Chapter X (2)

It was unbearable to the cast to be lectured and grilled unmercifully by a red-headed Mephistopheles dressed like a “fairly respectable carpenter” in a suit of clothes that looked as though it had originally been made of brown wrapping paper. The rehearsals continued, however, with the entire cast in a state of the most profound dejection.

“The end came suddenly and unexpectedly. We had made a special effort to fulfil our unfortunate contract.... We were honestly anxious to retrieve the situation by a great effort, and save our dear little theatre from the disgrace of a failure.

“Suddenly the author entered, _in a new suit of clothes_!!” Nobody who had seen Shaw sitting there day after day in a costume which the least self-respecting plasterer would have discarded months before could possibly have understood the devastating effect of the new suit upon the minds of the spectators. “That this was a calculated _coup de théâtre_ I have not the slightest doubt.” Shaw played the part of benevolent rescuer, and the play was withdrawn. “I met him in Garrick Street not long ago and noticed that he still wore the suit which he had purchased in 1897 in anticipation of the royalties on _You Never Can Tell_!”

“The only thanks that people give me for not 'boring them,'” Shaw once said, “is that they laugh delightedly for three hours at the play that has cost many months of hard labour, and then turn round and say that it is no play at all and accuse me of talking with my tongue in my cheek. And then they expect me to take them seriously!” No one can accuse Shaw of taking the world seriously in _You Never Can Tell_. Never was more playful play, more irresponsible fun. It is all a pure game of cross-purposes, a contest of intellectual motives, a conflict of ideas and sentiments.

This play is especially interesting to me because it was the first of Shaw's plays I saw produced, and led me to a study of his works. And yet I should be the last to deny that it is a farce, in which fun as a motive takes precedence over delineation of character. The characters are no more faithful to actuality than is the dialogue to ordinary conversation. Indeed, the play is almost a new _genre_, differing from the ordinary farce, in which action predominates over thought, in the respect that here thought, or rather vivacious mentalization, takes precedence over everything--the antics are psychical, not physical. Shaw maintains, not that the play is a comedy, but that it is cast in the ordinary practical comedy form. I take this to mean that Shaw has utilized the stock characters and devices of ordinary comedy--not to mention those of farce, burlesque and extravaganza!--purely for his own ends, giving them a fresh and unique interest by animating them with the infectious mirth of his own personality. At last Shaw has found that loose, variegated, kaleidoscopic comedic form which freely admits of the intrusive antics of the Shavian whimsicality.

There is not a single play of Shaw's that starts nowhere and never arrives; and here the fault is not that the play has no meaning, but that it has too many meanings. And it is perhaps just as well that there is no clear line of thought-filiation running through the play. It is quite possible, as Hervieu would say, to “disengage” one, or even several motives, inter-linked with one another, from the play. Shaw, however, seems content to put everyone on the defensive, to search out the weak points in their armour, and to give to each in turn the _coup de grâce_.

The play is notable in two respects--for its treatment of the emotions and for the figure of William. Valentine is the imperfect prototype of John Tanner. His sole equipment is his tongue; instead of a conscience and a heart, he has only a brain. George Ade would have called him “Gabby Val, the conversational dentist.” Gloria succumbs to the scientific wooing of the new “duellist of sex”; her armour of frigid reserve, the heritage of twentieth-century precepts, melts before the calculated warmth of Valentine's advances. After allowing her to belong to herself for years, Nature now seizes her and uses her for Nature's own large purposes. And Valentine, but now the triumphant victor in the duel of sex, realizes when it is too late that, after all, he is only the victimized captive. All comedies end with a wedding, because it is then that the tragedy begins! The real distinction of the play consists in Shaw's portrayal of his conception of love as it exhibits itself in the contemporary human being. As Mr. Walkley has put it, love, in Shaw's view, is not, as with Chamfort, the _échange de deux fantaisies_, but the _échange de deux explications_. With Shaw, the symbol of love is not a Cupid blindfold, but the alertest of Arguses. His intellectual reflection of the erotic illusion exhibits neither tender sentiment, emotive abandon, nor sexual passion. Shaw's lovers, as Mr. Desmond MacCarthy has pertinently put it, “instead of using the language of admiration and affection, in which this sexual passion is so often cloaked, simply convey by their words the kind of mental tumult they are in. Sexual infatuation is stripped bare of all the accessories of poetry and sympathy. It is represented as it is by itself, with its own peculiar romance, but with none of the feelings which may, and often do, accompany it.”[155]

