“Yes,” replies the stricken Judith; “you mean that you do not love me.”
“Is that all it means to you?” asks the revolted Richard, with fierce contempt.
“What more—what worse—can it mean to me?” are Judith's final words.
Last of all, Shaw indulges in his most hazardous stroke of satire in the scene of the military tribunal. Imagine the cloud of romantic gloom and melodramatic horror that the author of La Tosca would have cast over this valley of the shadow of death! Shaw ushers in an exquisite and urbane comedian to irradiate the gathering gloom with the sparks of his audacious speech and the scintillations of his heartless wit. Thus Shaw elevates the plane of the piece into a sublimated atmosphere of sheer satire.
In The Devil's Disciple, Shaw succeeds in humanizing the stock figures of melodrama, revealing in them a credible mixture of good and evil, of reality and romance. In life itself, Shaw finds no proof that a rake may not be generous, nor a blackguard tender to children, nor a minister virile and human. All mothers are not angels, all generals are not imposing dignitaries, all British soldiers are not Kitcheners in initiative or Gordons in heroism. That Dick scoffs at religion and breaks the social code does not prove that he is either naturally vicious or depraved. In the stern asceticism of his nature, he is a more genuine Puritan than his self-righteous mother. Under every trial is he always valid to himself, obedient to the law of his own nature; he might have chosen for his device the words of Luther: “Ich kann nicht anders.” The play was written for Richard Mansfield; and Mr. Shaw once told me that the part of Dudgeon was modelled upon Mansfield himself. On the stage, Dudgeon is usually represented either as the melodramatic type of hero, with white soft shirt and bared neck—e.g., Karl Wiene, in Vienna; or as the gay debonair rake, counterpart of the best type of those fascinating blades of Sheridan and the other writers of earlier English comedy—e.g., Richard Mansfield, in America. As a matter of fact, Dick is neither a conventional stage hero nor a dashing rake. “Dick Dudgeon is a Puritan of the Puritans,” says Shaw. “He is brought up in a household where the Puritan religion has died and become, in its corruption, an excuse for his mother's master-passion of hatred in all its phases of cruelty and envy. In such a home he finds himself starved of religion, which is the most clamorous need of his nature. With all his mother's indomitable selfishness, but with pity instead of hatred as his master-passion, he pities the devil, takes his side, and champions him, like a true Covenanter, against the world. He thus becomes, like all genuinely religious men, a reprobate and an outcast.” Unfortified by the power of a great love, unconsoled by hope of future reward, Dick makes the truly heroic sacrifice with all the sublime spirit of a Carton or a Cyrano. Of such stuff are made not stage, but real heroes. “He is in one word,” says Mr. J. T. Grein, “a man, spotted it is true, but a man, and, as such, perhaps the most human creature which native fancy has put on our modern stage.”
In The Devil's Disciple, as Hermann Bahr maintains, Shaw virtually asserts the modern dramatic principle that every situation of adventitious character, every external adventure which meets the hero like a vagabond upon the highway, is undramatic; the sole aim of modern drama is representation of the inner life, and all things must be transposed into the key of spiritual significance.[180] This principle is exemplified in the three leading characters. Like Raina in Arms and the Man, Judith learns by bitter experience to distrust the iridescent mirage of romance. Sentimental, spoiled, romantic, this refined Lydia Languish does not know whether to hate, to admire, or to love the fascinating, devil-may-care rake. In the briefest space of time, her husband has become in her eyes a coward and a poltroon. Her heart is in a tumult of emotions: like a willow she sways between duty to her husband and love for the dashing Dudgeon. And when she puts all to the touch, she discovers that her romance is only a pretty figment of her fancy, powerless before the omnipotent passion of obligation to self. And when her husband appears in the nick of time, and proves to be a hero after all, her love floods back to him. Dick must promise that he will never tell! Surely the figure of the minister's young wife, says Heinrich Stümcke, is one of the most delicate creations of the English stage. “In the recital of Judith's relations with Dick,” writes Dr. Brandes, “there is convincing irony, and rare insight into the idiosyncrasies and subtleties of the feminine heart.”
Among the minor excellences of the play, the figure of Burgoyne stands out in striking relief. In Shaw's view, his Burgoyne is not a conventional stage soldier, but “as faithful a portrait as it is in the nature of stage portraits to be”—whatever that may mean! In reality, Shaw's Burgoyne interests us, not at all as an historical personage, but as a distinct dramatic creation. “Gentleman Johnny,” suave, sarcastic, urbane—the high comedian with all the exquisite grace of the eighteenth century—delights us by exchanging rare repartee with Dick over the banal topic of the latter's death. Burgoyne's speech of Voltairean timbre, quite in the key of De Quincey's Murder as a Fine Art—beginning with “Let me persuade you to be hanged”—is the finest ironical touch in English drama since Sheridan. “The historic figure of the English General Burgoyne,” says Dr. Brandes, “though he holds only a subordinate place in the play, stands forth with a fresh and sparkling vitality, such as only great poets can impart to their creations.” Shaw once modestly averred that “the most effective situation on the modern stage occurs in my own play—The Devil's Disciple.” I have always had the feeling that the first act of this play, although actually delaying the beginning of the “love story” until the second act, is the most remarkable act Shaw has ever written—a genre picture eminently worthy of the hand of a Hogarth or a Dickens. And, to quote Dr. Brandes once more, “I consider The Devil's Disciple a masterpiece, whether viewed from the psychological or the dramatic standpoint. Well acted, it ought to create a furore.”
FOOTNOTES:
[160] Bernard Shaw and the Heroic Actor, in The Play, No. 62, Vol. X. In this same article Shaw says: “No man writes a play without any reference to the possibility of a performance: you may scorn the limitations of the theatre as much as you please; but for all that you do not write parts for six-legged actors or two-headed heroines, though there is great scope for drama in such conceptions.”
[161] Mr. Shaw's Future: A Conversation, in the Academy, April 30th, 1898. This interview is signed “C. R.”—presumably Clarence Rook.