George Bernard Shaw, his life and works

by Archibald Henderson

CHAPTER X

While resting from the over-exertions of the political campaign at the time of the General Election in 1892, Shaw came upon the manuscript of the partially finished play begun in 1885. “Tickled” by the play, and urged by Mr. Grein, Shaw began work upon it anew. “But for Mr. Grein and the Independent Theatre Society,” Shaw confessed, “it would have gone back to its drawer and lain there another seven years, if not for ever.”[134] With this play, Widowers' Houses, Shaw made his début upon the English stage as a problem dramatist with the avowed purpose of exposing existent evils in the prevailing social order. Widowers' Houses is the first native play of the New School in England consciously devoted to the exposure of the social guilt of the community.

In 1885, shortly after the completion of the novels of his nonage, Shaw began this play in collaboration with Mr. William Archer. After learning to know Shaw by sight in the British Museum reading-room, as a “young man of tawny complexion and attire,” studying alternately, if not simultaneously, Karl Marx's Das Kapital (in French), and an orchestral score of Tristan and Isolde, Mr. Archer finally met him at the house of a common acquaintance.

Bernard Shaw.

Joseph Simpson
Courtesy of the Artist.

From the original black and white wash-drawing.
Reproduced by permission of the owner, Mr. J. Murray Allison.

“I learned from himself that he was the author of several unpublished masterpieces of fiction. Construction, he owned with engaging modesty, was not his strong point, but his dialogue was incomparable. Now, in those days I had still a certain hankering after the rewards, if not the glories, of the playwright. With a modesty in no way inferior to Mr. Shaw's, I had realized that I could not write dialogue a bit; but I still considered myself a born constructor. I proposed, and Mr. Shaw agreed to, a collaboration. I was to provide him with one of the numerous plots I kept in stock, and he was to write the dialogue. So said, so done. I drew out, scene by scene, the scheme of a twaddling cup-and-saucer comedy vaguely suggested by Augier's Ceinture Dorée. The details I forget, but I know it was to be called Rhinegold, was to open, as Widowers' Houses actually does, in an hotel garden on the Rhine, and was to have two heroines, a sentimental and a comic one, according to the accepted Robertson-Byron-Carton formula. I fancy the hero was to propose to the sentimental heroine, believing her to be the poor niece instead of the rich daughter of the sweater, or slum-landlord, or whatever he may have been; and I know he was to carry on in the most heroic fashion, and was ultimately to succeed in throwing the tainted treasure of his father-in-law, metaphorically speaking, into the Rhine. All this I gravely propounded to Mr. Shaw, who listened with no less admirable gravity. Then I thought the matter had dropped, for I heard no more of it for many weeks. I used to see Mr. Shaw at the Museum, laboriously writing page after page of the most exquisitely neat shorthand at the rate of about three words a minute, but it did not occur to me that this was our play. After about six weeks he said to me: 'Look here: I've written half the first act of that comedy, and I've used up all your plot. Now I want some more to go on with.' I told him that my plot was a rounded and perfect organic whole, and that I could no more eke it out in this fashion than I could provide him or myself with a set of supplementary arms and legs. I begged him to extend his shorthand and let me see what he had done; but this would have taken him far too long. He tried to decipher some of it orally, but the process was too lingering and painful for endurance. So he simply gave me an outline in narrative of what he had done; and I saw that, so far from using up my plot, he had not even touched it. There the matter rested for months and years. Mr. Shaw would now and then hold out vague threats of finishing 'our play,' but I felt no serious alarm. I thought (judging from my own experience in other cases) that when he came to read over in cold blood what he had written, he would see what impossible stuff it was. Perhaps my free utterance of this view piqued him; perhaps he felt impelled to remove from the Independent Theatre the reproach of dealing solely in foreign products. The fire of his genius, at all events, was not to be quenched by my persistent application of the wet blanket. He finished his play; Mr. Grein, as in duty bound, accepted it; and the result was the performance of Friday last at the Independent Theatre.”[135]

According to Shaw's account, he produced a horribly incongruous effect by “laying violent hands on his (Archer's) thoroughly planned scheme for a sympathetically romantic 'well-made play' of the type then in vogue,” and perversely distorting it into a “grotesquely realistic exposure of slum-landlordism, municipal jobbery, and the pecuniary and matrimonial ties between it and the pleasant people of 'independent' incomes who imagine that such sordid matters do not touch their own lives.” Shortly before the production of Widowers' Houses, there appeared an “Interview” with Shaw, purporting to give some idea of the much-mooted play, but leaving the public in doubt as to the seriousness with which this mock-solemn information was to be taken.[136] “Sir,” said Shaw sternly to the interviewer (himself!), “it (my play) will be nothing else than didactic. Do you suppose I have gone to all this trouble to amuse the public? No, if they want that, there is the Criterion for them, the Comedy, the Garrick, and so on. My object is to instruct them.” And to explain the allusion contained in the title, concerning which speculation was rife, Shaw remarked to the interviewer: “I have been assured that in one of the sections of the Bible dealing with the land question there is a clause against the destruction of widows' houses. There is no widow in my play; but there is a widower who owns slum property. Hence the title. Perhaps you are not familiar with the Bible.”[137]

After repeated calls from the audience Shaw made an impromptu speech at the close of the first performance of Widowers' Houses. He said that “he wished to assure his listeners that the greeting of the play had been agreeable to him, for had the story been received lightly he would have been disappointed. What he had submitted to their notice was going on in actual life. The action of Widowers' Houses depicted the ordinary middle-class life of the day, but he heartily hoped the time would come when the play he had written would be both utterly impossible and utterly unintelligible. If anyone were to ask him where the Socialism came in, he would say that it was in the love of their art on Socialistic principles that had induced the performers to give their services on that occasion. In conclusion, he trusted that, above all, the critics would carefully discriminate between himself and the actors who had so zealously striven to carry out his intentions.” According to a contemporary account: “Warm cheers greeted the playwright who thus candidly and gratefully acknowledged the excellent work rendered by the players, whilst still proclaiming that his play was in all particulars the faithful reflex of a sordid and unpitying age.”

The play, a nine-days' wonder, was widely paragraphed in the newspapers, and regarded in some quarters as a daring attack on middle-class society. The storm of protest aroused by Widowers' Houses almost paralleled the howl of execration evoked by the production of Ibsen's Ghosts in England. Widowers' Houses was intended as neither a beautiful nor a lovable work. Shaw confessed years afterwards that the play was entirely unreadable except for the prefaces and appendices, which he rightly regarded as good. The art of this play was confessedly the expression of the sense of intellectual and moral perversity; for Shaw had passed most of his life in big modern towns, where his sense of beauty had been starved, whilst his intellect had been gorged with problems like that of the slums. Widowers' Houses is “saturated with the vulgarity of the life it represents”; and, in the first edition of the play, Shaw confesses that he is “not giving expression in pleasant fancies to the underlying beauty and romance of happy life, but dragging up to the smooth surface of 'respectability' a handful of the slime and foulness of its polluted bed, and playing off your laughter at the scandal of the exposure against your shudder at its blackness.”

Like Bulwer Lytton, Stevenson, and other nineteenth-century novelists who turned to the writing of plays, Shaw approached the theatre lacking due appreciation of the difficulties of dramatic art, the perfect artistic sincerity it demands. Writing his play as a pastime, he employed it as a means of shocking the sensibilities of his audience as well as of winging a barbed shaft at its smug respectability. Paying no heed to that golden mean of “average truth,” which Sainte Beuve impressed with such high seriousness upon the youthful Zola, Shaw indulges in that extreme form of depicting life, the mutilation of humanity, which Brunetière pronounced to be the vital defect of naturalism. A pair of lovers dans cette galère! As Mr. Archer said at the time: “When they are not acting with a Gilbertian naïveté of cynicism, they are snapping and snarling at each other like a pair of ill-conditioned curs.”

The accusation of indebtedness to Ibsen hurled at Shaw from all sides as soon as his play was produced was promptly squelched by Shaw's vigorous denial. It is worth remarking, however, that “tainted money,” that bone of contention in America and the theme of Shaw's later Major Barbara, is the abuse which serves as the mark for the satire, both of Ibsen in An Enemy of the People, and of Shaw in Widowers' Houses. The perverting effect of ill-gotten gains upon the moral sense is the lesson of these two plays. Whereas Shaw was content to uncover the social canker and expose its ravages in all directions, Ibsen, through the instrumentality of Stockmann, holds out an ideal for the regeneration of society.

