From the dramatic side, Arms and the Man is far less a “realistic” comedy than a satiric exposure of the illusions of warfare, of love, of romantic idealism. Of course, Shaw imparts an air of pleasing likelihood to the racial traits or characters, and the local colour of the scenes; and, as Dr. Brandes has remarked, in Bernard Shaw's choice of themes one feels the mental suppleness of the modern critic, with his ability to throw himself sympathetically into different historic periods and into the minds of different races. In Arms and the Man, “the whole environment is characteristic, the people of most refinement being proud of washing themselves 'almost every day,' and of owning a 'library,' the only one in the district. Everything smacks of the Balkan Peninsula, even to the waiting-maid and the man-servant, with their half-Asiatic mingling of forwardness and servility.”[147] To be accurate, Shaw sketches in his milieu with the very lightest of strokes. Bluntschli might just as well have served in a war between Peru and Chili, or Greece and Turkey; while for all practical purposes, the scene might just as well have been laid along the coasts of Bohemia. I have long contended that Arms and the Man was not a play, but a light opera; and now comes Oscar Straus to compose the music for the libretto adapted from Shaw's Bulgarian fantasy.

Mr. Shaw once told me that his two friends, Sidney Webb, the solid and the practical, and Cunninghame Graham, the hidalgesque and fantastic, suggested the contrast between Bluntschli and Saranoff. “The identity,” he explained, “only lies on the surface, of course. But the true dramatist must always find his contrasts in real life.” And it will be recalled that the rodomontade placed with such ludicrous effect in the mouth of the Bulgarian braggadocio, had actually been used, with equally telling effect, by Mr. Cunninghame Graham in a speech in the House of Commons. Shaw promptly stole the potent phrase, “I never withdraw,” for the sake of its perfect style, and used it as a cockade for Sergius the Sublime. The great charm of the play consists in the disillusionment of the romantic Raina and the sham-idealist Saranoff by the practical realism of the common-sense Bluntschli. A Bulgarian Byron, Sergius is perpetually mocked by the disparity between his imaginative ideals and the disillusions which continually sting his sensitive nature. And the true tragedy of the idealist, in the Shavian frame of mind, is summed up in his words, “Damnation! mockery everywhere! Everything that I think is mocked by everything that I do.” And Shaw himself has said:

Arms and the Man has laid its hold upon the modern imagination, and has been produced all over the world. What more delightful than to have seen Bluntschli interpreted by the actors of our generation—by Mansfield, with his quaintly dry cynicism, by Jarno, with a humour racy of the soil, by Mantzius, with scholarly accuracy, by Sommerstorff, with a touch of romance!—by Loraine, Nhil, Stephens, Daly. It is quite true that the play is loose in form, oscillating between comedy and fantastic farce, and that even now it is already beginning to “date.” But its fantasy, its satire, and its genial philosophy will amply suffice to give it a long lease on life.[149] Shaw's own confidence in his power as a dramatist and in the future of the play is humorously expressed in characteristic style in the following letter written in response to an apologetic note from his American agent, Miss Elisabeth Marbury, accompanying a meagre remittance for royalties on Arms and the Man:

Arms and the Man is an injunction to found our institutions, in Shaw's little-understood phrase, not on “the ideals suggested to our imagination by our half-satisfied passions,” but on a “genuinely scientific natural history.”

A distinguished dramatic critic once said to me that he regarded all of Shaw's works as derivative literature. Shaw's first three plays were traced to Ibsen, to De Maupassant, to Strindberg; and won for him the flattering title of the “second-hand Brummagem Ibsen” (William Winter)! And after witnessing two acts of Arms and the Man at the Avenue Theatre, Mr. Archer began to have a misgiving that he had wandered by mistake into The Palace of Truth. The relation of the art of Bernard Shaw to the art of W. S. Gilbert is one of much delicate intricacy; and deserves more than casual mention. Shaw has declared that those who regard the function of a writer as “creative” are the most illiterate of dupes, that in his business he knows me and te, not meum and tuum, and that he himself is “a crow who has followed many plows.” In a vein of mocking acknowledgment, Shaw once spoke of the seriousness with which he had pondered the jests of W. S. Gilbert. A careful critical examination of the methods of Shaw and Gilbert reveals the undoubted resemblance, as well as the fundamental dissimilarity, of these two satiric interpreters of human nature.[150]

