Part 6

William, the waiter, is one of Shaw’s most delightful characters. He is, in truth, the chorus to the drama, and a man of deep philosophies. To everyone’s consternation it is discovered that the eminent Mr. Bohun, Q. C., who is called in as legal adviser to the Clandon-Cramptons is William’s son.

“I’ve often wished he was a potman,” he says. “Would have had him off my hands ever so much sooner, sir. Yes, sir, had to support him until he was thirty-seven, sir....”

William reads Schopenhauer, but he has no intellectual yearnings.

“My name is Boon, sir,” he says, “though I am best known down here as Balmy Walters, sir. By rights I should spell it with the aitch you, sir, but I think it best not to take that liberty, sir. There is Norman blood in it, sir, and Norman blood is not a recommendation to a waiter.”

Bohun, the son, is a blustering, roaring legal whale of the low comedy type. The last act of the play is made a screaming farce by his elephantine efforts to smooth out the family tangles of the Clandon-Cramptons. In the end he reaches a decision worthy of Solomon.

“You can do nothing,” he says to Crampton, “but make a friendly arrangement. If you want your family more than they want you, you’ll get the worst of the arrangement; if they want you more than you want them, you’ll get the better of it. The strength of their position lies in their being very agreeable personally. The strength of your position lies in your income....”

And that is the nearest approach to a solution of the difficulty that the play offers.

“MAN AND SUPERMAN”

Measured with rule, plumb-line or hay-scales, “Man and Superman” is easily Shaw’s _magnum opus_. In bulk it is brobdignagian; in scope it is stupendous; in purpose it is one with the Odyssey. Like a full-rigged ship before a spanking breeze, it cleaves deep into the waves, sending ripples far to port and starboard, and its giant canvases rise half way to the clouds, with resplendent jibs, sky-sails, staysails and studdingsails standing out like quills upon the fretful porcupine. It has a preface as long as a campaign speech; an interlude in three scenes, with music and red fire; and a complete digest of the German philosophers as an appendix. With all its rings and satellites it fills a tome of 281 closely-printed pages. Its epigrams, quips, jests, and quirks are multitudinous; it preaches treason to all the schools; its hero has one speech of 350 words. No one but a circus press agent could rise to an adequate description of its innumerable marvels. It is a three-ring circus, with Ibsen doing running high jumps; Schopenhauer playing the calliope and Nietzsche selling peanuts in the reserved seats. And all the while it is the most entertaining play of its generation.

Maybe Shaw wrote it in a vain effort to rid himself at one fell swoop of all the disquieting doctrines that infested his innards. Into it he unloaded Kropotkin, Noyes, Bakounin, Wilde, Marx, Proudhon, Nietzsche, Netschajew, Wagner, Bunyan, Mozart, Shelley, Ibsen, Morris, Tolstoi, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Plato--seized them by the heels and heaved them in, with a sort of relieved “God help you!” The result is 281 pages of most diverting farce--farce that only half hides the tumultuous uproar of the two-and-seventy jarring sects beneath it. It is a tract cast in an encyclopedic and epic mold--a stupendous, magnificent colossal effort to make a dent in the cosmos with a slapstick.

Why, all the saints and sages who discuss’d Of the Two Worlds so learnedly, are thrust Like foolish Prophets forth: their Words to Scorn Are scatter’d, and their Mouths are stopt with Dust.

Shaw explains that he wrote the play in response to a suggestion by A. B. Walkley, the dramatic critic of the London _Times_ that he should tackle the subject of Don Juan. In his 37-page preface he traces, at length, the process of reasoning which led him to the conclusion that Juan, as he was depicted by the fathers, was a fraud and an impostor. In the business of mating, he says (after Schopenhauer) it is not the man but the woman that does the pursuing. Man’s function in life is that of food-getting. Woman’s is that of perpetuating the race. Hence man’s ordinary occupation is making money, and woman’s is getting married. To protect himself against “a too aggressive prosecution of woman’s business,” he says, man has “set up a feeble romantic convention that the initiative in sex business must always come from him.” But the pretense is so shallow “that even in the theater, that last sanctuary of unreality, it imposes only on the inexperienced. In Shakespeare’s plays the woman always takes the initiative. In his problem plays and his popular plays alike the love interest is the interest of seeing the woman hunt the man down.”

