Chapter X (1)

While resting from the over-exertions of the political campaign at the time of the General Election in 1892, Shaw came upon the manuscript of the partially finished play begun in 1885. “Tickled” by the play, and urged by Mr. Grein, Shaw began work upon it anew. “But for Mr. Grein and the Independent Theatre Society,” Shaw confessed, “it would have gone back to its drawer and lain there another seven years, if not for ever.”[134] With this play, _Widowers' Houses_, Shaw made his _début_ upon the English stage as a problem dramatist with the avowed purpose of exposing existent evils in the prevailing social order. _Widowers' Houses_ is the first native play of the New School in England consciously devoted to the exposure of the social guilt of the community.

In 1885, shortly after the completion of the novels of his nonage, Shaw began this play in collaboration with Mr. William Archer. After learning to know Shaw by sight in the British Museum reading-room, as a “young man of tawny complexion and attire,” studying alternately, if not simultaneously, Karl Marx's _Das Kapital_ (in French), and an orchestral score of _Tristan and Isolde_, Mr. Archer finally met him at the house of a common acquaintance.

_Joseph Simpson_
_Courtesy of the Artist._

From the original black and white wash-drawing.
Reproduced by permission of the owner, Mr. J. Murray Allison.

“I learned from himself that he was the author of several
unpublished masterpieces of fiction. Construction, he owned
with engaging modesty, was not his strong point, but his
dialogue was incomparable. Now, in those days I had still a
certain hankering after the rewards, if not the glories, of the
playwright. With a modesty in no way inferior to Mr. Shaw's,
I had realized that I could not write dialogue a bit; but I
still considered myself a born constructor. I proposed, and Mr.
Shaw agreed to, a collaboration. I was to provide him with one
of the numerous plots I kept in stock, and he was to write the
dialogue. So said, so done. I drew out, scene by scene, the
scheme of a twaddling cup-and-saucer comedy vaguely suggested
by Augier's _Ceinture Dorée_. The details I forget, but I know
it was to be called _Rhinegold_, was to open, as _Widowers'
Houses_ actually does, in an hotel garden on the Rhine, and was
to have two heroines, a sentimental and a comic one, according
to the accepted Robertson-Byron-Carton formula. I fancy the
hero was to propose to the sentimental heroine, believing
her to be the poor niece instead of the rich daughter of the
sweater, or slum-landlord, or whatever he may have been; and
I know he was to carry on in the most heroic fashion, and was
ultimately to succeed in throwing the tainted treasure of his
father-in-law, metaphorically speaking, into the Rhine. All
this I gravely propounded to Mr. Shaw, who listened with no
less admirable gravity. Then I thought the matter had dropped,
for I heard no more of it for many weeks. I used to see Mr.
Shaw at the Museum, laboriously writing page after page of the
most exquisitely neat shorthand at the rate of about three
words a minute, but it did not occur to me that this was our
play. After about six weeks he said to me: 'Look here: I've
written half the first act of that comedy, and I've used up
all your plot. Now I want some more to go on with.' I told him
that my plot was a rounded and perfect organic whole, and that
I could no more eke it out in this fashion than I could provide
him or myself with a set of supplementary arms and legs. I
begged him to extend his shorthand and let me see what he had
done; but this would have taken him far too long. He tried to
decipher some of it orally, but the process was too lingering
and painful for endurance. So he simply gave me an outline in
narrative of what he had done; and I saw that, so far from
using up my plot, he had not even touched it. There the matter
rested for months and years. Mr. Shaw would now and then
hold out vague threats of finishing 'our play,' but I felt no
serious alarm. I thought (judging from my own experience in
other cases) that when he came to read over in cold blood what
he had written, he would see what impossible stuff it was.
Perhaps my free utterance of this view piqued him; perhaps
he felt impelled to remove from the Independent Theatre the
reproach of dealing solely in foreign products. The fire of his
genius, at all events, was not to be quenched by my persistent
application of the wet blanket. He finished his play; Mr.
Grein, as in duty bound, accepted it; and the result was the
performance of Friday last at the Independent Theatre.”[135]

According to Shaw's account, he produced a horribly incongruous effect by “laying violent hands on his (Archer's) thoroughly planned scheme for a sympathetically romantic 'well-made play' of the type then in vogue,” and perversely distorting it into a “grotesquely realistic exposure of slum-landlordism, municipal jobbery, and the pecuniary and matrimonial ties between it and the pleasant people of 'independent' incomes who imagine that such sordid matters do not touch their own lives.” Shortly before the production of _Widowers' Houses_, there appeared an “Interview” with Shaw, purporting to give some idea of the much-mooted play, but leaving the public in doubt as to the seriousness with which this mock-solemn information was to be taken.[136] “Sir,” said Shaw sternly to the interviewer (himself!), “it (my play) will be nothing else than didactic. Do you suppose I have gone to all this trouble to _amuse_ the public? No, if they want that, there is the Criterion for them, the Comedy, the Garrick, and so on. My object is to instruct them.” And to explain the allusion contained in the title, concerning which speculation was rife, Shaw remarked to the interviewer: “I have been assured that in one of the sections of the Bible dealing with the land question there is a clause against the destruction of widows' houses. There is no widow in my play; but there is a widower who owns slum property. Hence the title. Perhaps you are not familiar with the Bible.”[137]

After repeated calls from the audience Shaw made an impromptu speech at the close of the first performance of _Widowers' Houses_. He said that “he wished to assure his listeners that the greeting of the play had been agreeable to him, for had the story been received lightly he would have been disappointed. What he had submitted to their notice was going on in actual life. The action of _Widowers' Houses_ depicted the ordinary middle-class life of the day, but he heartily hoped the time would come when the play he had written would be both utterly impossible and utterly unintelligible. If anyone were to ask him where the Socialism came in, he would say that it was in the love of their art on Socialistic principles that had induced the performers to give their services on that occasion. In conclusion, he trusted that, above all, the critics would carefully discriminate between himself and the actors who had so zealously striven to carry out his intentions.” According to a contemporary account: “Warm cheers greeted the playwright who thus candidly and gratefully acknowledged the excellent work rendered by the players, whilst still proclaiming that his play was in all particulars the faithful reflex of a sordid and unpitying age.”

