The play—for despite Shaw's prefaces, the play's the thing—is a truly admirable burlesque of rhetorical drama. Not Bashville, but Cashel only is admirable; it is Cashel's constancy that is rewarded. The piece is couched in a tone of the most delicious extravagance—a hit, a palpable hit, in every line. I cannot resist the temptation to quote from the scene in which Lydia, Lucian, and Bashville, fast locked against intrusion, debate the question of admitting Cashel, the presumably infuriated ruffian, who has just been successfully tripped up by Bashville as he is trying to enter the Carew mansion.
Lydia:We must not fail in courage with a fighter.
Unlock the door.
Lucian:Like all women, Lydia,
You have the courage of immunity.
To strike you were against his code of honour;
But me, above the belt, he may perform on
T' th' height of his profession. Also Bashville.
Bashville: Think not of me, sir. Let him do his worst.
Oh, if the valour of my heart could weigh
The fatal difference 'twixt his weight and mine,
A second battle should he do this day:
Nay, though outmatched I be, let but my mistress
Give me the word: instant I'll take him on
Here—now—at catchweight. Better bite the carpet
A man, than fly, a coward.
Lucian:Bravely said:
I will assist you with the poker.
And well worth remembering is the naïve autobiography, delivered at the request of the Zulu king, of that celestially denominated “bruiser” concerning whom Cashel once said: “Slave to the ring I rest until the face of Paradise be changed.”
Cetewayo: Ye sons of the white queen:
Tell me your names and deeds ere ye fall to.
Paradise:Your royal highness, you beholds a bloke
What gets his living honest by his fists.
I may not have the polish of some toffs
As I could mention on; but up to now
No man has took my number down. I scale
Close on twelve stun; my age is twenty-three;
And at Bill Richardson's “Blue Anchor” pub
Am to be heard of any day by such
As likes the job. I don't know, governor,
As ennythink remains for me to say.
Those who witnessed the original production of the play by the London Stage Society in 1903, and also the later production in 1909 at the “Afternoon Theatre” (His Majesty's), unhesitatingly gave it that “huge applause” of which Shaw speaks so frankly. “The best burlesque of rhetorical drama in the language,” is Mr. Archer's sweeping dictum. Even the most hardened of Philistines might find it easy to agree with his statement: “Fielding's 'Tom Thumb' and Carey's 'Chrononhotonthologos' are, it seems to me, not in the running.”
Not until the appearance of An Unsocial Socialist, fifth of the novels of his nonage, is the Pandora's box of Shavian theories opened. There now begin to troop forth those startling and anarchic views with which the name of Shaw is popularly associated. This modern “École des Maris” heralds the reign of the “literature of effrontery”; Shaw is beginning to take his stride. With all its extravagance and waywardness, An Unsocial Socialist has been declared by at least one critic of authority to be as brilliant as anything George Meredith ever wrote. Let us recall Stevenson's warning to Shaw: “Let him beware of his damned century; his gifts of insane chivalry and animated narration are just those that might be slain and thrown out like an untimely birth by the Daemon of the Epoch.” Gone are the chivalry and romance—the winds of Socialism have blown them all away. But the book fairly reeks of the “damned century,” with its mad irresponsibility, its exasperating levity, its religious and social revolt. Written in 1883, it seethes and bubbles with the scum of the Socialist brew just then beginning to ferment. Shaw's original design, he tells us, was to “produce a novel which should be a gigantic grapple with the whole social problem.... When I had finished two chapters of this enterprise—chapters of colossal length, but containing the merest preliminary matter—I broke down in sheer ignorance and incapacity.” Eventually the two prodigious chapters of Shaw's magnum opus were published as a complete novel, in two “books,” under the title An Unsocial Socialist. Shaw begins fiercely to sermonize humanity, to deride all customs and institutions which have not their roots sunk in individualism and in social justice. The Seven Deadly Sins are: respectability, conventional virtue, filial affection, modesty, sentiment, devotion to woman, romance. Sidney Trefusis is the philosopher of the New Order, revolted by the rottenness of present civilization and resolved, by any means, to set in motion some schemes for its reformation. Discovering too late that marriage to him, as to Tanner, means “apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of his soul, violation of his manhood, sale of his birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat,” Trefusis deliberately deserts his wife, not because, as with Falk and Svanhild in Ibsen's Love's Comedy, love seems too exquisite, too ethereal to be put to the illusion-shattering test of marriage, but because marriage involves the triumph of senses over sense, of passion over reason. Even after he has ceased to love Henrietta, her love for him continues to set in motion the mechanism of passion, and he is revolted by the fact that she is satisfied so long as “the wheels go round.”