The one really admirable figure in the play is the immortal William. A master figure of classic, rather than modern, comedy, he suggests, with exquisite subtlety, the graceful unobtrusiveness that dignifies his calling. Whenever he loses sight of his menial position long enough to utter one of his kindly bits of philosophy, it is always to fade back again into the waiter attitude with such deference and such celerity as to accentuate the pathos of the contrast between his station and the rare humanity of his genial philosophy.

_You Never Can Tell_, which Mr. Archer found to be a “formless and empty farce,” achieved immense popular success in New York and London, has been produced with gratifying results throughout German Europe, as well as all over Great Britain, and justifies Mr. Norman Hapgood's characterization: “The best farce that has been upon the English-speaking stage in many years.”

Before turning to the last of the fantastic farce-comedies, I would mention very briefly the three little topical pieces which exhibit the joker Shaw at his Shawest. First, there is that _petite comédie rosse_, so slight as to be dubbed by Shaw himself a “comediettina,” _How He Lied to Her Husband_--written in 1905 to eke out Mr. Arnold Daly's bill in New York. “I began by asking Mr. Shaw to write me a play about Cromwell,” relates Mr. Daly. “The idea appealed to him in his own way. He said he thought it good, but then he raced on to suggest that we might have Charles the First come on with his head under his arm. I pointed out to Shaw that it would be highly inconvenient for a man to come on the stage with his head under his arm, even if he were an acrobat. Shaw, however, said he thought it could be done. In the end, he said he would compromise. 'Write the first thirty-five minutes of that play yourself,' said he, 'and let me write the last five minutes.'”[156] What a convenient recipe for Shaw's formula of anti-climax! The point of the little topsy-turvy, knockabout farce is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the “Candidamaniacs”; but the penny-a-liners usually paragraphed it as a travesty on Shaw's own play of _Candida_. Shaw finally cabled: “Need I say that anyone who imagines that _How He Lied to Her Husband_ retracts _Candida_, or satirizes it, or travesties it, or belittles it in any way, understands neither the one nor the other?” This comediettina is a bright little skit, but it is no more amusing than it is untrue to the _intellectuels_ who made _Candida_ a success in New York and laid the foundations of Shaw's--and Daly's--success in America.

On July 14th, 1905, in a booth in Regent's Park, London, for the benefit of the Actors' Orphanage, was “performed repeatedly, with colossal success,” a “tragedy,” entitled _Passion, Poison and Petrifaction; or The Fatal Gazogene_, written by Shaw at the request of Mr. Cyril Maude. It is an extravagant burlesque on popular melodrama, and the main incident of the “tragedy” is the petrifaction of the hero caused by swallowing a lot of lime as an antidote to the poison administered to him by the jealous husband of his _inamorata_, Lady Magnesia Fitztollemache. “The play has a funny little history,” Mr. Shaw told me, “having its origin in a story I once made up for one of the Archer children. In the early days of William Archer's married life I was down there one night, and one of the children asked me to tell him a story. 'What about?' I asked. 'A story about a cat,' was the eager reply. It seems that at one time my aunt was interested in making little plaster-of-paris figures; and one day the cat came along, and, thinking it was milk, lapped up some of the moist plaster-of-paris. And so the sad result, as I told the Archer children, was that the poor cat petrified inside. 'And what did they do with the cat?' one of the children asked. 'Well, you see,' I replied, 'one of the doors of the house would never stay shut, so my mother kept the cat there ever afterwards to hold the door shut.' The funny part of it all was that Mrs. Archer said that she had caught me in a lie--and to her own children at that. To this day she never believes a single thing I say!”

