Part 5

The Admirable Bashville, or Constancy Rewarded,” a blank verse farce in two tableaux, is a dramatization by Shaw of certain incidents in his novel, “Cashel Byron’s Profession.” Cashel Byron, the hero of the novel, is a prize-fighter who wins his way to the hand and heart of Lydia Carew, a young woman of money, education and what Mulvaney calls “theouries.” Cashel sees in Lydia a remarkably fine girl; Lydia sees in Cashel an idealist and a philosopher as well as a bruiser. The race of Carew, she decides, needs an infusion of healthy red blood. And so she marries Byron--and they live happily ever after.

Bashville is Lydia’s footman and factotum, and he commits the unpardonable solecism of falling in love with her. Very frankly he confesses his passion and resigns his menial portfolio.

“If it is to be my last word,” he says, “I’ll tell you that the ribbon round your neck is more to me,” etc., etc.... “I am sorry to inconvenience you by a short notice, but I should take it as a particular favor if I might go this evening.”

“You had better,” says Lydia, rising quite calmly and keeping resolutely away from her the strange emotional result of being astonished, outraged and loved at one unlooked-for stroke. “It is not advisable that you should stay after what you have just----”

“I knew that when I said it,” interposes Bashville, hastily and doggedly.

“In going away,” continues Lydia, “you will be taking precisely the course that would be adopted by any gentleman who had spoken to the same effect. I am not offended by your declaration; I recognize your right to make it. If you need my testimony to further your future arrangements, I shall be happy to say that I believe you to be a man of honor.”

An American pugilist-actor, struck by the possibilities of the story, engaged a journeyman playwright to make a play of it, and Shaw, to protect his rights, put together “The Admirable Bashville.” The one performance required by the English copyright law was given by the Stage Society at the Imperial Theater, London, in the summer of 1903.

“It was funny,” says James Huneker, who witnessed the performance. “It gibed at Shakespeare, at the modern drama, at Parliament, at social snobbery, at Shaw himself, and at almost everything else within reach. The stage setting was a mockery of the Elizabethan stage, with two venerable beef-eaters in Tower costume, who hung up placards bearing the legend, ‘A Glade in Wiltstoken Park,’ etc. Ben Webster as Cashel Byron and James Hearn as the Zulu King (whom Cashel entertains by an exhibition of his fistic prowess) carried off the honors. Aubrey Smith, made up as Mr. Shaw in the costume of a policeman with a brogue, caused merriment, especially at the close, when he informed his audience that the author had left the house. And so he had. He was standing at the corner when I accosted him.”

Shaw explains that he wrote the extravaganza in blank verse because he had to hurry over it and “hadn’t time to write it in the usual prose.” To anyone “with the requisite ear and command of words,” he says in another place, “blank verse, written under the amazingly loose conditions which Shakespeare claimed, with full liberty to use all sorts of words, colloquial, technical, rhetorical and even obscurely technical, to indulge in the most far-fetched ellipses, and to impress ignorant people with every possible extremity of fantasy and affectation, is the easiest of all known modes of literary expression, and this is why whole oceans of dull bombast and drivel have been emptied on the head of England since Shakespeare’s time in this form by people who could not have written ‘Box and Cox’ to save their lives.”

“The Admirable Bashville” may be seen in the United States before long. Not long ago the London _Daily Mail_ reported that the eminent comedian and gladiator, Mr. James J. Corbett, was casting eager eyes upon it and that Shaw rather liked the idea of his appearing in it.

“He is a man who has made a success in one profession,” the dramatist is reported to have said, “and will therefore understand that there are difficulties to be encountered in making a success in another. Look at the books written to-day, and then consider which you would rather have--a man who can do nothing or a really capable prize-fighter.”

All of which you will find, much elaborated, in “Cashel Byron’s Profession,” which was written in 1882.

