H. L. Mencken

“ In such a home he finds himself starved of religion, which is the most clamorous need of his nature. With all his mother’s indomitable selfishness, but with pity instead of hatred as his master-passion, he pities the devil, takes his side, and champions him, like a true Covenanter, against the world. He thus becomes, like all genuinely religious men, a reprobate and an outcast. Once this is understood, the play becomes straightforwardly simple. ”

“ Popular opinion and himself to the contrary notwithstanding, Shaw is not a mere preacher. The function of the dramatist is not that of the village pastor. He has no need to exhort, nor to call upon his hearers to come to the mourners’ bench. All the world expects him to do is to picture human life as he sees it, as accurately and effectively as he can. Like the artist in color, form, or tone, his business is with impressions. ”

“ Into his home, by some mad, altruistic impulse, he brings Eugene Marchbanks, a moon-struck young man with the romantic ideals and day dreams of a medieval Edgar Allan Poe and the practical common-sense of an infant. Eugene is eighteen. He inhabits a world a mile or so above the pink clouds of the sunset and writes vague, immaterial verses of the sort that all of us invent and some of us set down in pen-and-ink when we are young. At the start, in all probability, Candida regards him as a nuisance. But by the time the play opens she has already lured him on to the rocks. ”

“ George Bernard Shaw, at the same task, produced Captain Bluntschli. Don Cesar is an idealist and a hero; Bluntschli is a sort of refined day laborer, bent upon earning his pay at the least possible expenditure of blood and perspiration. Inasmuch as no mere man—not even the soldier under analysis himself—could ever hope to pry into a fighting man’s mind and define and label his innermost shadows of thought and motive with absolute accuracy, there is no reason why we should hold Don Cesar to be a more natural figure than Captain Bluntschli. ”

“ In other words, Shaw, in attempting to bring the great conqueror down to date, has rather expatriated him. He is scarcely a Roman.
Cleopatra, on the contrary, is admirable. Shaw very frankly makes her an animal and her passion for Cæsar is the backbone of the play. She is fiery, lustful and murderous; a veritable she-devil; and all the while an impressionable, superstitious, shadow-fearing child. In his masterly gallery of women’s portraits—Mrs. Warren, Blanche Sartorius, Candida, Ann Whitefield and their company—Cleopatra is by no means the least. ”

“ If a play has what is known as a moral, it is the audience and not the playwright that formulates and voices it. A sermon without an obvious moral, well rubbed in, would be no sermon at all.
And so, if we divest ourselves of the idea that Shaw is trying to preach some rock-ribbed doctrine in each of his plays, instead of merely setting forth human events as he sees them, we may find his dramas much easier of comprehension. ”

“ Morell is staggered, not by Eugene’s frank avowal of his love for Candida, but by the other things he has said. What if it is true that she is stifled by the atmosphere of the Morell home? What if it is true that she has tired of being shadow and drudge to an obscure, over-earnest clergyman in a semi-slum and has turned her fancy toward the poet?
“It is easy, terribly easy,” he says pathetically, “to break a man’s faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man’s spirit is devil’s work. ”

“ It would be impossible to exaggerate the humor and delicacy of this little play. Napoleon, it must be remembered, is still a youngster, who has scarcely dared to confess to himself the sublime scope of his ambitions. But the man of Austerlitz and St. Helena peeps out, now and then, from the young general’s flashing eyes, and the portrait, in every detail, is an admirable one. Like Thackeray, Shaw is fond of considering great men in their ordinary everyday aspects. ”

“ If he would but remember the reiterated axiom that a dramatist’s purpose is to present a picture of life as he sees it, without reference to any particular moral conclusions, he would better enjoy and appreciate the play as a work of art. Playwrights of Shaw’s calibre do not think it necessary to plainly label every character or to reward their heroes and kill their villains in the last act. It is utterly immaterial whether Tanner is dragged into a marriage with Ann or escapes scot free. ”

