CHAPTER XI
Cæsar and Cleopatra, unique in Bernard Shaw's theatre, alike in subject matter and genre, warrants individual consideration. To an interviewer, on April 30th, 1898, Shaw related that he was just in the middle of the first act of a new play, in which he was going “to give Shakespeare a lead.” Unlike Oscar Wilde, who once said that the writing of plays for a particular actor or actress was work for the artisan in literature, not for the artist, Shaw freely confessed that he wrote Cæsar and Cleopatra for Forbes Robertson, “because he is the classic actor of our day, and had a right to require such a service from me.”[160] Asked if he had not been reading up “Mommsen and people like that,” Shaw replied, “Not a bit of it. History is only a dramatization of events. And if I start telling lies about Cæsar, it's a hundred to one that they will be just the same lies that other people have told about him.... Given Cæsar and a certain set of circumstances, I know what would happen, and when I have finished the play you will find I have written history.”[161]
In an opening scene of rare beauty and mystery, Cæsar discovers the child-truant Cleopatra reclining between the paws of her “baby-sphinx.” What possibilities, what previsions are packed in this prophetic hour, which witnesses the meeting of these two supreme representatives of two alien worlds, two diverse civilizations! From the sublime we are hurled down to the ridiculous. Cæsar, dreamer and world-conquerer, apostrophizing the sphinx in the immemorial moonlight of Egypt, is suddenly feazed out of countenance by a childish voice: “Old gentleman!—don't run away, old gentleman.” It is the voice of Shaw to his public: “I may take unpardonable liberties with you; but—don't run away.”
In Consultation.
From the original monochrome, made at 10, Adelphi Terrace,
London, W.C., August, 1907.
Éduard J. Steichen.
In the main, Shaw follows, as far as time, place and historical events go, such facts of history as are to be found in Plutarch and in De Bello Gallico; in every other respect the play is modern, colloquially modern, in tone and in spirit. Shaw approaches his theme under the domination of an idée fixe: scorn of tradition and of the science of history. The notion that there has been any progress since the time of Cæsar is absurd! Increased command over Nature by no means connotes increased command over self; if there has been any evolution, it has been in our conceptions of the meaning of greatness. When Shaw wrote his celebrated preface Better than Shakespeare? he had a very definite claim to make; that his Cæsar and Cleopatra are more credible, more natural, to a modern audience, than are the imaginative projections of a Shakespeare. Shaw maintains that, in manner and art, nobody can write better than Shakespeare, “because, carelessness apart, he did the thing as well as it can be done within the limits of human faculty.” But Shaw did profess to have something to say by this time that Shakespeare neither said nor dreamed of. “Allow me to set forth Cæsar in the same modern light,” pleads Shaw, in speaking of the hero-restorations of Carlyle and Mommsen, “taking the same liberty with Shakespeare as he with Homer, and with no thought of pretending to express the Mommsenite view of Cæsar any better than Shakespeare expressed a view that was not even Plutarchian....”[162] “Shakespeare's Cæsar is the reductio ad absurdum of the real Julius Cæsar,” Mr. Shaw once remarked to me; “my Cæsar is a simple return to nature and history.”
Are there many cases in dramatic psychology, asked M. Filon, as interesting as the liaison which would have had “Cæsarion” as result? But in Cæsar and Cleopatra, there is no battle of love, no dramatic conflict. Shaw might have produced a drama of the nations, in which the cunning intrigues of Egypt are matched against the forthrightness and efficiency of the Romans; or a drama of passion, charged to the full with poetic imagination. But he has availed himself neither of the historic sense, in which he appears to be deficient, nor of the romantic violence of poetic imagination, against which he rages with puritanical fervour. Shaw calls the play a “history”; certainly it is not a “drama” in the technical sense.[163] And yet, despite the numerous longueurs of the play, the pyrotechnic flashes of wit which only barely suffice to conceal the fact that the action is marking time, the exciting incidents which separately give a semblance of activity to the piece, there is a genuine thread of motive connecting scene with scene.
Cæsar and Cleopatra is, from one point of view, a study in the evolution of character; and this play, and Major Barbara, are the only exceptions to Shaw's theatre of static character. The psychological action of the piece consists in the evolution, under the guiding hand of Cæsar, of the little Egyptian sensualist, in the period of plastic adolescence. Cæsar has the weak fondness of an indulgent uncle for the adolescent Cleopatra, with her strange admixture of childish mauvaise honte and regal covetousness. Realizing with the instinct of a king-maker Cleopatra's dangerous possibilities as a ruler, Cæsar exercises upon her the plastic and determinative force of an architect of states. Slowly the little Cleopatra learns her lesson, glories in her newly-won power, tyrannizes inhumanly over all about her, and eventually—with well-nigh disastrous effects to herself—endeavours to teach her teacher the true secret of dominion.