“_Passion, Poison and Petrifaction_ is, of course, the most utter nonsense,” Shaw continued. “But, would you believe it,”--with a chuckle--“it was recently successfully produced in Vienna, and seriously praised as a characteristic play of the brilliant Irish dramatist and Socialist, Bernard Shaw!”[157]

Slightest of all three is _The Interlude at The Playhouse_, written for Mr. and Mrs. Cyril Maude, and delivered by them at the opening of The Playhouse, Mr. Maude's new theatre, on Monday, January 28th, 1907.[158] The little piece extracts all the comedy to be got out of the embarrassment of an actor-manager over having to deliver a certain speech, and the solicitude of his wife in making an appeal to the audience on his behalf, but without his knowledge, for sympathy and encouragement. The genuine delicacy and lightness of touch with which the situation is handled, and the absence of Shavian intrusiveness, unite in making of the interlude a little gem, quite perfect of its kind.

The last of the comedies of character is _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_, classified by Shaw as one of the _Three Plays for Puritans_. This play might never have been written, but for the fact that Ellen Terry made no secret of the fact that she was born in 1848. When her son, Gordon Craig, became a father, Ellen Terry, according to Shaw, said that now no one would ever write plays for a grandmother! Shaw immediately wrote _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_ to prove the contrary. And seven years later Ellen Terry portrayed Lady Cicely Waynflete with a charm, a waywardness, and a grace that gave pleasure to thousands in England and America.

Just as, in _The Devil's Disciple_, Shaw reduces the melodramatic form to absurdity, so in _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_ does he reduce to absurdity the melodramatic view of life. The scene of the play is an imaginary Morocco, a second-hand, fantastic image vicariously caught for Shaw by Mr. Cunninghame Graham. Not only did Shaw want to write a good part for Ellen Terry: he also wanted to write a good play. So he wrote a whimsical fantasy, half melodrama, half extravaganza, conditioned only by his own mildly philosophic bent and the need for developing Lady Cicely's character. The result, as he is fond of saying, is simply a story of conversion--a Christian tract!

The protagonist, the pirate Brassbound, orders his life upon the principle that, as Bacon puts it, “revenge is a sort of wild justice.” He is imbued with mediæval concepts of right and wrong. In opposition to him, he discovers his opposite--a cool, tactful, unsentimental woman of the world, disarming all opposition through her Tolstoyism. With sympathetic interest, she soon wins from Brassbound the secret of his life, and with quiet and delicious satire, opens his eyes to the pettiness of his mock-heroics, the absurdity of the melodramatic view-point--the code of the Kentucky feud, the Italian vendetta. The revulsion in Brassbound is instant and complete: he is wholly disarmed by the discovery that, instead of being the chosen instrument for the wild justice of lynch-law, he is only a ridiculous twopence coloured villain.

“My uncle was no worse than myself--better, most likely,” is his final confession to Lady Cicely. “Well, I took him for a villain out of a story-book. My mother would have opened anybody else's eyes: she shut mine. I'm a stupider man than Brandyfaced Jack even; for he got his romantic nonsense out of his penny numbers and such-like trash; but I got just the same nonsense out of life and experience.”

