Part 4

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”

Captain Brassbound’s Conversion” is a fantastic comedy, written with no very ponderous ulterior purpose and without the undercurrents that course through some of Shaw’s plays, but nevertheless, it is by no means a bit of mere foolery. The play of character upon character is shown with excellent skill, and if the drama has never attracted much attention from aspiring comedians it is because the humor is fine-spun, and not because it is weak.

The scene is the coast of Morocco and the hero, Captain Brassbound, is a sort of refined, latter-day pirate, who has a working arrangement with the wild natives of the interior and prospers in many ventures. To his field of endeavor come two jaded English tourists--Sir Howard Hallam, a judge of the criminal bench, and Lady Cicely Waynflete, his sister-in-law. Lady Cicely is a queer product of her sex’s unrest. She has traveled often and afar; she has held converse with cannibal kings; she has crossed Africa alone. Hearing that it is well-nigh suicidal to venture into the Atlas Mountains, which rear their ancient peaks from the eastern skyline, she is seized by a yearning to explore them. Sir Howard expostulates, pleads, argues, and storms--and in the end consents to go with her.

It is here that Brassbound enters upon the scene--in the capacity of guide and commander of the expedition. He is a strange being, this gentleman pirate, a person of “olive complexion, dark southern eyes ... grim mouth ... and face set to one tragic purpose....” A man of blood and iron. A hero of scarlet romance, red-handed and in league with the devil.

And so the little caravan starts off--Sir Howard, Lady Cicely, Brassbound and half a dozen of Brassbound’s thugs and thieves. They have little adventures and big adventures and finally they reach an ancient Moorish castle in the mountains, heavy with romance and an ideal scene for a tragedy. And here Brassbound reveals his true colors. Pirate no longer, he becomes traitor--and betrays his charges to a wild Moroccan chieftain.

But it is not gold that leads him into this crime, nor anything else so prosaic or unworthy. Revenge is his motive--dark, red-handed revenge of the sort that went out of fashion with shirts of mail. He has been seeking a plan for Sir Howard’s destruction for years and years, and now, at last, providence has delivered his enemy into his hands.

To see the why and wherefore of all this, it is necessary to know that Sir Howard, before reaching his present eminence, had a brother who fared upon the sea to the West Indies and there acquired a sugar estate and a yellow Brazilian wife. When he died the estate was seized by his manager and his widow took to drink. With her little son she proceeded to England, to seek Sir Howard’s aid in her fight for justice. Disgusted by her ill-favored person and unladylike habits, he turned her out of doors and she, having no philosophy, straightway drank herself to death. And then, after many years, Sir Howard himself, grown rich and influential, used his riches and his influence to dispossess the aforesaid dishonest manager of his brother’s estate. Of the bibulous widow’s son he knew nothing, but this son, growing up, remembered. In the play he bobs into view again. He is Captain Brassbound, pirate.

Brassbound has cherished his elaborate scheme of vengeance for so many years that it has become his other self. Awake and sleeping he thinks of little else, and when, at last, the opportunity to execute it arrives, he goes half mad with exultation. That such revenges have come to seem ridiculous to civilized men, he does not know. His life has been cast along barren coasts and among savages and outcasts, and ethically he is a brother to the crusaders. His creed still puts the strong arm above the law, and here is his chance to make it destroy one of the law’s most eminent ornaments. Viewed from his standpoint the stage is set for a stupendous and overpowering drama.

But the saturnine captain reckons without the fair Lady Cicely. In all his essentials, he is a half-savage hairy-armed knight of the early thirteenth century. Lady Cicely, calm, determined and cool, is of the late nineteenth. The conflict begins furiously and rages furiously to the climax. When the end comes Brassbound feels his heroics grow wabbly and pitiful; he sees himself mean and ridiculous.

“Damn you!” he cries in a final burst of rage. “You have belittled my whole life to me!”

There is something pathetic in the figure of the pirate as his ideals come crashing down about his head and he blindly gropes in the dark.

“It was vulgar--vulgar,” he says. “I see that now; for you have opened my eyes to the past; but what good is that for the future? What am I to do? Where am I to go?”

It is not enough that he undoes his treason and helps to save Sir Howard. What he wants is some rule of life to take the place of the smashed ideals of his wasted years. He gropes in vain and ends, like many another man, by idealizing a woman.

“You seem to be able to make me do pretty well what you like,” he says to Lady Cicely, “but you cannot make me marry anybody but yourself.”

“Do you really want a wife?” asks Cicely archly.

“I want a commander,” replies the reformed Brassbound. “I am a good man when I have a good leader.”