From another point of view, this play is the portrait of a hero in the light of Shavian psychology—a hero in undress costume, in his dressing-gown as he lived, with all his trivial vanities and endearing weaknesses. The halo of the “pathos of distance,” surrounding the head of the demi-god, wholly fades away; and there stands before us a real man, shorn of the romantic, the histrionic, the chivalric, it is true, but a real man, every inch of him, for all that. Shaw clearly draws the distinction:
“Our conception of heroism has changed of late years. The stage hero of the palmy days is a pricked bubble. The gentlemanly hero, of whom Tennyson's King Arthur was the type, suddenly found himself out as Torvald Helmer in Ibsen's Doll's House, and died of the shock. It is no use now going on with heroes who are no longer really heroic to us. Besides, we want credible heroes. The old demand for the incredible, the impossible, the superhuman, which was supplied by bombast, inflation, and the piling of crimes on catastrophes and factitious raptures on artificial agonies, has fallen off; and the demand now is for heroes in whom we can recognize our own humanity, and who, instead of walking, talking, eating, drinking, making love and fighting single combats in a monotonous ecstasy of continuous heroism, are heroic in the true human fashion: that is, touching the summits only at rare moments, and finding the proper level of all occasions, condescending with humour and good sense to the prosaic ones as well as rising to the noble ones, instead of ridiculously persisting in rising to them all on the principle that a hero must always soar, in season or out of season.”[164]
Mr. Forbes Robertson recently said that he regarded Cæsar and Cleopatra as a “great play,” representing very truly what one would imagine Cæsar said, thought and felt. “Possibly the play is before its time—some people have said such curious things about it. There are scenes of wonderful brilliancy and beauty, and I myself see nothing farcical about the play, as some people seem to suggest. I see a great wit and humour; and, as Mr. Shaw points out, by what right are we to presuppose that Cæsar had no sense of humour? He meets this amusing little impudent girl, and is very much amused with her, and interested in her, quite naturally as a human being. Why should one expect him to go strutting about, with one arm in his toga and the other extended, spouting dull blank verse?” Indeed, Shaw's Cæsar is a remarkable personality—in practice a man of business sagacity; in politics, a dreamer; in action, brilliant and resourceful; in private, a trifle vain and rhetorical—boyish, exuberant, humorous. When Pothinus expresses amazement that the conqueror of the world has time to busy himself with taxes, Cæsar affably replies: “My friend, taxes are the chief business of a conqueror of the world.”
Like Mirabeau, he had no memory for insults and affronts received, and “could not forgive, for the sole reason that—he forgot.” He answers to Nietzsche's differentia: “Not to be able to take seriously for a long time, an enemy, or a misfortune, or even one's own misdeeds—is the characteristic of strong and full natures, abundantly endowed with plastic, formative, restorative, also obliterative force.” Cæsar's policy of clemency is constantly thwarted by the murderous passions of his soldiers; the murder of Pompey he contemns as a stroke of unpardonable treachery and revenge, the removal of Vercingetorix very much as Talleyrand regarded the execution of the Due d'Enghien: it was worse than a crime, it was a blunder. Sufficient unto himself, strong enough to dispense with happiness, Cæsar is—to use a phrase of Mr. Desmond MacCarthy's—“content in the place of happiness with a kind of triumphant gaiety, springing from a sense of his own fortitude and power.” Cæsar is a thoroughly good fellow, prosaically, patho-comically looking approaching old age in the face and wearing his conqueror's wreath of oak leaves—to conceal his growing bald spot. Were Rome a true republic, Cæsar would be the first of republicans; he values the life of every Roman in his army as he values his own, and makes friends with everyone as he does with dogs and children. “Cæsar is an important public man,” as Mr. Max Beerbohm puts it, “who knows that a little chit of a girl-queen has taken a fancy to him, and is tickled by the knowledge and behaves very kindly to her, and rather wishes he were young enough to love her.” But when he is again recalled to Rome, Cleopatra concerns him no more. Cæsar is the Shavian type of the naturally great man—great, not because he mortifies his nature in fulfilment of duty, but because he fulfils his own will.”[165]
Cæsar and Cleopatra, to employ a phrase of the elder Coquelin, is a “combination of the most absolute fantasy with the most absolute truth.” One feels at times that it belongs in the category of Orphée aux Enfers and La Belle Hélène, and only needs the music of Offenbach to round it out. Shaw shatters the illusion of antiquity with a multitude of the stock phrases of contemporary history: “Peace with honour,” “Egypt for the Egyptians,” “Art for Art's sake,” etc., etc.[166] True to Shakespearean practice, Shaw revels in anachronisms, and goes so far as to assert that this is the only way to make the historic past take form and life before our eyes. If Shakespeare makes a clock strike in ancient Rome, Shaw shows a steam engine at work in Alexandria in 48 B.C.! If Shakespeare puts a billiard table in Cleopatra's palace, Shaw alludes to the ancient superstition of table-rapping in the year 707 of the Republic! Shaw gives free play to his abounding humour, having long since learned that nothing can be accomplished by solemnity. “Whenever I feel in writing a play,” he frankly confesses, “that my great command of the sublime threatens to induce solemnity of mind in my audience, I at once introduce a joke and knock the solemn people from their perch.” The eighteenth-century Irishman, with his contempt for John Bull, peeps out here and there; and when Cleopatra asks Britannus, Cæsar's young secretary from Britain, if it were true that he was painted all over blue, when Cæsar captured him, Britannus proudly replies: “Blue is the colour worn by all Britons of good standing. In war we stain our bodies blue; so that though our enemies may strip us of our clothes and our lives, they cannot strip us of our respectability.”
In Cæsar and Cleopatra Shaw has created something more or less than drama—a tremendous fantasy surcharged and interpenetrated with deep imaginative reality. In certain plays of which I shall now speak, Shaw shows that he can play the dramatist, pure and simple, and write with a concentration of energy, a compression of emotive intensity, that seem very foreign to the prolixity and discursiveness of his later manner. The stern artistic discipline to which he nearly succeeded in schooling himself in Mrs. Warren's Profession, once more exhibits itself in The Man of Destiny, Candida and The Devil's Disciple. The essential fact that these plays have proved popular stage successes in the capitals of the world—New York, London, Berlin, Vienna, Dresden, St. Petersburg, Buda-Pesth, Brussels, etc.—is in itself testimony to the fact that—always allowing for the refraction of the Shavian temperament—Bernard Shaw is a true dramatist, capable of touching the deeper emotions and appealing to universal sentiments.
