ART. X.-THE PLAYS OF MR. BERNARD SHAW. 1. Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant. London: Grant Richards. 1893. 2. Three Plays for Puritans: The Devil's Disciple, Cæsar and Cleopatra, and Captain Brassbound's Conversion. London: Grant Richards. 1901. 3. Cashel Byron's Profession. 1901. London: Grant Richards. 4. Man and Superman. A Comedy and a Philosophy. Westminster: Constable. 1903. 5. John Bull's Other Island. Court Theatre. 1904. ΑΝ N occasional illumination is thrown on the humble position occupied in the world by British art from the discovery, in cities where art is seriously esteemed, of a reputation won by British artists who are almost without significance to the public of their own country. One is especially thinking in this connexion of artists in the more particular sense of the term-since it is through the arts of painting and sculpture that as a nation our meagre artistic influence is exerted-and of painters whose names were familiar in Paris, Munich and Vienna before they had begun to be looked for in London galleries. But of quite recent years the list of those of whom their own land had not learned to be worthy has been enlarged by the name of an architect of drama, an art which had seemed the least likely to furnish an example to the foreigner. Of course, one is aware that British dramatists of our day have been acted in foreign capitals, and that British musical comedies may be met in their own adulterated tongue in the unlikeliest parts of Europe. But the fullest recognition of such exchanges does not affect one's vision of this country protected, so far as its theatrical industries are concerned, from the wit, the wisdom, the genius of other peoples by the tariff of an astounding stupidity, and with its manufactures regarded on foreign shores, until they have proved their competence, with the suspicions accorded to the destitute alien. Plays that have, abroad, so taken the fancy of the people as to be given as holiday attractions are here only to be discovered in the attenuated repertoire of some dramatic society; while, on the other hand, our great commercial successes are too defaced by their hall-mark of insularity to be seriously considered by the Continental connoisseur. These reflections explain one's surprise in finding a British dramatist honoured outside his own country, and explain, too, one's certainty of finding him considered of little account within it. Such a description, despite what has been done to expound him during the last two years, scarcely expresses the dark ignorance of the common playgoer-the person by whom successes are financed and eccentricities discouraged — regarding Mr. Bernard Shaw. His credit in other countries would naturally count for nothing, since in England the paying students of drama are about the most insular of its inhabitants, and know nothing dramatically of what happens in any country but their own. They remember him, if at all, as the author of two or three exasperations at which they had the ill-luck to be present, and in which they were continually mistaking the cues for tears and laughter, and on their ignorance or disaffection the efforts of Mr. Shaw's appreciators have so far been spent in vain. His appearances, with but few exceptions, have been short and sadde like the flights of a night-bird by day-not an inappengene simile for the apparition of a dramatist in the afterand despite the approval which those flights have was z manager has of late reckoned the intelligence of Lazi sufficient to support them for a profitate perso = = evening bill; and the common play-goer v bird also, has thus been debarred from formg4 of Mr. Shaw's more recent work. The misapprehension which at public of the theatre from Mr. Shaw as 'T variously and vivaciously accoun deed, that the reader may be neces realise why a reasonable, patiem. ce laborious person,' as he deseries lean an armful from fields dressmaking. though his production meet it is so only as authent: erisce a ir iz But Mr. Shaw is an artist of the other type. He is a dramatist because he is a moralist. For art's sake he would have nothing to do with art. He ranges himself beside the men with a message with Blake, with Bunyan, with Micah the Morasthite. That would appear a very promising position from which to interest a public that worries itself considerably about the moral intent of art. Unfortunately, however, the public and Mr. Shaw have different conceptions of morality. The dramatist's desire is to make things moral; the public's, to keep them so. The difference is disastrous when worked out in art. For while the public deems nothing needed by the social structure but the decencies of repair, Mr. Shaw's thoughts are in the basement bent on abolition. Not that he is a mere iconoclast; he has a constructive scheme of his own, but it is one that necessitates rebuilding from the foundations. And inevitably this preoccupation of the mind's eye with an architecture of the future makes it a somewhat unsympathetic critic of the fabrics at present occupying the ground. That is, so far as the popular estimate is concerned, his most obvious dramatic disability as a Socialist. He is interested in a new order of things; his public, in the old; and though his very sense of the necessity for that new order makes his trenchant commentary intellectually acceptable, his moral attitude, or as the public, having a different one, would say, his immoral attitude, is a source of continual exacerbation, and his treatment of the emotions consequently suggests either a complete petrifaction of 'feeling' or a wanton and sardonic trifling with the susceptibilities of others. Not that Socialism as a constructive theory is directly responsible for more than the acute