Shaw’s, Bernard Plays, Dec 13, 25:1
12/13/3 There is a myth that that delicious Irishman, Mr George Bernard Shaw, clad in motley, burst through a hoop in the circus of British public opinion, shouting to an audience of churchgoers, class worshipers, and beef-eaters that the was an atheist, an Anarchist, and a vegetarian. The legend has its picturesque values; but as the truth – or at least the authentic relation of Mr Shaw himself, in the preface to Play for Puritans – is scarcely less picturesque, it is supplemented here. “I first caught the ear of the British public on a cart in Hyde Park to the blaring of brass bands, and this not at all as a reluctant sacrifice of my instinct of privacy to political necessity, but because, like all dramatists and mimes of genuine vocation, I am a natural-born mountebank.” There’s for you! You will hardly detect in this the quality that was so charmingly revealed last Tuesday afternoon in Mr Arnold Daly’s production of Candida – that most delectable of plays, ‘pleasant,’ unpleasant,’ or ‘for puritans.’
The nature of the case admits of no appeal from Shaw drunk to Shaw sober, for whenever was Mr Shaw guilty of sobriety? But it does happen to be possible to appeal from Shaw squiffy to Shaw buffy, as they say in England, or, as we might put it, from the jag-Shaw to the buzz-Shaw. In the preface to the Unpleasant Plays he tells us that an ophthalmic surgeon once tested his eyesight and everybody else’s; but he rejected this construction as paradoxical, and hastened to explain to me that I was an exceptional and highly fortunate person optically, ‘normal’ sight conferring the power of seeing things accurately, and being enjoyed by only about 10 per cent of the population, the remaining 90 per cent being abnormal. I immediately perceived the explanation of my eant of success in fiction. My mind’s eye, like my body’s, was ‘normal.’ It saw things differently from other people’s eyes, and saw them better.” Here you have the quality of the playwright. He sees things better than most of the rest of us, even though he mounts the tail of a cart amid the blaring of trumpets to admonish us of our error.
As long as his cart was the post of dramatic critic on the Saturday Review it was possible to hail his frosty, chanticleer fanfare as the natural note of the Saturday Reviewster. Never has English criticism been more trenchant, even at his wildest; more stimulating, even at his most perverse, more suggestive in its paradox, more illuminating in its brilliancy. But when Mr Shaw undertook to make himself a playwright, most of all an English playwright, the situation was not without its embarrassments. On the Continent there are a great variety of playhouses, ranging from the academic Comedie Francaise, Berlin Schauspielhaus and Vienna Hof-burgtherter to the reactionary Antoine, Kleines Theater, and Volkstheater, where the 10 per cent of right-visioned minds, of whatever sort, (and the rest of us who like to have the ruler of pedagogic authority laid across the knuckles of our intellects,) can see things portrayed as they are, (however that may happen to be.) But in England every playhouse is dominated by a motley assemblage in which stalls, pit ad gallery are mingled in equal proportions. For better and for worse, the drama, in order to give a hard subsistence, must be more thoroughly representative of the public mind than in any other land. It must please the vulgarian, whether rich or poor, the aristocrat and the climber, the able and the obtuse.
Shaw’s dramatic debut, as he tells us, was made in the Independent Theater, that holds a fitful and nomadic existence in London. But even while ostensibly writing for this, it is clear that he had set out to conquer the regular stage. Arms and the Man was actually played by a capital actor named Drinkwater in the English provinces, and by Mr Mansfield here. Candida was put in rehearsal by Mansfield, and abandoned because of the physical difficulties of the leading part. You Never Can Tell was written at the request of the Haymarket Theater, London. The attempt of the Irish agnostic, Socialist, and vegetarian to win the approval of the British playgoer is one of the most interesting episodes in the history of the modern drama.
