ever forget the first acting of _Arms and the Man_. It was applauded by
that indescribable element in all of us which rejoices to see the
genuine thing prevail against the plausible; that element which rejoices
that even its enemies are alive. Apart from the problems raised in the
play, the very form of it was an attractive and forcible innovation.
Classic plays which were wholly heroic, comic plays which were wholly
and even heartlessly ironical, were common enough. Commonest of all in
this particular time was the play that began playfully, with plenty of
comic business, and was gradually sobered by sentiment until it ended on
a note of romance or even of pathos. A commonplace little officer, the
butt of the mess, becomes by the last act as high and hopeless a lover
as Dante. Or a vulgar and violent pork-butcher remembers his own youth
before the curtain goes down. The first thing that Bernard Shaw did when
he stepped before the footlights was to reverse this process. He
resolved to build a play not on pathos, but on bathos. The officer
should be heroic first and then everyone should laugh at him; the
curtain should go up on a man remembering his youth, and he should only
reveal himself as a violent pork-butcher when someone interrupted him
with an order for pork. This merely technical originality is indicated
in the very title of the play. The _Arma Virumque_ of Virgil is a
mounting and ascending phrase, the man is more than his weapons. The
Latin line suggests a superb procession which should bring on to the
stage the brazen and resounding armour, the shield and shattering axe,
but end with the hero himself, taller and more terrible because unarmed.
The technical effect of Shaw's scheme is like the same scene, in which a
crowd should carry even more gigantic shapes of shield and helmet, but
when the horns and howls were at their highest, should end with the
figure of Little Tich. The name itself is meant to be a bathos;
arms--and the man.
It is well to begin with the superficial; and this is the superficial
effectiveness of Shaw; the brilliancy of bathos. But of course the
vitality and value of his plays does not lie merely in this; any more
than the value of Swinburne lies in alliteration or the value of Hood in
puns. This is not his message; but it is his method; it is his style.
The first taste we had of it was in this play of _Arms and the Man_; but
even at the very first it was evident that there was much more in the
play than that. Among other things there was one thing not unimportant;
there was savage sincerity. Indeed, only a ferociously sincere person
can produce such effective flippancies on a matter like war; just as
only a strong man could juggle with cannon balls. It is all very well to
use the word "fool" as synonymous with "jester"; but daily experience
shows that it is generally the solemn and silent man who is the fool. It
is all very well to accuse Mr. Shaw of standing on his head; but if you
stand on your head you must have a hard and solid head to stand on. In
_Arms and the Man_ the bathos of form was strictly the incarnation of a
strong satire in the idea. The play opens in an atmosphere of military
melodrama; the dashing officer of cavalry going off to death in an
attitude, the lovely heroine left in tearful rapture; the brass band,
the noise of guns and the red fire. Into all this enters Bluntschli, the
little sturdy crop-haired Swiss professional soldier, a man without a
country but with a trade. He tells the army-adoring heroine frankly that
she is a humbug; and she, after a moment's reflection, appears to agree
with him. The play is like nearly all Shaw's plays, the dialogue of a
conversion. By the end of it the young lady has lost all her military
illusions and admires this mercenary soldier not because he faces guns,
but because he faces facts.
This was a fitting entrance for Shaw to his didactic drama; because the
commonplace courage which he respects in Bluntschli was the one virtue
which he was destined to praise throughout. We can best see how the play
symbolises and summarises Bernard Shaw if we compare it with some other
attack by modern humanitarians upon war. Shaw has many of the actual
opinions of Tolstoy. Like Tolstoy he tells men, with coarse innocence,
that romantic war is only butchery and that romantic love is only lust.
But Tolstoy objects to these things because they are real; he really
wishes to abolish them. Shaw only objects to them in so far as they are
ideal; that is in so far as they are idealised. Shaw objects not so much
to war as to the attractiveness of war. He does not so much dislike love
as the love of love. Before the temple of Mars, Tolstoy stands and
thunders, "There shall be no wars"; Bernard Shaw merely murmurs, "Wars
if you must; but for God's sake, not war songs." Before the temple of
Venus, Tolstoy cries terribly, "Come out of it!"; Shaw is quite content
to say, "Do not be taken in by it." Tolstoy seems really to propose that
high passion and patriotic valour should be destroyed. Shaw is more
moderate; and only asks that they should be desecrated. Upon this note,
both about sex and conflict, he was destined to dwell through much of
his work with the most wonderful variations of witty adventure and
intellectual surprise. It may be doubted perhaps whether this realism in
love and war is quite so sensible as it looks. _Securus judicat orbis
terrarum_; the world is wiser than the moderns. The world has kept
sentimentalities simply because they are the most practical things in
the world. They alone make men do things. The world does not encourage a
quite rational lover, simply because a perfectly rational lover would
never get married. The world does not encourage a perfectly rational
army, because a perfectly rational army would run away.
