“After all, we must recall this truth: the primordial function of the artist—whatever his means of artistic expression—is to be a purveyor of pleasure, and the man who can give us a refined intellectual pleasure, or a pleasure of moral nature or of social sympathy, or else a pleasure which arises from being given an unexpected or wider outlook upon life—this man imparts to us a series of delicate and moving sensations which the spectacle simply of technical address, of theatrical talent, can never inspire. And this man is no other than Bernard Shaw.”[127]
In conversation with me, Shaw vehemently repudiated the notion that he was anything so petty as a mere purveyor of pleasure. “The theatre cannot give pleasure,” he went so far as to say. “It defeats its very purpose if it does not take you outside of yourself. It may sometimes—and, indeed, often does—give one sensations which are far from pleasant, which may even be, in the last degree, horrifying and terrible. The function of the theatre is to stir people, to make them think, to make them suffer.
“Why, I have seen people stagger out of the Court Theatre after seeing one of my plays,” he said, laughing, “unspeakably indignant with me because I had made them think, had stirred them to opposition, and had made them heartily ashamed of themselves.”
In regard to comedy, the field in which he peculiarly excels, Shaw is equally positive in the statement that unless comedy touches as well as amuses him, he is defrauded of his just due. “When a comedy of mine is performed, it is nothing to me that the spectators laugh—any fool can make an audience laugh. I want to see how many of them, laughing or grave, have tears in their eyes.” More than once he has insisted that people's ideas, however useful they may be for embroidery, especially in passages of comedy, are not the true stuff of drama, which is always “the naïve feeling underlying the ideas.” When Mr. Meredith said, in his Essay on Comedy, “The English public have the basis of the comic in them: an esteem for common sense,” the remark aroused Mr. Shaw's most vigorous opposition. The intellectual virtuosity of the Frenchman, the Irishman, the American, the ancient Greek, leading to a love of intellectual mastery of things, Shaw acutely observes, “produces a positive enjoyment of disillusion (the most dreaded and hated of calamities in England), and consequently a love of comedy (the fine art of disillusion) deep enough to make huge sacrifices of dearly idealized institutions to it. Thus, in France, Molière was allowed to destroy the Marquises. In England he could not have shaken even such titles as the accidental sheriff's knighthood of the late Sir Augustus Harris.” Shaw had realized to his own misfortune that the Englishman's so-called “common sense” always involves a self-satisfied unconsciousness of its own moral and intellectual bluntness, whereas the function of comedy—in particular the comedies written by Shaw himself—is “to dispel such unconsciousness by turning the searchlight of the keenest moral and intellectual analysis right on it.” The following paragraph embodies Shaw's rather limited conception of comedy:
“The function of comedy is nothing less than the destruction of old-established morals. Unfortunately, to-day such iconoclasm can be tolerated by our play-going citizens only as a counsel of despair and pessimism. They can find a dreadful joy in it when it is done seriously, or even grimly and terribly as they understand Ibsen to be doing it; but that it should be done with levity, with silvery laughter like the crackling of thorns under a pot, is too scandalously wicked, too cynical, too heartlessly shocking to be borne. Consequently, our plays must either be exploitations of old-established morals or tragic challengings of the order of Nature. Reductions to absurdity, however logical; banterings, however kind; irony, however delicate; merriment, however silvery, are out of the question in matters of morality, except among men with a natural appetite for comedy which must be satisfied at all costs and hazards: that is to say, not among the English play-going public, which positively dislikes comedy.”[128]
It is perfectly apparent that it was Shaw's distinction—a notorious distinction—to be the leading and almost unique representative of a school which was in violent reaction against that of Pinero, generally regarded as the premier British dramatist. Moreover, he lacked the sympathy of his colleagues in dramatic criticism—Clement Scott, the impassioned champion of British sentimentality and ready-made morals, William Archer, the austere patron of young England in the drama, and Walkley, the Gallic impressionist and dilettante. Shaw endured the virulent attacks of Clement Scott with equanimity, if not with positive enjoyment. By his friend Walkley he was taunted, under the classic name of Euthrypho, with being an impossibilist: “Euthrypho hardly falls into Mr. Grant Allen's category of 'serious intellects,' for none has ever known him to be serious, but about his intellect there is, as the Grand Inquisitor says:
“'No probable possible shadow of doubt,
No possible doubt whatever.'
