Chapter VII (1)

But even if Shaw’s plays were not performed at all, he would be a world-figure in the modern drama, just as Ibsen is a world-figure and Maeterlinck another. Very frequently it happens, in literature as well as in other fields of metaphysical endeavor, that a master is unknown to the majority except through his disciples. Until Huxley began lecturing about it, no considerable number of laymen read “The Origin of Species.” Fielding is not even a name to thousands who know and love Thackeray. And Adam Smith--how many citizens of to-day read “The Wealth of Nations”? Yet it is undeniable that the Scotch schoolmaster’s conclusions have colored the statutes of the entire English-speaking world and that they are dished up to us, with new sauces, in every political campaign.

And so it is with playwrights. Ibsen is far less popular than Clyde Fitch, but Ibsen’s ideas are fast becoming universal. Persons who would, under no consideration, pay $2 a seat to see “Ghosts,” pay that sum willingly when “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray” or “The Climbers” is the bill. From these plays, unknowingly, they absorb Ibsenism in a palatable and diluted form, like children who take castor oil in taffy. That either is a conscious imitation of any Ibsen drama I do not intend to affirm. What I mean is that the Norwegian is that model of practically every contemporary play-maker worth considering, just as plainly as Molière was the model of Congreve, Wycherley, and Sheridan. A commanding personality, in literature as well as in statecraft, creates an atmosphere, and lesser men, breathing it, take on its creator’s characteristics.

Shaw himself, a follower of Ibsen, has shown variations sufficiently marked to bring him followers of his own. In all the history of the English stage, no man has exceeded him in technical resources nor in nimbleness of wit. Some of his scenes are fairly irresistible, and throughout his plays his avoidance of the old-fashioned machinery of the drama gives even his wildest extravagances an air of reality. So far but two men have exhibited skill in this regard at all measurable with his. They are Israel Zangwill and James M. Barrie. Perhaps neither of them consciously admires Shaw: but the fact is of small importance. The essential thing is that “The Admirable Crichton” is of Shaw, Shavian, and that “Agnes-Sit-By-The Fire,” in conception, development and treatment, might be one of the “Plays Pleasant.”

And now let us proceed to a consideration of the Shaw plays.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: HIS PLAYS

“MRS. WARREN’S PROFESSION.”

Mrs. “Kitty” Warren, the central character of Shaw’s most remarkable play (and it is one of the most remarkable plays, in many ways, of the time) is a successful practitioner of what Kipling calls the oldest profession in the world. She is no betrayed milkmaid or cajoled governess, this past mistress of the seventh unpardonable sin, but a wide-awake and deliberate sinner, who has studied the problem thoroughly and come to the conclusion, like Huckleberry Finn, that it is better, by far, to sin and be damned than to remain virtuous and suffer. The conflict in the play is between Mrs. Warren and her daughter, and in developing it, Shaw exhibits his insight into the undercurrents of human nature to a superlative degree. Mrs. Warren, though she is a convention smasher, does not stand for heterodoxy. In truth despite all her elaborate defense of herself and her bitter arraignment of the social conditions that have made her what she is, she is a worshiper of respectability and the only true believer, save one, in the play. It is Vivie, her daughter, a virgin, who holds the brief against orthodoxy.

“If I had been you, mother,” says Vivie, in the last scene, when the two part forever, “I might have done as you did; but I should not have lived one life and believed another. You are a conventional woman at heart. That is why I am leaving you now.”

This complexity of character has puzzled a good many readers of the play, but though there is a complexity, there is no real confusion. Mrs. Warren, despite her ingenious reasoning, is a vulgar, ignorant woman, little capable of analyzing her own motives. Vivie, on the other hand, is a girl of quick intelligence and extraordinary education--a Cambridge scholar, a mathematician and a student of the philosophies. As the play opens Mrs. Warren seems to have all the best of it. She is the rebel and Vivie is the slave. But in the course of the strangely searching action, there is a readjustment. Convention overcomes the mother and crushes her; her daughter, on the other hand, strikes off her shackles and is free.

At the beginning Vivie is home from Cambridge, where she has tied with the third wrangler--for and in consideration of a purse of $250 offered by Mrs. Warren. For years she has seen very little of her mother, and now, on the eve of a reunion, she is curious and inquisitive. They set up housekeeping in a small cottage in the country, near the parsonage of the Rev. Samuel Gardner, “a pretentious, booming, noisy person,” and the friend of Mrs. Warren. There come, too, Sir George Crofts, “a gentlemanly combination of the most brutal types of city man, sporting man and man-about-town,” and one Praed, a sort of Greek chorus to the drama. The Rev. Mr. Gardner’s son, Frank, “an entirely good-for-nothing young fellow,” is attracted to Vivie, and so when Crofts casts his eye upon her, there begins the action of a drama.

