Crofts: My code is a simple one, and, I think, a good one: Honour between man and man; fidelity between man and woman; and no cant about this or that religion, but an honest belief that things are making for good on the whole.
Vivie (with biting irony): “A power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness,” eh?
Crofts (taking her seriously): Oh, certainly, not ourselves, of course. You understand what I mean.
Dr. Brandes called Ibsen's Ghosts, if not the greatest achievement, at any rate the noblest action of the poet's career. Mrs. Warren's Profession is not only what Brunetière would call a work of combat: it is an act—an act of declared hostility against capitalistic society, the inertia of public opinion, the lethargy of the public conscience, and the criminality of a social order which begets such appalling social conditions. Into this play Shaw has poured all his Socialistic passion for a more just and humane social order.
As an arraignment of social conditions, the play is tremendous. As a work of art, it presents marked deficiencies. Shaw sought to dispose of one charge—that Vivie is merely Shaw in petticoats—in these words: “One of my female characters, who drinks whisky and smokes cigars and reads detective stories and regards the fine arts, especially music, as an insufferable and unintelligible waste of time, has been declared by my friend, Mr. William Archer, to be an exact and authentic portrait of myself, on no other grounds in the world except that she is a woman of business and not a creature of romantic impulse.” It is clear that this is not a satisfactory answer to Mr. Archer's charge; but even in more minor details, the play is open to criticism: the futility of Praed, save as a barefaced confidant; the cheap melodrama of Frank and the rifle; the series of coincidences culminating in the Rev. Mr. Gardner's miserably confused “Miss Vavasour, I believe!” at the end of the first act. More important still, as Mr. Archer once pointed out,[142] there is nothing of the inevitable in the meeting of Frank and Vivie, despite Shaw's assertion that “the children of any polyandrous group will, when they grow up, inevitably be confronted with the insoluble problem of their own possible consanguinity.” Had Vivie not happened to take lodgings at that particular farmhouse in Surrey, she would never have seen or heard of Frank, and the “inevitable” would never have happened. But this single lapse of logic, together with the other defects mentioned, are comparatively venial faults—which Shaw probably classes among those “relapses into staginess” betraying, as he confessed, “the young playwright and the old playgoer in this early work of mine.”
It is the predominance of a certain hard, sheer rationalism, and a defiant, irresponsible levity in places, which mars the artistic unity of the play, and denies it the exalted rank to which it well-nigh attains. At the fundamental morality of the play there is no cause to cavil. Instead of maintaining an association in the imagination of the spectators between prostitution and fashionable beauty, luxury and refinement, as do La Dame aux Caméllias, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, Iris, Zaza and countless other modern plays, Mrs. Warren's Profession exhibits the life of the courtesan in all its arid actuality, and inculcates a lesson of the sternest morality. It is because she is what she is that Mrs. Warren loses her daughter irrevocably. In general, the logic of the play is unimpeachable; but the rationalist character imparted to the conversations of the principal characters by their persistence in arguing everything out logically gives the play a sort of glacial rigidity. The principal defect of the play is the discrepancy between the tragic seriousness of the theme and the occasional depressing levity of its treatment. Consonance between theme and tone is the prime requisite of a work of art. This remarkable play falls just short of real greatness because its whimsical, facetious, irrepressible author was unable to discipline himself to artistic self-restraint. Mrs. Warren's Profession is calculated to produce an almost unendurable effect because, as Mr. Archer wisely says, Bernard Shaw is “the slave of his sense of the ridiculous.”
The close of the year 1893 marks the beginning of a new phase in the evolution of Shaw's art as a dramatist. As Brunetière said to the Symbolists, so the English public said to Mr. Grein and his supporters of the Independent Theatre Society: “Gentlemen, produce your masterpieces!” Shaw eagerly took up the case; and rather than let it collapse, he “manufactured the evidence.” His first play met with a succès de scandale; his second failed of production; and his third, the expected “masterpiece,” was debarred by the censorship. The union of economics and Socialism in thesis-plays met with no favour at the hands of the British public. Shaw was forced to relinquish for the time being his purpose of reforming the public through the medium of the stage. His original disavowal of any intent to amuse the public went for naught in default of a platform from which to deliver instruction.
Shaw's social determinism, as M. Auguste Hamon once expressed it to me, is “absolute”: his fundamental Socialism throws the blame, not upon Trench, Charteris, Crofts and Mrs. Warren, as individuals, but upon the prevailing social order, the capitalistic régime, which offers them as alternatives, not morality and immorality, but two sorts of immorality.[143] Upon each individual in his audience, whether in the study or in the theatre, Shaw threw the burden of responsibility for defective social organization, and for those social horrors which can only be mitigated, and, perhaps, ultimately abolished, by public opinion, public action and public contribution. Mr. Shaw once described this play to me as a faithful presentment of the “economic basis of modern commercial prostitution.” But the managers well knew that the public was averse to being forced to face the unpleasant facts set forth in Shaw's three “unpleasant” plays. The rigour of the censorship and prevailing theatrical conditions in London were hostile to Shaw's initial efforts.
“You cannot write three plays and then stop,” Shaw has explained. Accordingly, for obvious reasons, social determinism ceased to be the motive force of Shaw's dramas; and he began to write plays concerned more particularly with the comedy and tragedy of individual life and destiny. Shaw did not cease to be a satirist, did not desist from his effort to startle the public out of its bland complacency: he merely diverted for the time being the current of his satire from social abuses to the shams, pretences, illusions and self-deceptions of individual life. Having learned to beware of solemnity, Shaw makes the satiric jest his point of departure. From this time forward he occupies and operates upon a new plane. He has ceased to be purely the social scavenger. Bernard Shaw's comedy of manners and of character now enters into the history of British drama.
Arms and the Man—obviously deriving its title from the Arma virumque cano of the opening line of Virgil's Æneid—is one of Shaw's most delightful comedies—a genuine comedy of character and yet theatrical in the true sense, Dr. Brandes has called it. Not the least of its virtues is the implicitness of its philosophy; perhaps this is one reason why Mr. Shaw (as he lately remarked to me) now considers it a very slight and immature production! From one point of view, this play may be regarded as a study of the psychology of the military profession.[144] From another point of view—the standpoint of the regular playgoer—the play has for its dramatic essence the collision of romantic illusion with prosaic reality.