The play, a nine-days' wonder, was widely paragraphed in the newspapers, and regarded in some quarters as a daring attack on middle-class society. The storm of protest aroused by _Widowers' Houses_ almost paralleled the howl of execration evoked by the production of Ibsen's _Ghosts_ in England. _Widowers' Houses_ was intended as neither a beautiful nor a lovable work. Shaw confessed years afterwards that the play was entirely unreadable except for the prefaces and appendices, which he rightly regarded as good. The art of this play was confessedly the expression of the sense of intellectual and moral perversity; for Shaw had passed most of his life in big modern towns, where his sense of beauty had been starved, whilst his intellect had been gorged with problems like that of the slums. _Widowers' Houses_ is “saturated with the vulgarity of the life it represents”; and, in the first edition of the play, Shaw confesses that he is “not giving expression in pleasant fancies to the underlying beauty and romance of happy life, but dragging up to the smooth surface of 'respectability' a handful of the slime and foulness of its polluted bed, and playing off your laughter at the scandal of the exposure against your shudder at its blackness.”

Like Bulwer Lytton, Stevenson, and other nineteenth-century novelists who turned to the writing of plays, Shaw approached the theatre lacking due appreciation of the difficulties of dramatic art, the perfect artistic sincerity it demands. Writing his play as a pastime, he employed it as a means of shocking the sensibilities of his audience as well as of winging a barbed shaft at its smug respectability. Paying no heed to that golden mean of “average truth,” which Sainte Beuve impressed with such high seriousness upon the youthful Zola, Shaw indulges in that extreme form of depicting life, the mutilation of humanity, which Brunetière pronounced to be the vital defect of naturalism. A pair of lovers _dans cette galère_! As Mr. Archer said at the time: “When they are not acting with a Gilbertian _naïveté_ of cynicism, they are snapping and snarling at each other like a pair of ill-conditioned curs.”

The accusation of indebtedness to Ibsen hurled at Shaw from all sides as soon as his play was produced was promptly squelched by Shaw's vigorous denial. It is worth remarking, however, that “tainted money,” that bone of contention in America and the theme of Shaw's later _Major Barbara_, is the abuse which serves as the mark for the satire, both of Ibsen in _An Enemy of the People_, and of Shaw in _Widowers' Houses_. The perverting effect of ill-gotten gains upon the moral sense is the lesson of these two plays. Whereas Shaw was content to uncover the social canker and expose its ravages in all directions, Ibsen, through the instrumentality of Stockmann, holds out an ideal for the regeneration of society.

_Widowers' Houses_ abounds in flashes of insight, in passages of trenchant dialogue, in sardonic exposure of human nature; the keen intellect of the author is everywhere in evidence. Shaw's vigorous Socialism is largely responsible for the clarity and succinctness with which the economic point is driven home; and the discussions of social problems are tense with a nervous vivacity almost dramatic in quality. And yet the structural defect of the play is the loose dramatic connection between the economic elucidations and the general psychological processes of the action.

Before the production of _Widowers' Houses_, Shaw publicly stated that the first two acts were written before he ever heard of Ibsen; and afterwards he asserted that his critics “should have guessed this, because there is not one idea in the play that cannot be more easily referred to half a dozen English writers than to Ibsen; whilst of his peculiar retrospective method, by which his plays are made to turn upon events supposed to have happened before the rise of the curtain, there is not a trace in my work.”[138] Shaw laughed incontinently at those people who excitedly discussed the play as a daringly original sermon, but who would not accept it as a play on any terms “because its hero did not, when he learned that his income came from slum property, at once relinquish it (_i.e._, make it a present to Sartorius without benefiting the tenants), and go to the goldfields to dig out nuggets with his strong right arm, so that he might return to wed his Blanche after a shipwreck (witnessed by her in a vision), just in time to rescue her from beggary, brought upon her by the discovery that Lickcheese was the rightful heir to the property of Sartorius, who had dispossessed and enslaved him by a series of forgeries unmasked by the faithful Cokane!”

For the sake of its bearing upon Shaw's subsequent career, one important contemporary impression deserves to be placed on record. Five months after the production of _Widowers' Houses_, in a review (published May 4th, 1893) of the Independent Theatre edition of that play, Mr. William Archer earnestly endeavoured to dissuade Shaw from turning dramatist.

“It is a pity that Mr. Shaw should labour under a delusion as
to the true bent of his talent, and, mistaking an amusing _jeu
d'esprit_ for a work of creative art, should perhaps be tempted
to devote further time and energy to a form of production
for which he has no special ability and some constitutional
disabilities. A man of his power of mind can do nothing that is
altogether contemptible. We may be quite sure that if he took
palette and 'commenced painter,' or set to work to manipulate
a lump of clay, he would produce a picture or a statue that
would bear the impress of a keen intelligence, and would be
well worth looking at. That is precisely the case of _Widowers'
Houses_. It is a curious example of what can be done in art by
sheer brain-power, apart from natural aptitude. For it does not
appear that Mr. Shaw has any more specific talent for the drama
than he has for painting or sculpture.”

