and a cold daughter; the mother drives the ordinary and dirty trade of
harlotry; the daughter does not know until the end the atrocious origin
of all her own comfort and refinement. The daughter, when the discovery
is made, freezes up into an iceberg of contempt; which is indeed a very
womanly thing to do. The mother explodes into pulverising cynicism and
practicality; which is also very womanly. The dialogue is drastic and
sweeping; the daughter says the trade is loathsome; the mother answers
that she loathes it herself; that every healthy person does loathe the
trade by which she lives. And beyond question the general effect of the
play is that the trade is loathsome; supposing anyone to be so
insensible as to require to be told of the fact. Undoubtedly the upshot
is that a brothel is a miserable business, and a brothel-keeper a
miserable woman. The whole dramatic art of Shaw is in the literal sense
of the word, tragi-comic; I mean that the comic part comes after the
tragedy. But just as _You Never Can Tell_ represents the nearest
approach of Shaw to the purely comic, so _Mrs. Warren's Profession_
represents his only complete, or nearly complete, tragedy. There is no
twopenny modernism in it, as in _The Philanderer_. Mrs. Warren is as old
as the Old Testament; "for she hath cast down many wounded, yea, many
strong men have been slain by her; her house is in the gates of hell,
going down into the chamber of death." Here is no subtle ethics, as in
_Widowers' Houses_; for even those moderns who think it noble that a
woman should throw away her honour, surely cannot think it especially
noble that she should sell it. Here is no lighting up by laughter,
astonishment, and happy coincidence, as in _You Never Can Tell_. The
play is a pure tragedy about a permanent and quite plain human problem;
the problem is as plain and permanent, the tragedy is as proud and pure,
as in _OEdipus_ or _Macbeth_. This play was presented in the ordinary
way for public performance and was suddenly stopped by the Censor of
Plays.
The Censor of Plays is a small and accidental eighteenth-century
official. Like nearly all the powers which Englishmen now respect as
ancient and rooted, he is very recent. Novels and newspapers still talk
of the English aristocracy that came over with William the Conqueror.
Little of our effective oligarchy is as old as the Reformation; and none
of it came over with William the Conqueror. Some of the older English
landlords came over with William of Orange; the rest have come by
ordinary alien immigration. In the same way we always talk of the
Victorian woman (with her smelling salts and sentiment) as the
old-fashioned woman. But she really was a quite new-fashioned woman; she
considered herself, and was, an advance in delicacy and civilisation
upon the coarse and candid Elizabethan woman to whom we are now
returning. We are never oppressed by old things; it is recent things
that can really oppress. And in accordance with this principle modern
England has accepted, as if it were a part of perennial morality, a
tenth-rate job of Walpole's worst days called the Censorship of the
Drama. Just as they have supposed the eighteenth-century parvenus to
date from Hastings, just as they have supposed the eighteenth-century
ladies to date from Eve, so they have supposed the eighteenth-century
Censorship to date from Sinai. The origin of the thing was in truth
purely political. Its first and principal achievement was to prevent
Fielding from writing plays; not at all because the plays were coarse,
but because they criticised the Government. Fielding was a free writer;
but they did not resent his sexual freedom; the Censor would not have
objected if he had torn away the most intimate curtains of decency or
rent the last rag from private life. What the Censor disliked was his
rending the curtain from public life. There is still much of that spirit
in our country; there are no affairs which men seek so much to cover up
as public affairs. But the thing was done somewhat more boldly and
baldly in Walpole's day; and the Censorship of plays has its origin, not
merely in tyranny, but in a quite trifling and temporary and partisan
piece of tyranny; a thing in its nature far more ephemeral, far less
essential, than Ship Money. Perhaps its brightest moment was when the
office of censor was held by that filthy writer, Colman the younger; and
when he gravely refused to license a work by the author of _Our
Village_. Few funnier notions can ever have actually been facts than
this notion that the restraint and chastity of George Colman saved the
English public from the eroticism and obscenity of Miss Mitford.
Such was the play; and such was the power that stopped the play. A
private man wrote it; another private man forbade it; nor was there any
difference between Mr. Shaw's authority and Mr. Redford's, except that
Mr. Shaw did defend his action on public grounds and Mr. Redford did
not. The dramatist had simply been suppressed by a despot; and what was
worse (because it was modern) by a silent and evasive despot; a despot
in hiding. People talk about the pride of tyrants; but we at the present
day suffer from the modesty of tyrants; from the shyness and the
shrinking secrecy of the strong. Shaw's preface to _Mrs. Warren's
Profession_ was far more fit to be called a public document than the
slovenly refusal of the individual official; it had more exactness, more
universal application, more authority. Shaw on Redford was far more
national and responsible than Redford on Shaw.
