Chapter XII (1)

_Man and Superman_ inaugurates another cycle of Shaw's theatre, and first presents Shaw to the world as a conscious philosopher. By reason of its bi-partite nature--it is sub-entitled _A Comedy and a Philosophy_--this play furnishes the natural link between Shaw the dramatist and Shaw the creator of a new form of stage entertainment. It is worth recalling that at the time this play appeared Shaw had not yet won the favour of the “great public” in England. He had, however, won the attention and the enthusiastic, yet tempered, praise of one of the ablest dramatic critics in England. Mr. William Archer pronounced _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ a “masterpiece--yes, with all reservations, a masterpiece,” and as each one of Shaw's plays appeared, he discussed it in the fullest and most impartial way, bespoke for it the attention of the British public, and roundly berated the managers of the large West End theatres for letting slip through their fingers the golden opportunities afforded by the brilliant works of the witty Irishman.[181] For that matter, Shaw was not wanting in appreciative students of his plays among the dramatic critics of the day; and even Mr. Max Beerbohm and Mr. A. B. Walkley, though temperamentally Shaw's opposites, took the liveliest interest in the Shavian drama.

Indeed, it was Mr. Walkley who asked Shaw to write a Don Juan play; and the fulfilment of this request was _Man and Superman_. _Ab initio_, Shaw realized that there are no modern English plays in which the natural attraction of the sexes for one another is made the mainspring of the action. The popular contemporary playwrights, thinking to emulate Ibsen, had produced plays cut according to a certain pattern, _i.e._, plays preoccupied with sex, yet really devoid of all sexual interest. In plays, of which _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ is the type illustration, the woman through indiscretion is brought in conflict with the law which regulates the relation of the sexes, while the man by marriage is brought in conflict with the social convention that discountenances the woman. Such dramas, portraying merely the conflict of the individual with society, Shaw had railed at in the preface to his _Three Plays for Puritans_; such “senseless evasions” of the real sex problem serve in part to explain Shaw's partial lack of sympathy with Pinero during Shaw's _Saturday Review_ period. Shaw was in no mind to treat his friend Walkley to a lurid play of identical import; nor did the Don Juan of tradition, literature and opera, the libertine of a thousand _bonnes fortunes_, suit his wants any better. The prototypic Don Juan of sixteenth-century invention, Molière's persistently impenitent type of impiety, and Mozart's ravishingly attractive enemy of God had all served their turn; whilst in Byron's Don Juan, Shaw saw only a vagabond libertine, a sailor with a wife in every port. Even that spiritual cousin of Don Juan, Goethe's Faust, although he had passed far beyond mere love-making to altruism and humanitarianism, was still almost a century out of date.

This _reductio ad absurdum_ process finally gave Shaw the clue to the mystery; the other types being perfected, and in a sense exhausted, a Don Juan in the philosophic sense alone remained. The modern type of Don Juan “no longer pretends to read Ovid, but does actually read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, studies Westermarck, and is concerned for the future of the race instead of for the freedom of his own instincts.” Confronted with the stark problem of the duel of sex, Shaw solved it with the striking conclusion that Man is no longer, like Don Juan, the victor in that duel. Though sharing neither the prejudices of the homoist nor the enthusiasms of the feminist, Shaw found it easy to persuade himself that woman has become dangerous, aggressive, powerful. The _rôles_ established by romantic convention, and evidenced in the hackneyed phrase “Man is the hunter, woman the game,” are now reversed: Woman takes the initiative in the selection of her mate. Thus is Don Juan reincarnated; once the headlong huntsman, he is now the helpless quarry. _Man and Superman_, in Shaw's own words, is “a stage projection of the tragi-comic love chase of the man by the woman.”

Shaw's solution of the problem was generally regarded as audaciously novel and original. And yet, as Shaw points out in the Dedicatory Epistle, and as I have indicated in a former chapter, the notion is very far from novel. Beaumont and Fletcher's _The Wild Goose Chase_ furnishes the interesting analogy of Mirabell, a travelled Italianate gentleman and cynical philanderer, pursued by Oriana, the “witty follower of the chase,” who employs a number of more or less crude and coarse artifices to entrap him; when the ingenuity of the dramatists is exhausted, Mirabell succumbs to Oriana's wiles.[182] And those who have a passion for attributing all Shaw's ideas to Nietzsche, might find some support in that passage in _A Genealogy of Morals_: “The philosopher abhors _wedlock_ and all that would fain persuade to this state, as being an obstacle and fatality on his road to the _optimum_. Who among the great philosophers is known to have been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer--they were not; nay, we cannot even so much as _conceive_ them as married. A married philosopher is a figure _of comedy_....”

The attitude toward woman exhibited by Shaw in _Man and Superman_ has won for him the appellation, “the most ungallant of dramatists.” Mr. Huneker has ventured to assert that Shaw is “practically the first literary man who has achieved the feat of making his heroines genuinely disagreeable persons.” Now to Wilde and to Strindberg, woman is an inferior being, the history of woman being the history of tyranny in its harshest form, _i.e._, the tyranny of the weak over the strong. Shaw is quite as far from misogyny on the one hand as from gynolatry on the other. From the beginning of his literary career, Shaw has been imbued with the conviction that, to use his own words, “women are human beings just like men, only worse brought up, and consequently worse behaved.” In Shaw's plays it is a toss-up between the men and the women as to which are the worse behaved. The women in Shaw's plays seem always deliberately to challenge the conventional ideal of the womanly Woman. As a dramatist, Shaw rebelled from the very first against the long-established custom of making all heroines perfect, all heroes chivalrous and gallant, all villains irretrievably wicked. Stock characters, in Shaw's view, must be swept off from dramatic art along with romance, the womanly woman, the ideal heroine, and all the other useless lumber that so fatally cumbered the British stage. In Shaw's first play, he confessedly “jilted _the_ ideal lady for _a_ real one,” and predicted that he would probably do it again and again, even at the risk of having the real ones mistaken for counter-ideals. Shaw has kept his promise, and has been jilting the ideal lady ever since.

