just passed some time at Florence, where the religious
art gave a definite direction to his imagination.



PLAYS, PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT 179

" Religion was alive again " in England, he con-
sidered. His Socialist work brought him into contact
with that singular development among the Anglican
clergy, the High-Broad-Church-Socialist clergyman ;
and the artist catching the rays of the new age
(according to his theory, which I have already
described) would serve as dramatic antagonist. To
the " clear, bold, sure, sensible, benevolent, salutarily
shortsighted Christian Socialist idealism " he would
oppose " the higher, but vaguer, timider vision and
the incoherent, mischievous, and even ridiculous
unpracticalness " of the artist. The Christian
Socialist had hardened into dogma : his liberal
religion was clearly defined and his social idealism
firm. Shaw regarded nothing as final, and would
confront the cheerful dogmatist with the vague,
disturbing half-vision of something beyond. This
was the germ of his famous " Candida." It was not
built round the figure of Candida, but the need to
make a refined dramatic conflict of that type in-
telligible to the general public soon led him to invent
her. The dogmatist and the artist should quarrel,
not over doctrine, but over a woman ; and the woman
must suit the atmosphere. But Shaw fell in love so
much with her that the higher conflict is almost lost
in the experiences of Candida, who knows nothing
about it.

The story was necessarily simple. Candida is the
bustling, cheerful, self-sacrificing wife of the bustling,
cheerful, and self-absorbed Rev. James Mayor Morell.
It is the domestic life of a very busy, popular, earnest,
plausible urban vicarage. Morell breezily acknow-
ledges how everything depends on Candida, but has
no deep appreciation of the way in which she sacrifices
her own personality in the service of him and his






180 BERNARD SHAW






work. They pick up a stray young poet and intro-
duce him into the home. Under their purblind eyes
he falls violently in love with Candida, tells his host
that she is too good for him, and proposes that she
shall be asked to choose between them. A very
dramatic conception, but, as the light of the new age
does not often break in that form on the poet's mind,
somewhat strained. The interest is psychological.
You study how the emotional machinery of Morell
and Marchbanks and Candida reacts on this singular
situation. It is no use criticising Shaw's solution,
for he has invented a situation which real people
never have to confront ; that is, in practice, very
often his idea of realism. Candida adopts the con-
ventional solution, for unconventional reasons :
Marchbanks goes out into his world of shadows and
fitful gleams : Morell learns that there is such a thing
as personality as well as ministry. That is the story.
Curates and secretaries are thrown in to fill the bill,
and there is a very dense and vulgar contractor,
Candida's father, who seems to be a symbol of the
utter obtuseness of the man in the street to all such
finer conflicts. As such Burgess is a failure, because
the obtuseness is overdone, and the fun of his vulgarity
offends the tense artistic feeling which is aroused.
When the poet speaks of "horror" in the deepest
artistic sense, it is scarcely amusing to hear the con-
tractor warn him against the results of drinking.

Hamon, one of the best judges, says that this is
Shaw's finest play, and he is probably right. All
admit that it is one of the finest dramas he has written.
Up to the point of the crisis it is a very realistic
picture of the kind of life with which it deals, and
Morell is drawn to life, without the least caricature.
There is little argument, no propagandist elbow



PLAYS, PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT 181

sticking out from the dramatic coat, and no heavy
satire of the folly of everyman. As the crisis ap-
proaches, the play becomes heavily charged with
emotion, and the audience is roused to a keen objective
interest. Yet the play was rejected in London, and
not presented there until 1904, when American
enthusiasm had induced London to reconsider the
matter. Probably managers disliked Shaw's relapse
from comedy to Ibsenism ; probably also the crisis
of the play was regarded as too artificial and the
solution a paradox. Marchbanks is, in fact, an
aesthetic prig, unhealthy and unbalanced, and the
only defect in Morell is his toleration of the youth.
Candida is a fine and powerful conception, but not
clearly consistent. She has marvellous intelligence,
yet lets the seething young poet sit at her feet with
his head on her knees. She suppresses herself in the
service of the parson and his work, yet suddenly
astounds us by professing as complete an indifference
to moral rules as Mrs Warren :

" Ah, James, how little you understand me, to
talk of your confidence in my goodness and purity !
I would give them both to poor Eugene as willingly
as I would give my shawl to a beggar dying of cold,
if there were nothing else to restrain me. Put your
trust in my love for you, James, for if that went I
should care very little for your sermons — mere phrases
that you cheat yourself and others with every day."

