and they are inserted, whether or no you conceive
them as concessions to Fanny's crudeness, for the
purpose of vituperating the suburban English home.
Gilbey snarls like a caged animal during two and
three quarter acts, and is only restored to a genial,
wine-loving mood by the bad example of his son.
Knox is a kind of father whom you might possibly
find, after an arduous search, in a city of seven million
people, but it is doubtful whether even such a man.
if you found him, would ask the brother of a duke,
bluntly and publicly, if he were legitimate. The two
mothers are entirely charming and unreal : one a
lacrimose pietist, who breathes into her moist handker-
chief every few minutes that the source of happiness
is internal, and the other a placid, bovine, stupid,
good-natured old nonentity. All of them behave,
when the butler discloses his aristocratic birth, like
a compartment-full of half-intoxicated East-enders
returning from Southend. And the heavy satire
is crowned when, at the close, four of the leading
English dramatic critics are represented as undecided
whether the play was written by Pinero, Granville
Barker, Bernard Shaw, or a gushing young schoolgirl.

" Fanny's First Play " is, apart from its abounding
humour and technical excellence, a compendium of



IN THE LIME-LIGHT 221

Shaw's charges against the middle class ; and it is
a good illustration of his failure to enforce them.
From beginning to end it rails at English ignorance,
stupidity, prejudice, stodginess, hypocrisy, snobbery,
brutality, and domestic dreariness. Lest the moral of
it be not plain to all, Shaw lets his Frenchman deliver
a ten-minutes' speech on the stupidity and other
defects of his countrymen, and his auditors on the
stage are all supposed to be too dense to suspect
that he is describing them. The caricature evidently
defeated its purpose, and passed as entertainment —
as one of Mr Shaw's delightful inventions — with the
crowded audiences. The playgoers probably had
little suspicion, as a rule, that the homes of Gilbey
and Knox were supposed to be more or less faithful
reproductions of their homes in Bayswater or Syden-
ham ; nor can one say that this was due to density
so much as to their superior knowledge of their own
establishments. At the most, a man here and there
may have imagined that he was enjoying the laugh
at his neighbour's expense, and no doubt there was
a core of resolute Shavians applauding the realism of
the piece. It succeeded so well, however, because it
was good fun and very clever imaginary portraiture,
and one was not tempted to take any of it seriously.

In the following year, 1912, was written " Androcles
and the Lion," and the controversy about Mr Shaw's
purpose in writing it has hardly yet subsided. Men
with some public reputation for religious penetration,
like Sir Oliver Lodge, declare that the play is " pro-
foundly religious," whereas prominent clergymen
denounced it as thoroughly irreligious. Apparently
Shaw wished to commend the early Christians, but
could not resist the temptation to humanise them,
and this did not please their professional admirers.



222 BERNARD SHAW



One of the condemned Christians falls in love with
a Roman soldier; another makes so vigorous and
skilful a struggle for life that the remainder — much
to their relief, seemingly — are saved. One alone has
to face the lion, and from the remarkable behaviour
of the martyr and the stage-animal we gather that
they are the old friends of our nursery days, Androcles
and the Lion. The tragedy merges into comedy,
and the thoughtful part of the audience is left in
doubt as to whether Mr Shaw admired or disdains
the martyrs. We find the key in his earlier historical
plays. He is humanising the romantic figures of
early Christian tradition. Beyond that his only clear
purpose is to oppose the theoretical peacefulness
of early Christianity to the militarism of ancient
Rome and modern Christendom. As a more or
less serious attempt to urge the gospel of peace it
can have had little influence, and you can hardly
humanise historical characters by substituting prosy
fiction for romantic fiction. It is an interesting
suggestion ; but it will hardly be doubted that it was
the somewhat incongruous element of comedy which
kept the play on the boards for two months or so.

Three of Shaw's shorter sketches were also written
in 1912. " Overruled " is described by Mr Baughan
as " a poor little piece of Shavian dialectics." It is
the real sequel to, or continuation of, " Getting
Married." It formed a triple bill, with short plays
by Pinero and Barrie, at the Duke of York's Theatre
in October (1912), and survived only a few nights.
Two married couples exchange partners and discuss
the muddle, which ensues, until the dinner-gong puts
an end to the discussion. Except that current ideas
of sex-ethic are ridiculed, one does not gather any
definite lesson from the conversation, or " demonstra.



