Playbill of Arms and the Man.
Avenue Theatre, London. April 21st, 1894. First production on any stage.
To many people the play appeared as a “damning sneer at military courage,” an attempted demonstration of the astounding thesis that heroism is merely a sublimated form of cowardice! When King Edward—then Prince of Wales—witnessed a performance of the play, he could not be induced to smile even once; and afterwards it was reported that “his Royal Highness regretted that the play should have shown so disrespectful an attitude toward the Army as was betrayed by the character of the chocolate-cream soldier.”[145] Bluntschli is a natural realist, to whom long military service has taught the salutary lesson that bullets are to be avoided, not sought; that the main object of the efficient soldier is not the bubble reputation at the cannon's mouth, but practical success and the preservation of life. Shaw had never seen service, never participated in a battle—save the battle of Trafalgar Square. But he happened to be a modern realist with a tremendous fund of satire and fantasy. And although he had to get his data at second hand, he experienced no difficulty in finding abundant material, to authenticate his presentment of the common-sense soldier, in great realistic fiction such as Zola's La Débâcle, in classic autobiography such as Marbot's Memoirs, and in the recorded experiences of English and American generals, notably Lord Wolseley and General Horace Porter. People were inclined to laugh Shaw's play out of court as an exercise no more serious than that of a “mowing down military ideals with volleys of chocolate creams.” Yet Shaw knew a man who lived for two days in the Shipka Pass on chocolate; while some years later, during the Boer war, Queen Victoria presented every soldier in the British army with a ration of chocolate—chocolate which Liebig pronounced the most perfect food in the world. The idea of an officer carrying an empty pistol! And yet Lord Wolseley mentions two officers who seldom carried any weapons, and one of them was Gordon. Bluntschli's hysterical condition in the first act finds its analogue in General Porter's account describing the condition of his troops after a battle. And Bluntschli's delightful description of a cavalry charge finds its analogue, not in the Tennysonian Charge of the Light Brigade, but in the account of this charge as given by the popular historian Kinglake; and, as a matter of fact, Shaw's description was taken almost verbatim from an account given privately to a friend of Shaw's by an officer who served in the Franco-Prussian war. The catalogue might easily be extended; suffice it to say that, irrespective of the totality of impression, there can be no question of the credibility of the separate incidents in the play, which furnished such ready targets for critical marksmanship.[146]
From the dramatic side, Arms and the Man is far less a “realistic” comedy than a satiric exposure of the illusions of warfare, of love, of romantic idealism. Of course, Shaw imparts an air of pleasing likelihood to the racial traits or characters, and the local colour of the scenes; and, as Dr. Brandes has remarked, in Bernard Shaw's choice of themes one feels the mental suppleness of the modern critic, with his ability to throw himself sympathetically into different historic periods and into the minds of different races. In Arms and the Man, “the whole environment is characteristic, the people of most refinement being proud of washing themselves 'almost every day,' and of owning a 'library,' the only one in the district. Everything smacks of the Balkan Peninsula, even to the waiting-maid and the man-servant, with their half-Asiatic mingling of forwardness and servility.”[147] To be accurate, Shaw sketches in his milieu with the very lightest of strokes. Bluntschli might just as well have served in a war between Peru and Chili, or Greece and Turkey; while for all practical purposes, the scene might just as well have been laid along the coasts of Bohemia. I have long contended that Arms and the Man was not a play, but a light opera; and now comes Oscar Straus to compose the music for the libretto adapted from Shaw's Bulgarian fantasy.
Mr. Shaw once told me that his two friends, Sidney Webb, the solid and the practical, and Cunninghame Graham, the hidalgesque and fantastic, suggested the contrast between Bluntschli and Saranoff. “The identity,” he explained, “only lies on the surface, of course. But the true dramatist must always find his contrasts in real life.” And it will be recalled that the rodomontade placed with such ludicrous effect in the mouth of the Bulgarian braggadocio, had actually been used, with equally telling effect, by Mr. Cunninghame Graham in a speech in the House of Commons. Shaw promptly stole the potent phrase, “I never withdraw,” for the sake of its perfect style, and used it as a cockade for Sergius the Sublime. The great charm of the play consists in the disillusionment of the romantic Raina and the sham-idealist Saranoff by the practical realism of the common-sense Bluntschli. A Bulgarian Byron, Sergius is perpetually mocked by the disparity between his imaginative ideals and the disillusions which continually sting his sensitive nature. And the true tragedy of the idealist, in the Shavian frame of mind, is summed up in his words, “Damnation! mockery everywhere! Everything that I think is mocked by everything that I do.” And Shaw himself has said:
“My Bulgarian hero, quite as much as Helmer in A Doll's House, was a hero shown from the modern woman's point of view. I complicated the psychology by making him catch glimpse after glimpse of his own aspect and conduct from this point of view himself, as all men are beginning to do more or less now, the result, of course, being the most horrible dubiety on his part as to whether he was really a brave and chivalrous gentleman, or a humbug and a moral coward. His actions, equally of course, were hopelessly irreconcilable with either theory. Need I add that if the straightforward Helmer, a very honest and ordinary middle-class man misled by false ideals of womanhood, bewildered the public and was finally set down as a selfish cad by all the Helmers in the audience, a fortiori my introspective Bulgarian never had a chance, and was dismissed, with but moderately spontaneous laughter, as a swaggering impostor of the species for which contemporary slang has invented the term 'bounder'?”[148]
Arms and the Man has laid its hold upon the modern imagination, and has been produced all over the world. What more delightful than to have seen Bluntschli interpreted by the actors of our generation—by Mansfield, with his quaintly dry cynicism, by Jarno, with a humour racy of the soil, by Mantzius, with scholarly accuracy, by Sommerstorff, with a touch of romance!—by Loraine, Nhil, Stephens, Daly. It is quite true that the play is loose in form, oscillating between comedy and fantastic farce, and that even now it is already beginning to “date.” But its fantasy, its satire, and its genial philosophy will amply suffice to give it a long lease on life.[149] Shaw's own confidence in his power as a dramatist and in the future of the play is humorously expressed in characteristic style in the following letter written in response to an apologetic note from his American agent, Miss Elisabeth Marbury, accompanying a meagre remittance for royalties on Arms and the Man:
“Rapacious Elisabeth Marbury,
“What do you want me to make a fortune for? Don't you know that the draft you sent me will permit me to live and preach Socialism for six months? The next time you have so large an amount to remit, please send it to me by instalments, or you will put me to the inconvenience of having a bank account. What do you mean by giving me advice about writing a play with a view to the box-office receipts? I shall continue writing just as I do now for the next ten years. After that we can wallow in the gold poured at our feet by a dramatically regenerated public.”
Arms and the Man is an injunction to found our institutions, in Shaw's little-understood phrase, not on “the ideals suggested to our imagination by our half-satisfied passions,” but on a “genuinely scientific natural history.”