In speaking of his earliest works, Shaw airily refers to those “vain brilliancies given off in the days of my health and strength.” Perhaps something of their diffuseness, and the lack of concentrative thought evident in their construction, are explained, not alone by reference to Shaw's intransigéance, but in part by the conditions under which they were written. A bit of reminiscence voiced by the great English comedian, Sir Charles Wyndham, is illuminating:
“I shall never forget the first time Shaw called to see me. In those days he would not have a bit of linen about him. He wore soft shirts and long, flowing ties, which, with his tawny hair and long, red beard, gave him the appearance of a veritable Viking. Well, he came in and sat down at the table. Then he put his hand into his right trousers pocket and slowly drew out a small pocket memorandum-book; then he dug into the left side-pocket and fished out another of the little books, then still another and another. Finally, he paused in his explorations, looked at me and said:
“'I suppose you're surprised to see all these little pocket-books. The fact is, however, I write my plays in them while riding around London on top of a 'bus.'”[167]
The How and Where of the composition of such plays might well account for much inconsequence and aerial giddiness!
The Man of Destiny has an origin not a little unique. Many plays are written for some one great actor or actress—few are written for two. And yet, according to Shaw's own confessions, The Man of Destiny was written for Richard Mansfield and Ellen Terry—Mansfield serving as the model for Napoleon, Terry as the model for the Lady. At this time, Shaw had seen Mansfield only in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Richard III.; and once in 1894 had chatted with him for an hour at the Langham. The impression he received was so strong, the suggestion of Napoleon so striking, that he resolved to write a play about Napoleon based on a study of Mansfield.[168]
In a letter to Mansfield (September 8th, 1897), Shaw says: “I was much hurt by your contemptuous refusal of A Man of Destiny, not because I think it one of my masterpieces, but because Napoleon is nobody else but Richard Mansfield himself. I studied the character from you, and then read up Napoleon and found that I had got him exactly right.”[169] Shaw frequently corresponded with Ellen Terry during the days he was writing The Man of Destiny; he saw her numberless times on the stage, but had never actually met her when he wrote The Man of Destiny. Shaw escaped the “illusion” of the Lyceum, created by “Irving's incomparable dignity and Terry's incomparable beauty”—simply because “I was a dramatist and needed Ellen Terry for my own plays.... I had tried to win her when I wrote The Man of Destiny, in which the heroine is simply a delineation of Ellen Terry—imperfect, it is true, for who can describe the indescribable!”[170]
The Man of Destiny, Shaw, in fact, confesses, was written chiefly to exhibit the virtuosity of the two principal characters; and it must be confessed that their virtuosity is so pervasively dazzling as occasionally to distract attention from the dramatic procedure. The unnamed possibilities of the situation have been exploited in the subtlest fashion. This little “fragment” is a dramatic tour de force; the rapid shifting of victory from one side to the other, the excitingly unstable equilibrium of the balance of power, the fierce war of wills are of the very essence of true drama. The serious underlying issue, the struggle of Napoleon for a triumph that spells personal dishonour, is a dramatic motive sanctioned by that great classic example, the Œdipus Rex. Unlike Sophocles, whose listeners knew in advance the story of the ill-fated king, Shaw withholds from the spectator any foreknowledge of the outcome; but the growing curiosity of Napoleon, instantaneously inducing like inquisitiveness on the part of the spectator, is one of the chief factors of interest in the play. Early in the development of the action, the purpose of the letter is readily guessed by anyone familiar with such Napoleonic history as is recorded, for example, in the Memoirs of Barras.[171]
As Shaw's Cæsar is his interpretation of the great man of ancient history, so Napoleon is his interpretation of the great man of modern history. Shaw's Napoleon is a strange mixture of noble and ignoble impulses. He is strangely imaginative—a dreamer in the great sense, with a touch of the superstition of a Wallenstein, a great faith in his star. A ravenous beast at table, he feverishly gorges his food, while his hair sweeps into the ink and the gravy; his absolute obliviousness to surroundings is the mask of tremendous energy of purpose. Gravy answers the purpose of ink, a grape hull marks a strategic point on the map: the mark, not the material, is Napoleon's concern. And it is the imprévu of his decisions that so often puts his adversaries to rout. M. Filon protests against Shaw's portrait of Napoleon as a mere repetition of the caricatures of Gillray and the calumniating distortions of the historian Seeley; but Shaw's Napoleon is, in great measure, not the Napoleon of the glorified Bonapartist chromo, but the Napoleon post-figured by his later career. Le Petit Caporal is the ancestor of the Emperor Napoleon I.; and in this early phase, Napoleon may be best described in the sneering characterization of the Lady as “the vile, vulgar Corsican adventurer.” Says Mr. John Corbin: “The final sensation of the character is of vast unquenchable energy and intelligence, at once brutally real and sublimely theatrical. And is not this the great Napoleon? By virtue of this mingling of seemingly opposed but inherently true qualities this Man of Destiny, for all the impertinences and audacities of Mr. Shaw's pyrotechnics, may be reckoned the best presentation of Napoleon thus far achieved in the drama, as it is certainly by far the most delightful.” I asked Mlle. Yvette Guilbert one day if she thought The Man of Destiny would succeed in Paris. “I rather fear not,” she replied. “Shaw's portrait is too true to the original to suit the French!”[172]
Towards the close of The Man of Destiny, Napoleon, taking for his text the famous phrase: “The English are a nation of shop-keepers,” launches forth into a perfect torrent of irrelevant histrionic pyrotechnics. “Let me explain the English to you,” he says, and in Shaw's most Maxim-gun style, proceeds to summarize the history of England in the nineteenth century, in a half-critical, half-prophetic philippic, beginning with discussion of the views of the Manchester School, of British industrial and colonial policy, and of Imperialism, and concluding with allusions to Wellington and Waterloo! In reading the play, this passage appears to be a gross irrelevancy and an absurd anachronism; but on the stage the speech appears to be quite in character with Shaw's Napoleon. Still, this passage calls attention to Shaw's most obvious and most deliberately committed fault: self-projection through the medium of his characters. Shaw identifies himself with his work as possibly no other dramatist before him has ever done. I rejoice in Shaw as M. Filon rejoices in Dumas fils; selfless reserve, abdication of personality, are as impossible for Shaw as for Dumas fils, and I freely confess that what I enjoy most in Shaw's plays is—Shaw.
