George Bernard Shaw, his life and works

The drama is the casual, not the inevitable, vehicle for the exposition of Bernard Shaw's theories of conduct. This dramatist of “genuine vocation,” as he once denominated himself, was literally “called” to the post of dramatist for the New Movement. He was a “pressed” man, a conscript in the service of the theatre. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Shaw entered the ranks and took up arms against a sea of twaddle, not initially impelled by the inner, imperious necessity for creative expression, but fired with the desire to prove that he could write plays. According to his own statement, he proceeded to manufacture the evidence. At one time or another throughout his varied career he has employed almost every conceivable medium—novelistic, journalistic, critical, artistic, propagandist—for the communication of his unique and peculiar views. For the last eighteen years the drama has afforded him the most popular instrument for the wide diffusion of his brilliance. The drama has never been the supreme interest of his career; nor, indeed, as he recently told me, has it played any very absorbing part in his life until within the last nine or ten years. The American “discovery” of Shaw as a “new” dramatist amused him immensely, even awoke in him a sense of slight disappointment. He had rather hoped that he would not be “found out” until some years after his death! At last he saw that he must reconcile himself to the inevitable and make the best of the matter, since it could not be helped! “To me,” he said in a letter to me, after the Candida furore in New York, “all the fuss about Candida is only a remote ripple from the splashes I made in the days of my warfare long ago.”

Whether or not the drama has played a very absorbing part in Shaw's own life, it is certain that this is the field in which he has been most strikingly successful in making a world-wide reputation. Until Candida created such a stir in New York, he was regarded in America as a phenomenally clever dilettante in novelism, in art, music, and dramatic criticism; in fact, as anything but a dramatist. He was all but unheard of on the Continent until his plays gained admittance to the broadly catholic repertory of the German Theatre.[210] To-day Georg Brandes writes of him, not as a critic, a novelist, or a Socialist, but as the leader of the most modern, most advanced drama in England. Julius Bab pronounces Shaw the greatest spiritual phenomenon since Nietzsche, the greatest literary success since Ibsen. The time has come for a serious consideration of the question whether he is a good dramatist, a bad dramatist, or, in fact, whether, in the last analysis, he is a dramatist at all. Remarkable as it may appear, it is the last question upon which some of the acutest dramatic critics are divided. Moreover, it remains vivid that Shaw has made some distinct and original contributions to dramatic theory and practice. If Shaw were to paint a portrait or model a piece of sculpture, there is no doubt that he would produce a work presenting evidence of a keen and searching intelligence. Upon the drama, from the questions of prefaces, stage-directions, and technique down to that of punctuation, Shaw has left the marks of an adroit and sagacious ratiocinative faculty.

In his search for a field other than fiction and criticism for the free play of his “abnormally normal vision,” Shaw's eye fell upon the stage. He recognized that the existing popular drama of the day is “quite out of the question for cultivated people who are accustomed to use their brains.” Looking about him, he soon perceived that under present conditions the modern theatre creates the drama, despite the fact that the reverse is the ideal state of affairs. No one more than the idealistic Shaw deplores the present vogue of the musical comedy, the problem play which substitutes sensuous ecstasy for intellectual validity, and the well-made piece in which the plot is hatched by the stage-setting. To him, as to another, modern dramas may be classified under a few heads: neurotic, erotic, Pinerotic, and tommyrotic. The whole difficulty has arisen through the drama of the day being written “for the theatre instead of from its own inner necessity.” The only way to reform the theatre was by constructive effort. Realizing that reformation and regeneration could come only from within, and more especially from the man of abnormally normal vision, George Bernard Shaw—he set to work to effect the needed reforms.

Piquancy was imparted to the situation by the fact that Shaw was one of those restless modern spirits who are out of patience with the existing status, not only in the drama, but in the world at large. By his own confession, he ran counter to all conventional standards.[211] An Irishman by birth, an Englishman by adoption, he pretended to patriotism neither for the land of his nativity nor for the country to which it owed its ruin. A humanitarian, he detested warfare of any kind; a vegetarian, he abhorred the slaughter of animals, in sport or in the butcher's yard. An enthusiastic Ibsenist, he paralleled the Master in having no respect for popular morality, no admiration for popular heroics, no belief in popular religion. An art critic, he had no taste for popular art; a Socialist, profoundly imbued with an enthusiasm for social truth as an instrument of social reform, he was out of patience with the lagging snail-pace at which the world moved. The times were out of joint; but, unlike Hamlet, as Mr. Norman Hapgood suggests, he deemed it no cursed spite that he was born to set them right.

