Chapter VII (2)

The period of the play is the year 48 B.C., when Cleopatra was a girl of sixteen and Cæsar an oldster of fifty-two, with a widening bald spot beneath his laurel and a gradually lessening interest in the romantic side of life. Shaw depicts the young queen as an adolescent savage: ignorant, cruel, passionate, animal, impulsive, selfish and blood-thirsty. She is monarch in name only and spends her time as any child might. Egypt is torn by the feud that finally leads to the Alexandrine war, and, Cleopatra, perforce, is the nominal head of one of the two parties. But she knows little of the wire-pulling and intriguing, and the death of her brother and rival, Ptolemy Dionysius, interests her merely as an artistic example of murder. The health of a sacred cat seems of far more consequence to her than the welfare of Asia Minor.

Cæsar comes to Alexandria to take a hand in the affairs of Egypt and, incidentally, to collect certain moneys due him for past services as a professional conqueror. Cleopatra fears him at first, as a most potent and evil bogey-man, and is so vastly surprised when she finds him quite human, and even commonplace, that she straightway falls in love with him. Cæsar, in return, regards her with a mild and cynical interest. “He is an important public man,” says Max Beerbohm, “who knows that a little chit of a girl-queen has taken a fancy to him and is tickled by the knowledge, and behaves very kindly to her and rather wishes he were young enough to love her.” He needs 1600 talents in cash and tries to collect the money. In truth, he has little time to waste in listening to her sighs. Pothinus, of the palace--an early Roman Polonius--is appalled.

“Is it possible,” he gasps, “that Cæsar, the conqueror of the world, has time to occupy himself with such a trifle as our taxes?”

“My friend,” replies Cæsar affably, “taxes are the chief business of a conqueror of the world.”

And so there comes fighting and the burning of the Alexandrine library and the historic heaving of Cleopatra into the sea and other incidents more or less familiar. Through it all the figure of Cæsar looms calm and unromantic. To him this business of war has become a pretty dull trade: he longs for the time when he may retire and nurse his weary bones. He fishes Cleopatra out of the water--and complains of a touch of rheumatism. He sits down to a gorgeous banquet of peacock’s brains and nightingale’s tongues--and asks for oysters and barley water. Now and then Cleopatra’s blandishments tire him. Again, her frank savagery startles and enrages him. In the end, when his work is done and his fee pocketed, when Cleopatra’s throne is safe, with Roman soldiers on guard about it, he goes home.

“I will send you a beautiful present from Rome,” he tells the volcanic girl-queen.

She demands to know what Rome can offer Egypt.

“I will send you a man,” says Cæsar, “Roman from head to heel and Roman of the noblest; not old and ripe for the knife; not lean in the arms and cold in the heart; not hiding a bald head under his conqueror’s laurels; not stooped with the weight of the world on his shoulders; but brisk and fresh, strong and young, hoping in the morning, fighting in the day and revelling in the evening. Will you take such an one in exchange for Cæsar?”

“His name? His name?” breathes the palpitating Cleopatra.

“Shall it be Mark Anthony?” says Cæsar.

And the erotic little Cleopatra, who has a vivid remembrance of Anthony’s manly charms, born of a fleeting glimpse of him, falls into her elderly friend’s arms, speechless with gratitude.

Unlike most of Shaw’s plays, “Cæsar and Cleopatra” is modelled upon sweeping and spectacular lines. In its five acts there are countless scenes that recall Sardou at his most magnificent--scenes that would make “Ben Hur” seem pale and “The Darling of the Gods” a parlor play. And so, too, there is plenty of the more exciting sort of action--stabbings, rows, bugle-calls, shouts and tumults. What opportunity it would give to the riotous, purple fancy of Klaw and Erlanger or the pomp and pageantry of David Belasco!

Shaw makes Cleopatra a much more human character than Cæsar. In the latter there appears rather too much of the icy _sang froid_ we have grown accustomed to encounter in the heroes of the brigade commanded by “The Prisoner of Zenda.” Some of Cæsar’s witticisms are just a bit too redolent of the professional epigrammatist. Reading the play we fancy him in choker collar and silk hat, with his feet hoisted upon a club window-sill and an Havana cigar in his mouth,--the cynical man-of-the-world of the women novelists. In other words, Shaw, in attempting to bring the great conqueror down to date, has rather expatriated him. He is scarcely a Roman.

Cleopatra, on the contrary, is admirable. Shaw very frankly makes her an animal and her passion for Cæsar is the backbone of the play. She is fiery, lustful and murderous; a veritable she-devil; and all the while an impressionable, superstitious, shadow-fearing child. In his masterly gallery of women’s portraits--Mrs. Warren, Blanche Sartorius, Candida, Ann Whitefield and their company--Cleopatra is by no means the least.

The lesser characters--Brittanus, the primitive Briton (a parody of the latter-day Britisher); Apollodorus, the Sicilian dilletante; Ftatateeta, Cleopatra’s menial and mistress; Rufio, the Roman general (a sort of Tiber-bred William Dobbin); and the boy Ptolemy--all remain in the memory as personages clearly and certainly drawn.

In view of the chances that the play affords the player and the stage manager it seems curious that it was so long neglected by the Frohmans of the day. Between Shaw’s Cæsar and Shakespeare’s Cæsar there is a difference wide enough to make a choice necessary. That a great many persons, pondering the matter calmly, would cast their ballots for the former is a prophecy not altogether absurd. Just as the world has outgrown, in succession, the fairy tale, the morality play, the story in verse, the epic and the ode, so it has outgrown many ideas and ideals regarding humanity that once appeared as universal truths. Shakespeare, says Shaw, was far ahead of his time. This is shown by his Lear. But the need for earning his living made him write down to its level. As a result those of his characters that best pleased his contemporaries--Cæsar, Rosalind, Brutus, etc.--now seem obviously and somewhat painfully Elizabethan.