Shaw's next play, _The Philanderer_, is distinctly a _pièce d'occasion_ and should be read in the light of the attitude of the British public toward Ibsen and Ibsenism at the time of its writing. After Miss Janet Achurch's performance as Nora Helmer in _A Doll's House_, in 1889, Ibsen became the target of dramatic criticism; and Shaw's _Quintessence of Ibsenism_, published in 1891, was the big gun, going off when the controversy was at its height. Sir Edwin Arnold made an editorial attack on Ibsen, Mr. Frederick Wedmore echoed his denunciation, and Clement Scott exhausted his vocabulary of vituperation in an almost hysterical outcry against the foulness and obscenity of the shameless Norwegian. _The Philanderer_ was written just when the cult of Ibsen had reached the pinnacle of fatuity. From Shaw's picture, one is led to suppose that society, with reference to Ibsen, was roughly divided into three classes: the conservatives of the old guard, regarding Ibsen as a _monstrum horrendum_; the _soi-disant_ Ibsenites, glibly conversant with Ibsen's ideas but profoundly ignorant of their meaning; and, lastly, those who really understood Ibsen, this class being made up of two sorts of individuals, those who really intended to adopt Ibsen principles, and those who were keen and unscrupulous enough to exploit Ibsenism solely for the sake of the sustenance it afforded parasitic growths like themselves. The ideal of the “womanly woman” still prevailed in English society. Shaw here readily perceived the possibilities for satire and tragi-comedy, both in the clash of old prejudices with new ideas, and in the mordant contrast discovered by the conflict of the over-sexed, passionate “womanly woman” with the under-sexed, pallidly intellectual philanderer of the Ibsen school. Had Shaw's performance been as able as his perception was acute, _The Philanderer_ would have been a genuine achievement instead of a grimly promising failure.

_The Philanderer_ serves as a link between the plays of Shaw's earlier and later manners. Present marriage laws really have very little to do with this play, which concerns itself with a study of social types. Julia is the _fine fleur_ of feral femininity; woman's practice of employing her personal charms unscrupulously and man's practice of treating woman as a mere plaything both have a share in the formation of her character. Grace Tranfield is the best type of the advanced woman; she demands equality of opportunity for women, rejects the “lord and master” theory, and fights always for the integrity of her self-respect. Between these two women stands Leonard Charteris, holding the average young cub's cynical ideas about women, sharpened to acuteness through the intellectual astuteness of Bernard Shaw. Charteris, in his bloodless Don Juanism, is the type of the degenerate male flirt--the pallid prey of the _maladie du siècle_. “C'est un homme qui ne fait la cour aux femmes ni pour le bon ni pour le mauvais motif,” says M. Filon. “Que veut-il? S'amuser. Seulement--comme on l'a dit des Anglais en général--il s'amuse tristement; il y a dans l'attitude de ce séducteur glacial et dégoûté quelque chose qui n'est pas très viril. On dit la société anglaise infestée de ces gens-là.”[139]

Upon the mind of any unprejudiced person, I think, _The Philanderer_ creates the impression that Shaw's attitude toward women in this play must have been induced by unpleasant personal relations with women prior to the time at which the play was written. Many people paid him the insult of recognizing him in Charteris; and I have even been told that Shaw was temperamentally not dissimilar to Charteris, at that particular period. The play is marked by unnaturalness and immaturity at every turn; but several scenes exhibit great nervous strength. Mr. Robert Loraine once remarked to me that, in his opinion, the first act of _The Philanderer_ was unparalleled in its verisimilitude, always making him realize the truth of Ibsen's dictum that the modern stage must be regarded as a room of which one wall has been removed. Mr. Loraine's impression is fully justified by the fact that the scene is a more or less accurate replica of a scene in Mr. Shaw's own life.

As a play, _The Philanderer_ is crude and amateurish, revolving upon the pivot of Charteris's satire, and presenting various features in turn--now extravaganza, now broad farce, now comedy, now tragi-comedy. With all its brilliant mental vivisection, the conversation of Charteris is never natural, but supra-natural; the utterly gross and caddish indecency of his exposures would never be tolerated for an instant in polite or even respectable society. And yet Mr. Shaw once vehemently assured me: “Charteris is not passionless, not unscrupulous, and a sincere, not a pseudo, Ibsenist”! Cuthbertson is a caricature of Clement Scott; and, in virtually the same words used by Scott in his attacks upon Ibsen, Cuthbertson avows that the whole modern movement is abhorrent to him “because his life had been passed in witnessing scenes of suffering nobly endured and sacrifice willingly rendered by womanly women and manly men.” The mannerisms of Craven, “Now really” in especial, are taken directly, Mr. Shaw once told me, from Mr. H. M. Hyndman, the English Socialist leader. Dr. Paramore is the puppet of broad farce, immune to all humane concern through inoculation with the deadly germ of scientific research; while Sylvia is merely the pert little _soubrette_. The inverted Gilbertism of Colonel Craven's: “Do you mean to say that I am expected to treat my daughter the same as I would any other girl? Well, dash me if I will!” faintly strikes the note of Falsacappa, the brigand chief, in Meilhac and Halévy's _The Brigands_: “Marry my daughter to an honest man! Never!”--a phrase with which Mr. W. S. Gilbert afterwards did such execution in _The Pirates of Penzance_.