He is not the first man that has fallen beneath the spell of her dominating and masterful ego, to mistake his obedience for love, and she bluntly tells him so. And thus they part--Brassbound to return to his ship and his smuggling, and Cicely to go home to England.

As will be observed, this is no ordinary farce, but a play of considerable depth and beam. Shaw is a master of the art of depicting such conflicts as that here outlined, and Brassbound and Cicely are by no means the least of his creations. With all the extravagance of the play, there is something real and human about each, and the same may be said of the lesser characters--Sir Howard; the Rev. Leslie Rankin, missionary and philosopher; Drinkwater, Brassbound’s recruit from the slums of London; the Moorish chiefs; Captain Hamlin Kearney of the U. S. S. _Santiago_, who comes to Sir Howard’s rescue, and the others.

The chief fault of the play is the fact that the exposition, in the first act, requires an immense amount of talk without action. The whole act, in truth, might be played with all of the characters standing still. Later on, there is plenty of movement, but the play as a whole is decidedly inferior to the majority of the Shaw dramas. The dialogue lacks the surface brilliancy of “You Never Can Tell” and “Candida” and the humor, in places, is too delicate, almost, for the theme. The piece, in fact, is a satirical melodrama disguised as a farce--a melodrama of the true Shaw brand, in which the play of mind upon mind overshadows the play of club upon skull.

“CÆSAR AND CLEOPATRA”

Because he put it forth as a rival to “Julius Cæsar” and “Anthony and Cleopatra,” Shaw’s “Cæsar and Cleopatra” has been the football in an immense number of sanguinary critical rushes. His preface to it is headed “Better than Shakespeare?” and he frankly says that he thinks it _is_ better. But that he means thereby to elbow himself into the exalted position occupied by William of Avon for 300 years does not follow. “In manner and art,” he said, in a recent letter to the London _Daily News_, “nobody can write better than Shakespeare, because, carelessness apart, he did the thing as well as it can be done within the limits of human faculty.” Shaw, in other words, by no means lacks a true appreciation of Shakespeare’s genius. What he endeavors to maintain is simply the claim that, to modern audiences, _his_ Cæsar and _his_ Cleopatra should seem more human and more logical than Shakespeare’s. That this is a thesis susceptible of argument no one who has read “Cæsar and Cleopatra” will deny.

“The sun do move,” said the Rev. Mr. Jasper. Shaw says the same thing of the world. In Shakespeare’s day knighthood was still in flower and the popular ideals of military perfection were medieval. A hero was esteemed in proportion as he approached Richard Cœur de Lion. Chivalry was yet a very real thing and the masses of the people were still influenced by the transcendentalism of the Crusades. And so, when Shakespeare set out to draw a conqueror and hero of the first rank, he evolved an incarnation of these far-fetched and rather grotesque ideals and called it Julius Cæsar.

To-day men have very different notions. In these piping times of common-sense, were a Joan of Arc to arise, she would be packed off to a home for feeble-minded children. People admire, not Chevalier Bayard, but Lord Kitchener and U. S. Grant; not so much lofty purposes as tangible achievements; not so much rhetoric as accomplishment. For a man to occupy to-day the position held by Cæsar at the beginning of the year 44 B.C. he would have to possess traits far different from those Shakespeare gave his hero. Shaw endeavors to draw a Cæsar with just such modern marks of heroism--to create a Roman with the attributes that might exalt a man, in this prosaic twentieth century, to the eminence attained by the immortal Julius 1900 years ago. In other words, Shaw tries to reconstruct Shakespeare’s Cæsar (and incidentally, of course, his Cleopatra) just as a latter-day stage manager must reconstruct the scenes and language of Shakespeare to make them understandable to-day. That his own Cæsar, in consequence, is a more comprehensible, a more human and, on the whole, a more possible hero than Shakespeare’s is the substance of his argument.

The period of the play is the year 48 B.C., when Cleopatra was a girl of sixteen and Cæsar an oldster of fifty-two, with a widening bald spot beneath his laurel and a gradually lessening interest in the romantic side of life. Shaw depicts the young queen as an adolescent savage: ignorant, cruel, passionate, animal, impulsive, selfish and blood-thirsty. She is monarch in name only and spends her time as any child might. Egypt is torn by the feud that finally leads to the Alexandrine war, and, Cleopatra, perforce, is the nominal head of one of the two parties. But she knows little of the wire-pulling and intriguing, and the death of her brother and rival, Ptolemy Dionysius, interests her merely as an artistic example of murder. The health of a sacred cat seems of far more consequence to her than the welfare of Asia Minor.