M. Filon finds Shaw's “_galerie de femmes_” nothing short of astonishing in the veracity and vitality of the likenesses. Ann Whitefield, whom Shaw once pronounced his “most gorgeous female,” is really one of his least successful portraits. “As I sat watching _Everyman_ at the Charterhouse,” says Shaw, “I said to myself, 'Why not Everywoman?' Ann was the result; every woman is not Ann; but Ann is Everywoman.” Thus the play takes on the character of a “morality,” and purports to adumbrate a deep, underlying truth of nature. Unfortunately, Shaw is not a flesh painter; Ann is not a successful portrait of a woman who is “an unscrupulous user of her personal fascination to make men give her what she wants.” She is deficient in feminine subtlety--the obscurer instincts and emotions of sex. The strong, heedless, unquestioning voice of fruitful nature voices its command, not through the passion of a “mother woman,” but through the medium of the comic loquacity of a laughing philosopher![183] In the master works of that sovereign student of human nature, Thomas Hardy, the Life Force holds full sway; Wedekind's _Erdgeist_ reveals the omnivorous, man-eating monster, devouring her human prey with all the ferocity of a she-lioness. Inability to portray sexual passion convincingly is a limitation of Shaw's art. And yet in the present instance we must not forget that, as Mr. Archer reminds us, “no doubt the logic of allegory demanded that the case should be stated in its extremest form, and that the crudest femineity should, in the end, conquer the alertest and most open-eyed masculinity.” While concerned with the problem of sex, _Man and Superman_ remains a drama of ideas. And it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, had the Life Force in Ann been supreme, Maeterlinck would have been vindicated by her in his fine saying: “The first kiss of the betrothed is but the seal which thousands of hands, craving for birth, have impressed upon the lips of the mother they desire.”

_Man and Superman_ is the most pervasively brilliant of all Shaw's comedies. And in spite of the fact that the idea-plot is intricate and requires to be disengaged from the action-plot the comedy, as I saw it produced in both New York and London, gave rise to an almost unbroken burst of merriment on the part of the audience. It is customary to identify Shaw with Tanner; and in the first production of _Man and Superman_ at the Court Theatre, Tanner (Mr. Granville Barker) was “made up” to represent Shaw. As a matter of fact, Mr. Shaw once told me that in Tanner, with all his headlong loquacity, is satirized Mr. H. M. Hyndman, the great Socialist orator. One other detail in the play is noteworthy--the extrinsically irrelevant incident which leaves everyone at the end of the first act “cowering before the wedding-ring.” It is an illustration of a curious device once or twice employed by Shaw--a sort of comic “sell” of the audience, appearing beside the mark because its relation with the action is ideological, not dramatic. In general, the effect of _Man and Superman_ is to make one wish that Shaw would write a comedy of matrimony furnishing the lamentable spectacle pictured by Nietzsche of the married philosopher. Mr. Robert Loraine has actually written a clever sketch upon this theme, entitled _The Reformer's Revenge; or, the Revolutionist's Reconciliation to Reality_;[184] and Mr. William Archer publicly urged Shaw to complete his “Morality” and (following the precedent of _Lord Dundreary Married and Settled_) give us _John Tanner Married and Done For_.

The play just discussed is the society comedy, as it appears in the printed book, with the omission of the Shavio-Socratic scene in hell, and one or two alterations and omissions in the printed play itself. The dream in hell--Act III. of the printed book--is the ultimate form of Shaw's drama of discussion, and has actually been successfully presented at the Court Theatre, London. When I saw it produced there, I was surprised to note the favour with which it was received, the brilliancy and wit of the dialogue compensating in great measure for the absence of all action and the exceptional length of the speeches. At last Shaw's dream of long speeches, Shavian rhetoric, and a pit of philosophers was realized. Upon the average popular audience, the effect would doubtless have been devastating; and even under the most favourable circumstances, the audience was partially seduced into appreciative interest by well-executed scenic effects, exquisite costumes specially designed by Charles Ricketts, and a long synopsis of _Don Juan in Hell_, especially prepared by the author.[185]

The year 1904 marks a turning-point in the career of Bernard Shaw. The average age at which artists create their greatest work is forty-six to forty-seven, according to Jastrow's table; and so, practically speaking, _John Bull's Other Island_ is chronologically announced as Shaw's _magnum opus_. In the technical, no less than in the popular sense, this path-breaking play registers the inauguration of a new epoch in Shaw's career. In this new phase we find him breaking squarely with tradition, and finding artistic freedom in nonconformity. A true drama of national character, _John Bull's Other Island_ portrays the conflict of racial types and exhibits its author as a descendant of Molière, a master of comic irony, and at heart a poet.

