III
Sarcey, the great French critic, has shown us that the essence of dramatic action is conflict. Every principal character in a play must have a complement, or as it is commonly expressed, a foil. In the most primitive type of melodrama, there is a villain to battle with the hero and a comic servant to stand in contrast with the tearful heroine. As we go up the scale, the types are less strongly marked, but in every play that, in the true sense, is dramatic, there is this same balancing of characters and action. Comic scenes are contrasted with serious ones and for every Hamlet you will find a gravedigger.
In the dramas of George Bernard Shaw, which deal almost wholly with the current conflict between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, it is but natural that the characters should fall broadly into two general classes—the ordinary folks who represent the great majority, and the iconoclasts, or idol-smashers. Darwin made this war between the faithful and the scoffers the chief concern of the time, and the sham-smashing that is now going on, in all the fields of human inquiry, might be compared to the crusades that engrossed the world in the middle ages. Everyone, consciously or unconsciously, is more or less directly engaged in it, and so, when Shaw chooses conspicuous fighters in this war as the chief characters of his plays, he is but demonstrating his comprehension of human nature as it is manifested to-day. In “Man and Superman,” for instance, he makes John Tanner, the chief personage of the drama, a rabid adherent of certain very advanced theories in social philosophy, and to accentuate these theories and contrast them strongly with the more old-fashioned ideas of the majority of persons, he places Tanner among men and women who belong to this majority. The effect of this is that the old notions and the new—orthodoxy and heterodoxy—are brought sharply face to face, and there is much opportunity for what theater goers call “scenes”—i. e. clashes of purpose and will.
In all of the Shaw plays—including even the farces, though here to a less degree—this conflict between the worshipers of old idols and the iconoclasts, or idol-smashers, is the author’s chief concern. In “The Devil’s Disciple” he puts the scene back a century and a half because he wants to exhibit his hero’s doings against a background of particularly rigid and uncompromising orthodoxy, and the world has moved so fast since Darwin’s time that such orthodoxy scarcely exists to-day. Were it pictured as actually so existing the public would think the picture false and the playwright would fail in the first business of a maker of plays, which is to give an air of reality to his creations. So Dick Dudgeon, in “The Devil’s Disciple” is made a contemporary of George Washington, and the tradition against which he struggles seems fairly real.
In each of the Shaw plays you will find a sham-smasher like Dick. In “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” there are three of them—Mrs. Warren herself, her daughter Vivie and Frank Gardner. In “You Never Can Tell” there are the Clandons; in “Arms and the Man” there is Bluntschli, and in “Man and Superman” there are John Tanner and Mendoza, the brigand chief, who appears in the Hell scene as the Devil. In “Candida” and certain other of the plays it is somewhat difficult to label each character distinctly, because there is less definition in the outlines and the people of the play are first on one side and then on the other, much after the fashion of people in real life. But in all of the Shaw plays the necessary conflict is essentially one between old notions of conduct and new ones.
Dramatists of other days, before the world became engaged in its crusade against error and sham, depicted battles of other sorts. In “Hamlet” Shakespeare showed the prince in conflict with himself, and in “The Merchant of Venice” he showed Shylock combatting Antonio, or, in other words, the ideals of the Jew at strife with Christian ideals of charity and mercy. Of late, the most important plays have much resembled those of Shaw. Ibsen, except in his early poetical dramas, deals chiefly with the war between new schemes of human happiness and old rules of conduct. Nora Helmer fights the ancient idea that a married woman should love, honor and obey her husband, no matter what the provocation to do otherwise, just as Mrs. Warren defies the mandate that a woman should preserve her virtue, no matter how much she may suffer thereby. Sudermann, in “Magda,” shows his heroine in revolt against the patriarchal German doctrine that a father’s authority over his children is without limit, and Hauptmann, another German of rare talents, depicts his chief characters in similar situations. Shaw is frankly a disciple of Ibsen, but he is far more than a mere imitator. In some things, indeed—such, for instance, as in fertility of wit and invention—he very greatly exceeds the Norwegian.