“ In the dramas of George Bernard Shaw, which deal almost wholly with the current conflict between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, it is but natural that the characters should fall broadly into two general classes—the ordinary folks who represent the great majority, and the iconoclasts, or idol-smashers. Darwin made this war between the faithful and the scoffers the chief concern of the time, and the sham-smashing that is now going on, in all the fields of human inquiry, might be compared to the crusades that engrossed the world in thexvii middle ages. ”

“ By the same token, those plays which Shakespeare himself “wrote down” to the level of his audience have grown archaic in sentiment and character. Dramas like “Anthony and Cleopatra,” says Shaw, will nevermore be written, “nor relished by men in whose philosophy guilt and innocence, and, consequently, revenge and idolatry, have no meaning. Such men must rewrite all the old plays in terms of their own philosophy....” ”

“ To appreciate “The Devil’s Disciple,” for instance, a religious man would have to lift himself bodily from his accustomed rut of thought and look down upon himself from the same distance that separates him in his meditations from the rest of humanity. This, it is obvious, is possible only to man given to constant self-analysis and introspection—the 999th man in the thousand.
Even when the average spectator does not find himself the counterpart of a definite type in a Shaw play, he is confused by the handling of some of his ideals and ideas. ”

“ The play is such a gigantic, ponderous thing that any effort to summarize it is difficult. The central idea—that, in mating, the man is pursued by the woman—is one that we have seen Shaw employ in “Arms and the Man,” “The Philanderer,” and other plays. As he himself says, it is not a new conception. Shakespeare had it, though maybe unconsciously, and its rudiments appear in the works of other men. Schopenhauer made it classical. In “Man and Superman” Shaw uses it as an excuse for airing practically every radical doctrine in the modern repertoire. ”

“ Grace Tranfield and Julia Craven, young women of the period, agree that marriage is degrading and enslaving, and so join an Ibsen club, spout stale German paradoxes and prepare to lead the intellectual life. But before long both fall in love, and with the same man, and thereafter, in plain American, there is the devil to pay. ”

“ He laughs at honor, titles, the law, property, marriage, liberty, democracy, the golden rule and everything else that God-fearing folks hold sacred; he has a good word for Czolgosz; he gives directions for beating children; he curls his lip at civilization; he ventures the view that “every man over forty is a scoundrel.” And then, with all this cargo of nonconformity afloat in his hold, fate sends him sailing into a haven of staunch orthodoxy. ”

“ For a man to occupy to-day the position held by Cæsar at the beginning of the year 44 B.C. he would have to possess traits far different from those Shakespeare gave his hero. Shaw endeavors to draw a Cæsar with just such modern marks of heroism—to create a Roman with the attributes that might exalt a man, in this prosaic twentieth century, to the eminence attained by the immortal Julius 1900 years ago. ”

“ A man painting an Alpine scene endeavors to produce, not a mere record of each rock and tree, but an impression upon the observer like that he would experience were he to stand in the artist’s place and look upon the snow-capped crags. In music it is the same. Beethoven set out, with melody and harmony, to arouse the emotions that stir us upon pondering the triumphs of a great conqueror. ”

“ The play is well built and thoroughly balanced and mature. Its every scene shows that it is the work of a dramatist whose genius has been mellowed and whose hand has been made sure by experience. The action moves with that certain, natural air peculiar to many of Ibsen’s plays. The characters are not sketches, but definitive, finished portraits. They are not obvious types, perhaps, but even the poet, with all his extravagances, is strangely human.
The Rev. James Morell, Candida’s husband, is a Christian-socialist of a sort not uncommon on either side of the Atlantic. ”

“ The honest electors, misunderstanding Broadbent’s altruistic efforts for their welfare, get a great deal of innocent enjoyment out of his orations and a great deal more out of his honest efforts to deal with them as freeman to freeman. He offers to take a farmer’s pig home in his motor car. The car runs over the pig and, in addition, knocks out the window of the village china shop. “There is a jest in every line,” says the critic of the London Daily Mail. “The play exists for and by the comic spirit alone.” ”

“ There is one letter that he dare not read. It is a billet-doux from a woman to a man who is not her husband and it has been sent from Paris by a well-meaning blunderer that the husband may read it and learn. ”