The dramatist found in the quarrel one of the important occasions of his
life, because the crisis called out something in him which is in many
ways his highest quality--righteous indignation. As a mere matter of the
art of controversy of course he carried the war into the enemy's camp
at once. He did not linger over loose excuses for licence; he declared
at once that the Censor was licentious, while he, Bernard Shaw, was
clean. He did not discuss whether a Censorship ought to make the drama
moral. He declared that it made the drama immoral. With a fine strategic
audacity he attacked the Censor quite as much for what he permitted as
for what he prevented. He charged him with encouraging all plays that
attracted men to vice and only stopping those which discouraged them
from it. Nor was this attitude by any means an idle paradox. Many plays
appear (as Shaw pointed out) in which the prostitute and the procuress
are practically obvious, and in which they are represented as revelling
in beautiful surroundings and basking in brilliant popularity. The crime
of Shaw was not that he introduced the Gaiety Girl; that had been done,
with little enough decorum, in a hundred musical comedies. The crime of
Shaw was that he introduced the Gaiety Girl, but did not represent her
life as all gaiety. The pleasures of vice were already flaunted before
the playgoers. It was the perils of vice that were carefully concealed
from them. The gay adventures, the gorgeous dresses, the champagne and
oysters, the diamonds and motor-cars, dramatists were allowed to drag
all these dazzling temptations before any silly housemaid in the gallery
who was grumbling at her wages. But they were not allowed to warn her of
the vulgarity and the nausea, the dreary deceptions and the blasting
diseases of that life. _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ was not up to a
sufficient standard of immorality; it was not spicy enough to pass the
Censor. The acceptable and the accepted plays were those which made the
fall of a woman fashionable and fascinating; for all the world as if the
Censor's profession were the same as Mrs. Warren's profession.
Such was the angle of Shaw's energetic attack; and it is not to be
denied that there was exaggeration in it, and what is so much worse,
omission. The argument might easily be carried too far; it might end
with a scene of screaming torture in the Inquisition as a corrective to
the too amiable view of a clergyman in _The Private Secretary_. But the
controversy is definitely worth recording, if only as an excellent
example of the author's aggressive attitude and his love of turning the
tables in debate. Moreover, though this point of view involves a
potential overstatement, it also involves an important truth. One of
the best points urged in the course of it was this, that though vice is
punished in conventional drama, the punishment is not really impressive,
because it is not inevitable or even probable. It does not arise out of
the evil act. Years afterwards Bernard Shaw urged this argument again in
connection with his friend Mr. Granville Barker's play of _Waste_, in
which the woman dies from an illegal operation. Bernard Shaw said, truly
enough, that if she had died from poison or a pistol shot it would have
left everyone unmoved, for pistols do not in their nature follow female
unchastity. Illegal operations very often do. The punishment was one
which might follow the crime, not only in that case, but in many cases.
Here, I think, the whole argument might be sufficiently cleared up by
saying that the objection to such things on the stage is a purely
artistic objection. There is nothing wrong in talking about an illegal
operation; there are plenty of occasions when it would be very wrong not
to talk about it. But it may easily be just a shade too ugly for the
shape of any work of art. There is nothing wrong about being sick; but
if Bernard Shaw wrote a play in which all the characters expressed
their dislike of animal food by vomiting on the stage, I think we should
be justified in saying that the thing was outside, not the laws of
morality, but the framework of civilised literature. The instinctive
movement of repulsion which everyone has when hearing of the operation
in _Waste_ is not an ethical repulsion at all. But it is an æsthetic
repulsion, and a right one.
But I have only dwelt on this particular fighting phase because it
leaves us facing the ultimate characteristics which I mentioned first.