Widowers' Houses abounds in flashes of insight, in passages of trenchant dialogue, in sardonic exposure of human nature; the keen intellect of the author is everywhere in evidence. Shaw's vigorous Socialism is largely responsible for the clarity and succinctness with which the economic point is driven home; and the discussions of social problems are tense with a nervous vivacity almost dramatic in quality. And yet the structural defect of the play is the loose dramatic connection between the economic elucidations and the general psychological processes of the action.

Before the production of Widowers' Houses, Shaw publicly stated that the first two acts were written before he ever heard of Ibsen; and afterwards he asserted that his critics “should have guessed this, because there is not one idea in the play that cannot be more easily referred to half a dozen English writers than to Ibsen; whilst of his peculiar retrospective method, by which his plays are made to turn upon events supposed to have happened before the rise of the curtain, there is not a trace in my work.”[138] Shaw laughed incontinently at those people who excitedly discussed the play as a daringly original sermon, but who would not accept it as a play on any terms “because its hero did not, when he learned that his income came from slum property, at once relinquish it (i.e., make it a present to Sartorius without benefiting the tenants), and go to the goldfields to dig out nuggets with his strong right arm, so that he might return to wed his Blanche after a shipwreck (witnessed by her in a vision), just in time to rescue her from beggary, brought upon her by the discovery that Lickcheese was the rightful heir to the property of Sartorius, who had dispossessed and enslaved him by a series of forgeries unmasked by the faithful Cokane!”

For the sake of its bearing upon Shaw's subsequent career, one important contemporary impression deserves to be placed on record. Five months after the production of Widowers' Houses, in a review (published May 4th, 1893) of the Independent Theatre edition of that play, Mr. William Archer earnestly endeavoured to dissuade Shaw from turning dramatist.

“It is a pity that Mr. Shaw should labour under a delusion as to the true bent of his talent, and, mistaking an amusing jeu d'esprit for a work of creative art, should perhaps be tempted to devote further time and energy to a form of production for which he has no special ability and some constitutional disabilities. A man of his power of mind can do nothing that is altogether contemptible. We may be quite sure that if he took palette and 'commenced painter,' or set to work to manipulate a lump of clay, he would produce a picture or a statue that would bear the impress of a keen intelligence, and would be well worth looking at. That is precisely the case of Widowers' Houses. It is a curious example of what can be done in art by sheer brain-power, apart from natural aptitude. For it does not appear that Mr. Shaw has any more specific talent for the drama than he has for painting or sculpture.”

Shaw's next play, The Philanderer, is distinctly a pièce d'occasion and should be read in the light of the attitude of the British public toward Ibsen and Ibsenism at the time of its writing. After Miss Janet Achurch's performance as Nora Helmer in A Doll's House, in 1889, Ibsen became the target of dramatic criticism; and Shaw's Quintessence of Ibsenism, published in 1891, was the big gun, going off when the controversy was at its height. Sir Edwin Arnold made an editorial attack on Ibsen, Mr. Frederick Wedmore echoed his denunciation, and Clement Scott exhausted his vocabulary of vituperation in an almost hysterical outcry against the foulness and obscenity of the shameless Norwegian. The Philanderer was written just when the cult of Ibsen had reached the pinnacle of fatuity. From Shaw's picture, one is led to suppose that society, with reference to Ibsen, was roughly divided into three classes: the conservatives of the old guard, regarding Ibsen as a monstrum horrendum; the soi-disant Ibsenites, glibly conversant with Ibsen's ideas but profoundly ignorant of their meaning; and, lastly, those who really understood Ibsen, this class being made up of two sorts of individuals, those who really intended to adopt Ibsen principles, and those who were keen and unscrupulous enough to exploit Ibsenism solely for the sake of the sustenance it afforded parasitic growths like themselves. The ideal of the “womanly woman” still prevailed in English society. Shaw here readily perceived the possibilities for satire and tragi-comedy, both in the clash of old prejudices with new ideas, and in the mordant contrast discovered by the conflict of the over-sexed, passionate “womanly woman” with the under-sexed, pallidly intellectual philanderer of the Ibsen school. Had Shaw's performance been as able as his perception was acute, The Philanderer would have been a genuine achievement instead of a grimly promising failure.

The Philanderer serves as a link between the plays of Shaw's earlier and later manners. Present marriage laws really have very little to do with this play, which concerns itself with a study of social types. Julia is the fine fleur of feral femininity; woman's practice of employing her personal charms unscrupulously and man's practice of treating woman as a mere plaything both have a share in the formation of her character. Grace Tranfield is the best type of the advanced woman; she demands equality of opportunity for women, rejects the “lord and master” theory, and fights always for the integrity of her self-respect. Between these two women stands Leonard Charteris, holding the average young cub's cynical ideas about women, sharpened to acuteness through the intellectual astuteness of Bernard Shaw. Charteris, in his bloodless Don Juanism, is the type of the degenerate male flirt—the pallid prey of the maladie du siècle. “C'est un homme qui ne fait la cour aux femmes ni pour le bon ni pour le mauvais motif,” says M. Filon. “Que veut-il? S'amuser. Seulement—comme on l'a dit des Anglais en général—il s'amuse tristement; il y a dans l'attitude de ce séducteur glacial et dégoûté quelque chose qui n'est pas très viril. On dit la société anglaise infestée de ces gens-là.”[139]

Playbill of The Philanderer. Hebbel-Theater, Berlin. January 3rd, 1909.
Sixty-eighth performance.

Playbill of Mrs. Warren's Profession.
Last “Gastspiel” by the players of the Deutsches Theater and the Kammerspiele in Berlin. Schauspielhaus,
Munich. July 31st, 1908. Ninth performance.

Upon the mind of any unprejudiced person, I think, The Philanderer creates the impression that Shaw's attitude toward women in this play must have been induced by unpleasant personal relations with women prior to the time at which the play was written. Many people paid him the insult of recognizing him in Charteris; and I have even been told that Shaw was temperamentally not dissimilar to Charteris, at that particular period. The play is marked by unnaturalness and immaturity at every turn; but several scenes exhibit great nervous strength. Mr. Robert Loraine once remarked to me that, in his opinion, the first act of The Philanderer was unparalleled in its verisimilitude, always making him realize the truth of Ibsen's dictum that the modern stage must be regarded as a room of which one wall has been removed. Mr. Loraine's impression is fully justified by the fact that the scene is a more or less accurate replica of a scene in Mr. Shaw's own life.

As a play, The Philanderer is crude and amateurish, revolving upon the pivot of Charteris's satire, and presenting various features in turn—now extravaganza, now broad farce, now comedy, now tragi-comedy. With all its brilliant mental vivisection, the conversation of Charteris is never natural, but supra-natural; the utterly gross and caddish indecency of his exposures would never be tolerated for an instant in polite or even respectable society. And yet Mr. Shaw once vehemently assured me: “Charteris is not passionless, not unscrupulous, and a sincere, not a pseudo, Ibsenist”! Cuthbertson is a caricature of Clement Scott; and, in virtually the same words used by Scott in his attacks upon Ibsen, Cuthbertson avows that the whole modern movement is abhorrent to him “because his life had been passed in witnessing scenes of suffering nobly endured and sacrifice willingly rendered by womanly women and manly men.” The mannerisms of Craven, “Now really” in especial, are taken directly, Mr. Shaw once told me, from Mr. H. M. Hyndman, the English Socialist leader. Dr. Paramore is the puppet of broad farce, immune to all humane concern through inoculation with the deadly germ of scientific research; while Sylvia is merely the pert little soubrette. The inverted Gilbertism of Colonel Craven's: “Do you mean to say that I am expected to treat my daughter the same as I would any other girl? Well, dash me if I will!” faintly strikes the note of Falsacappa, the brigand chief, in Meilhac and Halévy's The Brigands: “Marry my daughter to an honest man! Never!”—a phrase with which Mr. W. S. Gilbert afterwards did such execution in The Pirates of Penzance.