And so, the hero of this new play, John Tanner (our old friend Juan Tenorio) is the pursued, and Doña Ana (Miss Ann Whitefield) is the pursuer. John is a being of most advanced and startling ideas. He writes a volume called “The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion,” full of all sorts of strange doctrines, from praise of the Oneida Community to speculations regarding the probable characteristics of the Superman. He laughs at honor, titles, the law, property, marriage, liberty, democracy, the golden rule and everything else that God-fearing folks hold sacred; he has a good word for Czolgosz; he gives directions for beating children; he curls his lip at civilization; he ventures the view that “every man over forty is a scoundrel.” And then, with all this cargo of nonconformity afloat in his hold, fate sends him sailing into a haven of staunch orthodoxy.

He and Roebuck Ramsden, a gentleman who hangs Herbert Spencer’s portrait on his library wall as a sort of banner of his intellectual modernity, are appointed guardians for Ann, whose papa has just passed away, and John, to protect himself against being caught in ambush by the Life Force, as represented in his ward, endeavors to marry her off to Octavius Robinson, a harmless young man who has lived beneath her father’s roof since his childhood. John is aware of the faults of Ann and has no yearning to be enmeshed in her web. He notices that she is a liar and politely calls her attention to the fact; he observes her pursuit of him and makes open preparations for flight. Finally, in full cry, he runs away in an automobile across Europe. But the Life Force is more powerful than gasoline, and Ann, yielding to its irresistible impulse, follows him--across the English channel, to Dover, and across France toward the Mediterranean. In the Sierra Nevada mountains she brings her game to bay and in old Grenada poor John receives his _coup de grace_. Thus he sinks to earth:

_Tanner._ ... The trap was laid from the beginning.

_Ann_ (_concentrating all her magic_). From the beginning--from our childhood--for both of us--by the Life Force.

_Tanner._ I will not marry you. I will not marry you.

_Ann._ Oh, you will, you will.

_Tanner._ I tell you, no, no, no.

_Ann._ I tell you, yes, yes, yes.

_Tanner._ No.

_Ann_ (_coaxing--imploring--almost exhausted_). Yes. Before it is too late for repentance. Yes.

_Tanner_ (_struck by an echo from the past_). When did all this happen to me before? Are we two dreaming?

_Ann_ (_suddenly losing her courage, with an anguish that she does not conceal_). No. We are awake and you have said no: that is all.

_Tanner_ (_brutally_). Well?

_Ann._ Well, I made a mistake, you do not love me.

_Tanner_ (_seizing her in his arms_). It is false: I love you. The Life Force enchants me: I have the whole world in my arms when I clasp you....

And this is the story upon which Shaw hangs his 175 pages of play--it would take seven hours to perform it in its entirety--his thirty-seven pages of introduction, and his sixty-nine pages of appendix.

The conflict between Tanner and the ethics and traditions represented by Ramsden is riotously and irresistibly humorous. The first act of the play, indeed, is the most gorgeously grotesque in all Shaw. Better fun is scarcely imaginable. The famous Hell scene, which forms a sort of movable third act, is also a masterpiece of comedy. Tanner during his flight from Ann, is captured by a band of social-anarchist brigands, led by one Capt. Mendoza, a sentimental Anglo-Hebrew. Mendoza’s story of his unrequited love for an English lass sends Tanner to dreamland, and he dreams that he is in Hell. And then an elaborately comic play within a play is performed. Mendoza appears as the Devil; Tanner as Don Juan; and Ann as Doña Ana de Ulloa. It is long, this episode, and beyond all hope of boiling down, but the persons who see “Man and Superman” without it miss two-thirds of the drama. An excellent exposition by the Devil of the superiority of Hell over Heaven forms part of it. During the rest of the action the characters discuss every imaginable subject, from love to the higher morality.

