by S. T. Joshi
In this will be seen the truth of the statement purposely reiterated: that Shaw is in no sense a preacher. His private opinions, very naturally, greatly color his plays, but his true purpose, like that of every dramatist worth while, is to give a more or less accurate and unbiased picture of some phase of human life, that persons observing it may be led to speculate and meditate upon it. In “Widowers’ Houses” he attempts, by setting forth a series of transactions between a given group of familiar Englishmen, to show that capitalism, as a social force, is responsible for the oppression that slum landlords heap upon their tenants, and that, in consequence, every other man of the capitalistic class, no matter what his own particular investments and activities may be, shares, to a greater or less extent, in the landlord’s offense. A capitalist reading this play may conclude with some justice that the merit of husbanding money—or, as Adam Smith calls it, the virtue of abstinence—outweighs his portion of the burden of this sin, or that it is, in a sense, inevitable and so not properly a sin at all; but whatever his conclusion, if he has honestly come to it after a consideration of the facts, he is a far better man than when he accepted the maxims of the majority unquestioningly and without analysis.
A preacher necessarily endeavors to make all his hearers think exactly as he does. A dramatist merely tries to make them think. The nature of their conclusions is of minor consequence.
VI
That Shaw will ever become a popular dramatist, in the sense that Sardou7 and Pinero are popular, seems to be beyond all probability. The vogue that his plays have had of late in the United States is to be ascribed, in the main, to the yearning to appear “advanced” and “intellectual” which afflicts Americans of a certain class. The very fact that they do not understand him makes him seem worthy of admiration to these virtuously ambitious folks. Were his aims and methods obvious, they would probably vote him tiresome. As it is, a performance of “Candida” delights them as much as an entertainment by Henry Kellar, the magician,8 and for the same reason.
But even among those who approach Shaw more honestly, there is little likelihood that he will ever grow more popular, in the current sense, than he is at present. In the first place, some of his plays are wellnigh impossible of performance in a paying manner without elaborate revision and expurgation. “Man and Superman,” for instance, would require five hours if presented as it was written. And “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” because of its subject-matter, will be unsuitable for a good many years to come. In the second place, Shaw’s extraordinary dexterity as a wit, which got him his first hearing and keeps him before the public almost constantly to-day, is a handicap of crushing weight. As long as he exercises it, the great majority will continue to think of him as a sort of glorified and magnificent buffoon. As soon as he abandons it, he will cease to be Shaw.
The reason of this lies in the fact that the average man clings fondly to two ancient delusions: (a) that wisdom is always solemn, and (b) that he himself is never ridiculous. Shaw outrages both of these ideas, the first by placing his most searching and illuminating observations in the mouths of such persons as Frank Gardner and Sidney Trefusis, and the second by drawing characters such as Finch McComas and Roebuck Ramsden.9 The average spectator laughs at Frank’s impertinences and at Trefusis’ satire, and by gradual stages, comes to laugh at Frank and Trefusis. Beginning as comedians, they become butts. And so, conversely, McComas and Ramsden, as their opponents fall, rise themselves. In the first act of “Man and Superman,” the battle seems to be all in favor of John Tanner and so the unthinking reader concludes that Tanner is Shaw’s personal spokesman and that the Tanner doctrines constitute the Shavian creed. Later on, when Tanner falls before the forces of inexorable law, this same reader is vastly puzzled and perplexed, and in the end he is left wondering what it is all about.
If he would but remember the reiterated axiom that a dramatist’s purpose is to present a picture of life as he sees it, without reference to any particular moral conclusions, he would better enjoy and appreciate the play as a work of art. Playwrights of Shaw’s calibre do not think it necessary to plainly label every character or to reward their heroes and kill their villains in the last act. It is utterly immaterial whether Tanner is dragged into a marriage with Ann or escapes scot free. The important thing is that the battle between the two be depicted naturally and plausibly and that it afford some tangible material for reflection.
The average citizen’s disinclination to see the ridiculous side of his own pet doctrines and characteristics has been noted by Shaw in his preface to Ibsen’s plays. Ibsen has drawn several characters intended to satirize the typical self-satisfied business man and tax-payer—the type greatly in the majority in the usual theater audience. These characters, very naturally, have failed utterly to impress the said gentlemen. One cannot expect a man, however keen his sense of humor, to laugh at the things he considers eminently proper and honorable. Shaw’s demand that he do so has greatly restricted the size of the Shaw audience. To appreciate “The Devil’s Disciple,” for instance, a religious man would have to lift himself bodily from his accustomed rut of thought and look down upon himself from the same distance that separates him in his meditations from the rest of humanity. This, it is obvious, is possible only to man given to constant self-analysis and introspection—the 999th man in the thousand.
