In the main, Shaw follows, as far as time, place and historical events go, such facts of history as are to be found in Plutarch and in De Bello Gallico; in every other respect the play is modern, colloquially modern, in tone and in spirit. Shaw approaches his theme under the domination of an idée fixe: scorn of tradition and of the science of history. The notion that there has been any progress since the time of Cæsar is absurd! Increased command over Nature by no means connotes increased command over self; if there has been any evolution, it has been in our conceptions of the meaning of greatness. When Shaw wrote his celebrated preface Better than Shakespeare? he had a very definite claim to make; that his Cæsar and Cleopatra are more credible, more natural, to a modern audience, than are the imaginative projections of a Shakespeare. Shaw maintains that, in manner and art, nobody can write better than Shakespeare, “because, carelessness apart, he did the thing as well as it can be done within the limits of human faculty.” But Shaw did profess to have something to say by this time that Shakespeare neither said nor dreamed of. “Allow me to set forth Cæsar in the same modern light,” pleads Shaw, in speaking of the hero-restorations of Carlyle and Mommsen, “taking the same liberty with Shakespeare as he with Homer, and with no thought of pretending to express the Mommsenite view of Cæsar any better than Shakespeare expressed a view that was not even Plutarchian....”[162] “Shakespeare's Cæsar is the reductio ad absurdum of the real Julius Cæsar,” Mr. Shaw once remarked to me; “my Cæsar is a simple return to nature and history.”

Are there many cases in dramatic psychology, asked M. Filon, as interesting as the liaison which would have had “Cæsarion” as result? But in Cæsar and Cleopatra, there is no battle of love, no dramatic conflict. Shaw might have produced a drama of the nations, in which the cunning intrigues of Egypt are matched against the forthrightness and efficiency of the Romans; or a drama of passion, charged to the full with poetic imagination. But he has availed himself neither of the historic sense, in which he appears to be deficient, nor of the romantic violence of poetic imagination, against which he rages with puritanical fervour. Shaw calls the play a “history”; certainly it is not a “drama” in the technical sense.[163] And yet, despite the numerous longueurs of the play, the pyrotechnic flashes of wit which only barely suffice to conceal the fact that the action is marking time, the exciting incidents which separately give a semblance of activity to the piece, there is a genuine thread of motive connecting scene with scene.

Cæsar and Cleopatra is, from one point of view, a study in the evolution of character; and this play, and Major Barbara, are the only exceptions to Shaw's theatre of static character. The psychological action of the piece consists in the evolution, under the guiding hand of Cæsar, of the little Egyptian sensualist, in the period of plastic adolescence. Cæsar has the weak fondness of an indulgent uncle for the adolescent Cleopatra, with her strange admixture of childish mauvaise honte and regal covetousness. Realizing with the instinct of a king-maker Cleopatra's dangerous possibilities as a ruler, Cæsar exercises upon her the plastic and determinative force of an architect of states. Slowly the little Cleopatra learns her lesson, glories in her newly-won power, tyrannizes inhumanly over all about her, and eventually—with well-nigh disastrous effects to herself—endeavours to teach her teacher the true secret of dominion.

From another point of view, this play is the portrait of a hero in the light of Shavian psychology—a hero in undress costume, in his dressing-gown as he lived, with all his trivial vanities and endearing weaknesses. The halo of the “pathos of distance,” surrounding the head of the demi-god, wholly fades away; and there stands before us a real man, shorn of the romantic, the histrionic, the chivalric, it is true, but a real man, every inch of him, for all that. Shaw clearly draws the distinction:

Mr. Forbes Robertson recently said that he regarded Cæsar and Cleopatra as a “great play,” representing very truly what one would imagine Cæsar said, thought and felt. “Possibly the play is before its time—some people have said such curious things about it. There are scenes of wonderful brilliancy and beauty, and I myself see nothing farcical about the play, as some people seem to suggest. I see a great wit and humour; and, as Mr. Shaw points out, by what right are we to presuppose that Cæsar had no sense of humour? He meets this amusing little impudent girl, and is very much amused with her, and interested in her, quite naturally as a human being. Why should one expect him to go strutting about, with one arm in his toga and the other extended, spouting dull blank verse?” Indeed, Shaw's Cæsar is a remarkable personality—in practice a man of business sagacity; in politics, a dreamer; in action, brilliant and resourceful; in private, a trifle vain and rhetorical—boyish, exuberant, humorous. When Pothinus expresses amazement that the conqueror of the world has time to busy himself with taxes, Cæsar affably replies: “My friend, taxes are the chief business of a conqueror of the world.”