IN THE LIME-LIGHT 223

tion." Shaw's mind is poised between the untruth
of monogamy and the inconvenience of polygamy.
The play was at first entitled " Trespassers will be
Prosecuted," as it is still called in some reference-
books, but Shaw found that there was already a play
with that name. The third 19 12 play was " Pyg-
malion," but this, up to the present, has only been
performed in Germany and published in that country.

Though these plays had been slight and unsuccess-
ful, the older plays kept Shaw well in the front rank
of English dramatists during 1912. " You Never
Can Tell " was revived with considerable success,
and " Captain Brassbound's Conversion " had a
moderate run, while " Fanny's First Play " continued
to attract crowds. Shaw had meantime returned
to his congenial task of humanising history, and his
next play was " Great Catherine," a moderate success
at the Vaudeville. Faithful to his principle of follow-
ing his artistic impulse rather than rules, Shaw has
in this case — and for the first time — divided the piece
into scenes. A single act or episode divided into
four scenes, each very short, cannot do more than
give, in Shaw's words, " a thumbnail sketch of Russian
court life in the eighteenth century " ; as the third
scene is dull and superfluous, moreover, the play
becomes a very slight sketch.

Historically, the piece is " founded on fact," but
the dramatist builds a good deal of fiction on his
facts. Mr Norman M'Kinnel makes Prince Patiomkin
a very plausible and amusing blackguard, but the
portrait of Catherine, for the sake of which the sketch
was presumably written, is not very convincing.
Her features are so well known that Shaw could not
fail to reproduce them, though it is singular that,
with so very definite a personality to reproduce, his



224 BERNARD SHAW

character has not all the idiosyncrasy and sharpness
of outline which he usually gives so effectively. Miss
Gertrude Kingston hardly improves matters by
making Catherine, for some occult reason, speak
English with a foreign accent. It is not supposed,
since even the Cossacks speak fluent English, that
she is really attempting to talk to her English visitor
in English. One fancies that Miss Kingston is trying
to give the character more individuality. In other
historical plays Shaw has aimed at humanising the
characters by the simple process of modernising them.
Human nature, he insists, is the same in all ages.
One could not apply that principle too rigorously
to Catherine the Great without erasing her most
prominent traits, and the only effect of Shaw's partial
application of it is the partial blurring of the very
definite personality of Catherine.

One suspects that Shaw's more geniune aim was
to have another fling at " God's Englishman." An
eighteenth-century officer of the British army visits
the Russian court. On his poor head are heaped all
Shaw's prejudices or exaggerations. Although he
is described as a Bachelor of Arts — and any English
officer who would take such a degree in the eighteenth
century would be exceptionally intellectual — and
a stickler for etiquette, he falls into convulsions of
laughter on hearing the name Popoff , chides Catherine
the Great for being unwomanly, and commits the
hundred atrocities that only " Shaw's Englishman "
can commit. As usual, the caricature is so heavy
that the English audience enjoys it. We have come
to regard it as the leit-motiv of the Shavian comedy,
and do not grudge it.



CHAPTER IX

THE MAN AND HIS INFLUENCE

It will now be apparent why a detailed study of
Shaw's opinions and their growth must precede any
appreciation of his dramas. Essays on the dramas
themselves, apart from Shaw's philosophy, generally
lead either to fantastic interpretations of his occult
meaning or bewildered speculation as to when he
is serious and when not. There is a common notion
that Shaw takes pleasure in advancing eccentric
statements with an air of profound seriousness and
then smiling at the critics who take them seriously.
This is, as a rule, a complete misconception of the
man. There are occasions when he flings out a
paradoxical statement for the mere purpose of catching
attention, as the showman displays his gorgeous
pictures at the fair, but in most of the cases where
his less-informed admirers take him to be fooling he
is quite serious.

