George Bernard Shaw, his life and works

by Archibald Henderson

CHAPTER XIV

There can be no new drama, as Mr. Stuart-Glennie has pointed out, without a new philosophy. Drama can never be the same again since Ibsen has lived. The drama of the future, in Shaw's view, can never be anything more than the play of ideas.

Whether as yet accurately formulated in standard works of dramatic criticism or not, the fact remains that a clear and demarcative line of division runs across the drama of to-day. On one side of this line falls that vast majority of plays—serious drama, comedy, melodrama, farce—which accord more or less rigidly with the established canons and authoritative traditions of dramatic art. On the other side falls the persistently crescent minority of plays which break away from the old conventions and set up new precedents for formulation by the Freytag of the future. In the first class are found those works of art which are founded upon emotion, live solely in and for the dramatic moment, and treat of the universal themes of time and age, character and destiny, life and death. They receive their impulse from eternal and enduring, rather than from topical or transitory, aspects of human life; and draw their inspiration as much—if not more—from the literature of the past as from the human pageant of the present. In the second class are found those works which start into life through the quickening touch of the contemporary, which seek an interpretation of society through the illuminative, transmutative intermediaries of all that is newest, most vitally fecund, most prophetic in the science, sociology, art and religion of to-day; and which endeavour, through faithful portraiture of the present, to detect and reveal the traits and qualities of human nature in its permanent and immutable aspects. The authors of such works find their themes chiefly in the crucial instances of to-day, the conflict of humanity with current institutions, of human wills with existent circumstances, and they have for their end a humanitarian ideal: the exposure of civic abuse, the redress of social wrong, and the regeneration, redemption and reform of society—not less than artistic fidelity to fact, satiric unmasking of human folly, and veritistic embodiment of human passion. To the one class belong Shakespeare, Calderon, Schiller, Rostand; to the other, Charles Reade, Ibsen, Gorki, Brieux. It is a fundamental characteristic of Bernard Shaw that he belongs to the second class—in this respect he is sealed of the tribe of Rousseau, Dumas fils, Zola and Tolstoy.

Through the powerful social thrust of modern art there has forged to the front a new and disquieting force. As an isolated phenomenon, this has occasionally made its appearance in the past; but as a distinct genus it may justly be regarded as a creation of the new social order. To scoff at, rather than to study, to dismiss cavalierly rather than to examine conscientiously, this new force, were as short-sighted and senseless as to deny its existence. We are in duty bound to consider and to weigh, carefully and critically, the claims of this “dramatist of the future” as opposed to the classic virtues of the dramatist working frankly in the manner of tradition. The dramatist who conforms to popular and critical standards is an artist facile in revealing either character in action or action in character, invariable in interpreting life from the side of the emotions, and resolute in imaging drama as a true conflict of wills—in a word, the artist gifted with what the French so aptly term la doigté du dramaturge. He recognizes the drama as the most impersonal of the arts, and sedulously devotes himself to the realization of Victor Hugo's dictum that dramatic art consists in being somebody else. On the other hand, the new type of dramatist—the dramatist of the future, if you will—is no less an artist than the other; his primal distinction is his demand for that large independence of rules and systems which Turgenev posited as the indispensable requisite of great art. Just as Zola enlarged the conception of the function of the novel, sublimating it into a powerful and far-reaching instrument for social and moral propagandism, so this new dramaturgic iconoclast demands the stage as an instrumentality for the exposition, diffusion, and wide dissemination of his views and theories—upon standards of morality, rules of conduct, codes of ethics, and philosophies of life. With him there is no question of importing the methods of the Blue Book into the drama; nor would he, in any broad sense, idly shirk what Walter Pater terms the responsibility of the artist to his material. He accepts the natural limitations, not the mechanical restrictions, of his art; he does not seek to appropriate the privileges, while refusing to shoulder the responsibilities, of his medium. His distinction arises from the discovery of the hackneyed, but ever alarming and heretical truth, that life is greater than art. For art's sake alone he refuses to exist, with strange perversity insisting that he lives not for the sake of art, but for the sake of humanity.

