One day in the summer of 1906, during a visit to the Shaws at Mevagissey on the seacoast of Cornwall, Mr. Granville Barker told Mrs. Shaw about a friend of his, a Dr. W——, who had recently been treated for tuberculosis at a London hospital. Mrs. Shaw was struck by the recital, which prompted the consideration of the vast pains often taken by medical scientists to preserve the lives of people who, unlike Dr. W——, were quite useless to the world. Such people, whose constitutions were hopelessly undermined, should not be dabbled over for endless time to no purpose: it was agreed that they ought to be put into the lethal chamber.
“Why, yes,” exclaimed Mrs. Shaw in a moment of inspiration, “there's a play in that!”
Mr. Shaw replied: “Sure enough, I believe you are right. Hand me my tablet and I will go to work on it at once.” The necessary writing materials were immediately handed him; this was the beginning of The Doctor's Dilemma.
Upon the leading motive of the play hinges the principal criticism which might be directed against Shaw as a realist. Almost everyone is inclined to maintain that, whereas problems of the most serious ethical significance confront even the most ordinary practitioner, the dilemma in which Ridgeon finds himself placed is one that would never arise in actual experience. The truth of the matter is that the play is based upon an actual incident; and Mr. Shaw once related the story to me in detail. One day he was at St. M——'s Hospital, London, visiting a famous physician, Sir A—— W——. The size of the hospital admitted of only a few patients for treatment, say fifteen all told. In the course of the conversation, an assistant came in to report to the head of the hospital that some unknown man had made an urgent request to be taken in as a patient at the hospital. “Is he worth it?” asked the eminent physician. “This gave me the clue to The Doctor's Dilemma, you see,” explained Mr. Shaw. “A choice between those worthy and those unworthy to be treated, and presumably saved, was an ethical question inevitably arising in virtue of the cramped facilities of the hospital. The question whether the patient was physically worthless or not was in no sense an inhuman question; and my own treatment, you see, is in no sense either freakish or inhuman.”
After Ibsen's death Shaw wrote a critical appreciation of Ibsen's work, in the course of which he said: “Ibsen seems to have succumbed without a struggle to the old notion that a play is not really a play unless it contains a murder, a suicide, or something else out of the Police Gazette.... The Brand infant and Little Eyolf are as tremendously effective as a blow below the belt; but they are dishonourable as artistic devices, because they depend on a morbid horror of death and a morbid enjoyment of horror.”[196] Loyally championing Ibsen and the fundamental principles of drama—for the above quotation appeared to be nothing short of an attack upon tragedy—Mr. William Archer characterized Shaw's charge as “the æstheticism of the fox without a tail ... the instinctive self-justification of the dramatist fatally at the mercy of his impish sense of humour.” In a challenging tone he went on to aver that Shaw “eschews those profounder revelations of character which come only in crises of tragic circumstance. He shrinks from that affirmation and consummation of destiny which only death can bring. Death is, after all, one of the most important incidents of life, not only to him or her who dies, but to those who survive.... If, in Mr. Shaw's own phrase, 'the illumination of life' is the main purpose of drama, what illuminant, we may ask, can be more powerful than death?... It is not the glory but the limitation of Mr. Shaw's theatre that it is peopled by immortals.”[197]
A few weeks later—as Mr. Archer himself has recorded[198]—a paragraph appeared in the Tribune, “from an unexceptionable source,” announcing the practical completion of The Doctor's Dilemma. This was its substance:
“Mr. Bernard Shaw has been taking advantage of his seaside holidays in Cornwall to write a new play.... It is the outcome of the article in which Mr. William Archer penned a remarkable dithyramb to Death, and denied that Mr. Shaw could claim the highest rank as a dramatist until he had faced the King of Terrors on the stage. Stung by this reproach from his old friend, Mr. Shaw is writing a play all about death.... He has not evaded the challenge by a quip; the play is in five acts, with the fatal situation in the correct position—at the end of the fourth. The death scene will be unlike any ever before represented.”