It is not to be wondered at that the acutely individualized

Shaw should feel the necessity of outlining his unusual, almost unparalleled frame of mind. As a public speaker, his aim had always been, not to awake the primitive feelings of the mob, but to make each individual in his audience think new thoughts: elucidation, not oratory, was the keynote of his public speeches. As a critic he had sought to speak out his whole thought without disguise: he dallied with no professional phraseology. He addressed the man who knew nothing of technique; accordingly, he wrote in the vernacular of every day. Clarity, lucidity and wit were the standards at which he aimed. In like manner, his sincere effort toward the constructive achievement of the “New Drama” necessitated the most elaborate elucidation of his views, aims and methods. As Mr. Walkley has pointed out, Bernard Shaw is nothing if not explanatory. By prefaces, appendices and epilogues, he endeavours to raise the intellectual standard of public opinion, which to him represents the will of the ignorant majority as opposed to that of the discerning few. It is matter for no surprise that such a strange phenomenon as Shaw should have led the critics astray. Few men in their lifetime have been so fundamentally misunderstood, so farcically misrepresented: Beyle, Shelley, Wilde, naturally come to mind. Shaw resolved to fight against misrepresentation with the many effective weapons, the use of which, from long and arduous practice, he had so well learned. The haughty aloofness of an Ibsen with his “Quod scripsi, scripsi,” the unconscious self-forgetfulness of a Browning in the oft-recorded anecdote of “me und Gott,” the lofty injunction of a Goethe “Bilde, Kunstler, rede nicht,” weighed with him not at all. The man who had first caught the ear of the British public on a cart in Hyde Park, to the blaring of brass bands, was not the man soon to forget his lesson. Shaw has never discarded the trumpet and the cart-wheel declamation. This is not merely the device to attract attention for the moment, but to win a hearing long enough to awaken thought upon the views he so adroitly and wittily expounds. He writes prefaces and appendices because he believes that an author should not merely allow his works to speak for themselves, but should present their claims to intelligent consideration with his utmost literary skill. Shaw avers that, like Dryden, he writes prefaces because he can. The crass ignorance, the unspeakable fatuity of his critics have driven him to it. Shaw writes prefaces not only because he can: he writes them because he must.

The rare and ancient custom of preface-writing is now almost a lost art. Shaw is virtually the only modern dramatist who writes expository and critical prefaces. His prefaces are little masterpieces of essay-writing. After The Quintessence of Ibsenism, they measure the high-water mark of Shaw's supreme talent as a polemist, a dialectician, a gorgeous and extravagant paradoxer. “In finely polyglot style” j'en chortle, as chortled Stevenson over the admirable Bashville. Inimitable, incomparable are these prefaces, vitally animate with the fantastic humours of the prankish Max, the solemn absurdities of Mark Twain, the mordant irony of Henry Becque. Shaw turns a paradox as dexterously as Chesterton, bubbles with self-persiflage as delightfully as Whistler, mocks the stolid British Philistine with an exasperating acuity for which we have to go to Heine to find a parallel. William Archer has said that one of the prefaces of Dumas fils might have been the product of collaboration between Isaiah, Tolstoy and Bernard Shaw. Any of the prefaces of Bernard Shaw might have been the product of a collaboration between Dumas fils, Friedrich Nietzsche, and that great American showman, P. T. Barnum.

