SHAW AND SUPER-SHAW

Showing that, in Shaw, the Playwright Sometimes Betrays the Doctrinaire

Frank Moore Colby

Author of "Imaginary Obligations," etc.

SOME of the players in "The Philanderer," Mr. George Bernard Shaw's play, seem to misunderstand the nature of Shaw's vivacity. They believe, apparently, that it involves as much agility of the body as of the mind, and it is almost impossible at times to follow the author's lines, so engrossing are the arms and legs of the performers. No one on the stage ought ever to try to repeat a witty saying and vault over a sofa at the same time, for while each accomplishment is interesting by itself, when taken together they confuse the mind. In spite , of these mistaken, though generous, endeavors, arising perhaps from a certain distrust in the adequacy of Shaw himself for an evening's entertainment, they provide very fair sport.

TWENTY years ago when "The Philanderer" failed miserably in London, critics damned it for their usual contradictory reasons. It was crude and amateurish, said some; brilliant, but cynical, said others It was an attack on Ibsen; it was Ibsenesque. It was an outrageous violation of "art and decency." It mixed up farce and comedy and tragi-comedy. It was not a play at all, and the man who wrote it was advised never to try and write a play again. Shaw himself classed it among his "unpleasant" plays, saying that the fearful conditions it described were the result of the existing marriage contract. Being twenty years distant from all this and having forgotten most of it, we see the play for what it is—merely a fantastic, inconsequent bit of intellectual foolery. It is simply one of Shaw's ethical burlesques, which give the same pleasure as a Gilbert and Sullivan opera with the additional advantage of leaving an afterthought.

HERE is always an afterthought in a Shaw play, but it may not be the one demanded by Shaw himself. Indeed, it very seldom is. Few people, for example, will go home from "The Philanderer" in any deep trouble of mind over the condition of the marriage relations. For my part, I believe that in this, as in many other of his plays, the doctrine of original sin will account as well for the bad condition of the characters as the particular social institution, which it is Shaw's mission at the moment to explode. Charteris, the philanderer, for instance, doomed by the law of his nature to flit from one foolish woman to another—bored, tantalized, haunted by the fear of approaching satiety—would surely stan d no better chance under the m o s t benign system of promiscuity than if he were tied to a termagant like Julia. A sternly disciplined life, terminated rather early perhaps by a hanging, might for aught I know, do more for the true development of Charteris's soul than a career of Shavian sex - expansion. Yet Shaw, no doubt believed he was here applying his philosophy. Change the marriage laws, said he, and there would be an end to the philanderings of Charteris. So sublime his faith that "the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom." Elsewhere he has said, after Ibsen and Nietzsche:

HAVE you kept the commandments? Have you obeyed the law? Have you attended church regularly; paid your rents and taxes to Caesar; and contributed, in reason, to charitable institutions? It may be hard to do all these things; but it is still harder not to do them, as our ninety-nine moral cowards in the hundred know. And even a scoundrel can do them all and yet live a worse life than the smuggler, or the prostitute, who must answer 'No' all the way through the catechism."

Of course people cannot make all of their own morality. They must take some of it about as they find it.

"Nobody can afford the time to do it on all the points. The professional thinker may on occasion make his own morality and philosophy as the cobbler may make his boots; but the ordinary man of business must buy at the shop, so to speak, and put up with what.he finds on sale there, whether it exactly suits him or not, because he can neither make a morality for himself or do without one."

Shaw's "philosophy" is merely a compilation of the ideas in the air and its effect on his plays has been grossly exaggerated, especially by himself. For all his destructive explanations, he has never been able to restrict his plays to the purposes he professed to have in mind when writing them. Shaw the philosopher is not much more valuable than a file of the Index to Periodicals. Shaw the playwright, whose characters get out of hand, stand on their own feet, often give their author the lie, and express a hundred things not contemplated in his propaganda, is indispensable and will endure. Long after every one has forgotten his views on the inequality of incomes, marriage, sport, carnivorousness, eugenics, vivisection, bacteria, the "Titanic disaster, vaccination, the Life Force, moralistic sophistication, diabolism, and the Superman, every one will remember the waiter in "You Never Can Tell." Any active minded person could have picked up Shavianism in six weeks by the aid of a librarian, had Shaw never lived. No one could have found in the world the precise equivalent of. say, a half-dozen pages of "Candida."

THEREFORE, I have always believed that in writing plays he was swept clean out of himself, away from all journalistic, and Fabian, and after-dinner activities, away from the Shaw of cheap surprises, and easy verbal victories, and world saving formulas, into a sort of super-Shaw who took a holiday from all that and wrote in disobedience of the usual Shaw whom we see every little while in the newspapers. I believe the playwright has delightfully betrayed the doctrinaire.

Not to deny that the mere common or familiar Shaw is an exceedingly interesting, and perhaps a useful, person; and for us who have formed the pleasant habit of him it is on the whole very fortunate that he has never had even a momentary impulse toward a private life. We are glad to see him reappearing regularly as the bogey-man of the respectable, or writing letters on any subject to the London press, or scrubbing all political economists because he too has studied Jevons's theory of value, or frightening old gentlemen out of their wits with thoughts out of Nietzsche, or calling all doctors quacks and all surgeons murderers, and the home a cage, and marriage a muddle, or setting the members of a London club all to the right about and ordering some to the smoking-room as "congenitally incapable" of understanding anything.

N short no one with a proper sense of the dullness of "printed matter" would care to curtail in any way his public activities. I contend merely that the super-Shaw who writes the plays succeeds often in escaping the control of this dogmatic and rather limited public character. I believe when he writes a play he is, in a happy sense, out of his mind. The world in them is so much larger, more complex, mysterious and interesting than that which he complacently includes in his "philosophy." By this Platonic theory of inspiration I would account for the complete irrelevancy of his prefaces to anything that follows in his published plays. A Shaw preface is really an expression of contrition, as if he were to say in spite of the humanity of what follows, "I am after all my little dogmatic self."