In reply to the question: “Should social problems be freely dealt with in the drama?” Shaw characteristically said: “Suppose I say yes, then, vaccination being a social question, and the Wagnerian music drama being the one complete form of drama in the opinion of its admirers, it will follow that I am in favour of the production of a Jennerian tetralogy at Bayreuth. If I say no, then, marriage being a social question, and also the theme of Ibsen's A Doll's House, I shall be held to condemn that work as a violation of the canons of art.” As a matter of fact, Shaw believes that every social question furnishes material for drama—the conflict of human feeling with circumstances—since institutions are themselves circumstances. On the other hand, every drama by no means involves a social question, since human feeling may be in conflict with circumstances which are not institutions. The limitation of drama with a social question for motive is that, ordinarily, it cannot outlive the solution of that question. It is true that some of the best and most popular plays are dramatized sermons, pamphlets, satires, or Blue Books: Gilbert's Trial by Jury, a satire on breach of promise; Sheridan's School for Scandal, a dramatic sermon; Reade's Never Too Late to Mend, a dramatic pamphlet; and so on. The greatest dramatists, however, abjure political and social themes, rooting their dramas in the firm soil of human nature and elemental feeling. The reason for this is that, as a rule, social questions are too temporal, too transient to move the great poet to the mightiest efforts of his imagination. Shaw maintains that the general preference of dramatists for subjects in which the conflict is between man and his apparently inevitable and eternal, rather than his political and temporal, circumstances, is due in the vast majority of cases to the dramatist's political ignorance, and in a few—Goethe and Wagner, for example—to the comprehensiveness of their philosophy.

The era of the drama of pure feeling, in Shaw's opinion, is now past. Every great social question, owing to the huge size of modern populations and the development of the Press, takes on the character of a world-problem. Les Misérables is the pure product of our epoch; Zola is the colossal champion of social justice and social reform, Ibsen the arch-enemy of social, as well as moral, abuse. William Morris left house decoration for propagandism; Ruskin resigned Modern Painters for modern pamphleteering; Carlyle began by studying German culture and ended with railing against English social crime. The poets are following Shelley as political and social agitators, the drama is becoming an arena for discussion, because the machinery of government is becoming so criminally tardy in its settlement of the perpetually increasing number of social questions: the poet must put his shoulder to the wheel. “The hugeness and complexity of modern civilizations and the development of our consciousness of them by means of the Press,” Mr. Shaw maintains, “have the double effect of discrediting comprehensive philosophies by revealing more facts than the ablest man can generalize, and at the same time intensifying the urgency of social reforms sufficiently to set even the poetic faculty in action on their behalf. The resultant tendency to drive social questions on to the stage, and into fiction and poetry, will eventually be counteracted by improvements in social organization which will enable all prosaic social questions to be dealt with satisfactorily long before they become grave enough to absorb the energies which claim the devotion of the dramatist, the story-teller, and the poet.”[217]

Shaw has placed on record his belief that subjects such as age, love, death, accident, personality, abnormal greatness of character, abnormal baseness of character give drama a permanent and universal interest independent of period and place, and will keep a language alive long after it has passed out of common use. It is not the drama of profound and elemental human feeling against which Shaw rails, but the drama designed solely for the obsession of the senses. His most vehement attack is directed against plays pleasurably appealing to animal passions and sensual appetites. To Bernard Shaw, as Benjamin de Casseres has indelicately expressed it, romantic love is lust dressed in Sunday clothes. The voluptuous appeal of the romantic drama is utterly abhorrent to him. The flaccid sentimentalities, the diluted sensualities of the modern plays which he dubs aphrodisiacs, totally fail to impose on him. Sitting at such plays, he says, we do not believe: we make believe. His own plays, he has spared no pains to tell us, are built “to induce, not voluptuous reverie, but intellectual interest, not romantic rhapsody but humane concern.... The drama of pure feeling is no longer in the hands of the playwright; it has been conquered by the musician, after whose enchantments all the verbal arts seem cold and tame.... The attempt to produce a genus of opera without music—and this absurdity is what our fashionable theatres have been driving at for a long time past without knowing it—is far less hopeful than my own determination to accept problem as the normal material of the drama.”[218]

Cervantes abolished chivalry; let us have done with it, is Shaw's insistent clamour. Romance died with Schopenhauer; let sentiment expire with Shaw. “The thing that Mr. Shaw calls romance,” says Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, “is simply the fullness of life, the boiling over of the pot of existence. Things are so good in general that men have, in order to keep pace with the great cataract of beneficence, to call them good in particular. This great and ancient tide of exultation, which makes the tree green, the sunset splendid, the woman beautiful, the flag a thing to be saved at any cost, is, of course, a fact as square and solid as a beefsteak or St. Paul's Cathedral.... But Mr. Bernard Shaw has, for all practical purposes, denied the existence of this elemental tendency, and it is not, therefore, strange that he finds the world a moon-struck and half-witted place.”[219] In his plays, indeed, Shaw does not sound these deep and eternal notes of the human symphony. He has fallen into the curious error of confounding contempt for romance with denial of its existence. It is all very well to deplore the eternal idealization of the sexual instinct; it is a totally different matter to represent life as devoid of the ecstasies and raptures of lovers, the pangs of despised love, the tyranny of romantic passion.