When The Philanderer was published in 1898, the public was puzzled and astounded to read an “attack” on Ibsen by Ibsen's most valiant champion in England! So shocked was Mr. Archer by this “outrage upon art and decency” that he wanted to “cut” his colleague and friend in the street. The Philanderer thus laid the foundation of Shaw's reputation as a cynic and a paradoxer. It is chiefly interesting to-day as a foreshadowing and promise of the lines of development of the later dramatist. Superficially, this play mirrors the glaring, even tragic contrast between faddist idealization of Ibsen, and sincere realization of Ibsenism. But, in the light of subsequent events, the play rather teaches that Charteris as male flirt is the model for the sketchy Valentine, that Julia is the Ann Whitefield of a more natural and less self-conscious phase. Throughout the play we are reminded of the brutal laughter of Wedekind, the sardonic humour of Becque, and, in places, even of the dark levity of Ibsen himself. The portrayal of Julia is remarkable, in spite of the damaging error of representing her as fit subject for the police court—mentally arrested in development, victim of violent “brain-storms,” unscrupulous, treacherous, deceitful, feline. And yet, by some marvellous trick of subtle art, the author has caused this creature to win our profound sympathy in the end. After all, her love for Charteris is genuine and sincere; and the scene between Grace and Julia, after the latter has accepted Dr. Paramore, is profoundly touching:

Grace (speaking in a low voice to Julia alone): So you have shown him that you can do without him! Now I take back everything I said. Will you shake hands with me? (Julia gives her hand painfully, with her face averted.) They think this a happy ending, Julia—these men—our lords and masters! (The two stand silent, hand in hand.)

The human drama of this play, merely sketched though it be, is the conflict in Julia's soul between her violent passion for Charteris and her true impulse toward self-respect. The quintessence of her tragedy is expressed in her last tilt with Charteris. He walks up to congratulate her, proffering his hand.

Julia (exhausted, allowing herself to take it): You are right. I am a worthless woman.

Charteris (triumphant, and gaily remonstrating): Oh, why?

Julia: Because I am not brave enough to kill you.

Shaw's next play, Mrs. Warren's Profession, completed his first cycle of economic studies in dramatic form; and at one stroke demonstrated Shaw to be a dramatist of marked powers and ability. Shaw's account of the genesis of this play is an important link in its history. In regard to the title, Shaw says: “The tremendously effective scene—which a baby could write if its sight were normal—in which she (Mrs. Warren) justifies herself, is only a paraphrase of a scene in a novel of my own, 'Cashel Byron's Profession' (hence the title, Mrs. Warren's Profession), in which a prize-fighter shows how he was driven into the ring exactly as Mrs. Warren was driven on the streets.” Shaw met the charge of indebtedness to Ibsen and De Maupassant with the statement that, if a dramatist living in the world of multifarious interests, duties and experiences in which he lived has to go to books for his ideas and his inspiration, he must be both blind and deaf. “Most dramatists are,” he laconically added. So Mrs. Warren's Profession came about in this way:

“Miss Janet Achurch mentioned to me a novel by some French writer as having a dramatizable story in it. It being hopeless to get me to read anything, she told me the story, which was ultra-romantic. I said, 'Oh, I will work out the real truth about that mother some day.' In the following autumn I was the guest of a lady of very distinguished ability—one whose knowledge of English social types is as remarkable as her command of industrial and political questions. She suggested that I should put on the stage a real modern lady of the governing class—not the sort of thing that theatrical and critical authorities imagine such a lady to be. I did so; and the result was Miss Vivie Warren, who has laid the intellect of Mr. William Archer in ruins.... I finally persuaded Miss Achurch, who is clever with her pen, to dramatize the story herself on the original romantic lines. Her version is called Mrs. Daintry's Daughter. That is the history of Mrs. Warren's Profession. I never dreamt of Ibsen or De Maupassant, any more than a blacksmith shoeing a horse thinks of the blacksmith in the next county.”[140]

Of course, one blacksmith cannot possibly know what another blacksmith in the next county is doing. But Shaw was not only aware of what Ibsen was doing and had done: he had actually written a remarkable analysis of Ibsen's plays and, with his utmost critical skill, defended Ibsen's art and philosophy, on the platform and in the press, against the ablest critics in England. As clearly as Ghosts does Mrs. Warren's Profession reveal the truth of George Eliot's dictum that consequences are unpitying; a true drama of catastrophe, employing Ibsen's peculiar retrospective method, Shaw's play exemplifies, in Amiel's words, the fatality of the consequences which follow every human act. Nora as daughter, instead of Nora as wife, Vivie leaves her home under the same profound conviction of her duty to herself as a human being—a duty infinitely more obligatory than any she may be conventionally imagined to owe to a Magdalen mother, who has educated and purposes to support her out of the profits of a profession which has its roots in the most hideous of all social evils.[141]

Mrs. Warren's Profession towers high above his first two plays, and places Shaw in the front rank of contemporary dramatic craftsmen. Its strength proceeds from the depth displayed in the consideration of the motives which prompt to action, the intellectual and emotional crises eventuating from the fierce clash of personalities and the sardonically unconscious self-scourging of the characters themselves. The scenes are so admirably ordered, the procedure so swift, the situations so charged with significance that one can find little to wonder at in Mr. Cunninghame Graham's characterization of Mrs. Warren's Profession as “the best that has been written in English in our generation.” Tense, nervous, vigorous, the great scenes are full of “that suppleness, that undulation of emotional process,” which Mr. Archer pronounces one of the unmistakable tokens of dramatic mastery. The tremendous dramatic power of the specious logic with which Mrs. Warren defends her course; the sardonic irony of the parting between mother and daughter! Goethe said of Molière that he chastises men by drawing them just as they are. True descendant of Molière, whom he once declared to be worth a thousand Shakespeares, Shaw wields upon vice the shrieking scourge, not of the preacher, but of the dramatist. Out of the mouths of the characters themselves proceeds their own condemnation. Devastating in its consummate irony is the passage in which Mrs. Warren, conventional to her heart's core, lauds her own respectability; and that in which Crofts propounds his own code of honour:

Crofts: My code is a simple one, and, I think, a good one: Honour between man and man; fidelity between man and woman; and no cant about this or that religion, but an honest belief that things are making for good on the whole.

Vivie (with biting irony): “A power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness,” eh?

Crofts (taking her seriously): Oh, certainly, not ourselves, of course. You understand what I mean.

Dr. Brandes called Ibsen's Ghosts, if not the greatest achievement, at any rate the noblest action of the poet's career. Mrs. Warren's Profession is not only what Brunetière would call a work of combat: it is an act—an act of declared hostility against capitalistic society, the inertia of public opinion, the lethargy of the public conscience, and the criminality of a social order which begets such appalling social conditions. Into this play Shaw has poured all his Socialistic passion for a more just and humane social order.

As an arraignment of social conditions, the play is tremendous. As a work of art, it presents marked deficiencies. Shaw sought to dispose of one charge—that Vivie is merely Shaw in petticoats—in these words: “One of my female characters, who drinks whisky and smokes cigars and reads detective stories and regards the fine arts, especially music, as an insufferable and unintelligible waste of time, has been declared by my friend, Mr. William Archer, to be an exact and authentic portrait of myself, on no other grounds in the world except that she is a woman of business and not a creature of romantic impulse.” It is clear that this is not a satisfactory answer to Mr. Archer's charge; but even in more minor details, the play is open to criticism: the futility of Praed, save as a barefaced confidant; the cheap melodrama of Frank and the rifle; the series of coincidences culminating in the Rev. Mr. Gardner's miserably confused “Miss Vavasour, I believe!” at the end of the first act. More important still, as Mr. Archer once pointed out,[142] there is nothing of the inevitable in the meeting of Frank and Vivie, despite Shaw's assertion that “the children of any polyandrous group will, when they grow up, inevitably be confronted with the insoluble problem of their own possible consanguinity.” Had Vivie not happened to take lodgings at that particular farmhouse in Surrey, she would never have seen or heard of Frank, and the “inevitable” would never have happened. But this single lapse of logic, together with the other defects mentioned, are comparatively venial faults—which Shaw probably classes among those “relapses into staginess” betraying, as he confessed, “the young playwright and the old playgoer in this early work of mine.”

It is the predominance of a certain hard, sheer rationalism, and a defiant, irresponsible levity in places, which mars the artistic unity of the play, and denies it the exalted rank to which it well-nigh attains. At the fundamental morality of the play there is no cause to cavil. Instead of maintaining an association in the imagination of the spectators between prostitution and fashionable beauty, luxury and refinement, as do La Dame aux Caméllias, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, Iris, Zaza and countless other modern plays, Mrs. Warren's Profession exhibits the life of the courtesan in all its arid actuality, and inculcates a lesson of the sternest morality. It is because she is what she is that Mrs. Warren loses her daughter irrevocably. In general, the logic of the play is unimpeachable; but the rationalist character imparted to the conversations of the principal characters by their persistence in arguing everything out logically gives the play a sort of glacial rigidity. The principal defect of the play is the discrepancy between the tragic seriousness of the theme and the occasional depressing levity of its treatment. Consonance between theme and tone is the prime requisite of a work of art. This remarkable play falls just short of real greatness because its whimsical, facetious, irrepressible author was unable to discipline himself to artistic self-restraint. Mrs. Warren's Profession is calculated to produce an almost unendurable effect because, as Mr. Archer wisely says, Bernard Shaw is “the slave of his sense of the ridiculous.”