Shaw's incorrigible practice of writing prefaces is the perfectly logical outcome of his point of view. The direct corollary of this practice is Shaw's distinctly original contribution to the technology of modern realistic drama in the matter of ample elucidative and descriptive stage directions. For reasons similar to those that actuated Gerhart Hauptmann to draw plans and write pages of stage directions to compel a clear visualization of the scenes of his early social drama, Vor Sonnenaufgang, Shaw describes in lucid and illuminating stage directions of considerable length the traits, qualities and characteristics of the people and places that play determining parts in his dramas. From the standpoint of the dramatic critic, he long ago recognized the bankruptcy of the old school of acting. Its technique was wholly inadequate for the interpretation of the plays of Ibsen and the modern school of realistic dramatists. A new fingering of the dramatic keyboard was demanded. The sophistication of the actor's consciousness by romance could be obviated only by the most cunning portraiture of each character. To aid the actor in every possible way to realize unusual states of mind and apparently aberrant views of ethical conceptions, Shaw drew the most tersely descriptive character sketches of the sort of person he meant the actor to incarnate. These little thumb-nail sketches are marvels of character-drawing in miniature. The German Shaw, Hermann Bahr, has paralleled, if not followed, Shaw in describing each personage, as he appears, with photographic minuteness, but with nothing like the piquancy and originality of his predecessor. Shaw has always fulminated against the romancer's habit of announcing his hero as a man of extraordinary genius, and yet totally failing to reinforce this announcement in his subsequent speech and action. Shaw complains even of Ibsen that he has left entirely too much to the reader's and the actor's imagination and insight. Is Borkman a real Napoleon of Finance or only an hallucinated impostor? What reason have we to believe, barring the author's statement, that Lövborg was actually a creative genius, that Allmers was in the least degree capable of a masterwork on Human Responsibility, or that Solness was an architect of exceptional original power? When interrogated as to his meaning, for example, Ibsen haughtily replies: “What I have said, I have said.” But, as Shaw pertinently indicates, what he hasn't said, he hasn't said. Whether uniformly successful or not, Shaw, as practical playwright, has made a definite contribution to modern realistic drama by conscientiously seeking to remedy in his own plays the defect he has discovered in Ibsen, the consummate craftsman of the age. Shaw's descriptions, not only of the characters, but of the scenes in which these characters are set, are little essays in social criticism. The description of the dentist's operating-room in You Never Can Tell, or of Ramsden's study in Man and Superman, is at once the epitome and the indictment of an entire social era, of a phase of ethical or industrial evolution. It intrigues the fancy, as Whistler used to say, to make the ludicrous, if futile, inquiry whether the fate of heroes, the destiny of humanity, depend upon the upholstery of the chairs, the ornaments upon the mantel-shelf, or the pattern of the wall-paper!

Among contemporary dramatists, Bernard Shaw is an exponent of that modern movement of which, as Mr. Chesterton has recently reminded us, Robert Browning, among modern poets, was the fount and origin—the school whose chief characteristic is the apotheosis of the insignificant. Like Browning, Shaw has “ceased to believe certain things to be important and the rest to be unimportant.” He has resolved to distil the quintessence of the unessential. By the cultivation of subjective intensity, Maurice Maeterlinck has opened our eyes to the miracle of the commonplace, the treasure of the humble. By examining the neglected, George Gissing has revealed the importance of the trivial. With an imaginative insight that subsequently finds verification in real life, Henrik Ibsen depicts a soul's tragedy in a married woman's loss of her dolls. In conformity with the realistic logic of his race, Paul Hervieu traces the finger of fate in the colour of a woman's bonnet. Realizing those queer mental experiences that the ordinary observer would not see or could not describe, George Meredith illumines the obscurity of fugitive and subconscious sensations. Bernard Shaw arraigns a social era in his description of a parlour because he has learnt the supreme importance of detail, the mystery and immensity of little things.

Shaw was driven to the expedients of preface and exhaustive stage-direction not alone by the false critical interpretations of his plays, by the actor's failure to divine the rationale of his characters, and by the evolutionary trend of modern realistic art. He also felt the necessity of falling back upon his own literary expertness in order to restore the English drama to anything like its former level of estimation in English literature. In that barren period of dramatic unproductivity, approximately speaking, from 1835 to 1885, the habit of reading plays, which had obtained in England from the time of Shakespeare to that of Sheridan Knowles, fell into “innocuous desuetude.” Against the notion that plays are essentially unreadable, a legacy of that period of England's abject servitude to France in the realm of the drama, Shaw has justly and finely protested as an author, as a dramatic critic, as a dramatist. With Fontenelle and the younger Dumas, he was united in the belief that “the spectator can give only success, it is the reader who confers renown.” He has employed his powers of literary expression in all their vigour and vitality to make his plays, as published and readable artistic productions, worthy of competition with such elaborate fiction as that of Bourget, James, or D'Annunzio. Shaw's discouraging experience in the effort to have his own plays published brought the subject forcibly to his attention. As late as 1896, every publisher who was approached with a view to publishing a play, Shaw asserts, at once said: “No use: people won't read plays in England.”