Like Mirabeau, he had no memory for insults and affronts received, and “could not forgive, for the sole reason that—he forgot.” He answers to Nietzsche's differentia: “Not to be able to take seriously for a long time, an enemy, or a misfortune, or even one's own misdeeds—is the characteristic of strong and full natures, abundantly endowed with plastic, formative, restorative, also obliterative force.” Cæsar's policy of clemency is constantly thwarted by the murderous passions of his soldiers; the murder of Pompey he contemns as a stroke of unpardonable treachery and revenge, the removal of Vercingetorix very much as Talleyrand regarded the execution of the Due d'Enghien: it was worse than a crime, it was a blunder. Sufficient unto himself, strong enough to dispense with happiness, Cæsar is—to use a phrase of Mr. Desmond MacCarthy's—“content in the place of happiness with a kind of triumphant gaiety, springing from a sense of his own fortitude and power.” Cæsar is a thoroughly good fellow, prosaically, patho-comically looking approaching old age in the face and wearing his conqueror's wreath of oak leaves—to conceal his growing bald spot. Were Rome a true republic, Cæsar would be the first of republicans; he values the life of every Roman in his army as he values his own, and makes friends with everyone as he does with dogs and children. “Cæsar is an important public man,” as Mr. Max Beerbohm puts it, “who knows that a little chit of a girl-queen has taken a fancy to him, and is tickled by the knowledge and behaves very kindly to her, and rather wishes he were young enough to love her.” But when he is again recalled to Rome, Cleopatra concerns him no more. Cæsar is the Shavian type of the naturally great man—great, not because he mortifies his nature in fulfilment of duty, but because he fulfils his own will.”[165]

Cæsar and Cleopatra, to employ a phrase of the elder Coquelin, is a “combination of the most absolute fantasy with the most absolute truth.” One feels at times that it belongs in the category of Orphée aux Enfers and La Belle Hélène, and only needs the music of Offenbach to round it out. Shaw shatters the illusion of antiquity with a multitude of the stock phrases of contemporary history: “Peace with honour,” “Egypt for the Egyptians,” “Art for Art's sake,” etc., etc.[166] True to Shakespearean practice, Shaw revels in anachronisms, and goes so far as to assert that this is the only way to make the historic past take form and life before our eyes. If Shakespeare makes a clock strike in ancient Rome, Shaw shows a steam engine at work in Alexandria in 48 B.C.! If Shakespeare puts a billiard table in Cleopatra's palace, Shaw alludes to the ancient superstition of table-rapping in the year 707 of the Republic! Shaw gives free play to his abounding humour, having long since learned that nothing can be accomplished by solemnity. “Whenever I feel in writing a play,” he frankly confesses, “that my great command of the sublime threatens to induce solemnity of mind in my audience, I at once introduce a joke and knock the solemn people from their perch.” The eighteenth-century Irishman, with his contempt for John Bull, peeps out here and there; and when Cleopatra asks Britannus, Cæsar's young secretary from Britain, if it were true that he was painted all over blue, when Cæsar captured him, Britannus proudly replies: “Blue is the colour worn by all Britons of good standing. In war we stain our bodies blue; so that though our enemies may strip us of our clothes and our lives, they cannot strip us of our respectability.”

In Cæsar and Cleopatra Shaw has created something more or less than drama—a tremendous fantasy surcharged and interpenetrated with deep imaginative reality. In certain plays of which I shall now speak, Shaw shows that he can play the dramatist, pure and simple, and write with a concentration of energy, a compression of emotive intensity, that seem very foreign to the prolixity and discursiveness of his later manner. The stern artistic discipline to which he nearly succeeded in schooling himself in Mrs. Warren's Profession, once more exhibits itself in The Man of Destiny, Candida and The Devil's Disciple. The essential fact that these plays have proved popular stage successes in the capitals of the world—New York, London, Berlin, Vienna, Dresden, St. Petersburg, Buda-Pesth, Brussels, etc.—is in itself testimony to the fact that—always allowing for the refraction of the Shavian temperament—Bernard Shaw is a true dramatist, capable of touching the deeper emotions and appealing to universal sentiments.

In speaking of his earliest works, Shaw airily refers to those “vain brilliancies given off in the days of my health and strength.” Perhaps something of their diffuseness, and the lack of concentrative thought evident in their construction, are explained, not alone by reference to Shaw's intransigéance, but in part by the conditions under which they were written. A bit of reminiscence voiced by the great English comedian, Sir Charles Wyndham, is illuminating:

The How and Where of the composition of such plays might well account for much inconsequence and aerial giddiness!