It is not a question whether such a woman is
plausible in her environment — a dramatist may go
as far away from reality as he chooses, even when he
professes realism — but whether she is consistent.
Huneker says that all the unhappy wives in New
York turned out to hear and applaud that " shawl
speech." The conclusion must have puzzled them.






182 BERNARD SHAW



After a number of very dramitic and impossible
scenes between Morell and Marchbanks, the play
culminates in Candida coldly choDsing between them.
She is, of course, not such a fool as to go off with a
bundle of ragged nerves like Marchbanks." Her
dismissal of him is, however, rather cold-blooded (she
cannot see herself at fifty with a husband of thirty-
five), and her choice of Morell is put as altruism.
She asks herself which of the two needs her most, and
decides for the weaker, Morell. Marchbanks goes
off, thinking himself mistaken in a woman who can
prefer " this greasy fool's paradise," as Shaw after-
wards said. Morell and Candida return to their
routine.

Shaw's aim is, of course, to commend the woman
who is mistress and proprietress of herself, and decry
the husband who takes her service for granted. One
feels that, dramatically, he has inoculated his dose
of Ibsenism into the wrong woman, and not been able
to make her consistent. No doubt he wanted to
show that an " emancipated " woman is not necessarily
a Julia or Sylvia Craven, and may be quite sweet
and domesticated. It is a piece of profound or very
clever artificial psychology. "It is," Shaw says,
" just this freedom from emotional slop, this unerring
wisdom on the domestic plane, that makes her so
completely mistress of the situation." She is as
coldly reasonable as Vivie Warren, yet very obtuse
to the condition of the young poet until the purpose
of the dramatist is served ; she is scornful of duty,
yet clings to Morell because he needs her. Yet she
is the finest woman Shaw ever conceived, and the
whole impossible situation is so charged with dramatic
feeling, and so ably elaborated, that the play is, as
Archer said, " something very like a masterpiece."



PLAYS, PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT 183

At the time it was still-born. Theatrical managers
found it impossible. It was only in 1904, long after it
had been published, that New York discovered its
greatness, and London grudgingly patronised it. By
that time it was better known in Germany, where it
was performed to crowded houses and greeted by
distinguished critics like George Brandes.

The next play was " The Man of Destiny " : a
dramatic dialogue between Napoleon Bonaparte and
Ellen Terry. It was written for the American actor
Richard Mansfield, who did not appreciate it, and
it has found very little favour with actors. Too
long for a sketch and too restricted for a play, it
remains an excellent piece of dramatic literature
marred by Shaw's iconoclastic perversity. In order
to rebuke hero-worshippers Shaw lets Napoleon trail
his long hair in his soup, and he cannot overlook so
good an opportunity to rail at England, even if it
involves anachronisms. " There is nothing so bad
or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing
it ; but you will never find an Englishman in the
wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights
you on patriotic principles ; he robs you on business
principles ; he enslaves you on imperial principles."
The voice is the voice of G. B. Shaw. The lady, who
is said to be built on Ellen Terry, is admirable, and
the long dialogue is very skilfully varied.

It was Shaw's first attempt to make history human.
The drama and the historical novel generally assume
that men and women of other times were so different
from us that it is an anachronism not to make them
speak a stilted and unnatural language. Shaw, as
he so frequently does, went to the opposite extreme.
He concluded, on principle and without much historical
reading, that man is just the same in a Roman toga



184 BERNARD SHAW



as a medieval uniform or a modern frock-coat. " The
man who writes about himself and his own time is the
only man who writes about all people and about all
time." Hence, as Professor Rogers says, his Caesar
and Napoleon " are simply on a large scale what
we may see any day in a successful ward politician."
This exaggeration, however, is more apparent in his
later historical plays. Napoleon is near enough to
our time to be fairly construed in modern terms, and
Shaw by no means ignores the historical facts ; his
chief fault is that he adds to them.

