Part 3

Bluntschli, returning, helps to set the stage for her. Raina’s father and Sergius, her betrothed, have met the Swiss and invited him to the Petkoff home, not connecting him with the intruder who invaded Raina’s bed-chamber. They want him to give them aid in the prosaic business of putting up the shutters of war--to show them how to get their men home and feed them on the way. This is his true forte and he comes to the domicile of the Petkoffs--and again meets Raina. She is now twenty-three, and the usual physiological revulsion against Byronic sentiment is beginning to stir her. She sees that Sergius, with all his gallant cavalry charges and play-acting, is rather a cheap sort after all, and in the same light she sees that Bluntschli, despite his frank running away and his fondness for chocolate-creams, is the more honest of the two. The Swiss himself still gives little thought to her. His business is to show old Petkoff how to bring his regiments home, and after that, to return to Switzerland and take over the management of his deceased father’s chain of Alpine hotels.

But, as Shaw hints, the man in the case has little to do with the ordering of such dramas. Raina and Louka, each with her prey in sight, fall to the chase. Sergius wavers, holds himself together, essays a flight, is dragged back, and capitulates. As Louka carries him into camp, the innocent and romantic little Raina is left free to bag Bluntschli. He walks into the net with eyes wide open and, as it were, sword in hand. When he finds himself enmeshed he is surprised beyond measure, but he is a good soldier, is Bluntschli, and this time it is too late to run away.

“Major Petkoff,” he says to the old man, “I beg to propose formally to become a suitor for your daughter’s hand.”

And that is the end of the drama.

A detailed description would spoil the charm of the play’s exuberant and boundless humor. As a comedy it is capital, from the scene of Bluntschli’s entrance into Raina’s chamber to the last scene of all, wherein the Petkoffs cross-examine him as to his finances. Bluntschli is no mere burlesque. In him Shaw has tried to depict a real soldier as opposed to a soldier of the grand opera or Ivanhoe type. He has succeeded, in his way, as admirably as Cervantes, albeit a great many persons--like Raina herself--whose idea of soldierly bearing is expressed in St. Louis and of heroism in the charge of the Light Brigade, have been vastly puzzled by Bluntschli.

Raina is drawn boldly and with what artists call an open line, and her revolt against romantic tomfoolery and humbug is shown with excellent art. Sergius, with his surface civilization and complex personality--“the half dozen Sergiuses who keep popping in and out of this handsome figure of mine”--and his keen self-analysis, is naturally a less obvious type, but even he is perfectly consistent in his inconsistency. Louka is the female Don Juan--the Donna Anna of “Man and Superman,”--to the life. Her deliberate ensnarement of Sergius, in itself would make a drama well worth the writing. The Petkoffs, Raina’s parents, are simple-minded barbarians, and Nicola, their man-servant, who willingly resigns Louka to Sergius, is of a breed not peculiar to Bulgaria.

The play, despite its abounding humor and excellent characterizations, is not to be numbered among Shaw’s best. The second act, which should be the strongest, is the weakest, and the remarkable originality and humor of the first scene rather detract from those that follow. Shaw describes the play as his first attempt at writing a drama comprehensible to the general public. With this object in view, he lavished upon it a wealth of wit, but it is to be doubted if the real, inner humor of the action has ever gone home. Mansfield still has it in his repertory, but he seldom presents it. Persons who admire “Beaucaire” and “Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde” are not apt to demand it.

“THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLE”

In “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” we saw individuals battling against the law and in “Arms and the Man” we observed romanticism in an _opera-bouffe_ catch-as-catch-can struggle with realism. In “The Devil’s Disciple” we have revealed religion bruising its fists upon the hard head of impious doubt. Dick Dudgeon, the hero (and he is a hero of the good old white-shirted, bare-necked, melodramatic sort) laughs at the commandments and the beatitudes--and then puts the virtuous to rout by an act of supreme nobility that few of them, with all their faith in post-mortem reward, would dare to venture.

It is a problem in human motives that looks formidable. Why does Dick, the excommunicated, brave Hell to save another? Why does he face death, dishonor, shame and damnation, with no hope of earthly recompense and less of glory in the beyond? For the same reason, in truth, that moved Huckleberry Finn to save the nigger Jim at the cost of his immortal soul. “I had no motive,” says Dick, in an attempt at self-analysis, “and no interest. All I can tell you is that when it came to the point whether I would take my neck out of the noose and put another man’s into it, I couldn’t do it.” You will find the psychology of this worked out in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, the mad German. If you think well of your belief in the good and the beautiful, don’t read them.

The scene of “The Devil’s Disciple” is a small town in New England and the time is the first year of the Revolutionary War. Shaw set the action back this far because he wanted to display Dick against a background of peculiarly steadfast and rock-ribbed faith, and the present, alackaday! has little of it that isn’t wobbly. Dick’s mother is a Puritan of the Puritans--a fetich worshiper whose fetich is the mortification of the flesh. She flays her body, her mind and her soul and in the end essays to flay the souls of those about her. Against all of this Dick revolts. He doesn’t know exactly why, for Darwin is unborn and doubt is still indecent, but he revolts, nevertheless. And so he becomes a disciple of the devil.