“A MAN OF DESTINY”

That characteristic tendency to look at the under side of things and to explore the depths beneath the obvious surface markings, which Shaw displays in “Cæsar and Cleopatra,” “Arms and the Man” and “The Devil’s Disciple,” is shown at the full in “The Man of Destiny.” The play is in one act and in intent it is a mere bravura piece, written, as the author says, “to display the virtuosity of the two principal performers.” But its picture of Napoleon Bonaparte, the principal character, is a startlingly novel one, and the little drama is remarkable alike for its fantastic character drawing, its cameo craftsmanship, its ingenious incident and its fairly dazzling dialogue. There is more of the quality called “brilliancy” in its one scene than in most three-act society comedies of the day. Some of its episodes are positive gems.

The Napoleon of the play is not the emperor of popular legend and Meissonier’s painting, but the young general of 1796, but recently come to opportunity and still far from immortality. The scene is the parlor of a little inn on the road from Lodi to Milan and the young general--he is but twenty-seven--is waiting impatiently for a packet of despatches. He has defeated the Austrians at Lodi, but they are yet foes to be feared and he is very eager to know whether General Massena will make his next stand at Mantua or at Peschiera. A blundering jackass of a lieutenant, the bearer of the expected despatches, comes staggering in with the information that he has been met on the road and outwitted and robbed of them by a boyish young officer of the enemy’s. Napoleon flies into a rage, very naturally, but after all it is an incident of the wars and, the papers being lost, he resigns himself to doing without them.

Almost simultaneously there appears from upstairs a handsome young woman. The lieutenant, seeing her, is instantly struck with her remarkable resemblance to the youthful officer who cajoled and robbed him. Napoleon pricks up his ears and orders the half-witted lieutenant out of the room. And then begins a struggle of wits. The young woman and the young officer are one person. Bonaparte knows it and demands the dispatches. But she is a nimble one, this patriot in skirts, and it seems for a while that he will have to play the dragoon and tear them from her bodice. Even when she yields and he has the papers in his hands, she is the victor. There is one letter that he dare not read. It is a _billet-doux_ from a woman to a man who is not her husband and it has been sent from Paris by a well-meaning blunderer that the husband may read it and learn. Josephine is the woman, the director Barras is the other man--and Napoleon himself is the husband.

Here we have Bonaparte the man, facing a crisis in his affairs more appalling than any he has ever encountered on the field of war. There is no gleam of a crown ahead to cheer him on and no crash of artillery to hearten him. It is a situation far more terrifying than the fight about the bridge at Lodi, but he meets it squarely and resolutely. And in the end he outplays and vanquishes his fair conqueror.

She tells the blundering lieutenant that the officer boy who outwitted him was her brother.

“If I undertake to place him in your hands, a prisoner,” she says, “will you promise me on your honor as an officer and a gentleman not to fight with him or treat him unkindly in any way?”

The simple-minded lieutenant promises--and the young woman slips out and once more discards her skirts for the uniform of a young officer. Then she reappears and surrenders.

“Where are the dispatches?” demands Napoleon, with heavy dissembling.

“My sister has bewitched the general,” says the protean stranger. “General: open your coat; you will find the dispatches in the breast of it....”

And lo! they are even there--and all agree that as papers bearing the gristly finger-prints of a witch, they must be burnt. Cæsar’s wife must be above suspicion.

“I read them the first thing....” whispers the witch’s alter ego; “So you see I know what’s in them; and you don’t.”

“Excuse me,” replies Napoleon blandly. “I read them when I was out there in the vineyard ten minutes ago.”

It would be impossible to exaggerate the humor and delicacy of this little play. Napoleon, it must be remembered, is still a youngster, who has scarcely dared to confess to himself the sublime scope of his ambitions. But the man of Austerlitz and St. Helena peeps out, now and then, from the young general’s flashing eyes, and the portrait, in every detail, is an admirable one. Like Thackeray, Shaw is fond of considering great men in their ordinary everyday aspects. He knows that Marengo was but a day, and that there were thousands of other days in the Little Corporal’s life. It is such week-days of existence that interest him, and in their light he has given us plays that offer amazingly searching studies of Cæsar and of Bonaparte, not to speak of General Sir John Burgoyne.

“THE ADMIRABLE BASHVILLE”

The Admirable Bashville, or Constancy Rewarded,” a blank verse farce in two tableaux, is a dramatization by Shaw of certain incidents in his novel, “Cashel Byron’s Profession.” Cashel Byron, the hero of the novel, is a prize-fighter who wins his way to the hand and heart of Lydia Carew, a young woman of money, education and what Mulvaney calls “theouries.” Cashel sees in Lydia a remarkably fine girl; Lydia sees in Cashel an idealist and a philosopher as well as a bruiser. The race of Carew, she decides, needs an infusion of healthy red blood. And so she marries Byron--and they live happily ever after.

Bashville is Lydia’s footman and factotum, and he commits the unpardonable solecism of falling in love with her. Very frankly he confesses his passion and resigns his menial portfolio.

“If it is to be my last word,” he says, “I’ll tell you that the ribbon round your neck is more to me,” etc., etc.... “I am sorry to inconvenience you by a short notice, but I should take it as a particular favor if I might go this evening.”

“You had better,” says Lydia, rising quite calmly and keeping resolutely away from her the strange emotional result of being astonished, outraged and loved at one unlooked-for stroke. “It is not advisable that you should stay after what you have just----”

“I knew that when I said it,” interposes Bashville, hastily and doggedly.

