by S. T. Joshi
As for the three plays in the book, they are diverting enough but will add little to his renown. “Fanny’s First Play,” which he dismisses sneeringly as a pot-boiler, is an excellent piece of nonsense, amusing alike on the stage and in the library, but “Misalliance,” which deals brilliantly with all the problems of civilization in the course of one long act, comes in the end to inconsequence; and “The Dark Lady of the Sonnets,” in which Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth are seen at grips, is no more than a clever piece of clowning. No, these new plays will not lift Shaw nearer Shakespeare; he has still to do anything better than the earliest fruits of his fancy—“Mrs. Warren,” “Candida” and “Arms and the Man.” But though he thus stands still as a dramatist, he yet remains a surpassing entertainer. You will not do much snoring over this latest book. It will tickle you and caress you and make you tingle with delight. It is bully good stuff.
The Ulster Polonius
The general formula of George Bernard Shaw, to wit, the announcement of the obvious in terms of the scandalous, is made so palpable in his new book, “Androcles and the Lion,” that even such besotted Shawolators as George Jean Nathan will at last perceive and acknowledge it. Here, indeed, the Irish Herbert Kaufman1 indulges himself in a veritable debauch of platitudes, and the sickly music of them fills the air. In the long and indignant preface to “Androcles” (it runs to 114 pages) all he manages to say about Christianity is what every man of the slightest intelligence has been thinking for years; and yet he gets into his statement of all this trite stuff so violent an appearance of radicalism that it will undoubtedly heat up the women’s clubs and the newspaper reviewers, and inspire them to hail him once more as a Great Thinker. It is amusing to rehearse in cold blood some of his principal contentions: (a) that the social and economical doctrines preached by Christ were indistinguishable from what is now called Socialism, (b) that the Pauline transcendentalism visible in the Acts and the Epistles differs enormously from the simple ideas set forth in the Four Gospels, (c) that the Christianity on tap to-day would be almost as abhorrent to Christ, supposing Him returned to earth, as the theories of Nietzsche, George Moore or Emma Goldman, (d) that the rejection of the Biblical miracles, and even of the historical credibility of the Gospels, by no means disposes of Christ Himself, and (e) that the early Christians were persecuted, not because their theology was unsound, but because their public conduct constituted a nuisance. Could one imagine a more abject surrender to the undeniable? And yet, as I say, these empty platitudes will probably be debated furiously as revolutionary iconoclasms, and perhaps even as blasphemies, and the reputation of Shaw as an original and powerful metaphysician will get a great boost.
In this new book his method of making a scandal with embalmed ideas is exactly the same that he used in all his previous prefaces, pontifications and pronunciamentos. That is to say, he takes a proposition which all reflective men know and admit to be true, and points out effects and implications of it which very few men, reflective or not, have the courage to face honestly. Turn to “Man and Superman” and you will see the whole process. There he starts out with the self-evident fact, disputed by no one, that a woman has vastly more to gain by marriage, under Christian monogamy, than a man, and then proceeds to manufacture a sensation by exhibiting the corollary fact that all women know it, and that they are thus more eager to marry than men are, and always prove it by taking the lead in the business. The second fact, to any man who has passed through the terrible decade between twenty-five and thirty-five, is as plain as the first, but its statement runs counter to many much-esteemed conventions and delusions of civilization, and so it cannot be stated without kicking up a row. That row stems from horror, and that horror has its roots in one of the commonest of all human weaknesses, viz.: intellectual cowardice, the craven yearning for mental ease and safety, the fear of thinking things out. Shaw is simply one who, for purposes of sensation, resolutely and mercilessly thinks things out—sometimes with much ingenuity and humor, but often, it must be said, in the same muddled way that the average “right-thinker” would do it if he ever got up the courage. Remember this formula, and all of the fellow’s alleged originality becomes no more than a sort of bad-boy audacity. He drags skeletons from their closets, and makes them dance obscenely—but everyone, of course, knew that they were there all the time. He would produce an excitement of exactly the same kind (though perhaps superior in intensity) if he should walk down the Strand naked to the waist, and so remind the horrified Londoners of the unquestioned fact (though conventionally concealed and forgotten) that he is a mammal, and hence outfitted with an umbilicus.
