“Yes, you are quite right about The Devil's Disciple,” replied Mr. Shaw. “You have stated precisely the significance of that first act. Unquestionably, the drama is the art of preparation and this method is as legitimate a means of preparation as many others, and certainly much more effective. There is no reason in the world why the drama should be debarred as a medium for the painting of genre pictures.”
“As for the first act of The Doctor's Dilemma,” he continued, “it is true, as you say, that the story really doesn't begin until nearly the end of the long first act. But you must remember that the hero of my play is no one single character, but modern medical science. You see, I have been absolutely modern in my treatment of medicine, and I have devoted this first act to a complete exposition of the present state of modern medicine.”
“The real truth of the matter,” he went on to explain, greatly interested in his subject, “is that in my first acts I have often put many things I can't afford to waste my time with later on. When an audience first enters a theatre, it comes absolutely fresh and is prepared to stand a great deal from the dramatic author—a great deal which is not, strictly speaking, germane to the carrying-on of the plot of the 'story'—provided it is cast in a sufficiently entertaining and diverting form. The average audience is so accustomed to the conventional, wearisome piling up of one detail upon another—mere mechanical exposition until the middle of the second act—that my method, by which I furnish forth a complete social and psychological milieu in as entertaining a fashion as I can, is quite a relief.”
One may say in general that, not without reason does Shaw claim to have cast his plays always in the ordinary practical comedy form in use at all the theatres. There are, however, two marked features in which his dramas, as tone pictures and as realistic transcripts of life, are strikingly unique and distinctive. In the first place, Shaw runs counter to the conventional standpoint of the emotion-racked critic by refusing to preserve the medium in which plays are customarily cast. Most of his plays deserve a twin appellation: tragi-comedy, farce-comedy, burlesque-extravaganza, and the like. In some of them the key is transposed so frequently as to defy brief classification. Shaw is intent upon opening our eyes to points of view, not accidentally variant, but purposely divergent from the conventional form. He scorns the attitude of the romance-riddled melodramatist, and is utterly impatient of the Fitch mood or the Belasco sentimentalism. If you have tears, Mr. Fitch seems to say, prepare to shed them now. Holding the blunderbuss of sentimentality and emotionalism to our heads, Mr. Belasco bids us stand and deliver. In Shaw's hands, the play is now comedy, now tragedy, now audacious satire—everything by turns and nothing long. Once catch the distinction between the vital spirit of Shaw and the demoralizing rant of the sentimentalists, and you have gained an insight into Shaw's philosophy of will that clarifies and illumines the motive and purpose of those creations of his that are customarily classed as eccentrics, perverts, madmen, bounders, or cads.[215]
We must, however, take account not only of the virtues, but also of the defects of Shaw's qualities. His ability to play the rôles of the acrobat, the trapeze-performer, the clown, even the stern ringmaster, has occasionally seduced him from the strait and narrow path of true drama. The statement that Shaw's serious plays are exceedingly good pastiches of Ibsen is perhaps an exaggeration of Mr. Max Beerbohm in his rôle of licensed jester. In reality there is no doubt that the strict compression demanded by the Ibsenic form gave Shaw no legitimate opportunity for the free play of his irresponsible humour. His appearance as jester was often a manifest intrusion. Mrs. Warren's Profession just missed being a masterpiece because Shaw was incapable of artistic self-sacrifice. The occasional lapse from tragic seriousness to a tone of almost revolting levity robbed the play of its dignity as a tragedy. Mr. Archer was severely shocked by Mrs. Warren's Profession when he saw it on the stage; in the study he had called it “a masterpiece—yes, with all reservations, a masterpiece.” Mr. Grein, who wished to produce the play in the Independent Theatre series, sternly renounced Shaw after seeing it played by the Stage Society. It is clear, then, why such plays as Arms and the Man and You Never Can Tell are genuine successes, theatric as well as dramatic. They are least disturbed by rapid transitions, their large and loose comedic form giving considerable room for Shaw's kaleidoscopic changes. Shaw's farce-comedies are the natural and spontaneous expressions of Shaw's peculiar comedic talent, the sports of his own humorous imagination. Shaw's compositions are chameleons which are always most interesting and attractive when they take the changing colours of his own temperament.
