“Colly, when you live in an age that runs to pictures and statues and plays and brass bands, because its men and women are not good enough to comfort its poor aching soul, you should thank Providence that you belong to a high and great profession, because its business is to heal and mend men and women.”
“In short, as a member of a high and great profession, I am to kill my patient.”
“Don't talk wicked nonsense. You can't kill him. But you can leave him in other hands.”
“In B. B.'s, for instance, eh?” queries Ridgeon, looking at Sir Patrick significantly.
“Sir Ralph Bloomfield-Bonington is a very eminent physician.”
“He is,” accedes Ridgeon.
“I'm going for my hat,” adds Sir Patrick, with conclusive finality.
Whilst all the characters are admirably drawn and sharply individualized, Shaw's inspiration is singularly displayed in making of Jennifer a native of Cornwall, that land of rhapsodic faith and splendid religious enthusiasm. She is a true child of nature, impulsive and romantic, to whom belief in Dubedat's genius, much more than love for his personality, has become nothing short of a religion. To engarb herself in the “purple pall of tragedy,” the instant Dubedat is dead, is a perfectly characteristic action. “Jennifer is an impossible person to live with, I grant you,” Mr. Shaw once remarked to me, “but it is clear to me that her impulsiveness and her unquestioning fidelity to Dubedat's memory must find immediate expression in fulfilment of the dying injunction of her King of Men. Even if I had been writing a novel, in which the treatment is more leisurely”—this in answer to my question—“I should have made her act precisely as she did.”
The first three acts of The Doctor's Dilemma are as able in treatment and solid in workmanship as anything Shaw has ever achieved. The pervasive comic irony is tremendous; and if in the latter part of the play there is a regrettable drop into farce-comedy, one should remember that this is a fault shared in by the plays of Sheridan and Molière. The anti-climax of the epilogue is banal—“a sell” of the true Shavian brand. It is exceedingly amusing to the dispassionate onlooker to note the discomfiture of the dismayed audience over the discovery that the enigmatic author regards the identity of Jennifer's second husband as a quite pointless secret between Jennifer and Bernard Shaw![204]
“I have just finished a crude melodrama in one act—the crudity and melodrama both intentional,” Mr. Shaw wrote me on March 15th, 1909, “which I should say will be played by Tree if it were not that my plays have such an extraordinary power of getting played by anybody in the world rather than by the people for whom they were originally intended.” Even then, it seems, Mr. Shaw dimly foresaw the banning of his play by the King's Reader of Plays, and the enforced alteration of plans for its production entailed by that decision. Promised initial production by Sir (then Mr.) H. Beerbohm Tree, “the first of our successful West End managers to step into the gap left by the retirement of Messrs. Vedrenne and Barker from what may be called National Theatre work with his Afternoon Theatre,” Blanco Posnet was driven away to far-off Dublin, where it first saw the light of production. Upon no play of Shaw's, with the single exception of Mrs. Warren's Profession, are we so fully “documented”—primarily due in both cases to the interdict of the Censorship. Fortunately a letter which Shaw wrote to Tolstoy in the autumn of 1909 gives a detailed account of the genesis of the play. Tolstoy had been reading Shaw's plays, and evinced much interest in the plot of Blanco Posnet as it had come to his ears. He expressed a wish to read the play, says Mr. Aylmer Maude in his biography of Tolstoy, “because, as he said, to many people the working of man's conscience is the only proof of the existence of a God.”[205] When Mr. Maude repeated this conversation to Mr. Shaw, the latter sent Tolstoy a copy of the play with the following letter (quoted in part):