In “The Philanderer” he shows a pack of individualists at war with the godly. Grace Tranfield and Julia Craven, young women of the period, agree that marriage is degrading and enslaving, and so join an Ibsen club, spout stale German paradoxes and prepare to lead the intellectual life. But before long both fall in love, and with the same man, and thereafter, in plain American, there is the devil to pay. Julia tracks the man—his name is Leonard Charteris—to Grace’s home and fairly drags him out of her arms, at the same time, yelling, shouting, weeping, howling and gnashing her teeth. Charteris, barricading himself behind furniture, politely points out the inconsistency of her conduct.
“As a woman of advanced views,” he says, “you determined to be free. You regarded marriage as a degrading bargain, by which a woman sold herself to a man for the social status of a wife and the right to be supported and pensioned out of his income in her old age. That’s the advanced view—our view....”
“I am too miserable to argue—to think,” wails Julia. “I only know that I love you....”
And so a fine temple of philosophy, built of cards, comes fluttering down.
As the struggle for Charteris’ battle-scarred heart rages, other personages are drawn into the trenches, unwillingly and greatly to their astonishment. Grace’s papa, a dramatic critic of the old school, and Julia’s fond parent, a retired military man, find themselves members of the Ibsen club and participants in the siege of their daughters’ reluctant Romeo. Percy Paramore, a highly respectable physician, also becomes involved in the fray. In the end he serves the useful peace-making purpose delegated to axmen and hangmen in the ancient drama. Charteris, despairing of eluding the erotic Julia shunts her off into Paramore’s arms. Then Grace, coming out of her dream, wisely flings him the mitten and the curtain falls.
It is frankly burlesque and in places it is Weberfieldian in its extravagance. It was not presented in London in 1893 because no actors able to understand it could be found. When it was published it made a great many honest folk marvel that a man who admired Ibsen as warmly as Shaw could write such a lampoon on the Ibsenites. This was the foundation of Shaw’s present reputation as a most puzzling manufacturer of paradoxes. The simple fact that the more a man understood and admired Ibsen the more he would laugh at the grotesqueries of the so-called Ibsenites did not occur to the majority, for the reason that an obvious thing of that sort always strikes the majority as unintellectual and childish and, in consequence, unthinkable. So Shaw got fame as a paradoxical sleight-of-hand man, as Ibsen did with “The Wild Duck” in 1884, and it has clung to him ever since. At present every time he rises to utterances a section of the public quite frankly takes it for granted that he means exactly the opposite of what he says.
It is unlikely that “The Philanderer” will ever take the place of “East Lynne” or “Charley’s Aunt” in the popular repertoire. In the first place, as has been mentioned, it is archaic and, in the second place, it is not a play at all, but a comic opera libretto in prose, savoring much of “Patience” and “The Princess Ida.” In the whole drama there is scarcely a scene even remotely possible.
Every line is vastly amusing,—even including the sermonizing of which Mr. Huneker complains,—but all remind one of the “I-am-going-away-from-here” colloquy between “Willie” Collier and Miss Louise Allen in a certain memorable entertainment of Messrs. Weber and Fields.
“CAPTAIN BRASSBOUND’S CONVERSION”