Temperamentally and philosophically, Shaw is the very antithesis of the romantic. He has consistently sought to reveal and exalt the creative forces in life and art; to awaken the individual to alerter consciousness and to sharpen his preference for actuality over illusion, for reality over appearance. To that romance which seeks to mask the facts of life with the roseate mists of sentiment, the golden halo of illusion, Shaw has proved an inveterate foe. Upon Nordau in his philistine and romantic struggle to uphold a hypothetical standard of normality and to pollute those clear streams of creative energy in art to which we owe the masterpieces of our epoch—upon Nordau Shaw retorted with such splendid force and energy that no one who realizes the issues involved can withhold his gratitude for that triumphant service to the creative spirit of art and of humanity.

One of Bernard Shaw's fundamental claims to attention consists in his effort toward the destruction, not only of romance, but of all the false ideals and illusions which obsess the soul of man. He has assumed the function of tearing the mask of idealism from the face of fact. And yet it is a mark of his catholicity of view, that in his attack upon illusions he is neither so blind nor so narrow as not to realize their far-reaching and oftentimes beneficent effect. Thus he says:

George Bernard Shaw.

From a photo by Histed & Co.
42, Baker Street, W.

“Suppress that phase of human activity which consists in the pursuit of illusions, and you suppress the greatest force in the world. Do not suppose that the pursuit of illusions is a vain pursuit: on the contrary, an illusion can no more exist without reality than a shadow without an object. Unfortunately the majority of men are so constituted that reality repels, while illusions attract them.”

With acute psychologic insight, Shaw draws the distinction between two classes of illusions: those which flatter and those which are indispensable. By flattering illusions he understands those which encourage us to make efforts to attain things which we do not know how to appreciate in their simple reality; either they reconcile us to our lot, or else to actions we are obliged to take contrary to the dictates of conscience. These are, indeed, deplorable consequences in the eyes of the humanitarian meliorist who believes that to be reconciled to one's lot is the worst fate that can befall mankind, and who once said that the one real tragedy in life is the being used by personally-minded men for purposes which you yourself recognize to be base.

The métier of Bernard Shaw is the destruction, not of the indispensable illusions which support the social structure and ultimately make for the uplift of humanity, but of those treacherously flattering illusions which ensnare men in the toils of an existence for which they have not the requisite passion, courage, faith, endurance and self-restraint. “In my plays,” Shaw wrote in the Vienna Zeit, “you will not be teased and plagued with happiness, goodness and virtue, or with crime and romance, or, indeed, with any senseless thing of that sort. My plays have only one subject: life; and only one attribute: interest in life.”[220] It is a mistake of the German dramatic critic, Heinrich Stümcke, to aver that the quintessence of Shaw is nil admirari. It would be far nearer the truth to say that he wonders at everything in this demented, moon-struck world. The law of contrasts is the motif of his art. He is never so brilliant as in the portrayal of opposites.

With the transcendent egotism of the genius, he unhesitatingly claims to see more clearly than humanity at large, to have ever fought illusion, denied the ideal, and scorned to call things by other than their real names.[221] Thus we see him always in search of what Walter Pater was fond of calling la vraie vérité, challenging the old formulas with the new ideas, transvaluing moral values with Nietzschean fervour, and bidding humanity stand from behind its artificial barriers of custom, law, religion and morality, and dare to speak and live the truth. In his capacity of realistic critic of contemporary civilization, he is neither surprised nor confounded to encounter scepticism on all hands. Indeed, he is wise enough to expect it, since he has observed that, when reality at last presents itself to men nourished on dramatic illusions, they have lost the power to recognize it.