“A universal genius, a brilliant political economist, a Fabian of the straitest sect of the Fabians, a critic (of other arts than the dramatic) comme il y en a peu, he persists, where the stage is concerned, in crying for the moon, and will not be satisfied, as the rest of us have learned to be, with the only attainable substitute, a good wholesome cheese. His standard is as much too high as Crito's (another critic) is too low. He asks from the theatre more than the theatre can give, and quarrels with the theatre because it is theatrical. He lumps La Tosca and A Man's Shadow together as 'French machine-made plays,' and, because he is not edified by them, refuses to be merely amused. Because The Dead Heart is not on the level of a Greek tragedy, he is blind to its merits as a pantomime. He refuses to recognize the advance made by Mr. Pinero because Mr. Pinero has not yet advanced as far as Henrik Ibsen. Half a loaf, the wise agree, is better than no bread; but because it is only half a loaf, Euthrypho complains that they have given him a stone.”[129] Worse than all, Mr. Archer vigorously charged him with the most aggressive hostility towards the contemporary movement in British drama. In one of his Study and Stage articles, entitled Mr. Shaw and Mr. Pinero, and published August 22d, 1903, Mr. Archer thus condemns Shaw as a dramatic critic: “Just at the time when the English drama began clearly to emerge from the puerility into which it had sunk between the 'fifties and the 'eighties, Mr. Shaw was engaged, week by week, in producing dramatic criticisms. Writing for a six-penny paper, he had but a limited audience; and, therefore, even his wit, energy and unique literary power (I use the epithet deliberately) could do little to influence the course of events. But all that he could do he did, to discredit, crush and stamp out the new movement. Had he been a power at all he would have been a power for evil. There were moments during that period when I sympathized, as never before or since, with the Terrorists of exactly a century ago. I felt that when a new and struggling order of things is persistently assailed with inveterate and inhuman hostility, it is no wonder if it defends itself with equal relentlessness. If a guillotine had been functioning in Trafalgar Square—but do not let us dwell on the horrid fantasy. Those days are over. 'We have marched prospering, not through his presence.' There is still a long fight to be fought before the English theatre becomes anything like the great social institution it ought to be; but even if the movement were now to stop dead (and of that there is not the slightest fear), nothing can alter the fact that the past ten years have given us a new and by no means despicable dramatic literature.”
These severe characterizations by the two leading English dramatic critics deserve more than casual notice. Shaw represented l'école du plein air; his unpardonable crime consisted in daringly throwing open the windows to let in a fresh and vivifying current of ideas. With Shaw, to dramatize was to philosophize; moreover, he sought to discredit the tradition that the drama is never the forerunner, but always the laggard, in interpretation of the Zeitgeist. Far from being the instigator of the crimes and the partner of the guilty joys of the drama, he regarded himself as the policeman of dramatic art; and avowed it his express business to denounce its delinquencies. Firm in the faith that the radicalism of yesterday is the conservatism of to-morrow, he boldly declared: “It is an instinct with me personally to attack every idea which has been full grown for ten years, especially if it claims to be the foundation of all human society. I am prepared to back human society against any idea, positive or negative, that can be brought into the field against it. In this—except as to my definite intellectual consciousness of it—I am, I believe, a much more typical and popular person in England than the conventional man; and I believe that when we begin to produce a genuine national drama, this apparently anarchic force, the mother of higher law and humaner order, will underlie it, and that the public will lose all patience with the conventional collapses which serve for the last acts to the serious dramas of to-day.” He found the contemporary English drama lamentably “dating” in ethics and philosophy; their daily observation kept the English dramatists up-to-date in personal descriptions, but there was “nothing to force them to revise the morality they inherited from their grandmothers.” But Shaw's high and uncompromising ideal for British drama was no justification for Mr. Archer's charge that Shaw as a dramatic critic was only a paralyzing and sterilizing force. “There is more talent now than ever,” wrote Shaw in December, 1895, to take a single example, “more skill now than ever, more artistic culture, better taste, better acting, better theatres, better dramatic literature. Mr. Tree, Mr. Alexander, Mr. Hare have made honourable experiments, Mr. Forbes Robertson's enterprise at the Lyceum is not a sordid one; Mr. Henry Arthur Jones and Mr. Pinero are doing better work than ever before, and doing it without any craven concession to the follies of the British public.”
We may, perhaps, best arrive at a notion of Shaw's relation to the British stage by discovering his attitude towards his colleagues in the drama—say Pinero, Jones, Wilde, Grundy, Stevenson and Henley. Pinero he resolutely refused, in the face of popular clamour, to laud as the “English Ibsen.” He regarded Pinero as an adroit describer of people as the ordinary man sees and judges them, but not as a genuine interpreter of character. “Add to this a clear head, a love of the stage, and a fair talent for fiction, all highly cultivated by hard and honourable work as a writer of effective stage plays for the modern commercial theatre; and you have him on his real level.” The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, hailed as the greatest tragedy of the modern English school, Shaw regarded as not only a stage play in the most technical sense, but even a noticeably old-fashioned one in its sentiment and stage-mechanism; he objected to it on another ground—and quite unreasonably, I think—because it exhibited, not the sexual relations between the principals, but the social reactions set up by this amazing marriage. Shaw was utterly revolted by Pinero's coarseness and unspeakable ignorance in the portrayal of the feminine social agitation in The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith; the noble work of such women as Annie Besant, who had worked at Shaw's side for many years, gave the direct lie to Pinero's characterization. “I once pointed out a method of treatment which might have made The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith bearable,” Mr. Shaw recently remarked to me. “Now I am of the opinion that nothing could have made it a good play.” Shaw had a vast contempt for Pinero as a moralist and a social philosopher. “Archer objected to me as a critic,” he once remarked to me, “because I didn't like The Profligate and The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.” But Shaw sincerely admired the Pinero of The Benefit of the Doubt and The Hobby Horse, notable as they were for high dramatic pressure or true comedy, close-knit action or genuine literary workmanship, humour, fresh observation, naturalness, and free development of character. Shaw technically defined a “character actor” as a “clever stage performer who cannot act, and therefore makes an elaborate study of the disguises and stage tricks by which acting can be grossly simulated.” And he pronounced Pinero's performance as a thinker and social philosopher to be “simply character acting in the domain of authorship, which can impose only on those who are taken in by character acting on the stage.”