Even when the average spectator does not find himself the counterpart of a definite type in a Shaw play, he is confused by the handling of some of his ideals and ideas. No doubt the men who essayed to stone the Magdalen were infinitely astounded when the Messiah called their attention to the fact that they themselves were not guiltless. But it is precisely this establishment of new view-points that makes Shaw as an author worth the time and toil of study. In “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” the heroine’s picturesque fall from grace is shown in literally a multitude of aspects. We have her own antipodal changes in self-valuation and self-depreciation, we have her daughter’s varying point of view, and we have the more constant judgments of Frank Gardner, his father, Crofts, and the rest. It is kaleidoscopic and puzzling, but it is not sermonizing. You pay your money and you take your choice.
VII
But even if Shaw’s plays were not performed at all, he would be a world-figure in the modern drama, just as Ibsen is a world-figure and Maeterlinck another. Very frequently it happens, in literature as well as in other fields of meta-physical endeavor, that a master is unknown to the majority except through his disciples. Until Huxley began lecturing about it, no considerable number of laymen read “The Origin of Species.” Fielding is not even a name to thousands who know and love Thackeray. And Adam Smith—how many citizens of to-day read “The Wealth of Nations”? Yet it is undeniable that the Scotch schoolmaster’s conclusions have colored the statutes of the entire English-speaking world and that they are dished up to us, with new sauces, in every political campaign.
And so it is with playwrights. Ibsen is far less popular than Clyde Fitch,10 but Ibsen’s ideas are fast becoming universal. Persons who would, under no consideration, pay $2 a seat to see “Ghosts,” pay that sum willingly when “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray” or “The Climbers” is the bill. From these plays, un-knowingly, they absorb Ibsenism in a palatable and diluted form, like children who take castor oil in taffy. That either is a conscious imitation of any Ibsen drama I do not intend to affirm. What I mean is that the Norwegian is that model of practically every contemporary playmaker worth considering, just as plainly as Molière was the model of Congreve, Wycherley, and Sheridan. A comman ding personality, in literature as well as in statecraft, creates an atmosphere, and lesser men, breathing it, take on its creator’s characteristics.
Shaw himself, a follower of Ibsen, has shown variations sufficiently marked to bring him followers of his own. In all the history of the English stage, no man has exceeded him in technical resources nor in nimbleness of wit. Some of his scenes are fairly irresistible, and throughout his plays his avoidance of the old-fashioned machi
nery of the drama gives even his wildest extravagances an air of reality. So far but two men have exhibited skill in this regard at all measurable with his. They are Israel Zangwill and James M. Barrie. Perhaps neither of them consciously admires Shaw: but the fact is of small importance. The essential thing is that “The Admirable Crichton” is of Shaw, Shavian, and that “Agnes-Sit-By-The-Fire,” in conception, development and treatment, might be one of the “Plays Pleasant.”11
William Shakespeare
Stratford-on-Avon, that sleepy old town, is as crowded and lively just now as a Chesapeake excursion boat on the Fourth of July, for today is the birthday of William Shakespeare, and thousands of tourists have flocked to his birthplace to see the festival performances in the Shakespeare Theatre. This year’s festival will last, not the usual two weeks, but a full month, and all the actors, including Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Lewis Waller and Sir John Hare,1 will have some hand in it.
That April 23 is Shakespeare’s birthday is nothing more than a convenient assumption, for no one really knows when he was born. All that the most painstaking research has been able to discover is that he was baptized on April 26, 1564. It was the general custom in those days to have a child baptized three days after birth, and so it is assumed that the greatest of all dramatists first saw the light on April 23.
To be strictly accurate, we should really celebrate his birthday on May 3, for he was born while the old style, or Julian, calendar was still in force, and there is a difference of 10 days between that calendar and the one now in use. The change was made by Pope Gregory XIII in October, 1582, when Shakespeare was 18 years old. To correct the error that the old calendar, with its few minutes loss of time every year, had brought about in the course of centuries Gregory decreed that October 5, 1582, should be called October 15. Thus everyone then living grew 10 days older in one day. In Russia, where the Julian calendar has never been ousted by the Gregorian, they are still 10 days behind us.
In late years a radical change has come over the world’s view of Shakespeare—a change in the direction of better understanding and sounder judgment. Time was, and not so long ago, when the poet was set upon a pedestal so high and his worshipers adored him so vociferously that the voice of common sense could not be heard. It was accepted as an axiom that every line in his plays was beyond criticism, that his art was perfect in the smallest things as well as in the largest, that he rose above all ordinary human limitations and wrote with the inspiration of a divine prophet.
In those days a horde of so-called “Shakespearean scholars,” male and female, wrote endless commentaries upon his plays—commentaries as ingenuous and as fatuous as some of the old-time homiletes’ expositions of Holy Writ. The rash critic who ventured to point out clumsiness in the dramatist’s plots, plagiarism in his rhetoric, inconsistencies in his characters and banality in his philosophy was hooted down as a loathsome ignoramus. That “scholar” was most esteemed who had memorized most passages from the plays (typographical errors and the childish interpolations of early editors included), and who could spout them with the greatest affectation of earnestness and reverence.
