The whole drama is played in this first act of the play and the rest of it is chiefly rather commonplace melodrama. Judith, the pastor’s wife, finds her anchors of faith and virtue swept away by Dick’s stupendous sacrifice. At the beginning it seems her duty to hate him. She ends by loving him. But Shaw complains pathetically of the stupidity which made an actor account for Dick’s heroism by exhibiting him as in love with her in turn. “From the moment that this fatally plausible explanation was launched,” he says, “my play ... was not mine.... But, then, where is the motive? On the stage, it appears, people do things for reasons. Off the stage they don’t.”... Herein the dramatist reads his orders aright. It is his business to set the stage and give the show. The solution of its problems and the pointing of its morals—these things are the business of those who pay to see it. Let each work it out for himself—with such incidental help as he may obtain from the aforesaid Friedrich Nietzsche.
Dick is by no means the only full-length figure in the drama. Anderson, the parson, is, in many ways, a creation of equal subtlety and interest. He is a true believer to the outward eye, and he plays his part honestly and conscientiously, but when the supreme moment comes, the man springs out from the cleric’s black coat and we have Captain Anthony Anderson, of the Springtown Militia. The colonists, so far, have fought the king’s red-coats with threats and curses. When Dick’s sacrifice spurs him to hot endeavor, Anderson is found to be the leader foreordained. Off come his sable trappings and out come his pistols—and he leads his embattled farmers to Dick’s rescue and to the war for freedom. It is a transformation supremely human, and in addition, vociferously dramatic. A wary builder of scenes is this man Shaw! A Sardou peeping from behind Ibsen’s whiskers!
One of the minor characters is General Burgoyne, that strange mixture of medieval romance and modern common-sense who met his doom at the hands of the Yankee farm-hands at Saratoga. Shaw pictures him as a sort of aristocratic and foppish Captain Bluntschli and devotes seven pages of a remarkably interesting appendix to defending the consequent battering of tradition. “He is not a conventional stage soldier,” says Shaw, “but as faithful a portrait as it is in the nature of stage portraits to be.”
The same may be said of most of Shaw’s characters. Dick Dudgeon is certainly not a conventional stage hero, despite his self-sacrifice, his white shirt, his bare neck, and his melodramatic rescue in the nick of time. But he is a living figure, for all that, because his humanity is fundamental. As Shaw himself says, some enemy of the gods has always been a popular hero, from the days of Prometheus. That such an enemy may be truly heroic, and even godlike, is evident, but evident facts are not always obvious ones, and it requires plays like “The Devil’s Disciple” to remind us of them.
“Dick Dudgeon,” says Shaw in his preface, “is a Puritan of the Puritans. 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. Once this is understood, the play becomes straightforwardly simple.”
“WIDOWERS’ HOUSES”
Just as Ibsen, when he set up shop as a dramatist, began by imitating the great men of his time, so Shaw, when he abandoned novel-writing for play-making, modeled his opus upon the dramas then in fashion. Ibsen’s first play was a one-act melodrama of the old school called “Kiaempehöien” and it has been forgotten, happily, these fifty years. Shaw’s bow was made in “Widowers’ Houses,” a three-act comedy. Begun in 1885, in collaboration with William Archer, the incompleted manuscript was dusted, revamped and pushed to “finis” in 1892. It is not a masterpiece, but its production by the Independent Theater Company of London, served to introduce Shaw to the public, and thus it had a respectable purpose. Admittedly modeled upon the early comedies of Pinero and Jones, it shows plain evidences that it was produced during the imitative stage of the author’s growth. It has scenes of orthodox build, it has an “emotional” climax at the end and there are even soliloquys—but the mark of Shaw is plainly upon every line of it. The “grand” scene between the hero and the heroine might be from “Man and Superman.” There is imitation in it, as there is in the earlier works of most men of creative genius, but there is also a vast deal of originality.
At the time the play was begun Shaw was engrossed in the propaganda of the Fabian Society and so it was not unnatural that, when he set out to write a play he made a social problem the foundation stone of it. Harry Trench, a young Englishman but twice removed from the lesser aristocracy and with the traditional ideals and ideas of his caste, is the tortured Prince of this little “Hamlet.” Happening in his travels upon two fellow Britishers—father and daughter—he falls in love with the latter and in due course makes his honorable proposals. The father, scenting the excellent joys of familiar association with Harry’s titled relatives, gives his paternal blessing, and the affair bobs along in a manner eminently commonplace and refined. The clan Sartorius has money; the clan Trench has blood. An alliance between Harry and the fair Miss Sartorius is one obviously desirable.
But before the wedding day is set, there comes trouble aplenty. By accident Harry is led into an investigation of the manner in which the Sartorius pounds, shillings and pence reach the wide pockets of his fiancée’s father. What he discovers fairly horrifies him. Papa Sartorius wrings his thousands from the people of the gutter. Down in the slums of St. Giles, of Marylebone and of Bethnal Green lie his estates—rows upon rows of filthy, tumble-down tenements. The pound saved on repairs kills a slum baby—and buys Blanche Sartorius a new pair of gloves. The shillings dragged from reluctant costermongers and washerwomen give Sartorius his excellent cigars. He is the worst slum landlord in London—the most heartless, the most grasping, the most murderous and the most prosperous. His millions pile up as his tenants shuffle off to the potter’s field.