“Whatever they say of me in churches on earth,” says the Devil, “I know that it is universally admitted in good society that the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman; and that is enough for me....”

In the first act Violet Robinson, Octavius’ sister, gives her family an overwhelming shock by passing to that moral bourne whence no feminine traveler returns. Her maiden aunt is for turning her out of doors. Ramsden is apoplectic. Octavius is speechless. The scandal is appalling. And here comes Tanner’s chance. He has preached against marriage and now he will follow his preaching with practise. Virtuous or unvirtuous, what are the odds? The Life Force is at it again, and he, John Tanner, is its champion. So he goes to Violet’s rescue grandly--a hero, every inch of him.

“They think to blame you,” he says loftily, “by their silly superstitions about morality and propriety and so forth. But I know, and the whole world really knows, that you are right to follow your instinct; that vitality and bravery are the greatest qualities a woman can have, and motherhood her solemn initiation into womanhood, and that the fact of your not being legally married matters not one scrap either to your own worth or to our real regard for you.”

The limelight flashes here, but suddenly it goes out and Violet’s eyes flash instead.

“Oh!” she exclaims, “you think me a wicked woman, like the rest! You think that I am not only vile, but that I share your abominable opinions.... I won’t bear such a horrible insult.... I have kept my marriage secret for my husband’s sake. But now I claim my right as a married woman not to be insulted....”

And as Tanner wilts his fine theories come crashing down about his head.

The play is such a gigantic, ponderous thing that any effort to summarize it is difficult. The central idea--that, in mating, the man is pursued by the woman--is one that we have seen Shaw employ in “Arms and the Man,” “The Philanderer,” and other plays. As he himself says, it is not a new conception. Shakespeare had it, though maybe unconsciously, and its rudiments appear in the works of other men. Schopenhauer made it classical. In “Man and Superman” Shaw uses it as an excuse for airing practically every radical doctrine in the modern repertoire. “The general impression of the book,” says Huneker, “causes us to believe there is a rift in the writer’s lute; not in his mentality, but in his own beliefs, or scepticisms. Perhaps Shaw no longer pins his faith to Shaw.” Herein the critic makes the common mistake of confusing the dramatist and the theorist. Shaw borrows part of the title from Nietzsche and makes sad sport of the mad German in many a scene, but that is no evidence that he is insincere when, in his introduction, he classes Nietzsche with those writers “whose peculiar sense of the world I recognize as more or less akin to my own.” “The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion” at the end of the play is given, he says, merely to prove that John Tanner, its author, is really the revolutionist and genius the drama makes him out to be. Too often, says Shaw, a playwright is content to say that his hero is a man of parts without offering any tangible evidence of the fact.

All in all, “Man and Superman” is a work worth the two years of effort the title page hints it cost the author. But it is a pity that Shaw didn’t divide it into two plays, a volume of essays, two dozen magazine articles and a book of epigrams. The age of the epic is past. To-day we sacrifice Fortinbras to get “Hamlet” into two hours and a half.

“JOHN BULL’S OTHER ISLAND”

This is a political satire in Shaw’s most amusing manner and, as its title indicates, deals with the eternal Irish question--a problem that, in England, rivals in perennial interest the dispute between capital and labor in the United States. The author, with characteristic impartiality, gives all sides a fair hearing, and “though in the end,” says A. B. Walkley, “all parties are dismissed with costs, we have a conviction that justice has been done.”

Two London engineers--Broadbent, an Englishman, and Larry Doyle, an anglicized Irishman--are the central characters. Broadbent is a political radical and insatiable reformer of a very familiar sort. Yearning to lend a hand in the uplifting of humanity, he turns to the martyred Irish and proposes to be their champion, without in the least understanding them. Doyle, on the other hand, looks upon all reform as so much moonshine. As far as he is concerned, Ireland may go hang. He is neither a patriot nor an altruist.

