" Captain Brassbound's Conversion " (1899) is the
last of the " Plays for Puritans." The title which
Shaw gave to the three plays, when he published
them in 1900, is one of those playful irrelevances of
IN THE LIME-LIGHT 193
which he is often guilty. They do not in the least
exhibit a design to write serious drama for play-
goers who ā if there are any ā resent the amorousness
and sense-stimulation of the ordinary play. Each of
the three has, more or less, the nature of caricature ;
not caricature of real character, as in the early plays,
but of dramatic character. In " Captain Brass-
bound " Shaw returns to melodrama, and once more
luxuriates in the swift movement and sensational
incident and sharply-drawn character which delight
a music-hall audience. The story is well known.
Sir Howard Hallam and his sister-in-law, Lady Cicely
Waynflete, wish to visit the interior of Morocco :
Captain Brassbound, a thoroughly romantic smuggler,
and his crew escort them ; Brassbound is secretly the
nephew of Howard, and nurses a deadly grievance ;
he plots to deliver the party to a wild Moorish chief,
but a convenient American gun-boat rescues them,
and the curtain falls on the time-honoured spectacle
of justice and reconciliation.
Beyond a slight and incidental fling at British
ideals of the administration of justice, the play has
no serious purpose. It was, in fact, written for Ellen
Terry, who is the model of Lady Cicely Waynflete.
Not even here is Shaw serious, for one can hardly
imagine Ellen Terry crediting every blackguard she
meets with a beautiful face and a really gentlemanly
soul, and disarming brigands and sheiks by saying
sweetly, " How do you do ? " Perhaps there is a
half-purpose of showing, on Tolstoian principles,
how gentleness succeeds where justice fails, but,
as the effect of her amiable stupidity would have been
very different in real life, it is useless to seek such a
purpose. The whole thing is a fantasia : it is melo-
drama smiling at itself. It lacks even the little
194 BERNARD SHAW
serious element of the preceding " Puritan " plays,
and must be estimated by its entertaining qualities,
which are conspicuous. In later years it ran for
three months at the Court Theatre. As a literary
play its interest is comparatively small, and the reader
is exasperated by the attempt to express with phonetic
accuracy the speech of a Cockney rascal of Brass-
bound's crew.
The long interval between " Captain Brassbound "
and " Man and Superman " was relieved only by the
publication of the short and fantastic sketch " The
Admirable Bashville " (1901). Someone in America
proposed to dramatise Shaw's prize-fighting novel,
" Cashel Byron's Profession," and to prevent an
outrage he roughly dramatised it himself. It is
an amusing and negligible extravagance : a joke in
pompous blank verse wildly alternating with very
vernacular speech. Some of the lines are actually
taken from the Elizabethan poets, and Shaw affected
to believe that no one could discriminate between his
own blank verse and theirs. It is good reading for
an idle hour.
By the beginning of 1903 Shaw had written ten
plays, and had had in the theatre only one modest
success. Ten years of amazing industry, experi-
ments in every variety of drama and comedy, had
left the general public callous or disdainful. He has
spoken of the way in which the G. B. S. of the Saturday
Review prepared the way for, and even impudently
(he says) heralded the genius of, George Bernard
Shaw the dramatist. All this is humorous exaggera-
tion. One may be a paragon of dramatic or literary
criticism without having any respectable skill in
production. It was chiefly Shaw's Socialism and
general criticism of life which secured for him a
IN THE LIME-LIGHT 195
relatively small public, in whose praises a friendly
critic like Archer occasionally joined. He was now
past the age at which dramatists usually gain the
public ear ā he was in his forty-eighth year ā and it
looked as though his appeal would be permanently
confined to the narrow public of the readers of his
printed plays. Outside England he was little known,
except to Socialists ; and the continental Socialists,
as a rule, were embittered against him by his attacks
on them and their " illusions." It must have occurred
to his friends that he had, from the point of view of
influence, made a grave mistake in deserting the
platform and the press to begin his long and futile
assault upon the theatre.
But the year 1903 witnessed a remarkable change
in his position. In that year his plays began to be
performed before Austrian and German audiences,
and to receive the high praise of great critics like
Brandes, and the story of his success in the United
States opened. Londoners learned with astonish-
ment that the plays they rejected were being regarded
as international art, and, for all his supposed disdain
of the foreigner, the Englishman has no more effective
stimulus than foreign appreciation of his writers or
artists. In the same year Shaw T published " Man
and Superman," and critics could no longer question
his ability, however much they might resent his
dramatic forms.