This is all I can get out of the long and highly diverting preface to “Androcles”: a statement of the indubitable in terms of the not-to-be-thought-of-for-an-instant. His discussion of the inconsistencies between the Four Gospels is no more than a réchauffé of what everyone knows who knows anything about the Four Gospels at all. You will find all of its points set forth at great length in any elemental treatise upon New Testament criticism—even in so childish a tract as Ramsden Balmforth’s.2 He actually dishes up, with a grave air of sapience, the news that there is a glaring inconsistency between the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew, I, 1–17, and the direct claim of Divine Paternity in Matthew, I, 18. More, he breaks out with the astounding discovery that Jesus was a good Jew, and that Paul’s repudiation of circumcision (now a cardinal article of Christian faith) would have surprised Him, and perhaps even shocked Him. Yet more, he takes thirty or forty pages to prove that the essential ideas of Jesus, stripped of the interpolations of Paul and all the later volunteers, were the ideas of a militant communist, and hence of a Socialist—a notion so obvious that it occurred to me (a man but little concerned with either Socialism or Christianity) fully a dozen years ago, and so much a part of my common stock of platitudes that I embalmed it in print last April in a tedious, rubber-stamp review of John Spargo’s “Marxian Socialism and Religion.”3 Of such startlingly “original” propositions the preface to “Androcles” is all compact. Searching it from end to end with eagle eye, I have failed to find a single fact or argument that has given me any sense of novelty—despite the circumstance, as I say, that I pay little attention to exegesis, and so might be expected to be surprised by its veriest commonplaces.
Nevertheless, this preface makes bouncing reading—and for the plain reason that Shaw is a clever workman in letters, and knows how to wrap up old goods in charming wrappers. When, in disposing of the common delusion that Jesus was a long-faced tear-squeezer like John the Baptist or the average Methodist evangelist, he arrives at the conclusion that He was “what we should call an artist and a Bohemian in His manner of life,” the result, no doubt, is a shock and a clandestine thrill to those who have been confusing the sour donkey they hear every Sunday with the genial, good-humored and likable Man they affect to worship. And when, dealing with the Atonement, he argues against it that it puts a premium upon weakness, and that the man who doesn’t accept it is apt to be a more careful and unflinching fellow than the man who does, he gets the easy dramatic effect of a raid upon the very sanctuary, and so achieves a pleasant devilishness. But, as I have said, these ideas are not, in themselves, new ideas, nor are they really very naughty. I have heard the first of the two maintained by a bishop, and as for the seeond, I myself urged it against a chance Christian encountered in a Pullman smoking-room three or four months ago, and snickered comfortably while he proceeded from an indignant repudiation of it to a reluctant confession of its practical truth. I remember well how staggered the poor old boy was when I complained that my inability to accept the orthodox doctrine put a heavy burden of moral responsibility upon me, and forced me to be more watchful of my conduct than the elect, and so robbed me of many good chances to make money. I was very considerate in dealing with this pious gentleman. So far as I remember, I avoided tackling him with any idea that was not wholly obvious. And yet, in half an hour, he was full of the same protesting (and subtly yielding) horror that
afflicts the simple folk who support the fame of Shaw.
A double joke reposes in the Shaw legend. The first half of it I have ex-pounded; the second half is to be found in the fact that Shaw is not at all the heretic his fascinated victims see him, but an orthodox Scotch Presbyterian of the most cock-sure and bilious sort. In the theory that he is Irish I take little stock. His very name is as Scotch as haggis, and the part of Ireland from which he comes is peopled almost entirely by Scots. The true Irishman is a romantic; he senses religion as a mystery, a thing of wonder, an experience of ineffable beauty; his interest centers, not in the commandments, but in the sacraments. The Scot, on the contrary, is almost devoid of that sort of religious feeling; he hasn’t imagination enough for it; all he can see in the Word of God is a sort of police regulation; his concern is not with beauty, but with morals. Here Shaw runs true to type. Read his critical writings from end to end, and you will not find the slightest hint that objects of art were passing before him as he wrote. He founded, in England, the superstition that Ibsen was no more than a tinpot evangelist—a sort of brother to General Booth, Mrs. Pankhurst, Mother Eddy and Billy Sunday.4 He turned Shakespeare into a prophet of evil, croaking dismally in a rain-barrel. He even injected a moral content (by dint of abominable straining) into the music dramas of Richard Wagner, surely the most colossal slaughters of all moral ideas on the altar of beauty ever seen by man. Always this ethical obsession, the hall-mark of the Scotch Puritan, is visible in him. He is forever discovering an atrocity in what has hitherto passed as no more than a human weakness; he is forever inventing new sins, and demanding their punishment; he always sees his opponent, not only as wrong, but also as a scoundrel. I have called him a good Presbyterian. Need I add that, in “Androcles,” he flirts with predestination under the scientific euphemism of determinism—that he seems to be convinced that while men may not be responsible for their virtues, they are undoubtedly responsible for their sins, and deserve to be clubbed therefor? . . . And this is Shaw the revolutionist, the heretic, the iconoclast! Next, perhaps, we shall be hearing of Woodrow the immoralist, of Pius the atheist, of Nicholas the Hindenburgista!