“In going away,” continues Lydia, “you will be taking precisely the course that would be adopted by any gentleman who had spoken to the same effect. I am not offended by your declaration; I recognize your right to make it. If you need my testimony to further your future arrangements, I shall be happy to say that I believe you to be a man of honor.”

An American pugilist-actor, struck by the possibilities of the story, engaged a journeyman playwright to make a play of it, and Shaw, to protect his rights, put together “The Admirable Bashville.” The one performance required by the English copyright law was given by the Stage Society at the Imperial Theater, London, in the summer of 1903.

“It was funny,” says James Huneker, who witnessed the performance. “It gibed at Shakespeare, at the modern drama, at Parliament, at social snobbery, at Shaw himself, and at almost everything else within reach. The stage setting was a mockery of the Elizabethan stage, with two venerable beef-eaters in Tower costume, who hung up placards bearing the legend, ‘A Glade in Wiltstoken Park,’ etc. Ben Webster as Cashel Byron and James Hearn as the Zulu King (whom Cashel entertains by an exhibition of his fistic prowess) carried off the honors. Aubrey Smith, made up as Mr. Shaw in the costume of a policeman with a brogue, caused merriment, especially at the close, when he informed his audience that the author had left the house. And so he had. He was standing at the corner when I accosted him.”

Shaw explains that he wrote the extravaganza in blank verse because he had to hurry over it and “hadn’t time to write it in the usual prose.” To anyone “with the requisite ear and command of words,” he says in another place, “blank verse, written under the amazingly loose conditions which Shakespeare claimed, with full liberty to use all sorts of words, colloquial, technical, rhetorical and even obscurely technical, to indulge in the most far-fetched ellipses, and to impress ignorant people with every possible extremity of fantasy and affectation, is the easiest of all known modes of literary expression, and this is why whole oceans of dull bombast and drivel have been emptied on the head of England since Shakespeare’s time in this form by people who could not have written ‘Box and Cox’ to save their lives.”

“The Admirable Bashville” may be seen in the United States before long. Not long ago the London _Daily Mail_ reported that the eminent comedian and gladiator, Mr. James J. Corbett, was casting eager eyes upon it and that Shaw rather liked the idea of his appearing in it.

“He is a man who has made a success in one profession,” the dramatist is reported to have said, “and will therefore understand that there are difficulties to be encountered in making a success in another. Look at the books written to-day, and then consider which you would rather have--a man who can do nothing or a really capable prize-fighter.”

All of which you will find, much elaborated, in “Cashel Byron’s Profession,” which was written in 1882.

“CANDIDA”

Candida” is a latter-day essay in feminine psychology after the fashion of “A Doll’s House,” “Monna Vanna” and “Hedda Gabler.” Candida Morell, the heroine, is a clergyman’s wife, who, lacking an acquaintance with the philosophies and face to face with the problem of earning her daily bread, might have gone the muddy way of Mrs. Warren. As it is, she exercises her fascinations upon a moony poet, arouses him to the mad-dog stage of passion, drives her husband to the verge of suicide--and then, with bland complacency and unanswerable logic, reads both an excellent lecture, turns the poet out of doors, and falls into her husband’s arms, still chemically pure. It is an edifying example of the influence of mind over matter.

Arnold Daly’s heroic production of the play, at the little Berkeley Lyceum, in New York City, served as the foundation of the present vogue of Shaw in the United States, and in consequence “Candida” has been the theme of many metropolitan and provincial philosophers and critics. At the start the vast majority of them muddled the play hopelessly. Candida, they decided, was a sublime type of the virtuous wife and mother--a good woman whose thoughts were as innocent as her acts. It remained for Shaw--and he is usually his own best critic--to set them right. Candida, he explained, was a “very immoral female ... who, without brains and strength of mind ... would be a wretched slattern or voluptuary.” In other words (as he tried to make clear) she remained virtuous, not because there was aught of the vestal or altruist about her, but because she had discovered that it was possible to enjoy all of the ecstatic excitement of a fall from grace, and still, by holding back at the actual brink of the precipice, to retain, in full measure, her reputation as a pattern of fidelity and virtue. She solved the problem of being immoral and respectable at the same time.

The play is well built and thoroughly balanced and mature. Its every scene shows that it is the work of a dramatist whose genius has been mellowed and whose hand has been made sure by experience. The action moves with that certain, natural air peculiar to many of Ibsen’s plays. The characters are not sketches, but definitive, finished portraits. They are not obvious types, perhaps, but even the poet, with all his extravagances, is strangely human.

The Rev. James Morell, Candida’s husband, is a Christian-socialist of a sort not uncommon on either side of the Atlantic. He has a parish in an unfashionable part of London, and beside the usual futilities of a conscientious clergyman’s daily labor, finds time to make frequent addresses to the masses and classes upon the problems of the hour. In his make-up, there is much of the unconscious make-believe of the actor off the stage, though his own belief in himself is unshaken. Public speaking seems to have this uncanny effect upon many men. Beginning in all sincerity, they gradually lay stress upon the manner of saying a thing at the expense of the matter. Their aim is to make an effect by means of the spoken word and in the end, without realizing it, they become stagey and unnatural. Such a man is Morell. By no means, it will be observed, is he to be mistaken for a hypocrite.

Into his home, by some mad, altruistic impulse, he brings Eugene Marchbanks, a moon-struck young man with the romantic ideals and day dreams of a medieval Edgar Allan Poe and the practical common-sense of an infant. Eugene is eighteen. He inhabits a world a mile or so above the pink clouds of the sunset and writes vague, immaterial verses of the sort that all of us invent and some of us set down in pen-and-ink when we are young. At the start, in all probability, Candida regards him as a nuisance. But by the time the play opens she has already lured him on to the rocks. It is pleasant to sit by the fire and listen to his hazy verses. He is a relief from the honest beefiness of Morell. And so Candida has her entertainment and Eugene, poor boy! falls in love with her.