“ I have set down certain human transactions and depicted certain human beings brought face to face with definite conditions, and I have tried to show them meeting these conditions as persons of their sort would meet them in real life. I have endeavored, in brief, to exhibit a scene from life as real people live it. Doubtless, there are lessons to be learned from this scene—lessons that may benefit real men and women if they are ever confronted with the conditions I have described. ”

“ Like a full-rigged ship before a spanking breeze, it cleaves deep into the waves, sending ripples far to port and starboard, and its giant canvases rise half way to the clouds, with resplendent jibs, sky-sails, staysails and studdingsails standing out like quills upon the fretful porcupine. It has a preface as long as a campaign speech; an interlude in three scenes, with music and red fire; and a complete digest of the German philosophers as an appendix. ”

“ In the most primitive type of melodrama, there is a villain to battle with the hero and a comic servant to stand in contrast with the tearful heroine. As we go up the scale, the types are less strongly marked, but in every play that, in the true sense, is dramatic, there is this same balancing of characters and action. ”

“ The ensuing scene between the two is a masterpiece of comedy and Richard Mansfield’s performances of the play have made it familiar to most American theater-goers. Bluntschli, as Shaw depicts him, is a soldier entirely devoid of the heroics associated in the popular imagination with men of war. He has no yearning to die for his country or any other country, and, after bullying his unwilling hostess with an unloaded revolver, he frankly confesses that he is hungry and sleepy, and that, as a general proposition, he prefers a good dinner to a forlorn hope. ”

“ But she is a nimble one, this patriot in skirts, and it seems for a while that he will have to play the dragoon and tear them from her bodice. Even when she yields and he has the papers in his hands, she is the victor. ”

“ Shaw himself is an Irishman, and no doubt the troubles of his native land are of some interest to him, despite his vigorous denial that he is a patriot. Probably the play indicates his subscription to the idea of many an Irishman whose emotionalism has been tempered by English common-sense: that Ireland must cease looking for relief without and seek it within. In so far as this is true, the play is dialectic. But first of all it is a farce by the dramatist whom one London critic, at least, calls “the best living writer of comedy.” ”

“ Warren’s Profession” and “Candida,” bear it supremely well.
It is the dramatist’s business, then, to record the facts of life as he sees them, that philosophers and moralists (by which is meant the public in meditative mood) may deduce therefrom new rules of human conduct, or observe and analyze old rules as they are exhibited in the light of practice. That the average playwright does not always do so with absolute accuracy is due to the fact that he is merely a human being. ”

“ What I mean is that the Norwegian is that model of practically every contemporary play-makerxxix worth considering, just as plainly as Molière was the model of Congreve, Wycherley, and Sheridan. A commanding personality, in literature as well as in statecraft, creates an atmosphere, and lesser men, breathing it, take on its creator’s characteristics.
Shaw himself, a follower of Ibsen, has shown variations sufficiently marked to bring him followers of his own. In all the history of the English stage, no man has exceeded him in technical resources nor in nimbleness of wit. ”

“ But the pretense is so shallow “that even in the theater, that last sanctuary of unreality, it imposes only on the inexperienced. In Shakespeare’s plays the woman always takes the initiative. In his problem plays and his popular plays alike the love interest is the interest of seeing the woman hunt the man down.”
And so, the hero of this new play, John Tanner (our old friend Juan Tenorio) is the pursued, and Doña Ana (Miss Ann Whitefield) is the pursuer. John is a being of most advanced and startling ideas. ”

“ Shaw explains that he wrote the play in response to a suggestion by A. B. Walkley, the dramatic critic of the London Times that he should tackle the subject of Don Juan. In his 37-page preface he traces, at length, the process of reasoning which led him to the conclusion that Juan, as he was depicted by the fathers, was a fraud and an impostor. In the business of mating, he says (after Schopenhauer) it is not the man but the woman that does the pursuing. Man’s function in life is that of food-getting. Woman’s is that of perpetuating the race. ”