From the original monochrome, made at 10, Adelphi Terrace,
London, W.C., August, 1907.
Éduard J. Steichen.
In the main, Shaw follows, as far as time, place and historical events go, such facts of history as are to be found in Plutarch and in De Bello Gallico; in every other respect the play is modern, colloquially modern, in tone and in spirit. Shaw approaches his theme under the domination of an idée fixe: scorn of tradition and of the science of history. The notion that there has been any progress since the time of Cæsar is absurd! Increased command over Nature by no means connotes increased command over self; if there has been any evolution, it has been in our conceptions of the meaning of greatness. When Shaw wrote his celebrated preface Better than Shakespeare? he had a very definite claim to make; that his Cæsar and Cleopatra are more credible, more natural, to a modern audience, than are the imaginative projections of a Shakespeare. Shaw maintains that, in manner and art, nobody can write better than Shakespeare, “because, carelessness apart, he did the thing as well as it can be done within the limits of human faculty.” But Shaw did profess to have something to say by this time that Shakespeare neither said nor dreamed of. “Allow me to set forth Cæsar in the same modern light,” pleads Shaw, in speaking of the hero-restorations of Carlyle and Mommsen, “taking the same liberty with Shakespeare as he with Homer, and with no thought of pretending to express the Mommsenite view of Cæsar any better than Shakespeare expressed a view that was not even Plutarchian....”[162] “Shakespeare's Cæsar is the reductio ad absurdum of the real Julius Cæsar,” Mr. Shaw once remarked to me; “my Cæsar is a simple return to nature and history.”
Are there many cases in dramatic psychology, asked M. Filon, as interesting as the liaison which would have had “Cæsarion” as result? But in Cæsar and Cleopatra, there is no battle of love, no dramatic conflict. Shaw might have produced a drama of the nations, in which the cunning intrigues of Egypt are matched against the forthrightness and efficiency of the Romans; or a drama of passion, charged to the full with poetic imagination. But he has availed himself neither of the historic sense, in which he appears to be deficient, nor of the romantic violence of poetic imagination, against which he rages with puritanical fervour. Shaw calls the play a “history”; certainly it is not a “drama” in the technical sense.[163] And yet, despite the numerous longueurs of the play, the pyrotechnic flashes of wit which only barely suffice to conceal the fact that the action is marking time, the exciting incidents which separately give a semblance of activity to the piece, there is a genuine thread of motive connecting scene with scene.
Cæsar and Cleopatra is, from one point of view, a study in the evolution of character; and this play, and Major Barbara, are the only exceptions to Shaw's theatre of static character. The psychological action of the piece consists in the evolution, under the guiding hand of Cæsar, of the little Egyptian sensualist, in the period of plastic adolescence. Cæsar has the weak fondness of an indulgent uncle for the adolescent Cleopatra, with her strange admixture of childish mauvaise honte and regal covetousness. Realizing with the instinct of a king-maker Cleopatra's dangerous possibilities as a ruler, Cæsar exercises upon her the plastic and determinative force of an architect of states. Slowly the little Cleopatra learns her lesson, glories in her newly-won power, tyrannizes inhumanly over all about her, and eventually—with well-nigh disastrous effects to herself—endeavours to teach her teacher the true secret of dominion.