Lady Cicely Waynflete is the most charming woman that Shaw has ever drawn. Shaw has intimated that he found in the friendship of Ellen Terry, who served as the model for Lady Cicely, the “best return which could be expected from a gifted, brilliant and beautiful woman, whose love had already been given elsewhere, and whose heart had witnessed thousands of temptations.”[159] In speaking of the character of Lady Cicely Waynflete, Miss Florence Farr once said: “As a sex, women must be for ever grateful to Miss Ellen Terry for teaching Mr. Shaw that lesson about woman.” Nothing could be simpler or more effective than the secret of command possessed by this charming woman. She knows that to go straight up to people, with hand outstretched and a frank “How d'ye do?” is all that is needed to win their confidence. The dastardly sheikh, into whose hands she is about to be delivered, is stupefied and “almost persuaded,” when she assures her friends that he will treat her like one of Nature's gentlemen: “Look at his perfectly splendid face!” Combining as she does the temperament of Ellen Terry with the genial _esprit_ of Bernard Shaw, Lady Cicely is a thoroughly delightful and unique type of the eternal feminine. She is just at the “age of charm,” her actions are unhampered by sentiment, and her chief attractions are frank _naïveté_, the trait of attributing the best of qualities to other people, and an innocent assumption of authority that quietly pinions all opposition. She always manages to do just what she likes because she is bound by no ties to her fellow-creatures, save the bonds of sympathy and innate human kindness. In one respect is she a true Shavienne: toward law, convention, propriety, prejudice, she takes an attitude of quaintly humorous scepticism. What a delicious touch is that when Sir Howard protests that she has made him her accomplice in defeating justice! “Yes,” is her delightfully feminine reply: “aren't you glad it's been defeated for once?”

The moral of this charming but very slight and superficially fantastic play is that revenge is not wild justice, but childish melodrama, and that the justice of the courts of law, enforced by melodramatic sentences of punishment, is often little else than a very base sort of organized revenge. The fable is rather trivial; and the long arm of coincidence puts its finger into the pie more than once, playing that part of timely intervention at which Shaw is so fond of railing. The mixture of Shavian satire with Tolstoyan principles is both novel and piquant; and the mildly Ibsenic ending is a good “curtain”--Brassbound discovering at last the secret of command, _i.e._, selflessness and disinterested sympathy, and Lady Cicely ecstatically felicitating herself upon her escape from--the bonds of love and matrimony.

One other feature of the play is the hideous language of the cockney, Felix Drinkwater, _alias_ Brandyfaced Jack. It takes quite an effort, even with the aid of the key which Shaw has considerately appended, to decipher the jargon of this unhappy hooligan, “a nime giv' us pore thortless lads baw a gint on the _Dily Chronicle_.” In Drinkwater, Shaw sought to fix on paper the dialect of the London cockney, and he once told me that he regarded this as the only accurate effort of the kind in modern fiction. Interested in the study of phonetics through his acquaintance and friendship with that “revolutionary don” and academic authority, Henry Sweet of Oxford, Shaw put his knowledge to work to represent phonetically the lingo of the Board-School-educated cockney. “All that the conventional spelling has done,” Shaw once said in one of his numerous journalistic controversies, “is to conceal the one change that a phonetic spelling might have checked; namely, the changes in pronunciation, including the waves of debasement that produced the half-rural cockney of Sam Weller, and the modern metropolitan cockney of Drinkwater in _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_.... Refuse to teach the Board School legions your pronunciation, and they will force theirs on you by mere force of numbers. And serve you right!”

FOOTNOTES:

[134] Compare the account of Mr. Eden Greville, one of Mr. Grein's associates in the Independent Theatre Society, in _Munsey's Magazine_, March, 1906, entitled, _Bernard Shaw and His Plays_.

[135] Mr. William Archer, writing in the _World_ (London), for Wednesday, December 14th, 1892.

[136] The _Star_, November 29th, 1892. Mr. Archer once told me that there was little doubt that Shaw wrote the “Interview” _in toto_.

[137] Matthew xxiii., 14; Mark xii., 38-40; Luke xx., 46-47.

[138] Appendix I., _Widowers' Houses_; Independent Theatre edition. Henry and Co., London, 1893.

[139] _M. Bernard Shaw et son Théâtre_, by Augustin Filon. _Revue des Deux Mondes_, November 15th, 1905; p. 424.

[140] _Mr. Shaw's Method and Secret_, letter to the editor of the _Daily Chronicle_, April 30th, 1898, signed G. Bernard Shaw. In the first draft, the play was entitled _Mrs. Jarman's Profession_.

