In his search for a field other than fiction and criticism for the free play of his “abnormally normal vision,” Shaw's eye fell upon the stage. He recognized that the existing popular drama of the day is “quite out of the question for cultivated people who are accustomed to use their brains.” Looking about him, he soon perceived that under present conditions the modern theatre creates the drama, despite the fact that the reverse is the ideal state of affairs. No one more than the idealistic Shaw deplores the present vogue of the musical comedy, the problem play which substitutes sensuous ecstasy for intellectual validity, and the well-made piece in which the plot is hatched by the stage-setting. To him, as to another, modern dramas may be classified under a few heads: neurotic, erotic, Pinerotic, and tommyrotic. The whole difficulty has arisen through the drama of the day being written “for the theatre instead of from its own inner necessity.” The only way to reform the theatre was by constructive effort. Realizing that reformation and regeneration could come only from within, and more especially from the man of abnormally normal vision, George Bernard Shaw—he set to work to effect the needed reforms.
Piquancy was imparted to the situation by the fact that Shaw was one of those restless modern spirits who are out of patience with the existing status, not only in the drama, but in the world at large. By his own confession, he ran counter to all conventional standards.[211] An Irishman by birth, an Englishman by adoption, he pretended to patriotism neither for the land of his nativity nor for the country to which it owed its ruin. A humanitarian, he detested warfare of any kind; a vegetarian, he abhorred the slaughter of animals, in sport or in the butcher's yard. An enthusiastic Ibsenist, he paralleled the Master in having no respect for popular morality, no admiration for popular heroics, no belief in popular religion. An art critic, he had no taste for popular art; a Socialist, profoundly imbued with an enthusiasm for social truth as an instrument of social reform, he was out of patience with the lagging snail-pace at which the world moved. The times were out of joint; but, unlike Hamlet, as Mr. Norman Hapgood suggests, he deemed it no cursed spite that he was born to set them right.
It is not to be wondered at that the acutely individualized
Shaw should feel the necessity of outlining his unusual, almost unparalleled frame of mind. As a public speaker, his aim had always been, not to awake the primitive feelings of the mob, but to make each individual in his audience think new thoughts: elucidation, not oratory, was the keynote of his public speeches. As a critic he had sought to speak out his whole thought without disguise: he dallied with no professional phraseology. He addressed the man who knew nothing of technique; accordingly, he wrote in the vernacular of every day. Clarity, lucidity and wit were the standards at which he aimed. In like manner, his sincere effort toward the constructive achievement of the “New Drama” necessitated the most elaborate elucidation of his views, aims and methods. As Mr. Walkley has pointed out, Bernard Shaw is nothing if not explanatory. By prefaces, appendices and epilogues, he endeavours to raise the intellectual standard of public opinion, which to him represents the will of the ignorant majority as opposed to that of the discerning few. It is matter for no surprise that such a strange phenomenon as Shaw should have led the critics astray. Few men in their lifetime have been so fundamentally misunderstood, so farcically misrepresented: Beyle, Shelley, Wilde, naturally come to mind. Shaw resolved to fight against misrepresentation with the many effective weapons, the use of which, from long and arduous practice, he had so well learned. The haughty aloofness of an Ibsen with his “Quod scripsi, scripsi,” the unconscious self-forgetfulness of a Browning in the oft-recorded anecdote of “me und Gott,” the lofty injunction of a Goethe “Bilde, Kunstler, rede nicht,” weighed with him not at all. The man who had first caught the ear of the British public on a cart in Hyde Park, to the blaring of brass bands, was not the man soon to forget his lesson. Shaw has never discarded the trumpet and the cart-wheel declamation. This is not merely the device to attract attention for the moment, but to win a hearing long enough to awaken thought upon the views he so adroitly and wittily expounds. He writes prefaces and appendices because he believes that an author should not merely allow his works to speak for themselves, but should present their claims to intelligent consideration with his utmost literary skill. Shaw avers that, like Dryden, he writes prefaces because he can. The crass ignorance, the unspeakable fatuity of his critics have driven him to it. Shaw writes prefaces not only because he can: he writes them because he must.
The rare and ancient custom of preface-writing is now almost a lost art. Shaw is virtually the only modern dramatist who writes expository and critical prefaces. His prefaces are little masterpieces of essay-writing. After The Quintessence of Ibsenism, they measure the high-water mark of Shaw's supreme talent as a polemist, a dialectician, a gorgeous and extravagant paradoxer. “In finely polyglot style” j'en chortle, as chortled Stevenson over the admirable Bashville. Inimitable, incomparable are these prefaces, vitally animate with the fantastic humours of the prankish Max, the solemn absurdities of Mark Twain, the mordant irony of Henry Becque. Shaw turns a paradox as dexterously as Chesterton, bubbles with self-persiflage as delightfully as Whistler, mocks the stolid British Philistine with an exasperating acuity for which we have to go to Heine to find a parallel. William Archer has said that one of the prefaces of Dumas fils might have been the product of collaboration between Isaiah, Tolstoy and Bernard Shaw. Any of the prefaces of Bernard Shaw might have been the product of a collaboration between Dumas fils, Friedrich Nietzsche, and that great American showman, P. T. Barnum.
