With acute psychologic insight, Shaw draws the distinction between two classes of illusions: those which flatter and those which are indispensable. By flattering illusions he understands those which encourage us to make efforts to attain things which we do not know how to appreciate in their simple reality; either they reconcile us to our lot, or else to actions we are obliged to take contrary to the dictates of conscience. These are, indeed, deplorable consequences in the eyes of the humanitarian meliorist who believes that to be reconciled to one's lot is the worst fate that can befall mankind, and who once said that the one real tragedy in life is the being used by personally-minded men for purposes which you yourself recognize to be base.

The métier of Bernard Shaw is the destruction, not of the indispensable illusions which support the social structure and ultimately make for the uplift of humanity, but of those treacherously flattering illusions which ensnare men in the toils of an existence for which they have not the requisite passion, courage, faith, endurance and self-restraint. “In my plays,” Shaw wrote in the Vienna Zeit, “you will not be teased and plagued with happiness, goodness and virtue, or with crime and romance, or, indeed, with any senseless thing of that sort. My plays have only one subject: life; and only one attribute: interest in life.”[220] It is a mistake of the German dramatic critic, Heinrich Stümcke, to aver that the quintessence of Shaw is nil admirari. It would be far nearer the truth to say that he wonders at everything in this demented, moon-struck world. The law of contrasts is the motif of his art. He is never so brilliant as in the portrayal of opposites.

With the transcendent egotism of the genius, he unhesitatingly claims to see more clearly than humanity at large, to have ever fought illusion, denied the ideal, and scorned to call things by other than their real names.[221] Thus we see him always in search of what Walter Pater was fond of calling la vraie vérité, challenging the old formulas with the new ideas, transvaluing moral values with Nietzschean fervour, and bidding humanity stand from behind its artificial barriers of custom, law, religion and morality, and dare to speak and live the truth. In his capacity of realistic critic of contemporary civilization, he is neither surprised nor confounded to encounter scepticism on all hands. Indeed, he is wise enough to expect it, since he has observed that, when reality at last presents itself to men nourished on dramatic illusions, they have lost the power to recognize it.

Bernard Shaw, as Alfred Kerr has put it, is a distinct ethical gain for our generation. His prime characteristic as a propagandist—and his deficiency as a dramatist—is found in his assertion that the quintessential function of comedy is the destruction of old-established morals. Hence it is that his plays are conceived in a militant spirit—in the Molièresque key of Les Précieuses Ridicules, or the Ibsenic key of An Enemy of the People. His drama may roughly be defined as the conflict of the Shavian Ausschauung with conventional dogma. Like Brieux, he has ingeniously employed the drama as a means of giving lectures. He frankly confesses that his object is to make people uncomfortable, to make them thoroughly ashamed of themselves. “Molière and I are much alike,” he once remarked to me; “we both attack pedantry.”[222] Shaw does not wish to drain the drama of all feeling; he merely wishes to make feeling subsidiary to logic. He regards the portrayal of emotion, not as an end in itself, but as an incentive to thought. “You cannot witness A Doll's House without feeling,” he once said, “and, as an inevitable consequence, thinking.” He wishes to set up, in the minds of his audience, a train of reflections and meditations which may alter their own lives, which may influence the whole world. For, as Emerson says, “To think is to act.” Shaw's object is to create a true drama of ideas, having for its normal material “problem, with its remorseless logic and iron framework of fact.” He would have intellect predominate over sentiment; will engineered by idea, and not unreasoning passion, the controlling factor. Bernard Shaw is frequently charged with being devoid of feeling. Shaw is less influenced by or concerned with mere personal feeling than anyone I have ever known; but his whole being is vibrant with passion for the welfare of society. If social pity is the underlying motive of the later Russian novelists, social indignation seems to be the guiding principle of Bernard Shaw. To him, social thought has become a genuine passion.