The Man of Destiny has an origin not a little unique. Many plays are written for some one great actor or actress—few are written for two. And yet, according to Shaw's own confessions, The Man of Destiny was written for Richard Mansfield and Ellen Terry—Mansfield serving as the model for Napoleon, Terry as the model for the Lady. At this time, Shaw had seen Mansfield only in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Richard III.; and once in 1894 had chatted with him for an hour at the Langham. The impression he received was so strong, the suggestion of Napoleon so striking, that he resolved to write a play about Napoleon based on a study of Mansfield.[168]

In a letter to Mansfield (September 8th, 1897), Shaw says: “I was much hurt by your contemptuous refusal of A Man of Destiny, not because I think it one of my masterpieces, but because Napoleon is nobody else but Richard Mansfield himself. I studied the character from you, and then read up Napoleon and found that I had got him exactly right.”[169] Shaw frequently corresponded with Ellen Terry during the days he was writing The Man of Destiny; he saw her numberless times on the stage, but had never actually met her when he wrote The Man of Destiny. Shaw escaped the “illusion” of the Lyceum, created by “Irving's incomparable dignity and Terry's incomparable beauty”—simply because “I was a dramatist and needed Ellen Terry for my own plays.... I had tried to win her when I wrote The Man of Destiny, in which the heroine is simply a delineation of Ellen Terry—imperfect, it is true, for who can describe the indescribable!”[170]

The Man of Destiny, Shaw, in fact, confesses, was written chiefly to exhibit the virtuosity of the two principal characters; and it must be confessed that their virtuosity is so pervasively dazzling as occasionally to distract attention from the dramatic procedure. The unnamed possibilities of the situation have been exploited in the subtlest fashion. This little “fragment” is a dramatic tour de force; the rapid shifting of victory from one side to the other, the excitingly unstable equilibrium of the balance of power, the fierce war of wills are of the very essence of true drama. The serious underlying issue, the struggle of Napoleon for a triumph that spells personal dishonour, is a dramatic motive sanctioned by that great classic example, the Œdipus Rex. Unlike Sophocles, whose listeners knew in advance the story of the ill-fated king, Shaw withholds from the spectator any foreknowledge of the outcome; but the growing curiosity of Napoleon, instantaneously inducing like inquisitiveness on the part of the spectator, is one of the chief factors of interest in the play. Early in the development of the action, the purpose of the letter is readily guessed by anyone familiar with such Napoleonic history as is recorded, for example, in the Memoirs of Barras.[171]

As Shaw's Cæsar is his interpretation of the great man of ancient history, so Napoleon is his interpretation of the great man of modern history. Shaw's Napoleon is a strange mixture of noble and ignoble impulses. He is strangely imaginative—a dreamer in the great sense, with a touch of the superstition of a Wallenstein, a great faith in his star. A ravenous beast at table, he feverishly gorges his food, while his hair sweeps into the ink and the gravy; his absolute obliviousness to surroundings is the mask of tremendous energy of purpose. Gravy answers the purpose of ink, a grape hull marks a strategic point on the map: the mark, not the material, is Napoleon's concern. And it is the imprévu of his decisions that so often puts his adversaries to rout. M. Filon protests against Shaw's portrait of Napoleon as a mere repetition of the caricatures of Gillray and the calumniating distortions of the historian Seeley; but Shaw's Napoleon is, in great measure, not the Napoleon of the glorified Bonapartist chromo, but the Napoleon post-figured by his later career. Le Petit Caporal is the ancestor of the Emperor Napoleon I.; and in this early phase, Napoleon may be best described in the sneering characterization of the Lady as “the vile, vulgar Corsican adventurer.” Says Mr. John Corbin: “The final sensation of the character is of vast unquenchable energy and intelligence, at once brutally real and sublimely theatrical. And is not this the great Napoleon? By virtue of this mingling of seemingly opposed but inherently true qualities this Man of Destiny, for all the impertinences and audacities of Mr. Shaw's pyrotechnics, may be reckoned the best presentation of Napoleon thus far achieved in the drama, as it is certainly by far the most delightful.” I asked Mlle. Yvette Guilbert one day if she thought The Man of Destiny would succeed in Paris. “I rather fear not,” she replied. “Shaw's portrait is too true to the original to suit the French!”[172]