One particular incident in Arms and the Man seems to derive directly from an incident in Gilbert's Engaged. The scene in which Nicola advises Louka, his betrothed, to gain a hold over Sergius, marry him ultimately, and so “come to be one of my grandest customers, instead of only being my wife and costing me money,” is but a paraphrase and inversion of that ludicrous scene in Engaged, in which “puir little Maggie Macfarlane” advises her lover, Angus Macalister, to resign her to Cheviot-Hill for the princely consideration of two pounds. Aside from this one minor similarity, Arms and the Man is very different from a Gilbert play. For purposes of general comparison, turn once more to Engaged—which will serve as well as any of the works of Gilbert—for this passage:

Here, not only is the comic note struck by the juxtaposition of two essential incongruities: in addition, the farcicality of the idea stamps it as impossible. It is an admirable illustration of that exquisite sense of quaint unexpectedness, evoked by the plays of both Gilbert and Shaw. Take now a scene of somewhat cognate appeal in Arms and the Man. In both scenes the bid is for sudden laughter, through the startle of surprise. Bluntschli flatly tells Raina to her face that he finds it impossible to believe a single thing she says.

Gilbert employs a device of the simplest mechanism, giving merely the shock of unexpected contrast. Shaw's spiritual adventure is an excogitated bit of psychology, of intellectual content and rational crescendo. It is the Shavian trick of putting into dialogue the revealing, accusatory words seldom spoken in real life.

This calls to mind a resemblance—with a difference—between Shaw and Gilbert. In Gilbert's The Palace of Truth each character indulges in frank self-revelation. Enchanted by the spell of a certain locality, everyone is compelled to speak his whole thought without disguise, under the delusion that he is only indulging in the usual polite insincerities. All this self-analysis and self-exposure goes for naught but to evoke laughter; for, lacking either profound insight into human nature or cynical distrust of humanity, Gilbert is incapable of trenchant generalization. In Shaw's plays, people play the game of “Truth” for all there is in it; and perhaps Shaw's greatest capacity is the capacity for generalization. Shaw's incomparable superiority to Gilbert consists in his acute perception and subtle delineation of the comic, and often tragic, inconsistencies of genuine human character. Shaw has succeeded in revealing certain subconscious sides of human nature that usually remain hidden because dramatists fail to put into the mouths of their creations the real thoughts that clamour for expression. One almost always hears their superficial selves speaking solely through the voluble medium of society or the reticent medium of self.

Not only in philosophic grasp, but also in imagination, does Shaw excel Gilbert; an incident will suffice to explain. Mr. John Corbin once told me that in comparing Shaw and Gilbert, he had instanced to Mr. Henry Arthur Jones the play of Pygmalion and Galatea, as showing that, after all, Gilbert had a heart and an imagination for beauty. “Ah, yes!” replied Mr. Jones. “But Gilbert never could have written that line in Cæsar and Cleopatra:

Philosophically speaking, Gilbert's characters accept without question the current ideals of life and conduct; and make ludicrous spectacles of themselves in the effort to live up to them. Shaw's creations discover the hollowness and vanity of these same current ideals, and gain freedom in escape from their obsession. As Mr. Walkley once put it: “Gilbertism consists in the ironic humour to be got out of the spectacle of a number of people hypocritically pretending, or naïvely failing, to act up to ideals which Mr. Gilbert and his people hold to be valid.... Shavianism consists in the ironic humour to be got out of the spectacle of a number of people trying to apply the current ideas only to find in the end that they won't work.”[151] Let us have done with rating of Shaw as a cheap imitator of Gilbert. It is quite true that Gilbert anticipated Shaw by many years in the use of the device of open confession—the characters naïvely “making a clean breast” of things; but the device was handed on to Shaw for legitimate use instead of for farcical misuse. In any deep sense, Shaw owes nothing to Gilbert; and his paradoxes, unlike Gilbert's, are the outcome of a profound study of human nature and of contemporary civilization. “Gilbert would have anticipated me,” Mr. Shaw once assured me, “if he had taken his paradoxes seriously. But it does not seem to have occurred to him that he had found any real flaw in conventional morality—only that he had found out how to make logical quips at its expense. His serious plays are all conventional. Most of the revolutionary ideas have come up first as jests; and Gilbert did not get deeper than this stage.”