Ibsen: Journeyman Dramatist
Ibsen, like Wagner and Manet, has lived down his commentators, and is now ready to be examined and enjoyed for what he actually was, namely, a first-rate journeyman dramatist, perhaps the best that ever lived. Twenty years ago he was hymned and damned as anything and everything else: symbolist, seer, prophet, necromancer, maker of riddles, rabble-rouser, cheap shocker, pornographer, spinner of gossamer nothings. Fools belabored him and fools defended him; he was near to being suffocated and done for in the fog of balderdash. I know of no sure cure for all the sorrows of the world, social, political, or æsthetic, that was not credited to him, read into him, forced into his baggage. And I know of no crime against virtue, good order, and the revelation of God that he was not accused of. The product of all this pawing and bawling was the Ibsen legend, that fabulous picture of a fabulous monster, half Nietzsche and half Dr. Frank Crane,1 drenching the world with scandalous platitudes from a watch-tower in the chilblained North. The righteous heard of him with creepy shudders; there was bold talk of denying him the use of the mails; he was the Gog and M agog, the Heliogabalus, nay, the downright Kaiser, of that distant and pious era.
No such Ibsen, of course, ever really existed. The genuine Ibsen was anything but the Antichrist thus conjured up by impudent partisans and terrified opponents. On the contrary, he was a man whose salient quality was precisely his distrust of, and disdain for, any and all such facile heresies; a highly respectable gentleman of the middle class, well-barbered, ease-loving, and careful in mind; a very skilful practitioner of a very exacting and lucrative trade; a safe and sane exponent of order, efficiency, honesty, and common sense. From end to end of his life there is no record that Ibsen ever wrote a single word or formulated a single idea that might not have been exposed in a newspaper editorial. He believed in all the things that the normal, law-abiding citizen of Christendom believes in, from democracy to romantic love, and from the obligations of duty to the value of virtue, and he always gave them the best of it in his plays. And whenever, mistaking his position, someone charged him with flouting these things or with advocating some notion that stood in opposition to them, he invariably called the plaintiff to book, and denied vehemently that he was guilty, and protested bitterly that it was outrageous to fasten any such wild and naughty stuff upon a reputable man.
Had he been, in truth, the extravagant iconoclast that a misinformed rabbinism tried to make him out, he would have remained, to the end of his career, a mere freak and blank cartridge in the theatre, and of no more influence than such extremists, say, as Max Stirner, Arthur Gobineau,2 and the Marquis de Sade. So long, indeed, as he was generally held to be such an iconoclast, he actually suffered that fate. But when it began to be noticcd, first by other dramatists and then by a widening public, that his ideas, after all, were really not extraordinary—that what he said, in the last analysis, was simply what every reasonably intelligent man thought—that his plays, for all their smashing air, were not actually blows at Christian culture—when this began to be understood, then he began to make his way, and all the serious dramatists of Europe began to imitate him. But they saw him, with their keener professional eyes, more clearly than the early and so absurd Ibsenites had seen him. Theys aw that he was not a brummagem prophet, but a play-maker of astounding skill—one who had a new and better method to teach them. And so, when they set out to follow him, what they imitated was not the imaginary mystifications that foolish fuglemen had read into his dramas, but his direct and adept manner of clothing simple and even self-evident arguments in unusually lucid and brilliant dramatic forms—in brief, his enormously effective technique as a dramatist. He didn’t teach them to think extraordinary thoughts; he taught them to put obvious thoughts into sound plays.