Now, loving another man’s wife, since the beginning of written history, has always presupposed or developed a rather ungenial attitude toward that other man, and Eugene, studying Morell, comes to the conclusion that he is a mere vaporish windbag--a silly bundle of stale platitudes, trite ponderosities and pulpit puerilities. Having the valor of youth, he makes open confession.

“I love your wife,” he says to Morell, “... a woman with a great soul craving reality, truth, freedom, and being fed on metaphors, sermons, stale perorations, mere rhetoric. Do you think a woman’s soul can live on your talent for preaching?...”

Morell is staggered, not by Eugene’s frank avowal of his love for Candida, but by the other things he has said. What if it is true that she is stifled by the atmosphere of the Morell home? What if it is true that she has tired of being shadow and drudge to an obscure, over-earnest clergyman in a semi-slum and has turned her fancy toward the poet?

“It is easy, terribly easy,” he says pathetically, “to break a man’s faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man’s spirit is devil’s work. Take care of what you are doing. Take care....”

It is a time of torment for the preacher and he sees his house of cards trembling as if for a fall. Eugene, all the while, is defiant and belligerent. He adds the virtue of rescuing Candida to the pleasure of possessing her, and the two together work his swift undoing.

“Send for her!” he roars. “Send for her and let her choose between us!”

Aha, my masters! what a scene is this!--what a scene of mad passion for the gallery to linger over breathlessly, for the orchestra to greet with stares and for the critics to belabor and dissect in the morning!

Candida comes in and the two bid for her heart and helping hand.

“I have nothing to offer you,” says Morell, with proud humility, “but my strength for your defense, my honesty of purpose for your surety, my ability and industry for your livelihood, and my authority and position for your dignity. That is all it becomes a man to offer a woman.”

“And you, Eugene?” asks Candida quietly. “What do you offer?”

“My weakness!” exclaims the poet passionately. “My desolation! My heart’s need!”

“That’s a good bid,” says Candida judicially. “Now I know how to make my choice.”

Then she pauses and looks curiously from one to the other, as if weighing them. Morell, whose lofty confidence has once more changed into heart-breaking dread, loses all power over himself and in a suffocating voice--the appeal bursting from the depths of his anguish--cries “Candida!”

“Coward!” shrieks Eugene, divining the victory in the surrender. And Candida--O most virtuous of wives!--says blandly, “I give myself to the weaker of the two” and falls into her husband’s arms. It is a situation that struck the first night audience at the Berkeley Lyceum as one eminently agreeable and refined.

As Shaw explains, the poet, despite the fact that “his face whitens like steel in a furnace that cannot melt it,” is a gainer by Candida’s choice. He enters the Morell home a sentimental boy yearning for an emotional outlet. He leaves it a man who has shouldered his cross and felt the unutterable stimulus of sacrifice. Candida makes a man of him, says Shaw, by showing him his strength. David finds that he must do without Uriah’s wife.

The dramatist makes Candida essay a most remarkable analysis of her own motives. It is after Morell has reproached her, sick at heart and consumed by a nameless fear, to learn if Eugene’s fiery onslaught has been born of any unrest that may be stirring within her. She explains freely and frankly, with more genuine honesty and self-revelation, perhaps, than she knows. Eugene, she says, is like a shivering beggar asking for her shawl. He needs love but scarcely knows it, and she conceives it her duty to teach him the value of love, that no worse woman may teach him its pains later on.

“Will he forgive me,” she says, “for not teaching him myself? For abandoning him to the bad women for the sake of my goodness--my purity, as you call it? Ah, James, how little you understand me, to talk of your confidence in my goodness and purity. _I would give them both to Eugene as willingly as I would give my shawl to a beggar dying of cold_, if there was nothing else to restrain me....”

“Here,” says Huneker, “is one of the most audacious speeches in any modern play. It has been passed over by most critics who saw in ‘Candida’ merely an attempt to make a clergyman ridiculous, not realizing that the theme is profound and far-reaching, the question put being no more or no less than: Shall a married man expect his wife’s love without working for it, without deserving it?” To this may be added another and more familiar question: May not the woman who lives in the odor of sanctity be more thoroughly immoral, at heart, than the worst of her erring sisters?

The play has a number of extremely exciting “grand” scenes and in general is admirably suitable for public performance. The minor characters are but three in number--Candida’s wine-buying vulgarian of a father, Morell’s curate and Proserpine, his typewriter. Proserpine is admirable, and her hopeless love for Morell--a complaint not uncommon among the women he knows--gives the play a note of homely sentiment that keeps it to earth.

As a piece of workmanship “Candida” is Shaw at his best; as a study in the workings of the feminine mind it deserves to rank with some of the best plays the modern stage has to offer.

“HOW HE LIED TO HER HUSBAND”

How He Lied to Her Husband” is a one-act bit of foolery that Shaw wrote for Arnold Daly after “Candida” had made a success in New York. It was presented for the first time on the evening of Sept. 26, 1904, and during the ensuing week was more vociferously discussed than any other one-act play that ever graced the boards of an American theater.

As he made fun of the vaporing Ibsenites of the early ’90’s in “The Philanderer,” just so Shaw got his joke at the expense of his own ecstatic followers in this little appendix to “Candida.” The latter had been presented with huge profit, and thousands of honest playgoers, alert for mysterious “symbolism” and subtle “purposes” had seen in its heroine a great many of the qualities they formerly sought and discovered in the much-mauled Ibsen women. Candida, in brief, became the high priestess of the advanced cult, in all its warring denominational variety. It became a sign of intellectual vigor to go to the Berkeley Lyceum and compare her with Nora Helmer, Hedda Gabler and their company. And so Shaw indited “How He Lied to Her Husband.”