Arms and the Man is the first of four plays which I class in a category by themselves—the plays constructed in the loose and variegated comedic form, presumably designed to be “popular” and to amuse the public, fantastically treated, and imbued with a mild philosophy held strictly implicit.[152] These four plays are Arms and the Man, You Never Can Tell, How He Lied to Her Husband and Captain Brassbound's Conversion. In You Never Can Tell Shaw deliberately made concessions to that coy monster, the British public. Thitherto he had in large measure disdained the task of complying with the demands of London audiences for a popular comedy, combining his oft-praised cynical brilliancy and his talent for “giving furiously to think,” with his unquestioned ability to amuse. Shaw's realization of the truth of Molière's words: “C'est une étrange entreprise que celle de faire rire les honnêtes gens,” did not in the least deter him from embarking upon this perilous undertaking. In You Never Can Tell he gave himself up wholly to the hazardous task, tentatively inaugurated in Arms and the Man, of attempting to amuse that public which had so persistently refused, so defiantly scorned, his instruction. You Never Can Tell was Shaw's propitiatory sacrifice to recalcitrant London. Strange to say, this deliberate concession to popular demand even his most lenient censors refused to validate.[153] London, matching Shaw for whimsicality, was no whit propitiated by his proposal of a mariage de convenance with that doubtful character, public opinion. Shaw has taken Shakespeare himself to task for pandering to public taste in a play coolly entitled As You Like It. When the “Dramatist of Donnybrook Fair,” as Mr. Corbin calls him, sets out to write As You Like It, what is the result? “You Never Can Tell!” It was nine years before Shaw was able to change his tentative and dubious, “You Never Can Tell!” into a triumphant, “I told you so!”

“I think it must have been in the year 1895,” one reads in some reminiscences by Mr. Cyril Maude, the well-known English actor, “that the devil put it into the mind of a friend of mine to tempt me with news of a play called Candida, by a writer named Bernard Shaw, of whom until then I had never heard.”[154] Mr. Maude wrote to Shaw, suggesting that he be allowed to see the play in question. In characteristic vein, the author replied that the play would not suit the needs of the Haymarket Theatre, offering, however, to write a new play instead; which Mr. Maude protests he never asked Shaw to do, yet to which he interposed no objection. Whereupon Shaw took a chair in Regent's Park for the whole season, and sat there, in the public eye, we are told, writing the threatened play.

It was not until the winter of 1897 that this play, You Never Can Tell, came into Mr. Maude's hands. It was accepted, and actually put into rehearsal. From that very moment things began to go wrong. Shaw proposed impossible casts, dictated to each actor in turn, equalled his own John Tanner in endless and torrential talk. Actor after actor, led by the genial Jack Barnes, withdrew in fatigue and disgust. One day Shaw insulted the entire cast and the entire profession by wanting a large table on the stage, on the ground that the company would fall over it unless they behaved as if they were coming into a real room instead of, as he coarsely observed, “rushing to the float to pick up the band at the beginning of a comic song.”

After a first reading of the manuscript, Mr. Maude's misgivings had been aroused to such an extent that he went to Shaw and plainly told him that certain lines would have to be cut out.

“Oh, no!” replied Shaw. “I really can't permit that.”

“But in this shape,” protested the alarmed actor-manager, “the play can never be produced.”

“My dear fellow, you delight me,” was the truly Shavian reply.

It was unbearable to the cast to be lectured and grilled unmercifully by a red-headed Mephistopheles dressed like a “fairly respectable carpenter” in a suit of clothes that looked as though it had originally been made of brown wrapping paper. The rehearsals continued, however, with the entire cast in a state of the most profound dejection.

“The end came suddenly and unexpectedly. We had made a special effort to fulfil our unfortunate contract.... We were honestly anxious to retrieve the situation by a great effort, and save our dear little theatre from the disgrace of a failure.

“Suddenly the author entered, in a new suit of clothes!!” Nobody who had seen Shaw sitting there day after day in a costume which the least self-respecting plasterer would have discarded months before could possibly have understood the devastating effect of the new suit upon the minds of the spectators. “That this was a calculated coup de théâtre I have not the slightest doubt.” Shaw played the part of benevolent rescuer, and the play was withdrawn. “I met him in Garrick Street not long ago and noticed that he still wore the suit which he had purchased in 1897 in anticipation of the royalties on You Never Can Tell!”

“The only thanks that people give me for not 'boring them,'” Shaw once said, “is that they laugh delightedly for three hours at the play that has cost many months of hard labour, and then turn round and say that it is no play at all and accuse me of talking with my tongue in my cheek. And then they expect me to take them seriously!” No one can accuse Shaw of taking the world seriously in You Never Can Tell. Never was more playful play, more irresponsible fun. It is all a pure game of cross-purposes, a contest of intellectual motives, a conflict of ideas and sentiments.

This play is especially interesting to me because it was the first of Shaw's plays I saw produced, and led me to a study of his works. And yet I should be the last to deny that it is a farce, in which fun as a motive takes precedence over delineation of character. The characters are no more faithful to actuality than is the dialogue to ordinary conversation. Indeed, the play is almost a new genre, differing from the ordinary farce, in which action predominates over thought, in the respect that here thought, or rather vivacious mentalization, takes precedence over everything—the antics are psychical, not physical. Shaw maintains, not that the play is a comedy, but that it is cast in the ordinary practical comedy form. I take this to mean that Shaw has utilized the stock characters and devices of ordinary comedy—not to mention those of farce, burlesque and extravaganza!—purely for his own ends, giving them a fresh and unique interest by animating them with the infectious mirth of his own personality. At last Shaw has found that loose, variegated, kaleidoscopic comedic form which freely admits of the intrusive antics of the Shavian whimsicality.

