George Bernard Shaw: His Plays

by H. L. Mencken

“All that I have composed,” said Hendrik Ibsen, in an address to the Ladies’ Club of Christiania, “has not proceeded from a conscious tendency. I have been more the poet and less the social philosopher than has been believed.... Not alone those who write, but also those who read, compose, and very often they are more full of poetry than the poet himself....”

“The poet,” said Schopenhauer, “brings pictures of life and human character and situations before the imagination, sets everything in motion and leaves it to everyone to think into these pictures as much as his intellectual power will find for him therein.”

Let us suppose, for instance, that “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” is given a performance and that 2000 average citizens pay to see it. Of the 2000 it is probable that 1900 will be persons who accept unquestioningly and without even a passing doubt the legal and ecclesiastical maxim that the Magdalen was a sinner, whom mercy might save from her punishment but not from her sin. A thousand, perhaps, will sit through the play without progressing any further; it will appeal to them merely as an entertainment and those who are not vastly delighted by its salaciousness, will condemn its immorality. But the 900, let us say, will slowly awaken to the strange fact that there is something to be said against as well as for the ancient maxim. Eight hundred of them, perhaps, after debating the matter in their minds, will decide that the arguments for it overwhelm those against it, and one hundred will leave the playhouse convinced to the contrary or in more or less doubt. But the eight hundred, though they have left harboring the same opinion that was theirs before they came, will have made an infinite step forward. Instead of being unthinking endorsers of a doctrine they have never even examined, they will have become, in the true sense, original thinkers. Thereafter, when they condemn the Magdalen, it will be, not because a hundred popes did so before them, but because on hearing her defense, they found it unconvincing.

In this will be seen the truth of the statement purposely reiterated: that Shaw is in no sense a preacher. His private opinions, very naturally, greatly color his plays, but his true purpose, like that of every dramatist worth while, is to give a more or less accurate and unbiased picture of some phase of human life, that persons observing it may be led to speculate and meditate upon it. In “Widowers’ Houses” he attempts, by setting forth a series of transactions between a given group of familiar Englishmen, to show that capitalism, as a social force, is responsible for the oppression that slum landlords heap upon their tenants, and that, in consequence, every other man of the capitalistic class, no matter what his own particular investments and activities may be, shares, to a greater or less extent, in the landlords’ offense. A capitalist reading this play may conclude with some justice that the merit of husbanding money—or, as Adam Smith calls it, the virtue of abstinence—outweighs his portion of the burden of this sin, or that it is, in a sense, inevitable and so not properly a sin at all; but whatever his conclusion, if he has honestly come to it after a consideration of the facts, he is a far better man than when he accepted the maxims of the majority unquestioningly and without analysis.

A preacher necessarily endeavors to make all his hearers think exactly as he does. A dramatist merely tries to make them think. The nature of their conclusions is of minor consequence.

VI

That Shaw will ever become a popular dramatist, in the sense that Sardou and Pinero are popular, seems to be beyond all probability. The vogue that his plays have had of late in the United States is to be ascribed, in the main, to the yearning to appear “advanced” and “intellectual” which afflicts Americans of a certain class. The very fact that they do not understand him makes him seem worthy of admiration to these virtuously ambitious folks. Were his aims and methods obvious, they would probably vote him tiresome. As it is, a performance of “Candida” delights them as much as an entertainment by Henry Kellar, the magician, and for the same reason.

But even among those who approach Shaw more honestly, there is little likelihood that he will ever grow more popular, in the current sense, than he is at present. In the first place, some of his plays are wellnigh impossible of performance in a paying manner without elaborate revision and expurgation. “Man and Superman,” for instance, would require five hours if presented as it was written. And “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” because of its subject-matter, will be unsuitable for a good many years to come. In the second place, Shaw’s extraordinary dexterity as a wit, which got him his first hearing and keeps him before the public almost constantly to-day, is a handicap of crushing weight. As long as he exercises it, the great majority will continue to think of him as a sort of glorified and magnificent buffoon. As soon as he abandons it, he will cease to be Shaw.

The reason of this lies in the fact that the average man clings fondly to two ancient delusions: (a) that wisdom is always solemn, and (b) that he himself is never ridiculous. Shaw outrages both of these ideas, the first by placing his most searching and illuminating observations in the mouths of such persons as Frank Gardner and Sidney Trefusis, and the second by drawing characters such as Finch McComas and Roebuck Ramsden. The average spectator laughs at Frank’s impertinences and at Trefusis’ satire, and by gradual stages, comes to laugh at Frank and Trefusis. Beginning as comedians, they become butts. And so, conversely, McComas and Ramsden, as their opponents fall, rise themselves. In the first act of “Man and Superman,” the battle seems to be all in favor of John Tanner and so the unthinking reader concludes that Tanner is Shaw’s personal spokesman and that the Tanner doctrines constitute the Shavian creed. Later on, when Tanner falls before the forces of inexorable law, this same reader is vastly puzzled and perplexed, and in the end he is left wondering what it is all about.

If he would but remember the reiterated axiom that a dramatist’s purpose is to present a picture of life as he sees it, without reference to any particular moral conclusions, he would better enjoy and appreciate the play as a work of art. Playwrights of Shaw’s calibre do not think it necessary to plainly label every character or to reward their heroes and kill their villains in the last act. It is utterly immaterial whether Tanner is dragged into a marriage with Ann or escapes scot free. The important thing is that the battle between the two be depicted naturally and plausibly and that it afford some tangible material for reflection.