Shaw's Present Home in London,
10, Adelphi Terrace, W.C.

Alvin Langdon Coburn.

In the case of Shaw, I often receive the impression that inspiration is replaced by excogitation, imagination by what Rossetti called fundamental brain-work. Lessing's phrase, “dramatic algebra,” is not a wholly inappropriate term for his plays. A partial explanation of this phenomenon may perhaps be found in the speech I heard him deliver at the Vedrenne-Barker dinner. “One hears a lot of talk these days about the New School of Shavian playwrights—Granville Barker, St. John Hankin, and the rest. I sincerely hope they will not try to imitate my style and method. There is only one Bernard Shaw, and that one is quite sufficient. I find a striking analogy between the case of the old Italian masters and myself. When they began to work, they found that the human form had been neglected and ignored. Forthwith they began to paint works which appeared to be anatomical studies, so emphasized was the figure. I found myself in much the same situation when I first began to write for the stage. I found that the one thing which had been neglected and ignored by British dramatists was human nature. So I began to put human nature barely and nakedly upon the stage, which so startled the public that they declared that my characters were utterly unnatural and untrue to life. But I have gone on and on exposing human nature, more and more in each succeeding play. If my imitators continue to reveal human nature so ruthlessly, I am afraid I shall have done more harm than good.”[226] The greatest artist, according to Shaw's own definition, is “he who goes a step beyond the demand, and, by supplying works of a higher beauty and a higher interest than have yet been perceived, succeeds, after a brief struggle with its strangeness, in adding this fresh extension of sense to the heritage of the race.” It is a mark of Shaw's high purpose, of the sociologic significance of the man, that he employs art merely as one of a number of means by which he can put his ideas into effect. Doubtless because of his belief that philosophic content is the touchstone of real greatness in art—that Bunyan is greater than Shakespeare, Blake than Lamb, Ibsen than Swinburne, Shaw than Pinero—his plays have something of the rigidity of theses. Shaw's plays not infrequently suffer from the malady of the à priori. Sometimes they are even stricken down with what Wagner called the incurable disease of thought.

Shakespeare created a drama of human nature in which the actions of the characters are their own commentary. Maeterlinck created a drama of shadow in which the characters are most articulate in their silence. Shaw has created a drama of discussion in which his characters have not the strength to hold their tongues. Shakespeare's characters are self-unconscious characters; Maeterlinck's, subconscious; Shaw's, self-conscious. Mr. Holbrook Jackson remarks that “Shaw's drama is the only consistently religious drama of the day—it is as relentless in its pursuit of an exalted idea as were the ancient Moralities and Mysteries.” But Mr. Jackson fails to draw the conclusion that, for this reason, Shaw's characters often take on the guise of intellectual abstractions. The Frenchman calls them hommes-idées; the German, Gedankenpuppen. Shaw's plays are pitched on a plane of transcendental realism. His supreme gift as a dramatist, someone has wisely said, is to produce an impression of life more real than reality itself. His power of penetrative insight at times appears to be something almost like divination. The soul of his wit is laconic brevity and marvellous astuteness in character exposure. His dialogue is the most entertaining, the most diverting, that has been written since the days of Sheridan. He has succeeded in interpreting life with so precise and so illuminating a medium that he frequently transcends the bounds of plausibility, probability, or even possibility, without the lapse being noted. Many, perhaps the majority, of his leading characters, operate upon a plane of fantasy; the psychological impossibility of their actions is concealed by the intellectual credibility of their ideas. They appear as the mouthpieces of his theories, as replicas of his personality, or as changing aspects of his own temperament. Or else, in the later plays, they appear as embodied forces of Nature, as allegorical personifications of modern Moralities. Shaw is constitutionally opposed to “holding the kodak up to Nature”; he believes in making the chaos of Nature intelligible by intelligent choice of material. His métier, then, is interpretation, not observation. As a consequence, he gives us life interpreted in strict accordance with Shavian sophistication. In large part, he depicts human beings not as they really are, but as they might be supposed to be if animated by the Shavian philosophy modified to suit the needs of their individual temperaments.

Quite a number of Shaw's leading characters, and the majority of the subsidiary characters, are marvellously natural studies in contemporary psychology. Unhampered by the impedimenta of Shavianism, they move freely and naturally along the beaten paths of humanity. Now and then, we are whisked away to the realm of fantasy; or else we have only to shut our eyes and open our ears to hear Shaw's ironical laughter echo through their speeches. But, on the whole, we are not deceived in believing that Bernard Shaw's plays are all stages in his search for the essential reality of things. Along the pathway, he has left many vivid, many brilliant, many comprehensible, some complex, and all essentially modern figures. Sartorius, kind-hearted and inhumane; the unwomanly “womanly woman,” Julia; Mrs. Warren, reptilianly fascinating and repulsive, her mother-love slain by the relentless sword of her profession; Crofts, upholding a hideously immoral standard of honour before our sickened gaze; Bluntschli, genial, droll expositor of the prose and common sense of life; Marchbanks, anæmic, asthenic—a visionary penetrating to the truth beneath all disguises and learning the lesson of life in the black hour of disillusionment; Morell, the stupid, good-natured, self-centred parson; Candida, the maternal clairvoyante; Dudgeon, the fascinating dare-devil, resolute in fulfilment of the law of his own nature; Judith, the sentimental and larmoyante; Lady Cicely, ingenuous, tactful, feline, irresistible; Cleopatra, subtly evolving from a kittenish minx into a tigerish and vengeful tyrant; the boyish, energetic, humane Cæsar, large in humour and in comic perception; Broadbent, the typical, stolid Englishman, blunderingly successful because he doesn't know where he is going; Keegan, the gentle and the bitter, vox clamantis in deserto, interpreting a new trinity for the worship of the coming age; Sir Patrick Cullen, quintessence of gruff and kindly common sense; the immortal William, deferential and urbane; and how many more!—a group of finely imagined, subtly conceived, essentially real, if not always credibly human, beings.

Shaw is a marvellous portrait painter, a Sargent in his insight into human nature and into contemporary life. He is a wit of the very first rank, a satirist to be classed with Voltaire, Renan and Anatole France. The static drama he has created enlarges our conception of the function of the drama. The new dramatic system of Shaw's creation, in the words of M. Filon, subordinates the development of the sentimental action to the painting of characters and the discussion of ideas. Like Molière, Shaw has stamped his characters in the idea, and made of them the necessary exponents of contemporary philosophy, the inevitable interpreters of contemporary life.

Capitally and fundamentally, Bernard Shaw's drama is socially deterministic. His characters are what they are, become what they become, far less on account of heredity or ancestral influence than on account of the social structure of the environment through which their fate is moulded. Economist as well as moralist, Shaw attributes paramount importance to the economic and political conditions of the régime in which his characters live and move and have their being. His drama has its true origin in the conflict between the wills of his characters and the social determinism perpetually at work to destroy the freedom of their wills. The germ idea of his philosophy is rooted in the effort to supplant modern social organization by Socialism through the intermediary of the free operation of the will of humanity.

FOOTNOTES:

[217] The Problem Play: A Symposium (V.), by G. Bernard Shaw, in the Humanitarian, May, 1895.