There is not a single play of Shaw's that starts nowhere and never arrives; and here the fault is not that the play has no meaning, but that it has too many meanings. And it is perhaps just as well that there is no clear line of thought-filiation running through the play. It is quite possible, as Hervieu would say, to “disengage” one, or even several motives, inter-linked with one another, from the play. Shaw, however, seems content to put everyone on the defensive, to search out the weak points in their armour, and to give to each in turn the coup de grâce.

The play is notable in two respects—for its treatment of the emotions and for the figure of William. Valentine is the imperfect prototype of John Tanner. His sole equipment is his tongue; instead of a conscience and a heart, he has only a brain. George Ade would have called him “Gabby Val, the conversational dentist.” Gloria succumbs to the scientific wooing of the new “duellist of sex”; her armour of frigid reserve, the heritage of twentieth-century precepts, melts before the calculated warmth of Valentine's advances. After allowing her to belong to herself for years, Nature now seizes her and uses her for Nature's own large purposes. And Valentine, but now the triumphant victor in the duel of sex, realizes when it is too late that, after all, he is only the victimized captive. All comedies end with a wedding, because it is then that the tragedy begins! The real distinction of the play consists in Shaw's portrayal of his conception of love as it exhibits itself in the contemporary human being. As Mr. Walkley has put it, love, in Shaw's view, is not, as with Chamfort, the échange de deux fantaisies, but the échange de deux explications. With Shaw, the symbol of love is not a Cupid blindfold, but the alertest of Arguses. His intellectual reflection of the erotic illusion exhibits neither tender sentiment, emotive abandon, nor sexual passion. Shaw's lovers, as Mr. Desmond MacCarthy has pertinently put it, “instead of using the language of admiration and affection, in which this sexual passion is so often cloaked, simply convey by their words the kind of mental tumult they are in. Sexual infatuation is stripped bare of all the accessories of poetry and sympathy. It is represented as it is by itself, with its own peculiar romance, but with none of the feelings which may, and often do, accompany it.”[155]

The one really admirable figure in the play is the immortal William. A master figure of classic, rather than modern, comedy, he suggests, with exquisite subtlety, the graceful unobtrusiveness that dignifies his calling. Whenever he loses sight of his menial position long enough to utter one of his kindly bits of philosophy, it is always to fade back again into the waiter attitude with such deference and such celerity as to accentuate the pathos of the contrast between his station and the rare humanity of his genial philosophy.

You Never Can Tell, which Mr. Archer found to be a “formless and empty farce,” achieved immense popular success in New York and London, has been produced with gratifying results throughout German Europe, as well as all over Great Britain, and justifies Mr. Norman Hapgood's characterization: “The best farce that has been upon the English-speaking stage in many years.”

Before turning to the last of the fantastic farce-comedies, I would mention very briefly the three little topical pieces which exhibit the joker Shaw at his Shawest. First, there is that petite comédie rosse, so slight as to be dubbed by Shaw himself a “comediettina,” How He Lied to Her Husband—written in 1905 to eke out Mr. Arnold Daly's bill in New York. “I began by asking Mr. Shaw to write me a play about Cromwell,” relates Mr. Daly. “The idea appealed to him in his own way. He said he thought it good, but then he raced on to suggest that we might have Charles the First come on with his head under his arm. I pointed out to Shaw that it would be highly inconvenient for a man to come on the stage with his head under his arm, even if he were an acrobat. Shaw, however, said he thought it could be done. In the end, he said he would compromise. 'Write the first thirty-five minutes of that play yourself,' said he, 'and let me write the last five minutes.'”[156] What a convenient recipe for Shaw's formula of anti-climax! The point of the little topsy-turvy, knockabout farce is the reductio ad absurdum of the “Candidamaniacs”; but the penny-a-liners usually paragraphed it as a travesty on Shaw's own play of Candida. Shaw finally cabled: “Need I say that anyone who imagines that How He Lied to Her Husband retracts Candida, or satirizes it, or travesties it, or belittles it in any way, understands neither the one nor the other?” This comediettina is a bright little skit, but it is no more amusing than it is untrue to the intellectuels who made Candida a success in New York and laid the foundations of Shaw's—and Daly's—success in America.