The conversation at Mevagissey and the incident at the hospital in London prior thereto were the real clues to the creation of The Doctor's Dilemma. Mr. Archer's “challenge,” as Mr. Shaw assured me, happened to fit in conveniently with his already formulated dramatic plan. When the play was actually produced, Mr. Archer triumphantly declared that Shaw had ingeniously evaded his challenge to “keep a straight face long enough to write a scene of pathos or of tragedy.” He explained that “death, of all things, requires to be approached in humility of spirit, and that humility has been omitted from Mr. Shaw's moral equipment. He must always be superior to every character, every emotion, every situation he portrays.... If the 'King of Terrors' thinks he can perturb or overawe the cool, clear, quizzical intelligence of G. B. S., his majesty is very much mistaken.... As he (Mr. Shaw) is superior to life, there is no reason in the world why he should not be superior to death.”[199] In a later article Mr. Archer maintained that Shaw had “doctored” the situation of Dubedat's death. Moreover, Mr. Archer gave his case away in the words: “He has not treated death soberly, seriously, naturally, or, in a word, with a straight face. He has chosen an extremely exceptional case, and has treated it realistically in outward detail; ironically in spirit and effect. It was not realism I demanded—it was poetry!”[200] Now, to expect a man quintessentially an ironic and comedic dramatist to throw around death a halo of imaginative poetry is to commit the critical blunder of complaining of one author that he does not write like another—say, that Shaw does not write like Shakespeare. If there is anything that Shaw abhors, it is the spectacle of death made stage-sublime. And it is quite unreasonable not to expect a man who does not believe in personal immortality to be “superior to death”; and Shaw once said, as I have remarked elsewhere, that he was looking for a race of men who were not afraid to die. Death is approached in The Doctor's Dilemma with neither awe nor humility; not by the doctors who are professionally callous, or by the amoral atheist, Dubedat. We are made to realize Jennifer's anguish during Dubedat's dissolution; her action following Dubedat's death—the action of a Ouida or a Laurence Hope—is both logical and psychological. It is quite true that Shaw has not complied with Mr. Archer's unreasonable and extravagant request; but he has treated the scene, allowing for the indispensable “heightening for dramatic effect,” with acute psychological penetration, with wonderful art, and with absolute consistency to his own view of life—an eminently honest and square course to pursue.
Various other incidents in the play, branded unqualifiedly by numerous critics as impish, in execrable taste, or frankly impossible, are based upon actual occurrences; the names of the parties concerned and the details are quite well known to others besides Shaw himself. For example, Dubedat's disgraceful suggestion about the worthless cheque, which of necessity must eventually be paid by Jennifer to avert Dubedat's disgrace, is an exact record of a similar proposal once made to Shaw himself by a man whose name, because of its association with that of one of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century, is known all over the world. Dubedat's lack of any sense of obligation to finish pictures paid for before execution is paralleled in an episode in the life of a well-known sculptor. The incident of the reporter's suggestion to interview the artist's widow five minutes after bereavement on “How it feels to be a widow,” is founded on fact. “A few years ago,” Shaw recounts, “when Mrs. Patrick Campbell's husband died in South Africa, a leading London paper sent a man up on the instant to interview her. Of course, she didn't see him, and next morning the editor of the paper in his story of the death actually expressed grieved surprise at her lack of hospitality.” There is a scene in the play in which Dubedat attempts to justify his conduct on the ground that he is a disciple of Bernard Shaw, whom he calls “the most advanced man now living.” To remove any misapprehension in the public mind on the subject, Shaw recently told the following story:
“Some people have thought that by allowing the immoral artist to say he was my disciple, I have virtually admitted that all my disciples die immoral and that immorality is what my teachings amount to. Of course, that is not what I meant. The incident, as I say, was founded on fact. About six months ago a scampish youth tried to blackmail his own father, and the old gentleman, a most respectable person, was actually forced to prosecute him. At his trial the youth excused himself just as the dying artist in my play attempted to excuse himself—by asserting that he was a 'follower of Bernard Shaw.' Then the youth said some irreligious things that scandalized the judge, and finally got sent to prison, where he actually expected me to go to visit him and act as a sort of chaplain to him.”[201]