What was Shaw’s plan of attack? Pinero and Jones were men of the theater almost before they began to think. Original, even revolutionary, as they both are, every stream in the composite magnetism of the audiences awakened an answering vibration in their theatric consciousness. British prejudice and British liberality, British hypocrisy and British honesty, they learned to interpret it and stimulate it by writing from the recognized point of view – even to cajole it and to flatter it with all the mechanism of juvenile lovers, comic relief, and happy ending. It was only by degrees, almost imperceptible and perhaps unconscious, that they rose from the ranks of the followers to the station of leaders.
With Shaw the case was quite the reverse. At the first leap through the hoop he struck an attitude that made the Briton insist on spelling his name with a P, and he answered with all an Irishman’s ardor for a cause and the instinct of Donnybrook Fair for hitting a head whenever he saw it. Artist and analyst that he is to the finger tips, however, he saw that he must recognize the conventions of his theater. As regards the incidents, plot, construction, and general professional and technical qualities of this plays, he worked frankly in the manner of tradition. “I am in these matters a very old-fashioned playwright. Mr Robert Buchanan, a dramatist who knows what I know and remembers what I remember of the history of the stage, pointed out that the stage tricks by which I gave the younger generation of playgoers an exquisite sense of quaint unexpectedness, had done duty years ago in many forgotten farces of the Byron-Robertson school.” But these are superficial matters. With the sincerity of the great soul which he delights to trap out in motley, he refused to bow to the moral and sentimental prejudices of this audience, much less cajole them. Without exception his plays turn on a view of society. To the ideal of duty he opposes the idea of freedom; to the ideal of heroism he opposes the scientific natural history of the eternal duel of sex.
All this is clear in the story of You Never Can tell. Beset by “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 manages in search of fashionable comedies for West End theatres,” he writes, “I had no ordinary practical comedy form as used at all the theaters; and far from taking a unsympathetic view of the popular demand for fun, for fashionable dress, for a pretty scene or two, a little music, and even for a great ordering of drinks by people with an expensive air form an if-possible-comic waiter, I was more than willing to show that the drama can humanize these things as easily as they, in undramatic hands, can dehumanize the drama.” No intention could be more amiable. But when the dramatist of Donnybrook Fair set out to write As You Like It, what is the result? You never can tell!
For his hero, true to his instincts as a social democrat, he chose a penniless dentist. Now, poverty may pass on the stage if it is the result of misfortune or oppression, and is clothed in rags or the mantle of genius. This young man has Mr Shaw’s own cocky self-confidence and wit, being the exponent of all sorts of right, iconoclastic ideas. And who does not realize that fashionable society can only regard dentists with pain, and a nose uptilted in the air? Worst of all, this dentist pursues his love affair, not with the ardent humility, the boundless self-sacrifice of the stage hero, triumphing in the end in an ecstasy of victorious passion, but with the old calculation of the duelist of sex, ending in a fit of terror when he realizes that by his very conquest he has become that abjectest of willing slaves, a husband. To the few who delight in having their preconceptions set topsy-turvy, the play has more than the satire of Gilbert, more than the wit of Wilde. But it never got beyond the preliminary stages of rehearsal. In a delightful chapter contributed to Cyril Maude’s Haymarket Theater Mr Shaw gives a fantastic narration of the episode, in which he attributes the withdrawal of the piece to the fact that, anticipating the wealth of royalties, he bought a new suit of clothes! To those who had seen him day after day ‘in a costume that a self-respecting carpenter would have discarded months before,’ the new suit came as a coup de theatre, intended to unnerve them quite. And so the play was shelved. The point of the story, of course, lies in the fact that what made the play impossible was the old suit of Mr Shaw’s iconoclasms. The theater is a place in which only the dead-head can be got in numbers to submit to the cudgel of Donnybrook Fair.
In the Devil’s Disciple the treatment, (as Mr Shaw points out,) is not so much of the elder school of comedy as of the conventional modern melodrama. The theme, which is the revolt of a sincere nature against a perverse and sterile Puritanism, is more generally familiar to modern ideas than most of Mr Shaw’s themes. The play has been acted in England by Forbes Robertson and here by Masefield; and though far too keen and original for the generality of playgoers, even of critics, it has had no little success. Captain Brassbounds Experiment, delightful play that it is, has never reached the professional stage. Caesar and Cleopatra is mainly known through Mr Shaw’s boast that it is “better than Shakespeare,” in that its ethics are sounder.
