Alvin Langdon Coburn. From the original monochrome, made in 1908.
Coming at a political Sturm und Drang period, John Bull's Other Island achieved an immediate and immense success. Leading figures in public life, including Mr. Arthur Balfour and the late Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, again and again heard the play with unmitigated delight; and, finally, King Edward “commanded” a special performance. The gods of English society, upon whose knees ever rests the ultimate fate of the British artist, suddenly awoke at last to the realization of the fact that a genius was living in their midst. John Bull's Other Island marked a new stage in Shaw's career; for whilst the play itself is the fine fleur of Shavian dramaturgy, the characters are set firmly upon solid ground. In Shaw's former plays, as a rule, the locality was not strikingly material, the characters often supra-natural, and the ideas deftly bandied about at times, much as a juggler manipulates glass balls. This new play exhibited nothing short of a new type of drama. Emotion is subsidiary to idea, action is less important than character, and conflict of ideas replaces the conflict of wills of the dramatic formula.
In the Shavian Anschauung, the action and reaction of national types inevitably takes precedence over the purely human problem of the love story. The study in emotional psychology is the incidental underplot to the larger study of England versus Ireland; here we see the line of cleavage between Shaw and the conventional dramatist. Shaw's hand, so deft in the handling of national types, the portrayal of racial traits, failed him in the delicate task of the exhibition of vital emotion. “I do not accuse Mr. Shaw of dealing in symbols,” says Mr. John Corbin, “but I shall not, I am sure, misinterpret him radically in saying that Nora is Kathleen ni Hoolihan—the embodiment of his idea of Ireland. The real drama of the piece centres in the story of how the Irishman loses Nora and the Briton wins her.... In his heart Larry loves his countrywoman, as she has always loved him, and she has no real affection for the Briton. Here lies the comic irony of the dénouement, the very essence of Shaw's comment on his problem.”[188] The “real drama,” one rather feels, is the death struggle of nations. Ireland and England are the antagonist and protagonist, respectively, of the drama; and the dramatic characters, in a broad sense, are both individualized human beings and concrete impersonations of racial traits. It seems to me quite improbable that John Bull's Other Island will “cross frontiers” as readily as many of Shaw's other plays. For, despite the signal merits of the character-drawing, the problem is essentially unique, and, as the title implies, peculiar to the British Isles.
Roscullen, the scene of the play, is a segment of the living Ireland, and here are encountered all those conflicting elements which have made a hopeless enigma of the Irish question for so many generations. In this miniature Ireland we find jostling each other the dreamer and the bigot, the superstitious and the unilluded. Instead of the great landowner, there is a group of small proprietors, who treat their employees and tenants with a harshness and industrial cruelty that can only result in the latter's ruin. Religion continues to be the dominant force in the community; and the clergy exhibit that profound political sagacity and that unscrupulousness in playing upon the superstition of the credulous peasants which are such defining marks of the Roman Catholic priesthood. Ireland's sense of her oppression and bitter wrongs has not succeeded in destroying her sense of humour, her passion for mysticism, and her native charm. These qualities we observe in the ineffable merriment of the peasants over the comic spectacle of Broadbent as an unconscious humorist; in the fascinating figure of the Irish St. Francis, chatting amicably with the grasshopper and breaking his heart over Ireland; and in Nora Reilly, quintessence of graceful coquetry, larmoyant piquancy and Celtic charm.
Thomas Broadbent, Shaw's conception of the typical Englishman, approximates quite closely to Napoleon's description of the Englishman in The Man of Destiny. To Mr. A. B. Walkley's characterization of John Bull's Other Island as a “Shavian farrago,” Shaw replied, “Walkley is too thorough an Englishman to be dramatically conscious of what an Englishman is, and too clever and individual a man to identify himself with a typical averaged English figure. I delight in Walkley: he has the courage of his esprit; and it gives me a sense of power to be able to play with him as I have done in a few Broadbent strokes which are taken straight from him.”[189] And in a letter to Mr. James Huneker, of date January 4th, 1904, Shaw says, “I tell you, you don't appreciate the vitality of the English.... Cromwell said that no man goes farther than the man who doesn't know where he is going.” In that you have the whole secret of the “typical averaged English figure.” Endowed with the stolid density and exaggerated self-confidence of the average Englishman, Broadbent resolves to study the apparently insoluble Irish question “on the ground”; but his incurable ignorance of Ireland's plight stands revealed in his declared faith that the panacea for all of Ireland's ills is to be found in the “great principles of the great Liberal party.” Ireland irresistibly appeals to his sentimentalities through its traditional charms—the Celtic melancholy, the Irish voice, the rich blarney, the poetic brogue. “Of the evils you describe,” he says to Keegan, “some are absolutely necessary for the preservation of society and others are encouraged only when the Tories are in office.” ... “I see no evils in the world—except, of course, natural evils—that cannot be remedied by freedom, self-government, and English institutions. I think so, not because I am an Englishman, but as a matter of common sense.” With blundering shrewdness, Broadbent announces himself as a candidate for the parliamentary seat, on the ground that he is a Home Ruler, a Nationalist, and Ireland's truest friend and supporter. “Reform,” he announces, “means maintaining these reforms which have already been conferred on humanity by the Liberal party, and trusting for future developments to the free activity of a free people on the basis of these reforms.” In Shaw's description, he (Broadbent) is “a robust, full-blooded, energetic man in the prime of life, sometimes eager and credulous, sometimes shrewd and roguish, sometimes portentously solemn, sometimes jolly and impetuous, always buoyant and irresistible, mostly likable, and enormously absurd in his most earnest moments.”
