Part 2

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.

The average citizen’s disinclination to see the ridiculous side of his own pet doctrines and characteristics has been noted by Shaw in his preface to Ibsen’s plays. Ibsen has drawn several characters intended to satirize the typical self-satisfied business man and tax-payer--the type greatly in the majority in the usual theater audience. These characters, very naturally, have failed utterly to impress the said gentlemen. One cannot expect a man, however keen his sense of humor, to laugh at the things he considers eminently proper and honorable. Shaw’s demand that he do so has greatly restricted the size of the Shaw audience. To appreciate “The Devil’s Disciple,” for instance, a religious man would have to lift himself bodily from his accustomed rut of thought and look down upon himself from the same distance that separates him in his meditations from the rest of humanity. This, it is obvious, is possible only to man given to constant self-analysis and introspection--the 999th man in the thousand.

Even when the average spectator does not find himself the counterpart of a definite type in a Shaw play, he is confused by the handling of some of his ideals and ideas. No doubt the men who essayed to stone the Magdalen were infinitely astounded when the Messiah called their attention to the fact that they themselves were not guiltless. But it is precisely this establishment of new view-points that makes Shaw as an author worth the time and toil of study. In “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” the heroine’s picturesque fall from grace is shown in literally a multitude of aspects. We have her own antipodal changes in self-valuation and self-depreciation, we have her daughter’s varying point of view, and we have the more constant judgments of Frank Gardner, his father, Crofts, and the rest. It is kaleidoscopic and puzzling, but it is not sermonizing. You pay your money and you take your choice.

VII

But even if Shaw’s plays were not performed at all, he would be a world-figure in the modern drama, just as Ibsen is a world-figure and Maeterlinck another. Very frequently it happens, in literature as well as in other fields of metaphysical endeavor, that a master is unknown to the majority except through his disciples. Until Huxley began lecturing about it, no considerable number of laymen read “The Origin of Species.” Fielding is not even a name to thousands who know and love Thackeray. And Adam Smith--how many citizens of to-day read “The Wealth of Nations”? Yet it is undeniable that the Scotch schoolmaster’s conclusions have colored the statutes of the entire English-speaking world and that they are dished up to us, with new sauces, in every political campaign.

And so it is with playwrights. Ibsen is far less popular than Clyde Fitch, but Ibsen’s ideas are fast becoming universal. Persons who would, under no consideration, pay $2 a seat to see “Ghosts,” pay that sum willingly when “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray” or “The Climbers” is the bill. From these plays, unknowingly, they absorb Ibsenism in a palatable and diluted form, like children who take castor oil in taffy. That either is a conscious imitation of any Ibsen drama I do not intend to affirm. What I mean is that the Norwegian is that model of practically every contemporary play-maker worth considering, just as plainly as Molière was the model of Congreve, Wycherley, and Sheridan. A commanding personality, in literature as well as in statecraft, creates an atmosphere, and lesser men, breathing it, take on its creator’s characteristics.

Shaw himself, a follower of Ibsen, has shown variations sufficiently marked to bring him followers of his own. In all the history of the English stage, no man has exceeded him in technical resources nor in nimbleness of wit. Some of his scenes are fairly irresistible, and throughout his plays his avoidance of the old-fashioned machinery of the drama gives even his wildest extravagances an air of reality. So far but two men have exhibited skill in this regard at all measurable with his. They are Israel Zangwill and James M. Barrie. Perhaps neither of them consciously admires Shaw: but the fact is of small importance. The essential thing is that “The Admirable Crichton” is of Shaw, Shavian, and that “Agnes-Sit-By-The Fire,” in conception, development and treatment, might be one of the “Plays Pleasant.”

And now let us proceed to a consideration of the Shaw plays.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: HIS PLAYS

“MRS. WARREN’S PROFESSION.”