Cæsar comes to Alexandria to take a hand in the affairs of Egypt and, incidentally, to collect certain moneys due him for past services as a professional conqueror. Cleopatra fears him at first, as a most potent and evil bogey-man, and is so vastly surprised when she finds him quite human, and even commonplace, that she straightway falls in love with him. Cæsar, in return, regards her with a mild and cynical interest. “He is an important public man,” says Max Beerbohm, “who knows that a little chit of a girl-queen has taken a fancy to him and is tickled by the knowledge, and behaves very kindly to her and rather wishes he were young enough to love her.” He needs 1600 talents in cash and tries to collect the money. In truth, he has little time to waste in listening to her sighs. Pothinus, of the palace--an early Roman Polonius--is appalled.

“Is it possible,” he gasps, “that Cæsar, the conqueror of the world, has time to occupy himself with such a trifle as our taxes?”

“My friend,” replies Cæsar affably, “taxes are the chief business of a conqueror of the world.”

And so there comes fighting and the burning of the Alexandrine library and the historic heaving of Cleopatra into the sea and other incidents more or less familiar. Through it all the figure of Cæsar looms calm and unromantic. To him this business of war has become a pretty dull trade: he longs for the time when he may retire and nurse his weary bones. He fishes Cleopatra out of the water--and complains of a touch of rheumatism. He sits down to a gorgeous banquet of peacock’s brains and nightingale’s tongues--and asks for oysters and barley water. Now and then Cleopatra’s blandishments tire him. Again, her frank savagery startles and enrages him. In the end, when his work is done and his fee pocketed, when Cleopatra’s throne is safe, with Roman soldiers on guard about it, he goes home.

“I will send you a beautiful present from Rome,” he tells the volcanic girl-queen.

She demands to know what Rome can offer Egypt.

“I will send you a man,” says Cæsar, “Roman from head to heel and Roman of the noblest; not old and ripe for the knife; not lean in the arms and cold in the heart; not hiding a bald head under his conqueror’s laurels; not stooped with the weight of the world on his shoulders; but brisk and fresh, strong and young, hoping in the morning, fighting in the day and revelling in the evening. Will you take such an one in exchange for Cæsar?”

“His name? His name?” breathes the palpitating Cleopatra.

“Shall it be Mark Anthony?” says Cæsar.

And the erotic little Cleopatra, who has a vivid remembrance of Anthony’s manly charms, born of a fleeting glimpse of him, falls into her elderly friend’s arms, speechless with gratitude.

Unlike most of Shaw’s plays, “Cæsar and Cleopatra” is modelled upon sweeping and spectacular lines. In its five acts there are countless scenes that recall Sardou at his most magnificent--scenes that would make “Ben Hur” seem pale and “The Darling of the Gods” a parlor play. And so, too, there is plenty of the more exciting sort of action--stabbings, rows, bugle-calls, shouts and tumults. What opportunity it would give to the riotous, purple fancy of Klaw and Erlanger or the pomp and pageantry of David Belasco!

Shaw makes Cleopatra a much more human character than Cæsar. In the latter there appears rather too much of the icy _sang froid_ we have grown accustomed to encounter in the heroes of the brigade commanded by “The Prisoner of Zenda.” Some of Cæsar’s witticisms are just a bit too redolent of the professional epigrammatist. Reading the play we fancy him in choker collar and silk hat, with his feet hoisted upon a club window-sill and an Havana cigar in his mouth,--the cynical man-of-the-world of the women novelists. In other words, Shaw, in attempting to bring the great conqueror down to date, has rather expatriated him. He is scarcely a Roman.

Cleopatra, on the contrary, is admirable. Shaw very frankly makes her an animal and her passion for Cæsar is the backbone of the play. She is fiery, lustful and murderous; a veritable she-devil; and all the while an impressionable, superstitious, shadow-fearing child. In his masterly gallery of women’s portraits--Mrs. Warren, Blanche Sartorius, Candida, Ann Whitefield and their company--Cleopatra is by no means the least.

The lesser characters--Brittanus, the primitive Briton (a parody of the latter-day Britisher); Apollodorus, the Sicilian dilletante; Ftatateeta, Cleopatra’s menial and mistress; Rufio, the Roman general (a sort of Tiber-bred William Dobbin); and the boy Ptolemy--all remain in the memory as personages clearly and certainly drawn.

In view of the chances that the play affords the player and the stage manager it seems curious that it was so long neglected by the Frohmans of the day. Between Shaw’s Cæsar and Shakespeare’s Cæsar there is a difference wide enough to make a choice necessary. That a great many persons, pondering the matter calmly, would cast their ballots for the former is a prophecy not altogether absurd. Just as the world has outgrown, in succession, the fairy tale, the morality play, the story in verse, the epic and the ode, so it has outgrown many ideas and ideals regarding humanity that once appeared as universal truths. Shakespeare, says Shaw, was far ahead of his time. This is shown by his Lear. But the need for earning his living made him write down to its level. As a result those of his characters that best pleased his contemporaries--Cæsar, Rosalind, Brutus, etc.--now seem obviously and somewhat painfully Elizabethan.

