And so ends the play of “Mrs. Warren’s Profession.” Posing as a smasher of shams, Mrs. Warren is the most abject devotee in the whole synagogue. Fenced within her virtue, Vivie is a true iconoclast—with seasons of backsliding, it is true (for she is supremely human), but with no permanent slacking of her unfaith.
William Archer, the translator of Ibsen, says that the play is “intellectually and dramatically, one of the most remarkable of the age,” and Cunninghame Graham calls it “the best that has been written in English in our generation.” And yet James Huneker finds Mrs. Warren “a bore” and Vivie “a chilly, waspish pig,” and Max Beerbohm, confused by the fact that Vivie runs the whole gamut of passions, up and down again, in the four acts, complains that the play exhibits no change in the characters and that Vivie ends as she begins—“determined to go out into the world to work.” Certainly it seems wellnigh incredible that a man of Mr. Beerbohm’s discernment should be blind to the vast battles that rage in the girl’s soul—her horror at the beginning, her yielding to sentimentality and her declaration for sincerity and truth at the close. Were the play ended with the extraordinary second act, his objections would probably seem fatuous even to himself.
“Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” as a bit of theatrical mechanics, is unsurpassed. Its events proceed with the inevitable air that marks the work of a thoroughly capable journeyman: not a scene is out of place; not a line is without its meaning and purpose. The characters are sketched in rapidly and vividly and before the first act is half over we have each of them clearly in our eye—Mrs. Warren and her ancient profession, her vulgarities and her string of “private hotels” from Brussels to Buda Pesth; the Rev. Samuel Gardner and his shallow, commonplace hypocrisy; Frank Gardner and his utter worthlessness and blasphemy; Crofts and his mellow lewdness; Vivie and her progress from undergraduate cynicism and spectacular cigar-smoking to real individualism; and Praed and his soft chanting in the background.
Taken as a play, the drama is wellnigh faultless. It might well serve, indeed, as a model to all who aspire to place upon the stage plausible records of human transactions.
“ARMS AND THE MAN”
“Arms and the man I sing.”
—The Aeneid.
Arms and the Man,” on its face, is a military satire, not unrelated to “A Milk White Flag,” and Shaw himself hints that he tried to keep it within the sphere of popular comprehension, but under the burlesque and surface wit there lies an idea that the author later elaborated in “Man and Superman.” This idea concerns the relationship of the sexes and particularly the matter of mating. Ninety-nine men in every hundred, when they go a-courting, fancy that they are the aggressors in the ancient game and rather pride themselves upon their enterprise and their daring. Hence we find Don Juan a popular hero. As a matter of fact, says Shaw, it is the woman that ordinarily makes the first advances and the woman that lures, forces, or drags the man on to the climax of marriage. You will find this theory set forth in detail in the preface of “Man and Superman” and elaborated in the play itself. In “Arms and the Man” it is overshadowed by the satire, but even a casual study of the drama will reveal its outlines.
The scene of “Arms and the Man” is a small town in Bulgaria and the time is the winter of the Balkan War, 1885–6. Captain Bluntschli, the hero, is a Swiss soldier of fortune, who takes service with the Servians because war is his trade and Servia happens to be nearer his home than Bulgaria. A machine gun detachment under his command is overwhelmed by a sudden and unscientific charge of blundering Bulgarian horsemen, and he swiftly takes to the woods, being little desirous of shedding his blood unnecessarily. He and his comrades are pursued by Bulgarians bent upon finishing them, and, passing through a small town at night at a gallop, he shins up a rainspout and takes refuge in the bed-chamber of a young woman, Raina Petkoff, the daughter of a Bulgarian officer.
The ensuing scene between the two is a masterpiece of comedy and Richard Mansfield’s performances of the play have made it familiar to most American theater-goers. Bluntschli, as Shaw depicts him, is a soldier entirely devoid of the heroics associated in the popular imagination with men of war. He has no yearning to die for his country or any other country, and, after bullying his unwilling hostess with an unloaded revolver, he frankly confesses that he is hungry and sleepy, and that, as a general proposition, he prefers a good dinner to a forlorn hope. She is a young woman suffering from much romanticism and undigested French fiction, and very naturally she is tremendously astonished. Her heavy-eyed intruder, as a matter of fact, fairly appals her. His common-sense seems idiocy and his callous realism sacrilege.