" The Man of Destiny " failed, like nearly all its
predecessors, but the memory of " Arms and the
Man " still lingered, and the excellence of " Candida "
was discussed. Shaw was believed to have dramatic
or comedic resources, and managers were interested.
Mr Cyril Maude gives us in his " Haymarket Theatre "
(pp. 2 1 1-6) an amusing, if uncomplimentary, account
of Shaw's ways at the time and of the appearance
of his next play.

Mr Maude heard in 1895 that Shaw had written a
brilliant play (" Candida ") and was engaged upon
another. He asked to see it. Shaw told him that it
would not suit him, but he would write one for the
Haymarket : " which," says Mr Maude, " I protest
I never asked him to do." He says that Shaw then
took a chair for the season in Regent's Park and
wrote his next play, under the public eye, in the
little pocket-books he used for the purpose. It was
finished in 1897, when Shaw amazed the manager
by emptying his pockets on to his desk of these little
note-books. The play was " You Never Can Tell,"
and Mr Maude protests that, though he did not like
it, he was persuaded by friends to put it in rehearsal.
As soon as Shaw came, dressed in a suit which " no



PLAYS, PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT 185



self-respecting carpenter " would wear (probably a
good brown Jaeger suit), to see the rehearsals, the
trouble began. " From the first the author showed
the perversity of his disposition and his utter want of
practical knowledge of the stage." Actors resigned,
and the atmosphere was such that " any author with
the slightest decency of feeling would have withdrawn
in the face of rebuffs so pointed as these." Shaw
placidly continued, and, as the narrative proceeds,
he becomes a " demon," a " veritable Svengali,"
torturing them with his " satanic attitude." The
final collapse Mr Maude attributes to their emotion
on seeing Shaw appear in a new suit. He withdrew
the play, and no other manager would accept it ;
though years afterwards it had a most successful run
in London and elsewhere, appearing on the boards
of the Court Theatre no less than 149 times.

In Mr Maude's prejudiced version we have an inter-
esting glimpse of Shaw in mid-career. He was then
making a comfortable income, about five hundred
pounds a year, by journalism, and his dress and ways
must be ascribed to unconventionality. He dis-
dained starched linen and starched manners. His
dramatic work was done out of love of the work
(mainly in leisure hours, or when travelling), and in
order to give the theatre a new standard. People
wanted comedy and fashionable dresses, and he
would show the way to do this kind of thing. But,
he says, " I overdid it " and found on rehearsal that
the comedy was impracticable. It was not at all
impracticable, as later experience showed, but Shaw
was not tactful.

" You Never Can Tell " is one of the most spirited
comedies that he has written, though it offends a
little by its extremes. Shaw's pessimistic estimate



186 BERNARD SHAW



of the relations of married people to each other and
to their children pervades the whole play, yet, on
the other hand, the humorous element often rises,
or descends, to boisterous fun. The father, Mr
Clandon, is a pathetic figure, and his elder daughter
has been too obviously fitted up with the Life-Force,
and its purpose of fecundity, as a Shavian main-spring.
But the brisk movement, a model comedy-waiter and
his hilarious lawyer-son, and the quaintest and
funniest pair of twins ever imagined, raise the piece
repeatedly to the pitch of farce. It is a successful
light comedy, with some original characters, but an
occasional exhibition of the cloven hoof of Shaw's
philosophy.

London would not have the play, and so the first
period of Shaw's dramatic productiveness came to
a close. Of the seven plays one only had been a
slight theatrical success : six were complete failures
from the point of view of representation. He had
tried drama and tragedy, comedy and farce, sociology
and psychology and history, with almost equal un-
success. In spite of the high praise which some
leading critics gave to one or other play, there was
something in Shaw which the public did not like.
He did not blame the managers. Their business was
to cater to " perfectly commonplace people," and he
would not do it ; their customers did not come to be
criticised, and Shaw " made war " on them. It is
not the whole explanation, since most of these plays
have not been successful even in the later years when
other plays of his, with the strongest intellectual bias,
drew large audiences. He was not quite honest with
himself, and therefore not just to the public. He
was really not " substituting natural history for
conventional ethics and romantic logic." He was



PLAYS, PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT 187

caricaturing life and pretending that it was realism.
To make this tolerable he needed a long training in
the use of humour and more concession to dramatic
usage.