Broadbent is a great comic figure, destined to take high rank in the portrait-gallery of English letters. His foil, the Irishman, Larry Doyle, without being less interesting, is less convincingly portrayed. Doyle is cursed with the habitual self-questioning and disillusionment of the self-expatriated Irishman. Realizing the charm of Ireland's dreams and the brutality of English facts, Doyle longs discontentedly for “a country to live in where the facts are not brutal and the dreams not unreal.” His hope for a Greater Ireland is based on his own dream of Irish intellectual lucidity mated with English push, the Irishman's cleverness and power of facing facts grafted on the Englishman's indomitable perseverance and high efficiency. And yet, he has absorbed the English view of his own race; this “clear-headed, sane Irishman,” so “hardily callous to the sentimentalities and susceptibilities and credulities,” if we accept Shaw's estimate of the typical Irishman, thus describes his own countrymen:
“Oh, the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding, never-satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming! No debauchery that ever coarsened and brutalized an Englishman can take the worth and usefulness out of him like that dreaming. An Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can't face reality, nor deal with it, nor handle it, nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do, and be 'agreeable to strangers,' like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets. It's all dreaming, all imagination. He can't be religious. The inspired churchman that teaches him the sanctity of life and the importance of conduct is sent away empty, while the poor village priest that gives him a miracle or a sentimental story of a saint has cathedrals built for him out of the pennies of the poor. He can't be intelligently political: he dreams of what the Shan Van Vocht said in '98. If you want to interest him in Ireland you've got to call the unfortunate island Kathleen ni Hoolihan and pretend she's a little old woman. It saves thinking. It saves working. It saves everything except imagination, imagination, imagination; and imagination's such a torture that you can't bear it without whiskey.”
A noticeable feature of the play's construction is its slow beginning; the first act might more properly be called a prologue. The remainder of the play, although it has little or no story worth recounting, is constructed with unusual care; the interest inheres chiefly in the dialogue and the traits of the principal characters. When Shaw was charged with throwing all attempt at construction overboard, he vehemently replied:
“I never achieved such a feat of construction in my life. Just consider my subject—the destiny of nations! Consider my characters—personages who stalk on the stage impersonating millions of real, living, suffering men and women. Good heavens! I have had to get all England and Ireland into three hours and a quarter. I have shown the Englishman to the Irishman and the Irishman to the Englishman, the Protestant to the Catholic and the Catholic to the Protestant. I have taken that panacea for all the misery and unrest of Ireland—your Land Purchase Bill—as to the perfect blessedness of which all your political parties and newspapers were for once unanimous; and I have shown at one stroke its idiocy, its shallowness, its cowardice, its utter and foredoomed futility. I have shown the Irish saint shuddering at the humour of the Irish blackguard—only to find, I regret to say, that the average critic thought the blackguard very funny and the saint very unpractical. I have shown that very interesting psychological event, the wooing of an unsophisticated Irishwoman by an Englishman, and made comedy of it without one lapse from its pure science. I have even demonstrated the Trinity to a generation which saw nothing in it but an arithmetical absurdity. I have done all this and a dozen other things so humanely and amusingly that an utterly exhausted audience, like the wedding guest in the grip of the Ancient Mariner, has waited for the last word before reeling out of the theatre as we used to reel out of the Wagner Theatre at Bayreuth after Die Götterdämmerung. And this they tell me is not a play. This, if you please, is not constructed.”[190]
Not the least noticeable feature of the play is the omission of the character which, in former plays, appeared as Shaw in disguise. The characters are sharply individualized, each is a personality as well as a type. Moreover, Shaw has seized the situation with the hand of a master; we discern an Irish Molière revelling in the comic irony of character-reactions, and observing the rigid impartiality of the true dramatist. This very fairness allows Shaw a free play of intellect that partisanship would have stifled; every situation is transfused with the Shavian ironic consciousness. I once asked Mr. William Archer which play he regarded as Shaw's magnum opus. “I suppose Man and Superman is Shaw's most popular play,” said Mr. Archer, “but I have always regarded it, somehow, as beneath—unworthy of—Shaw. I should be inclined to rate John Bull's Other Island as Shaw's greatest dramatic work.” I remember remarking to Mr. Shaw one day that John Bull's Other Island revealed greater solidity of workmanship and greater self-restraint than any of his former plays. “Yes, that is quite true,” replied Mr. Shaw; “my last plays, beginning with John Bull, are set more firmly upon the earth. They have ceased to be fantastic, and tend to grow more solid and more human.” The cleverest and truest remark about John Bull was made by W. B. Yeats: “John Bull's Other Island is the first play of Bernard Shaw's that has a genuine geography.”