Bernard Shaw cares nothing for art; in comparison with morals, literally
nothing. Bernard Shaw is a Puritan and his work is Puritan work. He has
all the essentials of the old, virile and extinct Protestant type. In
his work he is as ugly as a Puritan. He is as indecent as a Puritan. He
is as full of gross words and sensual facts as a sermon of the
seventeenth century. Up to this point of his life indeed hardly anyone
would have dreamed of calling him a Puritan; he was called sometimes an
anarchist, sometimes a buffoon, sometimes (by the more discerning stupid
people) a prig. His attitude towards current problems was felt to be
arresting and even indecent; I do not think that anyone thought of
connecting it with the old Calvinistic morality. But Shaw, who knew
better than the Shavians, was at this moment on the very eve of
confessing his moral origin. The next book of plays he produced
(including The _Devil's Disciple_, _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_,
and _Cæsar and Cleopatra_), actually bore the title of _Plays for
Puritans_.
The play called _The Devil's Disciple_ has great merits, but the merits
are incidental. Some of its jokes are serious and important, but its
general plan can only be called a joke. Almost alone among Bernard
Shaw's plays (except of course such things as _How he Lied to her
Husband_ and _The Admirable Bashville_) this drama does not turn on any
very plain pivot of ethical or philosophical conviction. The artistic
idea seems to be the notion of a melodrama in which all the conventional
melodramatic situations shall suddenly take unconventional turns. Just
where the melodramatic clergyman would show courage he appears to show
cowardice; just where the melodramatic sinner would confess his love he
confesses his indifference. This is a little too like the Shaw of the
newspaper critics rather than the Shaw of reality. There are indeed
present in the play two of the writer's principal moral conceptions.
The first is the idea of a great heroic action coming in a sense from
nowhere; that is, not coming from any commonplace motive; being born in
the soul in naked beauty, coming with its own authority and testifying
only to itself. Shaw's agent does not act towards something, but from
something. The hero dies, not because he desires heroism, but because he
has it. So in this particular play the Devil's Disciple finds that his
own nature will not permit him to put the rope around another man's
neck; he has no reasons of desire, affection, or even equity; his death
is a sort of divine whim. And in connection with this the dramatist
introduces another favourite moral; the objection to perpetual playing
upon the motive of sex. He deliberately lures the onlooker into the net
of Cupid in order to tell him with salutary decision that Cupid is not
there at all. Millions of melodramatic dramatists have made a man face
death for the woman he loves; Shaw makes him face death for the woman he
does not love--merely in order to put woman in her place. He objects to
that idolatry of sexualism which makes it the fountain of all forcible
enthusiasms; he dislikes the amorous drama which makes the female the
only key to the male. He is Feminist in politics, but Anti-feminist in
emotion. His key to most problems is, "Ne cherchez pas la femme."
As has been observed, the incidental felicities of the play are frequent
and memorable, especially those connected with the character of General
Burgoyne, the real full-blooded, free-thinking eighteenth century
gentleman, who was much too much of an aristocrat not to be a liberal.
One of the best thrusts in all the Shavian fencing matches is that which
occurs when Richard Dudgeon, condemned to be hanged, asks rhetorically
why he cannot be shot like a soldier. "Now there you speak like a
civilian," replies General Burgoyne. "Have you formed any conception of
the condition of marksmanship in the British Army?" Excellent, too, is
the passage in which his subordinate speaks of crushing the enemy in
America, and Burgoyne asks him who will crush their enemies in England,
snobbery and jobbery and incurable carelessness and sloth. And in one
sentence towards the end, Shaw reaches a wider and more genial
comprehension of mankind than he shows anywhere else; "it takes all
sorts to make a world, saints as well as soldiers." If Shaw had
remembered that sentence on other occasions he would have avoided his
mistake about Cæsar and Brutus. It is not only true that it takes all
sorts to make a world; but the world cannot succeed without its
failures. Perhaps the most doubtful point of all in the play is why it
is a play for Puritans; except the hideous picture of a Calvinistic home
is meant to destroy Puritanism. And indeed in this connection it is
constantly necessary to fall back upon the facts of which I have spoken
at the beginning of this brief study; it is necessary especially to
remember that Shaw could in all probability speak of Puritanism from the
inside. In that domestic circle which took him to hear Moody and Sankey,
in that domestic circle which was teetotal even when it was intoxicated,
in that atmosphere and society Shaw might even have met the monstrous
mother in _The Devil's Disciple_, the horrible old woman who declares
that she has hardened her heart to hate her children, because the heart
of man is desperately wicked, the old ghoul who has made one of her
children an imbecile and the other an outcast. Such types do occur in
small societies drunk with the dismal wine of Puritan determinism. It is
possible that there were among Irish Calvinists people who denied that
charity was a Christian virtue. It is possible that among Puritans there
were people who thought a heart was a kind of heart disease. But it is
enough to make one tear one's hair to think that a man of genius
received his first impressions in so small a corner of Europe that he
could for a long time suppose that this Puritanism was current among
Christian men. The question, however, need not detain us, for the batch
of plays contained two others about which it is easier to speak.
