Upon the mind of any unprejudiced person, I think, The Philanderer creates the impression that Shaw's attitude toward women in this play must have been induced by unpleasant personal relations with women prior to the time at which the play was written. Many people paid him the insult of recognizing him in Charteris; and I have even been told that Shaw was temperamentally not dissimilar to Charteris, at that particular period. The play is marked by unnaturalness and immaturity at every turn; but several scenes exhibit great nervous strength. Mr. Robert Loraine once remarked to me that, in his opinion, the first act of The Philanderer was unparalleled in its verisimilitude, always making him realize the truth of Ibsen's dictum that the modern stage must be regarded as a room of which one wall has been removed. Mr. Loraine's impression is fully justified by the fact that the scene is a more or less accurate replica of a scene in Mr. Shaw's own life.

As a play, The Philanderer is crude and amateurish, revolving upon the pivot of Charteris's satire, and presenting various features in turn—now extravaganza, now broad farce, now comedy, now tragi-comedy. With all its brilliant mental vivisection, the conversation of Charteris is never natural, but supra-natural; the utterly gross and caddish indecency of his exposures would never be tolerated for an instant in polite or even respectable society. And yet Mr. Shaw once vehemently assured me: “Charteris is not passionless, not unscrupulous, and a sincere, not a pseudo, Ibsenist”! Cuthbertson is a caricature of Clement Scott; and, in virtually the same words used by Scott in his attacks upon Ibsen, Cuthbertson avows that the whole modern movement is abhorrent to him “because his life had been passed in witnessing scenes of suffering nobly endured and sacrifice willingly rendered by womanly women and manly men.” The mannerisms of Craven, “Now really” in especial, are taken directly, Mr. Shaw once told me, from Mr. H. M. Hyndman, the English Socialist leader. Dr. Paramore is the puppet of broad farce, immune to all humane concern through inoculation with the deadly germ of scientific research; while Sylvia is merely the pert little soubrette. The inverted Gilbertism of Colonel Craven's: “Do you mean to say that I am expected to treat my daughter the same as I would any other girl? Well, dash me if I will!” faintly strikes the note of Falsacappa, the brigand chief, in Meilhac and Halévy's The Brigands: “Marry my daughter to an honest man! Never!”—a phrase with which Mr. W. S. Gilbert afterwards did such execution in The Pirates of Penzance.

When The Philanderer was published in 1898, the public was puzzled and astounded to read an “attack” on Ibsen by Ibsen's most valiant champion in England! So shocked was Mr. Archer by this “outrage upon art and decency” that he wanted to “cut” his colleague and friend in the street. The Philanderer thus laid the foundation of Shaw's reputation as a cynic and a paradoxer. It is chiefly interesting to-day as a foreshadowing and promise of the lines of development of the later dramatist. Superficially, this play mirrors the glaring, even tragic contrast between faddist idealization of Ibsen, and sincere realization of Ibsenism. But, in the light of subsequent events, the play rather teaches that Charteris as male flirt is the model for the sketchy Valentine, that Julia is the Ann Whitefield of a more natural and less self-conscious phase. Throughout the play we are reminded of the brutal laughter of Wedekind, the sardonic humour of Becque, and, in places, even of the dark levity of Ibsen himself. The portrayal of Julia is remarkable, in spite of the damaging error of representing her as fit subject for the police court—mentally arrested in development, victim of violent “brain-storms,” unscrupulous, treacherous, deceitful, feline. And yet, by some marvellous trick of subtle art, the author has caused this creature to win our profound sympathy in the end. After all, her love for Charteris is genuine and sincere; and the scene between Grace and Julia, after the latter has accepted Dr. Paramore, is profoundly touching:

The human drama of this play, merely sketched though it be, is the conflict in Julia's soul between her violent passion for Charteris and her true impulse toward self-respect. The quintessence of her tragedy is expressed in her last tilt with Charteris. He walks up to congratulate her, proffering his hand.