King George’s red-coats are abroad in the land, on the hunt for rebels, and Dick’s uncle, a blasphemer and sinner like himself, is nabbed by them and hanged for treason. Dick sees the hanging and enjoys it as a spectacle, but it fails to make him a tory, and he comes home as much an enemy of church and king as ever. Then the soldiers come nearer and the rumor spreads that they propose to hang Dick as horrible example the second. Anthony Anderson, the village pastor, undertakes to warn him, and incidentally to counsel him against his sacrilege and his sins. Dick, in turn, warns Anderson. King George’s men, he says, will not choose the village heretic the next time. The uselessness of such a course has been shown in the case of his late and unlamented uncle. When they come to hang again, he points out, they will select a patriot whose taking off will leave a profound impression and something approaching regret--to wit, Anderson himself. The pastor laughs at this. He is a holy man and a truly good one. He fears no military but the hosts of darkness.

But Dick is right after all. One morning he goes to the Anderson home and while he is there the pastor is called away to the bedside of his (Dick’s) mother. Dick does not think it is worth while to go himself. His mother has tortured and preached at him from birth and he frankly hates her. During the pastor’s absence soldiers come to the door. They have a warrant for the good dominie, charging him with treason. The sergeant sees Dick, and--

“Anthony Anderson,” he says, “I arrest you in King George’s name as a rebel.... Put on your coat and come along....”

And so Dick faces his Calvary, with no faith to lead him on. By all the books he should seek shelter behind the truth and leave self-sacrifice to the godly. But he is a man, this devil’s disciple, and he doesn’t.

“Yes,” he says, “I’ll come.”

The whole drama is played in this first act of the play and the rest of it is chiefly rather commonplace melodrama. Judith, the pastor’s wife, finds her anchors of faith and virtue swept away by Dick’s stupendous sacrifice. At the beginning it seems her duty to hate him. She ends by loving him. But Shaw complains pathetically of the stupidity which made an actor account for Dick’s heroism by exhibiting him as in love with her in turn. “From the moment that this fatally plausible explanation was launched,” he says, “my play ... was not mine.... But, then, where is the motive? On the stage, it appears, people do things for reasons. Off the stage they don’t.”... Herein the dramatist reads his orders aright. It is his business to set the stage and give the show. The solution of its problems and the pointing of its morals--these things are the business of those who pay to see it. Let each work it out for himself--with such incidental help as he may obtain from the aforesaid Friedrich Nietzsche.

Dick is by no means the only full-length figure in the drama. Anderson, the parson, is, in many ways, a creation of equal subtlety and interest. He is a true believer to the outward eye, and he plays his part honestly and conscientiously, but when the supreme moment comes, the man springs out from the cleric’s black coat and we have Captain Anthony Anderson, of the Springtown Militia. The colonists, so far, have fought the king’s red-coats with threats and curses. When Dick’s sacrifice spurs him to hot endeavor, Anderson is found to be the leader foreordained. Off come his sable trappings and out come his pistols--and he leads his embattled farmers to Dick’s rescue and to the war for freedom. It is a transformation supremely human, and in addition, vociferously dramatic. A wary builder of scenes is this man Shaw! A Sardou peeping from behind Ibsen’s whiskers!

One of the minor characters is General Burgoyne, that strange mixture of medieval romance and modern common-sense who met his doom at the hands of the Yankee farm-hands at Saratoga. Shaw pictures him as a sort of aristocratic and foppish Captain Bluntschli and devotes seven pages of a remarkably interesting appendix to defending the consequent battering of tradition. “He is not a conventional stage soldier,” says Shaw, “but as faithful a portrait as it is in the nature of stage portraits to be.”

The same may be said of most of Shaw’s characters. Dick Dudgeon is certainly not a conventional stage hero, despite his self-sacrifice, his white shirt, his bare neck, and his melodramatic rescue in the nick of time. But he is a living figure, for all that, because his humanity is fundamental. As Shaw himself says, some enemy of the gods has always been a popular hero, from the days of Prometheus. That such an enemy may be truly heroic, and even godlike, is evident, but evident facts are not always obvious ones, and it requires plays like “The Devil’s Disciple” to remind us of them.

“Dick Dudgeon,” says Shaw in his preface, “is a Puritan of the Puritans. He is brought up in a household where the Puritan religion has died and become, in its corruption, an excuse for his mother’s master-passion of hatred in all its phases of cruelty and envy. In such a home he finds himself starved of religion, which is the most clamorous need of his nature. With all his mother’s indomitable selfishness, but with pity instead of hatred as his master-passion, he pities the devil, takes his side, and champions him, like a true Covenanter, against the world. He thus becomes, like all genuinely religious men, a reprobate and an outcast. Once this is understood, the play becomes straightforwardly simple.”