Towards the close of The Man of Destiny, Napoleon, taking for his text the famous phrase: “The English are a nation of shop-keepers,” launches forth into a perfect torrent of irrelevant histrionic pyrotechnics. “Let me explain the English to you,” he says, and in Shaw's most Maxim-gun style, proceeds to summarize the history of England in the nineteenth century, in a half-critical, half-prophetic philippic, beginning with discussion of the views of the Manchester School, of British industrial and colonial policy, and of Imperialism, and concluding with allusions to Wellington and Waterloo! In reading the play, this passage appears to be a gross irrelevancy and an absurd anachronism; but on the stage the speech appears to be quite in character with Shaw's Napoleon. Still, this passage calls attention to Shaw's most obvious and most deliberately committed fault: self-projection through the medium of his characters. Shaw identifies himself with his work as possibly no other dramatist before him has ever done. I rejoice in Shaw as M. Filon rejoices in Dumas fils; selfless reserve, abdication of personality, are as impossible for Shaw as for Dumas fils, and I freely confess that what I enjoy most in Shaw's plays is—Shaw.

Sir Charles Wyndham was once asked his opinion of the plays of Bernard Shaw. “Shaw's works are wonderful intellectual studies, but,” he replied firmly, “they are not plays!” And he continued: “At one time I saw a great deal of Shaw and had great hopes of him as a dramatist. But he wouldn't come down to earth, he wouldn't be practical. When he had just completed Candida he came and read it to me. I told him it was 'twenty years too soon for England.' Well, he put it on at a special matinée, and it was much applauded. Then Shaw went out and addressed the audience. 'I read the play to Wyndham,' he said in his speech, 'and he told me it was twenty years too soon. You have given the contradiction to that statement.'” Candida has been played on some of the greatest stages of Europe, as well as all over England and America, and leading critics have praised it as one of the most remarkable plays of this generation.[173]

Candida is an acute psychological observation upon the emotional reverberations in the souls of three clearly imagined, exquisitely realized characters; its connection with pre-Raphaelitism, as Mr. Shaw confessed to me, is purely superficial and extrinsic. Aside from its association with a certain stage in Shaw's own development, the character of Marchbanks might just as well have been linked with the name of Shelley,[174] or with the Celtic Renascence of to-day; but the whole atmosphere of the play makes it inconceivable at any time in the world's history save in the age of Ibsen. It bears marked resemblances to The Comedy of Love and The Lady from the Sea. Candida portrays the conflict between prose convention and poetic anarchy, concretely mirroring that conflict of human wills which Brunetière announced as the criterion of authentic drama. “Unity, however desirable in political agitations,” Shaw once wrote, in reference to this play, “is fatal to drama, since every drama must be the artistic presentation of a conflict. The end may be reconciliation or destruction, or, as in life itself, there may be no end; but the conflict is indispensable: no conflict, no drama.”

In striking contrast to many of Shaw's plays which are marked by a hyper-natural, almost blatant psychology, Candida reveals in Shaw a mastery of what may be termed profound psychological secrecy. “This is the play in which Bernard Shaw has tried to dig deepest, and has used his material with the greatest economy,” wrote Dr. Brandes, in 1902. “The quietude of the action, which works itself out purely in dialogue, is here akin to Ibsen's quietude.... There is great depth of thought in this play, and a knowledge of the human soul which penetrates far below the surface.” A domestic drama—little more than a “scene from private life”—Candida is the latest form of Diderot's invention, the bourgeois drama. Abounding in scenes and situations tense with emotional and dramatic power, it is stamped with the finish and restraint of great art. The characters in this play, so chameleon-like in its changing lustres, at every instant turn toward the light new facets of their natures. We catch the iridescent and ever-varying tints of life; and over all is a sparkle of fine and subtle humour, lightening the tension of soul-conflicts with touches of homely veracity.

The “auction scene” of the third act is transcendentally real, making an almost imperceptible transition from verisimilitude to fantasy.[175] Indulging his penchant for dialectic, Shaw here turns advocate, and argues the case with all the surety of the lawyer, the art of the littérateur. Men and women do not guide their actions in accordance with the dictates of pure reason; as Alceste says to Philinte in Le Misanthrope:

And, after all, the auction scene is merely the scène à faire, leaving the situation absolutely unchanged. As Shaw himself once confessed: “It is an interesting sample of the way in which a scene, which should be conceived and written only by transcending the ordinary notion of the relations between the persons, nevertheless stirs the ordinary emotions to a very high degree, all the more because the language of the poet, to those who have not the clue to it, is mysterious and bewildering, and, therefore, worshipful. I divined it myself before I found out the whole truth about it.”