21 FEBRUARY 1925, Page 10

MR. SHAW AND IMMORTALITY

" Those are pearls which were his eyes."

THE plays of Mr. George Bernard Shaw are at the present day perhaps nowhere so little performed as in London. It is therefore almost an event that Londoners should within a few weeks have had an opportunity of seeing so many of his plays. First came The Philanderer, at the Everyman, and now there are St. Joan at the Regent and the Macdona Players at the Chelsea Palace. This cycle includes over a dozen plays, nearly all of Mr. Shaw's earlier period ; they are the plays of the Edwardian cartoonist—the whole galaxy of his sparkling social satire. It is very interesting to see these comedies, once apparently almost incomprehensibly intellectual, played by these artists in the atmosphere of this particular theatre, at " Popular Prices " to packed houses. Neither the theatre nor the players nor the audience is highbrow, and we see at last the plays robbed of all preciosity and snobbery, and realize how much vigour there is in them and how ready we are for them at last.

Finally there has been the too brief season of Jitta's Atonement at the Grand at Putney--Mr. Shaw's transla- tion of his translator's play. A very pretty problem in influence and origin, this play presents, incidentally, a problem that, alas ! I can't discuss till a copy of Herr Trebitsch's play comes from Germany. You'd think some London bookseller would stock it temporarily, but you'd be wrong. Now, this list of Shaw pro- ductions might be nothing in Berlin, land no doubt: would mark the slack season in Stockholm, Munich, Prague or Budapest—the sort of time when theatre managers feel like putting on a safe draw. But here, to see so much Shaw sets us rather laboriously thinking.

Laboriously and also diffidently, partly because Mr.. Shaw has so obviously thought and said so much about himself, and partly because all this Middle-Europe popularity has its sinister side. Somewhere there are thick books, closely printed, and there are Theses written by the earnest for their Professorships and Doctorates. In these every conceivable aspect of Shaw must have been exhaustively discussed, with a collation of texts. and an immense bibliography. " The Telephone con-. versation in the works of George Bernard Shaw "' (remarkable absence of), " The Exit in Shaw." " Shaw's final Curtains," his punctuation (do they, do those spaced letters in German I wonder ?), his heroes, his heroines, his old men (" Polonianism in Shaw "), his First Acts and his Love Scenes. The only one that I really grudge is the large treatise that must inevitably have been written on " Domestic Servants in Shaw's plays of the Early and Middle Periods." (I should only have made an essay of it, of course, but it is the perfect subject.) There would be the waiter in You Never Can Tell and the footman who is brother to a duke in Fanny's First Play, Straker (I should have tried to argue him a failure) and, finally, the Parlourmaid in Back To Methuselah.

But these things, even if unread, get into the air. The commentator wields a terrible weapon. And yet, though there may be too much contemporary Shaw com- ment, I wish we had had a little more Shakespearean, if. only to help in the matter of " placing " Mr. Shaw before his time. Is it just possible that Shaw will be re- membered as a poet and a mystic ? It is possible, for instance, that his contemporaries looked upon Shakespeare as we look upon Shaw. It would be a reasonable view for a contemporary in whose mind Coriolanus and that pacifist tract Troilus and Cressida or Julius Caesar had particularly stuck, to see Shakespeare as a playwright certainly, but still more as a sociologist albeit an amusing dog, a man with no particular respect for any- body, who in his more serious moments could pitch in politics with a powerful spade. The historical plays all had their application once and so had those speculations on kings and other rulers of men. We have seen this sort of thing happen in our own time in the case of Ibsen. He used to be thought a realist, but to us now he is a romantic and a mystic. What lives of him is the sound of " Harps in the air " ; he brought a castle down on to the plush cloth of the sitting-room table, and harnessed the " white horses " of Rosmersholm to the village fly in which we sit trembling.

Did that happen to Shakespeare, and will it happen to Shaw ? When the ills are cured for which a dramatist's thoughts were medicinal, and when from time, the strength is out of both balsam and blister, then do we see the politician or the far-sighted social reformer only as a poet ?

" Those are pearls which were his eyes."

However, as far as we can see at the moment Shaw has not put poetry into all his plays, though some seem to me almost entirely poetic. Indeed, some of them seem to us now, technically, the lineal descendants of Ben Jonson. One of his commentators has remarked very ,truly that most of Shaw's characters are men and women with the inhibitions left out, that is to say they all live up to their principles or peculiarities.

And what is that but the principle of " The Humours " which was, as far as English literature is concerned, first formulated by Ben Jonson ? You postulated that one man's humour was gluttonous, another's avaricious, and a third's amorous, and these characters remained fixed—" Every Man in his Humour " to the end of the play. So all your attention could be devoted to the involutions of your plot, to the brilliance and neatness of your dialogue, and to a minute observation of contem- porary manners.

Some such process of fixing and freeing as Ben Jonson applied to his characters' appetites and emotions, Shaw performs for his personages' intellectual convictions. St. Joan, Tanner, Major Barbara, Ramsden, Higgins, and Julius Caesar have each had the brake taken off some intellectual or moral conviction by which they are, therefore, thereafter ruled unless overcome by an exterior force—Tanner by Anne Whitefield, for instance. She is an example of the rarer Shaw character who is ruled by an instinct set free.

But perhaps Julius Caesar should not have come into the list. For there are occasionally born into the world men and women with no brakes ; Napoleon was one of them ; •and Mr. Shaw wants to discuss whether or no Julius Caesar was another—or was Cleopatra, or were they both ? But this is one of Mr. Shaw's poetic plays and in it as in the others in that list—Androeles and the Lion, for instance, St. Joan and Heartbreak House—the people matter more than the ideas. And it is, I hazard, these plays, with their beauty, their grandeur and their magic, which will outlast medicinal plays whose use will pass with the abuses they ridicule. But if we decide this let us not be ungrateful. If they grow old it will be because they have done the work of cleansing us of this or that folly. If the satiric plays ever become so old-fashioned as to be tedious, may we live to see it !

A. WILLIAMS-ELLIS.