Hudson Theatre, N. Y. May 21st, 1906. Second Season.
Shaw's solution of the problem was generally regarded as audaciously novel and original. And yet, as Shaw points out in the Dedicatory Epistle, and as I have indicated in a former chapter, the notion is very far from novel. Beaumont and Fletcher's The Wild Goose Chase furnishes the interesting analogy of Mirabell, a travelled Italianate gentleman and cynical philanderer, pursued by Oriana, the “witty follower of the chase,” who employs a number of more or less crude and coarse artifices to entrap him; when the ingenuity of the dramatists is exhausted, Mirabell succumbs to Oriana's wiles.[182] And those who have a passion for attributing all Shaw's ideas to Nietzsche, might find some support in that passage in A Genealogy of Morals: “The philosopher abhors wedlock and all that would fain persuade to this state, as being an obstacle and fatality on his road to the optimum. Who among the great philosophers is known to have been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer—they were not; nay, we cannot even so much as conceive them as married. A married philosopher is a figure of comedy....”
The attitude toward woman exhibited by Shaw in Man and Superman has won for him the appellation, “the most ungallant of dramatists.” Mr. Huneker has ventured to assert that Shaw is “practically the first literary man who has achieved the feat of making his heroines genuinely disagreeable persons.” Now to Wilde and to Strindberg, woman is an inferior being, the history of woman being the history of tyranny in its harshest form, i.e., the tyranny of the weak over the strong. Shaw is quite as far from misogyny on the one hand as from gynolatry on the other. From the beginning of his literary career, Shaw has been imbued with the conviction that, to use his own words, “women are human beings just like men, only worse brought up, and consequently worse behaved.” In Shaw's plays it is a toss-up between the men and the women as to which are the worse behaved. The women in Shaw's plays seem always deliberately to challenge the conventional ideal of the womanly Woman. As a dramatist, Shaw rebelled from the very first against the long-established custom of making all heroines perfect, all heroes chivalrous and gallant, all villains irretrievably wicked. Stock characters, in Shaw's view, must be swept off from dramatic art along with romance, the womanly woman, the ideal heroine, and all the other useless lumber that so fatally cumbered the British stage. In Shaw's first play, he confessedly “jilted the ideal lady for a real one,” and predicted that he would probably do it again and again, even at the risk of having the real ones mistaken for counter-ideals. Shaw has kept his promise, and has been jilting the ideal lady ever since.
M. Filon finds Shaw's “galerie de femmes” nothing short of astonishing in the veracity and vitality of the likenesses. Ann Whitefield, whom Shaw once pronounced his “most gorgeous female,” is really one of his least successful portraits. “As I sat watching Everyman at the Charterhouse,” says Shaw, “I said to myself, 'Why not Everywoman?' Ann was the result; every woman is not Ann; but Ann is Everywoman.” Thus the play takes on the character of a “morality,” and purports to adumbrate a deep, underlying truth of nature. Unfortunately, Shaw is not a flesh painter; Ann is not a successful portrait of a woman who is “an unscrupulous user of her personal fascination to make men give her what she wants.” She is deficient in feminine subtlety—the obscurer instincts and emotions of sex. The strong, heedless, unquestioning voice of fruitful nature voices its command, not through the passion of a “mother woman,” but through the medium of the comic loquacity of a laughing philosopher![183] In the master works of that sovereign student of human nature, Thomas Hardy, the Life Force holds full sway; Wedekind's Erdgeist reveals the omnivorous, man-eating monster, devouring her human prey with all the ferocity of a she-lioness. Inability to portray sexual passion convincingly is a limitation of Shaw's art. And yet in the present instance we must not forget that, as Mr. Archer reminds us, “no doubt the logic of allegory demanded that the case should be stated in its extremest form, and that the crudest femineity should, in the end, conquer the alertest and most open-eyed masculinity.” While concerned with the problem of sex, Man and Superman remains a drama of ideas. And it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, had the Life Force in Ann been supreme, Maeterlinck would have been vindicated by her in his fine saying: “The first kiss of the betrothed is but the seal which thousands of hands, craving for birth, have impressed upon the lips of the mother they desire.”
