[180] Rezensionen. Wiener Theater, 1901-1903, by Hermann Bahr; article Ein Teufelskerl, pp. 440-453.
THE PLAYWRIGHT—III
“I find that the surest way to startle the world with daring innovations and originalities is to do exactly what playwrights have been doing for thousands of years; to revive the ancient attraction of long rhetorical speeches; to stick closely to the methods of Molière; and to lift characters bodily out of the pages of Charles Dickens.”—Prophets of the Nineteenth Century (Unpublished), by G. Bernard Shaw.
“I have honour and humanity on my side, wit in my head, skill in my hand, and a higher life for my aim.”—G. Bernard Shaw, in the New York Times, September 25th, 1905.
CHAPTER XII
Man and Superman inaugurates another cycle of Shaw's theatre, and first presents Shaw to the world as a conscious philosopher. By reason of its bi-partite nature—it is sub-entitled A Comedy and a Philosophy—this play furnishes the natural link between Shaw the dramatist and Shaw the creator of a new form of stage entertainment. It is worth recalling that at the time this play appeared Shaw had not yet won the favour of the “great public” in England. He had, however, won the attention and the enthusiastic, yet tempered, praise of one of the ablest dramatic critics in England. Mr. William Archer pronounced Mrs. Warren's Profession a “masterpiece—yes, with all reservations, a masterpiece,” and as each one of Shaw's plays appeared, he discussed it in the fullest and most impartial way, bespoke for it the attention of the British public, and roundly berated the managers of the large West End theatres for letting slip through their fingers the golden opportunities afforded by the brilliant works of the witty Irishman.[181] For that matter, Shaw was not wanting in appreciative students of his plays among the dramatic critics of the day; and even Mr. Max Beerbohm and Mr. A. B. Walkley, though temperamentally Shaw's opposites, took the liveliest interest in the Shavian drama.
Indeed, it was Mr. Walkley who asked Shaw to write a Don Juan play; and the fulfilment of this request was Man and Superman. Ab initio, Shaw realized that there are no modern English plays in which the natural attraction of the sexes for one another is made the mainspring of the action. The popular contemporary playwrights, thinking to emulate Ibsen, had produced plays cut according to a certain pattern, i.e., plays preoccupied with sex, yet really devoid of all sexual interest. In plays, of which The Second Mrs. Tanqueray is the type illustration, the woman through indiscretion is brought in conflict with the law which regulates the relation of the sexes, while the man by marriage is brought in conflict with the social convention that discountenances the woman. Such dramas, portraying merely the conflict of the individual with society, Shaw had railed at in the preface to his Three Plays for Puritans; such “senseless evasions” of the real sex problem serve in part to explain Shaw's partial lack of sympathy with Pinero during Shaw's Saturday Review period. Shaw was in no mind to treat his friend Walkley to a lurid play of identical import; nor did the Don Juan of tradition, literature and opera, the libertine of a thousand bonnes fortunes, suit his wants any better. The prototypic Don Juan of sixteenth-century invention, Molière's persistently impenitent type of impiety, and Mozart's ravishingly attractive enemy of God had all served their turn; whilst in Byron's Don Juan, Shaw saw only a vagabond libertine, a sailor with a wife in every port. Even that spiritual cousin of Don Juan, Goethe's Faust, although he had passed far beyond mere love-making to altruism and humanitarianism, was still almost a century out of date.
This reductio ad absurdum process finally gave Shaw the clue to the mystery; the other types being perfected, and in a sense exhausted, a Don Juan in the philosophic sense alone remained. The modern type of Don Juan “no longer pretends to read Ovid, but does actually read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, studies Westermarck, and is concerned for the future of the race instead of for the freedom of his own instincts.” Confronted with the stark problem of the duel of sex, Shaw solved it with the striking conclusion that Man is no longer, like Don Juan, the victor in that duel. Though sharing neither the prejudices of the homoist nor the enthusiasms of the feminist, Shaw found it easy to persuade himself that woman has become dangerous, aggressive, powerful. The rôles established by romantic convention, and evidenced in the hackneyed phrase “Man is the hunter, woman the game,” are now reversed: Woman takes the initiative in the selection of her mate. Thus is Don Juan reincarnated; once the headlong huntsman, he is now the helpless quarry. Man and Superman, in Shaw's own words, is “a stage projection of the tragi-comic love chase of the man by the woman.”
Program of Man and Superman.