In Cæsar and Cleopatra Shaw has created something more or less than drama—a tremendous fantasy surcharged and interpenetrated with deep imaginative reality. In certain plays of which I shall now speak, Shaw shows that he can play the dramatist, pure and simple, and write with a concentration of energy, a compression of emotive intensity, that seem very foreign to the prolixity and discursiveness of his later manner. The stern artistic discipline to which he nearly succeeded in schooling himself in Mrs. Warren's Profession, once more exhibits itself in The Man of Destiny, Candida and The Devil's Disciple. The essential fact that these plays have proved popular stage successes in the capitals of the world—New York, London, Berlin, Vienna, Dresden, St. Petersburg, Buda-Pesth, Brussels, etc.—is in itself testimony to the fact that—always allowing for the refraction of the Shavian temperament—Bernard Shaw is a true dramatist, capable of touching the deeper emotions and appealing to universal sentiments.
In speaking of his earliest works, Shaw airily refers to those “vain brilliancies given off in the days of my health and strength.” Perhaps something of their diffuseness, and the lack of concentrative thought evident in their construction, are explained, not alone by reference to Shaw's intransigéance, but in part by the conditions under which they were written. A bit of reminiscence voiced by the great English comedian, Sir Charles Wyndham, is illuminating:
“I shall never forget the first time Shaw called to see me. In those days he would not have a bit of linen about him. He wore soft shirts and long, flowing ties, which, with his tawny hair and long, red beard, gave him the appearance of a veritable Viking. Well, he came in and sat down at the table. Then he put his hand into his right trousers pocket and slowly drew out a small pocket memorandum-book; then he dug into the left side-pocket and fished out another of the little books, then still another and another. Finally, he paused in his explorations, looked at me and said:
“'I suppose you're surprised to see all these little pocket-books. The fact is, however, I write my plays in them while riding around London on top of a 'bus.'”[167]
The How and Where of the composition of such plays might well account for much inconsequence and aerial giddiness!
The Man of Destiny has an origin not a little unique. Many plays are written for some one great actor or actress—few are written for two. And yet, according to Shaw's own confessions, The Man of Destiny was written for Richard Mansfield and Ellen Terry—Mansfield serving as the model for Napoleon, Terry as the model for the Lady. At this time, Shaw had seen Mansfield only in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Richard III.; and once in 1894 had chatted with him for an hour at the Langham. The impression he received was so strong, the suggestion of Napoleon so striking, that he resolved to write a play about Napoleon based on a study of Mansfield.[168]
In a letter to Mansfield (September 8th, 1897), Shaw says: “I was much hurt by your contemptuous refusal of A Man of Destiny, not because I think it one of my masterpieces, but because Napoleon is nobody else but Richard Mansfield himself. I studied the character from you, and then read up Napoleon and found that I had got him exactly right.”[169] Shaw frequently corresponded with Ellen Terry during the days he was writing The Man of Destiny; he saw her numberless times on the stage, but had never actually met her when he wrote The Man of Destiny. Shaw escaped the “illusion” of the Lyceum, created by “Irving's incomparable dignity and Terry's incomparable beauty”—simply because “I was a dramatist and needed Ellen Terry for my own plays.... I had tried to win her when I wrote The Man of Destiny, in which the heroine is simply a delineation of Ellen Terry—imperfect, it is true, for who can describe the indescribable!”[170]
The Man of Destiny, Shaw, in fact, confesses, was written chiefly to exhibit the virtuosity of the two principal characters; and it must be confessed that their virtuosity is so pervasively dazzling as occasionally to distract attention from the dramatic procedure. The unnamed possibilities of the situation have been exploited in the subtlest fashion. This little “fragment” is a dramatic tour de force; the rapid shifting of victory from one side to the other, the excitingly unstable equilibrium of the balance of power, the fierce war of wills are of the very essence of true drama. The serious underlying issue, the struggle of Napoleon for a triumph that spells personal dishonour, is a dramatic motive sanctioned by that great classic example, the Œdipus Rex. Unlike Sophocles, whose listeners knew in advance the story of the ill-fated king, Shaw withholds from the spectator any foreknowledge of the outcome; but the growing curiosity of Napoleon, instantaneously inducing like inquisitiveness on the part of the spectator, is one of the chief factors of interest in the play. Early in the development of the action, the purpose of the letter is readily guessed by anyone familiar with such Napoleonic history as is recorded, for example, in the Memoirs of Barras.[171]
As Shaw's Cæsar is his interpretation of the great man of ancient history, so Napoleon is his interpretation of the great man of modern history. Shaw's Napoleon is a strange mixture of noble and ignoble impulses. He is strangely imaginative—a dreamer in the great sense, with a touch of the superstition of a Wallenstein, a great faith in his star. A ravenous beast at table, he feverishly gorges his food, while his hair sweeps into the ink and the gravy; his absolute obliviousness to surroundings is the mask of tremendous energy of purpose. Gravy answers the purpose of ink, a grape hull marks a strategic point on the map: the mark, not the material, is Napoleon's concern. And it is the imprévu of his decisions that so often puts his adversaries to rout. M. Filon protests against Shaw's portrait of Napoleon as a mere repetition of the caricatures of Gillray and the calumniating distortions of the historian Seeley; but Shaw's Napoleon is, in great measure, not the Napoleon of the glorified Bonapartist chromo, but the Napoleon post-figured by his later career. Le Petit Caporal is the ancestor of the Emperor Napoleon I.; and in this early phase, Napoleon may be best described in the sneering characterization of the Lady as “the vile, vulgar Corsican adventurer.” Says Mr. John Corbin: “The final sensation of the character is of vast unquenchable energy and intelligence, at once brutally real and sublimely theatrical. And is not this the great Napoleon? By virtue of this mingling of seemingly opposed but inherently true qualities this Man of Destiny, for all the impertinences and audacities of Mr. Shaw's pyrotechnics, may be reckoned the best presentation of Napoleon thus far achieved in the drama, as it is certainly by far the most delightful.” I asked Mlle. Yvette Guilbert one day if she thought The Man of Destiny would succeed in Paris. “I rather fear not,” she replied. “Shaw's portrait is too true to the original to suit the French!”[172]
Towards the close of The Man of Destiny, Napoleon, taking for his text the famous phrase: “The English are a nation of shop-keepers,” launches forth into a perfect torrent of irrelevant histrionic pyrotechnics. “Let me explain the English to you,” he says, and in Shaw's most Maxim-gun style, proceeds to summarize the history of England in the nineteenth century, in a half-critical, half-prophetic philippic, beginning with discussion of the views of the Manchester School, of British industrial and colonial policy, and of Imperialism, and concluding with allusions to Wellington and Waterloo! In reading the play, this passage appears to be a gross irrelevancy and an absurd anachronism; but on the stage the speech appears to be quite in character with Shaw's Napoleon. Still, this passage calls attention to Shaw's most obvious and most deliberately committed fault: self-projection through the medium of his characters. Shaw identifies himself with his work as possibly no other dramatist before him has ever done. I rejoice in Shaw as M. Filon rejoices in Dumas fils; selfless reserve, abdication of personality, are as impossible for Shaw as for Dumas fils, and I freely confess that what I enjoy most in Shaw's plays is—Shaw.