Originally designed for production by Mr. W. B. Yeats under the auspices of the Irish Literary Theatre, this play was found unsuited both to the resources of the new Abbey Theatre and to the temper of the neo-Gaelic movement.[186] Temperamentally incapable of visionarily imagining Ireland as “a little old woman called Kathleen ni Hoolihan,” Shaw drew a bold and uncompromising picture of the real Ireland of to-day; and the sequel was the production of the play, not at the Abbey, but at the Royal Court Theatre, London. That interesting experiment in dramatic production inaugurated by Messrs. J. E. Vedrenne and H. Granville Barker at the Royal Court Theatre in 1904, furnishes material for the most interesting chapter in the history of the development of the contemporary English drama.[187] The companies trained by Mr. Barker, an able actor and already a promising dramatist, wrought something very like a revolution in the art of dramatic production in England. The unity of tone, the subordination of the individual, the general striving for totality of effect, the constant changes of bill, the abolition of the “star” system--all were noteworthy features of these productions. There were given nine hundred and eighty-eight performances of thirty-two plays by seventeen authors; seven hundred and one of these performances were of eleven plays by one author--Bernard Shaw. Plays of other authors--notably of Mr. Barker himself--were produced, and often with noticeable success. But in the main the whole undertaking may be regarded as a monster Shaw _Festspiel_, prolonged over three years. Mr. Barker, Mr. Galsworthy, the late Mr. Hankin, Miss Elizabeth Robins and Mr. Masefield, all came prominently into public notice as dramatists of the “new” school. The Court was not, in the strict sense, a repertory theatre; rather it furnished a tentative compromise between the _théâtre à coté_ and the actor-managed theatre backed by a syndicate of capitalists. The Vedrenne-Barker enterprise did the imperatively needed pioneer work of breaking ground for the repertory theatre idea; created a public of intelligent playgoers with literary tastes, who had long since lost interest in the theatre of commerce; developed a whole “school” of playwrights, with Mr. Barker at their head; and brought to the English public at large a belated consciousness of the greatness of Bernard Shaw.

_Alvin Langdon Coburn._ From the original monochrome, made in 1908.

Coming at a political _Sturm und Drang_ period, _John Bull's Other Island_ achieved an immediate and immense success. Leading figures in public life, including Mr. Arthur Balfour and the late Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, again and again heard the play with unmitigated delight; and, finally, King Edward “commanded” a special performance. The gods of English society, upon whose knees ever rests the ultimate fate of the British artist, suddenly awoke at last to the realization of the fact that a genius was living in their midst. _John Bull's Other Island_ marked a new stage in Shaw's career; for whilst the play itself is the _fine fleur_ of Shavian dramaturgy, the characters are set firmly upon solid ground. In Shaw's former plays, as a rule, the locality was not strikingly material, the characters often supra-natural, and the ideas deftly bandied about at times, much as a juggler manipulates glass balls. This new play exhibited nothing short of a new type of drama. Emotion is subsidiary to idea, action is less important than character, and conflict of ideas replaces the conflict of wills of the dramatic formula.

In the Shavian _Anschauung_, the action and reaction of national types inevitably takes precedence over the purely human problem of the love story. The study in emotional psychology is the incidental underplot to the larger study of England _versus_ Ireland; here we see the line of cleavage between Shaw and the conventional dramatist. Shaw's hand, so deft in the handling of national types, the portrayal of racial traits, failed him in the delicate task of the exhibition of vital emotion. “I do not accuse Mr. Shaw of dealing in symbols,” says Mr. John Corbin, “but I shall not, I am sure, misinterpret him radically in saying that _Nora_ is _Kathleen ni Hoolihan_--the embodiment of his idea of Ireland. The real drama of the piece centres in the story of how the Irishman loses Nora and the Briton wins her.... In his heart Larry loves his countrywoman, as she has always loved him, and she has no real affection for the Briton. Here lies the comic irony of the _dénouement_, the very essence of Shaw's comment on his problem.”[188] The “real drama,” one rather feels, is the death struggle of nations. Ireland and England are the antagonist and protagonist, respectively, of the drama; and the dramatic characters, in a broad sense, are both individualized human beings and concrete impersonations of racial traits. It seems to me quite improbable that _John Bull's Other Island_ will “cross frontiers” as readily as many of Shaw's other plays. For, despite the signal merits of the character-drawing, the problem is essentially unique, and, as the title implies, peculiar to the British Isles.

Roscullen, the scene of the play, is a segment of the living Ireland, and here are encountered all those conflicting elements which have made a hopeless enigma of the Irish question for so many generations. In this miniature Ireland we find jostling each other the dreamer and the bigot, the superstitious and the unilluded. Instead of the great landowner, there is a group of small proprietors, who treat their employees and tenants with a harshness and industrial cruelty that can only result in the latter's ruin. Religion continues to be the dominant force in the community; and the clergy exhibit that profound political sagacity and that unscrupulousness in playing upon the superstition of the credulous peasants which are such defining marks of the Roman Catholic priesthood. Ireland's sense of her oppression and bitter wrongs has not succeeded in destroying her sense of humour, her passion for mysticism, and her native charm. These qualities we observe in the ineffable merriment of the peasants over the comic spectacle of Broadbent as an unconscious humorist; in the fascinating figure of the Irish St. Francis, chatting amicably with the grasshopper and breaking his heart over Ireland; and in Nora Reilly, quintessence of graceful coquetry, _larmoyant_ piquancy and Celtic charm.