Shaw's next play, Mrs. Warren's Profession, completed his first cycle of economic studies in dramatic form; and at one stroke demonstrated Shaw to be a dramatist of marked powers and ability. Shaw's account of the genesis of this play is an important link in its history. In regard to the title, Shaw says: “The tremendously effective scene—which a baby could write if its sight were normal—in which she (Mrs. Warren) justifies herself, is only a paraphrase of a scene in a novel of my own, 'Cashel Byron's Profession' (hence the title, Mrs. Warren's Profession), in which a prize-fighter shows how he was driven into the ring exactly as Mrs. Warren was driven on the streets.” Shaw met the charge of indebtedness to Ibsen and De Maupassant with the statement that, if a dramatist living in the world of multifarious interests, duties and experiences in which he lived has to go to books for his ideas and his inspiration, he must be both blind and deaf. “Most dramatists are,” he laconically added. So Mrs. Warren's Profession came about in this way:

Of course, one blacksmith cannot possibly know what another blacksmith in the next county is doing. But Shaw was not only aware of what Ibsen was doing and had done: he had actually written a remarkable analysis of Ibsen's plays and, with his utmost critical skill, defended Ibsen's art and philosophy, on the platform and in the press, against the ablest critics in England. As clearly as Ghosts does Mrs. Warren's Profession reveal the truth of George Eliot's dictum that consequences are unpitying; a true drama of catastrophe, employing Ibsen's peculiar retrospective method, Shaw's play exemplifies, in Amiel's words, the fatality of the consequences which follow every human act. Nora as daughter, instead of Nora as wife, Vivie leaves her home under the same profound conviction of her duty to herself as a human being—a duty infinitely more obligatory than any she may be conventionally imagined to owe to a Magdalen mother, who has educated and purposes to support her out of the profits of a profession which has its roots in the most hideous of all social evils.[141]

Mrs. Warren's Profession towers high above his first two plays, and places Shaw in the front rank of contemporary dramatic craftsmen. Its strength proceeds from the depth displayed in the consideration of the motives which prompt to action, the intellectual and emotional crises eventuating from the fierce clash of personalities and the sardonically unconscious self-scourging of the characters themselves. The scenes are so admirably ordered, the procedure so swift, the situations so charged with significance that one can find little to wonder at in Mr. Cunninghame Graham's characterization of Mrs. Warren's Profession as “the best that has been written in English in our generation.” Tense, nervous, vigorous, the great scenes are full of “that suppleness, that undulation of emotional process,” which Mr. Archer pronounces one of the unmistakable tokens of dramatic mastery. The tremendous dramatic power of the specious logic with which Mrs. Warren defends her course; the sardonic irony of the parting between mother and daughter! Goethe said of Molière that he chastises men by drawing them just as they are. True descendant of Molière, whom he once declared to be worth a thousand Shakespeares, Shaw wields upon vice the shrieking scourge, not of the preacher, but of the dramatist. Out of the mouths of the characters themselves proceeds their own condemnation. Devastating in its consummate irony is the passage in which Mrs. Warren, conventional to her heart's core, lauds her own respectability; and that in which Crofts propounds his own code of honour:

Dr. Brandes called Ibsen's Ghosts, if not the greatest achievement, at any rate the noblest action of the poet's career. Mrs. Warren's Profession is not only what Brunetière would call a work of combat: it is an act—an act of declared hostility against capitalistic society, the inertia of public opinion, the lethargy of the public conscience, and the criminality of a social order which begets such appalling social conditions. Into this play Shaw has poured all his Socialistic passion for a more just and humane social order.

As an arraignment of social conditions, the play is tremendous. As a work of art, it presents marked deficiencies. Shaw sought to dispose of one charge—that Vivie is merely Shaw in petticoats—in these words: “One of my female characters, who drinks whisky and smokes cigars and reads detective stories and regards the fine arts, especially music, as an insufferable and unintelligible waste of time, has been declared by my friend, Mr. William Archer, to be an exact and authentic portrait of myself, on no other grounds in the world except that she is a woman of business and not a creature of romantic impulse.” It is clear that this is not a satisfactory answer to Mr. Archer's charge; but even in more minor details, the play is open to criticism: the futility of Praed, save as a barefaced confidant; the cheap melodrama of Frank and the rifle; the series of coincidences culminating in the Rev. Mr. Gardner's miserably confused “Miss Vavasour, I believe!” at the end of the first act. More important still, as Mr. Archer once pointed out,[142] there is nothing of the inevitable in the meeting of Frank and Vivie, despite Shaw's assertion that “the children of any polyandrous group will, when they grow up, inevitably be confronted with the insoluble problem of their own possible consanguinity.” Had Vivie not happened to take lodgings at that particular farmhouse in Surrey, she would never have seen or heard of Frank, and the “inevitable” would never have happened. But this single lapse of logic, together with the other defects mentioned, are comparatively venial faults—which Shaw probably classes among those “relapses into staginess” betraying, as he confessed, “the young playwright and the old playgoer in this early work of mine.”