" Man and Superman " represents not only the
culimna/don~of his artistic skill, but that important
stage in the development of his opinions which I
have described in a previous chapter. The Eugeni c ~"_ I
movement was making progress in England, and
Shaw yielded to its fascination. His increasingly
pessimistic estimate of his generation was suddenly
196 BERNARD SHAW
relieved by the discovery that there was no need
to drill it with education, and evangelise it with
Socialism, before any progress could be made. It
would be much wiser and more economical to take
the better specimens and let them breed the new
generation : as to the others, he threw out dark hints
at lethal chambers, sterilisation, and so on. The
failure of education and Socialist propaganda now
disturbed him little. That was not the real purpose
of the Life-Force. It was going to annihilate this
generation, as it annihilated the reptiles of old, and
create a new species, the Superman. He approached
his new task, therefore, in a more philosophic mood
than ever. His play might be performed ; he would
not overload it with philosophy. But it would need
" a pit of philosophers " to appreciate it, and he
must appeal to readers. Hence the predominantly
literary form of the new work, with its prodigious
preface and its lengthy interlude and its fiery appendix.
Certainly Shaw has never done a more brilliant piece
of literary 7 work.
I have examined the opinions expressed in the
preface and appendix, and need only consider here
what light they throw on the drama. Walkley had
suggested that he should write a Don Juan play.
Instead of rejecting what most people would regard as
an unalterably erotic subject, Shaw reflected on it
and found in it a most ingenious method of presenting
his own ascetic philosophy. Professor Masson once
described Goethe's Mephistopheles as a logical develop-
ment of Milton's Satan after a century or two of
experience in tempting men. Why not give Don
Juan the benefit of experience and show him con-
verted to asceticism, and very much bored by the
attentions or intentions of women ? Dr Henderson
IN THE LIME-LIGHT 197
says, apparently on Shaw's authority, that John
Tanner, or Don Juan Tenorio in the twentieth century,
is not Shaw, but H. M. Hyndman, his old Socialist
opponent. There is much more of Shaw than of
Hyndman in him, and Mr Granville Barker made
the character an exact reproduction of Shaw. In
sentiment, at least, he is Shaw, especially in the Inter-
lude in Hell and the " Revolutionist's Handbook."
The love-episode, on which the play is built, is
purely artificial. It is love-making seen through
Shaw's academic spectacles. Ann Whitefield makes
love to Tanner because she must : the Life-Force,
which is as inexorable as the Fate of the Greek
tragedians, is incarnated in her. The dramatic
conflict is not merely the conflict of a girl's whim
and a man's aversion from marriage. Behind this
petty struggle Shaw sees the cosmic struggle of the
two incarnations of the Life-Force, as he conceives
it. It seeks self-consciousness in the genius and
makes him egotistic ; it impels woman to life-giving,
and, when the two meet, we have the most dramatic
conflict in the world. But the Life-Force, or cosmic
Will, being one, it makes the woman persistently
hunt the man until he yields. This is the underlying
philosophy, or, as Shaw afterwards said, the religion
of the play. In the preface to the popular edition
he observes that Natural Selection is dead on the one
hand, and " garden-of-Edenism " on the other.
A new Bible is needed, and he, " with later lights of
science to guide " him, makes this contribution to it,
and allows the public to purchase it for a few pence
on that account.
Happily ā because one cannot take the obscuring
of his philosophy as a very serious loss ā this new
gospel is effectively concealed by the dramatic
198 BERNARD SHAW
trimming with which Shaw proposed to adorn it. It is
fairly safe to say that not one in a thousand of the
audiences who have enjoyed the play, especially in
the United States, has the dimmest perception of its
r moral. The only serious didactic element they see in
it is a suggestion that marriage is not a necessary
condition to maternity ; I have seen ladies stalk
indignantly from the theatre when Tanner propounds
this gospel. Of the cosmic conflict of purposes they
have no suspicion, and Ann's pursuit of Tanner,
which all regard as a singularly perverse taste on her
part, is deemed an unconventional suggestion that a
woman has as much right to do the hunting as the
man, or as a libel on the actual life of women. The
play is merely taken as a comedy. Tanner's wit,
irony, and paradox are artistically set against the
muddle-headed fussiness of Shaw's typical middle-
class father (Ramsden) and the muddle-headed
romance of Shaw's typical middle-class young man.