The quintessence of the Shavian drama is the Shavian philosophy. Shaw's theatre may be defined as an effort to depict naked instincts upon the stage; this is the meaning of his “scientific natural history.” He has sought to project instinctive temperaments, alive and potent, before our very eyes. The inspiring words of Zola at the funeral of Edmond de Goncourt might well have served as the motto for his principal figures: “Ah! to have intellectual courage! To tell the truth and the whole truth, even if it cost one peace and friends; never to consider any convention, to go to the end of one's thought, careless of consequence. Nothing is rarer, nothing is finer, nothing is grander.” Unhampered by such scrupulousness as that of Mark Twain, who declared that it was immodest to tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies, Shaw's leading characters are ever in quest of truth and freedom. They seek truth in unflinching recognition of facts, freedom in emancipation from slavery to the false idealism of romantic convention. They are libertines, in the original and not the perverted sense of the word, with judgment unbiased by traditional influence or contemporary prejudice. They are natural, not so much in the sense of being perfect replicas of contemporary men and women—for they are often little more than personified aspects of Shavianism—as in the sense of being in a state of nature in regard to whim, eccentricity, fancy, impulse, passion. There is a sort of complex and advanced juvenility about Shaw's characters; they are the enfants gâtés of modern drama. In them are concretely delineated the outlines of the Shavian philosophy: “Duty is the thing one should never do,” “Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it,” “Sentimentality is the error of supposing that quarter can be given or taken in moral conflicts.” The difference between moral and right, for these Shavians, is the difference between doing what you ought to do and what you want to do. Shakespeare's “To thine own self be true” is insufficient; the modern sociologist knows that it is imperative to realize, not only what you are, but where you are. After studying the possibilities, not the restrictions, of their environment, the Shavian characters go straight ahead and do what they choose. Shaw outranks Ibsen himself in the individualistic injunction “Live your own life.”

In his own admirable way, Shaw has given us a succinct exposition of his conception of the Shavian drama. Asked if he wrote plays to make fun of people, Shaw replied, more in sorrow than in anger:

The supreme difficulty in any criticism of Bernard Shaw as dramatist is to draw the many fine distinctions between his critical expositions of his dramatic system and the actual qualities of the dramas themselves. It is primarily incumbent upon the interpreter of Shaw to indicate with sufficient clearness the discrepancy between theory and practice, between purpose and performance. No objection need be raised to Shaw's definitions. “Drama is no mere setting up of the camera to Nature,” he says: “it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man's will and his environment: in a word, of problem.” But what is one to make of Sir Charles Wyndham's assertion that Shaw's dramatic works are wonderful intellectual studies, but not plays? The dramas are undoubtedly manufactured after the usual pattern, with divisions called acts; figures like people walk back and forth and engage each other in conversation; the mechanical illusion is complete. What is it, then, that gives an air of unreality to all this mimic show?

Bernard Shaw possesses in rich measure the genius of the stage-director, the pliability and suppleness of the critic of modern civilization. The effects he produces, quite often, are tremendous. But capitally and congenitally, Shaw is lacking in that quality ordinarily recognized as natural dramatic genius. In his plays we look almost in vain for those crucial emotional conjunctures, those climacteric soul-crises, which dramatic critics announce to be the criteria of authentic drama—the scène à faire of a Sarcey. Just as Oscar Wilde may be said to have invented the comedy of conversation, so Bernard Shaw may be said to have invented the drama of discussion. The tendency to prolixity and discursiveness has steadily grown upon him; at last he has thrown off all disguise and deliberately set to work to create a dramatic system based on dialectic. Two noteworthy features of his career are his attacks upon conventional cant and Shakespearean rhetoric. And all the time, he has been creating, for his own part, both a Shavian cant and a Shavian rhetoric. “I find that the surest way to startle the world with daring innovations and originalities,” he recently said, “is to do exactly what playwrights have been doing for thousands of years; to revive the ancient attraction of long rhetorical speeches; to stick closely to the methods of Molière; and to lift characters bodily out of the pages of Charles Dickens.” The defining characteristic of his plays is their argumentative and controversial character. They are expository lectures, in dramatic form, on the Shavian philosophy. Mr. Archer once said that Shaw's keen and subtle intellect has built for itself a world of its own, in which it sits apart, inaccessible; this world is not the real earth, but

“Composed just as he is inclined to conjecture her,
Namely, one part pure earth, ninety-nine parts pure lecturer.”