The close of the year 1893 marks the beginning of a new phase in the evolution of Shaw's art as a dramatist. As Brunetière said to the Symbolists, so the English public said to Mr. Grein and his supporters of the Independent Theatre Society: “Gentlemen, produce your masterpieces!” Shaw eagerly took up the case; and rather than let it collapse, he “manufactured the evidence.” His first play met with a succès de scandale; his second failed of production; and his third, the expected “masterpiece,” was debarred by the censorship. The union of economics and Socialism in thesis-plays met with no favour at the hands of the British public. Shaw was forced to relinquish for the time being his purpose of reforming the public through the medium of the stage. His original disavowal of any intent to amuse the public went for naught in default of a platform from which to deliver instruction.

Shaw's social determinism, as M. Auguste Hamon once expressed it to me, is “absolute”: his fundamental Socialism throws the blame, not upon Trench, Charteris, Crofts and Mrs. Warren, as individuals, but upon the prevailing social order, the capitalistic régime, which offers them as alternatives, not morality and immorality, but two sorts of immorality.[143] Upon each individual in his audience, whether in the study or in the theatre, Shaw threw the burden of responsibility for defective social organization, and for those social horrors which can only be mitigated, and, perhaps, ultimately abolished, by public opinion, public action and public contribution. Mr. Shaw once described this play to me as a faithful presentment of the “economic basis of modern commercial prostitution.” But the managers well knew that the public was averse to being forced to face the unpleasant facts set forth in Shaw's three “unpleasant” plays. The rigour of the censorship and prevailing theatrical conditions in London were hostile to Shaw's initial efforts.

“You cannot write three plays and then stop,” Shaw has explained. Accordingly, for obvious reasons, social determinism ceased to be the motive force of Shaw's dramas; and he began to write plays concerned more particularly with the comedy and tragedy of individual life and destiny. Shaw did not cease to be a satirist, did not desist from his effort to startle the public out of its bland complacency: he merely diverted for the time being the current of his satire from social abuses to the shams, pretences, illusions and self-deceptions of individual life. Having learned to beware of solemnity, Shaw makes the satiric jest his point of departure. From this time forward he occupies and operates upon a new plane. He has ceased to be purely the social scavenger. Bernard Shaw's comedy of manners and of character now enters into the history of British drama.

Arms and the Man—obviously deriving its title from the Arma virumque cano of the opening line of Virgil's Æneid—is one of Shaw's most delightful comedies—a genuine comedy of character and yet theatrical in the true sense, Dr. Brandes has called it. Not the least of its virtues is the implicitness of its philosophy; perhaps this is one reason why Mr. Shaw (as he lately remarked to me) now considers it a very slight and immature production! From one point of view, this play may be regarded as a study of the psychology of the military profession.[144] From another point of view—the standpoint of the regular playgoer—the play has for its dramatic essence the collision of romantic illusion with prosaic reality.

Playbill of Arms and the Man.
Avenue Theatre, London. April 21st, 1894. First production on any stage.

To many people the play appeared as a “damning sneer at military courage,” an attempted demonstration of the astounding thesis that heroism is merely a sublimated form of cowardice! When King Edward—then Prince of Wales—witnessed a performance of the play, he could not be induced to smile even once; and afterwards it was reported that “his Royal Highness regretted that the play should have shown so disrespectful an attitude toward the Army as was betrayed by the character of the chocolate-cream soldier.”[145] Bluntschli is a natural realist, to whom long military service has taught the salutary lesson that bullets are to be avoided, not sought; that the main object of the efficient soldier is not the bubble reputation at the cannon's mouth, but practical success and the preservation of life. Shaw had never seen service, never participated in a battle—save the battle of Trafalgar Square. But he happened to be a modern realist with a tremendous fund of satire and fantasy. And although he had to get his data at second hand, he experienced no difficulty in finding abundant material, to authenticate his presentment of the common-sense soldier, in great realistic fiction such as Zola's La Débâcle, in classic autobiography such as Marbot's Memoirs, and in the recorded experiences of English and American generals, notably Lord Wolseley and General Horace Porter. People were inclined to laugh Shaw's play out of court as an exercise no more serious than that of a “mowing down military ideals with volleys of chocolate creams.” Yet Shaw knew a man who lived for two days in the Shipka Pass on chocolate; while some years later, during the Boer war, Queen Victoria presented every soldier in the British army with a ration of chocolate—chocolate which Liebig pronounced the most perfect food in the world. The idea of an officer carrying an empty pistol! And yet Lord Wolseley mentions two officers who seldom carried any weapons, and one of them was Gordon. Bluntschli's hysterical condition in the first act finds its analogue in General Porter's account describing the condition of his troops after a battle. And Bluntschli's delightful description of a cavalry charge finds its analogue, not in the Tennysonian Charge of the Light Brigade, but in the account of this charge as given by the popular historian Kinglake; and, as a matter of fact, Shaw's description was taken almost verbatim from an account given privately to a friend of Shaw's by an officer who served in the Franco-Prussian war. The catalogue might easily be extended; suffice it to say that, irrespective of the totality of impression, there can be no question of the credibility of the separate incidents in the play, which furnished such ready targets for critical marksmanship.[146]

From the dramatic side, Arms and the Man is far less a “realistic” comedy than a satiric exposure of the illusions of warfare, of love, of romantic idealism. Of course, Shaw imparts an air of pleasing likelihood to the racial traits or characters, and the local colour of the scenes; and, as Dr. Brandes has remarked, in Bernard Shaw's choice of themes one feels the mental suppleness of the modern critic, with his ability to throw himself sympathetically into different historic periods and into the minds of different races. In Arms and the Man, “the whole environment is characteristic, the people of most refinement being proud of washing themselves 'almost every day,' and of owning a 'library,' the only one in the district. Everything smacks of the Balkan Peninsula, even to the waiting-maid and the man-servant, with their half-Asiatic mingling of forwardness and servility.”[147] To be accurate, Shaw sketches in his milieu with the very lightest of strokes. Bluntschli might just as well have served in a war between Peru and Chili, or Greece and Turkey; while for all practical purposes, the scene might just as well have been laid along the coasts of Bohemia. I have long contended that Arms and the Man was not a play, but a light opera; and now comes Oscar Straus to compose the music for the libretto adapted from Shaw's Bulgarian fantasy.

Mr. Shaw once told me that his two friends, Sidney Webb, the solid and the practical, and Cunninghame Graham, the hidalgesque and fantastic, suggested the contrast between Bluntschli and Saranoff. “The identity,” he explained, “only lies on the surface, of course. But the true dramatist must always find his contrasts in real life.” And it will be recalled that the rodomontade placed with such ludicrous effect in the mouth of the Bulgarian braggadocio, had actually been used, with equally telling effect, by Mr. Cunninghame Graham in a speech in the House of Commons. Shaw promptly stole the potent phrase, “I never withdraw,” for the sake of its perfect style, and used it as a cockade for Sergius the Sublime. The great charm of the play consists in the disillusionment of the romantic Raina and the sham-idealist Saranoff by the practical realism of the common-sense Bluntschli. A Bulgarian Byron, Sergius is perpetually mocked by the disparity between his imaginative ideals and the disillusions which continually sting his sensitive nature. And the true tragedy of the idealist, in the Shavian frame of mind, is summed up in his words, “Damnation! mockery everywhere! Everything that I think is mocked by everything that I do.” And Shaw himself has said:

“My Bulgarian hero, quite as much as Helmer in A Doll's House, was a hero shown from the modern woman's point of view. I complicated the psychology by making him catch glimpse after glimpse of his own aspect and conduct from this point of view himself, as all men are beginning to do more or less now, the result, of course, being the most horrible dubiety on his part as to whether he was really a brave and chivalrous gentleman, or a humbug and a moral coward. His actions, equally of course, were hopelessly irreconcilable with either theory. Need I add that if the straightforward Helmer, a very honest and ordinary middle-class man misled by false ideals of womanhood, bewildered the public and was finally set down as a selfish cad by all the Helmers in the audience, a fortiori my introspective Bulgarian never had a chance, and was dismissed, with but moderately spontaneous laughter, as a swaggering impostor of the species for which contemporary slang has invented the term 'bounder'?”[148]

Arms and the Man has laid its hold upon the modern imagination, and has been produced all over the world. What more delightful than to have seen Bluntschli interpreted by the actors of our generation—by Mansfield, with his quaintly dry cynicism, by Jarno, with a humour racy of the soil, by Mantzius, with scholarly accuracy, by Sommerstorff, with a touch of romance!—by Loraine, Nhil, Stephens, Daly. It is quite true that the play is loose in form, oscillating between comedy and fantastic farce, and that even now it is already beginning to “date.” But its fantasy, its satire, and its genial philosophy will amply suffice to give it a long lease on life.[149] Shaw's own confidence in his power as a dramatist and in the future of the play is humorously expressed in characteristic style in the following letter written in response to an apologetic note from his American agent, Miss Elisabeth Marbury, accompanying a meagre remittance for royalties on Arms and the Man:

“Rapacious Elisabeth Marbury,

“What do you want me to make a fortune for? Don't you know that the draft you sent me will permit me to live and preach Socialism for six months? The next time you have so large an amount to remit, please send it to me by instalments, or you will put me to the inconvenience of having a bank account. What do you mean by giving me advice about writing a play with a view to the box-office receipts? I shall continue writing just as I do now for the next ten years. After that we can wallow in the gold poured at our feet by a dramatically regenerated public.”