Shaw rightly lays the blame for the passing of the printed play as a marketable commodity at the doors, not of the publisher, but of the playwright, on account of the absurd jargon in which stage directions are customarily couched. There is a sign-language, a scenic chirography pertaining peculiarly to the stage; it is essential, as Mr. Brander Matthews recently said, that the playwright who wishes his play to be generally read “should translate it out of the special dialect of the stage folk into the language of the people.” And a number of years ago Shaw wrote: “I suggest that it is the fault of the playwrights who deliberately make their plays unreadable by flinging repulsive stage technicalities in the face of the public, and omitting from their descriptions even that simplest common decency of literature, the definite article? I wonder how many readers Charles Dickens would have had, or deserved to have, if he had written in this manner:

In this sort of thing, “literary people trying their hand at the drama for the first time revel as ludicrously as amateur actors revel in flagrant false hair, misfitting tunics and tin spears.” The abuse, as Mr. William Archer has pointed out, arose at the time when the drama ceased to be regarded as literature. Plays designed for “intending performers,” amateur and professional, were often printed from the actual prompt-books used in the theatre. Even when this was not the case, they were closely modelled after the prompt-books.

Shakespeare and Ibsen, to mention two obvious examples, suffer from this very deficiency. “What would we not give,” asks Shaw, “for the copy of Hamlet used by Shakespeare at rehearsal, with the original 'business' scrawled by the prompter's pencil?... It is for want of this (realistic) process of elaboration that Shakespeare, unsurpassed as poet, story-teller, character draughtsman, humorist and rhetorician, has left us no intellectually coherent drama, and could not afford to pursue a genuinely scientific method in his studies of character and society....” The literary product of two years of Ibsen's life, exhibiting exhaustive knowledge not only of the character of the individuals represented, but also of their personal history and antecedents, reads to the actor-manager, Shaw declares, exactly like a specification for a gas-fitter! It is an “insult” to an exceptionally susceptible, imaginative, fastidious person like Shaw. Frankly speaking, Ibsen in this respect occupies a position intermediate between Pinero, with his dry enumeration, and Shaw, with his breezy loquacity. Shaw swings to the furthest extreme, making his stage-directions piquant and facetious essays for the edification of the reader—discursive, argumentative, polemical, historical, psychological, or social essays, varying in length from two lines to five pages. With characteristic adroitness, Shaw has defended one of his own stage-directions which has been rebuked as a silly joke. “It runs thus: 'So-and-So's complexion fades into stone-gray, and all movement and expression desert his eyes.' This is the sort of stage-direction an actor really wants. Of course, he can no more actually change his complexion to stone-gray than Mr. Forbes Robertson can actually die after saying, 'The rest is silence.' But he can produce the impression suggested by the direction perfectly. How he produces it is his business, not mine. This distinction is important, because, if I wrote such a stage-direction as 'turns his back to the audience and furtively dabs vaseline on his eyelashes,' instead of 'his eyes glisten with tears,' I should be guilty of an outrage on both actor and reader. Yet we find almost all our inexperienced dramatic authors taking the greatest pains to commit just such outrages.”

The issue, however, is not to be confused by any such defence, however adroit. In fact, in this particular instance Shaw makes a valid defence of a stage-direction with which no fault can be found save that of literary over-accentuation. Shaw has followed one safe rule in his stage-directions: “Write nothing in a play that you would not write in a novel”; but the converse: “Write everything in a play that you would in a novel,” would be fatal. The great fictionist does not write: “A keen pang shot through the mother's heart; for she saw at a glance that her child had not many more chapters to live.” Similarly the dramatic author should not tell the public that “part of the stage is removed to represent the entrance to a cellar.” Shaw is perfectly correct in saying that “a dramatist's business is to make the reader forget the stage and the actor forget the audience, not to remind them of both at every turn, like an incompetent 'extra gentleman' who turns the wrong side of his banner towards the footlights.” But Shaw's practice of obtruding the refractory lens of his own temperament between the reader and the characters of the drama is open to very serious objection. The prime incident in the history of the production of Candida in both New York and Vienna was the animated discussion over the concluding sentence, which Georg Brandes regarded as wholly superfluous: “James and Candida embrace. But they do not know the secret in the poet's heart.” Shaw was so much amused by the futile guesses of the Candida-maniacs that he wrote to Mr. James Huneker a Shavian exposé of the “secret in the poet's heart.” A spurious interest was thus tacked on to the play on account of Shaw's proposition of a riddle of which he alone claimed knowledge of the solution. Again, Shaw goes to the length of explaining dubious and laconic remarks of his characters, thus totally destroying the realistic illusion that this conversation is actually taking place. The following illustration from The Devil's Disciple seems to be a sort of first aid to the actor: “Judith smiles, implying 'How stupid of me!' ...” At one point in the trial of Dick Dudgeon, Burgoyne remarks: “By the way, since you are not Mr. Anderson, do we still——eh, Major Swindon?” [Meaning “do we still hang him?”] When the party breaks up at the close of the first act of the same play, Shaw pauses to give us the following historical and social reminder: “Mrs. Dudgeon, now an intruder in her own home, stands erect, crushed by the weight of the law on women.... For at this time, remember, Mary Wollstonecraft is as yet only a girl of eighteen, and her Vindication of the Rights of Women is still fourteen years off.” The vital defect of Shaw's method is epitomized in that single word “remember.” He might just as well write “Gentle Reader” and be done with it. And yet Shaw is not alone in this defect; Bahr not infrequently strikes the personal note, and some of D'Annunzio's stage directions are little poems in themselves—delightful, but not strictly artistic. Shaw has done genuine service to the modern English drama by his conscientious effort to make his plays readable, to write not mere drama, but genuine literature. Through his long training as dramatic critic, he learned to effect the complete visualization of the painted sets of the stage, thus preserving intact, in that respect, the illusion of reality. He has replaced the old stocks and stones of French's Acting Edition by personal and scenic descriptions, imaginatively, vividly, humorously—in a word, artistically—rendered. But he has not avoided the intrusion of the personality of the dramatist; he has imported into the English drama that pleasant vice of English fiction: imperfect objectivity. Mr. Archer states the plain common-sense of the matter when he says that stage-directions should be clear, adequate, and helpful, but that they should always be impersonal.[212] With all Shaw's praiseworthy efforts to create the realistic illusion of life by making us forget that his characters are only fictions of the stage, he occasionally destroys that illusion by making us remember that they are only the puppets of Bernard Shaw.