A chauffeur with supermannic coolness and im-
pudence (Straker), a couple of stagey Americans,
and a fantastic group of brigands, help to obscure
the new religion. Ann Whitefield's ingenuous per-
sistence and conscientious mendacity are, as I said,
merely regarded as part of Shaw's irrepressible
tendency to caricature ; and her conventional mother
and Octavius's conventional sister merely enhance
the artistic effect. It is a comedy of romantic love-
making, as far as action goes, without romantic
sentiment : eked out by the minor comedy of the
collapse of a middle-class family at a supposed moral
transgression and an entirely burlesque scene among
brigands.
The comedy itself, as it is presented on the stage,
is not a masterpiece. Archer thought it " primitive
IN THE LIME-LIGHT 199
in invention and second-rate in execution/' Huneker
would only allow " for the sake of argument " that
it was a play. Hamon thinks it " a splendid philo-
sophic piece," but is clearly referring to the written
play. If we set aside the very original Interlude in
Hell, which is always omitted, the plot is slender
and the course of the play never quickened into really
dramatic moments. As in the case of so many of
Shaw's plays, the best rule for the playgoer is : Enjoy
and be thankful, and do not attempt to analyse and
classify. You can only classify what the author
has previously classified, and Shaw does not follow
the rules. It is a comedy, entertaining enough to
obscure its own philosophy. We roar at Tanner's
quips and paradoxes and dread of marriage, without
the least thought of his being a genius with a mission.
We enjoy Ann's evasions and subterfuges and fibs, '
and do not care twopence about the Life-Force in
her. She is by no means " everywoman," as Shaw
said, and by no means his " most gorgeous creation,"
as he claims. She is a very ordinary young lady
credited with an unnatural desire to wed (not a love
of) Tanner, and forced by her conventional sur-
roundings to conceal it and play the hypocrite. As
to Tanner's long speeches, we have to forgive them
when Shaw (by the mouth of Ann) laughs at himself
for them ; and the long dialogues are too witty and
funny to quarrel with.
So the comedy has had a well-deserved success on
the stage ā it was presented 176 times at the Court
Theatre, and I believe that its royalties brought
him in one year, especially from the United States,
more than ten thousand pounds ā but its philosophy
is reserved for the faithful few who read the book,
and its religion remains with its founder. The
200 BERNARD SHAW
published work ā preface, play, interlude, and
appendix ā is one of the most serious and finished
presentments of Shaw's views. It is not fortunate
for him that it embodies a phase of development of
which he soon saw the error. But we have sufficiently
discussed all this. The Interlude in Hell alone calls
for special consideration.
Under the stars of the Sierra Nevada John Tanner
dreams himself back into the shape of Don Juan
Tenorio, Ann into the shape of Dona Ana de Ulloa ;
and they gather with Ann's father and the devil in
the underworld to discuss life. Hell is too comfort-
able, too sensuous, for the new Don Juan. The
devil presides over a genial, art-loving colony of sober
Epicureans, and lures men away from the chilly
heights of heaven. They consider Don Juan a
" social failure," a man with no " soul," and press
him to leave them and go to heaven. He is " bored "
in hell, and those who are happy in it are the really
wicked. " Hell, in short, is a place where you have
nothing to do but amuse 3*ourself " ; in heaven " you
live and work." The devil left heaven because he
was bored there, and founded the rival colony for the
tranquil enjoyment of love, beauty, art, and senti-
ment, to which all are migrating from heaven. Only
the few who love " the work of helping Life in its
struggle upward " remain in heaven.