Years ago, when I was less acquainted with his
peculiar set of first principles, I ventured, in review-
ing an essay of his on modern science, to suggest
that his alternate paragraphs ought to be labelled
" serious " or " humorous," for the guidance of the
innocent reader. I see to-day that the whole of his
statements in that essay, outrageous as some of them
were, were logical deductions from his deepest con-
victions. Again, in recent times I have seen large
audiences regard as an exquisite joke his suggestion

225



u-



I'"



226 BERNARD SHAW

that the next monarch of the earth may not be a
Superman at all, but " a Supersnake or something."
He is, however, perfectly serious. His impatience
of science has prevented him from mastering its
teaching patiently and accurately, and he contends
that there are facts in the past story of life in this
planet which justify him in thinking that the Life-
Force may come to sterility in the human branch of
the animal world, or, in a kind of disgust, transfer
its higher purpose to some other branch and make
it supersede man. Other audiences, even Socialist
audiences, smile at his contention that the State
ought to settle an income at birth on each individual ;
that we ought to examine periodically if each man
and woman has earned this income, and politely make
an end of those who have failed to do so ; that we
ought to give a long rope to criminals and merely
tighten the noose when they go too far ; and so on.
Yet in these and a score of other equally eccentric
opinions Mr Shaw is by no means imitating the
deliberate paradoxes of Samuel Butler. They are
ideas which arise logically from his principles, or
attacks on other people's principles, and he has advo-
cated them consistently for a number of years.

These opinions form the framework of his dramatic
constructions, the steel frame, as it were, hidden
beneath the decorative exterior. He began his career
as an evangelist, setting forth his naked gospel in
blunt and incisive speech or explicit pamphlets.
Circumstances led him to realise the great potentialities
of the stage for putting ideas or sentiments into the
mind of people, and he decided to employ the dramatic
form. As time went on he learned to moderate the
dose of social physic in his productions, and to develop
more and more the comedic element which chiefly



THE MAN AND HIS INFLUENCE 221

secured him an audience. People, as someone once
said, learned to expect from Bernard Shaw the opposite
of what they expected of him. He could make them
applaud his originality even when he put before them
a hotch-potch of stale melodramatic situations ; and
in point of fact he was original in this. It is waste
of time to discuss whether his plays are plays. He
invented, if you like, a new way of employing the
theatre and the player's art, and, as it was entertaining,
the public applauded. That does not imply either
failure to reach the current dramatic standard (at
which he never aimed) or the genius to transcend it.
It implies originality, which is one of the elements of
genius.

On the other hand, the critic may justly com-
plain that he has not made good by his own example
the strictures which he passed on contemporary
dramatists. We may ignore his censure of artists
(writers and composers of dramatic comedy, for
instance) whose aim is solely to amuse. The Life-
Force must be compelled, like every other modern
employer, to be satisfied with an eight-hour service,
and leave men and women some time for relaxation.
It is a sound and admirable function to supply amuse-
ment which is consonant with good taste. We may
also pass over his contention that the artist must
have an idea to propound or defend, and that his
morality must not be " second-hand." The latter
objection, indeed, is foolish. When the new morality
is accepted, if it ever is accepted, even the advanced
artist will merely repeat it at second hand. Moreover,
the artist who uses his gifts for seriously enforcing
the old morality may be as genuine and laudable as
the artist who regards it as obsolete. But there is,
in point of fact, no apparent reason why art should



228 BERNARD SHAW



include a purpose at all. One might, indeed, say
that art cannot include a purpose. It may be used
for an ulterior purpose, but it remains a complete and
distinct human gift in itself, whether it be so used
or no. Here, however, we touch an irreconcilable
opposition, because the conflicting views are founded
on conflicting tastes or temperaments. There is no
neutral or universal principle on which you can con-
tend that an artist may not be content with his
ministry as artist. It is only an individual asceticism
which can challenge his position.