When _The Philanderer_ was published in 1898, the public was puzzled and astounded to read an “attack” on Ibsen by Ibsen's most valiant champion in England! So shocked was Mr. Archer by this “outrage upon art and decency” that he wanted to “cut” his colleague and friend in the street. _The Philanderer_ thus laid the foundation of Shaw's reputation as a cynic and a paradoxer. It is chiefly interesting to-day as a foreshadowing and promise of the lines of development of the later dramatist. Superficially, this play mirrors the glaring, even tragic contrast between faddist idealization of Ibsen, and sincere realization of Ibsenism. But, in the light of subsequent events, the play rather teaches that Charteris as male flirt is the model for the sketchy Valentine, that Julia is the Ann Whitefield of a more natural and less self-conscious phase. Throughout the play we are reminded of the brutal laughter of Wedekind, the sardonic humour of Becque, and, in places, even of the dark levity of Ibsen himself. The portrayal of Julia is remarkable, in spite of the damaging error of representing her as fit subject for the police court--mentally arrested in development, victim of violent “brain-storms,” unscrupulous, treacherous, deceitful, feline. And yet, by some marvellous trick of subtle art, the author has caused this creature to win our profound sympathy in the end. After all, her love for Charteris is genuine and sincere; and the scene between Grace and Julia, after the latter has accepted Dr. Paramore, is profoundly touching:

GRACE (_speaking in a low voice to Julia alone_): So you
have shown him that you can do without him! Now I take back
everything I said. Will you shake hands with me? (_Julia gives
her hand painfully, with her face averted._) They think this a
happy ending, Julia--these men--our lords and masters! (_The
two stand silent, hand in hand._)

The human drama of this play, merely sketched though it be, is the conflict in Julia's soul between her violent passion for Charteris and her true impulse toward self-respect. The quintessence of her tragedy is expressed in her last tilt with Charteris. He walks up to congratulate her, proffering his hand.

JULIA (_exhausted, allowing herself to take it_): You are
right. I am a worthless woman.

CHARTERIS (_triumphant, and gaily remonstrating_): Oh, why?

JULIA: Because I am not brave enough to kill you.

Shaw's next play, _Mrs. Warren's Profession_, completed his first cycle of economic studies in dramatic form; and at one stroke demonstrated Shaw to be a dramatist of marked powers and ability. Shaw's account of the genesis of this play is an important link in its history. In regard to the title, Shaw says: “The tremendously effective scene--which a baby could write if its sight were normal--in which she (Mrs. Warren) justifies herself, is only a paraphrase of a scene in a novel of my own, 'Cashel Byron's Profession' (hence the title, _Mrs. Warren's Profession_), in which a prize-fighter shows how he was driven into the ring exactly as Mrs. Warren was driven on the streets.” Shaw met the charge of indebtedness to Ibsen and De Maupassant with the statement that, if a dramatist living in the world of multifarious interests, duties and experiences in which he lived has to go to books for his ideas and his inspiration, he must be both blind and deaf. “Most dramatists are,” he laconically added. So _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ came about in this way:

“Miss Janet Achurch mentioned to me a novel by some French
writer as having a dramatizable story in it. It being hopeless
to get me to read anything, she told me the story, which was
ultra-romantic. I said, 'Oh, I will work out the real truth
about that mother some day.' In the following autumn I was
the guest of a lady of very distinguished ability--one whose
knowledge of English social types is as remarkable as her
command of industrial and political questions. She suggested
that I should put on the stage a real modern lady of the
governing class--not the sort of thing that theatrical and
critical authorities imagine such a lady to be. I did so; and
the result was Miss Vivie Warren, who has laid the intellect
of Mr. William Archer in ruins.... I finally persuaded Miss
Achurch, who is clever with her pen, to dramatize the story
herself on the original romantic lines. Her version is called
_Mrs. Daintry's Daughter_. That is the history of _Mrs.
Warren's Profession_. I never dreamt of Ibsen or De Maupassant,
any more than a blacksmith shoeing a horse thinks of the
blacksmith in the next county.”[140]

Of course, one blacksmith cannot possibly know what another blacksmith in the next county is doing. But Shaw was not only aware of what Ibsen was doing and had done: he had actually written a remarkable analysis of Ibsen's plays and, with his utmost critical skill, defended Ibsen's art and philosophy, on the platform and in the press, against the ablest critics in England. As clearly as _Ghosts_ does _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ reveal the truth of George Eliot's dictum that consequences are unpitying; a true drama of catastrophe, employing Ibsen's peculiar retrospective method, Shaw's play exemplifies, in Amiel's words, the fatality of the consequences which follow every human act. Nora as daughter, instead of Nora as wife, Vivie leaves her home under the same profound conviction of her duty to herself as a human being--a duty infinitely more obligatory than any she may be conventionally imagined to owe to a Magdalen mother, who has educated and purposes to support her out of the profits of a profession which has its roots in the most hideous of all social evils.[141]

_Mrs. Warren's Profession_ towers high above his first two plays, and places Shaw in the front rank of contemporary dramatic craftsmen. Its strength proceeds from the depth displayed in the consideration of the motives which prompt to action, the intellectual and emotional crises eventuating from the fierce clash of personalities and the sardonically unconscious self-scourging of the characters themselves. The scenes are so admirably ordered, the procedure so swift, the situations so charged with significance that one can find little to wonder at in Mr. Cunninghame Graham's characterization of _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ as “the best that has been written in English in our generation.” Tense, nervous, vigorous, the great scenes are full of “that suppleness, that undulation of emotional process,” which Mr. Archer pronounces one of the unmistakable tokens of dramatic mastery. The tremendous dramatic power of the specious logic with which Mrs. Warren defends her course; the sardonic irony of the parting between mother and daughter! Goethe said of Molière that he chastises men by drawing them just as they are. True descendant of Molière, whom he once declared to be worth a thousand Shakespeares, Shaw wields upon vice the shrieking scourge, not of the preacher, but of the dramatist. Out of the mouths of the characters themselves proceeds their own condemnation. Devastating in its consummate irony is the passage in which Mrs. Warren, conventional to her heart's core, lauds her own respectability; and that in which Crofts propounds his own code of honour:

CROFTS: My code is a simple one, and, I think, a good one:
Honour between man and man; fidelity between man and woman;
and no cant about this or that religion, but an honest belief
that things are making for good on the whole.

VIVIE (_with biting irony_): “A power, not ourselves, that
makes for righteousness,” eh?