Man and Superman is the most pervasively brilliant of all Shaw's comedies. And in spite of the fact that the idea-plot is intricate and requires to be disengaged from the action-plot the comedy, as I saw it produced in both New York and London, gave rise to an almost unbroken burst of merriment on the part of the audience. It is customary to identify Shaw with Tanner; and in the first production of Man and Superman at the Court Theatre, Tanner (Mr. Granville Barker) was “made up” to represent Shaw. As a matter of fact, Mr. Shaw once told me that in Tanner, with all his headlong loquacity, is satirized Mr. H. M. Hyndman, the great Socialist orator. One other detail in the play is noteworthy—the extrinsically irrelevant incident which leaves everyone at the end of the first act “cowering before the wedding-ring.” It is an illustration of a curious device once or twice employed by Shaw—a sort of comic “sell” of the audience, appearing beside the mark because its relation with the action is ideological, not dramatic. In general, the effect of Man and Superman is to make one wish that Shaw would write a comedy of matrimony furnishing the lamentable spectacle pictured by Nietzsche of the married philosopher. Mr. Robert Loraine has actually written a clever sketch upon this theme, entitled The Reformer's Revenge; or, the Revolutionist's Reconciliation to Reality;[184] and Mr. William Archer publicly urged Shaw to complete his “Morality” and (following the precedent of Lord Dundreary Married and Settled) give us John Tanner Married and Done For.
The play just discussed is the society comedy, as it appears in the printed book, with the omission of the Shavio-Socratic scene in hell, and one or two alterations and omissions in the printed play itself. The dream in hell—Act III. of the printed book—is the ultimate form of Shaw's drama of discussion, and has actually been successfully presented at the Court Theatre, London. When I saw it produced there, I was surprised to note the favour with which it was received, the brilliancy and wit of the dialogue compensating in great measure for the absence of all action and the exceptional length of the speeches. At last Shaw's dream of long speeches, Shavian rhetoric, and a pit of philosophers was realized. Upon the average popular audience, the effect would doubtless have been devastating; and even under the most favourable circumstances, the audience was partially seduced into appreciative interest by well-executed scenic effects, exquisite costumes specially designed by Charles Ricketts, and a long synopsis of Don Juan in Hell, especially prepared by the author.[185]
The year 1904 marks a turning-point in the career of Bernard Shaw. The average age at which artists create their greatest work is forty-six to forty-seven, according to Jastrow's table; and so, practically speaking, John Bull's Other Island is chronologically announced as Shaw's magnum opus. In the technical, no less than in the popular sense, this path-breaking play registers the inauguration of a new epoch in Shaw's career. In this new phase we find him breaking squarely with tradition, and finding artistic freedom in nonconformity. A true drama of national character, John Bull's Other Island portrays the conflict of racial types and exhibits its author as a descendant of Molière, a master of comic irony, and at heart a poet.
Originally designed for production by Mr. W. B. Yeats under the auspices of the Irish Literary Theatre, this play was found unsuited both to the resources of the new Abbey Theatre and to the temper of the neo-Gaelic movement.[186] Temperamentally incapable of visionarily imagining Ireland as “a little old woman called Kathleen ni Hoolihan,” Shaw drew a bold and uncompromising picture of the real Ireland of to-day; and the sequel was the production of the play, not at the Abbey, but at the Royal Court Theatre, London. That interesting experiment in dramatic production inaugurated by Messrs. J. E. Vedrenne and H. Granville Barker at the Royal Court Theatre in 1904, furnishes material for the most interesting chapter in the history of the development of the contemporary English drama.[187] The companies trained by Mr. Barker, an able actor and already a promising dramatist, wrought something very like a revolution in the art of dramatic production in England. The unity of tone, the subordination of the individual, the general striving for totality of effect, the constant changes of bill, the abolition of the “star” system—all were noteworthy features of these productions. There were given nine hundred and eighty-eight performances of thirty-two plays by seventeen authors; seven hundred and one of these performances were of eleven plays by one author—Bernard Shaw. Plays of other authors—notably of Mr. Barker himself—were produced, and often with noticeable success. But in the main the whole undertaking may be regarded as a monster Shaw Festspiel, prolonged over three years. Mr. Barker, Mr. Galsworthy, the late Mr. Hankin, Miss Elizabeth Robins and Mr. Masefield, all came prominently into public notice as dramatists of the “new” school. The Court was not, in the strict sense, a repertory theatre; rather it furnished a tentative compromise between the théâtre à coté and the actor-managed theatre backed by a syndicate of capitalists. The Vedrenne-Barker enterprise did the imperatively needed pioneer work of breaking ground for the repertory theatre idea; created a public of intelligent playgoers with literary tastes, who had long since lost interest in the theatre of commerce; developed a whole “school” of playwrights, with Mr. Barker at their head; and brought to the English public at large a belated consciousness of the greatness of Bernard Shaw.
H. Granville Barker.