The characters in the little farce are a fashionable young poet named Henry Upjohn, an untamed American husband named Bumpus, and his wife, Aurora Bumpus, a young woman with yearnings. Aurora and Henry have seen a performance of “Candida” and have come away with a feeling that an intrigue after the fashion of Candida and Eugene, is one of those things that no really advanced poet or modern wife should be without. So Henry writes a sheaf of sonnets to Aurora and being determined to play the game according to the rules, proposes that they run off together. They are about to depart, conscientiously leaving the Bumpus diamonds behind, when Aurora, at the brink of the precipice, draws back.

Meanwhile Bumpus happens upon Henry’s sonnets and confronts the poet with the charge of having written them. Henry, determined to save Aurora, “lies like a gentleman”--and incidentally overdoes it. Bumpus, mistaking his well-meant prevarication for impolite indifference to Aurora’s beauty, or denial of it, flies into a passion, and is on the point of soundly thrashing the amorous bard when Aurora stays his hand. Then Henry confesses, and Bumpus is so much pleased by the manner in which the sonnets celebrate his wife’s charms that he offers to print them for private circulation among connoisseurs with broad margins and _de luxe_ binding.

The play is built upon the lines of broad farce, and in New York it made an uproarious success. The encounter between Bumpus and Henry is extraordinarily ludicrous. Aurora throughout is the typical enthusiast of the women’s clubs--filled with vague longings and ambitions, but intensely practical and commonplace at bottom. Henry, during one of their tumultuous exchanges, is about to break her fan. She shrieks the warning that it cost a dollar. He ventures upon a dark, melodramatic oath. “How dare you swear in my presence?” she demands. “One would think you were my husband!”

A pretty bit of fooling, _à la_ “The Wild Duck,” “The Philanderer” and “Alice-Sit-by-the Fire.” Shaw calls it “a warning to theater-goers.” It is.

“YOU NEVER CAN TELL”

You Never Can Tell,” like many of the dramas of Shakespeare, was made to order. Shaw wrote it in 1896 and he calls it “an attempt to comply with many requests for a play in which the much paragraphed “brilliancy” of “Arms and the Man” should be tempered by some consideration for the requirements of managers, in search of fashionable comedies for West End theaters.” And so he laid the scene in England, and made all his characters English and kept as close to the earth as he could. But for all that, he failed to make a conventional parlor drama of it. Shaw is Shaw, and when he set out to build a comedy _à la mode_ he evolved instead a tragedy covered with a sugar-coating of farce. On its face it is uproariously and irresistibly funny; beneath the surface there is as nasty an undercurrent as that of “Widowers’ Houses.”

Fergus Crampton, a wealthy English yacht builder, and his most marvellous family are the chief characters of the play. Years before the curtain rises Crampton and his wife agree to disagree and she packs off to Madeira with their three babies--two girls and a boy. Subscribing to the heterodox doctrine that a married woman is entitled to her own home, her own pocket-book and her own name, Mrs. Crampton assumes the cognomen of Clandon, bestows it upon her offspring and brings them up in complete ignorance of the existence of their paternal progenitor. Also she rears them in strict accordance with her ultra-advanced ideas of independence and individualism. In all matters concerning the emotions and intellect, they have freedom. And so they become unconscionable egotists, disrespectful to their elders, self-willed and obstinate, and nuisances in general.

As the curtain rises we find the Clandons back in England. Happening into a small seaside town, Phil and Dolly, the younger of the three children, scrape an acquaintance with one Valentine, a struggling young dentist (and also a being with advanced views of human events), and Dolly has the honor of paying him his first fee. Through him they meet his landlord, an irascible old gentleman in a semi-nautical coat and an habitual frown. They invite both dentist and landlord to luncheon, and at the meal the discovery is made that the latter is none other than the long-lost Mr. Crampton. Like the leading comedian of a burlesque show afterpiece, Crampton is in consternation and shrieks “My wife!” in a hoarse stage whisper.

“You are very greatly changed,” observes Mrs. Clandon-Crampton.

“I daresay,” replies the wretched husband and father. “A man does change in eighteen years.”

This much of the prologue being accomplished, the personages proceed to the real business of the action. Crampton, outraged and disgusted beyond measure by the manners and dress of his progeny, demands that Phil and Dolly be given over to his care and custody on the ground that their mother is an unfit person to have the charge of them. Meanwhile Valentine, the dentist, has felt a yearning towards Gloria, the elder daughter, and Gloria, after surviving five previous sieges of her heart, looks upon him not unkindly. One brief interview, in fact, serves to advance him to a point whereat he may safely offer her a chaste caress. Her mother, greatly astonished by his easy victory over Gloria’s battalions of modern principles, seeks an explanation. Valentine very blandly discusses the situation.

The duel of sex, he says, is much like the contest between the makers of guns and the makers of ship’s armor. One year one is ahead and the next year the other. In the old days, he says, mothers taught their daughters old-fashioned methods of resisting the wiles of old-fashioned Romeos, and for a space this method of defense was successful. But by-and-by the Romeos learned its weak points, and the fond mammas of England had to devise some new armor. They hit upon scientific education, and for awhile it, too, was successful. But in the end the old story was repeated.

“What did the man do?” says Valentine. “Just what the artilleryman does--went one better than the woman--educated himself scientifically and beat her at that game just as he had beaten her at the old one. I learned how to circumvent the Woman’s Rights’ woman before I was twenty-three....”