The superiority of Candida is both technical and spiritual. The struggle of opposing wills and passions, which, like all playwrights worthy of the name, Mr Shaw recognizes as the mainspring of true drama, is here most clearly defined and most evenly balanced. On the one hand in Marchbanks, the Pre-Raphaelite Christian, with his vision of life which is as vague as it is high; and on the other is the best type of modern Christian, (a Christian Socialist being Mr Shaw’s choice, though the Socialism counts for little in the conflict of motives,) whose idealism is as short-sighted as it is clear, bold, and sure. If Marchbanks has the intellectual alertness, the emotional rectitude of instinct of Shelley, he has also Shelley’s incoherence of motive, his physical cowardice, even his laughable grotesqueness. If Morell is a fountain of such spiritual gruel as is good for “cheap earthenware souls,” a windbag of parsonical phrases to blow conviction into empty minds, he has also beneath it all a devoted steadfast, and courageous soul. The concrete struggle between the two is for Morell’s wife, Candida, who, though living in an atmosphere of simple domesticity – of boot-blacking, lamp-filling, and the slicing of onions – is conceived in the mold of Titian’s Madonna of the Assumption. The first act develops the combat between the two men, and the second brings it to a focus. In the last act the theme reaches its climax in a passage in which Candida is forced to choose between the two. Technically nothing could be better.
The peculiar spiritual force of the play originates in the fact that Candida, true Ibsen woman that she is, however much more gracious and charming, (for the philosophy of Shaw is the quintessence of Ibsenism,) recognizes none of the usual moral conventions as binding. The beauty of her character is all the greater. To quote one of Shaw’s inimitable stage directions, she treats Marchbanks “without the least fear or coldness, quite nobly, and with perfect respect for his passion, but with a touch of her wisehearted maternal humor.” Morell trusts in Candida’s goodness and purity to keep her true to him. “My goodness and purity!” she says. “I would give them both to Eugene [Marchbanks] as I would give my shawl to a beggar dying of the cold, if there were nothing else to restrain me!” And so, when it comes to Candida’s decision between the two, the clergyman is in great trepidation. With a smile of subtle humor, Candida asks what each has to give her. Morell offers his conventional virtues. Marchbanks, with a flight of intuition, offers his weakness and his need of her. Morell sees that Eugene’s bid is the stronger. Candida says that, being a woman, she chooses the weaker of the two, and her husband gives up in despair. But it transpires that by “the weaker” Candida means the clergyman. In such a duel, of course, the husband is always the weaker, even when he is less purblind than Morell – and that’s why he generally wins out. Theatrical as the moment is, it is of a sublimated truth. However devious Candida’s path, it comes back in the end to the most approved, morality. Only, in the journey one has bathed in the well-springs of life, the vital realities that alone make morality moral.
Conventional Christians, of course, if they understand the play, will sympathize with Morell, and will feel the shillelagh on their sconces. Good mothers and daughters will probably not understand what Candida means, and therefore will be scandalized. But that is only because, as Mr Charles Wyndham remarked when Mr Shaw submitted the play to him, it is a quarter of a century ahead of us all. Whatever one may think of Mr Shaw’s ethics, however, his characters ring true; and such another divination of hearts and souls does not exist in the English drama.
That such plays as these, pleasant, unpleasant, and anti-Puritanical, are not given year in and year out is the great reproach of our theater. In the repertory theaters of Germany they are just becoming known, and already Mr Shaw is recognized as in himself a far more interesting and stimulating personality than either Jones or Pinero. The point of view is perfectly comprehensible. They belong to the present that is founded on the past, while he belongs to the present that looks toward a possible future. But in developing the present out of the past they have guided and preserved the national tradition, and are therefore an integral part of the history of English literature. In the future Shaw may be known as a successful revolutionist, and then again, as seems quite as likely, he may be known as the delectable dramatist of Donnybrook Fair. (John Corbin)