Arms and the Man is an injunction to found our institutions, in Shaw's little-understood phrase, not on “the ideals suggested to our imagination by our half-satisfied passions,” but on a “genuinely scientific natural history.”

A distinguished dramatic critic once said to me that he regarded all of Shaw's works as derivative literature. Shaw's first three plays were traced to Ibsen, to De Maupassant, to Strindberg; and won for him the flattering title of the “second-hand Brummagem Ibsen” (William Winter)! And after witnessing two acts of Arms and the Man at the Avenue Theatre, Mr. Archer began to have a misgiving that he had wandered by mistake into The Palace of Truth. The relation of the art of Bernard Shaw to the art of W. S. Gilbert is one of much delicate intricacy; and deserves more than casual mention. Shaw has declared that those who regard the function of a writer as “creative” are the most illiterate of dupes, that in his business he knows me and te, not meum and tuum, and that he himself is “a crow who has followed many plows.” In a vein of mocking acknowledgment, Shaw once spoke of the seriousness with which he had pondered the jests of W. S. Gilbert. A careful critical examination of the methods of Shaw and Gilbert reveals the undoubted resemblance, as well as the fundamental dissimilarity, of these two satiric interpreters of human nature.[150]

One particular incident in Arms and the Man seems to derive directly from an incident in Gilbert's Engaged. The scene in which Nicola advises Louka, his betrothed, to gain a hold over Sergius, marry him ultimately, and so “come to be one of my grandest customers, instead of only being my wife and costing me money,” is but a paraphrase and inversion of that ludicrous scene in Engaged, in which “puir little Maggie Macfarlane” advises her lover, Angus Macalister, to resign her to Cheviot-Hill for the princely consideration of two pounds. Aside from this one minor similarity, Arms and the Man is very different from a Gilbert play. For purposes of general comparison, turn once more to Engaged—which will serve as well as any of the works of Gilbert—for this passage:

Cheviot-Hill (suddenly seeing her): Maggie, come here. Angus, do take your arm from around that girl's waist. Stand back, and don't you listen. Maggie, three months ago I told you I loved you passionately; to-day I tell you that I love you as passionately as ever; I may add that I am still a rich man. Can you blige me with a postage-stamp?

Here, not only is the comic note struck by the juxtaposition of two essential incongruities: in addition, the farcicality of the idea stamps it as impossible. It is an admirable illustration of that exquisite sense of quaint unexpectedness, evoked by the plays of both Gilbert and Shaw. Take now a scene of somewhat cognate appeal in Arms and the Man. In both scenes the bid is for sudden laughter, through the startle of surprise. Bluntschli flatly tells Raina to her face that he finds it impossible to believe a single thing she says.

Raina (gasping): I! I!!! (She points to herself incredulously, meaning, “I, Raina Petkoff, tell lies!” He meets her gaze unflinchingly. She suddenly sits down beside him, and adds, with a complete change of manner from the heroic to the familiar.) How did you find me out?

Bluntschli (promptly): Instinct, dear young lady. Instinct, and experience of the world.

Raina (wonderingly): Do you know, you are the first man I ever met who did not take me seriously?

Bluntschli: You mean, don't you, that I am the first man that has ever taken you quite seriously?

Raina: Yes, I suppose I do mean that. (Cosily, quite at her ease with him.) How strange it is to be talked to in such a way!...

Gilbert employs a device of the simplest mechanism, giving merely the shock of unexpected contrast. Shaw's spiritual adventure is an excogitated bit of psychology, of intellectual content and rational crescendo. It is the Shavian trick of putting into dialogue the revealing, accusatory words seldom spoken in real life.

This calls to mind a resemblance—with a difference—between Shaw and Gilbert. In Gilbert's The Palace of Truth each character indulges in frank self-revelation. Enchanted by the spell of a certain locality, everyone is compelled to speak his whole thought without disguise, under the delusion that he is only indulging in the usual polite insincerities. All this self-analysis and self-exposure goes for naught but to evoke laughter; for, lacking either profound insight into human nature or cynical distrust of humanity, Gilbert is incapable of trenchant generalization. In Shaw's plays, people play the game of “Truth” for all there is in it; and perhaps Shaw's greatest capacity is the capacity for generalization. Shaw's incomparable superiority to Gilbert consists in his acute perception and subtle delineation of the comic, and often tragic, inconsistencies of genuine human character. Shaw has succeeded in revealing certain subconscious sides of human nature that usually remain hidden because dramatists fail to put into the mouths of their creations the real thoughts that clamour for expression. One almost always hears their superficial selves speaking solely through the voluble medium of society or the reticent medium of self.

Not only in philosophic grasp, but also in imagination, does Shaw excel Gilbert; an incident will suffice to explain. Mr. John Corbin once told me that in comparing Shaw and Gilbert, he had instanced to Mr. Henry Arthur Jones the play of Pygmalion and Galatea, as showing that, after all, Gilbert had a heart and an imagination for beauty. “Ah, yes!” replied Mr. Jones. “But Gilbert never could have written that line in Cæsar and Cleopatra:

Cæsar: What has Rome to show me that I have not seen already? One year of Rome is like another, except that I grow older, whilst the crowd in the Appian way is always the same age.”

Philosophically speaking, Gilbert's characters accept without question the current ideals of life and conduct; and make ludicrous spectacles of themselves in the effort to live up to them. Shaw's creations discover the hollowness and vanity of these same current ideals, and gain freedom in escape from their obsession. As Mr. Walkley once put it: “Gilbertism consists in the ironic humour to be got out of the spectacle of a number of people hypocritically pretending, or naïvely failing, to act up to ideals which Mr. Gilbert and his people hold to be valid.... Shavianism consists in the ironic humour to be got out of the spectacle of a number of people trying to apply the current ideas only to find in the end that they won't work.”[151] Let us have done with rating of Shaw as a cheap imitator of Gilbert. It is quite true that Gilbert anticipated Shaw by many years in the use of the device of open confession—the characters naïvely “making a clean breast” of things; but the device was handed on to Shaw for legitimate use instead of for farcical misuse. In any deep sense, Shaw owes nothing to Gilbert; and his paradoxes, unlike Gilbert's, are the outcome of a profound study of human nature and of contemporary civilization. “Gilbert would have anticipated me,” Mr. Shaw once assured me, “if he had taken his paradoxes seriously. But it does not seem to have occurred to him that he had found any real flaw in conventional morality—only that he had found out how to make logical quips at its expense. His serious plays are all conventional. Most of the revolutionary ideas have come up first as jests; and Gilbert did not get deeper than this stage.”