CROFTS (_taking her seriously_): Oh, certainly, not ourselves,
of course. _You_ understand what I mean.

Dr. Brandes called Ibsen's _Ghosts_, if not the greatest achievement, at any rate the noblest action of the poet's career. _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ is not only what Brunetière would call a work of combat: it is an act--an act of declared hostility against capitalistic society, the inertia of public opinion, the lethargy of the public conscience, and the criminality of a social order which begets such appalling social conditions. Into this play Shaw has poured all his Socialistic passion for a more just and humane social order.

As an arraignment of social conditions, the play is tremendous. As a work of art, it presents marked deficiencies. Shaw sought to dispose of one charge--that Vivie is merely Shaw in petticoats--in these words: “One of my female characters, who drinks whisky and smokes cigars and reads detective stories and regards the fine arts, especially music, as an insufferable and unintelligible waste of time, has been declared by my friend, Mr. William Archer, to be an exact and authentic portrait of myself, on no other grounds in the world except that she is a woman of business and not a creature of romantic impulse.” It is clear that this is not a satisfactory answer to Mr. Archer's charge; but even in more minor details, the play is open to criticism: the futility of Praed, save as a barefaced confidant; the cheap melodrama of Frank and the rifle; the series of coincidences culminating in the Rev. Mr. Gardner's miserably confused “Miss Vavasour, I believe!” at the end of the first act. More important still, as Mr. Archer once pointed out,[142] there is nothing of the inevitable in the meeting of Frank and Vivie, despite Shaw's assertion that “the children of any polyandrous group will, when they grow up, inevitably be confronted with the insoluble problem of their own possible consanguinity.” Had Vivie not happened to take lodgings at that particular farmhouse in Surrey, she would never have seen or heard of Frank, and the “inevitable” would never have happened. But this single lapse of logic, together with the other defects mentioned, are comparatively venial faults--which Shaw probably classes among those “relapses into staginess” betraying, as he confessed, “the young playwright and the old playgoer in this early work of mine.”

It is the predominance of a certain hard, sheer rationalism, and a defiant, irresponsible levity in places, which mars the artistic unity of the play, and denies it the exalted rank to which it well-nigh attains. At the fundamental morality of the play there is no cause to cavil. Instead of maintaining an association in the imagination of the spectators between prostitution and fashionable beauty, luxury and refinement, as do _La Dame aux Caméllias_, _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, _Iris_, _Zaza_ and countless other modern plays, _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ exhibits the life of the courtesan in all its arid actuality, and inculcates a lesson of the sternest morality. It is because she is what she is that Mrs. Warren loses her daughter irrevocably. In general, the logic of the play is unimpeachable; but the rationalist character imparted to the conversations of the principal characters by their persistence in arguing everything out logically gives the play a sort of glacial rigidity. The principal defect of the play is the discrepancy between the tragic seriousness of the theme and the occasional depressing levity of its treatment. Consonance between theme and tone is the prime requisite of a work of art. This remarkable play falls just short of real greatness because its whimsical, facetious, irrepressible author was unable to discipline himself to artistic self-restraint. _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ is calculated to produce an almost unendurable effect because, as Mr. Archer wisely says, Bernard Shaw is “the slave of his sense of the ridiculous.”

The close of the year 1893 marks the beginning of a new phase in the evolution of Shaw's art as a dramatist. As Brunetière said to the Symbolists, so the English public said to Mr. Grein and his supporters of the Independent Theatre Society: “Gentlemen, produce your masterpieces!” Shaw eagerly took up the case; and rather than let it collapse, he “manufactured the evidence.” His first play met with a _succès de scandale_; his second failed of production; and his third, the expected “masterpiece,” was debarred by the censorship. The union of economics and Socialism in thesis-plays met with no favour at the hands of the British public. Shaw was forced to relinquish for the time being his purpose of reforming the public through the medium of the stage. His original disavowal of any intent to amuse the public went for naught in default of a platform from which to deliver instruction.

Shaw's social determinism, as M. Auguste Hamon once expressed it to me, is “absolute”: his fundamental Socialism throws the blame, not upon Trench, Charteris, Crofts and Mrs. Warren, as _individuals_, but upon the _prevailing social order_, the capitalistic _régime_, which offers them as alternatives, not morality and immorality, but two sorts of immorality.[143] Upon each individual in his audience, whether in the study or in the theatre, Shaw threw the burden of responsibility for defective social organization, and for those social horrors which can only be mitigated, and, perhaps, ultimately abolished, by public opinion, public action and public contribution. Mr. Shaw once described this play to me as a faithful presentment of the “economic basis of modern commercial prostitution.” But the managers well knew that the public was averse to being forced to face the unpleasant facts set forth in Shaw's three “unpleasant” plays. The rigour of the censorship and prevailing theatrical conditions in London were hostile to Shaw's initial efforts.

“You cannot write three plays and then stop,” Shaw has explained. Accordingly, for obvious reasons, social determinism ceased to be the motive force of Shaw's dramas; and he began to write plays concerned more particularly with the comedy and tragedy of individual life and destiny. Shaw did not cease to be a satirist, did not desist from his effort to startle the public out of its bland complacency: he merely diverted for the time being the current of his satire from social abuses to the shams, pretences, illusions and self-deceptions of individual life. Having learned to beware of solemnity, Shaw makes the satiric jest his point of departure. From this time forward he occupies and operates upon a new plane. He has ceased to be purely the social scavenger. Bernard Shaw's comedy of manners and of character now enters into the history of British drama.