Sir Charles Wyndham was once asked his opinion of the plays of Bernard Shaw. “Shaw's works are wonderful intellectual studies, but,” he replied firmly, “they are not plays!” And he continued: “At one time I saw a great deal of Shaw and had great hopes of him as a dramatist. But he wouldn't come down to earth, he wouldn't be practical. When he had just completed Candida he came and read it to me. I told him it was 'twenty years too soon for England.' Well, he put it on at a special matinée, and it was much applauded. Then Shaw went out and addressed the audience. 'I read the play to Wyndham,' he said in his speech, 'and he told me it was twenty years too soon. You have given the contradiction to that statement.'” Candida has been played on some of the greatest stages of Europe, as well as all over England and America, and leading critics have praised it as one of the most remarkable plays of this generation.[173]
Candida is an acute psychological observation upon the emotional reverberations in the souls of three clearly imagined, exquisitely realized characters; its connection with pre-Raphaelitism, as Mr. Shaw confessed to me, is purely superficial and extrinsic. Aside from its association with a certain stage in Shaw's own development, the character of Marchbanks might just as well have been linked with the name of Shelley,[174] or with the Celtic Renascence of to-day; but the whole atmosphere of the play makes it inconceivable at any time in the world's history save in the age of Ibsen. It bears marked resemblances to The Comedy of Love and The Lady from the Sea. Candida portrays the conflict between prose convention and poetic anarchy, concretely mirroring that conflict of human wills which Brunetière announced as the criterion of authentic drama. “Unity, however desirable in political agitations,” Shaw once wrote, in reference to this play, “is fatal to drama, since every drama must be the artistic presentation of a conflict. The end may be reconciliation or destruction, or, as in life itself, there may be no end; but the conflict is indispensable: no conflict, no drama.”
In striking contrast to many of Shaw's plays which are marked by a hyper-natural, almost blatant psychology, Candida reveals in Shaw a mastery of what may be termed profound psychological secrecy. “This is the play in which Bernard Shaw has tried to dig deepest, and has used his material with the greatest economy,” wrote Dr. Brandes, in 1902. “The quietude of the action, which works itself out purely in dialogue, is here akin to Ibsen's quietude.... There is great depth of thought in this play, and a knowledge of the human soul which penetrates far below the surface.” A domestic drama—little more than a “scene from private life”—Candida is the latest form of Diderot's invention, the bourgeois drama. Abounding in scenes and situations tense with emotional and dramatic power, it is stamped with the finish and restraint of great art. The characters in this play, so chameleon-like in its changing lustres, at every instant turn toward the light new facets of their natures. We catch the iridescent and ever-varying tints of life; and over all is a sparkle of fine and subtle humour, lightening the tension of soul-conflicts with touches of homely veracity.
The “auction scene” of the third act is transcendentally real, making an almost imperceptible transition from verisimilitude to fantasy.[175] Indulging his penchant for dialectic, Shaw here turns advocate, and argues the case with all the surety of the lawyer, the art of the littérateur. Men and women do not guide their actions in accordance with the dictates of pure reason; as Alceste says to Philinte in Le Misanthrope:
“'Tis true my reason tells me so each day;
Yet reason's not the power to govern love.”
And, after all, the auction scene is merely the scène à faire, leaving the situation absolutely unchanged. As Shaw himself once confessed: “It is an interesting sample of the way in which a scene, which should be conceived and written only by transcending the ordinary notion of the relations between the persons, nevertheless stirs the ordinary emotions to a very high degree, all the more because the language of the poet, to those who have not the clue to it, is mysterious and bewildering, and, therefore, worshipful. I divined it myself before I found out the whole truth about it.”
Playbill of Candida.
Théâtre des Arts, Paris. Director: Robert d'Humières. May 7th, 8th, 9th, 1908.
Twenty-five subsequent performances. Shaw's only play to be produced in France to date.
Candida well justifies its sub-title of a Mystery in the number of astounding interpretations given it by the critics. In France it was regarded as a new solution of the Feminist problem. Candida remains as the free companion of a weak man, we are told by certain foreign critics, because “she understands that she has a duty to fulfil to her big baby of a husband, who could no longer succeed in playing his rôle in society without the firm hand which sustains and guides him.” M. Maurice Muret, who wrote me that he was induced to read Candida by laudatory articles in the German Press after Agnes Sorma's production in Berlin, has thus betrayed his comic misunderstanding: “From the mass of femmes revoltées who encumber the contemporary drama, the personage of Candida stands out with happy distinction. Feminist literature has produced nothing comparable to this exquisite figure. A tardy, but brilliant revenge of the traditional ideal upon the new ideal, is this victory of la femme selon Titien over the Scandinavian virago, this triumph of Candida over Nora”![176] And one of the most eminent of German dramatic critics, after Lili Petri's production in Vienna, said in an open letter to Shaw: “It is not virtue; not prosaically bourgeois, nor vaguely romantic, feeling; nor even the strength of this Morell, but simply his weakness, which chains Candida to his side: because he needs her, the woman loves him more than the young poet, who may perhaps recover from his disappointment and learn to live without her. Shaw, Bernard, Irishman! I abjure thee!”