“A MAN OF DESTINY”

That characteristic tendency to look at the under side of things and to explore the depths beneath the obvious surface markings, which Shaw displays in “Cæsar and Cleopatra,” “Arms and the Man” and “The Devil’s Disciple,” is shown at the full in “The Man of Destiny.” The play is in one act and in intent it is a mere bravura piece, written, as the author says, “to display the virtuosity of the two principal performers.” But its picture of Napoleon Bonaparte, the principal character, is a startlingly novel one, and the little drama is remarkable alike for its fantastic character drawing, its cameo craftsmanship, its ingenious incident and its fairly dazzling dialogue. There is more of the quality called “brilliancy” in its one scene than in most three-act society comedies of the day. Some of its episodes are positive gems.

The Napoleon of the play is not the emperor of popular legend and Meissonier’s painting, but the young general of 1796, but recently come to opportunity and still far from immortality. The scene is the parlor of a little inn on the road from Lodi to Milan and the young general--he is but twenty-seven--is waiting impatiently for a packet of despatches. He has defeated the Austrians at Lodi, but they are yet foes to be feared and he is very eager to know whether General Massena will make his next stand at Mantua or at Peschiera. A blundering jackass of a lieutenant, the bearer of the expected despatches, comes staggering in with the information that he has been met on the road and outwitted and robbed of them by a boyish young officer of the enemy’s. Napoleon flies into a rage, very naturally, but after all it is an incident of the wars and, the papers being lost, he resigns himself to doing without them.

Almost simultaneously there appears from upstairs a handsome young woman. The lieutenant, seeing her, is instantly struck with her remarkable resemblance to the youthful officer who cajoled and robbed him. Napoleon pricks up his ears and orders the half-witted lieutenant out of the room. And then begins a struggle of wits. The young woman and the young officer are one person. Bonaparte knows it and demands the dispatches. But she is a nimble one, this patriot in skirts, and it seems for a while that he will have to play the dragoon and tear them from her bodice. Even when she yields and he has the papers in his hands, she is the victor. There is one letter that he dare not read. It is a _billet-doux_ from a woman to a man who is not her husband and it has been sent from Paris by a well-meaning blunderer that the husband may read it and learn. Josephine is the woman, the director Barras is the other man--and Napoleon himself is the husband.

Here we have Bonaparte the man, facing a crisis in his affairs more appalling than any he has ever encountered on the field of war. There is no gleam of a crown ahead to cheer him on and no crash of artillery to hearten him. It is a situation far more terrifying than the fight about the bridge at Lodi, but he meets it squarely and resolutely. And in the end he outplays and vanquishes his fair conqueror.

She tells the blundering lieutenant that the officer boy who outwitted him was her brother.

“If I undertake to place him in your hands, a prisoner,” she says, “will you promise me on your honor as an officer and a gentleman not to fight with him or treat him unkindly in any way?”

The simple-minded lieutenant promises--and the young woman slips out and once more discards her skirts for the uniform of a young officer. Then she reappears and surrenders.

“Where are the dispatches?” demands Napoleon, with heavy dissembling.

“My sister has bewitched the general,” says the protean stranger. “General: open your coat; you will find the dispatches in the breast of it....”

And lo! they are even there--and all agree that as papers bearing the gristly finger-prints of a witch, they must be burnt. Cæsar’s wife must be above suspicion.

“I read them the first thing....” whispers the witch’s alter ego; “So you see I know what’s in them; and you don’t.”

“Excuse me,” replies Napoleon blandly. “I read them when I was out there in the vineyard ten minutes ago.”

It would be impossible to exaggerate the humor and delicacy of this little play. Napoleon, it must be remembered, is still a youngster, who has scarcely dared to confess to himself the sublime scope of his ambitions. But the man of Austerlitz and St. Helena peeps out, now and then, from the young general’s flashing eyes, and the portrait, in every detail, is an admirable one. Like Thackeray, Shaw is fond of considering great men in their ordinary everyday aspects. He knows that Marengo was but a day, and that there were thousands of other days in the Little Corporal’s life. It is such week-days of existence that interest him, and in their light he has given us plays that offer amazingly searching studies of Cæsar and of Bonaparte, not to speak of General Sir John Burgoyne.

“THE ADMIRABLE BASHVILLE”