_Arms and the Man_--obviously deriving its title from the _Arma virumque cano_ of the opening line of Virgil's _Æneid_--is one of Shaw's most delightful comedies--a genuine comedy of character and yet _theatrical_ in the true sense, Dr. Brandes has called it. Not the least of its virtues is the implicitness of its philosophy; perhaps this is one reason why Mr. Shaw (as he lately remarked to me) now considers it a very slight and immature production! From one point of view, this play may be regarded as a study of the psychology of the military profession.[144] From another point of view--the standpoint of the regular playgoer--the play has for its dramatic essence the collision of romantic illusion with prosaic reality.

To many people the play appeared as a “damning sneer at military courage,” an attempted demonstration of the astounding thesis that heroism is merely a sublimated form of cowardice! When King Edward--then Prince of Wales--witnessed a performance of the play, he could not be induced to smile even once; and afterwards it was reported that “his Royal Highness regretted that the play should have shown so disrespectful an attitude toward the Army as was betrayed by the character of the chocolate-cream soldier.”[145] Bluntschli is a natural realist, to whom long military service has taught the salutary lesson that bullets are to be avoided, not sought; that the main object of the efficient soldier is not the bubble reputation at the cannon's mouth, but practical success and the preservation of life. Shaw had never seen service, never participated in a battle--save the battle of Trafalgar Square. But he happened to be a modern realist with a tremendous fund of satire and fantasy. And although he had to get his data at second hand, he experienced no difficulty in finding abundant material, to authenticate his presentment of the common-sense soldier, in great realistic fiction such as Zola's _La Débâcle_, in classic autobiography such as Marbot's _Memoirs_, and in the recorded experiences of English and American generals, notably Lord Wolseley and General Horace Porter. People were inclined to laugh Shaw's play out of court as an exercise no more serious than that of a “mowing down military ideals with volleys of chocolate creams.” Yet Shaw knew a man who lived for two days in the Shipka Pass on chocolate; while some years later, during the Boer war, Queen Victoria presented every soldier in the British army with a ration of chocolate--chocolate which Liebig pronounced the most perfect food in the world. The idea of an officer carrying an empty pistol! And yet Lord Wolseley mentions two officers who seldom carried any weapons, and one of them was Gordon. Bluntschli's hysterical condition in the first act finds its analogue in General Porter's account describing the condition of his troops after a battle. And Bluntschli's delightful description of a cavalry charge finds its analogue, not in the Tennysonian _Charge of the Light Brigade_, but in the account of this charge as given by the popular historian Kinglake; and, as a matter of fact, Shaw's description was taken almost verbatim from an account given privately to a friend of Shaw's by an officer who served in the Franco-Prussian war. The catalogue might easily be extended; suffice it to say that, _irrespective of the totality of impression_, there can be no question of the credibility of the separate incidents in the play, which furnished such ready targets for critical marksmanship.[146]

From the dramatic side, _Arms and the Man_ is far less a “realistic” comedy than a satiric exposure of the illusions of warfare, of love, of romantic idealism. Of course, Shaw imparts an air of pleasing likelihood to the racial traits or characters, and the local colour of the scenes; and, as Dr. Brandes has remarked, in Bernard Shaw's choice of themes one feels the mental suppleness of the modern critic, with his ability to throw himself sympathetically into different historic periods and into the minds of different races. In _Arms and the Man_, “the whole environment is characteristic, the people of most refinement being proud of washing themselves 'almost every day,' and of owning a 'library,' the only one in the district. Everything smacks of the Balkan Peninsula, even to the waiting-maid and the man-servant, with their half-Asiatic mingling of forwardness and servility.”[147] To be accurate, Shaw sketches in his _milieu_ with the very lightest of strokes. Bluntschli might just as well have served in a war between Peru and Chili, or Greece and Turkey; while for all practical purposes, the scene might just as well have been laid along the coasts of Bohemia. I have long contended that _Arms and the Man_ was not a play, but a light opera; and now comes Oscar Straus to compose the music for the libretto adapted from Shaw's Bulgarian fantasy.

Mr. Shaw once told me that his two friends, Sidney Webb, the solid and the practical, and Cunninghame Graham, the hidalgesque and fantastic, suggested the contrast between Bluntschli and Saranoff. “The identity,” he explained, “only lies on the surface, of course. But the true dramatist must always find his contrasts in real life.” And it will be recalled that the rodomontade placed with such ludicrous effect in the mouth of the Bulgarian braggadocio, had actually been used, with equally telling effect, by Mr. Cunninghame Graham in a speech in the House of Commons. Shaw promptly stole the potent phrase, “I never withdraw,” for the sake of its perfect style, and used it as a cockade for Sergius the Sublime. The great charm of the play consists in the disillusionment of the romantic Raina and the sham-idealist Saranoff by the practical realism of the common-sense Bluntschli. A Bulgarian Byron, Sergius is perpetually mocked by the disparity between his imaginative ideals and the disillusions which continually sting his sensitive nature. And the true tragedy of the idealist, in the Shavian frame of mind, is summed up in his words, “Damnation! mockery everywhere! Everything that I think is mocked by everything that I do.” And Shaw himself has said:

“My Bulgarian hero, quite as much as Helmer in _A Doll's
House_, was a hero shown from the modern woman's point of
view. I complicated the psychology by making him catch glimpse
after glimpse of his own aspect and conduct from this point
of view himself, as all men are beginning to do more or less
now, the result, of course, being the most horrible dubiety on
his part as to whether he was really a brave and chivalrous
gentleman, or a humbug and a moral coward. His actions,
equally of course, were hopelessly irreconcilable with either
theory. Need I add that if the straightforward Helmer, a very
honest and ordinary middle-class man misled by false ideals of
womanhood, bewildered the public and was finally set down as a
selfish cad by all the Helmers in the audience, _a fortiori_ my
introspective Bulgarian never had a chance, and was dismissed,
with but moderately spontaneous laughter, as a swaggering
impostor of the species for which contemporary slang has
invented the term 'bounder'?”[148]