Bernard Shaw, as Alfred Kerr has put it, is a distinct ethical gain for our generation. His prime characteristic as a propagandist—and his deficiency as a dramatist—is found in his assertion that the quintessential function of comedy is the destruction of old-established morals. Hence it is that his plays are conceived in a militant spirit—in the Molièresque key of Les Précieuses Ridicules, or the Ibsenic key of An Enemy of the People. His drama may roughly be defined as the conflict of the Shavian Ausschauung with conventional dogma. Like Brieux, he has ingeniously employed the drama as a means of giving lectures. He frankly confesses that his object is to make people uncomfortable, to make them thoroughly ashamed of themselves. “Molière and I are much alike,” he once remarked to me; “we both attack pedantry.”[222] Shaw does not wish to drain the drama of all feeling; he merely wishes to make feeling subsidiary to logic. He regards the portrayal of emotion, not as an end in itself, but as an incentive to thought. “You cannot witness A Doll's House without feeling,” he once said, “and, as an inevitable consequence, thinking.” He wishes to set up, in the minds of his audience, a train of reflections and meditations which may alter their own lives, which may influence the whole world. For, as Emerson says, “To think is to act.” Shaw's object is to create a true drama of ideas, having for its normal material “problem, with its remorseless logic and iron framework of fact.” He would have intellect predominate over sentiment; will engineered by idea, and not unreasoning passion, the controlling factor. Bernard Shaw is frequently charged with being devoid of feeling. Shaw is less influenced by or concerned with mere personal feeling than anyone I have ever known; but his whole being is vibrant with passion for the welfare of society. If social pity is the underlying motive of the later Russian novelists, social indignation seems to be the guiding principle of Bernard Shaw. To him, social thought has become a genuine passion.

The quintessence of the Shavian drama is the Shavian philosophy. Shaw's theatre may be defined as an effort to depict naked instincts upon the stage; this is the meaning of his “scientific natural history.” He has sought to project instinctive temperaments, alive and potent, before our very eyes. The inspiring words of Zola at the funeral of Edmond de Goncourt might well have served as the motto for his principal figures: “Ah! to have intellectual courage! To tell the truth and the whole truth, even if it cost one peace and friends; never to consider any convention, to go to the end of one's thought, careless of consequence. Nothing is rarer, nothing is finer, nothing is grander.” Unhampered by such scrupulousness as that of Mark Twain, who declared that it was immodest to tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies, Shaw's leading characters are ever in quest of truth and freedom. They seek truth in unflinching recognition of facts, freedom in emancipation from slavery to the false idealism of romantic convention. They are libertines, in the original and not the perverted sense of the word, with judgment unbiased by traditional influence or contemporary prejudice. They are natural, not so much in the sense of being perfect replicas of contemporary men and women—for they are often little more than personified aspects of Shavianism—as in the sense of being in a state of nature in regard to whim, eccentricity, fancy, impulse, passion. There is a sort of complex and advanced juvenility about Shaw's characters; they are the enfants gâtés of modern drama. In them are concretely delineated the outlines of the Shavian philosophy: “Duty is the thing one should never do,” “Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it,” “Sentimentality is the error of supposing that quarter can be given or taken in moral conflicts.” The difference between moral and right, for these Shavians, is the difference between doing what you ought to do and what you want to do. Shakespeare's “To thine own self be true” is insufficient; the modern sociologist knows that it is imperative to realize, not only what you are, but where you are. After studying the possibilities, not the restrictions, of their environment, the Shavian characters go straight ahead and do what they choose. Shaw outranks Ibsen himself in the individualistic injunction “Live your own life.”

In his own admirable way, Shaw has given us a succinct exposition of his conception of the Shavian drama. Asked if he wrote plays to make fun of people, Shaw replied, more in sorrow than in anger:

“People talk all this nonsense about my plays because they have been to the theatre so much that they have lost their sense of the unreality and insincerity of the romantic drama. They take stage human nature for real human nature, whereas, of course, real human nature is the bitterest satire on stage human nature. The result is that when I try to put real human nature on the stage they think that I am laughing at them. They flatter themselves enormously, for I am not thinking of them at all. I am simply writing natural history very carefully and laboriously; and they are expecting something else. I can imagine a Japanese who had ordered a family portrait of himself, and expected it to be in the Japanese convention as to design, being exceedingly annoyed if the artist handed him a photograph, however artistic, because it was like him in a natural way. He would accuse the photographer of making fun of him and of having his tongue in his cheek.