The brain of Bernard Shaw was like a wedge in the literal sense. Its
sharpest end was always in front; and it split our society from end to
end the moment it had entrance at all. As I have said he was long
unheard of; but he had not the tragedy of many authors, who were heard
of long before they were heard. When you had read any Shaw you read all
Shaw. When you had seen one of his plays you waited for more. And when
he brought them out in volume form, you did what is repugnant to any
literary man--you bought a book.
The dramatic volume with which Shaw dazzled the public was called,
_Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant_. I think the most striking and typical
thing about it was that he did not know very clearly which plays were
unpleasant and which were pleasant. "Pleasant" is a word which is almost
unmeaning to Bernard Shaw. Except, as I suppose, in music (where I
cannot follow him), relish and receptivity are things that simply do not
appear. He has the best of tongues and the worst of palates. With the
possible exception of _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ (which was at least
unpleasant in the sense of being forbidden) I can see no particular
reason why any of the seven plays should be held specially to please or
displease. First in fame and contemporary importance came the reprint
of _Arms and the Man_, of which I have already spoken. Over all the rest
towered unquestionably the two figures of Mrs. Warren and of Candida.
They were neither of them pleasant, except as all good art is pleasant.
They were neither of them really unpleasant except as all truth is
unpleasant. But they did represent the author's normal preference and
his principal fear; and those two sculptured giantesses largely upheld
his fame.
I fancy that the author rather dislikes _Candida_ because it is so
generally liked. I give my own feeling for what it is worth (a foolish
phrase), but I think that there were only two moments when this powerful
writer was truly, in the ancient and popular sense, inspired; that is,
breathing from a bigger self and telling more truth than he knew. One is
that scene in a later play where after the secrets and revenges of Egypt
have rioted and rotted all round him, the colossal sanity of Cæsar is
suddenly acclaimed with swords. The other is that great last scene in
_Candida_ where the wife, stung into final speech, declared her purpose
of remaining with the strong man because he is the weak man. The wife is
asked to decide between two men, one a strenuous self-confident popular
preacher, her husband, the other a wild and weak young poet, logically
futile and physically timid, her lover; and she chooses the former
because he has more weakness and more need of her. Even among the plain
and ringing paradoxes of the Shaw play this is one of the best reversals
or turnovers ever effected. A paradoxical writer like Bernard Shaw is
perpetually and tiresomely told that he stands on his head. But all
romance and all religion consist in making the whole universe stand on
its head. That reversal is the whole idea of virtue; that the last shall
be first and the first last. Considered as a pure piece of Shaw
therefore, the thing is of the best. But it is also something much
better than Shaw. The writer touches certain realities commonly outside
his scope; especially the reality of the normal wife's attitude to the
normal husband, an attitude which is not romantic but which is yet quite
quixotic; which is insanely unselfish and yet quite cynically
clear-sighted. It involves human sacrifice without in the least
involving idolatry.
The truth is that in this place Bernard Shaw comes within an inch of
expressing something that is not properly expressed anywhere else; the
idea of marriage. Marriage is not a mere chain upon love as the
anarchists say; nor is it a mere crown upon love as the sentimentalists
say. Marriage is a fact, an actual human relation like that of
motherhood which has certain human habits and loyalties, except in a few
monstrous cases where it is turned to torture by special insanity and
sin. A marriage is neither an ecstasy nor a slavery; it is a
commonwealth; it is a separate working and fighting thing like a nation.
Kings and diplomatists talk of "forming alliances" when they make
weddings; but indeed every wedding is primarily an alliance. The family
is a fact even when it is not an agreeable fact, and a man is part of
his wife even when he wishes he wasn't. The twain are one flesh--yes,
even when they are not one spirit. Man is duplex. Man is a quadruped.
Of this ancient and essential relation there are certain emotional
results, which are subtle, like all the growths of nature. And one of
them is the attitude of the wife to the husband, whom she regards at
once as the strongest and most helpless of human figures. She regards
him in some strange fashion at once as a warrior who must make his way
and as an infant who is sure to lose his way. The man has emotions which
exactly correspond; sometimes looking down at his wife and sometimes up
at her; for marriage is like a splendid game of see-saw. Whatever else
it is, it is not comradeship. This living, ancestral bond (not of love
or fear, but strictly of marriage) has been twice expressed splendidly
in literature. The man's incurable sense of the mother in his lawful
wife was uttered by Browning in one of his two or three truly shattering
lines of genius, when he makes the execrable Guido fall back finally
upon the fact of marriage and the wife whom he has trodden like mire:
"Christ! Maria! God,
Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"
And the woman's witness to the same fact has been best expressed by
Bernard Shaw in this great scene where she remains with the great
stalwart successful public man because he is really too little to run
alone.