But before the play is done the philosophical duellist of sex finds himself the vanquished rather than the victor. He begins to have doubts about his preparedness for the marriage state and essays a polite withdrawal. But Gloria, weighted with the wisdom of five previous amorous encounters, is no easy adversary to lose.

“Be sensible,” says the valiant Valentine. “It’s no use. I haven’t a penny in the world.”

“Can’t you earn one?” demands Gloria. “Other people do.”

Valentine, scenting a chance to flee, is half-delighted, half-frightened.

“I never could!” he declares. “You’d be unhappy.... My dearest love, I should be the merest fortune-hunting adventurer if----”

She grips his arm and kisses him.

“Oh, Lord!” he gasps. “O, I----”

The trap has sprung and he is caught fast.

“I don’t know anything about women,” wails the duellist of sex, pathetically. “Twelve years’ experience is not enough.”

William, the waiter at the hotel, reads the moral.

“You never can tell, sir,” he says, “You never can tell.”

So much for the love making, which you will find, in slightly different form in “Widowers’ Houses” and “Man and Superman.” The battle between the Cramptons, husband and wife, is a more serious thing. In some mysterious way the dramatist manages to keep the spectator from sympathizing with either, but Crampton, nevertheless, is a character in a tragedy and not in a comedy. It is all a ghastly horror to him--the flight of his wife, the cynical, worldwise impudence and grotesque individualism of his children, the perversity and topsy-turveyness of the whole domestic drama. He is no martyr, by any means, for life in his company, it is evident, would be an excellent imitation of existence in a cage with a tiger, but if he is not lovable, he at least has a great capacity for loving. He and Gloria have a memorable encounter, in which she explains her theory of conduct in detail.

“You see,” she says triumphantly, at the end, “everything comes right if we only _think_ it resolutely out.”

“No,” says Crampton sullenly, “I don’t think. I want you to feel: that’s the only thing that can help us....”

In the end he succumbs to the inevitable senilely.

“Ho! ho! He! he! he!” he laughs, as Gloria bears Valentine away. And then, say the stage directions, “he goes into the garden, chuckling at the fun.”

Somehow the boundless humor of the play is forgotten long before this undercurrent of ironic pathos.

William, the waiter, is one of Shaw’s most delightful characters. He is, in truth, the chorus to the drama, and a man of deep philosophies. To everyone’s consternation it is discovered that the eminent Mr. Bohun, Q. C., who is called in as legal adviser to the Clandon-Cramptons is William’s son.

“I’ve often wished he was a potman,” he says. “Would have had him off my hands ever so much sooner, sir. Yes, sir, had to support him until he was thirty-seven, sir....”

William reads Schopenhauer, but he has no intellectual yearnings.

“My name is Boon, sir,” he says, “though I am best known down here as Balmy Walters, sir. By rights I should spell it with the aitch you, sir, but I think it best not to take that liberty, sir. There is Norman blood in it, sir, and Norman blood is not a recommendation to a waiter.”

Bohun, the son, is a blustering, roaring legal whale of the low comedy type. The last act of the play is made a screaming farce by his elephantine efforts to smooth out the family tangles of the Clandon-Cramptons. In the end he reaches a decision worthy of Solomon.

“You can do nothing,” he says to Crampton, “but make a friendly arrangement. If you want your family more than they want you, you’ll get the worst of the arrangement; if they want you more than you want them, you’ll get the better of it. The strength of their position lies in their being very agreeable personally. The strength of your position lies in your income....”

And that is the nearest approach to a solution of the difficulty that the play offers.

“MAN AND SUPERMAN”

Measured with rule, plumb-line or hay-scales, “Man and Superman” is easily Shaw’s _magnum opus_. In bulk it is brobdignagian; in scope it is stupendous; in purpose it is one with the Odyssey. Like a full-rigged ship before a spanking breeze, it cleaves deep into the waves, sending ripples far to port and starboard, and its giant canvases rise half way to the clouds, with resplendent jibs, sky-sails, staysails and studdingsails standing out like quills upon the fretful porcupine. It has a preface as long as a campaign speech; an interlude in three scenes, with music and red fire; and a complete digest of the German philosophers as an appendix. With all its rings and satellites it fills a tome of 281 closely-printed pages. Its epigrams, quips, jests, and quirks are multitudinous; it preaches treason to all the schools; its hero has one speech of 350 words. No one but a circus press agent could rise to an adequate description of its innumerable marvels. It is a three-ring circus, with Ibsen doing running high jumps; Schopenhauer playing the calliope and Nietzsche selling peanuts in the reserved seats. And all the while it is the most entertaining play of its generation.

Maybe Shaw wrote it in a vain effort to rid himself at one fell swoop of all the disquieting doctrines that infested his innards. Into it he unloaded Kropotkin, Noyes, Bakounin, Wilde, Marx, Proudhon, Nietzsche, Netschajew, Wagner, Bunyan, Mozart, Shelley, Ibsen, Morris, Tolstoi, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Plato--seized them by the heels and heaved them in, with a sort of relieved “God help you!” The result is 281 pages of most diverting farce--farce that only half hides the tumultuous uproar of the two-and-seventy jarring sects beneath it. It is a tract cast in an encyclopedic and epic mold--a stupendous, magnificent colossal effort to make a dent in the cosmos with a slapstick.

Why, all the saints and sages who discuss’d
Of the Two Worlds so learnedly, are thrust
Like foolish Prophets forth: their Words to Scorn
Are scatter’d, and their Mouths are stopt with Dust.