Thomas Broadbent, Shaw's conception of the typical Englishman, approximates quite closely to Napoleon's description of the Englishman in _The Man of Destiny_. To Mr. A. B. Walkley's characterization of _John Bull's Other Island_ as a “Shavian farrago,” Shaw replied, “Walkley is too thorough an Englishman to be dramatically conscious of what an Englishman is, and too clever and individual a man to identify himself with a typical averaged English figure. I delight in Walkley: he has the courage of his _esprit_; and it gives me a sense of power to be able to play with him as I have done in a few Broadbent strokes which are taken straight from him.”[189] And in a letter to Mr. James Huneker, of date January 4th, 1904, Shaw says, “I tell you, you don't appreciate the vitality of the English.... Cromwell said that no man goes farther than the man who doesn't know where he is going.” In that you have the whole secret of the “typical averaged English figure.” Endowed with the stolid density and exaggerated self-confidence of the average Englishman, Broadbent resolves to study the apparently insoluble Irish question “on the ground”; but his incurable ignorance of Ireland's plight stands revealed in his declared faith that the panacea for all of Ireland's ills is to be found in the “great principles of the great Liberal party.” Ireland irresistibly appeals to his sentimentalities through its traditional charms--the Celtic melancholy, the Irish voice, the rich blarney, the poetic brogue. “Of the evils you describe,” he says to Keegan, “some are absolutely necessary for the preservation of society and others are encouraged only when the Tories are in office.” ... “I see no evils in the world--except, of course, natural evils--that cannot be remedied by freedom, self-government, and English institutions. I think so, not because I am an Englishman, but as a matter of common sense.” With blundering shrewdness, Broadbent announces himself as a candidate for the parliamentary seat, on the ground that he is a Home Ruler, a Nationalist, and Ireland's truest friend and supporter. “Reform,” he announces, “means maintaining these reforms which have already been conferred on humanity by the Liberal party, and trusting for future developments to the free activity of a free people on the basis of these reforms.” In Shaw's description, he (Broadbent) is “a robust, full-blooded, energetic man in the prime of life, sometimes eager and credulous, sometimes shrewd and roguish, sometimes portentously solemn, sometimes jolly and impetuous, always buoyant and irresistible, mostly likable, and enormously absurd in his most earnest moments.”

Broadbent is a great comic figure, destined to take high rank in the portrait-gallery of English letters. His foil, the Irishman, Larry Doyle, without being less interesting, is less convincingly portrayed. Doyle is cursed with the habitual self-questioning and disillusionment of the self-expatriated Irishman. Realizing the charm of Ireland's dreams and the brutality of English facts, Doyle longs discontentedly for “a country to live in where the facts are not brutal and the dreams not unreal.” His hope for a Greater Ireland is based on his own dream of Irish intellectual lucidity mated with English push, the Irishman's cleverness and power of facing facts grafted on the Englishman's indomitable perseverance and high efficiency. And yet, he has absorbed the English view of his own race; this “clear-headed, sane Irishman,” so “hardily callous to the sentimentalities and susceptibilities and credulities,” if we accept Shaw's estimate of the typical Irishman, thus describes his own countrymen:

“Oh, the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding,
never-satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming! No
debauchery that ever coarsened and brutalized an Englishman can
take the worth and usefulness out of him like that dreaming. An
Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never convinces
him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can't
face reality, nor deal with it, nor handle it, nor conquer
it: he can only sneer at them that do, and be 'agreeable to
strangers,' like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets. It's
all dreaming, all imagination. He can't be religious. The
inspired churchman that teaches him the sanctity of life and
the importance of conduct is sent away empty, while the poor
village priest that gives him a miracle or a sentimental story
of a saint has cathedrals built for him out of the pennies of
the poor. He can't be intelligently political: he dreams of
what the Shan Van Vocht said in '98. If you want to interest
him in Ireland you've got to call the unfortunate island
Kathleen ni Hoolihan and pretend she's a little old woman. It
saves thinking. It saves working. It saves everything except
imagination, imagination, imagination; and imagination's such a
torture that you can't bear it without whiskey.”

A noticeable feature of the play's construction is its slow beginning; the first act might more properly be called a prologue. The remainder of the play, although it has little or no story worth recounting, is constructed with unusual care; the interest inheres chiefly in the dialogue and the traits of the principal characters. When Shaw was charged with throwing all attempt at construction overboard, he vehemently replied:

“I never achieved such a feat of construction in my life.
Just consider my subject--the destiny of nations! Consider my
characters--personages who stalk on the stage impersonating
millions of real, living, suffering men and women. Good
heavens! I have had to get all England and Ireland into three
hours and a quarter. I have shown the Englishman to the
Irishman and the Irishman to the Englishman, the Protestant to
the Catholic and the Catholic to the Protestant. I have taken
that panacea for all the misery and unrest of Ireland--your
Land Purchase Bill--as to the perfect blessedness of which all
your political parties and newspapers were for once unanimous;
and I have shown at one stroke its idiocy, its shallowness,
its cowardice, its utter and foredoomed futility. I have
shown the Irish saint shuddering at the humour of the Irish
blackguard--only to find, I regret to say, that the average
critic thought the blackguard very funny and the saint very
unpractical. I have shown that very interesting psychological
event, the wooing of an unsophisticated Irishwoman by an
Englishman, and made comedy of it without one lapse from
its pure science. I have even demonstrated the Trinity to
a generation which saw nothing in it but an arithmetical
absurdity. I have done all this and a dozen other things so
humanely and amusingly that an utterly exhausted audience,
like the wedding guest in the grip of the Ancient Mariner, has
waited for the last word before reeling out of the theatre as
we used to reel out of the Wagner Theatre at Bayreuth after
_Die Götterdämmerung_. And this they tell me is not a play.
This, if you please, is not constructed.”[190]

Not the least noticeable feature of the play is the omission of the character which, in former plays, appeared as Shaw in disguise. The characters are sharply individualized, each is a personality as well as a type. Moreover, Shaw has seized the situation with the hand of a master; we discern an Irish Molière revelling in the comic irony of character-reactions, and observing the rigid impartiality of the true dramatist. This very fairness allows Shaw a free play of intellect that partisanship would have stifled; every situation is transfused with the Shavian ironic consciousness. I once asked Mr. William Archer which play he regarded as Shaw's _magnum opus_. “I suppose _Man and Superman_ is Shaw's most popular play,” said Mr. Archer, “but I have always regarded it, somehow, as beneath--unworthy of--Shaw. I should be inclined to rate _John Bull's Other Island_ as Shaw's greatest dramatic work.” I remember remarking to Mr. Shaw one day that _John Bull's Other Island_ revealed greater solidity of workmanship and greater self-restraint than any of his former plays. “Yes, that is quite true,” replied Mr. Shaw; “my last plays, beginning with _John Bull_, are set more firmly upon the earth. They have ceased to be fantastic, and tend to grow more solid and more human.” The cleverest and truest remark about _John Bull_ was made by W. B. Yeats: “_John Bull's Other Island_ is the first play of Bernard Shaw's that has a genuine geography.”