Mrs. “Kitty” Warren, the central character of Shaw’s most remarkable play (and it is one of the most remarkable plays, in many ways, of the time) is a successful practitioner of what Kipling calls the oldest profession in the world. She is no betrayed milkmaid or cajoled governess, this past mistress of the seventh unpardonable sin, but a wide-awake and deliberate sinner, who has studied the problem thoroughly and come to the conclusion, like Huckleberry Finn, that it is better, by far, to sin and be damned than to remain virtuous and suffer. The conflict in the play is between Mrs. Warren and her daughter, and in developing it, Shaw exhibits his insight into the undercurrents of human nature to a superlative degree. Mrs. Warren, though she is a convention smasher, does not stand for heterodoxy. In truth despite all her elaborate defense of herself and her bitter arraignment of the social conditions that have made her what she is, she is a worshiper of respectability and the only true believer, save one, in the play. It is Vivie, her daughter, a virgin, who holds the brief against orthodoxy.

“If I had been you, mother,” says Vivie, in the last scene, when the two part forever, “I might have done as you did; but I should not have lived one life and believed another. You are a conventional woman at heart. That is why I am leaving you now.”

This complexity of character has puzzled a good many readers of the play, but though there is a complexity, there is no real confusion. Mrs. Warren, despite her ingenious reasoning, is a vulgar, ignorant woman, little capable of analyzing her own motives. Vivie, on the other hand, is a girl of quick intelligence and extraordinary education--a Cambridge scholar, a mathematician and a student of the philosophies. As the play opens Mrs. Warren seems to have all the best of it. She is the rebel and Vivie is the slave. But in the course of the strangely searching action, there is a readjustment. Convention overcomes the mother and crushes her; her daughter, on the other hand, strikes off her shackles and is free.

At the beginning Vivie is home from Cambridge, where she has tied with the third wrangler--for and in consideration of a purse of $250 offered by Mrs. Warren. For years she has seen very little of her mother, and now, on the eve of a reunion, she is curious and inquisitive. They set up housekeeping in a small cottage in the country, near the parsonage of the Rev. Samuel Gardner, “a pretentious, booming, noisy person,” and the friend of Mrs. Warren. There come, too, Sir George Crofts, “a gentlemanly combination of the most brutal types of city man, sporting man and man-about-town,” and one Praed, a sort of Greek chorus to the drama. The Rev. Mr. Gardner’s son, Frank, “an entirely good-for-nothing young fellow,” is attracted to Vivie, and so when Crofts casts his eye upon her, there begins the action of a drama.

Vivie, beginning by wondering at her mother’s long absence from home, ends by harboring a sickening sense of suspicion. The elder woman’s unconscious vulgarities, her bizarre view-point, her championing of Crofts--all add fuel to the flame of doubt. At first Mrs. Warren tries browbeating, after the orthodox custom of parents, but to her horror she finds that Vivie will not submit to such an exercise of authority. And soon they are face to face in a mighty struggle and there is no quarter on either side.

Finally Vivie demands to know the name of her father. Mrs. Warren blusters, threatens, begs, evades, lies--and ends by breaking down and telling the truth. Vivie is disgusted, horrified, appalled; Mrs. Warren, at first in tears, returns to her browbeating.

“What right have you to set yourself above me like this?” she demands. “You boast of what you are to me--to me who gave you the chance of being what you are....”

“You attack me with the conventional authority of a mother,” replies Vivie calmly. “I defend myself with the conventional superiority of a respectable woman....”

But for the present, it is Mrs. Warren who triumphs. She has reasons, arguments, causes, theories: Vivie’s shields are merely custom, authority, the law. Mrs. Warren sees her advantage and hastens to seize it. She tells Vivie all--of the squalor that she knew, of her temptation, of the lure of comfort--“a lovely house, plenty of servants and the choicest of eating and drinking”--and finally, of her strong and resolute determination to yield and of the fruits of her yielding.

“Do you think,” she says, “that I was such a fool as to let other people trade in my good looks by employing me as a shopgirl, a barmaid or a waitress, when I could trade in them myself and get all the profits, instead of starvation wages...?”