The fantastic and intellectually brilliant scene is,
in other words, a naked presentment of the philosophy
of life which is veiled in the drama itself. Hell is a
temperament : the Epicurean temperament which
Shaw despises. He rarely uses the word Epicurean,
because, probably, people wrongly take it to imply
an unrestrained indulgence in sense-pleasure. It is.
on the contrary, the feeling that work is only a healthy
IN THE LIME-LIGHT 201
condition of earning enjoyment (sensuous and spiritual) :
that the supreme ideal of men is to eliminate misery
from the earth and promote tranquil happiness. This
is a mean and despicable aim ā it is hell ā to the new
Don Juan, John Tanner, or Bernard Shaw. Your
highest ideal is to co-operate austerely with the Life-
Force, and even Ana, or Ann Whitefield, is converted
to a belief in this Superman, and sets out in search
of a father for him. If a persistent Rationalist asks
why in the name of creation he should adopt this
bloodless and joyless philosophy of life, Shaw makes
a concession to his weakness for " reasons." If men
do not co-operate with the Life-Force, it will cast
them aside, as it cast aside the Mesozoic reptiles, and
will incarnate its highest aspirations in some other
creature. So healthy, sensuous women must pursue
brainy men and pin them, despite their wriggling
antrTiatred of sex, to the matrimonial board. We
exist for the sake of the next generation ; we must
exchange the Christian God or the Epicurean ideal
for this bleak Calvinistic Life-Force. That is the
key of the parable of " Man and Superman." As a
comedy, with the parable omitted, it is very popular
and entertaining and clever : as a serious literary
and philosophical whole it is brilliant and futile and
unpopular. People pick out of it the scraps which
suit them : the denial of progress, the scorn of
democracy, the praise of eugenics, the indictment of
England, the denial of moral law, and so on. But
of a Shavian cult, in Shaw's deepest sense, there is
no trace.
The tremendous ability of " Man and Superman "
and the echoes of recognition abroad disposed the
English public to welcome the work of Shaw, if he
would moderate his satire and conceal his philosophy.
202 BERNARD SHAW
In his next play, " John Bull's Other Island " (1904),
he met the public, and there was a reconciliation which
gave him his place as a dramatist in the English
theatre. Most people, knowing Shaw's unlimited
capacity for abusing England, would have expected
that, in dealing with the relations of England and
Ireland, he would outdo a member of the Clan-na-
Gael in denouncing England's record in the sister
isle. Instead of this he represented the co-operation
of the two nations as mutually useful. Irishmen
might put it that he was so eager to stand upright
between the contending parties that he fell back-
ward. Most certainly English people were more
pleased with his typical Englishman than the Irish
were pleased with his " real Ireland." Possibly this
was because he wrote the play for the Irish Literary
Theatre. It is ā if the way of putting it be not too
Hibernian ā Shaw's custom to hit the man who is
present, not the man who is absent.
It was a fine, conciliatory play, very able in char-
acterisation if very loose in plan, so surprisingly
moderate in its satire of England that people almost
hailed Shaw as a Pro-Saxon. He conceives an
engineering partnership of an Englishman, Broad-
bent, with an Irishman, Doyle, in London. The
business prospers because the men's qualities are
mutually corrective. In Broadbent (or England, as
partner in the Imperial firm) were " the strength,
satisfaction, social confidence, and cheerful bumptious-
ness that money, comfort, and good feeding bring
to all healthy people." In Doyle we find " the
freedom from illusion, the power of facing facts, the
nervous industry, the sharpened wits, the sensitive
pride of the imaginative man who has fought his way
up through social persecution and poverty." Broad-
IN THE LIME-LIGHT 203
bent quite overshadows his partner in the play, and
it is not surprising ā though Shaw affected to be
surprised ā that English audiences were flattered.
He takes Broadbent on business to Ireland, and pur-
ports to show us the real Ireland. As I said in the
first chapter, it is not a flattering picture. " Celtic
wit " is shown to be a poor myth. There is only one
really intelligent and clear-headed man on the stage,
and he is regarded by his neighbours as <f the mad
priest." The heroine, if one may so describe her, is
a good type, but she can scarcely be called distinctively
Irish. The whole atmosphere gives a feeling of
pettiness, slovenliness, heavy gaiety, and mischievous
ignorance. There is really no " plot." It is a group
of characters in relation with Broadbent, and, for all
his defects, the Englishman overtops them. Shaw
would probably not admit that he is superior to Doyle,
but that is one's impression.