“But there is a deeper reason for this attitude of mind. People imagine that actions and feelings are dictated by moral systems, by religious systems, by codes of honour and conventions of conduct which lie outside the real human will. Now it is a part of my gift as a dramatist that I know that these conventions do not supply them with their motives. They make very plausible ex post facto excuses for their conduct; but the real motives are deep down in the will itself.

“And so an infinite comedy arises in everyday life from the contrast between the real motives and the alleged artificial motives; and when the dramatist refuses to be imposed upon, and forces his audience to laugh at the imposture, there is always a desperate effort to cover up the scandal and save the face of the conventional by the new convention that whoever refuses to play the conventional game is a cynic and a satirist, a farceur, a person whom no one takes seriously.”[223]

The supreme difficulty in any criticism of Bernard Shaw as dramatist is to draw the many fine distinctions between his critical expositions of his dramatic system and the actual qualities of the dramas themselves. It is primarily incumbent upon the interpreter of Shaw to indicate with sufficient clearness the discrepancy between theory and practice, between purpose and performance. No objection need be raised to Shaw's definitions. “Drama is no mere setting up of the camera to Nature,” he says: “it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man's will and his environment: in a word, of problem.” But what is one to make of Sir Charles Wyndham's assertion that Shaw's dramatic works are wonderful intellectual studies, but not plays? The dramas are undoubtedly manufactured after the usual pattern, with divisions called acts; figures like people walk back and forth and engage each other in conversation; the mechanical illusion is complete. What is it, then, that gives an air of unreality to all this mimic show?

Bernard Shaw possesses in rich measure the genius of the stage-director, the pliability and suppleness of the critic of modern civilization. The effects he produces, quite often, are tremendous. But capitally and congenitally, Shaw is lacking in that quality ordinarily recognized as natural dramatic genius. In his plays we look almost in vain for those crucial emotional conjunctures, those climacteric soul-crises, which dramatic critics announce to be the criteria of authentic drama—the scène à faire of a Sarcey. Just as Oscar Wilde may be said to have invented the comedy of conversation, so Bernard Shaw may be said to have invented the drama of discussion. The tendency to prolixity and discursiveness has steadily grown upon him; at last he has thrown off all disguise and deliberately set to work to create a dramatic system based on dialectic. Two noteworthy features of his career are his attacks upon conventional cant and Shakespearean rhetoric. And all the time, he has been creating, for his own part, both a Shavian cant and a Shavian rhetoric. “I find that the surest way to startle the world with daring innovations and originalities,” he recently said, “is to do exactly what playwrights have been doing for thousands of years; to revive the ancient attraction of long rhetorical speeches; to stick closely to the methods of Molière; and to lift characters bodily out of the pages of Charles Dickens.” The defining characteristic of his plays is their argumentative and controversial character. They are expository lectures, in dramatic form, on the Shavian philosophy. Mr. Archer once said that Shaw's keen and subtle intellect has built for itself a world of its own, in which it sits apart, inaccessible; this world is not the real earth, but

“Composed just as he is inclined to conjecture her,
Namely, one part pure earth, ninety-nine parts pure lecturer.”

Instead of the indispensable conflict of wills, we often seem to have merely a war of wits, in which the cleverest dialectician wins. Aristophanes and Shaw have certainly one point in common: the plays of both are dramatized debates. Instead of touching each other's emotions, Shaw's characters often seem merely to arouse each other's combative interest. Just as Victor Hugo gives a passion apiece to each of his characters and lets them fight it out, so Shaw gives a philosophy apiece to each of his characters and lets them argue it out. His comedies exhibit with tremendous comic irony the exposure of non-Shavians by Shavians. One day Huxley in jest described Herbert Spencer's idea of a tragedy as “a deduction killed by a fact.” In a moderate, a partial, sense, this might serve as a just criticism of the theatre of Bernard Shaw.

There is a certain fanciful sort of resemblance between a play of Shaw's and a meeting of his own Borough Council: the meeting is called to order, there is argument and discussion pro and con, a resolution is moved, seconded, carried. Shaw is positively judicial in his fairness, even to the extent of creating the impression that his characters are vocalized points of view. With consummate shrewdness, Shaw has fully realized that if the dramatist take sides in a dramatic wrangle, he is lost. A sense of the most absolute fairness and impartiality pervades and dominates his plays. Every character has his say without let or hindrance; and the whole play is signalized by the “honesty of its dialectic.” Shaw does not disclaim the fullest responsibility for the opinions of all his characters, pleasant and unpleasant. “They are all right from their several points of view; and their points of view are, for the dramatic moment, mine also. This may puzzle the people who believe that there is such a thing as an absolutely right point of view, usually their own. It may seem to them that nobody who doubts this can be in a state of grace. However that may be, it is certainly true that nobody who argues with them can possibly be a dramatist, or, indeed, anything else that turns upon a knowledge of mankind. Hence it has been pointed out that Shakespeare had no conscience. Neither have I, in that sense.”[224]

