Through the powerful social thrust of modern art there has forged to the front a new and disquieting force. As an isolated phenomenon, this has occasionally made its appearance in the past; but as a distinct genus it may justly be regarded as a creation of the new social order. To scoff at, rather than to study, to dismiss cavalierly rather than to examine conscientiously, this new force, were as short-sighted and senseless as to deny its existence. We are in duty bound to consider and to weigh, carefully and critically, the claims of this “dramatist of the future” as opposed to the classic virtues of the dramatist working frankly in the manner of tradition. The dramatist who conforms to popular and critical standards is an artist facile in revealing either character in action or action in character, invariable in interpreting life from the side of the emotions, and resolute in imaging drama as a true conflict of wills—in a word, the artist gifted with what the French so aptly term la doigté du dramaturge. He recognizes the drama as the most impersonal of the arts, and sedulously devotes himself to the realization of Victor Hugo's dictum that dramatic art consists in being somebody else. On the other hand, the new type of dramatist—the dramatist of the future, if you will—is no less an artist than the other; his primal distinction is his demand for that large independence of rules and systems which Turgenev posited as the indispensable requisite of great art. Just as Zola enlarged the conception of the function of the novel, sublimating it into a powerful and far-reaching instrument for social and moral propagandism, so this new dramaturgic iconoclast demands the stage as an instrumentality for the exposition, diffusion, and wide dissemination of his views and theories—upon standards of morality, rules of conduct, codes of ethics, and philosophies of life. With him there is no question of importing the methods of the Blue Book into the drama; nor would he, in any broad sense, idly shirk what Walter Pater terms the responsibility of the artist to his material. He accepts the natural limitations, not the mechanical restrictions, of his art; he does not seek to appropriate the privileges, while refusing to shoulder the responsibilities, of his medium. His distinction arises from the discovery of the hackneyed, but ever alarming and heretical truth, that life is greater than art. For art's sake alone he refuses to exist, with strange perversity insisting that he lives not for the sake of art, but for the sake of humanity.
In reply to the question: “Should social problems be freely dealt with in the drama?” Shaw characteristically said: “Suppose I say yes, then, vaccination being a social question, and the Wagnerian music drama being the one complete form of drama in the opinion of its admirers, it will follow that I am in favour of the production of a Jennerian tetralogy at Bayreuth. If I say no, then, marriage being a social question, and also the theme of Ibsen's A Doll's House, I shall be held to condemn that work as a violation of the canons of art.” As a matter of fact, Shaw believes that every social question furnishes material for drama—the conflict of human feeling with circumstances—since institutions are themselves circumstances. On the other hand, every drama by no means involves a social question, since human feeling may be in conflict with circumstances which are not institutions. The limitation of drama with a social question for motive is that, ordinarily, it cannot outlive the solution of that question. It is true that some of the best and most popular plays are dramatized sermons, pamphlets, satires, or Blue Books: Gilbert's Trial by Jury, a satire on breach of promise; Sheridan's School for Scandal, a dramatic sermon; Reade's Never Too Late to Mend, a dramatic pamphlet; and so on. The greatest dramatists, however, abjure political and social themes, rooting their dramas in the firm soil of human nature and elemental feeling. The reason for this is that, as a rule, social questions are too temporal, too transient to move the great poet to the mightiest efforts of his imagination. Shaw maintains that the general preference of dramatists for subjects in which the conflict is between man and his apparently inevitable and eternal, rather than his political and temporal, circumstances, is due in the vast majority of cases to the dramatist's political ignorance, and in a few—Goethe and Wagner, for example—to the comprehensiveness of their philosophy.