Not only with such interpretations, but even with Shaw's own dissection of his greatest play, I find it quite impossible to sympathize or to agree. Shaw seems merely to be taking a fling at the “Candidamaniacs,” as he called the play's admirers; his “analysis” strikes me as a batch of Shavian half-truths, rather than a fair estimate of the play's true significance. In answer to Mr. Huneker's question à propos of Candida's famous “shawl” speech, Shaw wrote:
“Don't ask me conundrums about that very immoral female Candida. Observe the entry of W. Burgess: 'You're the lady as hused to typewrite for him?' 'No.' 'Naaow: she was younger?' And therefore Candida sacked her. Prossy is a very highly selected young person indeed, devoted to Morell to the extent of helping in the kitchen, but to him the merest pet rabbit, unable to get the slightest hold on him. Candida is as unscrupulous as Siegfried:
Morell himself sees that 'no law will bind her.' She seduces Eugene just exactly as far as it is worth her while to seduce him. She is a woman without character in the conventional sense. Without brains and strength of mind she would be a wretched slattern or voluptuary. She is straight for natural reasons, not for conventional ethical ones. Nothing can be more cold-bloodedly reasonable than her farewell to Eugene. 'All very well, my lad; but I don't quite see myself at fifty with a husband of thirty-five. It is just this freedom from emotional slop, this unerring wisdom on the domestic plane, that makes her so completely mistress of the situation.
“Then consider the poet. She makes a man of him by showing him his own strength—that David must do without poor Uriah's wife. And then she pitches in her picture of the home, the onions, and the tradesmen, and the cossetting of big baby Morell. The New York Hausfrau thinks it a little paradise; but the poet rises up and says: 'Out, then, into the night with me'—Tristan's holy night. If this greasy fool's paradise is happiness, then I give it to you with both hands, 'life is nobler than that.' That is the 'poet's secret.' The young things in front weep to see the poor boy going out lonely and broken-hearted in the cold night to save the proprieties of New England Puritanism; but he is really a god going back to his heaven, proud, unspeakably contemptuous of the happiness he envied in the days of his blindness, clearly seeing that he has higher business on hand than Candida. She has a little quaint intuition of the completeness of his cure: she says: 'He has learnt to do without happiness.'”[177]
Candida quickly divines that Marchbanks is “falling in love with her,” and whilst fully conscious of her charms, she is equally conscious of the evil that may be wrought by unscrupulous use of them. She has too much respect for Marchbanks' passion to insult him with virtuous indignation. Her maternal insight enables her to sympathize with him in his aspirations and in his struggles.
Playbill of Candida.
Théâtre Royal du Parc, Brussels. Preceded by a conférence on The Theatre of Bernard Shaw,
by M. A. Hamon. Four “Matinées Littéraires,” February 7th, 14th, 17th, 21st, 1907.
First production of any of Shaw's plays in the French language.
It is quite true that Candida's standards are instinctively natural, not conventionally ethical: “Put your trust in my love, James, not in my conscience,” is her eminently sound point of view. It is her desire to save Eugene from future pain, to show him quite gently the hopelessness of his passion, that leads her to “seduce” him into perfect self-expression, to make clear to him that he is a “foolish boy” and that her love is not the inevitable reward for the triumph of his logic. Marchbanks' magnificent bid of “his soul's need” does not win her, because she loves Morell. Taught by Candida to recognize the difference between poetic vision and prosaic actuality, Marchbanks realizes that his hour has struck: it is the end of his youth. He has made the inevitable Shavian discovery that service, not happiness, is the nobler aim in life; and this episode in his soul's history, as Friedrich Düsel suggests, should be entitled, “Wie aus einem Knaben ein Mann wird.” He has learnt to do without happiness, not because he has been completely cured of love, but because he has learnt that his own love soars far above the unideal plane of Burgess—or is it bourgeois?—respectability. This, indeed, is the “secret in the poet's heart”; otherwise the golden-winged god of dreams shrivels up into a pitiful shape of egoism. Candida is a miracle of candour and sympathy; she lacks the one essential—true comprehension of his love. Possessing some sort of spiritual affinity with the Virgin of the Assumption, she lacks the faintest sympathy or concern with the art of Titian; feeling some sort of sympathy with Marchbanks and what is to her his comedy of calf-love, she lacks any true comprehension of the fineness and spirituality of his passion.[178]
Whatever interpretation may be adopted, this drama of disillusion is a work of true genius. In a series of productions by the Independent Theatre in the English provinces in the spring of 1897, and again in 1898, Janet Achurch (Mrs. Charles Charrington) “created” the rôle of Candida; the cast was notable, the parts of Morell and Marchbanks being taken by Mr. Charles Charrington and Mr. Courtenay Thorpe respectively. Doubtless Janet Achurch's interpretation of Candida as the serene clairvoyante remains unequalled to-day, even by Agnes Sorma or Lili Petri. The play has been patronizingly spoken of as an amusing little comedy; Oliver Herford, the humorist, hailed it with great enthusiasm as a “problem-farce”! But Candida has always appealed to me, as to Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, “not only as the noblest work of Mr. Shaw, but as one of the noblest, if not the noblest, of modern plays: a most square and manly piece of moral truth.”
The Devil's Disciple is the fourth and last play in the category of authentically dramatic pieces, ranking just below Candida in the subtlety of its character-delineation and the magnetic force of its appeal. The play had its genesis in a conversation between Shaw and that remarkable romantic actor, William Terriss. In Shaw's words:
“One day Terriss sent for me, and informed me that since witnessing the production of Arms and the Man he regarded me as one of the 'greatest intellectual forces of the present day.' He proposed to combine my intellect with his knowledge of the stage in the construction of a play. Whereupon he gave me one of the most astounding scenarios I ever encountered.... When I endeavoured with all my reasoning powers to convince this terrible Terriss that such a scenario contained far too much action and far too little delineation of character, he declared firmly: 'Mister Shaw, you have convinced me.' With these words, and without the slightest hesitation, he threw the whole scenario into the fire with the attitude and decision of a man who well knows that he has another draft lying in his desk. Nevertheless, the fact that he greeted me as a great intellectual force and yet had implied that I was incapable of writing a popular melodrama delighted me beyond words, and I resolved to get together all the trite episodes, all the stale situations, which had done such good service in the last ten years in trashy plays, and combine them in a new melodrama, which should have the appearance of a deeply thought-out, original modern play. The result of it all was The Devil's Disciple.”[179]
The spontaneity and naturalness which characterize the dialogue of Shaw's plays are the results, in part, of his habit of writing his plays on scraps of paper at odd times. And in the case of The Devil's Disciple, Shaw achieved the incomparable feat of writing a brilliant play and “looking pleasant” at one and the same time! “A young lady I know,” relates Shaw, “wanted to make a portrait of me, sitting on the corner of a table, which is a favourite attitude of mine. So I wrote the play in a notebook to fill up the time.”