Shaw explains that he wrote the play in response to a suggestion by A. B. Walkley, the dramatic critic of the London _Times_ that he should tackle the subject of Don Juan. In his 37-page preface he traces, at length, the process of reasoning which led him to the conclusion that Juan, as he was depicted by the fathers, was a fraud and an impostor. In the business of mating, he says (after Schopenhauer) it is not the man but the woman that does the pursuing. Man’s function in life is that of food-getting. Woman’s is that of perpetuating the race. Hence man’s ordinary occupation is making money, and woman’s is getting married. To protect himself against “a too aggressive prosecution of woman’s business,” he says, man has “set up a feeble romantic convention that the initiative in sex business must always come from him.” But the pretense is so shallow “that even in the theater, that last sanctuary of unreality, it imposes only on the inexperienced. In Shakespeare’s plays the woman always takes the initiative. In his problem plays and his popular plays alike the love interest is the interest of seeing the woman hunt the man down.”

And so, the hero of this new play, John Tanner (our old friend Juan Tenorio) is the pursued, and Doña Ana (Miss Ann Whitefield) is the pursuer. John is a being of most advanced and startling ideas. He writes a volume called “The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion,” full of all sorts of strange doctrines, from praise of the Oneida Community to speculations regarding the probable characteristics of the Superman. He laughs at honor, titles, the law, property, marriage, liberty, democracy, the golden rule and everything else that God-fearing folks hold sacred; he has a good word for Czolgosz; he gives directions for beating children; he curls his lip at civilization; he ventures the view that “every man over forty is a scoundrel.” And then, with all this cargo of nonconformity afloat in his hold, fate sends him sailing into a haven of staunch orthodoxy.

He and Roebuck Ramsden, a gentleman who hangs Herbert Spencer’s portrait on his library wall as a sort of banner of his intellectual modernity, are appointed guardians for Ann, whose papa has just passed away, and John, to protect himself against being caught in ambush by the Life Force, as represented in his ward, endeavors to marry her off to Octavius Robinson, a harmless young man who has lived beneath her father’s roof since his childhood. John is aware of the faults of Ann and has no yearning to be enmeshed in her web. He notices that she is a liar and politely calls her attention to the fact; he observes her pursuit of him and makes open preparations for flight. Finally, in full cry, he runs away in an automobile across Europe. But the Life Force is more powerful than gasoline, and Ann, yielding to its irresistible impulse, follows him--across the English channel, to Dover, and across France toward the Mediterranean. In the Sierra Nevada mountains she brings her game to bay and in old Grenada poor John receives his _coup de grace_. Thus he sinks to earth:

_Tanner._ ... The trap was laid from the beginning.

_Ann_ (_concentrating all her magic_). From the beginning--from
our childhood--for both of us--by the Life Force.

_Tanner._ I will not marry you. I will not marry you.

_Ann._ Oh, you will, you will.

_Tanner._ I tell you, no, no, no.

_Ann._ I tell you, yes, yes, yes.

_Tanner._ No.

_Ann_ (_coaxing--imploring--almost exhausted_). Yes. Before it is
too late for repentance. Yes.

_Tanner_ (_struck by an echo from the past_). When did all this
happen to me before? Are we two dreaming?

_Ann_ (_suddenly losing her courage, with an anguish that she
does not conceal_). No. We are awake and you have said no: that
is all.

_Tanner_ (_brutally_). Well?

_Ann._ Well, I made a mistake, you do not love me.

_Tanner_ (_seizing her in his arms_). It is false: I love you.
The Life Force enchants me: I have the whole world in my arms
when I clasp you....

And this is the story upon which Shaw hangs his 175 pages of play--it would take seven hours to perform it in its entirety--his thirty-seven pages of introduction, and his sixty-nine pages of appendix.

The conflict between Tanner and the ethics and traditions represented by Ramsden is riotously and irresistibly humorous. The first act of the play, indeed, is the most gorgeously grotesque in all Shaw. Better fun is scarcely imaginable. The famous Hell scene, which forms a sort of movable third act, is also a masterpiece of comedy. Tanner during his flight from Ann, is captured by a band of social-anarchist brigands, led by one Capt. Mendoza, a sentimental Anglo-Hebrew. Mendoza’s story of his unrequited love for an English lass sends Tanner to dreamland, and he dreams that he is in Hell. And then an elaborately comic play within a play is performed. Mendoza appears as the Devil; Tanner as Don Juan; and Ann as Doña Ana de Ulloa. It is long, this episode, and beyond all hope of boiling down, but the persons who see “Man and Superman” without it miss two-thirds of the drama. An excellent exposition by the Devil of the superiority of Hell over Heaven forms part of it. During the rest of the action the characters discuss every imaginable subject, from love to the higher morality.

“Whatever they say of me in churches on earth,” says the Devil, “I know that it is universally admitted in good society that the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman; and that is enough for me....”

In the first act Violet Robinson, Octavius’ sister, gives her family an overwhelming shock by passing to that moral bourne whence no feminine traveler returns. Her maiden aunt is for turning her out of doors. Ramsden is apoplectic. Octavius is speechless. The scandal is appalling. And here comes Tanner’s chance. He has preached against marriage and now he will follow his preaching with practise. Virtuous or unvirtuous, what are the odds? The Life Force is at it again, and he, John Tanner, is its champion. So he goes to Violet’s rescue grandly--a hero, every inch of him.

“They think to blame you,” he says loftily, “by their silly superstitions about morality and propriety and so forth. But I know, and the whole world really knows, that you are right to follow your instinct; that vitality and bravery are the greatest qualities a woman can have, and motherhood her solemn initiation into womanhood, and that the fact of your not being legally married matters not one scrap either to your own worth or to our real regard for you.”