This quality of anxious self-explanation in his characters, this “Let me make clear to you my philosophy of life,” produces upon the reader and spectator two distinct impressions: first an “overwhelming impression of coldness and inhuman rationalism”; and, second, the impression that the characters are replicas or mouthpieces of Shaw himself. The resemblance is still further enhanced through the instrumentality of one of Shaw's most diverting traits as a humorist: his idiosyncrasy for self-mockery and self-puffery. There is nothing, not even himself, about which Shaw will not jest; for, to use an Oscarism, he respects life too deeply to discuss it seriously. He is a master of that art of burlesque which, in Brunetière's harsh characterization, consists “in the expansion of the ego in the joyous satisfaction of its own vulgarity.” One of the truest words, spoken in jest, is Shaw's confession that the main obstacle to the performance of his plays has been—himself!

In contradistinction to the classic formula—that the drama should be the most impersonal of the arts—Shaw's drama may be defined as a revelation of the personality of Bernard Shaw. “We must agree with him,” concludes M. Filon, “and accept—or reject—the dramatic work of Mr. Shaw as it is, namely, as the expression of the ideas, sentiments and fantasies of Mr. Shaw.”[225]

In fine, I should say that Bernard Shaw is a striking instance of the unusual combination of critical and creative faculties. Sometimes the dramatist, he is always the critic. While Shaw can make one laugh, it is seldom that he can make one weep. He unites within himself the power both to construct and to dissect. With Shaw—the Richter und Dichter of German characterization—rationality precedes creation. His richly constructive fancy seldom imagines what his cooler reason has not already perceived. In his plays, there is scarcely a hint of what he himself somewhere described as “the stirring of the blood, the bristling of the fibres, the transcendent, fearless fury which makes romance so delightful.” Shaw is always perfectly aware of himself; Coventry Patmore would have denied him the title of true genius. As someone has cleverly said: “Shaw's eye has never yet in a fine frenzy rolled.” If he had ever listened to the horns of elfland faintly blowing, he would doubtless have said afterwards that Kosleck of Berlin could have done it better. If he had ever heard the morning stars sing together and the sons of God shout for joy, the experience would probably have elicited the coolly critical remark that the ensemble effect was not as good as at Bayreuth, and that the shouting was not as ear-splitting as the “wilful bawling” of the De Reszkes.

This coolly critical attitude, which Shaw manages to transfer to his characters, gives them the appearance of beings peculiarly rationalistic and bloodless. In their veins, as Mr. Archer once said of the leading characters in Widowers' Houses, there seems to flow a sort of sour whey. Shaw has almost succeeded in eliminating the Red Corpuscle from Art.

His characters seem to be devoid of animal passions; their pallid ratiocinations can more aptly be described as vegetable passions.

Shaw's Present Home in London,
10, Adelphi Terrace, W.C.

Alvin Langdon Coburn.

In the case of Shaw, I often receive the impression that inspiration is replaced by excogitation, imagination by what Rossetti called fundamental brain-work. Lessing's phrase, “dramatic algebra,” is not a wholly inappropriate term for his plays. A partial explanation of this phenomenon may perhaps be found in the speech I heard him deliver at the Vedrenne-Barker dinner. “One hears a lot of talk these days about the New School of Shavian playwrights—Granville Barker, St. John Hankin, and the rest. I sincerely hope they will not try to imitate my style and method. There is only one Bernard Shaw, and that one is quite sufficient. I find a striking analogy between the case of the old Italian masters and myself. When they began to work, they found that the human form had been neglected and ignored. Forthwith they began to paint works which appeared to be anatomical studies, so emphasized was the figure. I found myself in much the same situation when I first began to write for the stage. I found that the one thing which had been neglected and ignored by British dramatists was human nature. So I began to put human nature barely and nakedly upon the stage, which so startled the public that they declared that my characters were utterly unnatural and untrue to life. But I have gone on and on exposing human nature, more and more in each succeeding play. If my imitators continue to reveal human nature so ruthlessly, I am afraid I shall have done more harm than good.”[226] The greatest artist, according to Shaw's own definition, is “he who goes a step beyond the demand, and, by supplying works of a higher beauty and a higher interest than have yet been perceived, succeeds, after a brief struggle with its strangeness, in adding this fresh extension of sense to the heritage of the race.” It is a mark of Shaw's high purpose, of the sociologic significance of the man, that he employs art merely as one of a number of means by which he can put his ideas into effect. Doubtless because of his belief that philosophic content is the touchstone of real greatness in art—that Bunyan is greater than Shakespeare, Blake than Lamb, Ibsen than Swinburne, Shaw than Pinero—his plays have something of the rigidity of theses. Shaw's plays not infrequently suffer from the malady of the à priori. Sometimes they are even stricken down with what Wagner called the incurable disease of thought.