But Shaw's more persistent and urgent criticism
during his few years of service on the Saturday Review
was that the modern drama was romantic and unreal.
The review we have made of his plays shows that he
completely failed to reform the stage in this direction.
He brought forward the model of Ibsen, and challenged
all others by comparison. Even in Ibsen he found
one element of untruth or unreality. A tragic ending
was no more true to life than the happy ending of the
conventional drama or novel ; life goes on, as a rule,
and does not suddenly end in a peal of wedding-bells
or a suicide. In this single respect Shaw is more
realistic than the others. He is by no means always
scrupulous in adhering to his principle. In " The
Doctor's Dilemma " Dubedat dies and the widow
marries again. " Fanny's First Play," " Man and
Superman," " Getting Married," and many other
plays, end in quite a matrimonial epidemic.
" Candida " and half the other plays come to an
artistic and psychological conclusion ; they have a
much more definite conclusion than, say, Ibsen's
" Doll's House " or " Enemy of the People." The
truth is that the stage has requirements as well as
conventions. To say that you must put on it a slice



THE MAN AND HIS INFLUENCE 229

of real life, just as it is, is an arbitrary principle. A
story is not a picture ; it has action, and it is more
congenial both to the artist and the audience to
Tiave the action more or less completed, instead of
broken off.

All dramatic rules are really conventions, because
drama is an imaginative construction. You may
take as your convention that the stage shall simply
mirror life, or you may decide to use the agents and
experiences of life in some other way. Shaw decided,
twenty years ago, that the stage was to reflect real life,
and ran amok amongst our dramatists with that
idea in his hand. Then he turned to preaching by
example, and there never was a baser desertion of
principle. He has given us, in his twenty-nine plays,
a wonderfully varied gallery of characters, nearly all
very definite and different, yet very few of them
belong to the world of reality. The great majority of
them are creatures of his fertile and original imagina-
tion. A large proportion of them could not live, or
certainly never did live, in the flesh ; and, where they
may be in their fundamental traits conceived as
portraits of living persons, we find him almost always
making a liberal use of the photographer's art of
" touching up." In his portraits he is generally as
little realistic as Aubrey Beardsley ; but he prefers,
as a rule, to make his characters himself.

We have seen this sufficiently in our review of his
plays. From the first (in "Widowers' Houses")
he constructs his villains — and they are all villains —
as arbitrarily as Dickens did. In " The Philan-
derers " he puts a real person, Clement Scott, amongst
his artificial characters, but the secret would never
have been penetrated if he had not revealed it. In
" Mrs Warren's Profession " he is even more arbitrary,



230 BERNARD SHAW

and he diverges further and further from realism.
I am not thinking merely of the impossible butlers
who enliven " You Never Can Tell " or " Fanny's
First Play." His middle-class parent is always a
caricature, and his women are rarely like the women
one meets in those particular situations. When a
class is odious to him, on general principles, he gives
its representative in his dramas a touch of the tar-
brush. When a man or woman is to exemplify a
Shavian theory he puts an additional spring in his
or her composition. He calls this bringing to light
the real inner motives of their actions, which they
and their favourite dramatists conspire to conceal ;
and his admirers repeat that his characters are real
people dissected. In point of fact he is a fantasist :
the hardest reality is as supple as indiarubber to his
imagination : human material is plasticine which he
moulds as he wills. It is half the charm of his plays.

He had set out, in particular, to correct the current
dramatic treatment of the love-theme, and in this
again he failed, or, rather, ignored the device on his
banner. There was too much love-making on the
stage and it was unreal. In his first three plays his
characters made love quite as conspicuously as, and
less really than, in any contemporary drama, and
there are few of his plays in which they have not
continued to do it. The only exceptions are, I think,
" Captain Brassbound's Conversion " and " Caesar
and Cleopatra " ; the latter play comes as near
amorousness as the disparity of age permits, and in
the former the disparity of characters absolutely
forbids it. In all the other plays the love-theme is
prominent ; in some it ends in quite an orgie of
marriages.

It may be suggested that he has retained the love-



THE MAN AND HIS INFLUENCE 231

theme in order to treat it more realistically. In fact,
one of the admiring writers on Shaw thinks that the
love-making of Ann Whitefield and John Tanner
(which is an outrageous piece of theorising) and of
Valentine and Gloria in " You Never Can Tell "
(which is almost as bad) is " superb " in its " mystic
and inner truth." The contention is that Shaw lays
bare the psychology of lovers instead of merely
describing their outward caresses. On the contrary,
he denies the caresses altogether, though he will
hardly maintan that they are confined to the stage
and are not found in real life. In how many of
Shaw's thirty plays do lovers caress each other ?
He conceives their real love-making as an economic
calculation or mystic impulse which drives the woman
to the man, who is almost always more or less bored
and indifferent. He is not giving us psychology at
all, but a fantastic theory of a very simple and common
occurrence. He is not a " professor of natural
psychology," as he claims ; he is nearly as far re-
moved from it, on this point, as Immanuel Kant.
Probably Eugene in " Candida " is the only character
in his plays who is really in love, and Eugene is too
morbid and unnatural in other respects to be a model
of real life.