[141] It should be clearly pointed out that Shaw is in no sense indebted to Ibsen for dissatisfaction with the existent social order. The facts of Shaw's life disprove the statement of Dr. Georg Brandes (_Bernard Shaw's Teater_, in _Politikken_, Copenhagen, December 29th, 1902): “What Shaw chiefly owes to Ibsen, whose harbinger he was, seems to be a tendency towards rebellion against commonly recognized prejudices, dramatic as well as social.” Shaw's attacks upon modern capitalistic society, both in _Widowers' Houses_ and in _Mrs. Warren's Profession_, are the immediate fruits of his Socialism and his economic studies.

[142] _Study and Stage_, by William Archer, in the _Daily News_, June 21st, 1902.

[143] Compare _The Author's Apology_, the preface to the Stage Society edition of _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ (Grant Richards, London, 1902), pp. xxvii. and xxviii. in especial; and also _Mainly About Myself_, the preface to Vol. I. of _Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant_, pp. xxix-xxxi. in the American edition (H. S. Stone and Co., Chicago, 1902).

[144] Compare _La Psychologie du Militaire Professionel_, by Auguste Hamon, which appeared in November, 1893. I have no reason to believe that Shaw was under any indebtedness to this book in writing _Arms and the Man_.

[145] Compare the reminiscences on the Avenue Theatre production, by Mr. Yorke Stephens, who played the part of Bluntschli; _Music and the Drama_, in the _Daily Chronicle_, November 6th, 1906. It was at the _première_ at the Avenue Theatre that Shaw, called before the audience, found himself disarmed by lack of opposition. A solitary malcontent in the gallery began to boo: Bernard was himself again. Looking up at the belligerent oppositionist, he said with an engaging smile: “My friend, I quite agree with you--but what are we two against so many?”

[146] Compare Shaw's brilliant article, _A Dramatic Realist to His Critics_, in the _New Review_, September, 1894, appearing two months after the close of the run of _Arms and the Man_ at the Avenue Theatre. In _A Word about Stepniak_, in _To-Morrow_, February, 1896, Mr. Shaw says: “He (Stepniak) studiously encouraged me to think well of my own work, and went into the questions of Bulgarian manners and customs for me when I was preparing my play _Arms and the Man_ for the stage as if the emancipation of Russia was a matter of comparatively little importance.... To him I owe the assistance I received from that Bulgarian admiral in whose existence the public, regarding Bulgaria as an inland State, positively declined to believe.”

[147] _Der Dramatiker Bernard Shaw_: in _Gestalten und Gedanken_, by Georg Brandes, München-Langen, 1903. “Human nature is very much the same, always and everywhere,” Shaw explained. “And when I go over my play to put the details right I find there is surprisingly little to alter. _Arms and the Man_, for example, was finished before I had decided where to set the scene, and then it only wanted a word here and there to put matters straight. You see, I know human nature”!

[148] From Shaw's preface to Mr. Archer's _The Theatrical World of 1894_, pp. xxvii-xxviii. In view of the interest manifested in _Arms and the Man_ at the time of its first production in 1894, Mr. Archer requested Mr. Shaw to say something about it in this preface.

[149] _Arms and the Man_ has, most appropriately, furnished the “book” for a comic opera, entitled _The Chocolate Soldier_, written by Bernauer and Jacobson, music by Oscar Straus, the popular composer. It was to be expected that there would be many “comic” attractions in the adaptation of Mr. Shaw's play. Of course, all the complications, such as the incident of the incriminating photograph, are multiplied by three: Nicola disappears and Louka makes way for Mascha, now the cousin of Raina. In the end all are happily mated. In consequence of the “comic variations” from the original play, Mr. Shaw insisted that the programme contain a frank apology for this “unauthorized parody of one of Mr. Bernard Shaw's comedies.” First successfully produced at the Theater des Westens, Berlin, 1909, _The Chocolate Soldier_, both for the borrowed, if parodied, cleverness, and the delightful music, has since won great popularity through the productions of Mr. F. C. Whitney (English version by Mr. Stanislaus Stange), in New York (May, 1910) and London (September, 1910).