Shakespeare created a drama of human nature in which the actions of the characters are their own commentary. Maeterlinck created a drama of shadow in which the characters are most articulate in their silence. Shaw has created a drama of discussion in which his characters have not the strength to hold their tongues. Shakespeare's characters are self-unconscious characters; Maeterlinck's, subconscious; Shaw's, self-conscious. Mr. Holbrook Jackson remarks that “Shaw's drama is the only consistently religious drama of the day—it is as relentless in its pursuit of an exalted idea as were the ancient Moralities and Mysteries.” But Mr. Jackson fails to draw the conclusion that, for this reason, Shaw's characters often take on the guise of intellectual abstractions. The Frenchman calls them hommes-idées; the German, Gedankenpuppen. Shaw's plays are pitched on a plane of transcendental realism. His supreme gift as a dramatist, someone has wisely said, is to produce an impression of life more real than reality itself. His power of penetrative insight at times appears to be something almost like divination. The soul of his wit is laconic brevity and marvellous astuteness in character exposure. His dialogue is the most entertaining, the most diverting, that has been written since the days of Sheridan. He has succeeded in interpreting life with so precise and so illuminating a medium that he frequently transcends the bounds of plausibility, probability, or even possibility, without the lapse being noted. Many, perhaps the majority, of his leading characters, operate upon a plane of fantasy; the psychological impossibility of their actions is concealed by the intellectual credibility of their ideas. They appear as the mouthpieces of his theories, as replicas of his personality, or as changing aspects of his own temperament. Or else, in the later plays, they appear as embodied forces of Nature, as allegorical personifications of modern Moralities. Shaw is constitutionally opposed to “holding the kodak up to Nature”; he believes in making the chaos of Nature intelligible by intelligent choice of material. His métier, then, is interpretation, not observation. As a consequence, he gives us life interpreted in strict accordance with Shavian sophistication. In large part, he depicts human beings not as they really are, but as they might be supposed to be if animated by the Shavian philosophy modified to suit the needs of their individual temperaments.

Quite a number of Shaw's leading characters, and the majority of the subsidiary characters, are marvellously natural studies in contemporary psychology. Unhampered by the impedimenta of Shavianism, they move freely and naturally along the beaten paths of humanity. Now and then, we are whisked away to the realm of fantasy; or else we have only to shut our eyes and open our ears to hear Shaw's ironical laughter echo through their speeches. But, on the whole, we are not deceived in believing that Bernard Shaw's plays are all stages in his search for the essential reality of things. Along the pathway, he has left many vivid, many brilliant, many comprehensible, some complex, and all essentially modern figures. Sartorius, kind-hearted and inhumane; the unwomanly “womanly woman,” Julia; Mrs. Warren, reptilianly fascinating and repulsive, her mother-love slain by the relentless sword of her profession; Crofts, upholding a hideously immoral standard of honour before our sickened gaze; Bluntschli, genial, droll expositor of the prose and common sense of life; Marchbanks, anæmic, asthenic—a visionary penetrating to the truth beneath all disguises and learning the lesson of life in the black hour of disillusionment; Morell, the stupid, good-natured, self-centred parson; Candida, the maternal clairvoyante; Dudgeon, the fascinating dare-devil, resolute in fulfilment of the law of his own nature; Judith, the sentimental and larmoyante; Lady Cicely, ingenuous, tactful, feline, irresistible; Cleopatra, subtly evolving from a kittenish minx into a tigerish and vengeful tyrant; the boyish, energetic, humane Cæsar, large in humour and in comic perception; Broadbent, the typical, stolid Englishman, blunderingly successful because he doesn't know where he is going; Keegan, the gentle and the bitter, vox clamantis in deserto, interpreting a new trinity for the worship of the coming age; Sir Patrick Cullen, quintessence of gruff and kindly common sense; the immortal William, deferential and urbane; and how many more!—a group of finely imagined, subtly conceived, essentially real, if not always credibly human, beings.