Shaw had perceived two truths which he made
the basis of his " psychology." On the one hand,
there is much calculation in love-making among real
persons ; on the other hand, there is much romantic
decoration of love-making in fiction. But he has
made the mistake of generalising these experiences
and maintaining that they are the rule rather than the
exception. His power of observation was thwarted
by his habitually low estimate of human nature and
his asceticism. He is quite right in contending that






232 BERNARD SHAW

love is not the lofty, spiritual element which some
romantic writers represent it to be ; neither is it the
frigid and inartistic approach of the sexes which he
represents it to be. But because he has a disdain
of the sensuous enjoyment which most lovers, con-
sciously or unconsciously, experience in it, and thinks
the approach of the sexes only a preliminary of the
grave function of creating the Superman, he has
wholly failed to teach contemporary dramatists
realism. The average musical comedy is in this
respect nearer to life than his malicious dissection or
imagination of motives.

Has he succeeded in his more important aim of
using dramatic art for educational purposes ? One
may confidently say that he has not succeeded to
any great extent. The early plays, in which the
audience could not possibly miss the lesson, have
been rarely presented on the stage, and in the literary
form they are confined to a relatively small group of
readers who are mostly of advanced views. Shaw
scolds the public severely, or lightly rails at it, because
it will not patronise plays which provoke thought.
There is much truth in his charge, but the public
might justly bring a counter-charge. He has chosen
to put the evil in an exaggerated and unreal form,
or in so exceptional a form that it lies beyond the
experience or control of most people. The docile
disciple ought, after witnessing " Widowers' Houses,"
to find out such men as Sartorius in real life and pay
critical attention to them. He will, however, probably
be unable to find any such person ; Certainly not
one in ten thousand of the middle-class young ladies
he meets on the Rhine or at the theatre has been
educated and fed on the rents from squalid slums.
Similarly, the convert to Shaw's gospel would have



THE MAN AND HIS INFLUENCE 233

to wait many generations before he would meet an
English baronet who derived his income from con-
tinental brothels, or a Girton girl whose mother was
a prostitute. Shaw believes that a problem will
attract more attention if it be stated in violent or
paradoxical form. The fate of his earlier plays shows
that, as is not unnatural, this is not generally correct.
" Mrs Warren's Profession " has not opened the eyes
of multitudes to the " white-slave trafhc." Its
readers are, for the most part, men and women of
social enthusiasm who already know and resent it.
A recent debate in Parliament, and its echoes in the
press, caught the attention of ten thousand people
for every one who read Shaw ; nor, when the occasion
arose, was there any disposition to suppress the
discussion.

The contrast of the success of Dickens shows us
a special reason for Shaw's failure in these explicit
problem-plays. Dickens, apparently, committed the
same fault of incarnating the evil he attacked in
such obviously exaggerated characters as Squeers,
Ralph Copperfield, Jingle, Sergeant Buzfuz, etc.
Yet few resented his use of the art of fiction for social
reform, and he had a mighty influence in preparing
the public demand for reform. One important reason
why he succeeded where Shaw failed was that he did
not alienate the sympathy of the middle class to
which he appealed ; he did not suggest that his
villains were typical representatives of it, and did
not caricature it as a whole. Shaw, on the other
hand, frame? his plays in such sweeping and acrid
generalisations about the middle class, and makes its
representatives so consistently stupid and unjust,
that you must regard his characters either as amusing
fictions or unfortunate libels.



234 BERNARD SHAW

Dickens did not announce that his purpose was
to show how the comfort of the middle class was
based on tainted incomes — on abominable schools,
or usury, or parasitism. He suggested that certain
men who were a disgrace to the middle class did these
things, and the general public were quite ready to