The limelight flashes here, but suddenly it goes out and Violet’s eyes flash instead.

“Oh!” she exclaims, “you think me a wicked woman, like the rest! You think that I am not only vile, but that I share your abominable opinions.... I won’t bear such a horrible insult.... I have kept my marriage secret for my husband’s sake. But now I claim my right as a married woman not to be insulted....”

And as Tanner wilts his fine theories come crashing down about his head.

The play is such a gigantic, ponderous thing that any effort to summarize it is difficult. The central idea--that, in mating, the man is pursued by the woman--is one that we have seen Shaw employ in “Arms and the Man,” “The Philanderer,” and other plays. As he himself says, it is not a new conception. Shakespeare had it, though maybe unconsciously, and its rudiments appear in the works of other men. Schopenhauer made it classical. In “Man and Superman” Shaw uses it as an excuse for airing practically every radical doctrine in the modern repertoire. “The general impression of the book,” says Huneker, “causes us to believe there is a rift in the writer’s lute; not in his mentality, but in his own beliefs, or scepticisms. Perhaps Shaw no longer pins his faith to Shaw.” Herein the critic makes the common mistake of confusing the dramatist and the theorist. Shaw borrows part of the title from Nietzsche and makes sad sport of the mad German in many a scene, but that is no evidence that he is insincere when, in his introduction, he classes Nietzsche with those writers “whose peculiar sense of the world I recognize as more or less akin to my own.” “The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion” at the end of the play is given, he says, merely to prove that John Tanner, its author, is really the revolutionist and genius the drama makes him out to be. Too often, says Shaw, a playwright is content to say that his hero is a man of parts without offering any tangible evidence of the fact.

All in all, “Man and Superman” is a work worth the two years of effort the title page hints it cost the author. But it is a pity that Shaw didn’t divide it into two plays, a volume of essays, two dozen magazine articles and a book of epigrams. The age of the epic is past. To-day we sacrifice Fortinbras to get “Hamlet” into two hours and a half.

“JOHN BULL’S OTHER ISLAND”

This is a political satire in Shaw’s most amusing manner and, as its title indicates, deals with the eternal Irish question--a problem that, in England, rivals in perennial interest the dispute between capital and labor in the United States. The author, with characteristic impartiality, gives all sides a fair hearing, and “though in the end,” says A. B. Walkley, “all parties are dismissed with costs, we have a conviction that justice has been done.”

Two London engineers--Broadbent, an Englishman, and Larry Doyle, an anglicized Irishman--are the central characters. Broadbent is a political radical and insatiable reformer of a very familiar sort. Yearning to lend a hand in the uplifting of humanity, he turns to the martyred Irish and proposes to be their champion, without in the least understanding them. Doyle, on the other hand, looks upon all reform as so much moonshine. As far as he is concerned, Ireland may go hang. He is neither a patriot nor an altruist.

Nevertheless, when Broadbent decides to go to Ireland to study the problem of saving the Irish on the ground, Doyle consents to go with him, and together they arrive at a primitive sort of Irish village. There they make acquaintance with the folks who constitute suffering Ireland--an unfrocked priest whose mysticism has given him the local character of a lunatic, a peasant fairly savage in his simple superstitions, the fanatical parish priest and other types more or less familiar. To Doyle they are commonplace bores. To Broadbent they constitute a People yearning for a Moses.

When Doyle refuses to stand for Parliament for the district, Broadbent willingly steps into the breach, and in the ensuing campaign all the multitudinous facets of the Irish question are revealed. The honest electors, misunderstanding Broadbent’s altruistic efforts for their welfare, get a great deal of innocent enjoyment out of his orations and a great deal more out of his honest efforts to deal with them as freeman to freeman. He offers to take a farmer’s pig home in his motor car. The car runs over the pig and, in addition, knocks out the window of the village china shop. “There is a jest in every line,” says the critic of the London _Daily Mail_. “The play exists for and by the comic spirit alone.”

In the end, after many farcical situations and excellent quips, the canny Irish yeomanry accept Broadbent as a profitable acquaintance, and as the novelty of his misunderstood good intentions dies, come to regard him more or less seriously. As the curtain falls they are looking forward with interest to certain very material boons he promises to confer upon them--a big hotel in the village, a new tower for the village landmark and links for the village golfers. Meanwhile he has fallen in love with an old sweetheart of Doyle’s and, after an uphill wooing, has supplanted the latter in the fair charmer’s affections.

The play is a characteristically Shavian _reductio ad absurdum_ of the vast ocean of hair-raising schemes and startling theories that has so long deluged the Irish question. Shaw himself is an Irishman, and no doubt the troubles of his native land are of some interest to him, despite his vigorous denial that he is a patriot. Probably the play indicates his subscription to the idea of many an Irishman whose emotionalism has been tempered by English common-sense: that Ireland must cease looking for relief without and seek it within. In so far as this is true, the play is dialectic. But first of all it is a farce by the dramatist whom one London critic, at least, calls “the best living writer of comedy.”

“It’s all rot,” says Broadbent, the Englishman in the play, of some speech made by Doyle. “It’s all rot, but it’s so brilliant, you know.”

“Here, no doubt,” observed Mr. Walkley of the _Times_, “Shaw is slyly taking a side glance at the usual English verdict on his own works. The verdict will need some slight modification in the case of ‘John Bull’s Other Island.’ For, in the first place, the play is not _all_ rot. Further, it has some other qualities than mere brilliancy. It is at once a delight and a disappointment.... Shaw takes up the empty bladders of life, the current commonplaces, the cant phrases, the windbags of rodomontade, the hollow conventions, and the sham sentiments; quietly he inserts his pin; and the thing collapses with a pop.”