Arms and the Man is the first of four plays which I class in a category by themselves—the plays constructed in the loose and variegated comedic form, presumably designed to be “popular” and to amuse the public, fantastically treated, and imbued with a mild philosophy held strictly implicit.[152] These four plays are Arms and the Man, You Never Can Tell, How He Lied to Her Husband and Captain Brassbound's Conversion. In You Never Can Tell Shaw deliberately made concessions to that coy monster, the British public. Thitherto he had in large measure disdained the task of complying with the demands of London audiences for a popular comedy, combining his oft-praised cynical brilliancy and his talent for “giving furiously to think,” with his unquestioned ability to amuse. Shaw's realization of the truth of Molière's words: “C'est une étrange entreprise que celle de faire rire les honnêtes gens,” did not in the least deter him from embarking upon this perilous undertaking. In You Never Can Tell he gave himself up wholly to the hazardous task, tentatively inaugurated in Arms and the Man, of attempting to amuse that public which had so persistently refused, so defiantly scorned, his instruction. You Never Can Tell was Shaw's propitiatory sacrifice to recalcitrant London. Strange to say, this deliberate concession to popular demand even his most lenient censors refused to validate.[153] London, matching Shaw for whimsicality, was no whit propitiated by his proposal of a mariage de convenance with that doubtful character, public opinion. Shaw has taken Shakespeare himself to task for pandering to public taste in a play coolly entitled As You Like It. When the “Dramatist of Donnybrook Fair,” as Mr. Corbin calls him, sets out to write As You Like It, what is the result? “You Never Can Tell!” It was nine years before Shaw was able to change his tentative and dubious, “You Never Can Tell!” into a triumphant, “I told you so!”

“I think it must have been in the year 1895,” one reads in some reminiscences by Mr. Cyril Maude, the well-known English actor, “that the devil put it into the mind of a friend of mine to tempt me with news of a play called Candida, by a writer named Bernard Shaw, of whom until then I had never heard.”[154] Mr. Maude wrote to Shaw, suggesting that he be allowed to see the play in question. In characteristic vein, the author replied that the play would not suit the needs of the Haymarket Theatre, offering, however, to write a new play instead; which Mr. Maude protests he never asked Shaw to do, yet to which he interposed no objection. Whereupon Shaw took a chair in Regent's Park for the whole season, and sat there, in the public eye, we are told, writing the threatened play.

It was not until the winter of 1897 that this play, You Never Can Tell, came into Mr. Maude's hands. It was accepted, and actually put into rehearsal. From that very moment things began to go wrong. Shaw proposed impossible casts, dictated to each actor in turn, equalled his own John Tanner in endless and torrential talk. Actor after actor, led by the genial Jack Barnes, withdrew in fatigue and disgust. One day Shaw insulted the entire cast and the entire profession by wanting a large table on the stage, on the ground that the company would fall over it unless they behaved as if they were coming into a real room instead of, as he coarsely observed, “rushing to the float to pick up the band at the beginning of a comic song.”

After a first reading of the manuscript, Mr. Maude's misgivings had been aroused to such an extent that he went to Shaw and plainly told him that certain lines would have to be cut out.

“Oh, no!” replied Shaw. “I really can't permit that.”

“But in this shape,” protested the alarmed actor-manager, “the play can never be produced.”

“My dear fellow, you delight me,” was the truly Shavian reply.

It was unbearable to the cast to be lectured and grilled unmercifully by a red-headed Mephistopheles dressed like a “fairly respectable carpenter” in a suit of clothes that looked as though it had originally been made of brown wrapping paper. The rehearsals continued, however, with the entire cast in a state of the most profound dejection.

“The end came suddenly and unexpectedly. We had made a special effort to fulfil our unfortunate contract.... We were honestly anxious to retrieve the situation by a great effort, and save our dear little theatre from the disgrace of a failure.

“Suddenly the author entered, in a new suit of clothes!!” Nobody who had seen Shaw sitting there day after day in a costume which the least self-respecting plasterer would have discarded months before could possibly have understood the devastating effect of the new suit upon the minds of the spectators. “That this was a calculated coup de théâtre I have not the slightest doubt.” Shaw played the part of benevolent rescuer, and the play was withdrawn. “I met him in Garrick Street not long ago and noticed that he still wore the suit which he had purchased in 1897 in anticipation of the royalties on You Never Can Tell!”

“The only thanks that people give me for not 'boring them,'” Shaw once said, “is that they laugh delightedly for three hours at the play that has cost many months of hard labour, and then turn round and say that it is no play at all and accuse me of talking with my tongue in my cheek. And then they expect me to take them seriously!” No one can accuse Shaw of taking the world seriously in You Never Can Tell. Never was more playful play, more irresponsible fun. It is all a pure game of cross-purposes, a contest of intellectual motives, a conflict of ideas and sentiments.

This play is especially interesting to me because it was the first of Shaw's plays I saw produced, and led me to a study of his works. And yet I should be the last to deny that it is a farce, in which fun as a motive takes precedence over delineation of character. The characters are no more faithful to actuality than is the dialogue to ordinary conversation. Indeed, the play is almost a new genre, differing from the ordinary farce, in which action predominates over thought, in the respect that here thought, or rather vivacious mentalization, takes precedence over everything—the antics are psychical, not physical. Shaw maintains, not that the play is a comedy, but that it is cast in the ordinary practical comedy form. I take this to mean that Shaw has utilized the stock characters and devices of ordinary comedy—not to mention those of farce, burlesque and extravaganza!—purely for his own ends, giving them a fresh and unique interest by animating them with the infectious mirth of his own personality. At last Shaw has found that loose, variegated, kaleidoscopic comedic form which freely admits of the intrusive antics of the Shavian whimsicality.

There is not a single play of Shaw's that starts nowhere and never arrives; and here the fault is not that the play has no meaning, but that it has too many meanings. And it is perhaps just as well that there is no clear line of thought-filiation running through the play. It is quite possible, as Hervieu would say, to “disengage” one, or even several motives, inter-linked with one another, from the play. Shaw, however, seems content to put everyone on the defensive, to search out the weak points in their armour, and to give to each in turn the coup de grâce.

The play is notable in two respects—for its treatment of the emotions and for the figure of William. Valentine is the imperfect prototype of John Tanner. His sole equipment is his tongue; instead of a conscience and a heart, he has only a brain. George Ade would have called him “Gabby Val, the conversational dentist.” Gloria succumbs to the scientific wooing of the new “duellist of sex”; her armour of frigid reserve, the heritage of twentieth-century precepts, melts before the calculated warmth of Valentine's advances. After allowing her to belong to herself for years, Nature now seizes her and uses her for Nature's own large purposes. And Valentine, but now the triumphant victor in the duel of sex, realizes when it is too late that, after all, he is only the victimized captive. All comedies end with a wedding, because it is then that the tragedy begins! The real distinction of the play consists in Shaw's portrayal of his conception of love as it exhibits itself in the contemporary human being. As Mr. Walkley has put it, love, in Shaw's view, is not, as with Chamfort, the échange de deux fantaisies, but the échange de deux explications. With Shaw, the symbol of love is not a Cupid blindfold, but the alertest of Arguses. His intellectual reflection of the erotic illusion exhibits neither tender sentiment, emotive abandon, nor sexual passion. Shaw's lovers, as Mr. Desmond MacCarthy has pertinently put it, “instead of using the language of admiration and affection, in which this sexual passion is so often cloaked, simply convey by their words the kind of mental tumult they are in. Sexual infatuation is stripped bare of all the accessories of poetry and sympathy. It is represented as it is by itself, with its own peculiar romance, but with none of the feelings which may, and often do, accompany it.”[155]

The one really admirable figure in the play is the immortal William. A master figure of classic, rather than modern, comedy, he suggests, with exquisite subtlety, the graceful unobtrusiveness that dignifies his calling. Whenever he loses sight of his menial position long enough to utter one of his kindly bits of philosophy, it is always to fade back again into the waiter attitude with such deference and such celerity as to accentuate the pathos of the contrast between his station and the rare humanity of his genial philosophy.

You Never Can Tell, which Mr. Archer found to be a “formless and empty farce,” achieved immense popular success in New York and London, has been produced with gratifying results throughout German Europe, as well as all over Great Britain, and justifies Mr. Norman Hapgood's characterization: “The best farce that has been upon the English-speaking stage in many years.”

Before turning to the last of the fantastic farce-comedies, I would mention very briefly the three little topical pieces which exhibit the joker Shaw at his Shawest. First, there is that petite comédie rosse, so slight as to be dubbed by Shaw himself a “comediettina,” How He Lied to Her Husband—written in 1905 to eke out Mr. Arnold Daly's bill in New York. “I began by asking Mr. Shaw to write me a play about Cromwell,” relates Mr. Daly. “The idea appealed to him in his own way. He said he thought it good, but then he raced on to suggest that we might have Charles the First come on with his head under his arm. I pointed out to Shaw that it would be highly inconvenient for a man to come on the stage with his head under his arm, even if he were an acrobat. Shaw, however, said he thought it could be done. In the end, he said he would compromise. 'Write the first thirty-five minutes of that play yourself,' said he, 'and let me write the last five minutes.'”[156] What a convenient recipe for Shaw's formula of anti-climax! The point of the little topsy-turvy, knockabout farce is the reductio ad absurdum of the “Candidamaniacs”; but the penny-a-liners usually paragraphed it as a travesty on Shaw's own play of Candida. Shaw finally cabled: “Need I say that anyone who imagines that How He Lied to Her Husband retracts Candida, or satirizes it, or travesties it, or belittles it in any way, understands neither the one nor the other?” This comediettina is a bright little skit, but it is no more amusing than it is untrue to the intellectuels who made Candida a success in New York and laid the foundations of Shaw's—and Daly's—success in America.