All this must be plain to anyone who goes through his so-called social dramas to-day despite the confusing memory of all the gabble that went about in the high days of the Ibsen uproar. What ideas does one actually find in them? Such ideas, first and last, as even a Harvard professor might evolve without bursting his brain—for example, that it is unpleasant and degrading for a wife to be treated as a mere mistress and empty-head; that professional patriots and town-boomers are frauds; that success in business usually involves doing things that a self-respecting man hesitates to do; that a woman who continues to cohabit with a syphilitic husband may expect to have defective children—that a joint sorrow tends to dampen passion in husband and wife, and so bring them together upon a more secure basis; that a neurotic and lascivious woman is apt to be horrified when she finds that she is pregnant; that a man of fifty-five or sixty is an ass to fall in love with a flapper of seventeen; that the world is barbarously cruel to a woman who has violated the seventh commandment or a man who has violated the eighth. If you are discontented with these summaries, then turn to summaries that Ibsen made hims elf—that is, turn to his notes for his social dramas in his “Nachgelassene Schriften.”3 Here you will find precisely what he was trying to say. Here you will find, in plain words, the ideas that he started from. They are, without exception, ideas of the utmost simplicity. There is nothing mysterious in them; there is not even anything new in them. Above all, there is no idiotic symbolism in them. They mean just what they say.
As I have said, Ibsen himself was under no delusions about his dramas of ideas. He was a hard-working dramatist and a man of sense: he never allowed the grotesque guesses and fantasies of his advocates to corrupt the clarity of his own purpose. Down to the time he lost his mind—he was then at work on “John Gabriel Borkman”—he never wrote a line that had any significance save the obvious one, and he never forgot for an instant that he was writing, not tracts, but stage plays. When the sentimental German middle classes mistook “A Doll’s House” for a revolutionary document against monogamy, and began grouping him with the preachers of free love, he was
as indignant as only a respectable family man can be, and even agreed to write a new ending for the play in order to shut off that nonsense. A year later he wrote “Ghosts” to raise a laugh against the alarmed moralists who had swallowed the free lovers’ error. The noise of combat continuing, he decided to make an end of it by burlesquing the Ibsenites, and the result was “The Wild Duck,” in which the chief figure is a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the modern Drama Leaguer. In “The Master Builder” he took a holiday from social ideas, even the most elemental, and put himself into a play, shedding a salt tear over his lost youth. And in “Hedda Gabler,” as if to confute the Ibsen talmudists forever, he fashioned a thumping drama out of the oldest, shoddiest materials of Sardou, Scribe, and Feuillet, nay, Meilhac and Ha-lévy,4 as if to prove, once and for all time, that he was a dramatist first and last, and not a windy evangelist and reformer, and that he could meet any other dramatist, however skilful, on equal terms, and dispose of him neatly and completely.
Ibsen’s chief interest, from the beginning to the end of his career as a dramatist, was not with the propagation of ethical ideas, but with the solution of æsthetic problems. He was, in brief, not a preacher, but an artist, and not the moony artist of popular legend, but the alert and competent artist ot fact, intent upon the technical difficulties of his business. He gave infinitely more thought to questions of practical dramaturgy—to getting his characters on and off the stage, to building up climaxes, to calculating effects—than he ever gave to the ideational content of his dramas. Almost any idea was good enough, so long as it could be converted into a conflict, and the conflict could be worked out straight forwardly and effectively. Read his letters and you will find him tremendously concerned, from the start, with technical difficulties and expedients—and never mentioning morals, lesson, symbols, and that sort of thing at all. So early as the time he wrote “The League of Youth” you will find him discussing the details of dramatic machinery with Dr. Georg Brandes,5 and laying stress on the fact, with no little vanity, that he had “accomplished the feat of doing without a single monologue, in fact without a single aside.” A bit later he begn developing the stage direction; go through his plays and observe how he gradually increased its importance, until in the end it almost overshadowed the dialogue. And if you would get, in brief, the full measure of his contribution to the art of the drama, give hard study to “A Doll’s House.” Here, for the first time, his new technique was in full working. Here he deposed Scribe and company at one blow, and founded an entirely new order of dramaturgy. Other dramatists, long before him, had concocted dramas of ideas—and good ones. The idea in Augier’s “Le Mariage d’Olympe” was quite as sound and interesting as that in “A Doll’s House”; the idea in Augier’s “Les Effrontés” perhaps exceeded it in both ways. But Ibsen got into “A Doll’s House” something that Augier and Feuillet and Dumas fils and all that crowd of Empire dramatists had never been able to get into their plays, and that was an air of utter and absolute reality, an overwhelming conviction, a complete concealment of the dramatic machinery.