Shaw's incorrigible practice of writing prefaces is the perfectly logical outcome of his point of view. The direct corollary of this practice is Shaw's distinctly original contribution to the technology of modern realistic drama in the matter of ample elucidative and descriptive stage directions. For reasons similar to those that actuated Gerhart Hauptmann to draw plans and write pages of stage directions to compel a clear visualization of the scenes of his early social drama, Vor Sonnenaufgang, Shaw describes in lucid and illuminating stage directions of considerable length the traits, qualities and characteristics of the people and places that play determining parts in his dramas. From the standpoint of the dramatic critic, he long ago recognized the bankruptcy of the old school of acting. Its technique was wholly inadequate for the interpretation of the plays of Ibsen and the modern school of realistic dramatists. A new fingering of the dramatic keyboard was demanded. The sophistication of the actor's consciousness by romance could be obviated only by the most cunning portraiture of each character. To aid the actor in every possible way to realize unusual states of mind and apparently aberrant views of ethical conceptions, Shaw drew the most tersely descriptive character sketches of the sort of person he meant the actor to incarnate. These little thumb-nail sketches are marvels of character-drawing in miniature. The German Shaw, Hermann Bahr, has paralleled, if not followed, Shaw in describing each personage, as he appears, with photographic minuteness, but with nothing like the piquancy and originality of his predecessor. Shaw has always fulminated against the romancer's habit of announcing his hero as a man of extraordinary genius, and yet totally failing to reinforce this announcement in his subsequent speech and action. Shaw complains even of Ibsen that he has left entirely too much to the reader's and the actor's imagination and insight. Is Borkman a real Napoleon of Finance or only an hallucinated impostor? What reason have we to believe, barring the author's statement, that Lövborg was actually a creative genius, that Allmers was in the least degree capable of a masterwork on Human Responsibility, or that Solness was an architect of exceptional original power? When interrogated as to his meaning, for example, Ibsen haughtily replies: “What I have said, I have said.” But, as Shaw pertinently indicates, what he hasn't said, he hasn't said. Whether uniformly successful or not, Shaw, as practical playwright, has made a definite contribution to modern realistic drama by conscientiously seeking to remedy in his own plays the defect he has discovered in Ibsen, the consummate craftsman of the age. Shaw's descriptions, not only of the characters, but of the scenes in which these characters are set, are little essays in social criticism. The description of the dentist's operating-room in You Never Can Tell, or of Ramsden's study in Man and Superman, is at once the epitome and the indictment of an entire social era, of a phase of ethical or industrial evolution. It intrigues the fancy, as Whistler used to say, to make the ludicrous, if futile, inquiry whether the fate of heroes, the destiny of humanity, depend upon the upholstery of the chairs, the ornaments upon the mantel-shelf, or the pattern of the wall-paper!
Among contemporary dramatists, Bernard Shaw is an exponent of that modern movement of which, as Mr. Chesterton has recently reminded us, Robert Browning, among modern poets, was the fount and origin—the school whose chief characteristic is the apotheosis of the insignificant. Like Browning, Shaw has “ceased to believe certain things to be important and the rest to be unimportant.” He has resolved to distil the quintessence of the unessential. By the cultivation of subjective intensity, Maurice Maeterlinck has opened our eyes to the miracle of the commonplace, the treasure of the humble. By examining the neglected, George Gissing has revealed the importance of the trivial. With an imaginative insight that subsequently finds verification in real life, Henrik Ibsen depicts a soul's tragedy in a married woman's loss of her dolls. In conformity with the realistic logic of his race, Paul Hervieu traces the finger of fate in the colour of a woman's bonnet. Realizing those queer mental experiences that the ordinary observer would not see or could not describe, George Meredith illumines the obscurity of fugitive and subconscious sensations. Bernard Shaw arraigns a social era in his description of a parlour because he has learnt the supreme importance of detail, the mystery and immensity of little things.
Shaw was driven to the expedients of preface and exhaustive stage-direction not alone by the false critical interpretations of his plays, by the actor's failure to divine the rationale of his characters, and by the evolutionary trend of modern realistic art. He also felt the necessity of falling back upon his own literary expertness in order to restore the English drama to anything like its former level of estimation in English literature. In that barren period of dramatic unproductivity, approximately speaking, from 1835 to 1885, the habit of reading plays, which had obtained in England from the time of Shakespeare to that of Sheridan Knowles, fell into “innocuous desuetude.” Against the notion that plays are essentially unreadable, a legacy of that period of England's abject servitude to France in the realm of the drama, Shaw has justly and finely protested as an author, as a dramatic critic, as a dramatist. With Fontenelle and the younger Dumas, he was united in the belief that “the spectator can give only success, it is the reader who confers renown.” He has employed his powers of literary expression in all their vigour and vitality to make his plays, as published and readable artistic productions, worthy of competition with such elaborate fiction as that of Bourget, James, or D'Annunzio. Shaw's discouraging experience in the effort to have his own plays published brought the subject forcibly to his attention. As late as 1896, every publisher who was approached with a view to publishing a play, Shaw asserts, at once said: “No use: people won't read plays in England.”
Shaw rightly lays the blame for the passing of the printed play as a marketable commodity at the doors, not of the publisher, but of the playwright, on account of the absurd jargon in which stage directions are customarily couched. There is a sign-language, a scenic chirography pertaining peculiarly to the stage; it is essential, as Mr. Brander Matthews recently said, that the playwright who wishes his play to be generally read “should translate it out of the special dialect of the stage folk into the language of the people.” And a number of years ago Shaw wrote: “I suggest that it is the fault of the playwrights who deliberately make their plays unreadable by flinging repulsive stage technicalities in the face of the public, and omitting from their descriptions even that simplest common decency of literature, the definite article? I wonder how many readers Charles Dickens would have had, or deserved to have, if he had written in this manner:
(Sykes lights pipe—calls dog—loads pistol with newspaper, takes bludgeon from R. above fireplace and strikes Nancy.) Nancy: Oh, Lord, Bill! (Dies. Sykes wipes brow—shudders—takes hat from chair O. P.—sees ghost, not visible to audience—and exit L. U. E.)”