There are one or two errors in the play; and they are all due to the
primary error of despising the mental attitude of romance, which is the
only key to real human conduct. For instance, the love making of the
young poet is all wrong. He is supposed to be a romantic and amorous
boy; and therefore the dramatist tries to make him talk turgidly, about
seeking for "an archangel with purple wings" who shall be worthy of his
lady. But a lad in love would never talk in this mock heroic style;
there is no period at which the young male is more sensitive and serious
and afraid of looking a fool. This is a blunder; but there is another
much bigger and blacker. It is completely and disastrously false to the
whole nature of falling in love to make the young Eugene complain of the
cruelty which makes Candida defile her fair hands with domestic duties.
No boy in love with a beautiful woman would ever feel disgusted when she
peeled potatoes or trimmed lamps. He would like her to be domestic. He
would simply feel that the potatoes had become poetical and the lamps
gained an extra light. This may be irrational; but we are not talking of
rationality, but of the psychology of first love. It may be very unfair
to women that the toil and triviality of potato peeling should be seen
through a glamour of romance; but the glamour is quite as certain a fact
as the potatoes. It may be a bad thing in sociology that men should
deify domesticity in girls as something dainty and magical; but all men
do. Personally I do not think it a bad thing at all; but that is another
argument. The argument here is that Bernard Shaw, in aiming at mere
realism, makes a big mistake in reality. Misled by his great heresy of
looking at emotions from the outside, he makes Eugene a cold-blooded
prig at the very moment when he is trying, for his own dramatic
purposes, to make him a hot-blooded lover. He makes the young lover an
idealistic theoriser about the very things about which he really would
have been a sort of mystical materialist. Here the romantic Irishman is
much more right than the very rational one; and there is far more truth
to life as it is in Lover's couplet--
"And envied the chicken
That Peggy was pickin'."
than in Eugene's solemn, æsthetic protest against the potato-skins and
the lamp-oil. For dramatic purposes, G. B. S., even if he despises
romance, ought to comprehend it. But then, if once he comprehended
romance, he would not despise it.
The series contained, besides its more substantial work, tragic and
comic, a comparative frivolity called _The Man of Destiny_. It is a
little comedy about Napoleon, and is chiefly interesting as a
foreshadowing of his after sketches of heroes and strong men; it is a
kind of parody of _Cæsar and Cleopatra_ before it was written. In this
connection the mere title of this Napoleonic play is of interest. All
Shaw's generation and school of thought remembered Napoleon only by his
late and corrupt title of "The Man of Destiny," a title only given to
him when he was already fat and tired and destined to exile. They forgot
that through all the really thrilling and creative part of his career he
was not the man of destiny, but the man who defied destiny. Shaw's
sketch is extraordinarily clever; but it is tinged with this unmilitary
notion of an inevitable conquest; and this we must remember when we come
to those larger canvases on which he painted his more serious heroes. As
for the play, it is packed with good things, of which the last is
perhaps the best. The long duologue between Bonaparte and the Irish lady
ends with the General declaring that he will only be beaten when he
meets an English army under an Irish general. It has always been one of
Shaw's paradoxes that the English mind has the force to fulfil orders,
while the Irish mind has the intelligence to give them, and it is among
those of his paradoxes which contain a certain truth.
A far more important play is _The Philanderer_, an ironic comedy which
is full of fine strokes and real satire; it is more especially the
vehicle of some of Shaw's best satire upon physical science. Nothing
could be cleverer than the picture of the young, strenuous doctor, in
the utter innocence of his professional ambition, who has discovered a
new disease, and is delighted when he finds people suffering from it and
cast down to despair when he finds that it does not exist. The point is
worth a pause, because it is a good, short way of stating Shaw's
attitude, right or wrong, upon the whole of formal morality. What he
dislikes in young Doctor Paramore is that he has interposed a secondary
and false conscience between himself and the facts. When his disease is
disproved, instead of seeing the escape of a human being who thought he
was going to die of it, Paramore sees the downfall of a kind of flag or
cause. This is the whole contention of _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_,
put better than the book puts it; it is a really sharp exposition of the
dangers of "idealism," the sacrifice of people to principles, and Shaw
is even wiser in his suggestion that this excessive idealism exists
nowhere so strongly as in the world of physical science. He shows that
the scientist tends to be more concerned about the sickness than about
the sick man; but it was certainly in his mind to suggest here also that
the idealist is more concerned about the sin than about the sinner.