Instead of the indispensable conflict of wills, we often seem to have merely a war of wits, in which the cleverest dialectician wins. Aristophanes and Shaw have certainly one point in common: the plays of both are dramatized debates. Instead of touching each other's emotions, Shaw's characters often seem merely to arouse each other's combative interest. Just as Victor Hugo gives a passion apiece to each of his characters and lets them fight it out, so Shaw gives a philosophy apiece to each of his characters and lets them argue it out. His comedies exhibit with tremendous comic irony the exposure of non-Shavians by Shavians. One day Huxley in jest described Herbert Spencer's idea of a tragedy as “a deduction killed by a fact.” In a moderate, a partial, sense, this might serve as a just criticism of the theatre of Bernard Shaw.

There is a certain fanciful sort of resemblance between a play of Shaw's and a meeting of his own Borough Council: the meeting is called to order, there is argument and discussion pro and con, a resolution is moved, seconded, carried. Shaw is positively judicial in his fairness, even to the extent of creating the impression that his characters are vocalized points of view. With consummate shrewdness, Shaw has fully realized that if the dramatist take sides in a dramatic wrangle, he is lost. A sense of the most absolute fairness and impartiality pervades and dominates his plays. Every character has his say without let or hindrance; and the whole play is signalized by the “honesty of its dialectic.” Shaw does not disclaim the fullest responsibility for the opinions of all his characters, pleasant and unpleasant. “They are all right from their several points of view; and their points of view are, for the dramatic moment, mine also. This may puzzle the people who believe that there is such a thing as an absolutely right point of view, usually their own. It may seem to them that nobody who doubts this can be in a state of grace. However that may be, it is certainly true that nobody who argues with them can possibly be a dramatist, or, indeed, anything else that turns upon a knowledge of mankind. Hence it has been pointed out that Shakespeare had no conscience. Neither have I, in that sense.”[224]

This quality of anxious self-explanation in his characters, this “Let me make clear to you my philosophy of life,” produces upon the reader and spectator two distinct impressions: first an “overwhelming impression of coldness and inhuman rationalism”; and, second, the impression that the characters are replicas or mouthpieces of Shaw himself. The resemblance is still further enhanced through the instrumentality of one of Shaw's most diverting traits as a humorist: his idiosyncrasy for self-mockery and self-puffery. There is nothing, not even himself, about which Shaw will not jest; for, to use an Oscarism, he respects life too deeply to discuss it seriously. He is a master of that art of burlesque which, in Brunetière's harsh characterization, consists “in the expansion of the ego in the joyous satisfaction of its own vulgarity.” One of the truest words, spoken in jest, is Shaw's confession that the main obstacle to the performance of his plays has been—himself!

In contradistinction to the classic formula—that the drama should be the most impersonal of the arts—Shaw's drama may be defined as a revelation of the personality of Bernard Shaw. “We must agree with him,” concludes M. Filon, “and accept—or reject—the dramatic work of Mr. Shaw as it is, namely, as the expression of the ideas, sentiments and fantasies of Mr. Shaw.”[225]

In fine, I should say that Bernard Shaw is a striking instance of the unusual combination of critical and creative faculties. Sometimes the dramatist, he is always the critic. While Shaw can make one laugh, it is seldom that he can make one weep. He unites within himself the power both to construct and to dissect. With Shaw—the Richter und Dichter of German characterization—rationality precedes creation. His richly constructive fancy seldom imagines what his cooler reason has not already perceived. In his plays, there is scarcely a hint of what he himself somewhere described as “the stirring of the blood, the bristling of the fibres, the transcendent, fearless fury which makes romance so delightful.” Shaw is always perfectly aware of himself; Coventry Patmore would have denied him the title of true genius. As someone has cleverly said: “Shaw's eye has never yet in a fine frenzy rolled.” If he had ever listened to the horns of elfland faintly blowing, he would doubtless have said afterwards that Kosleck of Berlin could have done it better. If he had ever heard the morning stars sing together and the sons of God shout for joy, the experience would probably have elicited the coolly critical remark that the ensemble effect was not as good as at Bayreuth, and that the shouting was not as ear-splitting as the “wilful bawling” of the De Reszkes.

This coolly critical attitude, which Shaw manages to transfer to his characters, gives them the appearance of beings peculiarly rationalistic and bloodless. In their veins, as Mr. Archer once said of the leading characters in Widowers' Houses, there seems to flow a sort of sour whey. Shaw has almost succeeded in eliminating the Red Corpuscle from Art.

His characters seem to be devoid of animal passions; their pallid ratiocinations can more aptly be described as vegetable passions.