However original and iconoclastic Shaw may be in respect to interpretative prefaces and artistically cast stage-directions, in the matter of dramatic construction and technique he has been notably rigorous, rather than careless, in his attempt at realistic representation. In minor matters of punctuation, it is true, he has freely gratified his own preferences and likings—using spaced letters for emphasis, omitting commas and apostrophes whenever no doubt as to the sense is involved, avoiding quotation marks for titles and, indeed, in Biblical fashion, dispensing with punctuation on every possible occasion. All these things are merely matters of taste. But the conventional technique of the drama, the customs, tricks and devices of stage-craft, he ordinarily accepts without question. In Widowers' Houses in its first form, he made the explicit division into scenes; since that time, he has made each of his plays, as far as scenes go, a continuous whole, unbroken save only by division into acts, and by a succession of asterisks where a lapse of time is to be understood. In this respect, he has carefully preserved his rule of writing down nothing that might remind the reader of an actual stage or a theatric representation.[213]

The incidents, plot, construction and technical details of drama Bernard Shaw manipulates for his own purposes, giving them novelty, piquancy, and charm by the essentially modern use he makes of them. As for indebtedness to Ibsen for his technique, he vigorously scorns the idea. “It is quite the customary thing to say, nowadays,” Mr. Shaw once remarked to me, “that Ibsen revolutionized the technique of English drama. I cannot, for the life of me, find the least evidence of such a thing. The objective side of Ibsen's technique is a part of the common stock of modern dramatic realism. The symbolic side of Ibsen's technique is incommunicable—peculiar to Ibsen alone. The technique of such a play as John Gabriel Borkman, for example, is inextricably bound up with the dramatic genius which devised it.” Shaw asserts that his own plays have all the latest mechanical improvements. In his plays there are no “asides,” no impossible soliloquies, no long-winded recitals in the second act of what has taken place in the first, no senseless multiplication of doors and windows, no incessant stream of letters and telegrams. Shaw revolted against many of the technical practices of Ibsen. “Go back to Lady Inger,” he recently wrote, “and you will be tempted to believe that Ibsen was deliberately burlesquing the absurdities of Richardson's booth; for the action is carried on mostly in impossible asides.” And he said to me, in discussing the use of the soliloquy, “I do not in the least object to the soliloquy provided it does not exceed the time-limit a rational man might be supposed to observe in talking aloud. But if there is anything that drives me wild, it is to hear Brown come down to the footlights, and begin: 'I wonder where Jones can be! He promised to meet me here at half-past four. Can it be possible that he is still suffering from remorse for the murder of his father-in-law? etc., etc.' Deliver me from the soliloquy used solely as a first aid to ignorant audiences.” In his Saturday Review period, Shaw insisted that, “What most of our critics mean by mastery of stage-craft is recklessness in the substitution of dead machinery and lay figures for vital action and real characters.” And in his notable essay on Ibsen, in 1906, he clearly sets forth his dramatic ideal.