mainly About Myself_,
Preface to _Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant_, Vol. I., p. 11.
[222] At various times, in essays published in Europe and in America,
I have called attention to the resemblance between Shaw and Molière,
dubbing Shaw the Molière of our time. Recently, M. Auguste Hamon
has made a detailed comparison of the two comic dramatists in the
_Nineteenth Century and After: Un Nouveau Molière_, July, 1908.
[223] _Our Saturday Talk.--VI._, Mr. Bernard Shaw, in the _Saturday
Westminster Gazette_, November 26th, 1904.
[224] _Man and Superman: Epistle Dedicatory to Arthur Bingham Walkley_,
p. xxvi.
[225] _M. Bernard Shaw et son Théâtre_, by Augustin Filon; _Revue des
Deux Mondes_, November 15th, 1905.
[226] Response to the toast: _The Authors of the Court Theatre_, by
G. Bernard Shaw, at the Vedrenne-Barker Dinner, Criterion Restaurant,
London, July 7th, 1907.
ARTIST AND PHILOSOPHER
“It was easy for Ruskin to lay down the rule of dying rather
than doing unjustly; but death is a plain thing, justice a
very obscure thing. How is an ordinary man to draw the line
between right and wrong otherwise than by accepting public
opinion on the subject; and what more conclusive expression of
sincere public opinion can there be than market demand? Even
when we repudiate that and fall back on our own judgment, the
matter gathers doubt rather than clearness. The popular notion
of morality and piety is to simply beg all the more important
questions in life for other people; but when these questions
come home to ourselves, we suddenly discover that the devil's
advocate has a stronger case than we thought: we remember
that the way of righteousness or death was the way of the
Inquisition; that hell is paved, not with bad intentions but
with good ones.”--An Essay on Modern Glove Fighting appended to
_Cashel Byron's Profession_.