For the time he despaired of reaching the public
through the theatre and resolved to write literary
drama. Publishers had been unwilling to bring out
his plays. No one read plays ; there was too much
of the algebra of stage-directions about them, and too
little of the life which actors and actresses put into
them. At last a publisher was found for the first
seven plays, and they were issued under the now
well-known title, " Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant."
He stretched the terms a little in placing the first
three plays in the second category and describing the
other four as " pleasant." They appeared in 1898,
with the lengthy preface which he now proposed to
prefix to his plays as " a first aid to critics." He
declared that, at least as long as the theatre remained
purely commercial, he would write plays to be read,
and make them- intelligible and vivid to readers.
From that came his habit of omitting the more
technical stage-directions, including miniature-
sketches of the characters, and even inserting state-
ments or asking questions about them which had
no relation to the stage. These things, however,
developed slowly and gradually. In point of fact,
he had already written another play which had little
chance of being appreciated except on the stage, and
with this he opens the little series of " Plays for
Puritans " and the longer series of his mature
productions.



CHAPTER VIII

IN THE LIME-LIGHT

The next three dramas which Shaw wrote were
called by him " Plays for Puritans." By a Puritan
he means a man who resents the use of art as " the
instrument of a systematic idolatry of sensuousness."
He had now spent several years in criticising plays,
and one of his most general objections to the existing
drama was its incessant pre-occupation with love,
or, as he said, with a false and romanticised erotism.
Love was neither so dominating nor so maudlin in
real life as it was generally represented to be on the
stage, and Shaw would write truer dramas. Critics
might have retorted that he had not yet written a
play in which the love-theme was not conspicuous,
and we may add that he has scarcely yet succeeded
in doing this. They were, however, content to reply
that he only succeeded in avoiding the usual emotional
effect — whether or no it is a naughty encouragement
of sensuousness — by making his love-scenes blood-
less and unreal. It is a question for lovers to decide.
It is at least clear that Shaw did not abandon the
love-theme, and, if he made any alteration in his
procedure beyond the smoother workmanship which
came of experience, it was in approaching nearer to
stage-traditions.

(In his next play, " The Devil's Disciple," he took
an amusing revenge on the critics who scolded him
for dramatic heterodoxy. He wrote a melodrama,

IM



IN THE LIME-LIGHT 189



combining in it some of the oldest and most sensational
incidents of that blood-curdling variety of stage-
performance. I would rather say that he was amusing
himself than that he was seriously burlesquing the
melodrama. At all periods of his career he has
enjoyed jokes of this kind, and has probably after-
wards enjoyed the penetration of his disciples in
finding grave underlying motives. In the preface to
the published play he does poke fun at American
writers who discovered brilliantly original work in
his combination of stock-situations : the hero donning
the coat of a wanted man in order to enable him to
escape, the heroine falling in love with the scapegrace
and vainly attempting to reveal his identity, the
reprieve at the foot of the scaffold, and so on. Most
of it, after the promising and original first act, was
familiar enough.

At the most he might claim that he had humanised
melodrama as he had earlier humanised comedy and
would later humanise history. His success may be
measured by the complete unintelligibility of his hero's
conduct to the general public. His hero saves the
life, and takes the place, of a minister, who is wanted
by the soldiers during the American rebellion. Is it
because he loves the minister's wife, who clearly falls
in love with him ? The actors felt that this alone
would make the play plausible and human, and Dick,
on the stage, furtively kissed the heroine's hair while
saying that he did not love her. Shaw vehemently
resented this : Dick had had no motive whatever.
Does the rescuer of a drowning man excogitate a
motive ? But there is no analogy between an act
which it would be generally regarded as sheer cowardice
to omit and an act which it would generally be re-
garded as sheer folly to do without a motive. The



190 BERNARD SHAW



ordinary romantic melodramatist, in making Dick
love the minister's wife, would be nearer to real life.

