George Bernard Shaw: His Plays

by H. L. Mencken

Of course, that puts a new face upon the situation. Thinking over it calmly, Harry comes to the conclusion that the oppression of slum dwellers is a thing regrettable and deplorable, but, on the whole, inevitable and necessary. As Sartorius shows him, they would not appreciate generosity if it were accorded them. Ethically, they are to be pitied; practically, pity would do them no good. In matters of money a man must make some sacrifice of his ideals and look out for himself. And so Harry and Blanche are united with benefit of clergy and the Sartorius money and the Trench blood enters upon an honorable and—let us hope—happy and permanent alliance.

In incident and character-drawing the play is rather elemental. Sartorius is the stock capitalist of drama—a figure as invariable as the types in Jerome K. Jerome’s “Stageland.” And the other persons of the play—Harry Trench, the altruist with reservations; William de Burgh Cokane, his mentor in orthodox hypocrisy; Lickcheese, Sartorius’ rent-collector and rival, and Blanche herself—all rather impress us as beings we have met before. Nevertheless, an occasional flash reveals the fine Italian hand of Shaw—a hand albeit, but yet half trained. That Blanche is a true daughter to Sartorius, psychologically as well as physically, is shown in a brief scene wherein she and a serving maid are the only players. And the “grand” scene at the close of the play, between Blanche and Harry, smells of the latter-day Shaw to high heaven. Harry has come to her father’s house to discuss their joint affairs and she goes at him savagely:

“Well? So you have come back here. You have had the meanness to come into this house again. (He blushes and retreats a step.) What a poor-spirited creature you must be! Why don’t you go? (Red and wincing, he starts huffily to get his hat from the table, but when he turns to the door with it she deliberately gets in his way, so that he has to stop.) I don’t want you to stay. (For a moment they stand face to face, quite close to one another, she provocative, taunting, half-defying, half-inviting him to advance, in a flush of undisguised animal excitement. It suddenly flashes upon him that all this ferocity is erotic—that she is making love to him. His eye lights up; a cunning expression comes into the corner of his mouth; with a heavy assumption of indifference he walks straight back to his chair and plants himself in it with his arms folded. She comes down the room after him.)...”

It is too late for poor Harry to beat a retreat. He is lost as hopelessly as John Tanner in “Man and Superman” and in the same way.

The scene savors strongly of Nietzsche, particularly in its frank acceptance of the doctrine that, when all the poets have had their say, plain physical desire is the chief basis of human mating. No doubt Shaw’s interest in Marx and Schopenhauer led him to make a pretty thorough acquaintance with all the German metaphysicians of the early eighties. “Widowers’ Houses” was begun in 1885, four years before Nietzsche was dragged off to an asylum. In 1892, when the play was completed and the last scene written, the mad German’s theories of life were just beginning to gain a firm foothold in England.

“THE PHILANDERER”

Shaw calls “The Philanderer” a topical comedy, which describes it exactly. Written in 1893, at the height of the Ibsen craze, it served a purpose like that of the excellent revues which formerly adorned the stage of the New York Casino. Frankly, a burlesque upon fads of the moment, its interest now is chiefly archeological. For these many moons we have ceased to regard Ibsen as a man of subterranean mystery—who has heard any talk of “symbolic” plays for two years?—and have learned to accept his dramas as dramas and his heroines as human beings. Those Ibsenites of ’93 who haven’t grown civilized and cut their hair are now buzzing about the head of Maeterlinck or D’Annunzio or some other new god. To enjoy “A Doll’s House” is no longer a sign of extraordinary intellectual muscularity. The stock companies of Peoria and Oil City now present it as a matter of course, between “The Henrietta” and “Camille.”

But when Shaw wrote “The Philanderer” a wave of groping individualism was sweeping over Europe, the United States and other more or less Christian lands. Overeducated young women of the middle class, with fires of discontent raging within them, descended upon Nora Helmer with a whoop and became fearsome Ibsenites. They formed clubs, they pleaded for freedom, for a wider area of development, for an equal chance; they demanded that the word “obey” be removed from their lines in the marriage comedy; they wrote letters to the newspapers; they patronized solemn pale-green matinées: some of them even smoked cigarettes. Poor old Nietzsche had something to do with this uprising. His ideas regarding the orthodox virtues, mangled in the mills of his disciples, appeared on every hand. Iconoclasts, amateur and professional, grew as common as policemen.

Very naturally, this series of phenomena vastly amused our friend from Ireland. Himself a devoted student of Ibsen’s plays and a close friend to William Archer, their translator, he saw the absurdity and pretense in the popular excitement, and so set about making fun of it.