[150] Shaw has been charged with indebtedness, not only to W. S. Gilbert, but to earlier topsy-turvyists. In April, 1906, there appeared in the _New York Tribune_ a “deadly parallel” between _Arms and the Man_ and _Used Up_, adapted from the French by Charles Mathews in 1845. As a matter of fact, the passage cited--Bluntschli's proposal for the hand of Raina (compared with Sir Charles Coldstream's for the hand of Lady Clutterbuck)--is neither an imitation of Mathews, nor a triumph of eccentric invention, but a paraphrase, Shaw unqualifiedly asserts, of an actual proposal made by an Austrian hotel proprietor for the hand of a member of Mr. Shaw's own family.

[151] _Mr. Bernard Shaw's Plays_, in _Frames of Mind_ (Grant Richards, London, 1889), p. 47.

[152] By this method of treatment, chronology is of necessity sacrificed to logic.

[153] Preferring to see Shaw fail seriously rather than succeed farcically, Mr. Archer sternly admonished him to “quit his foolishness”; and Mr. Shaw's former champion of Independent Theatre days, Mr. J. T. Grein, gently but firmly advised him never again to send up any more such _ballons d'essai_.

[154] _The Haymarket Theatre_ (Grant Richards, London, 1903). Chapter XIV. (from which the above and following quotations are taken), Mr. Maude says, “was sent to me as an aid to the completion of this work. It professes to deal with that period of our management when we rehearsed a piece by the brilliant Mr. Bernard Shaw. The writer, I am assured, is well fitted to deal with that period. I leave it to the reader to judge, and to guess its authorship.” Needless to say that the author was Bernard Shaw himself!

[155] _The Court Theatre, 1904-1907_, by Desmond MacCarthy (A. H. Bullen, London, 1907), p. 57.

[156] _Post-Express_ (Rochester, N. Y.), December 3d, 1904.

[157] _Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction; or the Fatal Gazogene_; originally appeared in _Harry Furniss's Christmas Annual_ for 1905 (Arthur Treherne and Co. Ltd., Adelphi, London), pp. 11-24, with illustrations by Mr. Harry Furniss.

[158] The text of this dainty little interlude is to be found in the _Daily Mail_, January 29th, 1907. Mr. and Mrs. Maude were playing in _Toddles_ at the time.

[159] The figure of Lady Cicely Waynflete possesses an unique interest in view of the fact conveyed in the following record of Ellen Terry's: “At this time (1897), Mr. Shaw and I frequently corresponded. It began by my writing to ask him, as musical critic of the _Saturday Review_ (!), to tell me frankly what he thought of the chances of a composer-singer friend of mine. He answered 'characteristically,' and we developed a perfect fury for writing to each other. Sometimes the letters were on business, sometimes they were not, but always his were entertaining, and mine were, I suppose, 'good copy,' as he drew the character of Lady Cicely Waynflete in _Brassbound_ entirely from my letters. He never met me until after the play was written.” _From Lewis Carroll to Bernard Shaw_, in _McClure's Magazine_, September, 1908.

THE PLAYWRIGHT--II

“I have, I think, always been a Puritan in my attitude towards
Art. I am as fond of fine music and handsome buildings as
Milton was, or Cromwell, or Bunyan; but if I found that they
were becoming the instruments of a systematic idolatry of
sensuousness, I would hold it good statesmanship to blow every
cathedral in the world to pieces with dynamite, organ and all,
without the least heed to the screams of the art critics and
cultured voluptuaries.”--_Why for Puritans?_ Preface to _Three
Plays for Puritans_, p. xix.

“I do not satirize types. I draw individuals as they are. When
I describe a tub, Archer and Walkley say it is a satire on a
tub.”--Conversation with the author.