Vivie, beginning by wondering at her mother’s long absence from home, ends by harboring a sickening sense of suspicion. The elder woman’s unconscious vulgarities, her bizarre view-point, her championing of Crofts--all add fuel to the flame of doubt. At first Mrs. Warren tries browbeating, after the orthodox custom of parents, but to her horror she finds that Vivie will not submit to such an exercise of authority. And soon they are face to face in a mighty struggle and there is no quarter on either side.

Finally Vivie demands to know the name of her father. Mrs. Warren blusters, threatens, begs, evades, lies--and ends by breaking down and telling the truth. Vivie is disgusted, horrified, appalled; Mrs. Warren, at first in tears, returns to her browbeating.

“What right have you to set yourself above me like this?” she demands. “You boast of what you are to me--to me who gave you the chance of being what you are....”

“You attack me with the conventional authority of a mother,” replies Vivie calmly. “I defend myself with the conventional superiority of a respectable woman....”

But for the present, it is Mrs. Warren who triumphs. She has reasons, arguments, causes, theories: Vivie’s shields are merely custom, authority, the law. Mrs. Warren sees her advantage and hastens to seize it. She tells Vivie all--of the squalor that she knew, of her temptation, of the lure of comfort--“a lovely house, plenty of servants and the choicest of eating and drinking”--and finally, of her strong and resolute determination to yield and of the fruits of her yielding.

“Do you think,” she says, “that I was such a fool as to let other people trade in my good looks by employing me as a shopgirl, a barmaid or a waitress, when I could trade in them myself and get all the profits, instead of starvation wages...?”

Vivie is visibly impressed, and herein Shaw shows his skill in laying open the human animal. His iconoclasts sometimes go to mass and his saints sometimes sin, exactly as saint and sinner sin and pray in real life. Vivie, we learn in the end, is the real sham-smasher of the two, but in this scene she seems to change places with her mother. Mrs. Warren, alert to the slightest advantage, drives home her logic. It is a scene that exhibits the play of mind upon mind as no other scene in a contemporary play exhibits it, saving only that marvellous one between Marikka and George in “Johnnisfeuer.” Mrs. Warren’s picture of the forces that overcame her, her sturdy defense of her philosophy of life; her contempt for those who fear to risk their all--it would take a girl more than human to resist these things.

But the season of sentiment and pathos is destined to be brief. Crofts, who is Mrs. Warren’s partner in her chain of brothels, resumes his siege of Vivie. Even Mrs. Warren grows nauseated and Vivie’s own disgust is undisguised. Then, for a moment, Crofts becomes the conventional villain and hurls the sins of the mother into the daughter’s teeth. It is all melodrama here--Crofts grows “black with rage,” and Frank, bobbing up, rifle in hand, proposes to shoot him. And then comes the climax.

“Allow me, Mister Frank,” says Crofts, “to introduce you to your half-sister, the eldest daughter of the Reverend Samuel Gardner. Miss Vivie: your half-brother. Good morning.”

As he turns on his heel, Frank raises the rifle and takes aim at his back.

“You’ll testify before the coroner that it’s an accident?” he says to Vivie.

She “seizes the muzzle and pulls it round against her breast.”

“Fire now,” she says. “You may.”

After that the play goes downhill to its inevitable conclusion. Vivie, admitting her mother’s justification, revolts against her effort to distort it into a grotesque sort of respectability. So there is a parting and the daughter goes off to London, to begin life anew as a public accountant and conveyancer. Mrs. Warren, now sunk to the wailing, snivelling stage, follows her. The final scene between mother and daughter is strangely impressive. Mrs. Warren pleads and begs and screams. At the end of her rope she turns, and like an animal at bay shows her teeth.

“From this time forth,” she shrieks, with the air of a tragedy queen, “I’ll do wrong, and nothing but wrong! And I’ll prosper on it!”

“Yes,” said Vivie philosophically, “it’s better to choose your line and go through with it. If I had been you, mother, I might have done as you did; but I should not have lived one life and believed another.... That is why I am bidding you good-bye now....”

And so ends the play of “Mrs. Warren’s Profession.” Posing as a smasher of shams, Mrs. Warren is the most abject devotee in the whole synagogue. Fenced within her virtue, Vivie is a true iconoclast--with seasons of backsliding, it is true (for she is supremely human), but with no permanent slacking of her unfaith.

William Archer, the translator of Ibsen, says that the play is “intellectually and dramatically, one of the most remarkable of the age,” and Cunninghame Graham calls it “the best that has been written in English in our generation.” And yet James Huneker finds Mrs. Warren “a bore” and Vivie “a chilly, waspish pig,” and Max Beerbohm, confused by the fact that Vivie runs the whole gamut of passions, up and down again, in the four acts, complains that the play exhibits no change in the characters and that Vivie ends as she begins--“determined to go out into the world to work.” Certainly it seems wellnigh incredible that a man of Mr. Beerbohm’s discernment should be blind to the vast battles that rage in the girl’s soul--her horror at the beginning, her yielding to sentimentality and her declaration for sincerity and truth at the close. Were the play ended with the extraordinary second act, his objections would probably seem fatuous even to himself.

“Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” as a bit of theatrical mechanics, is unsurpassed. Its events proceed with the inevitable air that marks the work of a thoroughly capable journeyman: not a scene is out of place; not a line is without its meaning and purpose. The characters are sketched in rapidly and vividly and before the first act is half over we have each of them clearly in our eye--Mrs. Warren and her ancient profession, her vulgarities and her string of “private hotels” from Brussels to Buda Pesth; the Rev. Samuel Gardner and his shallow, commonplace hypocrisy; Frank Gardner and his utter worthlessness and blasphemy; Crofts and his mellow lewdness; Vivie and her progress from undergraduate cynicism and spectacular cigar-smoking to real individualism; and Praed and his soft chanting in the background.

Taken as a play, the drama is wellnigh faultless. It might well serve, indeed, as a model to all who aspire to place upon the stage plausible records of human transactions.

“ARMS AND THE MAN”

“Arms and the man I sing.”

--_The Aeneid._

Arms and the Man,” on its face, is a military satire, not unrelated to “A Milk White Flag,” and Shaw himself hints that he tried to keep it within the sphere of popular comprehension, but under the burlesque and surface wit there lies an idea that the author later elaborated in “Man and Superman.” This idea concerns the relationship of the sexes and particularly the matter of mating. Ninety-nine men in every hundred, when they go a-courting, fancy that they are the aggressors in the ancient game and rather pride themselves upon their enterprise and their daring. Hence we find Don Juan a popular hero. As a matter of fact, says Shaw, it is the woman that ordinarily makes the first advances and the woman that lures, forces, or drags the man on to the climax of marriage. You will find this theory set forth in detail in the preface of “Man and Superman” and elaborated in the play itself. In “Arms and the Man” it is overshadowed by the satire, but even a casual study of the drama will reveal its outlines.

The scene of “Arms and the Man” is a small town in Bulgaria and the time is the winter of the Balkan War, 1885–6. Captain Bluntschli, the hero, is a Swiss soldier of fortune, who takes service with the Servians because war is his trade and Servia happens to be nearer his home than Bulgaria. A machine gun detachment under his command is overwhelmed by a sudden and unscientific charge of blundering Bulgarian horsemen, and he swiftly takes to the woods, being little desirous of shedding his blood unnecessarily. He and his comrades are pursued by Bulgarians bent upon finishing them, and, passing through a small town at night at a gallop, he shins up a rainspout and takes refuge in the bed-chamber of a young woman, Raina Petkoff, the daughter of a Bulgarian officer.

The ensuing scene between the two is a masterpiece of comedy and Richard Mansfield’s performances of the play have made it familiar to most American theater-goers. Bluntschli, as Shaw depicts him, is a soldier entirely devoid of the heroics associated in the popular imagination with men of war. He has no yearning to die for his country or any other country, and, after bullying his unwilling hostess with an unloaded revolver, he frankly confesses that he is hungry and sleepy, and that, as a general proposition, he prefers a good dinner to a forlorn hope. She is a young woman suffering from much romanticism and undigested French fiction, and very naturally she is tremendously astonished. Her heavy-eyed intruder, as a matter of fact, fairly appals her. His common-sense seems idiocy and his callous realism sacrilege.

But, nevertheless, the theatricality of his appearance makes an overwhelming appeal to her and she shelters him and conceals him from his enemies--her countrymen--and when he goes away, she sends after him a portrait of herself, just as any other romantic young woman might do. To her the incident is epochal, but Bluntschli himself gives little thought to it. As he says afterwards, a soldier soon forgets such things: “He is always getting his life saved in all sorts of ways by all sorts of people.” So he fights a bit, forages a bit, perspires a bit, draws his pay, eats his meals, and waits, in patience, for the war to end.

But Raina does not forget. Even when peace comes at last and her betrothed, Major Sergius Saranoff, comes home, she still remembers her “chocolate-cream soldier.” Sergius was the blundering ass whose reckless charge sent Bluntschli flying through the night into Raina’s chamber. He is a queer mixture of romanticist and realist, of aristocrat and blackguard, with the ideals alternately of a Cæsar and a potman. One moment he revels in a Byronic ecstacy with Raina, the next moment he is making Mulvaney-like advances to Louka, her maid.

This Louka is one of Shaw’s peculiarly human characters--a sort of refined and developed Regina, taken from “Ghosts” and given an essentially Shavian cast. She has a soul above servility, though she answers Raina’s bell, and when Saranoff, awakening to his own grotesque hypocrisy, revolts against Raina’s idealization of his very tawdry heroics, Louka is ready to enmesh him in her net. She will be a fine lady, this superwoman in a maid’s cap, and like Raina she will go to Belgrade for the opera and to Vienna for frocks and frills.

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.

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.