The third play in order in the series called _Plays for Puritans_ is a
very charming one; _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_. This also turns,
as does so much of the Cæsar drama, on the idea of vanity of
revenge--the idea that it is too slight and silly a thing for a man to
allow to occupy and corrupt his consciousness. It is not, of course, the
morality that is new here, but the touch of cold laughter in the core of
the morality. Many saints and sages have denounced vengeance. But they
treated vengeance as something too great for man. "Vengeance is Mine,
saith the Lord; I will repay." Shaw treats vengeance as something too
small for man--a monkey trick he ought to have outlived, a childish
storm of tears which he ought to be able to control. In the story in
question Captain Brassbound has nourished through his whole erratic
existence, racketting about all the unsavoury parts of Africa--a mission
of private punishment which appears to him as a mission of holy justice.
His mother has died in consequence of a judge's decision, and Brassbound
roams and schemes until the judge falls into his hands. Then a pleasant
society lady, Lady Cicely Waynefleet tells him in an easy conversational
undertone--a rivulet of speech which ripples while she is mending his
coat--that he is making a fool of himself, that his wrong is irrelevant,
that his vengeance is objectless, that he would be much better if he
flung his morbid fancy away for ever; in short, she tells him he is
ruining himself for the sake of ruining a total stranger. Here again we
have the note of the economist, the hatred of mere loss. Shaw (one might
almost say) dislikes murder, not so much because it wastes the life of
the corpse as because it wastes the time of the murderer. If he were
endeavouring to persuade one of his moon-lighting fellow-countrymen not
to shoot his landlord, I can imagine him explaining with benevolent
emphasis that it was not so much a question of losing a life as of
throwing away a bullet. But indeed the Irish comparison alone suggests a
doubt which wriggles in the recesses of my mind about the complete
reliability of the philosophy of Lady Cicely Waynefleet, the complete
finality of the moral of _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_. Of course,
it was very natural in an aristocrat like Lady Cicely Waynefleet to wish
to let sleeping dogs lie, especially those whom Mr. Blatchford calls
under-dogs. Of course it was natural for her to wish everything to be
smooth and sweet-tempered. But I have the obstinate question in the
corner of my brain, whether if a few Captain Brassbounds did revenge
themselves on judges, the quality of our judges might not materially
improve.
When this doubt is once off one's conscience one can lose oneself in the
bottomless beatitude of Lady Cicely Waynefleet, one of the most living
and laughing things that her maker has made. I do not know any stronger
way of stating the beauty of the character than by saying that it was
written specially for Ellen Terry, and that it is, with Beatrice, one of
the very few characters in which the dramatist can claim some part of
her triumph.
We may now pass to the more important of the plays. For some time
Bernard Shaw would seem to have been brooding upon the soul of Julius
Cæsar. There must always be a strong human curiosity about the soul of
Julius Cæsar; and, among other things, about whether he had a soul. The
conjunction of Shaw and Cæsar has about it something smooth and
inevitable; for this decisive reason, that Cæsar is really the only
great man of history to whom the Shaw theories apply. Cæsar _was_ a Shaw
hero. Cæsar was merciful without being in the least pitiful; his mercy
was colder than justice. Cæsar was a conqueror without being in any
hearty sense a soldier; his courage was lonelier than fear. Cæsar was a
demagogue without being a democrat. In the same way Bernard Shaw is a
demagogue without being a democrat. If he had tried to prove his
principle from any of the other heroes or sages of mankind he would have
found it much more difficult. Napoleon achieved more miraculous
conquest; but during his most conquering epoch he was a burning boy
suicidally in love with a woman far beyond his age. Joan of Arc achieved
far more instant and incredible worldly success; but Joan of Arc
achieved worldly success because she believed in another world. Nelson
was a figure fully as fascinating and dramatically decisive; but Nelson
was "romantic"; Nelson was a devoted patriot and a devoted lover.