In that mock-modest preface, On Diabolonian Ethics, Shaw has confessed his indebtedness to literary history and openly acknowledged his thefts from the past. But in one place he quietly asserts that he has put something original into this play. “The Devil's Disciple has, in truth, a genuine novelty in it. Only, that novelty is not any invention of my own, but simply the novelty of the advanced thought of my own day.” How can one express more succinctly the end and aim of the modern dramatist? Goethe once said that the great aim of the modern intelligence should be to gain control over every means afforded by the past, in order thereby to enable himself to exhibit those features in which the modern world feels itself new and different and unique. A remarkably subtle travesty upon melodrama, The Devil's Disciple is a picture of life seen through the refractory temperament of a thoroughly modern intelligence.
The veiled satire underlying The Devil's Disciple is found in the fact that, whilst speciously purporting to be a melodrama, by individual and unique treatment the play gives the lie to the specific melodramatic formula. The comprehension of the dual rôle made this play as presented by Richard Mansfield peculiarly appreciated by American audiences; in England, the play was absurdly misunderstood, as related in one of Shaw's prefaces.
If we consider the crucial moments of the play, we observe the brilliant way in which Shaw has combined popular melodrama for the masses and Shavian satire upon melodrama for the discerning few. How the hardened old playgoer chuckles over his prevision of the situation that is to result after Dick is arrested and led off to prison! Of course, the minister will come back, Judith will waver between love for her husband and desire to save the noble altruist, the secret will be torn from her at last, her husband will prepare to go and take Dick's place. She will adjure him to save himself, but he will remain firm as adamant. What a tumult of passions, what a moving farewell, every eye is moist—the genuine scène à faire! What a sense of exquisite relief when Shaw has the minister take the natural, the business-like, and not the melodramatic course! Again, in the third act, when Judith, like a true Shakespearean heroine, disregards the convention of feminine fastidiousness in order to penetrate to the profoundest depths of Dick's heart, the melodramatic formula is clear: Dick will kneel at Judith's feet, pour out his burning love for her, the two will revel in the ecstasies of la grande passion. Reality is far subtler and more complex than melodrama—not a game of heroics, but a clash of natures, says Shaw.
“You know you did it for his sake,” charges Judith, “believing he was a more worthy man than yourself.”
“Oho! No,” laughs Dick in reply; “that's a very pretty reason, I must say; but I'm not so modest as that. No, it wasn't for his sake.”
Now she blushes, her heart beats painfully, and she asks softly: “Was it for my sake?” “Perhaps a little for your sake,” he indulgently admits; but when, emboldened by his words, she romantically charges him to save himself, that he may go with her, even to the ends of the earth, he takes hold of her firmly by the wrists, gazes steadily into her eyes, and says:
“If I said—to please you—that I did what I did ever so little for your sake, I lied as men always lie to women. You know how much I have lived with worthless men—aye, and worthless women too. Well, they could all rise to some sort of goodness and kindness when they were in love. That has taught me to set very little store by the goodness that only comes out red-hot. What I did last night, I did in cold blood, caring not half so much for your husband or for you as I do for myself. I had no motive and no interest: all I can tell you is that when it came to the point whether I would take my neck out of the noose and put another man's into it, I could not do it. I don't know why not: I see myself as a fool for my pains; but I could not, and I cannot. I have been brought up standing by the law of my own nature; and I may not go against it, gallows or no gallows. I should have done the same thing for any other man in the town, or any other man's wife. Do you understand that?”
“Yes,” replies the stricken Judith; “you mean that you do not love me.”
“Is that all it means to you?” asks the revolted Richard, with fierce contempt.
“What more—what worse—can it mean to me?” are Judith's final words.
Last of all, Shaw indulges in his most hazardous stroke of satire in the scene of the military tribunal. Imagine the cloud of romantic gloom and melodramatic horror that the author of La Tosca would have cast over this valley of the shadow of death! Shaw ushers in an exquisite and urbane comedian to irradiate the gathering gloom with the sparks of his audacious speech and the scintillations of his heartless wit. Thus Shaw elevates the plane of the piece into a sublimated atmosphere of sheer satire.
In The Devil's Disciple, Shaw succeeds in humanizing the stock figures of melodrama, revealing in them a credible mixture of good and evil, of reality and romance. In life itself, Shaw finds no proof that a rake may not be generous, nor a blackguard tender to children, nor a minister virile and human. All mothers are not angels, all generals are not imposing dignitaries, all British soldiers are not Kitcheners in initiative or Gordons in heroism. That Dick scoffs at religion and breaks the social code does not prove that he is either naturally vicious or depraved. In the stern asceticism of his nature, he is a more genuine Puritan than his self-righteous mother. Under every trial is he always valid to himself, obedient to the law of his own nature; he might have chosen for his device the words of Luther: “Ich kann nicht anders.” The play was written for Richard Mansfield; and Mr. Shaw once told me that the part of Dudgeon was modelled upon Mansfield himself. On the stage, Dudgeon is usually represented either as the melodramatic type of hero, with white soft shirt and bared neck—e.g., Karl Wiene, in Vienna; or as the gay debonair rake, counterpart of the best type of those fascinating blades of Sheridan and the other writers of earlier English comedy—e.g., Richard Mansfield, in America. As a matter of fact, Dick is neither a conventional stage hero nor a dashing rake. “Dick Dudgeon is a Puritan of the Puritans,” says Shaw. “He is brought up in a household where the Puritan religion has died and become, in its corruption, an excuse for his mother's master-passion of hatred in all its phases of cruelty and envy. In such a home he finds himself starved of religion, which is the most clamorous need of his nature. With all his mother's indomitable selfishness, but with pity instead of hatred as his master-passion, he pities the devil, takes his side, and champions him, like a true Covenanter, against the world. He thus becomes, like all genuinely religious men, a reprobate and an outcast.” Unfortified by the power of a great love, unconsoled by hope of future reward, Dick makes the truly heroic sacrifice with all the sublime spirit of a Carton or a Cyrano. Of such stuff are made not stage, but real heroes. “He is in one word,” says Mr. J. T. Grein, “a man, spotted it is true, but a man, and, as such, perhaps the most human creature which native fancy has put on our modern stage.”
