The supreme difficulty in any criticism of Bernard Shaw as dramatist is to draw the many fine distinctions between his critical expositions of his dramatic system and the actual qualities of the dramas themselves. It is primarily incumbent upon the interpreter of Shaw to indicate with sufficient clearness the discrepancy between theory and practice, between purpose and performance. No objection need be raised to Shaw's definitions. “Drama is no mere setting up of the camera to Nature,” he says: “it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man's will and his environment: in a word, of problem.” But what is one to make of Sir Charles Wyndham's assertion that Shaw's dramatic works are wonderful intellectual studies, but not plays? The dramas are undoubtedly manufactured after the usual pattern, with divisions called acts; figures like people walk back and forth and engage each other in conversation; the mechanical illusion is complete. What is it, then, that gives an air of unreality to all this mimic show?
Bernard Shaw possesses in rich measure the genius of the stage-director, the pliability and suppleness of the critic of modern civilization. The effects he produces, quite often, are tremendous. But capitally and congenitally, Shaw is lacking in that quality ordinarily recognized as natural dramatic genius. In his plays we look almost in vain for those crucial emotional conjunctures, those climacteric soul-crises, which dramatic critics announce to be the criteria of authentic drama—the scène à faire of a Sarcey. Just as Oscar Wilde may be said to have invented the comedy of conversation, so Bernard Shaw may be said to have invented the drama of discussion. The tendency to prolixity and discursiveness has steadily grown upon him; at last he has thrown off all disguise and deliberately set to work to create a dramatic system based on dialectic. Two noteworthy features of his career are his attacks upon conventional cant and Shakespearean rhetoric. And all the time, he has been creating, for his own part, both a Shavian cant and a Shavian rhetoric. “I find that the surest way to startle the world with daring innovations and originalities,” he recently said, “is to do exactly what playwrights have been doing for thousands of years; to revive the ancient attraction of long rhetorical speeches; to stick closely to the methods of Molière; and to lift characters bodily out of the pages of Charles Dickens.” The defining characteristic of his plays is their argumentative and controversial character. They are expository lectures, in dramatic form, on the Shavian philosophy. Mr. Archer once said that Shaw's keen and subtle intellect has built for itself a world of its own, in which it sits apart, inaccessible; this world is not the real earth, but
“Composed just as he is inclined to conjecture her,
Namely, one part pure earth, ninety-nine parts pure lecturer.”
Instead of the indispensable conflict of wills, we often seem to have merely a war of wits, in which the cleverest dialectician wins. Aristophanes and Shaw have certainly one point in common: the plays of both are dramatized debates. Instead of touching each other's emotions, Shaw's characters often seem merely to arouse each other's combative interest. Just as Victor Hugo gives a passion apiece to each of his characters and lets them fight it out, so Shaw gives a philosophy apiece to each of his characters and lets them argue it out. His comedies exhibit with tremendous comic irony the exposure of non-Shavians by Shavians. One day Huxley in jest described Herbert Spencer's idea of a tragedy as “a deduction killed by a fact.” In a moderate, a partial, sense, this might serve as a just criticism of the theatre of Bernard Shaw.
There is a certain fanciful sort of resemblance between a play of Shaw's and a meeting of his own Borough Council: the meeting is called to order, there is argument and discussion pro and con, a resolution is moved, seconded, carried. Shaw is positively judicial in his fairness, even to the extent of creating the impression that his characters are vocalized points of view. With consummate shrewdness, Shaw has fully realized that if the dramatist take sides in a dramatic wrangle, he is lost. A sense of the most absolute fairness and impartiality pervades and dominates his plays. Every character has his say without let or hindrance; and the whole play is signalized by the “honesty of its dialectic.” Shaw does not disclaim the fullest responsibility for the opinions of all his characters, pleasant and unpleasant. “They are all right from their several points of view; and their points of view are, for the dramatic moment, mine also. This may puzzle the people who believe that there is such a thing as an absolutely right point of view, usually their own. It may seem to them that nobody who doubts this can be in a state of grace. However that may be, it is certainly true that nobody who argues with them can possibly be a dramatist, or, indeed, anything else that turns upon a knowledge of mankind. Hence it has been pointed out that Shakespeare had no conscience. Neither have I, in that sense.”[224]
This quality of anxious self-explanation in his characters, this “Let me make clear to you my philosophy of life,” produces upon the reader and spectator two distinct impressions: first an “overwhelming impression of coldness and inhuman rationalism”; and, second, the impression that the characters are replicas or mouthpieces of Shaw himself. The resemblance is still further enhanced through the instrumentality of one of Shaw's most diverting traits as a humorist: his idiosyncrasy for self-mockery and self-puffery. There is nothing, not even himself, about which Shaw will not jest; for, to use an Oscarism, he respects life too deeply to discuss it seriously. He is a master of that art of burlesque which, in Brunetière's harsh characterization, consists “in the expansion of the ego in the joyous satisfaction of its own vulgarity.” One of the truest words, spoken in jest, is Shaw's confession that the main obstacle to the performance of his plays has been—himself!
In contradistinction to the classic formula—that the drama should be the most impersonal of the arts—Shaw's drama may be defined as a revelation of the personality of Bernard Shaw. “We must agree with him,” concludes M. Filon, “and accept—or reject—the dramatic work of Mr. Shaw as it is, namely, as the expression of the ideas, sentiments and fantasies of Mr. Shaw.”[225]
In fine, I should say that Bernard Shaw is a striking instance of the unusual combination of critical and creative faculties. Sometimes the dramatist, he is always the critic. While Shaw can make one laugh, it is seldom that he can make one weep. He unites within himself the power both to construct and to dissect. With Shaw—the Richter und Dichter of German characterization—rationality precedes creation. His richly constructive fancy seldom imagines what his cooler reason has not already perceived. In his plays, there is scarcely a hint of what he himself somewhere described as “the stirring of the blood, the bristling of the fibres, the transcendent, fearless fury which makes romance so delightful.” Shaw is always perfectly aware of himself; Coventry Patmore would have denied him the title of true genius. As someone has cleverly said: “Shaw's eye has never yet in a fine frenzy rolled.” If he had ever listened to the horns of elfland faintly blowing, he would doubtless have said afterwards that Kosleck of Berlin could have done it better. If he had ever heard the morning stars sing together and the sons of God shout for joy, the experience would probably have elicited the coolly critical remark that the ensemble effect was not as good as at Bayreuth, and that the shouting was not as ear-splitting as the “wilful bawling” of the De Reszkes.
This coolly critical attitude, which Shaw manages to transfer to his characters, gives them the appearance of beings peculiarly rationalistic and bloodless. In their veins, as Mr. Archer once said of the leading characters in Widowers' Houses, there seems to flow a sort of sour whey. Shaw has almost succeeded in eliminating the Red Corpuscle from Art.
His characters seem to be devoid of animal passions; their pallid ratiocinations can more aptly be described as vegetable passions.