The play is a conventional red-hot melodrama,
full of sensational incidents, involving a large variety
of finely-drawn characters. The first act, in a harsh
and sour Puritan home of New Hampshire, where the
acid religiosity has driven the elder son to the service
of the devil, is instinct with truth and dramatic feeling.
The second act, in the accused minister's house, fails
to impress on account of the lack of motive. The
third act, among the military, too plainly introduces
Shaw's opinions of military men ; he has a plausible
mouthpiece in dare-devil Dick. Amusing satire and
heavy caricature and fragments of emotional intensity
are mingled with something like recklessness. In
the tensest crisis of the play, when a moment's delay
saves the life of Dick, General Burgoyne flippantly
observes : "I should never dream of hanging any
gentleman by an American clock." Of serious under-
current one can only recognise a plea for the devil as
against the sour and hypocritical Puritan, and an
intention of ridiculing militarism. But these are inci-
dental rather than essential, and " The Devil's
Disciple " must be taken as an extremely able satire
of the melodrama, restrained for the most part but
freakishly ignoring its own artistic requirements in
others^

In " Caesar and Cleopatra " (1898) Shaw set out to
correct Shakespeare and the pundits of historical
science. As far as the interpretation of character
goes he deliberately challenged comparison with
Shakespeare and confidently claimed superiority.
Few would claim that Shakespeare gives us a valuable
or interesting analysis of Caesar's character, or deny
that he has squeezed the ancient story into the frame



IN THE LIME-LIGHT 191

of seventeenth-century drama. Shaw detested the
theatrical sublimity of Shakespeare's endings. Nature
is not moral, and practises no poetic justice, so that
it is not sound art at the close to " cover your eyes
with the undertaker's handkerchief, duly onioned
with some pathetic phrase." Caesar must be pre-
sented as a human being, and simply, pass on to the
next chapter of his life, as human beings generally
do when the particular episode is ended. Cleopatra
also must be described as human. Not only dramatists,
and novelists like Sir Rider Haggard, have thought it
necessary to give a special and conventional psvchic
outfit to people of an earlier age, but historical scholars
equally fail to humanise their figures.

But Shaw has passed to the other extreme, and
met theory by theory. His theory is that human
nature is just the same in all climes and all ages, and
you must ascribe to Caesar and Cleopatra such
characters as they would bear to-day. His Caesar is
a soldier-statesman w r ho might have been trained at
Eton, and his Cleopatra is a bad-tempered little
English girl out of one of Mrs Bland's stories. Caesar
soliloquises at tiresome length, a la G. B. Shaw, on
the loneliness of a superman in such a world as ours :
Cleopatra, a pert little girl, invites him to sit on the
Sphinx with her, as it is " quite cosy," and is told
that she ought to be in bed. The humanising con-
sists, not in substituting for the stilted English of
conventional historical drama or novel a speech
which will take account of the different shades of
character detected by historians, but in simply making
the characters talk as English characters would in
the circumstances. Sometimes the conception varies,
and Caesar appears as a quaint combination of an
ancient Roman and a modern Socialist with some



192 BERNARD SHAW



sense of humour. The suggestion of the development
of Cleopatra's character, which the last act introduces,
is merely fantastic, and is quite out of accord with
the opinions ©f recent students. But Shaw cares as
little about historical scholarship as he does about
science. Human nature is always the same ; there
has been no progress since the beginning of history.
Such an opinion, to be of any value at all, ought to be
based on a vast knowledge of history, and we know
that it is not. It is one of the Shavian dogmas, and
" Caesar and Cleopatra " is an outcome of it.

Hence, though the departure from the unnatural
forms and conventions of historical fiction is refresh-
ing, we cannot regard " Caesar and Cleopatra " as a
serious historical play. As if he wished to prevent
us from doing so, Shaw inserts deliberate anachronisms
and very modern jokes whenever his freakish imagina-
tion suggests them. Except in scenery and a few
other external details, the shock of characters might
occur anywhere. Indeed, the chief novelty of the
play, the introduction of Cleopatra in her childhood,
rather reduces the dramatic quality by making the
conflict of characters very unequal. In spite, there-
fore, of some excellent scenes, of the humanisation of
Caesar, and of the piquancy of the little British-
Egyptian princess, the play has not been well received,
and it had to wait a number of years for even a
moderate appreciation. It is too serious in substance
for the lighter public, and too funny and fantastic for
the serious. Of its cleverness, within those limits,
there can hardly be two opinions.