“CANDIDA”

Candida” is a latter-day essay in feminine psychology after the fashion of “A Doll’s House,” “Monna Vanna” and “Hedda Gabler.” Candida Morell, the heroine, is a clergyman’s wife, who, lacking an acquaintance with the philosophies and face to face with the problem of earning her daily bread, might have gone the muddy way of Mrs. Warren. As it is, she exercises her fascinations upon a moony poet, arouses him to the mad-dog stage of passion, drives her husband to the verge of suicide--and then, with bland complacency and unanswerable logic, reads both an excellent lecture, turns the poet out of doors, and falls into her husband’s arms, still chemically pure. It is an edifying example of the influence of mind over matter.

Arnold Daly’s heroic production of the play, at the little Berkeley Lyceum, in New York City, served as the foundation of the present vogue of Shaw in the United States, and in consequence “Candida” has been the theme of many metropolitan and provincial philosophers and critics. At the start the vast majority of them muddled the play hopelessly. Candida, they decided, was a sublime type of the virtuous wife and mother--a good woman whose thoughts were as innocent as her acts. It remained for Shaw--and he is usually his own best critic--to set them right. Candida, he explained, was a “very immoral female ... who, without brains and strength of mind ... would be a wretched slattern or voluptuary.” In other words (as he tried to make clear) she remained virtuous, not because there was aught of the vestal or altruist about her, but because she had discovered that it was possible to enjoy all of the ecstatic excitement of a fall from grace, and still, by holding back at the actual brink of the precipice, to retain, in full measure, her reputation as a pattern of fidelity and virtue. She solved the problem of being immoral and respectable at the same time.

The play is well built and thoroughly balanced and mature. Its every scene shows that it is the work of a dramatist whose genius has been mellowed and whose hand has been made sure by experience. The action moves with that certain, natural air peculiar to many of Ibsen’s plays. The characters are not sketches, but definitive, finished portraits. They are not obvious types, perhaps, but even the poet, with all his extravagances, is strangely human.

The Rev. James Morell, Candida’s husband, is a Christian-socialist of a sort not uncommon on either side of the Atlantic. He has a parish in an unfashionable part of London, and beside the usual futilities of a conscientious clergyman’s daily labor, finds time to make frequent addresses to the masses and classes upon the problems of the hour. In his make-up, there is much of the unconscious make-believe of the actor off the stage, though his own belief in himself is unshaken. Public speaking seems to have this uncanny effect upon many men. Beginning in all sincerity, they gradually lay stress upon the manner of saying a thing at the expense of the matter. Their aim is to make an effect by means of the spoken word and in the end, without realizing it, they become stagey and unnatural. Such a man is Morell. By no means, it will be observed, is he to be mistaken for a hypocrite.

Into his home, by some mad, altruistic impulse, he brings Eugene Marchbanks, a moon-struck young man with the romantic ideals and day dreams of a medieval Edgar Allan Poe and the practical common-sense of an infant. Eugene is eighteen. He inhabits a world a mile or so above the pink clouds of the sunset and writes vague, immaterial verses of the sort that all of us invent and some of us set down in pen-and-ink when we are young. At the start, in all probability, Candida regards him as a nuisance. But by the time the play opens she has already lured him on to the rocks. It is pleasant to sit by the fire and listen to his hazy verses. He is a relief from the honest beefiness of Morell. And so Candida has her entertainment and Eugene, poor boy! falls in love with her.

Now, loving another man’s wife, since the beginning of written history, has always presupposed or developed a rather ungenial attitude toward that other man, and Eugene, studying Morell, comes to the conclusion that he is a mere vaporish windbag--a silly bundle of stale platitudes, trite ponderosities and pulpit puerilities. Having the valor of youth, he makes open confession.

“I love your wife,” he says to Morell, “... a woman with a great soul craving reality, truth, freedom, and being fed on metaphors, sermons, stale perorations, mere rhetoric. Do you think a woman’s soul can live on your talent for preaching?...”

Morell is staggered, not by Eugene’s frank avowal of his love for Candida, but by the other things he has said. What if it is true that she is stifled by the atmosphere of the Morell home? What if it is true that she has tired of being shadow and drudge to an obscure, over-earnest clergyman in a semi-slum and has turned her fancy toward the poet?

“It is easy, terribly easy,” he says pathetically, “to break a man’s faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man’s spirit is devil’s work. Take care of what you are doing. Take care....”