Alexander was passionate; Cromwell could shed tears; Bismarck had some
suburban religion; Frederick was a poet; Charlemagne was fond of
children. But Julius Cæsar attracted Shaw not less by his positive than
by his negative enormousness. Nobody can say with certainty that Cæsar
cared for anything. It is unjust to call Cæsar an egoist; for there is
no proof that he cared even for Cæsar. He may not have been either an
atheist or a pessimist. But he may have been; that is exactly the rub.
He may have been an ordinary decently good man slightly deficient in
spiritual expansiveness. On the other hand, he may have been the
incarnation of paganism in the sense that Christ was the incarnation of
Christianity. As Christ expressed how great a man can be humble and
humane, Cæsar may have expressed how great a man can be frigid and
flippant. According to most legends Antichrist was to come soon after
Christ. One has only to suppose that Antichrist came shortly before
Christ; and Antichrist might very well be Cæsar.
It is, I think, no injustice to Bernard Shaw to say that he does not
attempt to make his Cæsar superior except in this naked and negative
sense. There is no suggestion, as there is in the Jehovah of the Old
Testament, that the very cruelty of the higher being conceals some
tremendous and even tortured love. Cæsar is superior to other men not
because he loves more, but because he hates less. Cæsar is magnanimous
not because he is warm-hearted enough to pardon, but because he is not
warm-hearted enough to avenge. There is no suggestion anywhere in the
play that he is hiding any great genial purpose or powerful tenderness
towards men. In order to put this point beyond a doubt the dramatist has
introduced a soliloquy of Cæsar alone with the Sphinx. There if anywhere
he would have broken out into ultimate brotherhood or burning pity for
the people. But in that scene between the Sphinx and Cæsar, Cæsar is as
cold and as lonely and as dead as the Sphinx.
But whether the Shavian Cæsar is a sound ideal or no, there can be
little doubt that he is a very fine reality. Shaw has done nothing
greater as a piece of artistic creation. If the man is a little like a
statue, it is a statue by a great sculptor; a statue of the best
period. If his nobility is a little negative in its character, it is the
negative darkness of the great dome of night; not as in some "new
moralities" the mere mystery of the coal-hole. Indeed, this somewhat
austere method of work is very suitable to Shaw when he is serious.
There is nothing Gothic about his real genius; he could not build a
mediæval cathedral in which laughter and terror are twisted together in
stone, molten by mystical passion. He can build, by way of amusement, a
Chinese pagoda; but when he is in earnest, only a Roman temple. He has a
keen eye for truth; but he is one of those people who like, as the
saying goes, to put down the truth in black and white. He is always
girding and jeering at romantics and idealists because they will not put
down the truth in black and white. But black and white are not the only
two colours in the world. The modern man of science who writes down a
fact in black and white is not more but less accurate than the mediæval
monk who wrote it down in gold and scarlet, sea-green and turquoise.
Nevertheless, it is a good thing that the more austere method should
exist separately, and that some men should be specially good at it.
Bernard Shaw is specially good at it; he is pre-eminently a black and
white artist.
And as a study in black and white nothing could be better than this
sketch of Julius Cæsar. He is not so much represented as "bestriding the
earth like a Colossus" (which is indeed a rather comic attitude for a
hero to stand in), but rather walking the earth with a sort of stern
levity, lightly touching the planet and yet spurning it away like a
stone. He walks like a winged man who has chosen to fold his wings.
There is something creepy even about his kindness; it makes the men in
front of him feel as if they were made of glass. The nature of the
Cæsarian mercy is massively suggested. Cæsar dislikes a massacre, not
because it is a great sin, but because it is a small sin. It is felt
that he classes it with a flirtation or a fit of the sulks; a senseless
temporary subjugation of man's permanent purpose by his passing and
trivial feelings. He will plunge into slaughter for a great purpose,
just as he plunges into the sea. But to be stung into such action he
deems as undignified as to be tipped off the pier. In a singularly fine
passage Cleopatra, having hired assassins to stab an enemy, appeals to
her wrongs as justifying her revenge, and says, "If you can find one
man in all Africa who says that I did wrong, I will be crucified by my
own slaves." "If you can find one man in all the world," replies Cæsar,
"who can see that you did wrong, he will either conquer the world as I
have done or be crucified by it." That is the high water mark of this
heathen sublimity; and we do not feel it inappropriate, or unlike Shaw,
when a few minutes afterwards the hero is saluted with a blaze of
swords.