The era of the drama of pure feeling, in Shaw's opinion, is now past. Every great social question, owing to the huge size of modern populations and the development of the Press, takes on the character of a world-problem. Les Misérables is the pure product of our epoch; Zola is the colossal champion of social justice and social reform, Ibsen the arch-enemy of social, as well as moral, abuse. William Morris left house decoration for propagandism; Ruskin resigned Modern Painters for modern pamphleteering; Carlyle began by studying German culture and ended with railing against English social crime. The poets are following Shelley as political and social agitators, the drama is becoming an arena for discussion, because the machinery of government is becoming so criminally tardy in its settlement of the perpetually increasing number of social questions: the poet must put his shoulder to the wheel. “The hugeness and complexity of modern civilizations and the development of our consciousness of them by means of the Press,” Mr. Shaw maintains, “have the double effect of discrediting comprehensive philosophies by revealing more facts than the ablest man can generalize, and at the same time intensifying the urgency of social reforms sufficiently to set even the poetic faculty in action on their behalf. The resultant tendency to drive social questions on to the stage, and into fiction and poetry, will eventually be counteracted by improvements in social organization which will enable all prosaic social questions to be dealt with satisfactorily long before they become grave enough to absorb the energies which claim the devotion of the dramatist, the story-teller, and the poet.”[217]
Shaw has placed on record his belief that subjects such as age, love, death, accident, personality, abnormal greatness of character, abnormal baseness of character give drama a permanent and universal interest independent of period and place, and will keep a language alive long after it has passed out of common use. It is not the drama of profound and elemental human feeling against which Shaw rails, but the drama designed solely for the obsession of the senses. His most vehement attack is directed against plays pleasurably appealing to animal passions and sensual appetites. To Bernard Shaw, as Benjamin de Casseres has indelicately expressed it, romantic love is lust dressed in Sunday clothes. The voluptuous appeal of the romantic drama is utterly abhorrent to him. The flaccid sentimentalities, the diluted sensualities of the modern plays which he dubs aphrodisiacs, totally fail to impose on him. Sitting at such plays, he says, we do not believe: we make believe. His own plays, he has spared no pains to tell us, are built “to induce, not voluptuous reverie, but intellectual interest, not romantic rhapsody but humane concern.... The drama of pure feeling is no longer in the hands of the playwright; it has been conquered by the musician, after whose enchantments all the verbal arts seem cold and tame.... The attempt to produce a genus of opera without music—and this absurdity is what our fashionable theatres have been driving at for a long time past without knowing it—is far less hopeful than my own determination to accept problem as the normal material of the drama.”[218]
Cervantes abolished chivalry; let us have done with it, is Shaw's insistent clamour. Romance died with Schopenhauer; let sentiment expire with Shaw. “The thing that Mr. Shaw calls romance,” says Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, “is simply the fullness of life, the boiling over of the pot of existence. Things are so good in general that men have, in order to keep pace with the great cataract of beneficence, to call them good in particular. This great and ancient tide of exultation, which makes the tree green, the sunset splendid, the woman beautiful, the flag a thing to be saved at any cost, is, of course, a fact as square and solid as a beefsteak or St. Paul's Cathedral.... But Mr. Bernard Shaw has, for all practical purposes, denied the existence of this elemental tendency, and it is not, therefore, strange that he finds the world a moon-struck and half-witted place.”[219] In his plays, indeed, Shaw does not sound these deep and eternal notes of the human symphony. He has fallen into the curious error of confounding contempt for romance with denial of its existence. It is all very well to deplore the eternal idealization of the sexual instinct; it is a totally different matter to represent life as devoid of the ecstasies and raptures of lovers, the pangs of despised love, the tyranny of romantic passion.
Temperamentally and philosophically, Shaw is the very antithesis of the romantic. He has consistently sought to reveal and exalt the creative forces in life and art; to awaken the individual to alerter consciousness and to sharpen his preference for actuality over illusion, for reality over appearance. To that romance which seeks to mask the facts of life with the roseate mists of sentiment, the golden halo of illusion, Shaw has proved an inveterate foe. Upon Nordau in his philistine and romantic struggle to uphold a hypothetical standard of normality and to pollute those clear streams of creative energy in art to which we owe the masterpieces of our epoch—upon Nordau Shaw retorted with such splendid force and energy that no one who realizes the issues involved can withhold his gratitude for that triumphant service to the creative spirit of art and of humanity.
One of Bernard Shaw's fundamental claims to attention consists in his effort toward the destruction, not only of romance, but of all the false ideals and illusions which obsess the soul of man. He has assumed the function of tearing the mask of idealism from the face of fact. And yet it is a mark of his catholicity of view, that in his attack upon illusions he is neither so blind nor so narrow as not to realize their far-reaching and oftentimes beneficent effect. Thus he says:
George Bernard Shaw.
From a photo by Histed & Co.
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