Playbill of You Never Can Tell. Vasa-Theater, Stockholm. Director: Albert Ranft.
February 27th, 1908. Thirty-seventh performance.

Playbill of The Man of Destiny. Schauspielhaus, Frankfurt. April 20th, 1903.
First performance in the German language.

On July 14th, 1905, in a booth in Regent's Park, London, for the benefit of the Actors' Orphanage, was “performed repeatedly, with colossal success,” a “tragedy,” entitled Passion, Poison and Petrifaction; or The Fatal Gazogene, written by Shaw at the request of Mr. Cyril Maude. It is an extravagant burlesque on popular melodrama, and the main incident of the “tragedy” is the petrifaction of the hero caused by swallowing a lot of lime as an antidote to the poison administered to him by the jealous husband of his inamorata, Lady Magnesia Fitztollemache. “The play has a funny little history,” Mr. Shaw told me, “having its origin in a story I once made up for one of the Archer children. In the early days of William Archer's married life I was down there one night, and one of the children asked me to tell him a story. 'What about?' I asked. 'A story about a cat,' was the eager reply. It seems that at one time my aunt was interested in making little plaster-of-paris figures; and one day the cat came along, and, thinking it was milk, lapped up some of the moist plaster-of-paris. And so the sad result, as I told the Archer children, was that the poor cat petrified inside. 'And what did they do with the cat?' one of the children asked. 'Well, you see,' I replied, 'one of the doors of the house would never stay shut, so my mother kept the cat there ever afterwards to hold the door shut.' The funny part of it all was that Mrs. Archer said that she had caught me in a lie—and to her own children at that. To this day she never believes a single thing I say!”

“Passion, Poison and Petrifaction is, of course, the most utter nonsense,” Shaw continued. “But, would you believe it,”—with a chuckle—“it was recently successfully produced in Vienna, and seriously praised as a characteristic play of the brilliant Irish dramatist and Socialist, Bernard Shaw!”[157]

Slightest of all three is The Interlude at The Playhouse, written for Mr. and Mrs. Cyril Maude, and delivered by them at the opening of The Playhouse, Mr. Maude's new theatre, on Monday, January 28th, 1907.[158] The little piece extracts all the comedy to be got out of the embarrassment of an actor-manager over having to deliver a certain speech, and the solicitude of his wife in making an appeal to the audience on his behalf, but without his knowledge, for sympathy and encouragement. The genuine delicacy and lightness of touch with which the situation is handled, and the absence of Shavian intrusiveness, unite in making of the interlude a little gem, quite perfect of its kind.

The last of the comedies of character is Captain Brassbound's Conversion, classified by Shaw as one of the Three Plays for Puritans. This play might never have been written, but for the fact that Ellen Terry made no secret of the fact that she was born in 1848. When her son, Gordon Craig, became a father, Ellen Terry, according to Shaw, said that now no one would ever write plays for a grandmother! Shaw immediately wrote Captain Brassbound's Conversion to prove the contrary. And seven years later Ellen Terry portrayed Lady Cicely Waynflete with a charm, a waywardness, and a grace that gave pleasure to thousands in England and America.

Just as, in The Devil's Disciple, Shaw reduces the melodramatic form to absurdity, so in Captain Brassbound's Conversion does he reduce to absurdity the melodramatic view of life. The scene of the play is an imaginary Morocco, a second-hand, fantastic image vicariously caught for Shaw by Mr. Cunninghame Graham. Not only did Shaw want to write a good part for Ellen Terry: he also wanted to write a good play. So he wrote a whimsical fantasy, half melodrama, half extravaganza, conditioned only by his own mildly philosophic bent and the need for developing Lady Cicely's character. The result, as he is fond of saying, is simply a story of conversion—a Christian tract!

The protagonist, the pirate Brassbound, orders his life upon the principle that, as Bacon puts it, “revenge is a sort of wild justice.” He is imbued with mediæval concepts of right and wrong. In opposition to him, he discovers his opposite—a cool, tactful, unsentimental woman of the world, disarming all opposition through her Tolstoyism. With sympathetic interest, she soon wins from Brassbound the secret of his life, and with quiet and delicious satire, opens his eyes to the pettiness of his mock-heroics, the absurdity of the melodramatic view-point—the code of the Kentucky feud, the Italian vendetta. The revulsion in Brassbound is instant and complete: he is wholly disarmed by the discovery that, instead of being the chosen instrument for the wild justice of lynch-law, he is only a ridiculous twopence coloured villain.

“My uncle was no worse than myself—better, most likely,” is his final confession to Lady Cicely. “Well, I took him for a villain out of a story-book. My mother would have opened anybody else's eyes: she shut mine. I'm a stupider man than Brandyfaced Jack even; for he got his romantic nonsense out of his penny numbers and such-like trash; but I got just the same nonsense out of life and experience.”

Lady Cicely Waynflete is the most charming woman that Shaw has ever drawn. Shaw has intimated that he found in the friendship of Ellen Terry, who served as the model for Lady Cicely, the “best return which could be expected from a gifted, brilliant and beautiful woman, whose love had already been given elsewhere, and whose heart had witnessed thousands of temptations.”[159] In speaking of the character of Lady Cicely Waynflete, Miss Florence Farr once said: “As a sex, women must be for ever grateful to Miss Ellen Terry for teaching Mr. Shaw that lesson about woman.” Nothing could be simpler or more effective than the secret of command possessed by this charming woman. She knows that to go straight up to people, with hand outstretched and a frank “How d'ye do?” is all that is needed to win their confidence. The dastardly sheikh, into whose hands she is about to be delivered, is stupefied and “almost persuaded,” when she assures her friends that he will treat her like one of Nature's gentlemen: “Look at his perfectly splendid face!” Combining as she does the temperament of Ellen Terry with the genial esprit of Bernard Shaw, Lady Cicely is a thoroughly delightful and unique type of the eternal feminine. She is just at the “age of charm,” her actions are unhampered by sentiment, and her chief attractions are frank naïveté, the trait of attributing the best of qualities to other people, and an innocent assumption of authority that quietly pinions all opposition. She always manages to do just what she likes because she is bound by no ties to her fellow-creatures, save the bonds of sympathy and innate human kindness. In one respect is she a true Shavienne: toward law, convention, propriety, prejudice, she takes an attitude of quaintly humorous scepticism. What a delicious touch is that when Sir Howard protests that she has made him her accomplice in defeating justice! “Yes,” is her delightfully feminine reply: “aren't you glad it's been defeated for once?”

The moral of this charming but very slight and superficially fantastic play is that revenge is not wild justice, but childish melodrama, and that the justice of the courts of law, enforced by melodramatic sentences of punishment, is often little else than a very base sort of organized revenge. The fable is rather trivial; and the long arm of coincidence puts its finger into the pie more than once, playing that part of timely intervention at which Shaw is so fond of railing. The mixture of Shavian satire with Tolstoyan principles is both novel and piquant; and the mildly Ibsenic ending is a good “curtain”—Brassbound discovering at last the secret of command, i.e., selflessness and disinterested sympathy, and Lady Cicely ecstatically felicitating herself upon her escape from—the bonds of love and matrimony.

One other feature of the play is the hideous language of the cockney, Felix Drinkwater, alias Brandyfaced Jack. It takes quite an effort, even with the aid of the key which Shaw has considerately appended, to decipher the jargon of this unhappy hooligan, “a nime giv' us pore thortless lads baw a gint on the Dily Chronicle.” In Drinkwater, Shaw sought to fix on paper the dialect of the London cockney, and he once told me that he regarded this as the only accurate effort of the kind in modern fiction. Interested in the study of phonetics through his acquaintance and friendship with that “revolutionary don” and academic authority, Henry Sweet of Oxford, Shaw put his knowledge to work to represent phonetically the lingo of the Board-School-educated cockney. “All that the conventional spelling has done,” Shaw once said in one of his numerous journalistic controversies, “is to conceal the one change that a phonetic spelling might have checked; namely, the changes in pronunciation, including the waves of debasement that produced the half-rural cockney of Sam Weller, and the modern metropolitan cockney of Drinkwater in Captain Brassbound's Conversion.... Refuse to teach the Board School legions your pronunciation, and they will force theirs on you by mere force of numbers. And serve you right!”