“WIDOWERS’ HOUSES”

Just as Ibsen, when he set up shop as a dramatist, began by imitating the great men of his time, so Shaw, when he abandoned novel-writing for play-making, modeled his _opus_ upon the dramas then in fashion. Ibsen’s first play was a one-act melodrama of the old school called “Kiaempehöien” and it has been forgotten, happily, these fifty years. Shaw’s bow was made in “Widowers’ Houses,” a three-act comedy. Begun in 1885, in collaboration with William Archer, the incompleted manuscript was dusted, revamped and pushed to “finis” in 1892. It is not a masterpiece, but its production by the Independent Theater Company of London, served to introduce Shaw to the public, and thus it had a respectable purpose. Admittedly modeled upon the early comedies of Pinero and Jones, it shows plain evidences that it was produced during the imitative stage of the author’s growth. It has scenes of orthodox build, it has an “emotional” climax at the end and there are even soliloquys--but the mark of Shaw is plainly upon every line of it. The “grand” scene between the hero and the heroine might be from “Man and Superman.” There is imitation in it, as there is in the earlier works of most men of creative genius, but there is also a vast deal of originality.

At the time the play was begun Shaw was engrossed in the propaganda of the Fabian Society and so it was not unnatural that, when he set out to write a play he made a social problem the foundation stone of it. Harry Trench, a young Englishman but twice removed from the lesser aristocracy and with the traditional ideals and ideas of his caste, is the tortured Prince of this little “Hamlet.” Happening in his travels upon two fellow Britishers--father and daughter--he falls in love with the latter and in due course makes his honorable proposals. The father, scenting the excellent joys of familiar association with Harry’s titled relatives, gives his paternal blessing, and the affair bobs along in a manner eminently commonplace and refined. The clan Sartorius has money; the clan Trench has blood. An alliance between Harry and the fair Miss Sartorius is one obviously desirable.

But before the wedding day is set, there comes trouble aplenty. By accident Harry is led into an investigation of the manner in which the Sartorius pounds, shillings and pence reach the wide pockets of his _fiancée’s_ father. What he discovers fairly horrifies him. Papa Sartorius wrings his thousands from the people of the gutter. Down in the slums of St. Giles, of Marylebone and of Bethnal Green lie his estates--rows upon rows of filthy, tumble-down tenements. The pound saved on repairs kills a slum baby--and buys Blanche Sartorius a new pair of gloves. The shillings dragged from reluctant costermongers and washerwomen give Sartorius his excellent cigars. He is the worst slum landlord in London--the most heartless, the most grasping, the most murderous and the most prosperous. His millions pile up as his tenants shuffle off to the potter’s field.

Harry’s disgust is unspeakable. He will have nothing of the Sartorius hoard. Rather starve upon his miserable $3500 a year! He will work--he has a license to practise upon his fellow-men as physician and surgeon--and he and Blanche will face the world bravely. But Blanche, unfortunately, does not see it in that light. Harry’s income is regular and safe, but seven hundred pounds is no revenue for the daughter and son-in-law of a millionaire. And when she discovers the reason for Harry’s singular self-sacrifice and modesty, her pride rages high. After all, Sartorius is her father. He may squeeze his tenants for the last farthing, but he has been good to her. His money has been hers, and even when she fathoms the depths of his heartlessness, her shame does not break her loyalty. So she sends Harry about his business and seeks consolation in maidenly tears. Thus they remain for a space--he sacrificing his love to his ideals of honesty and honor, and she offering her virtuous affection upon the altar of filial allegiance and pride.

It is Sartorius who solves the problem. He is not shocked by Harry’s revolt, by any means. The world, as he knows, is full of such silly scruples and senseless ideas of altruism. And, at any rate, he is willing to give his tenants as much as he can afford. He explains it all to Blanche.

“I have made up my mind,” he says, “to improve the property and get in a new class of tenants.... I am only waiting for the consent of the ground landlord, Lady Roxdale.”

Lady Roxdale is Harry’s aristocratic aunt and Blanche’s face shows her surprise.

“Lady Roxdale!” she exclaims.

“Yes,” replies her fond papa. “But I shall expect the mortgagee to take his share of the risk.”

“The mortgagee!” says Blanche. “Do you mean----”

“Harry Trench,” says Sartorius blandly, finishing the sentence for her.

And so the melancholy fact is laid bare that Harry’s safe and honorable $3500 a year, upon which he proposed to Blanche that they board and lodge in lieu of her father’s tainted thousands, is just as dirty, penny for penny, as the latter. Sartorius puts it before Harry, too, and very plainly.

“When I,” he says, “to use your own words, screw and bully and drive those people to pay what they have freely undertaken to pay me, I cannot touch one penny of the money they give me until I have first paid you your seven hundred pounds out of it....”

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.

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.