Shaw is a marvellous portrait painter, a Sargent in his insight into human nature and into contemporary life. He is a wit of the very first rank, a satirist to be classed with Voltaire, Renan and Anatole France. The static drama he has created enlarges our conception of the function of the drama. The new dramatic system of Shaw's creation, in the words of M. Filon, subordinates the development of the sentimental action to the painting of characters and the discussion of ideas. Like Molière, Shaw has stamped his characters in the idea, and made of them the necessary exponents of contemporary philosophy, the inevitable interpreters of contemporary life.

Capitally and fundamentally, Bernard Shaw's drama is socially deterministic. His characters are what they are, become what they become, far less on account of heredity or ancestral influence than on account of the social structure of the environment through which their fate is moulded. Economist as well as moralist, Shaw attributes paramount importance to the economic and political conditions of the régime in which his characters live and move and have their being. His drama has its true origin in the conflict between the wills of his characters and the social determinism perpetually at work to destroy the freedom of their wills. The germ idea of his philosophy is rooted in the effort to supplant modern social organization by Socialism through the intermediary of the free operation of the will of humanity.

FOOTNOTES:

[217] The Problem Play: A Symposium (V.), by G. Bernard Shaw, in the Humanitarian, May, 1895.

[218] The Author's Apology, Preface to the Stage Society's edition of Mrs. Warren's Profession, p. xxii.

[219] The Meaning of Mr. Bernard Shaw, by G. K. Chesterton, in the Daily News, October 30th, 1901.

[220] Prospectus of the Schiller-Theater, Berlin. Vornehmlich über mich selbst, von Bernard Shaw. This “Plauderei” appeared in the Vienna Zeit in February, 1903, shortly before the production of Teufelskerl (The Devil's Disciple) in Vienna.

[221] The celebrated account Shaw once gave of his visit to an ophthalmic surgeon clearly sets before us his conception of the nature and value of his critical faculty: “He tested my eyesight one evening, and informed me that it was quite uninteresting to him because it was 'normal.' I naturally took this to mean that it was like everybody else's; but he rejected this construction as paradoxical, and hastened to explain to me that I was an exceptional and highly fortunate person optically, 'normal' sight conferring the power of seeing things accurately, and being enjoyed by only about ten per cent. of the population, the remaining ninety per cent. being abnormal. I immediately perceived the explanation of my want of success in fiction. My mind's eye, like my body's, was 'normal'; it saw things differently from other people's eyes, and saw them better.”—Mainly About Myself, Preface to Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant, Vol. I., p. 11.

[222] At various times, in essays published in Europe and in America, I have called attention to the resemblance between Shaw and Molière, dubbing Shaw the Molière of our time. Recently, M. Auguste Hamon has made a detailed comparison of the two comic dramatists in the Nineteenth Century and After: Un Nouveau Molière, July, 1908.

[223] Our Saturday Talk.—VI., Mr. Bernard Shaw, in the Saturday Westminster Gazette, November 26th, 1904.

[224] Man and Superman: Epistle Dedicatory to Arthur Bingham Walkley, p. xxvi.

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

[226] Response to the toast: The Authors of the Court Theatre, by G. Bernard Shaw, at the Vedrenne-Barker Dinner, Criterion Restaurant, London, July 7th, 1907.

ARTIST AND PHILOSOPHER

“It was easy for Ruskin to lay down the rule of dying rather than doing unjustly; but death is a plain thing, justice a very obscure thing. How is an ordinary man to draw the line between right and wrong otherwise than by accepting public opinion on the subject; and what more conclusive expression of sincere public opinion can there be than market demand? Even when we repudiate that and fall back on our own judgment, the matter gathers doubt rather than clearness. The popular notion of morality and piety is to simply beg all the more important questions in life for other people; but when these questions come home to ourselves, we suddenly discover that the devil's advocate has a stronger case than we thought: we remember that the way of righteousness or death was the way of the Inquisition; that hell is paved, not with bad intentions but with good ones.”—An Essay on Modern Glove Fighting appended to Cashel Byron's Profession.