While no character in the play can be called essentially Shavian, it is noteworthy that Keegan, the unfrocked parish priest, is the “ideal spectator”; in his mouth Shaw places his own poignant criticisms penetrating to the heart of the situation. At last the mystic in Shaw's temperament utters his noble message. And the true poet, vaguely shadowed forth in that essentially romantic figure Marchbanks, speaks from the heart of Bernard Shaw in the accents of Keegan, the mystic:

“In my dreams heaven is a country where the State is the Church
and the Church the people: three in one and one in three. It is
a commonwealth in which work is play and play is life: three in
one and one in three. It is a temple in which the priest is the
worshipper and the worshipper the worshipped: three in one
and one in three. It is a godhead in which all life is human
and all humanity divine: three in one and one in three. It is,
in short, the dream of a madman.”

In _Major Barbara_, Shaw's next play, we discover a reversion to the earlier economic tone of _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ combined with a more specific elaboration of the “Shavian dramaturgy.” This “Discussion in three acts” has aroused so much discussion as to its meaning and purpose that the story of its genesis may throw some light upon its obscurities. Mr. Shaw once related to me the circumstances under which the germ ideas of the play first took form in his mind. It seems that, while spending some time at his county place, Ayot St. Lawrence, in Hertfordshire, he formed an acquaintance with a young man who was a near neighbour, Mr. Charles McEvoy, the author of a play entitled _David Ballard_, produced under the auspices of the London Stage Society. At the close of the War between the States in America, Mr. McEvoy's father, who had fought on the side of the Confederacy, and was a most gentle and humane man, established a factory for the manufacture of torpedoes and various high-power explosives. The idea of this grey-haired gentleman, of peculiarly gentle nature and benignant appearance, manufacturing the most deadly instruments for the destruction of his fellow-creatures appealed to Shaw as the quintessence of ironic contrast. Here, of course, we have the germ idea of Andrew Undershaft. The contrast of the mild-mannered professor of Greek with the militant armourer occurred to Shaw as the result of his acquaintance with a well-known scholar, Professor Gilbert Murray, admirably kodaked by Shaw in the stage description: “Cusins is a spectacled student, slight, thin-haired and sweet voiced.... His sense of humour is intellectual and subtle, and is complicated by an appalling temper. The lifelong struggle of a benevolent temperament and a high conscience against impulses of inhuman ridicule and fierce impatience has set up a chronic strain which has visibly wrecked his constitution. He is a most implacable, determined, tenacious, intolerant person, who, by mere force of character, presents himself as--and actually is--considerate, gentle, explanatory, even mild and apologetic, capable possibly of murder, but not of cruelty or coarseness.”

In 1902, when _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ was produced in London, Shaw said in the _Author's Apology_ affixed to the Stage Society edition of that play, “So well have the rescuers (of fallen and social outcasts) learnt that Mrs. Warren's defence of herself and indictment of society is the thing that most needs saying, that those who know me personally reproach me, not for writing this play, but for wasting my energies on 'pleasant plays' for the amusement of frivolous people, when I can build up such excellent stage sermons on their own work.” _Major Barbara_ marks a return to Shaw's earlier preoccupation with economic themes and is a profound study of some of the greatest social and economic evils of the contemporary capitalistic _régime_. In conversation, Mr. Shaw gave me the reasons which led him to write this play.

“For a long time,” he said, “I had had the idea of the religious play in mind; and I always saw it as a conflict between the economic and religious views of life.

“You see, long ago, I wrote a novel called _Cashel Byron's Profession_, in which I showed the strange anomaly of a profession which has the poetry and romance of fighting about it reduced to a perfectly and wholly commercial basis. Here we see the pressure of economics upon the profession of prize-fighting.

“After a while, I wrote a play which I called _Mrs. Warren's Profession_. I showed that women were driven to prostitution, not at all as the result of excessive female concupiscence, but because the economic conditions of modern capitalistic society forced them into a life from which, in another state of society, they would have shrunk with horror. Here we see the pressure of economics upon the profession of prostitution.

“Finally, there came _Major Barbara_. Perhaps a more suitable title for this play, save for the fact of repetition, would have been _Andrew Undershaft's Profession_. Here we see the pressure of economics upon the profession of dealing in death and destruction to one's fellow-creatures. I have shown the conflict between the naturally religious soul, Barbara, and Undershaft, with his gospel of money, of force, of power and his doctrine not only that money controls morality, but that it is a crime not to have money. The tragedy results from the collision of Undershaft's philosophy with Barbara's.”