and humorous commentary which the plays offer on things as they are, since Mr. Shaw never puts his own seriousness-which is a very considerable affair-into direct conflict with that of the public. His touch is always lightest where his convictions are most involved. But in his search for a system which shall reduce misgovernment to its least significant terms, and extend to civilisation the possibilities of progress, he has encountered the most serious discouragement from those self-constituted allies of the moral forces which finally usurp in common esteem the functions of morality itself; and it is his scorn of these, of their formalism and hypocrisy, that makes him seem to the ignorant in his most earnest moments an immoral trifler, and his treatment of their false conventions! estranges him integrally from sympathies which would consider him as an artist complacently enough. The chief of these discouragements seems to have come from that romantic idealism which is worn as an excuse or a concealment by almost everything that is respectably wrong in the world. It serves as a cloak alike for religion and crime, and affords the deadliest opposition to the reformer from its plausible refutation of there being anything to reform. Mr. Shaw is in consequence its unrelenting enemy. He regards romance as the great heresy 'to be swept off from art and life-as the food of modern 'pessimism and the bane of modern self-respect,' and declares that 'idealism, which is only a flattering name for romance ' in politics and morals,' is as obnoxious to him as romance in ethics or religion. 6 Now, perverse as such views may seem to those who never have taken the road beside a reformer, they will be recognised as inevitable by those who have. The first sacrifice to be made to the new perfection is inexorably the old one. It is not the abomination of outworn systems that opens the way to the melting-pot, but their charm, their beauty, the esteem in which they have been held. So far one can sympathise with Mr. Shaw. A man's foes, when it comes to reform, must be those of his own household, his tenderest fancies, his dearest illusions, his most romantic faith. But with the optimism which would lead one to expect from Socialism, from Shavism,' or from any ethical system a cure for romantic hypocrisy it is not so easy to satisfy one's misgivings. It is perhaps hardly fair to charge such optimism to Mr. Shaw's account, except so far as optimism must inevitably be accredited to an ardour for reform. Revolutionist's Handbook,' with which Mr. John Tanne insults the respectability of his friends, does not suggest. its sage views of what has passed for progress, anys for palpitating expectancy of what the future ma forth. But despite the sound sense and keer is that remarkable document, its vicarious author most 125 FOT determination to abolish romantic ideals somaat & Tum idealist to those who cherish them: as: as I the ther hand, Leo Tolstoy is reckoned an deist, and mi s tet sane one, because he has attempted to ask The theories of conduct into a patiate yok a lik nie ne two have been separated the anes Thus Mr. Shaw, as the NDA & SSER viinei not yet suffered the suganz i se sans The position of the apostles of Christianity before the Pentecost, or the disciples of Mohammed before the Hegira. The separation of Socialism into profession and practice has not yet begun, its romantic ideals seem still realities because they have not yet been realised; and in dealing with the romantic theories of others he is protected from apology for the unsatisfactory developement of his own. But this security from the need for extenuation or defence leaves Mr. Shaw a little too obviously in the air when dealing as a dramatist of the unities with the Human Comedy. So that it is not surprising that those who live and love in an atmosphere of romantic ideals, and other interesting follies, should find irritation in the criticism of a creature so airily invulnerable, who can enjoy the fullest repute as a preacher without being under an obligation, until he convert the State, to endure the commonplace inconveniences of practice. They may, however, find consolation in the assurance that Mr. Shaw pays much more dearly in popularity for his contemptuous treatment of romance, whether it be the romance of sex, of polity, or of religion, than for any other of his intellectual persuasions. 6 And it is that derision of the romantic convention, latent in so many of his situations, that offends, rather than any direct assault upon it. Arms and the Man' is the most obvious and sustained affront he has perpetrated on the romance of sex. In Raina and her lover he puts romance on a pedestal in order to mock it the more effectively; and yet such treatment has probably alienated the sentimentalist far less than his ruthless ignoring of the romantic motive in many others of his plays. An attitude of amused acquiescence in the sweet conceit of sentiment is not the objective at which Mr. Shaw aims. He knows that the most romantic of us can laugh at romance without our allegiance thereto being in the least disturbed. But disturbance is his continual aim, the supplanting of complacent tolerance by disgust. He must be aware how much such an objective costs him in theatrical effect, how cold and lean all culminations seem which can make no appeal to inherent feeling. But theatrical effect is to him a very secondary consideration; his plays have all the modern improve'ments,' but not at the expense of their author's message. And so he is not content to let romance, that great grave goose, lay in its own way those golden eggs for him which are such treasures of humour, and posturing, and tender folly. That was Cervantes' way; and the fact that his lean |