[205] The Life of Tolstoy: Later Years, by Aylmer Maude; Constable and Co., 1910.
[206] The Censor objected to two passages; the second passage Mr. Shaw was perfectly willing to alter, but not so the first—Blanco's story of his conversion, so reminiscent of the style of Job, in which he describes how God “caught him out at last.” This first passage, which Mr. Shaw rightly considered to embody the crux and central meaning of the play, he refused point-blank to alter. The play was next promised production by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. A certain passage which was subject to misinterpretation was willingly altered by Mr. Shaw at the suggestion of Lady Gregory; and the phrase, “Dearly beloved brethren,” and the use of the word “immoral” in description of Feemy's relations with the men of the village, were omitted in deference to the wishes of the Lord-Lieutenant. The directors of the Abbey Theatre, Lady Gregory and Mr. W. B. Yeats, were warned by the Lord-Lieutenant that their patent for the theatre might be withdrawn in case the play offended popular and religious sentiment in Ireland. Despite these warnings, the play was successfully produced on August 25th, 1909. “The audience took it in a very friendly manner,” wrote the dramatic critic of the Times (London), “laughing heartily at its humours, passing over its dangerous passages with attentive silence, calling loudly but in vain for the author at the close.” There was no sensation and no excitement—and no cause for any. The Irish Times said that if ridicule were as deadly in England and Ireland as it is in France, the Censorship would be “blown away in the shouts of laughter that greeted Blanco Posnet.” In September, 1909, the play was once again presented to the Censor for consideration—in the meantime the author having rewritten an important passage after it had been tested in rehearsal. Miss Horniman wished to produce it at her Repertory Theatre in Manchester. “What the Censorship has actually done,” said Mr. Shaw in comment on the decision, “exceeds the utmost hopes of those who, like myself, have devoted themselves to its destruction. It has licensed the play, and endorsed on the licence specific orders that all its redeeming passages shall be omitted in representation. I may have my insolent prostitute, my bloodthirsty, profane backwoodsmen, my atmosphere of coarseness, of savagery, of mockery, and all the foul darkness which I devised to make the light visible; but the light must be left out. I may wallow in filth, ferocity and sensuality, provided I do not hint that there is any force in Nature higher and stronger than these.” Subsequently the play was successfully produced under the auspices of the Incorporated Stage Society, at the Aldwych Theatre, London, December 5th and 6th, 1909, by the Irish National Theatre Society's Company from the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.
[207] For detailed and excellent expositions of the purport of the play—particularly helpful at the time of the banning by the Censorship—compare The Incorrigible Censorship, in the Nation, July 29th, 1909; and an open letter to the Spectator of September 4th, 1909, by George A. Birmingham.
[208] The play was subsequently produced successfully at the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, October 18th, 1909, and at the Kingsway Theatre, London, June 21st, 1910, at a benefit matinée organized by the Actresses' Franchise League. The Reader of Plays allowed the production of the play after the change of the names of “Balsquith” and “Mitchener” to “Johnson” and “Bones,” respectively.
[209] Report of the Joint Select Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Commons on the Stage Plays (Censorship), together with the Proceedings of the Committee, and Minutes of Evidence; Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1909. The many questions which intimately concern the free development of the national drama in England, arising in connection with the investigation of the Censorship, fall outside the scope of the present work. They will be considered in detail in a subsequent volume dealing with the movements in dramatic art associated with Mr. Shaw's name. Mr. Shaw, desiring to have his full views on the Censorship included in the printed report, had a volume printed at his own expense which he filed with the committee. The committee decided by vote not to allow this printed evidence to be printed in their report. This volume, entitled Statement of the Evidence in Chief of George Bernard Shaw before the Joint Committee on Stage Plays (Censorship and Theatre Licensing), printed privately and marked “Confidential,” constitutes a remarkable indictment against the Censorship, and an elaborate exposition of grounds for the abolition of the Censorship as at present constituted.
THE TECHNICIAN
“Like all dramatists and mimes of genuine vocation, I am a natural-born mountebank.”—On Diabolonian Ethics. Preface to Three Plays for Puritans.
CHAPTER XIII
The drama is the casual, not the inevitable, vehicle for the exposition of Bernard Shaw's theories of conduct. This dramatist of “genuine vocation,” as he once denominated himself, was literally “called” to the post of dramatist for the New Movement. He was a “pressed” man, a conscript in the service of the theatre. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Shaw entered the ranks and took up arms against a sea of twaddle, not initially impelled by the inner, imperious necessity for creative expression, but fired with the desire to prove that he could write plays. According to his own statement, he proceeded to manufacture the evidence. At one time or another throughout his varied career he has employed almost every conceivable medium—novelistic, journalistic, critical, artistic, propagandist—for the communication of his unique and peculiar views. For the last eighteen years the drama has afforded him the most popular instrument for the wide diffusion of his brilliance. The drama has never been the supreme interest of his career; nor, indeed, as he recently told me, has it played any very absorbing part in his life until within the last nine or ten years. The American “discovery” of Shaw as a “new” dramatist amused him immensely, even awoke in him a sense of slight disappointment. He had rather hoped that he would not be “found out” until some years after his death! At last he saw that he must reconcile himself to the inevitable and make the best of the matter, since it could not be helped! “To me,” he said in a letter to me, after the Candida furore in New York, “all the fuss about Candida is only a remote ripple from the splashes I made in the days of my warfare long ago.”
Whether or not the drama has played a very absorbing part in Shaw's own life, it is certain that this is the field in which he has been most strikingly successful in making a world-wide reputation. Until Candida created such a stir in New York, he was regarded in America as a phenomenally clever dilettante in novelism, in art, music, and dramatic criticism; in fact, as anything but a dramatist. He was all but unheard of on the Continent until his plays gained admittance to the broadly catholic repertory of the German Theatre.[210] To-day Georg Brandes writes of him, not as a critic, a novelist, or a Socialist, but as the leader of the most modern, most advanced drama in England. Julius Bab pronounces Shaw the greatest spiritual phenomenon since Nietzsche, the greatest literary success since Ibsen. The time has come for a serious consideration of the question whether he is a good dramatist, a bad dramatist, or, in fact, whether, in the last analysis, he is a dramatist at all. Remarkable as it may appear, it is the last question upon which some of the acutest dramatic critics are divided. Moreover, it remains vivid that Shaw has made some distinct and original contributions to dramatic theory and practice. If Shaw were to paint a portrait or model a piece of sculpture, there is no doubt that he would produce a work presenting evidence of a keen and searching intelligence. Upon the drama, from the questions of prefaces, stage-directions, and technique down to that of punctuation, Shaw has left the marks of an adroit and sagacious ratiocinative faculty.