It is a time of torment for the preacher and he sees his house of cards trembling as if for a fall. Eugene, all the while, is defiant and belligerent. He adds the virtue of rescuing Candida to the pleasure of possessing her, and the two together work his swift undoing.

“Send for her!” he roars. “Send for her and let her choose between us!”

Aha, my masters! what a scene is this!--what a scene of mad passion for the gallery to linger over breathlessly, for the orchestra to greet with stares and for the critics to belabor and dissect in the morning!

Candida comes in and the two bid for her heart and helping hand.

“I have nothing to offer you,” says Morell, with proud humility, “but my strength for your defense, my honesty of purpose for your surety, my ability and industry for your livelihood, and my authority and position for your dignity. That is all it becomes a man to offer a woman.”

“And you, Eugene?” asks Candida quietly. “What do you offer?”

“My weakness!” exclaims the poet passionately. “My desolation! My heart’s need!”

“That’s a good bid,” says Candida judicially. “Now I know how to make my choice.”

Then she pauses and looks curiously from one to the other, as if weighing them. Morell, whose lofty confidence has once more changed into heart-breaking dread, loses all power over himself and in a suffocating voice--the appeal bursting from the depths of his anguish--cries “Candida!”

“Coward!” shrieks Eugene, divining the victory in the surrender. And Candida--O most virtuous of wives!--says blandly, “I give myself to the weaker of the two” and falls into her husband’s arms. It is a situation that struck the first night audience at the Berkeley Lyceum as one eminently agreeable and refined.

As Shaw explains, the poet, despite the fact that “his face whitens like steel in a furnace that cannot melt it,” is a gainer by Candida’s choice. He enters the Morell home a sentimental boy yearning for an emotional outlet. He leaves it a man who has shouldered his cross and felt the unutterable stimulus of sacrifice. Candida makes a man of him, says Shaw, by showing him his strength. David finds that he must do without Uriah’s wife.

The dramatist makes Candida essay a most remarkable analysis of her own motives. It is after Morell has reproached her, sick at heart and consumed by a nameless fear, to learn if Eugene’s fiery onslaught has been born of any unrest that may be stirring within her. She explains freely and frankly, with more genuine honesty and self-revelation, perhaps, than she knows. Eugene, she says, is like a shivering beggar asking for her shawl. He needs love but scarcely knows it, and she conceives it her duty to teach him the value of love, that no worse woman may teach him its pains later on.

“Will he forgive me,” she says, “for not teaching him myself? For abandoning him to the bad women for the sake of my goodness--my purity, as you call it? Ah, James, how little you understand me, to talk of your confidence in my goodness and purity. _I would give them both to Eugene as willingly as I would give my shawl to a beggar dying of cold_, if there was nothing else to restrain me....”

“Here,” says Huneker, “is one of the most audacious speeches in any modern play. It has been passed over by most critics who saw in ‘Candida’ merely an attempt to make a clergyman ridiculous, not realizing that the theme is profound and far-reaching, the question put being no more or no less than: Shall a married man expect his wife’s love without working for it, without deserving it?” To this may be added another and more familiar question: May not the woman who lives in the odor of sanctity be more thoroughly immoral, at heart, than the worst of her erring sisters?

The play has a number of extremely exciting “grand” scenes and in general is admirably suitable for public performance. The minor characters are but three in number--Candida’s wine-buying vulgarian of a father, Morell’s curate and Proserpine, his typewriter. Proserpine is admirable, and her hopeless love for Morell--a complaint not uncommon among the women he knows--gives the play a note of homely sentiment that keeps it to earth.

As a piece of workmanship “Candida” is Shaw at his best; as a study in the workings of the feminine mind it deserves to rank with some of the best plays the modern stage has to offer.

“HOW HE LIED TO HER HUSBAND”

How He Lied to Her Husband” is a one-act bit of foolery that Shaw wrote for Arnold Daly after “Candida” had made a success in New York. It was presented for the first time on the evening of Sept. 26, 1904, and during the ensuing week was more vociferously discussed than any other one-act play that ever graced the boards of an American theater.