Vivie is visibly impressed, and herein Shaw shows his skill in laying open the human animal. His iconoclasts sometimes go to mass and his saints sometimes sin, exactly as saint and sinner sin and pray in real life. Vivie, we learn in the end, is the real sham-smasher of the two, but in this scene she seems to change places with her mother. Mrs. Warren, alert to the slightest advantage, drives home her logic. It is a scene that exhibits the play of mind upon mind as no other scene in a contemporary play exhibits it, saving only that marvellous one between Marikka and George in “Johnnisfeuer.” Mrs. Warren’s picture of the forces that overcame her, her sturdy defense of her philosophy of life; her contempt for those who fear to risk their all--it would take a girl more than human to resist these things.

But the season of sentiment and pathos is destined to be brief. Crofts, who is Mrs. Warren’s partner in her chain of brothels, resumes his siege of Vivie. Even Mrs. Warren grows nauseated and Vivie’s own disgust is undisguised. Then, for a moment, Crofts becomes the conventional villain and hurls the sins of the mother into the daughter’s teeth. It is all melodrama here--Crofts grows “black with rage,” and Frank, bobbing up, rifle in hand, proposes to shoot him. And then comes the climax.

“Allow me, Mister Frank,” says Crofts, “to introduce you to your half-sister, the eldest daughter of the Reverend Samuel Gardner. Miss Vivie: your half-brother. Good morning.”

As he turns on his heel, Frank raises the rifle and takes aim at his back.

“You’ll testify before the coroner that it’s an accident?” he says to Vivie.

She “seizes the muzzle and pulls it round against her breast.”

“Fire now,” she says. “You may.”

After that the play goes downhill to its inevitable conclusion. Vivie, admitting her mother’s justification, revolts against her effort to distort it into a grotesque sort of respectability. So there is a parting and the daughter goes off to London, to begin life anew as a public accountant and conveyancer. Mrs. Warren, now sunk to the wailing, snivelling stage, follows her. The final scene between mother and daughter is strangely impressive. Mrs. Warren pleads and begs and screams. At the end of her rope she turns, and like an animal at bay shows her teeth.

“From this time forth,” she shrieks, with the air of a tragedy queen, “I’ll do wrong, and nothing but wrong! And I’ll prosper on it!”

“Yes,” said Vivie philosophically, “it’s better to choose your line and go through with it. If I had been you, mother, I might have done as you did; but I should not have lived one life and believed another.... That is why I am bidding you good-bye now....”

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.

But, nevertheless, the theatricality of his appearance makes an overwhelming appeal to her and she shelters him and conceals him from his enemies--her countrymen--and when he goes away, she sends after him a portrait of herself, just as any other romantic young woman might do. To her the incident is epochal, but Bluntschli himself gives little thought to it. As he says afterwards, a soldier soon forgets such things: “He is always getting his life saved in all sorts of ways by all sorts of people.” So he fights a bit, forages a bit, perspires a bit, draws his pay, eats his meals, and waits, in patience, for the war to end.

But Raina does not forget. Even when peace comes at last and her betrothed, Major Sergius Saranoff, comes home, she still remembers her “chocolate-cream soldier.” Sergius was the blundering ass whose reckless charge sent Bluntschli flying through the night into Raina’s chamber. He is a queer mixture of romanticist and realist, of aristocrat and blackguard, with the ideals alternately of a Cæsar and a potman. One moment he revels in a Byronic ecstacy with Raina, the next moment he is making Mulvaney-like advances to Louka, her maid.

This Louka is one of Shaw’s peculiarly human characters--a sort of refined and developed Regina, taken from “Ghosts” and given an essentially Shavian cast. She has a soul above servility, though she answers Raina’s bell, and when Saranoff, awakening to his own grotesque hypocrisy, revolts against Raina’s idealization of his very tawdry heroics, Louka is ready to enmesh him in her net. She will be a fine lady, this superwoman in a maid’s cap, and like Raina she will go to Belgrade for the opera and to Vienna for frocks and frills.