Naturally, the Irish Literary Society found that
its actors were not competent to perform the piece
ā the second play of Shaw's rejected on that curious
ground ā and Vedrenne and Barker put it on the stage
at the Royal Court Theatre. The Irish question was
under discussion at the time, and the play easily got
attention. It greatly pleased English audiences,
rather to Shaw's disgust, and ran for 121 nights at
the Court. Prominent politicians were seen enjoying
it, and the King commanded a performance. It is
one of the ironies of Shaw's life that a play in which
he seemed to flatter England won for him at last the
ear of London. Certainly the play in itself, as a play,
was not calculated to do this. It has nothing like
the humour of some of his earlier comedies, and it
can scarcely be called a drama. Walkley called it
farrago." It was an interesting pre-
204 BERNARD SHAW
sentment of a group of finely drawn characters, with
a moral ; and the moral was that England was by no
means the villain of the Irish tragedy, as Irishmen
thought.
In the preface to the published play Shaw sought
to modify the impression he had given. He meant
Broadbent to represent that " hysterical, nonsense-
crammed, fact-proof, truth-terrified, unballasted
sport of all the bogey panics and all the silly en-
thusiasms that now calls itself ' God's Englishman.' '
He represented the Irishman as " clear-headed, sane,
hardily callous to the boyish sentimentalities, sus-
ceptibilities, and credulities that make the English-
man the dupe of every charlatan and the idolater of
every numbskull." He certainly did not succeed
in his design, and it is not without significance that
he adds : ā¢ " I like Englishmen much better than
Irishmen " : though he undoes the compliment, with
his usual perversity, by saying afterwards : "It
takes an Irishman years of residence in England to
respect a blockhead. An Englishman will not respect
or like anyone else."
I venture to say that the psychology of this play
is as wrong as the philosophy of its predecessor. It
is an excellent example of my contention that Shaw
is farther from realism than the dramatists he con-
demns, and that his characters are not at all typical,
as Hamon contends. We may put aside as feeble
jokes the suggestions that the Englishman of to-day
calls himself " God's Englishman " and will respect
none but a blockhead. The quintessential point of
Shaw's racial psychology is that the Englishman is
" muddle-headed," and the Irishman is " clear-
headed." He does not admit, of course, that there
is a Celtic race and an Anglo-Saxon race. But it
IN THE LIME-LIGHT 205
comes to the same thing when he says that there
is "an Irish climate which will stamp an immigrant
more deeply and durably in two years, apparently,
than the English climate will in two hundred." In
point of fact, he assigns psychological racial characters
more sharply than believers in race generally do ;
and it is not uninteresting to remark that his view
of the action of environment here is out of joint with
his theory of heredity. The Englishman has the
virtues of money ā strength, confidence, etc. ā to
redeem his muddle-headedness and illusions, and his
prosperity enables him to tolerate leaders who
" muddle through " imperial affairs. The Irishman
has been schooled to reality and clearness of mind.
I have spent half my life in intimate association with
Irishmen, of various classes, and emphatically deny
that they are clearer-headed and less duped by illusions
than the English. Shaw is not relying on observation
at all, but is complacently building on the foolish
proverb about Englishmen " muddling through."
If the Boer War is quoted, one may confidently
challenge comparison of our whole statesmanship,
on internal or external affairs, with that of Germany,
France, or Italy ; while the whole history of Ireland
is against the claim that the Irish are clear-headed
and free from illusions. Shaw would probably class
himself as Irish in intellectual temperament. It
must seem to many that the vagaries of his philosophy
and the delightful extravagances of his comedies
hardly confirm his estimate.
In the preface to this play Shaw glances at the
religious and political problem of Ireland. For the
Catholic clergy he has no more tenderness than
George Moore. He severely condemns their rapacity
and their efforts to restrict the culture of the laity
206 BERNARD SHAW
But, like most Irishmen who belong to neither religious
camp, he believes that Home Rule will lead to a
curtailment of the power of the clergy. The Pro-
testants will co-operate with the growing Catholic
resentment of the despotism of the priests, and check
it. English officials in Ireland form a Mutual Admira-
tion Society. The Irish Protestant does not belong
to the Society, though he profits by it, and he will
not be pained at the disappearance of the Castle.
The Church will seek advantages from an Irish
Parliament, and the reaction in the country will be
such that you will find " To Hell with the Pope "
chalked on the walls of southern Catholic towns.
From the broader point of view the gain will be
important. Ireland, with its perennial dwelling
on the conquest, is like a man with a broken arm ;
you must set it before he will do any good. At
present " Nationalism stands between Ireland and
the light of the world," inspiring futile oratory and
bitter dissension. Responsible self-government will
deflate the windbags.
The simultaneous success of " Man and Superman "
and " John Bull's Other Island " was enhanced by