As he made fun of the vaporing Ibsenites of the early ’90’s in “The Philanderer,” just so Shaw got his joke at the expense of his own ecstatic followers in this little appendix to “Candida.” The latter had been presented with huge profit, and thousands of honest playgoers, alert for mysterious “symbolism” and subtle “purposes” had seen in its heroine a great many of the qualities they formerly sought and discovered in the much-mauled Ibsen women. Candida, in brief, became the high priestess of the advanced cult, in all its warring denominational variety. It became a sign of intellectual vigor to go to the Berkeley Lyceum and compare her with Nora Helmer, Hedda Gabler and their company. And so Shaw indited “How He Lied to Her Husband.”

The characters in the little farce are a fashionable young poet named Henry Upjohn, an untamed American husband named Bumpus, and his wife, Aurora Bumpus, a young woman with yearnings. Aurora and Henry have seen a performance of “Candida” and have come away with a feeling that an intrigue after the fashion of Candida and Eugene, is one of those things that no really advanced poet or modern wife should be without. So Henry writes a sheaf of sonnets to Aurora and being determined to play the game according to the rules, proposes that they run off together. They are about to depart, conscientiously leaving the Bumpus diamonds behind, when Aurora, at the brink of the precipice, draws back.

Meanwhile Bumpus happens upon Henry’s sonnets and confronts the poet with the charge of having written them. Henry, determined to save Aurora, “lies like a gentleman”--and incidentally overdoes it. Bumpus, mistaking his well-meant prevarication for impolite indifference to Aurora’s beauty, or denial of it, flies into a passion, and is on the point of soundly thrashing the amorous bard when Aurora stays his hand. Then Henry confesses, and Bumpus is so much pleased by the manner in which the sonnets celebrate his wife’s charms that he offers to print them for private circulation among connoisseurs with broad margins and _de luxe_ binding.

The play is built upon the lines of broad farce, and in New York it made an uproarious success. The encounter between Bumpus and Henry is extraordinarily ludicrous. Aurora throughout is the typical enthusiast of the women’s clubs--filled with vague longings and ambitions, but intensely practical and commonplace at bottom. Henry, during one of their tumultuous exchanges, is about to break her fan. She shrieks the warning that it cost a dollar. He ventures upon a dark, melodramatic oath. “How dare you swear in my presence?” she demands. “One would think you were my husband!”

A pretty bit of fooling, _à la_ “The Wild Duck,” “The Philanderer” and “Alice-Sit-by-the Fire.” Shaw calls it “a warning to theater-goers.” It is.

“YOU NEVER CAN TELL”

You Never Can Tell,” like many of the dramas of Shakespeare, was made to order. Shaw wrote it in 1896 and he calls it “an attempt to comply with many requests for a play in which the much paragraphed “brilliancy” of “Arms and the Man” should be tempered by some consideration for the requirements of managers, in search of fashionable comedies for West End theaters.” And so he laid the scene in England, and made all his characters English and kept as close to the earth as he could. But for all that, he failed to make a conventional parlor drama of it. Shaw is Shaw, and when he set out to build a comedy _à la mode_ he evolved instead a tragedy covered with a sugar-coating of farce. On its face it is uproariously and irresistibly funny; beneath the surface there is as nasty an undercurrent as that of “Widowers’ Houses.”

Fergus Crampton, a wealthy English yacht builder, and his most marvellous family are the chief characters of the play. Years before the curtain rises Crampton and his wife agree to disagree and she packs off to Madeira with their three babies--two girls and a boy. Subscribing to the heterodox doctrine that a married woman is entitled to her own home, her own pocket-book and her own name, Mrs. Crampton assumes the cognomen of Clandon, bestows it upon her offspring and brings them up in complete ignorance of the existence of their paternal progenitor. Also she rears them in strict accordance with her ultra-advanced ideas of independence and individualism. In all matters concerning the emotions and intellect, they have freedom. And so they become unconscionable egotists, disrespectful to their elders, self-willed and obstinate, and nuisances in general.

