On July 14th, 1905, in a booth in Regent's Park, London, for the benefit of the Actors' Orphanage, was “performed repeatedly, with colossal success,” a “tragedy,” entitled Passion, Poison and Petrifaction; or The Fatal Gazogene, written by Shaw at the request of Mr. Cyril Maude. It is an extravagant burlesque on popular melodrama, and the main incident of the “tragedy” is the petrifaction of the hero caused by swallowing a lot of lime as an antidote to the poison administered to him by the jealous husband of his inamorata, Lady Magnesia Fitztollemache. “The play has a funny little history,” Mr. Shaw told me, “having its origin in a story I once made up for one of the Archer children. In the early days of William Archer's married life I was down there one night, and one of the children asked me to tell him a story. 'What about?' I asked. 'A story about a cat,' was the eager reply. It seems that at one time my aunt was interested in making little plaster-of-paris figures; and one day the cat came along, and, thinking it was milk, lapped up some of the moist plaster-of-paris. And so the sad result, as I told the Archer children, was that the poor cat petrified inside. 'And what did they do with the cat?' one of the children asked. 'Well, you see,' I replied, 'one of the doors of the house would never stay shut, so my mother kept the cat there ever afterwards to hold the door shut.' The funny part of it all was that Mrs. Archer said that she had caught me in a lie—and to her own children at that. To this day she never believes a single thing I say!”

“Passion, Poison and Petrifaction is, of course, the most utter nonsense,” Shaw continued. “But, would you believe it,”—with a chuckle—“it was recently successfully produced in Vienna, and seriously praised as a characteristic play of the brilliant Irish dramatist and Socialist, Bernard Shaw!”[157]

Slightest of all three is The Interlude at The Playhouse, written for Mr. and Mrs. Cyril Maude, and delivered by them at the opening of The Playhouse, Mr. Maude's new theatre, on Monday, January 28th, 1907.[158] The little piece extracts all the comedy to be got out of the embarrassment of an actor-manager over having to deliver a certain speech, and the solicitude of his wife in making an appeal to the audience on his behalf, but without his knowledge, for sympathy and encouragement. The genuine delicacy and lightness of touch with which the situation is handled, and the absence of Shavian intrusiveness, unite in making of the interlude a little gem, quite perfect of its kind.

The last of the comedies of character is Captain Brassbound's Conversion, classified by Shaw as one of the Three Plays for Puritans. This play might never have been written, but for the fact that Ellen Terry made no secret of the fact that she was born in 1848. When her son, Gordon Craig, became a father, Ellen Terry, according to Shaw, said that now no one would ever write plays for a grandmother! Shaw immediately wrote Captain Brassbound's Conversion to prove the contrary. And seven years later Ellen Terry portrayed Lady Cicely Waynflete with a charm, a waywardness, and a grace that gave pleasure to thousands in England and America.

Just as, in The Devil's Disciple, Shaw reduces the melodramatic form to absurdity, so in Captain Brassbound's Conversion does he reduce to absurdity the melodramatic view of life. The scene of the play is an imaginary Morocco, a second-hand, fantastic image vicariously caught for Shaw by Mr. Cunninghame Graham. Not only did Shaw want to write a good part for Ellen Terry: he also wanted to write a good play. So he wrote a whimsical fantasy, half melodrama, half extravaganza, conditioned only by his own mildly philosophic bent and the need for developing Lady Cicely's character. The result, as he is fond of saying, is simply a story of conversion—a Christian tract!

The protagonist, the pirate Brassbound, orders his life upon the principle that, as Bacon puts it, “revenge is a sort of wild justice.” He is imbued with mediæval concepts of right and wrong. In opposition to him, he discovers his opposite—a cool, tactful, unsentimental woman of the world, disarming all opposition through her Tolstoyism. With sympathetic interest, she soon wins from Brassbound the secret of his life, and with quiet and delicious satire, opens his eyes to the pettiness of his mock-heroics, the absurdity of the melodramatic view-point—the code of the Kentucky feud, the Italian vendetta. The revulsion in Brassbound is instant and complete: he is wholly disarmed by the discovery that, instead of being the chosen instrument for the wild justice of lynch-law, he is only a ridiculous twopence coloured villain.