_Major Barbara_ is Shaw's presentment, as Socialist, of the problem of social determinism. Undershaft began as an East Ender, moralizing and starving, until he swore that he would be a full-fed free man at all costs. “I said, 'Thou shalt starve ere I starve'; and with that word I became free and great.” As in the case of Mrs. Warren, “Undershaft is simply a man who, having grasped the fact that poverty is a crime, knows that when society offered him the alternative of poverty or a lucrative trade in death and destruction, it offered him not a choice between opulent villainy and humble virtue, but between energetic enterprise and cowardly infamy.” The doctrine of the direct functionality of money and morality is no new doctrine. Colonel Sellers maintained that every man has his price. Becky Sharp averred that any woman can be virtuous on five thousand pounds a year. The penniless De Rastignac on the heights of Montmartre, shaking his fist at the city that never sleeps, bitterly exclaimed: “Money _is_ morality.” Shaw has declared again and again in the public prints and on the platform, that money controls morality, that money is the most important thing in the world, and that all sound and successful personal and social morality should have this fact for its basis. So Undershaft, asked if he calls poverty a crime, replies:

“The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtue beside
it: all the other dishonours are chivalry itself by comparison.
Poverty blights whole cities: spreads horrible pestilences;
strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound
or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here
and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they
matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life:
there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London.
But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty
people, ill-fed, ill-clothed people. They poison us morally
and physically: they kill the happiness of society; they force
us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural
cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us
down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear
poverty. Pah! you talk of your half-saved ruffian in West Ham;
you accuse me of dragging his soul back to perdition. Well,
bring him to me here; and I will drag his soul back again to
salvation for you. Not by words and dreams; but by thirty-eight
shillings a week, a sound house in a handsome street, and a
permanent job. In three weeks he will have a fancy waistcoat;
in three months a tall hat and a chapel sitting; before the end
of the year he will shake hands with a duchess at a Primrose
League meeting, and join the Conservative party.... It is cheap
work converting starving men with a Bible in one hand and a
slice of bread-and-butter in the other. I will undertake to
convert West Ham to Mahommedanism on the same terms.... I had
rather be a thief than a pauper. I had rather be a murderer
than a slave. I don't want to be either; but if you force the
alternative on me, then, by Heaven! I'll choose the braver
and more moral one. I hate poverty and slavery worse than any
other crime whatsoever. And let me tell you this. Poverty and
slavery have stood up for centuries to your sermons and leading
articles: they will not stand up to my machine guns. Don't
preach at them: don't reason with them. Kill them.”

Now it is patent on reflection that poverty _per se_ is not a crime, but frequently an incentive to crime; poverty is an evil that must be remedied by social reforms.[191] The casuistry of Undershaft's arguments lies in the assumption that good ends justify the worst of crimes; but the very strongest case can be made out against this materialist Socialism, inasmuch as it leaves out of consideration all sense of individual integrity and personal honour. The implication of _Major Barbara_ is that the _summum bonum vitæ_ is not virtue, or honour, or goodness, or personal worth, but material well-being, if not worldly prosperity. Undershaft expresses the doctrine of those industrial captains of the predatory rich class whom Mr. Roosevelt has entitled “malefactors of great wealth.” Mr. John D. Rockefeller is publicly quoted as preaching to his Sunday School class that it is every man's _religious_ duty to make as much money as he possibly can--adding the sardonic parenthesis, “honestly, of course.” Undershaft, whose motto is “Unashamed,” finds the parenthesis superfluous--his expressed doctrine is to acquire money at all hazards--_recte si possit, si non, quocumque modo rem_. He would displace the Christian doctrine of submission with the Shavian doctrine of self-assertion. If the present practice of the Christian religion is found inadequate to modern social conditions, Undershaft asserts, why, scrap the Christian morality, and try another--the Undershaft morality, say, _faute de mieux_. But with that comic irony which never deserts Shaw even in treating the characters most akin to himself in temperament, he betrays the discrepancy in Undershaft's position: the lack of connection between his “tall talk” and his perfectly legitimate actions. There is no evidence that Undershaft employed dishonest means in the acquisition of his wealth, or committed any violence in the furtherance of his commercial ambition. Lady Britomart acutely pricks the bubble in the assertion that she could not get along with Undershaft because he gave the most immoral reasons for the most moral conduct!

Shaw suffered the customary fate of the dramatist in having Undershaft's Nietzschean doctrine of the “will to power” laid at his own door. It is an historic fact that Shaw once dissuaded a mob from going on another window-smashing excursion in the West End, by convincing them of its futility: and yet in the preface to _Major Barbara_ he says, “The problem being to make heroes out of cowards, we paper apostles and artist magicians have succeeded only in giving cowards all the sensations of heroes whilst they tolerate every domination, accept every plunder, and submit to every oppression.” As a Fabian, Shaw is a strict advocate of procedure by constitutional means; he constitutionally agitated for Old Age Pensions, threatening the Liberal Party all the while with speedy dissolution if this measure were not carried into effect. It is quite evident that in _Major Barbara_, Shaw is endeavouring to awake public thought and arouse public sentiment in England upon the momentous problems of poverty and the unemployed. To rich and poor alike, he quite consistently and impartially preaches Socialism, finding this to be most effectively accomplished by putting in the mouths of his dramatic characters extremes of opinion expressed in the extremest ways. Shaw advises the malefactor of great wealth, after acquiring a swollen fortune, to turn Socialist and, emulating the examples of Carnegie and Rhodes in educational and other fields, to employ his wealth in improving the conditions of life for the working classes.[192] To the poor, Shaw points out the inadequacy of the “paper apostles and artist magicians,” and the imperative necessity of militant opposition to oppression, revolt against subjection and poverty. In speaking of Undershaft's “hideous gospel,” Sir Oliver Lodge pertinently says, “Perhaps, after all, it is only the wealthy cannon-maker's gospel that is being preached to us; why should we take it as the gospel of Shaw himself? Shaw must have a better gospel than that in the future, and some day he will tell it us, but not yet. As yet, perhaps, it has not dawned clearly on him.... In nearly all Bernard Shaw's writings ... the background of strenuous labour, of poverty and overwork, which constitutes the foundation of modern society, is kept present to the consciousness all the time, is borne in upon the mind even of the most thoughtless: it is not possible to overlook it, and that is why his writings are so instructive and so welcome.”[193]