As the curtain rises we find the Clandons back in England. Happening into a small seaside town, Phil and Dolly, the younger of the three children, scrape an acquaintance with one Valentine, a struggling young dentist (and also a being with advanced views of human events), and Dolly has the honor of paying him his first fee. Through him they meet his landlord, an irascible old gentleman in a semi-nautical coat and an habitual frown. They invite both dentist and landlord to luncheon, and at the meal the discovery is made that the latter is none other than the long-lost Mr. Crampton. Like the leading comedian of a burlesque show afterpiece, Crampton is in consternation and shrieks “My wife!” in a hoarse stage whisper.

“You are very greatly changed,” observes Mrs. Clandon-Crampton.

“I daresay,” replies the wretched husband and father. “A man does change in eighteen years.”

This much of the prologue being accomplished, the personages proceed to the real business of the action. Crampton, outraged and disgusted beyond measure by the manners and dress of his progeny, demands that Phil and Dolly be given over to his care and custody on the ground that their mother is an unfit person to have the charge of them. Meanwhile Valentine, the dentist, has felt a yearning towards Gloria, the elder daughter, and Gloria, after surviving five previous sieges of her heart, looks upon him not unkindly. One brief interview, in fact, serves to advance him to a point whereat he may safely offer her a chaste caress. Her mother, greatly astonished by his easy victory over Gloria’s battalions of modern principles, seeks an explanation. Valentine very blandly discusses the situation.

The duel of sex, he says, is much like the contest between the makers of guns and the makers of ship’s armor. One year one is ahead and the next year the other. In the old days, he says, mothers taught their daughters old-fashioned methods of resisting the wiles of old-fashioned Romeos, and for a space this method of defense was successful. But by-and-by the Romeos learned its weak points, and the fond mammas of England had to devise some new armor. They hit upon scientific education, and for awhile it, too, was successful. But in the end the old story was repeated.

“What did the man do?” says Valentine. “Just what the artilleryman does--went one better than the woman--educated himself scientifically and beat her at that game just as he had beaten her at the old one. I learned how to circumvent the Woman’s Rights’ woman before I was twenty-three....”

But before the play is done the philosophical duellist of sex finds himself the vanquished rather than the victor. He begins to have doubts about his preparedness for the marriage state and essays a polite withdrawal. But Gloria, weighted with the wisdom of five previous amorous encounters, is no easy adversary to lose.

“Be sensible,” says the valiant Valentine. “It’s no use. I haven’t a penny in the world.”

“Can’t you earn one?” demands Gloria. “Other people do.”

Valentine, scenting a chance to flee, is half-delighted, half-frightened.

“I never could!” he declares. “You’d be unhappy.... My dearest love, I should be the merest fortune-hunting adventurer if----”

She grips his arm and kisses him.

“Oh, Lord!” he gasps. “O, I----”

The trap has sprung and he is caught fast.

“I don’t know anything about women,” wails the duellist of sex, pathetically. “Twelve years’ experience is not enough.”

William, the waiter at the hotel, reads the moral.

“You never can tell, sir,” he says, “You never can tell.”

So much for the love making, which you will find, in slightly different form in “Widowers’ Houses” and “Man and Superman.” The battle between the Cramptons, husband and wife, is a more serious thing. In some mysterious way the dramatist manages to keep the spectator from sympathizing with either, but Crampton, nevertheless, is a character in a tragedy and not in a comedy. It is all a ghastly horror to him--the flight of his wife, the cynical, worldwise impudence and grotesque individualism of his children, the perversity and topsy-turveyness of the whole domestic drama. He is no martyr, by any means, for life in his company, it is evident, would be an excellent imitation of existence in a cage with a tiger, but if he is not lovable, he at least has a great capacity for loving. He and Gloria have a memorable encounter, in which she explains her theory of conduct in detail.

“You see,” she says triumphantly, at the end, “everything comes right if we only _think_ it resolutely out.”

“No,” says Crampton sullenly, “I don’t think. I want you to feel: that’s the only thing that can help us....”

In the end he succumbs to the inevitable senilely.

“Ho! ho! He! he! he!” he laughs, as Gloria bears Valentine away. And then, say the stage directions, “he goes into the garden, chuckling at the fun.”

Somehow the boundless humor of the play is forgotten long before this undercurrent of ironic pathos.