FOOTNOTES:

[134] Compare the account of Mr. Eden Greville, one of Mr. Grein's associates in the Independent Theatre Society, in Munsey's Magazine, March, 1906, entitled, Bernard Shaw and His Plays.

[135] Mr. William Archer, writing in the World (London), for Wednesday, December 14th, 1892.

[136] The Star, November 29th, 1892. Mr. Archer once told me that there was little doubt that Shaw wrote the “Interview” in toto.

[137] Matthew xxiii., 14; Mark xii., 38-40; Luke xx., 46-47.

[138] Appendix I., Widowers' Houses; Independent Theatre edition. Henry and Co., London, 1893.

[139] M. Bernard Shaw et son Théâtre, by Augustin Filon. Revue des Deux Mondes, November 15th, 1905; p. 424.

[140] Mr. Shaw's Method and Secret, letter to the editor of the Daily Chronicle, April 30th, 1898, signed G. Bernard Shaw. In the first draft, the play was entitled Mrs. Jarman's Profession.

[141] It should be clearly pointed out that Shaw is in no sense indebted to Ibsen for dissatisfaction with the existent social order. The facts of Shaw's life disprove the statement of Dr. Georg Brandes (Bernard Shaw's Teater, in Politikken, Copenhagen, December 29th, 1902): “What Shaw chiefly owes to Ibsen, whose harbinger he was, seems to be a tendency towards rebellion against commonly recognized prejudices, dramatic as well as social.” Shaw's attacks upon modern capitalistic society, both in Widowers' Houses and in Mrs. Warren's Profession, are the immediate fruits of his Socialism and his economic studies.

[142] Study and Stage, by William Archer, in the Daily News, June 21st, 1902.

[143] Compare The Author's Apology, the preface to the Stage Society edition of Mrs. Warren's Profession (Grant Richards, London, 1902), pp. xxvii. and xxviii. in especial; and also Mainly About Myself, the preface to Vol. I. of Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant, pp. xxix-xxxi. in the American edition (H. S. Stone and Co., Chicago, 1902).

[144] Compare La Psychologie du Militaire Professionel, by Auguste Hamon, which appeared in November, 1893. I have no reason to believe that Shaw was under any indebtedness to this book in writing Arms and the Man.

[145] Compare the reminiscences on the Avenue Theatre production, by Mr. Yorke Stephens, who played the part of Bluntschli; Music and the Drama, in the Daily Chronicle, November 6th, 1906. It was at the première at the Avenue Theatre that Shaw, called before the audience, found himself disarmed by lack of opposition. A solitary malcontent in the gallery began to boo: Bernard was himself again. Looking up at the belligerent oppositionist, he said with an engaging smile: “My friend, I quite agree with you—but what are we two against so many?”

[146] Compare Shaw's brilliant article, A Dramatic Realist to His Critics, in the New Review, September, 1894, appearing two months after the close of the run of Arms and the Man at the Avenue Theatre. In A Word about Stepniak, in To-Morrow, February, 1896, Mr. Shaw says: “He (Stepniak) studiously encouraged me to think well of my own work, and went into the questions of Bulgarian manners and customs for me when I was preparing my play Arms and the Man for the stage as if the emancipation of Russia was a matter of comparatively little importance.... To him I owe the assistance I received from that Bulgarian admiral in whose existence the public, regarding Bulgaria as an inland State, positively declined to believe.”

[147] Der Dramatiker Bernard Shaw: in Gestalten und Gedanken, by Georg Brandes, München-Langen, 1903. “Human nature is very much the same, always and everywhere,” Shaw explained. “And when I go over my play to put the details right I find there is surprisingly little to alter. Arms and the Man, for example, was finished before I had decided where to set the scene, and then it only wanted a word here and there to put matters straight. You see, I know human nature”!

[148] From Shaw's preface to Mr. Archer's The Theatrical World of 1894, pp. xxvii-xxviii. In view of the interest manifested in Arms and the Man at the time of its first production in 1894, Mr. Archer requested Mr. Shaw to say something about it in this preface.

[149] Arms and the Man has, most appropriately, furnished the “book” for a comic opera, entitled The Chocolate Soldier, written by Bernauer and Jacobson, music by Oscar Straus, the popular composer. It was to be expected that there would be many “comic” attractions in the adaptation of Mr. Shaw's play. Of course, all the complications, such as the incident of the incriminating photograph, are multiplied by three: Nicola disappears and Louka makes way for Mascha, now the cousin of Raina. In the end all are happily mated. In consequence of the “comic variations” from the original play, Mr. Shaw insisted that the programme contain a frank apology for this “unauthorized parody of one of Mr. Bernard Shaw's comedies.” First successfully produced at the Theater des Westens, Berlin, 1909, The Chocolate Soldier, both for the borrowed, if parodied, cleverness, and the delightful music, has since won great popularity through the productions of Mr. F. C. Whitney (English version by Mr. Stanislaus Stange), in New York (May, 1910) and London (September, 1910).

[150] Shaw has been charged with indebtedness, not only to W. S. Gilbert, but to earlier topsy-turvyists. In April, 1906, there appeared in the New York Tribune a “deadly parallel” between Arms and the Man and Used Up, adapted from the French by Charles Mathews in 1845. As a matter of fact, the passage cited—Bluntschli's proposal for the hand of Raina (compared with Sir Charles Coldstream's for the hand of Lady Clutterbuck)—is neither an imitation of Mathews, nor a triumph of eccentric invention, but a paraphrase, Shaw unqualifiedly asserts, of an actual proposal made by an Austrian hotel proprietor for the hand of a member of Mr. Shaw's own family.

[151] Mr. Bernard Shaw's Plays, in Frames of Mind (Grant Richards, London, 1889), p. 47.

[152] By this method of treatment, chronology is of necessity sacrificed to logic.

[153] Preferring to see Shaw fail seriously rather than succeed farcically, Mr. Archer sternly admonished him to “quit his foolishness”; and Mr. Shaw's former champion of Independent Theatre days, Mr. J. T. Grein, gently but firmly advised him never again to send up any more such ballons d'essai.

[154] The Haymarket Theatre (Grant Richards, London, 1903). Chapter XIV. (from which the above and following quotations are taken), Mr. Maude says, “was sent to me as an aid to the completion of this work. It professes to deal with that period of our management when we rehearsed a piece by the brilliant Mr. Bernard Shaw. The writer, I am assured, is well fitted to deal with that period. I leave it to the reader to judge, and to guess its authorship.” Needless to say that the author was Bernard Shaw himself!

[155] The Court Theatre, 1904-1907, by Desmond MacCarthy (A. H. Bullen, London, 1907), p. 57.

[156] Post-Express (Rochester, N. Y.), December 3d, 1904.

[157] Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction; or the Fatal Gazogene; originally appeared in Harry Furniss's Christmas Annual for 1905 (Arthur Treherne and Co. Ltd., Adelphi, London), pp. 11-24, with illustrations by Mr. Harry Furniss.

[158] The text of this dainty little interlude is to be found in the Daily Mail, January 29th, 1907. Mr. and Mrs. Maude were playing in Toddles at the time.

[159] The figure of Lady Cicely Waynflete possesses an unique interest in view of the fact conveyed in the following record of Ellen Terry's: “At this time (1897), Mr. Shaw and I frequently corresponded. It began by my writing to ask him, as musical critic of the Saturday Review (!), to tell me frankly what he thought of the chances of a composer-singer friend of mine. He answered 'characteristically,' and we developed a perfect fury for writing to each other. Sometimes the letters were on business, sometimes they were not, but always his were entertaining, and mine were, I suppose, 'good copy,' as he drew the character of Lady Cicely Waynflete in Brassbound entirely from my letters. He never met me until after the play was written.” From Lewis Carroll to Bernard Shaw, in McClure's Magazine, September, 1908.

THE PLAYWRIGHT—II

“I have, I think, always been a Puritan in my attitude towards Art. I am as fond of fine music and handsome buildings as Milton was, or Cromwell, or Bunyan; but if I found that they were becoming the instruments of a systematic idolatry of sensuousness, I would hold it good statesmanship to blow every cathedral in the world to pieces with dynamite, organ and all, without the least heed to the screams of the art critics and cultured voluptuaries.”—Why for Puritans? Preface to Three Plays for Puritans, p. xix.

“I do not satirize types. I draw individuals as they are. When I describe a tub, Archer and Walkley say it is a satire on a tub.”—Conversation with the author.