In The Devil's Disciple, as Hermann Bahr maintains, Shaw virtually asserts the modern dramatic principle that every situation of adventitious character, every external adventure which meets the hero like a vagabond upon the highway, is undramatic; the sole aim of modern drama is representation of the inner life, and all things must be transposed into the key of spiritual significance.[180] This principle is exemplified in the three leading characters. Like Raina in Arms and the Man, Judith learns by bitter experience to distrust the iridescent mirage of romance. Sentimental, spoiled, romantic, this refined Lydia Languish does not know whether to hate, to admire, or to love the fascinating, devil-may-care rake. In the briefest space of time, her husband has become in her eyes a coward and a poltroon. Her heart is in a tumult of emotions: like a willow she sways between duty to her husband and love for the dashing Dudgeon. And when she puts all to the touch, she discovers that her romance is only a pretty figment of her fancy, powerless before the omnipotent passion of obligation to self. And when her husband appears in the nick of time, and proves to be a hero after all, her love floods back to him. Dick must promise that he will never tell! Surely the figure of the minister's young wife, says Heinrich Stümcke, is one of the most delicate creations of the English stage. “In the recital of Judith's relations with Dick,” writes Dr. Brandes, “there is convincing irony, and rare insight into the idiosyncrasies and subtleties of the feminine heart.”
Among the minor excellences of the play, the figure of Burgoyne stands out in striking relief. In Shaw's view, his Burgoyne is not a conventional stage soldier, but “as faithful a portrait as it is in the nature of stage portraits to be”—whatever that may mean! In reality, Shaw's Burgoyne interests us, not at all as an historical personage, but as a distinct dramatic creation. “Gentleman Johnny,” suave, sarcastic, urbane—the high comedian with all the exquisite grace of the eighteenth century—delights us by exchanging rare repartee with Dick over the banal topic of the latter's death. Burgoyne's speech of Voltairean timbre, quite in the key of De Quincey's Murder as a Fine Art—beginning with “Let me persuade you to be hanged”—is the finest ironical touch in English drama since Sheridan. “The historic figure of the English General Burgoyne,” says Dr. Brandes, “though he holds only a subordinate place in the play, stands forth with a fresh and sparkling vitality, such as only great poets can impart to their creations.” Shaw once modestly averred that “the most effective situation on the modern stage occurs in my own play—The Devil's Disciple.” I have always had the feeling that the first act of this play, although actually delaying the beginning of the “love story” until the second act, is the most remarkable act Shaw has ever written—a genre picture eminently worthy of the hand of a Hogarth or a Dickens. And, to quote Dr. Brandes once more, “I consider The Devil's Disciple a masterpiece, whether viewed from the psychological or the dramatic standpoint. Well acted, it ought to create a furore.”
FOOTNOTES:
[160] Bernard Shaw and the Heroic Actor, in The Play, No. 62, Vol. X. In this same article Shaw says: “No man writes a play without any reference to the possibility of a performance: you may scorn the limitations of the theatre as much as you please; but for all that you do not write parts for six-legged actors or two-headed heroines, though there is great scope for drama in such conceptions.”
[161] Mr. Shaw's Future: A Conversation, in the Academy, April 30th, 1898. This interview is signed “C. R.”—presumably Clarence Rook.
[162] Better than Shakespeare? Preface to Three Plays for Puritans.
[163] In Berlin the play was given in its entirety at the Neues Theater; in London, at the Savoy Theatre, it proved quite feasible to give the play omitting the entire third act. And yet the third act, according to M. Jean Blum (Revue Germanique, November-December, 1906), contains the dramatic climax! Compare also, Dramatische Rundschau, by Friedrich Düsel, Westermann's Monatshefte, June, 1906.
[164] Bernard Shaw and the Heroic Actor, in The Play, No. 62, Vol. X.
[165] Cf. Genealogy of Morals (Translated by William A. Hausemann, the Macmillan Co.), where Nietzsche points out that in the case of “noble men,” prudence is far less essential than the “perfect reliableness of function of the regulating, unconscious instincts or even a certain imprudence, such as readiness to encounter things—whether danger or an enemy, or that eccentric suddenness of anger, love, reverence, gratitude and revenge by which noble souls at all times have recognized themselves as such.”
[166] Cæsar and Cleopatra, in respect to its revolt against the dogmas of classical antiquity, against the accepted conventions in the reconstitution of past epochs, has been classed by Herr Heinrich Stümcke with the Cäsar in Alexandria of Mora and Thoele's Heidnischen Geschichten. In a skit, Cäsar (ohne Cleopatra), by the German dramatic critic, Alfred Kerr, and dedicated “an Bernard Shaw mit freundlichen Grüssen,” this feature is wittily satirized, in these two verses:
“Könnt ich den Zweck des Blödsinns ahnen!
Ich führte manchen schweren Streich,
Bezwang mit Mühe die Germanen—
Trotzdem kommt Sedan und das Reich.
