IV
As long as a dramatist is faithful to his task of depicting human life as he sees it, it is of small consequence whether the victory, in the dramatic conflict, goes to the one side or the other. In Pinero’s play, “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,” the heroine loses her battle with convention and her life pays the forfeit. In Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” the contest ends with the destruction of all concerned; in Hauptmann’s “Friedensfest” there is no conclusion at all, and in Sudermann’s “Johnnisfeuer,” orthodox virtue triumphs. The dramatist, properly speaking, is not concerned about the outcome of the struggle. All he is required to do is to draw the two sides accurately and understandingly and to show the conflict naturally. In other words, it is not his business to decide the matter for his audience, but to make those who see his play think it out for themselves.
“Here,” he says, as it were, “I have set down certain human transactions and depicted certain human beings brought face to face with definite conditions, and I have tried to show them meeting these conditions as persons of their sort would meet them in real life. I have endeavored, in brief, to exhibit a scene from life as real people live it. Doubtless, there are lessons to be learned from this scene—lessons that may benefit real men and women if they are ever confronted with the conditions I have described. It is for you, my friends, to work out these lessons for yourselves, each according to his ideas of right and wrong.”
That Shaw makes such an invitation in each of his plays is very plain. The proof lies in the fact that they have, as a matter of common knowledge, caused the public to do more thinking than the dramas of any other contemporary dramatist, with the sole exception of Ibsen. Pick up any of the literary monthlies and you will find a disquisition upon his technique, glance through the dramatic column of your favorite newspaper and you will find some reference to his plays. Go to your woman’s club, O gentle reader! and you will hear your neighbor, Mrs. McGinnis, deliver her views upon “Candida.” Pass among any collection of human beings accustomed to even rudimentary mental activity—and you will hear some mention, direct or indirect, and some opinion, original or cribbed, of or about the wild Irishman. All of this presupposes thinking, somewhere and by somebody. Mrs. McGinnis’ analysis of Candida’s soul may be plagiarized and in error, but it takes thinking to make errors, and the existence of a plagiarist always proves the existence of a plagiaree. Even the writers of reviews in the literary monthlies, and the press agents who provide discourses upon “You Never Can Tell” for the provincial dailies are thinkers, strange as the idea, at first sight, may seem. And so we may take it for granted that Shaw tries to make us think and that he succeeds.