_Arms and the Man_ has laid its hold upon the modern imagination, and has been produced all over the world. What more delightful than to have seen Bluntschli interpreted by the actors of our generation--by Mansfield, with his quaintly dry cynicism, by Jarno, with a humour racy of the soil, by Mantzius, with scholarly accuracy, by Sommerstorff, with a touch of romance!--by Loraine, Nhil, Stephens, Daly. It is quite true that the play is loose in form, oscillating between comedy and fantastic farce, and that even now it is already beginning to “date.” But its fantasy, its satire, and its genial philosophy will amply suffice to give it a long lease on life.[149] Shaw's own confidence in his power as a dramatist and in the future of the play is humorously expressed in characteristic style in the following letter written in response to an apologetic note from his American agent, Miss Elisabeth Marbury, accompanying a meagre remittance for royalties on _Arms and the Man_:

“RAPACIOUS ELISABETH MARBURY,

“What do you want me to make a fortune for? Don't you know
that the draft you sent me will permit me to live and preach
Socialism for six months? The next time you have so large an
amount to remit, please send it to me by instalments, or you
will put me to the inconvenience of having a bank account. What
do you mean by giving me advice about writing a play with a
view to the box-office receipts? I shall continue writing just
as I do now for the next ten years. After that we can wallow
in the gold poured at our feet by a dramatically regenerated
public.”

_Arms and the Man_ is an injunction to found our institutions, in Shaw's little-understood phrase, not on “the ideals suggested to our imagination by our half-satisfied passions,” but on a “genuinely scientific natural history.”

A distinguished dramatic critic once said to me that he regarded all of Shaw's works as derivative literature. Shaw's first three plays were traced to Ibsen, to De Maupassant, to Strindberg; and won for him the flattering title of the “second-hand Brummagem Ibsen” (William Winter)! And after witnessing two acts of _Arms and the Man_ at the Avenue Theatre, Mr. Archer began to have a misgiving that he had wandered by mistake into The Palace of Truth. The relation of the art of Bernard Shaw to the art of W. S. Gilbert is one of much delicate intricacy; and deserves more than casual mention. Shaw has declared that those who regard the function of a writer as “creative” are the most illiterate of dupes, that in his business he knows _me_ and _te_, not _meum_ and _tuum_, and that he himself is “a crow who has followed many plows.” In a vein of mocking acknowledgment, Shaw once spoke of the seriousness with which he had pondered the jests of W. S. Gilbert. A careful critical examination of the methods of Shaw and Gilbert reveals the undoubted resemblance, as well as the fundamental dissimilarity, of these two satiric interpreters of human nature.[150]

One particular incident in _Arms and the Man_ seems to derive directly from an incident in Gilbert's _Engaged_. The scene in which Nicola advises Louka, his betrothed, to gain a hold over Sergius, marry him ultimately, and so “come to be one of my grandest customers, instead of only being my wife and costing me money,” is but a paraphrase and inversion of that ludicrous scene in _Engaged_, in which “puir little Maggie Macfarlane” advises her lover, Angus Macalister, to resign her to Cheviot-Hill for the princely consideration of two pounds. Aside from this one minor similarity, _Arms and the Man_ is very different from a Gilbert play. For purposes of general comparison, turn once more to _Engaged_--which will serve as well as any of the works of Gilbert--for this passage:

CHEVIOT-HILL (_suddenly seeing her_): Maggie, come here. Angus,
do take your arm from around that girl's waist. Stand back,
and don't you listen. Maggie, three months ago I told you I
loved you passionately; to-day I tell you that I love you as
passionately as ever; I may add that I am still a rich man. Can
you blige me with a postage-stamp?

Here, not only is the comic note struck by the juxtaposition of two essential incongruities: in addition, the farcicality of the idea stamps it as impossible. It is an admirable illustration of that exquisite sense of quaint unexpectedness, evoked by the plays of both Gilbert and Shaw. Take now a scene of somewhat cognate appeal in _Arms and the Man_. In both scenes the bid is for sudden laughter, through the startle of surprise. Bluntschli flatly tells Raina to her face that he finds it impossible to believe a single thing she says.

RAINA (_gasping_): I! I!!! (_She points to herself
incredulously, meaning, “I, Raina Petkoff, tell lies!” He meets
her gaze unflinchingly. She suddenly sits down beside him, and
adds, with a complete change of manner from the heroic to the
familiar._) How did you find me out?

BLUNTSCHLI (_promptly_): Instinct, dear young lady. Instinct,
and experience of the world.

RAINA (_wonderingly_): Do you know, you are the first man I
ever met who did not take me seriously?

BLUNTSCHLI: You mean, don't you, that I am the first man that
has ever taken you quite seriously?

RAINA: Yes, I suppose I do mean that. (_Cosily, quite at her
ease with him._) How strange it is to be talked to in such a
way!...

Gilbert employs a device of the simplest mechanism, giving merely the shock of unexpected contrast. Shaw's spiritual adventure is an excogitated bit of psychology, of intellectual content and rational crescendo. It is the Shavian trick of putting into dialogue the revealing, accusatory words seldom spoken in real life.

This calls to mind a resemblance--with a difference--between Shaw and Gilbert. In Gilbert's _The Palace of Truth_ each character indulges in frank self-revelation. Enchanted by the spell of a certain locality, everyone is compelled to speak his whole thought without disguise, under the delusion that he is only indulging in the usual polite insincerities. All this self-analysis and self-exposure goes for naught but to evoke laughter; for, lacking either profound insight into human nature or cynical distrust of humanity, Gilbert is incapable of trenchant generalization. In Shaw's plays, people play the game of “Truth” for all there is in it; and perhaps Shaw's greatest capacity is the capacity for generalization. Shaw's incomparable superiority to Gilbert consists in his acute perception and subtle delineation of the comic, and often tragic, inconsistencies of genuine human character. Shaw has succeeded in revealing certain subconscious sides of human nature that usually remain hidden because dramatists fail to put into the mouths of their creations the real thoughts that clamour for expression. One almost always hears their superficial selves speaking solely through the voluble medium of society or the reticent medium of self.