“My uncle was no worse than myself—better, most likely,” is his final confession to Lady Cicely. “Well, I took him for a villain out of a story-book. My mother would have opened anybody else's eyes: she shut mine. I'm a stupider man than Brandyfaced Jack even; for he got his romantic nonsense out of his penny numbers and such-like trash; but I got just the same nonsense out of life and experience.”

Lady Cicely Waynflete is the most charming woman that Shaw has ever drawn. Shaw has intimated that he found in the friendship of Ellen Terry, who served as the model for Lady Cicely, the “best return which could be expected from a gifted, brilliant and beautiful woman, whose love had already been given elsewhere, and whose heart had witnessed thousands of temptations.”[159] In speaking of the character of Lady Cicely Waynflete, Miss Florence Farr once said: “As a sex, women must be for ever grateful to Miss Ellen Terry for teaching Mr. Shaw that lesson about woman.” Nothing could be simpler or more effective than the secret of command possessed by this charming woman. She knows that to go straight up to people, with hand outstretched and a frank “How d'ye do?” is all that is needed to win their confidence. The dastardly sheikh, into whose hands she is about to be delivered, is stupefied and “almost persuaded,” when she assures her friends that he will treat her like one of Nature's gentlemen: “Look at his perfectly splendid face!” Combining as she does the temperament of Ellen Terry with the genial esprit of Bernard Shaw, Lady Cicely is a thoroughly delightful and unique type of the eternal feminine. She is just at the “age of charm,” her actions are unhampered by sentiment, and her chief attractions are frank naïveté, the trait of attributing the best of qualities to other people, and an innocent assumption of authority that quietly pinions all opposition. She always manages to do just what she likes because she is bound by no ties to her fellow-creatures, save the bonds of sympathy and innate human kindness. In one respect is she a true Shavienne: toward law, convention, propriety, prejudice, she takes an attitude of quaintly humorous scepticism. What a delicious touch is that when Sir Howard protests that she has made him her accomplice in defeating justice! “Yes,” is her delightfully feminine reply: “aren't you glad it's been defeated for once?”

The moral of this charming but very slight and superficially fantastic play is that revenge is not wild justice, but childish melodrama, and that the justice of the courts of law, enforced by melodramatic sentences of punishment, is often little else than a very base sort of organized revenge. The fable is rather trivial; and the long arm of coincidence puts its finger into the pie more than once, playing that part of timely intervention at which Shaw is so fond of railing. The mixture of Shavian satire with Tolstoyan principles is both novel and piquant; and the mildly Ibsenic ending is a good “curtain”—Brassbound discovering at last the secret of command, i.e., selflessness and disinterested sympathy, and Lady Cicely ecstatically felicitating herself upon her escape from—the bonds of love and matrimony.

One other feature of the play is the hideous language of the cockney, Felix Drinkwater, alias Brandyfaced Jack. It takes quite an effort, even with the aid of the key which Shaw has considerately appended, to decipher the jargon of this unhappy hooligan, “a nime giv' us pore thortless lads baw a gint on the Dily Chronicle.” In Drinkwater, Shaw sought to fix on paper the dialect of the London cockney, and he once told me that he regarded this as the only accurate effort of the kind in modern fiction. Interested in the study of phonetics through his acquaintance and friendship with that “revolutionary don” and academic authority, Henry Sweet of Oxford, Shaw put his knowledge to work to represent phonetically the lingo of the Board-School-educated cockney. “All that the conventional spelling has done,” Shaw once said in one of his numerous journalistic controversies, “is to conceal the one change that a phonetic spelling might have checked; namely, the changes in pronunciation, including the waves of debasement that produced the half-rural cockney of Sam Weller, and the modern metropolitan cockney of Drinkwater in Captain Brassbound's Conversion.... Refuse to teach the Board School legions your pronunciation, and they will force theirs on you by mere force of numbers. And serve you right!”