Nevertheless, when Broadbent decides to go to Ireland to study the problem of saving the Irish on the ground, Doyle consents to go with him, and together they arrive at a primitive sort of Irish village. There they make acquaintance with the folks who constitute suffering Ireland--an unfrocked priest whose mysticism has given him the local character of a lunatic, a peasant fairly savage in his simple superstitions, the fanatical parish priest and other types more or less familiar. To Doyle they are commonplace bores. To Broadbent they constitute a People yearning for a Moses.

When Doyle refuses to stand for Parliament for the district, Broadbent willingly steps into the breach, and in the ensuing campaign all the multitudinous facets of the Irish question are revealed. The honest electors, misunderstanding Broadbent’s altruistic efforts for their welfare, get a great deal of innocent enjoyment out of his orations and a great deal more out of his honest efforts to deal with them as freeman to freeman. He offers to take a farmer’s pig home in his motor car. The car runs over the pig and, in addition, knocks out the window of the village china shop. “There is a jest in every line,” says the critic of the London _Daily Mail_. “The play exists for and by the comic spirit alone.”

In the end, after many farcical situations and excellent quips, the canny Irish yeomanry accept Broadbent as a profitable acquaintance, and as the novelty of his misunderstood good intentions dies, come to regard him more or less seriously. As the curtain falls they are looking forward with interest to certain very material boons he promises to confer upon them--a big hotel in the village, a new tower for the village landmark and links for the village golfers. Meanwhile he has fallen in love with an old sweetheart of Doyle’s and, after an uphill wooing, has supplanted the latter in the fair charmer’s affections.

The play is a characteristically Shavian _reductio ad absurdum_ of the vast ocean of hair-raising schemes and startling theories that has so long deluged the Irish question. Shaw himself is an Irishman, and no doubt the troubles of his native land are of some interest to him, despite his vigorous denial that he is a patriot. Probably the play indicates his subscription to the idea of many an Irishman whose emotionalism has been tempered by English common-sense: that Ireland must cease looking for relief without and seek it within. In so far as this is true, the play is dialectic. But first of all it is a farce by the dramatist whom one London critic, at least, calls “the best living writer of comedy.”

“It’s all rot,” says Broadbent, the Englishman in the play, of some speech made by Doyle. “It’s all rot, but it’s so brilliant, you know.”

“Here, no doubt,” observed Mr. Walkley of the _Times_, “Shaw is slyly taking a side glance at the usual English verdict on his own works. The verdict will need some slight modification in the case of ‘John Bull’s Other Island.’ For, in the first place, the play is not _all_ rot. Further, it has some other qualities than mere brilliancy. It is at once a delight and a disappointment.... Shaw takes up the empty bladders of life, the current commonplaces, the cant phrases, the windbags of rodomontade, the hollow conventions, and the sham sentiments; quietly he inserts his pin; and the thing collapses with a pop.”

The play was given six special matinée performances at the London Court Theater in the latter part of 1904, and Arnold Daly has since presented it in America.

THE NOVELS AND OTHER WRITINGS

Shaw’s four published novels both suffer and gain by the widespread public interest in his plays; gain because this interest serves to keep them somewhat in the foreground, and suffer because, as the work of a very young man, they are ill-fitted to stand comparison with the literary offspring of his maturity. Of the four, “Love Among the Artists” is the best and “Cashel Byron’s Profession” the most popular. “An Unsocial Socialist” is a wild extravaganza that has lived its day and done its task, and “The Irrational Knot” is forgotten. The author’s first novel, written in his early twenties, has never seen the light. The publishers of that time would have none of it, and later on, when Shaw “copy” began to find a market and there even arose a mild demand for it, Shaw wisely decided that the yellowing manuscript should remain in the twilight of its tomb.

The hero of “Cashel Byron’s Profession” has become one of the most familiar characters of latter-day fiction. References to him are made in the newspapers frequently and every time a star of the roped arena marries a chorus girl the love making of Mr. Byron is recalled. He was not the first bruiser to grace the pages of an English romance--as admirers of “Pendennis” and _The Spectator_ well know--but he has become, by long odds, the most conspicuous. It is to be deplored that Shaw did not save him for a play. “The Admirable Bashville,” a burlesque dramatization of the novel, does not answer. Cashel should be the hero of a melodrama _a la_ “Arms and the Man.” What an opportunity he would give to our Greek god stars!