This business of Dr. Paramore's disease while it is the most farcical
thing in the play is also the most philosophic and important. The rest
of the figures, including the Philanderer himself, are in the full sense
of those blasting and obliterating words "funny without being vulgar,"
that is, funny without being of any importance to the masses of men. It
is a play about a dashing and advanced "Ibsen Club," and the squabble
between the young Ibsenites and the old people who are not yet up to
Ibsen. It would be hard to find a stronger example of Shaw's only
essential error, modernity--which means the seeking for truth in terms
of time. Only a few years have passed and already almost half the wit of
that wonderful play is wasted, because it all turns on the newness of a
fashion that is no longer new. Doubtless many people still think the
Ibsen drama a great thing, like the French classical drama. But going to
"The Philanderer" is like going among periwigs and rapiers and hearing
that the young men are now all for Racine. What makes such work sound
unreal is not the praise of Ibsen, but the praise of the novelty of
Ibsen. Any advantage that Bernard Shaw had over Colonel Craven I have
over Bernard Shaw; we who happen to be born last have the meaningless
and paltry triumph in that meaningless and paltry war. We are the
superiors by that silliest and most snobbish of all superiorities, the
mere aristocracy of time. All works must become thus old and insipid
which have ever tried to be "modern," which have consented to smell of
time rather than of eternity. Only those who have stooped to be in
advance of their time will ever find themselves behind it.
But it is irritating to think what diamonds, what dazzling silver of
Shavian wit has been sunk in such an out-of-date warship. In _The
Philanderer_ there are five hundred excellent and about five magnificent
things. The rattle of repartees between the doctor and the soldier about
the humanity of their two trades is admirable. Or again, when the
colonel tells Chartaris that "in his young days" he would have no more
behaved like Chartaris than he would have cheated at cards. After a
pause Chartaris says, "You're getting old, Craven, and you make a
virtue of it as usual." And there is an altitude of aerial tragedy in
the words of Grace, who has refused the man she loves, to Julia, who is
marrying the man she doesn't, "This is what they call a happy
ending--these men."
There is an acrid taste in _The Philanderer_; and certainly he might be
considered a super-sensitive person who should find anything acrid in
_You Never Can Tell_. This play is the nearest approach to frank and
objectless exuberance in the whole of Shaw's work. _Punch_, with wisdom
as well as wit, said that it might well be called not "You Never Can
Tell" but "You Never Can be Shaw." And yet if anyone will read this
blazing farce and then after it any of the romantic farces, such as
_Pickwick_ or even _The Wrong Box_, I do not think he will be disposed
to erase or even to modify what I said at the beginning about the
ingrained grimness and even inhumanity of Shaw's art. To take but one
test: love, in an "extravaganza," may be light love or love in idleness,
but it should be hearty and happy love if it is to add to the general
hilarity. Such are the ludicrous but lucky love affairs of the sportsman
Winkle and the Maestro Jimson. In Gloria's collapse before her bullying
lover there is something at once cold and unclean; it calls up all the
modern supermen with their cruel and fishy eyes. Such farces should
begin in a friendly air, in a tavern. There is something very symbolic
of Shaw in the fact that his farce begins in a dentist's.
The only one out of this brilliant batch of plays in which I think that
the method adopted really fails, is the one called _Widower's Houses_.
The best touch of Shaw is simply in the title. The simple substitution
of widowers for widows contains almost the whole bitter and yet
boisterous protest of Shaw; all his preference for undignified fact over
dignified phrase; all his dislike of those subtle trends of sex or
mystery which swing the logician off the straight line. We can imagine
him crying, "Why in the name of death and conscience should it be tragic
to be a widow but comic to be a widower?" But the rationalistic method
is here applied quite wrong as regards the production of a drama. The
most dramatic point in the affair is when the open and indecent
rack-renter turns on the decent young man of means and proves to him
that he is equally guilty, that he also can only grind his corn by
grinding the faces of the poor. But even here the point is undramatic
because it is indirect; it is indirect because it is merely
sociological. It may be the truth that a young man living on an
unexamined income which ultimately covers a great deal of house-property
is as dangerous as any despot or thief. But it is a truth that you can
no more put into a play than into a triolet. You can make a play out of
one man robbing another man, but not out of one man robbing a million
men; still less out of his robbing them unconsciously.
Of the plays collected in this book I have kept _Mrs. Warren's
Profession_ to the last, because, fine as it is, it is even finer and
more important because of its fate, which was to rouse a long and
serious storm and to be vetoed by the Censor of Plays. I say that this
drama is most important because of the quarrel that came out of it. If I
were speaking of some mere artist this might be an insult. But there are
high and heroic things in Bernard Shaw; and one of the highest and most
heroic is this, that he certainly cares much more for a quarrel than for
a play. And this quarrel about the censorship is one on which he feels
so strongly that in a book embodying any sort of sympathy it would be
much better to leave out Mrs. Warren than to leave out Mr. Redford. The
veto was the pivot of so very personal a movement by the dramatist, of
so very positive an assertion of his own attitude towards things, that
it is only just and necessary to state what were the two essential
parties to the dispute; the play and the official who prevented the
play.