From the dramatic standpoint, _Major Barbara_ is the most remarkable demonstration yet given by Shaw of the vitality of a type of entertainment in complete contradistinction to the classical model. Shaw has created a form of stage representation, not differing externally from the conventional form of drama, in which material action attains its irreducible minimum, and the conflict takes place absolutely within the minds and souls of the characters. _Major Barbara_ consists in a succession of logical demonstrations, flowing from conflicting reactions set up in the souls of the leading characters by the simplest actions, externally trivial but subjectively of vital significance. In this play Shaw fully justifies his cardinal tenet of dramatic criticism that _illumination of life_ is the prime function of the dramatist, and that the life of drama is not merely the passion of sexual excitement, but the social, _religious and humanitarian passions_. The drama of the future will concern itself with the passion of humanity for all great ends.

_Major Barbara_ is epoch-making in virtue of its theme: the evolutional struggle of the religious consciousness in a single personality. The stage upon which the drama is enacted is the soul of the Salvation Army devotee. “Since I saw the Passion Play at Oberammergau,” said Mr. W. T. Stead in writing of _Major Barbara_, “I have not seen any play which represented so vividly the pathos of Gethsemane, the tragedy of Calvary.”[194] I do not see how anyone can read this story of a soul's tragedy, or see the play upon the stage, without a quickening of the nobler emotions, and a realization that Bernard Shaw is a man of profound feeling and of sentiment, in the best sense. The second act is the acme of great art, alike in the validity of its emotive power and the marvellous portraiture of true practical Christianity in the character of Major Barbara. The sanity and sweetness of her noble nature, the positive divination of her religious sense which inspires her to sink self and go straight to the heart of the religious problem, are revelations in the art of character-portrayal. Her loss of faith appears insufficiently motived in the play; her conversion in the last act is even less convincing. Undershaft's intellectuality dominates Barbara's emotionality; slight reflection might well have convinced her that the Salvation Army accepted Undershaft's and Bodger's “tainted money” without explicit or tacit obligation of any sort whatsoever.[195] But perhaps she saw--as Shaw intends us to see--that the Salvation Army is foredoomed to failure so long as its chief means of support is derived from the very class against which it animadverts. If the Salvation Army goes so far as actually to threaten the incomes of the predatory rich, it will at once discover that its means of support derived from that quarter, will be forthcoming no longer.

Not without its significance is the fact that, in _Major Barbara_, leading dramatic critics found fantastic and absurd what leading publicists found momentous and profound. To Mr. Walkley, _Major Barbara_ was a “farrago,” to Mr. Archer, a play in which there are “no human beings.” On the other hand, Sir Oliver Lodge and Mr. W. T. Stead were immensely impressed with this play as a vital study of contemporary religious and social manifestations. These contrasted views tend to emphasize the facts that the plot of _Major Barbara_ is quite obviously fantastic, and Undershaft a mystic whose ideas are dangerously unpractical. And yet the separate characters in the play, with the exception of Undershaft--and even in his case, we should remember that no character is impossible in a world which holds a Bernard Shaw--are all perfectly natural and perfectly comprehensible. Shaw's practically unlimited acquaintance with all ranks of society enables him to exhibit characters so diametrically diverse as Bill Walker and Major Barbara, Lady Britomart and Mrs. Baines, Undershaft and Cusins, Lomax and “Snobby” Price. The play's greatest faults are the fantastic plot, the exaggerated discursiveness degenerating toward the close into rather wearisome prolixity, and the lack of conviction inspired by Barbara's “conversion” to Undershaftism at the close. The seriousness of the theme is everywhere lightened by the brilliancy of the dialogue, the deadly accuracy of the paradoxes, and the satiric portraiture of social types. But Shaw's incorrigible dialecticism leaves something to be desired; and we feel toward Shaw the playwright much as Lady Britomart felt towards Undershaft. “Stop making speeches, Andrew,” she says. “This is not the place for them”; to which Undershaft (_punctured_) replies: “My dear, I have no other way of conveying my ideas.”

Shaw recently asserted that the “way to get the real English public into the theatre was to give them plenty of politics, to suffuse the politics with religion, and have as many long speeches as possible. I knew this because I was in the habit of delivering long speeches to British audiences myself.” At the Court Theatre, and later at the Savoy, Shaw drew the real English public to the theatre with the politics of _John Bull's Other Island_, the religion of _Major Barbara_, and the long speeches of these two and _Man and Superman_. In his next play, which he told me he regarded as his most human and most rational drama, Shaw's active and long-continued interest in modern medicine found full vent. “The theme of my new play is modern serumpathy; and the hero is a doctor,” he wrote me while engaged upon the first act of _The Doctor's Dilemma_.

One day in the summer of 1906, during a visit to the Shaws at Mevagissey on the seacoast of Cornwall, Mr. Granville Barker told Mrs. Shaw about a friend of his, a Dr. W----, who had recently been treated for tuberculosis at a London hospital. Mrs. Shaw was struck by the recital, which prompted the consideration of the vast pains often taken by medical scientists to preserve the lives of people who, unlike Dr. W----, were quite useless to the world. Such people, whose constitutions were hopelessly undermined, should not be dabbled over for endless time to no purpose: it was agreed that they ought to be put into the lethal chamber.

“Why, yes,” exclaimed Mrs. Shaw in a moment of inspiration, “there's a play in that!”