Cashel is the son of an actress and becoming tired of her variable moods and the exactions of his instructors, runs away from boarding school in England and journeys to Australia. There, by chance, he is taken into the household of Mr. “Ned” Skene, an eminent retired pugilist, as secretary and gymnasium assistant. The alert Skene discerns in him a rare “find” and before long he is back in England again, battling his way to fame and fortune.

Before long, through one Lord Worthington, a man of vast acquaintance and catholic taste, Cashel is introduced to the notice of Miss Lydia Carew, a young Englishwoman of huge fortune and most marvellous intellectuality. It is not until page 189--more than half way through the 330 page book--that Lydia learns that Cashel is a prize-fighter. Very naturally she recoils from him, but all the while, half-unconsciously, she has been falling desperately in love with him, and in the end, despite his profession, she marries him.

“I practically believe,” she explains to his rejected rival, “in the doctrine of heredity; and as my body is frail and my brain morbidly active, I think my impulse toward a man strong in body and untroubled in mind is a trustworthy one. You can understand that; it is a plain proposition in eugenics.”

And so Cashel retires from the ring and gradually, though never completely, takes on the polish of civilization. It is a union so happy that it soon descends into the commonplace.

The author was born with the dramatic instinct of a Sardou or a Hal Reid and throughout the book there are scenes of tremendous excitement and clatter. Cashel fights fairly terrific battles--among others one with Miss Carew’s footman, Bashville, who also loves her--and the general air of the book is distinctly warlike. Most of the minor characters are commonplace. Skene and his wife and Lord Worthington are old friends from Thackeray and Lucian Webber, Lydia’s cousin and unsuccessful Romeo, is the ready-made rising young statesman of contemporary English fiction.

“An Unsocial Socialist” is a tract born of the nights that Shaw passed in pondering the philosophies. All of the ten articles in the manifesto of 1845 are preached in it, and in addition there is much that the Hon. “Tom” Watson, the Hon. Eugene Debs, and various other earnest gentlemen were destined to spout forth years later. “I suppose,” says Max Beerbohm, “that there is not under heaven a subject on which Shaw has not thought deeply and indignantly.” “An Unsocial Socialist” justifies this venture. It is the most riotous hodge-podge of cart-tail oratory and low comedy in the language.

Sidney Trefusis, a millionaire, takes to wife Henriette Jansenius, the daughter of a millionaire, and after a brief honeymoon bids her good-bye. He is no ordinary money-king, this strange young man, but a Rothschild with the ideas of a Marx. The times, he decides, are out of joint. Things have grown rotten in Denmark. To live as men of his fortune live would be to give his tacit consent to the immoral scheme of things. And so he deserts his wife, assumes the name of Smilash, and going to a small country town, sets up shop as the local jack-of-all-trades.

From this point on, for a hundred pages, the book is a socialist tract. To his wife, who pursues him, and to everyone else he encounters--the faculty and student body of a refined young ladies’ seminary, the village politicians, chance passersby, enemies, and friends--he expounds his theories. Also--and this is what makes him rise from the common level of propagandists--he practices many (though not all) of the things he preaches. In the end, his neglect kills his wife and he goes ranging England in search of a real affinity. When he finds her he marries her and the book ends--with a most marvellous letter from the hero to the author.

As in the case of “The Philanderer” a great many persons have wondered how Shaw could make such a ridiculous character of a man whose doctrines apparently coincide with his own. In truth, it is highly improbable that Shaw, or any other sane man, ever held to the ideas expressed by Trefusis. The latter’s speech beside the corpse of his wife is without parallel in fiction. And some of his other utterances and acts--how royally and deliciously sacrilegious they are! Certainly an age that finds Schopenhauer’s essay on women a never-ending delight should be better acquainted with the ecstatic shocks of “An Unsocial Socialist.” Trefusis, being utterly beyond the pale, is as productive of wicked little thrills to the orthodox and virtuous as McIntosh Jellaludin, David, Pantagruel, or the latest popular murderer.