From another point of view, this play is the portrait of a hero in the light of Shavian psychology—a hero in undress costume, in his dressing-gown as he lived, with all his trivial vanities and endearing weaknesses. The halo of the “pathos of distance,” surrounding the head of the demi-god, wholly fades away; and there stands before us a real man, shorn of the romantic, the histrionic, the chivalric, it is true, but a real man, every inch of him, for all that. Shaw clearly draws the distinction:
“Our conception of heroism has changed of late years. The stage hero of the palmy days is a pricked bubble. The gentlemanly hero, of whom Tennyson's King Arthur was the type, suddenly found himself out as Torvald Helmer in Ibsen's Doll's House, and died of the shock. It is no use now going on with heroes who are no longer really heroic to us. Besides, we want credible heroes. The old demand for the incredible, the impossible, the superhuman, which was supplied by bombast, inflation, and the piling of crimes on catastrophes and factitious raptures on artificial agonies, has fallen off; and the demand now is for heroes in whom we can recognize our own humanity, and who, instead of walking, talking, eating, drinking, making love and fighting single combats in a monotonous ecstasy of continuous heroism, are heroic in the true human fashion: that is, touching the summits only at rare moments, and finding the proper level of all occasions, condescending with humour and good sense to the prosaic ones as well as rising to the noble ones, instead of ridiculously persisting in rising to them all on the principle that a hero must always soar, in season or out of season.”[164]
Mr. Forbes Robertson recently said that he regarded Cæsar and Cleopatra as a “great play,” representing very truly what one would imagine Cæsar said, thought and felt. “Possibly the play is before its time—some people have said such curious things about it. There are scenes of wonderful brilliancy and beauty, and I myself see nothing farcical about the play, as some people seem to suggest. I see a great wit and humour; and, as Mr. Shaw points out, by what right are we to presuppose that Cæsar had no sense of humour? He meets this amusing little impudent girl, and is very much amused with her, and interested in her, quite naturally as a human being. Why should one expect him to go strutting about, with one arm in his toga and the other extended, spouting dull blank verse?” Indeed, Shaw's Cæsar is a remarkable personality—in practice a man of business sagacity; in politics, a dreamer; in action, brilliant and resourceful; in private, a trifle vain and rhetorical—boyish, exuberant, humorous. When Pothinus expresses amazement that the conqueror of the world has time to busy himself with taxes, Cæsar affably replies: “My friend, taxes are the chief business of a conqueror of the world.”
Like Mirabeau, he had no memory for insults and affronts received, and “could not forgive, for the sole reason that—he forgot.” He answers to Nietzsche's differentia: “Not to be able to take seriously for a long time, an enemy, or a misfortune, or even one's own misdeeds—is the characteristic of strong and full natures, abundantly endowed with plastic, formative, restorative, also obliterative force.” Cæsar's policy of clemency is constantly thwarted by the murderous passions of his soldiers; the murder of Pompey he contemns as a stroke of unpardonable treachery and revenge, the removal of Vercingetorix very much as Talleyrand regarded the execution of the Due d'Enghien: it was worse than a crime, it was a blunder. Sufficient unto himself, strong enough to dispense with happiness, Cæsar is—to use a phrase of Mr. Desmond MacCarthy's—“content in the place of happiness with a kind of triumphant gaiety, springing from a sense of his own fortitude and power.” Cæsar is a thoroughly good fellow, prosaically, patho-comically looking approaching old age in the face and wearing his conqueror's wreath of oak leaves—to conceal his growing bald spot. Were Rome a true republic, Cæsar would be the first of republicans; he values the life of every Roman in his army as he values his own, and makes friends with everyone as he does with dogs and children. “Cæsar is an important public man,” as Mr. Max Beerbohm puts it, “who knows that a little chit of a girl-queen has taken a fancy to him, and is tickled by the knowledge and behaves very kindly to her, and rather wishes he were young enough to love her.” But when he is again recalled to Rome, Cleopatra concerns him no more. Cæsar is the Shavian type of the naturally great man—great, not because he mortifies his nature in fulfilment of duty, but because he fulfils his own will.”[165]
Cæsar and Cleopatra, to employ a phrase of the elder Coquelin, is a “combination of the most absolute fantasy with the most absolute truth.” One feels at times that it belongs in the category of Orphée aux Enfers and La Belle Hélène, and only needs the music of Offenbach to round it out. Shaw shatters the illusion of antiquity with a multitude of the stock phrases of contemporary history: “Peace with honour,” “Egypt for the Egyptians,” “Art for Art's sake,” etc., etc.[166] True to Shakespearean practice, Shaw revels in anachronisms, and goes so far as to assert that this is the only way to make the historic past take form and life before our eyes. If Shakespeare makes a clock strike in ancient Rome, Shaw shows a steam engine at work in Alexandria in 48 B.C.! If Shakespeare puts a billiard table in Cleopatra's palace, Shaw alludes to the ancient superstition of table-rapping in the year 707 of the Republic! Shaw gives free play to his abounding humour, having long since learned that nothing can be accomplished by solemnity. “Whenever I feel in writing a play,” he frankly confesses, “that my great command of the sublime threatens to induce solemnity of mind in my audience, I at once introduce a joke and knock the solemn people from their perch.” The eighteenth-century Irishman, with his contempt for John Bull, peeps out here and there; and when Cleopatra asks Britannus, Cæsar's young secretary from Britain, if it were true that he was painted all over blue, when Cæsar captured him, Britannus proudly replies: “Blue is the colour worn by all Britons of good standing. In war we stain our bodies blue; so that though our enemies may strip us of our clothes and our lives, they cannot strip us of our respectability.”