In any classification according to form, Shaw's plays are very difficult to catalogue. We have seen in the first place that Shaw purposely runs counter to the conventional standpoint of the dramatic critic. In Widowers' Houses he jilts the ideal heroine; in The Philanderer he blasts the womanly woman; in Arms and the Man he knocks the romantic notion of war, and of the stage, so to speak, into a cocked hat. In You Never Can Tell he tilts against the Old Man and the New Woman; in The Devil's Disciple he reduces the melodramatic formula to absurdity; in John Bull's Other Island he explodes that outworn fiction, the stage Irishman; in Major Barbara he exposes the evils of charity; in The Doctor's Dilemma medical quackery is the target for his ridicule. All this he does in the most fantastic and variable forms—farce, melodrama, burlesque, extravaganza, comedy, allegory—any one, but usually a diverting combination and succession of these forms. In fact, he has almost succeeded in inventing a new form of drama. This second characteristic of Shaw's plays, as Professor Hale has remarked, is almost a note of Shaw's dramaturgy.[216] His plays are frequently fantastic criticisms of life, cast in the most photographically realistic form. In the guise of severely natural transcripts of life, many of his plays, at bottom, are critical judgments of humanity on a satiric plane of pure fantasy. If neo-realism is “merely the presentation of the ultimate facts of life in any way you like,” then Bernard Shaw is the high-priest of neo-realism. In him we discern the marvellous versatility of the modern critic, capable of making himself at home in any nationality and in any age. But whether he is giving us an Offenbachian Egypt, a comic-opera Bulgaria, a melodramatic America, or an imaginary Morocco, the result is the same: a portrayal of human nature, a criticism of life, penetrating, engaging, true. As Dr. Max Meyerfeld, the German champion of Wilde, has tersely put it, Bernard Shaw possesses the supreme faculty of the critic: “in fremden Seelengehäuse hineinzuschlupfen.”
Shaw spent nearly four years of his life continuously in saying to British dramatists, “That's not the way to do it.” He has spent a considerable part of his life in the last eighteen years in saying to the world, by concrete and constructive achievement, “This is the way to do it.” Bernard Shaw is to be reckoned as one of the most suggestive and certainly the most brilliant of all the critics of the modern British stage, understanding the word critic in its broadest sense. His prime distinction consists not only in the cleverness of his critical attacks upon the stage, past and present, but also in the notable effort he has made, by actually writing plays, to elevate its plane. Every phase of his activities as dramatic critic and dramatic author has been vital with the force of powerful originality. His feuilletons in the Saturday Review easily won him the title of the most brilliant of contemporary British journalistic critics. If he did not set a precedent, he almost rediscovered a lost art in writing those masterpieces of egotistical, combative, polemical, controversial criticism, the prefaces, appendices and epilogues to his plays. A genuine contribution to dramaturgy is his innovation of ample stage-directions so-called: penetrating character sketches of places as well as people, revelative hints to the actor, brief clarifying essays to elucidate each dramatic situation. His effort to make plays readable, to write literature instead of specifications, is worthy of emulation, and eventually his method, in certain modified forms, will doubtless be generally adopted. His practice of casting fantastic situations in rigidly realistic form strikes quite a novel note in dramaturgy despite Shaw's oft-repeated assertion that, after all, he is a very old-fashioned playwright.
FOOTNOTES:
[210] Almost all of Bernard Shaw's plays have been produced at the most distinguished and artistic theatres of German Europe. In gaining the German stage, he won a leading position in world-drama. Compare, for example, the statement of Herr Carl Hagemann in his recent book Aufgaben des Modernen Theaters: “Neben den anerkannten Vertretern der Bühne der Lebenden (Ibsen, Hauptmann, Schnitzler und andere—im Musikdrama: Wagner), müssen auch die Jüngeren und Jüngsten erschienen (alle die Wedekind, Hoffmannsthal, Vollmoeller, Eulenberg, Wilde, Shaw, Strindberg—im Musikdrama Strauss, Schillings, Humperdinck, Weingartner, Pfitzner, Blech, Siegfried Wagner).” Hermann Bahr recently said that a Shaw première is as great an event in Berlin as a Hauptmann première.
[211] The following characterization closely follows his own words in Mainly about Myself, preface to Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant, Vol. I.