Mr. Shaw replied: “Sure enough, I believe you are right. Hand me my tablet and I will go to work on it at once.” The necessary writing materials were immediately handed him; this was the beginning of _The Doctor's Dilemma_.

Upon the leading motive of the play hinges the principal criticism which might be directed against Shaw as a realist. Almost everyone is inclined to maintain that, whereas problems of the most serious ethical significance confront even the most ordinary practitioner, the dilemma in which Ridgeon finds himself placed is one that would never arise in actual experience. The truth of the matter is that the play is based upon an actual incident; and Mr. Shaw once related the story to me in detail. One day he was at St. M----'s Hospital, London, visiting a famous physician, Sir A---- W----. The size of the hospital admitted of only a few patients for treatment, say fifteen all told. In the course of the conversation, an assistant came in to report to the head of the hospital that some unknown man had made an urgent request to be taken in as a patient at the hospital. “Is he worth it?” asked the eminent physician. “This gave me the clue to _The Doctor's Dilemma_, you see,” explained Mr. Shaw. “A choice between those worthy and those unworthy to be treated, and presumably saved, was an ethical question inevitably arising in virtue of the cramped facilities of the hospital. The question whether the patient was physically worthless or not was in no sense an inhuman question; and my own treatment, you see, is in no sense either freakish or inhuman.”

After Ibsen's death Shaw wrote a critical appreciation of Ibsen's work, in the course of which he said: “Ibsen seems to have succumbed without a struggle to the old notion that a play is not really a play unless it contains a murder, a suicide, or something else out of the _Police Gazette_.... The Brand infant and Little Eyolf are as tremendously effective as a blow below the belt; but they are dishonourable as artistic devices, because they depend on a morbid horror of death and a morbid enjoyment of horror.”[196] Loyally championing Ibsen and the fundamental principles of drama--for the above quotation appeared to be nothing short of an attack upon tragedy--Mr. William Archer characterized Shaw's charge as “the æstheticism of the fox without a tail ... the instinctive self-justification of the dramatist fatally at the mercy of his impish sense of humour.” In a challenging tone he went on to aver that Shaw “eschews those profounder revelations of character which come only in crises of tragic circumstance. He shrinks from that affirmation and consummation of destiny which only death can bring. Death is, after all, one of the most important incidents of life, not only to him or her who dies, but to those who survive.... If, in Mr. Shaw's own phrase, 'the illumination of life' is the main purpose of drama, what illuminant, we may ask, can be more powerful than death?... It is not the glory but the limitation of Mr. Shaw's theatre that it is peopled by immortals.”[197]

A few weeks later--as Mr. Archer himself has recorded[198]--a paragraph appeared in the _Tribune_, “from an unexceptionable source,” announcing the practical completion of _The Doctor's Dilemma_. This was its substance:

“Mr. Bernard Shaw has been taking advantage of his seaside
holidays in Cornwall to write a new play.... It is the outcome
of the article in which Mr. William Archer penned a remarkable
dithyramb to Death, and denied that Mr. Shaw could claim the
highest rank as a dramatist until he had faced the King of
Terrors on the stage. Stung by this reproach from his old
friend, Mr. Shaw is writing a play all about death.... He has
not evaded the challenge by a quip; the play is in five acts,
with the fatal situation in the correct position--at the end
of the fourth. The death scene will be unlike any ever before
represented.”

The conversation at Mevagissey and the incident at the hospital in London prior thereto were the real clues to the creation of _The Doctor's Dilemma_. Mr. Archer's “challenge,” as Mr. Shaw assured me, happened to fit in conveniently with his already formulated dramatic plan. When the play was actually produced, Mr. Archer triumphantly declared that Shaw had ingeniously evaded his challenge to “keep a straight face long enough to write a scene of pathos or of tragedy.” He explained that “death, of all things, requires to be approached in humility of spirit, and that humility has been omitted from Mr. Shaw's moral equipment. He must always be superior to every character, every emotion, every situation he portrays.... If the 'King of Terrors' thinks he can perturb or overawe the cool, clear, quizzical intelligence of G. B. S., his majesty is very much mistaken.... As he (Mr. Shaw) is superior to life, there is no reason in the world why he should not be superior to death.”[199] In a later article Mr. Archer maintained that Shaw had “doctored” the situation of Dubedat's death. Moreover, Mr. Archer gave his case away in the words: “He has not treated death soberly, seriously, naturally, or, in a word, with a straight face. He has chosen an extremely exceptional case, and has treated it realistically in outward detail; ironically in spirit and effect. It was not realism I demanded--it was poetry!”[200] Now, to expect a man quintessentially an ironic and comedic dramatist to throw around death a halo of imaginative poetry is to commit the critical blunder of complaining of one author that he does not write like another--say, that Shaw does not write like Shakespeare. If there is anything that Shaw abhors, it is the spectacle of death made stage-sublime. And it is quite unreasonable not to expect a man who does not believe in personal immortality to be “superior to death”; and Shaw once said, as I have remarked elsewhere, that he was looking for a race of men who were not afraid to die. Death is approached in _The Doctor's Dilemma_ with neither awe nor humility; not by the doctors who are professionally callous, or by the amoral atheist, Dubedat. We are made to realize Jennifer's anguish during Dubedat's dissolution; her action following Dubedat's death--the action of a Ouida or a Laurence Hope--is both logical and psychological. It is quite true that Shaw has not complied with Mr. Archer's unreasonable and extravagant request; but he has treated the scene, allowing for the indispensable “heightening for dramatic effect,” with acute psychological penetration, with wonderful art, and with absolute consistency to his own view of life--an eminently honest and square course to pursue.