“Ein Zauberer, ihr grossen Götter,
Ist jener nordische Poet;
Herr Arnold Rubek bleibt mein Vetter:
Dich, Leben! Leben! spur ich spät....”
[167] The New York Times, November 20th, 1904.
[168] “Mansfield was always especially sympathetic with the character of Napoleon, and, indeed—however extravagant the statement may seem at first glance—his personality comprised some of the attributes of that character—stalwart courage, vaulting ambition, inflexible will, resolute self-confidence, great capacity for labour, iron endurance, promptitude of decision, propensity for large schemes, and passionate taste for profusion of opulent surroundings.”—William Winter's Life and Art of Richard Mansfield, Vol. I., pp. 222-223; Moffat, Yard and Co., New York, 1910.
[169] Richard Mansfield: The Man and the Actor, by Paul Wilstach, p. 264; Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1909.
[170] Ellen Terry, by Bernard Shaw. Neue Freie Presse, January, 1906; English translation, Boston Transcript, January 20th, 1906.
[171] On account of the vagueness of the story in certain details, Mr. John Corbin has taken Shaw to task for not stating “who the Lady is and why she was so heroically bent on rescuing Napoleon from himself.” It suffices to know that she is Josephine's emissary, sent to intercept the incriminating letter. Her duel with Napoleon is a heroic effort, not to “rescue Napoleon from himself,” but, by playing upon his boundless ambition, to prevent him from discovering the extent of Josephine's perfidy, and to rescue Josephine from the consequences of her indiscretion. That the Lady in the end proves faithless to her trust merely transposes the key from tragedy to comedy; and the dramatic excellence of the play is no whit impaired by this characteristically Shawesque conclusion.
[172] I believe that Shaw's Napoleon has never been adequately interpreted save possibly by Max Reinhardt in Berlin. The impersonation I saw at the Court Theatre, London, in June, 1907, was an egregious failure.
[173] Mr. W. K. Tarpey, who called Candida “one of the masterpieces of the world,” relates that some time at the end of 1894, or beginning of 1895, Shaw fell into a calm slumber; in a vision an angel carrying a roll of manuscript appeared unto him. To Shaw, who was no whit abashed, the angel thus spoke: “Look here, Shaw! wouldn't it be rather a good idea if you were to produce a work of absolute genius?” Shaw granted that the idea was not half a bad one, although he did not see how it could be carried out. Then the angel resolved his doubts: “I've got a good play here, that is to say, good for one of us angels to have written. We want it produced in London. The author does not wish to have his name known.” “Oh!” replied Shaw, “I'll father it with pleasure; it is not up to my form, but I don't care much for my reputation.” Shaw undertook the business side of the matter, put in the comic relief, and named the play Candida: a Mystery!
[174] Mr. Arnold Daly was in the habit of opening the third act of Candida by reading the familiar verses of Shelley to an unnamed love:
“One word is too oft profaned
For me to profane it;
One feeling too falsely disclaimed
For thee to disclaim it.
One hope is too like despair
For prudence to smother,
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.
“I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the heavens reject not,
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?”
[175] In a notable conférence on Candida at the Théâtre des Arts, in Paris, preceding a production of that play, during the latter part of May, 1908, Mme. Georgette Le Blanc-Maeterlinck said: “La situation du mari n'est pas neuve, mais elle se présente ordinairement au troisième acte, et elle est toujours tranchée sans que la conscience intervienne, elle est tranchée par la jalousie, par la douleur et la mort. Ici, nous avons affaire à des intelligences meilleures, à des êtres qui essayent de se conduire d'après leur raison et leur volonté la plus haute.... C'est leur effort de sagesse qui les rend absolument illogiques, les soustrait à l'analyse et les rend presque inadmissibles à la lecture; mais c'est parce qu'ils sont illogiques, comme nous tous, qu'ils sont si vivants, si curieux en scène.”—Le Figaro, May 30th, 1908; also L'Art Moderne, September 20th and 27th, 1908.
[176] De Nora à Candida, by Maurice Muret; Journal des Débats, No. 544, June 24th, 1904, pp. 1216-1218.
[177] The Truth about Candida, by James Huneker, Metropolitan Magazine, August, 1904.
[178] Hermann Bahr has acutely observed: “In the Germanic world, the woman wields power over the man only so long as he feels her to be a higher being, almost a saint: so Candida is the transcendent, the immaculate, the pure—the heaven, the stars, the eternal light. And this Candida? There is no doubt that she is an angel. The only question is in which heaven she dwells. There is a first heaven, and a second heaven, and so on up to the seventh heaven. In the seventh heaven, as you well know, Shaw, dwell only the poets; and of the seventh heaven must the woman be, before the worshipful Marchbanks will once kneel to her, if, indeed, it can be said that a poet ever kneels. But your beloved Candida is of a lower heaven—a lesser alp, a thousand metres below, in the region of the respectable bourgeoisie. There is she the saint the Germanic mannikin needs. There she shines—shines for the Morells, the good people who inculcate virtue and solve social questions every Sunday. And it is there that she belongs.”
[179] Vornehmlich über mich selbst, in Program No. 88 of the Schiller Theater, Berlin. This Plauderei appeared originally in the Vienna Zeit in February, 1903, shortly before the production of Teufelskerl in Vienna.
[180] Rezensionen. Wiener Theater, 1901-1903, by Hermann Bahr; article Ein Teufelskerl, pp. 440-453.
THE PLAYWRIGHT—III
“I find that the surest way to startle the world with daring innovations and originalities is to do exactly what playwrights have been doing for thousands of years; to revive the ancient attraction of long rhetorical speeches; to stick closely to the methods of Molière; and to lift characters bodily out of the pages of Charles Dickens.”—Prophets of the Nineteenth Century (Unpublished), by G. Bernard Shaw.
“I have honour and humanity on my side, wit in my head, skill in my hand, and a higher life for my aim.”—G. Bernard Shaw, in the New York Times, September 25th, 1905.