[212] Cf. Shaw on Stage Directions, by William Archer, in the Daily News, December 28th, 1901.
[213] In Herr Siegfried Trebitsch's translations of Shaw's plays into German is found the explicit division into scenes.
[214] Ibsen, by G. Bernard Shaw, in the Clarion, June 1st, 1906. Also published in Die Neue Rundschau, December, 1906.
[215] “About the plays of Shaw,” writes Hermann Bahr, “we are never quite sure in what category they belong, whether they are farces, comedies, or plays: for they summon death and the devil, threaten the hero's life and happiness, and, in the midst of the greatest danger, indulge in such audacious wit that we are not always sure whether to shudder or to laugh. By degrees, however, it dawns upon us that this has happened to us once before, namely, in life itself, which so intermingles hope and despair, the previsions of destiny and the absurdities of chance, necessity and free will, law and whim, favour and spite, that it is peculiarly the experience of our time to question whether our existence be tragic, against which view our daily life warns us; or a senseless jest, to which our pride will never submit; or a pleasant, disturbed dream, which, again, is too weighty, too terrible a burden for our consciousness. This very uncertainty in the elements of our primitive feelings, Shaw expresses with a mad, malicious joy. Indeed, one might say, first and foremost, that Shaw is the poet of our uncertainty.” Rezensionen. Wiener Theater, 1901-3, by Hermann Bahr: article, Bernard Shaw.
[216] Dramatists of To-Day, by E. E. Hale, Jr.: article, Bernard Shaw.
THE DRAMATIST
“The function of comedy is nothing less than the destruction of old-established morals.”—Meredith on Comedy, by G. B. Shaw, in the Saturday Review, March 27th, 1897.
CHAPTER XIV
There can be no new drama, as Mr. Stuart-Glennie has pointed out, without a new philosophy. Drama can never be the same again since Ibsen has lived. The drama of the future, in Shaw's view, can never be anything more than the play of ideas.
Whether as yet accurately formulated in standard works of dramatic criticism or not, the fact remains that a clear and demarcative line of division runs across the drama of to-day. On one side of this line falls that vast majority of plays—serious drama, comedy, melodrama, farce—which accord more or less rigidly with the established canons and authoritative traditions of dramatic art. On the other side falls the persistently crescent minority of plays which break away from the old conventions and set up new precedents for formulation by the Freytag of the future. In the first class are found those works of art which are founded upon emotion, live solely in and for the dramatic moment, and treat of the universal themes of time and age, character and destiny, life and death. They receive their impulse from eternal and enduring, rather than from topical or transitory, aspects of human life; and draw their inspiration as much—if not more—from the literature of the past as from the human pageant of the present. In the second class are found those works which start into life through the quickening touch of the contemporary, which seek an interpretation of society through the illuminative, transmutative intermediaries of all that is newest, most vitally fecund, most prophetic in the science, sociology, art and religion of to-day; and which endeavour, through faithful portraiture of the present, to detect and reveal the traits and qualities of human nature in its permanent and immutable aspects. The authors of such works find their themes chiefly in the crucial instances of to-day, the conflict of humanity with current institutions, of human wills with existent circumstances, and they have for their end a humanitarian ideal: the exposure of civic abuse, the redress of social wrong, and the regeneration, redemption and reform of society—not less than artistic fidelity to fact, satiric unmasking of human folly, and veritistic embodiment of human passion. To the one class belong Shakespeare, Calderon, Schiller, Rostand; to the other, Charles Reade, Ibsen, Gorki, Brieux. It is a fundamental characteristic of Bernard Shaw that he belongs to the second class—in this respect he is sealed of the tribe of Rousseau, Dumas fils, Zola and Tolstoy.