It is the predominance of a certain hard, sheer rationalism, and a defiant, irresponsible levity in places, which mars the artistic unity of the play, and denies it the exalted rank to which it well-nigh attains. At the fundamental morality of the play there is no cause to cavil. Instead of maintaining an association in the imagination of the spectators between prostitution and fashionable beauty, luxury and refinement, as do La Dame aux Caméllias, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, Iris, Zaza and countless other modern plays, Mrs. Warren's Profession exhibits the life of the courtesan in all its arid actuality, and inculcates a lesson of the sternest morality. It is because she is what she is that Mrs. Warren loses her daughter irrevocably. In general, the logic of the play is unimpeachable; but the rationalist character imparted to the conversations of the principal characters by their persistence in arguing everything out logically gives the play a sort of glacial rigidity. The principal defect of the play is the discrepancy between the tragic seriousness of the theme and the occasional depressing levity of its treatment. Consonance between theme and tone is the prime requisite of a work of art. This remarkable play falls just short of real greatness because its whimsical, facetious, irrepressible author was unable to discipline himself to artistic self-restraint. Mrs. Warren's Profession is calculated to produce an almost unendurable effect because, as Mr. Archer wisely says, Bernard Shaw is “the slave of his sense of the ridiculous.”

The close of the year 1893 marks the beginning of a new phase in the evolution of Shaw's art as a dramatist. As Brunetière said to the Symbolists, so the English public said to Mr. Grein and his supporters of the Independent Theatre Society: “Gentlemen, produce your masterpieces!” Shaw eagerly took up the case; and rather than let it collapse, he “manufactured the evidence.” His first play met with a succès de scandale; his second failed of production; and his third, the expected “masterpiece,” was debarred by the censorship. The union of economics and Socialism in thesis-plays met with no favour at the hands of the British public. Shaw was forced to relinquish for the time being his purpose of reforming the public through the medium of the stage. His original disavowal of any intent to amuse the public went for naught in default of a platform from which to deliver instruction.

Shaw's social determinism, as M. Auguste Hamon once expressed it to me, is “absolute”: his fundamental Socialism throws the blame, not upon Trench, Charteris, Crofts and Mrs. Warren, as individuals, but upon the prevailing social order, the capitalistic régime, which offers them as alternatives, not morality and immorality, but two sorts of immorality.[143] Upon each individual in his audience, whether in the study or in the theatre, Shaw threw the burden of responsibility for defective social organization, and for those social horrors which can only be mitigated, and, perhaps, ultimately abolished, by public opinion, public action and public contribution. Mr. Shaw once described this play to me as a faithful presentment of the “economic basis of modern commercial prostitution.” But the managers well knew that the public was averse to being forced to face the unpleasant facts set forth in Shaw's three “unpleasant” plays. The rigour of the censorship and prevailing theatrical conditions in London were hostile to Shaw's initial efforts.

“You cannot write three plays and then stop,” Shaw has explained. Accordingly, for obvious reasons, social determinism ceased to be the motive force of Shaw's dramas; and he began to write plays concerned more particularly with the comedy and tragedy of individual life and destiny. Shaw did not cease to be a satirist, did not desist from his effort to startle the public out of its bland complacency: he merely diverted for the time being the current of his satire from social abuses to the shams, pretences, illusions and self-deceptions of individual life. Having learned to beware of solemnity, Shaw makes the satiric jest his point of departure. From this time forward he occupies and operates upon a new plane. He has ceased to be purely the social scavenger. Bernard Shaw's comedy of manners and of character now enters into the history of British drama.

Arms and the Man—obviously deriving its title from the Arma virumque cano of the opening line of Virgil's Æneid—is one of Shaw's most delightful comedies—a genuine comedy of character and yet theatrical in the true sense, Dr. Brandes has called it. Not the least of its virtues is the implicitness of its philosophy; perhaps this is one reason why Mr. Shaw (as he lately remarked to me) now considers it a very slight and immature production! From one point of view, this play may be regarded as a study of the psychology of the military profession.[144] From another point of view—the standpoint of the regular playgoer—the play has for its dramatic essence the collision of romantic illusion with prosaic reality.