Such foolishness had to end, and end it did. A new race of critics sprang up, who sought to understand Shakespeare better by gaining a better knowledge of the time in which he lived. In the light of that knowledge, when at last it had been painfully acquired, many things became clear and the occupation of the ancient cabalists was gone.
It was learned, for example, that much of Shakespeare’s carelessness—his loose writing, his barbarous blunders in names and facts, his occasional dependency upon cheap theatrical devices—was due to the great speed with which he had to work to make a living. It was learned, too, that he had to make frequent and lamentable concessions to the taste and prejudices of his audiences at the Blackfriars and Globe Theatre—that he had to give his principal personages long and flowery speeches because those pugnacious Elizabethans had a liking for fustian, that he had to regale them with coarse buffoonery because they were hoggish, and offer them plenty of fighting because they were bullies. And it was learned, finally, that Shakespeare did not take himself too seriously; that he placed his main dependence, not upon flashes of genius, but upon hard work; that he was, first of all, a busy journeyman dramatist and ready to tackle any job in his line that offered.
After he had thus been rid of his supernatural halo it became possible to study the plays of Shakespeare as the plays of any other man are studied. The result of that study, which has now been in progress for a good while, has been no diminution of his fame, but only a change in its quality. No sane critic maintains today that Shakespeare was divinely inspired or that all he wrote came from within and nothing from without, or that his plays, in themselves, offer credible answers to all the riddles of human existence. But by the same token, no sane critic denies that, if not in kind, then at least in degree, he differs enormously from all other dramatists, that his best plays, in structure and in detail, are the best plays by long odds ever written, and that, in nearly every one of the qualities which enter into the make up of a great imaginative writer, he exceeded all other men whose writings we know today.
But in what qualities is his greatness especially to be sought? Chiefly in two. In the first place, he was the most marvelous master of words that ever set pen to paper, and in the second place he was the most prodigal creator of living, upstanding characters that ever peopled a dream world with his fancies.
Shakespeare’s skill at putting beautiful thoughts into arresting words was altogether beyond compare. His phrases have entered into the common speech of the race, not so much on account of the truth of their matter, as on account of the astonishing felicity of their manner. He reduced the race philosophy of the English to electric sentences; he got young love and old romance, the music of the spheres and the hope of Heaven into single lines.
No other language save the English has ever known so subtle a master. The German of Goethe, the Spanish of Calderon and Cervantes, the French of Corneille and Hugo and the Greek of Homer must ever delight the connoisseur of verbal magic, but Shakespeare’s English stands above them all. In more than one place the thing that he says is scarcely worth hearing, but he always says it with such inimitable art that it lingers in memory forever.
In his characters, Shakespeare’s genius is even more astonishingly displayed. His vast canvas is crowded with figures, and though some of them, true enough, are mere shadows, others stand out with such reality that they seem actually to move and breathe. There is more reality in Dogberry than in most English kings; Hamlet is as real as William the Conqueror; Shylock and Mercutio, Benedict and Petruchio, Malvolio and Romeo, by the strange humor of fate are vastly more real than Shakespeare himself.
The canvas of Molière is also full of personages, and some of them have abounding vitality, but they are not to be compared to the people of Shakespeare. So, too, Corneille and Schiller, Aeschylus and Aristophanes, Lope de Vega and Ben Jonson have given us plays with credible human beings in them, but which of those creations appeals to our sense of reality as strongly as Portia? Which of them is the old friend that Falstaff is? Which remains in memory as Rosalind does?
Now, since the creation of plausible characters is the principal business of a dramatist, and Shakespeare has done that work better than any other man, it follows that he is the greatest of all dramatists. He is, indeed, a very colossus of the theatre, a genius unapproachable and incomparable. But in many of the minor things of his art lesser men have surpassed him, and we get a surer and saner view of him if we admit it.
He is often careless, for example, where Congreve is always careful; he is sometimes banal, where Racine is dignified. Scribe2 knew a great deal more about deft play building than Shakespeare, and Wycherley was a better hand at writing dialogue. George Bernard Shaw, in truth, is not altogether absurd when he maintains that much water has gone under the bridges since Shakespeare’s time, and that many things are done better today, even in the theatre
and even by Shaw himself.
Such admissions would have seemed sacrilegious to the old-time Shakespearean “scholars,” but we may make them today without hesitation. We have outgrown the ancient fashion of regarding the plays of the poet as impeccable scriptures, which must be accepted without cavil or inquiry. We no longer go into raptures over his so-called philosophy, with its confusing echoes of all creeds and schools and its superficial resignationism. We no longer hail Shakespeare as a master psychologist, for psychology is no longer a mere name, but a definite science, and we know that an artist is not a scientist. In a word, we have abandoned a lot of cant, a lot of cheap worship, a lot of doddering nonsense.
But the more we study the plays of Shakespeare, as stage plays, the more we become convinced that the world will never see his peer as a dramatist, and the more we study that marvelous English of his, as a work of art, the more we incline to the belief that he must stand first, for many long years, among all the great masters of the written word.