Not only in philosophic grasp, but also in imagination, does Shaw excel Gilbert; an incident will suffice to explain. Mr. John Corbin once told me that in comparing Shaw and Gilbert, he had instanced to Mr. Henry Arthur Jones the play of _Pygmalion and Galatea_, as showing that, after all, Gilbert had a heart and an imagination for beauty. “Ah, yes!” replied Mr. Jones. “But Gilbert never could have written that line in _Cæsar and Cleopatra_:

CÆSAR: What has Rome to show me that I have not seen already?
One year of Rome is like another, except that I grow older,
whilst the crowd in the Appian way is always the same age.”

Philosophically speaking, Gilbert's characters accept without question the current ideals of life and conduct; and make ludicrous spectacles of themselves in the effort to live up to them. Shaw's creations discover the hollowness and vanity of these same current ideals, and gain freedom in escape from their obsession. As Mr. Walkley once put it: “Gilbertism consists in the ironic humour to be got out of the spectacle of a number of people hypocritically pretending, or naïvely failing, to act up to ideals which Mr. Gilbert and his people hold to be valid.... Shavianism consists in the ironic humour to be got out of the spectacle of a number of people trying to apply the current ideas only to find in the end that they won't work.”[151] Let us have done with rating of Shaw as a cheap imitator of Gilbert. It is quite true that Gilbert anticipated Shaw by many years in the use of the device of open confession--the characters naïvely “making a clean breast” of things; but the device was handed on to Shaw for legitimate use instead of for farcical misuse. In any deep sense, Shaw owes nothing to Gilbert; and his paradoxes, unlike Gilbert's, are the outcome of a profound study of human nature and of contemporary civilization. “Gilbert would have anticipated me,” Mr. Shaw once assured me, “if he had taken his paradoxes seriously. But it does not seem to have occurred to him that he had found any real flaw in conventional morality--only that he had found out how to make logical quips at its expense. His serious plays are all conventional. Most of the revolutionary ideas have come up first as jests; and Gilbert did not get deeper than this stage.”

_Arms and the Man_ is the first of four plays which I class in a category by themselves--the plays constructed in the loose and variegated comedic form, presumably designed to be “popular” and to amuse the public, fantastically treated, and imbued with a mild philosophy held strictly implicit.[152] These four plays are _Arms and the Man_, _You Never Can Tell_, _How He Lied to Her Husband_ and _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_. In _You Never Can Tell_ Shaw deliberately made concessions to that coy monster, the British public. Thitherto he had in large measure disdained the task of complying with the demands of London audiences for a popular comedy, combining his oft-praised cynical brilliancy and his talent for “giving furiously to think,” with his unquestioned ability to amuse. Shaw's realization of the truth of Molière's words: “_C'est une étrange entreprise que celle de faire rire les honnêtes gens_,” did not in the least deter him from embarking upon this perilous undertaking. In _You Never Can Tell_ he gave himself up wholly to the hazardous task, tentatively inaugurated in _Arms and the Man_, of attempting to amuse that public which had so persistently refused, so defiantly scorned, his instruction. _You Never Can Tell_ was Shaw's propitiatory sacrifice to recalcitrant London. Strange to say, this deliberate concession to popular demand even his most lenient censors refused to validate.[153] London, matching Shaw for whimsicality, was no whit propitiated by his proposal of a _mariage de convenance_ with that doubtful character, public opinion. Shaw has taken Shakespeare himself to task for pandering to public taste in a play coolly entitled _As You Like It_. When the “Dramatist of Donnybrook Fair,” as Mr. Corbin calls him, sets out to write _As You Like It_, what is the result? “You Never Can Tell!” It was nine years before Shaw was able to change his tentative and dubious, “You Never Can Tell!” into a triumphant, “I told you so!”

“I think it must have been in the year 1895,” one reads in some reminiscences by Mr. Cyril Maude, the well-known English actor, “that the devil put it into the mind of a friend of mine to tempt me with news of a play called _Candida_, by a writer named Bernard Shaw, of whom until then I had never heard.”[154] Mr. Maude wrote to Shaw, suggesting that he be allowed to see the play in question. In characteristic vein, the author replied that the play would not suit the needs of the Haymarket Theatre, offering, however, to write a new play instead; which Mr. Maude protests he never asked Shaw to do, yet to which he interposed no objection. Whereupon Shaw took a chair in Regent's Park for the whole season, and sat there, in the public eye, we are told, writing the threatened play.

It was not until the winter of 1897 that this play, _You Never Can Tell_, came into Mr. Maude's hands. It was accepted, and actually put into rehearsal. From that very moment things began to go wrong. Shaw proposed impossible casts, dictated to each actor in turn, equalled his own John Tanner in endless and torrential talk. Actor after actor, led by the genial Jack Barnes, withdrew in fatigue and disgust. One day Shaw insulted the entire cast and the entire profession by wanting a large table on the stage, on the ground that the company would fall over it unless they behaved as if they were coming into a real room instead of, as he coarsely observed, “rushing to the float to pick up the band at the beginning of a comic song.”

After a first reading of the manuscript, Mr. Maude's misgivings had been aroused to such an extent that he went to Shaw and plainly told him that certain lines would have to be cut out.

“Oh, no!” replied Shaw. “I really can't permit that.”

“But in this shape,” protested the alarmed actor-manager, “the play can never be produced.”

“My dear fellow, you delight me,” was the truly Shavian reply.