MR. BERNARD SHAW'S DRAMATIC CRITICISMS. "LIVERY writer of note whose
success has come to him -111 gradually lives his mellow years under the heavy fore- boding that some piratical American publisher will rake up the literary indiscretions of his youth, and present them to the world at no cost to himself in type that is only too clear and in covers that are only too attractive. The defective law of copyright makes this possible. Some authors, following the example of those who commit suicide rather than face the anxieties of a natural death, scuttle their own ship, as it were, as soon as the pirate heaves in sight Mr. Bernard Shaw, fearing the worst, as a man of his reputation is bound to do— we are only surprised that it has not happened sooner—has taken this violent course in his "Dramatic Opinions and Essays" (A. Constable and Co., 2 vole., 10s. 6d. net). He does not profess even to have rebind the dramatic criticisms of earlier years—he is too busy for that nowadays. He has simply said to Mr. James Huneker r—." Sink me the ship, Master Gunner. Let me fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain." In other words, Mr. Huneker has chosen the criticisms for republication, and written an heroic, gunner-like preface, full of explosions and boomings, which is, perhaps, suitable to so gallant an occasion. The criticisms were written for the Saturday Review between 1895 and 1898. We can only say that few men when the deck sinks under them, and they face the record of their past, have less intellectual reason than Mr. Shaw for crying peered. We shall have a general charge to make (or perhaps we should say to "confirm," as the common-sense of Mr. Shaw's countrymen has already made it) presently ; but for the moment it is enough to say that not one of these criticisms and essays is without something extremely well said, and is not gay reading from first to last. Mr. Shaw plainly said to himself :—" Unless criticism enlightens the dull and the idiotic it is unproductive labour, a treeless exercise in pedantry. How can British playgoers—or idiots—be induced to read my criticisms ? Only if I write more amusingly than the other critics." This he succeeded in doing beyond dispute. But it must have taken something out of him. He says that three years of the British theatre nearly killed him.
The chief thing to be remarked about these dramatic criti- cisms is that they supply one of the most notable examples of cause and effect modem literary history can show. Mr. Shaw not only had a theory that the British drama was wrong in its very foundations, but had a theory as to how it ought to be reconstructed. His theory of reconstruction was that playa ought to be written like those he has since written himself. Of course, he argued his point with enthusiasm. He was tremendously combative. He had no sweet reasonableness— except in the case of certain personal friends, as he admits— and he did not want to have any. Was a play the kind of play which Bernard Shaw was predestined to write, or was it not ? That was the only teat. Well, within about seven years of the conclusion of this series of criticisms the author of them had won a higher reputation for quality as a playwright than any English dramatist. His positiveness, with all its lopsidedness, and partly perhaps because of it, had triumphed. He had attacked the citadel (to change from the naval metaphor with which we began to a military one), and in seven years it had fallen. His method was Joshua's more or less. He had marched round the walls blowing his own trumpet.
Mr. Shaw's " apology " is perhaps as handsome a con- cession as he has ever made in his life. Any one who thinks he has been too roughly handled is invited to reflect on the things which Mr. Shaw did not say. No one need expect fairness from a man who speaks from a brief. That is all the 'consolation that can be offered to the victims. The result of the Shaw method is a strange medley of assorted criticisms, Though the principles are as plain as a pikestaff, we defy any one to foresee what authors will be made to illustrate what points. Mr. Pinero is tossed and gored repeatedly, whereas Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, whom we should have expected to find lying dead on the other side of the hedge at the end of the first chapter, in allowed to walk about the field in comparative safety. Shakespeare is raked fore and aft (though Mr. Shaw is an admirer of Shakespeare, as you discover when you have made a collection of the points be admires), but Ibsen is allowed a pontifical pre-eminence. With the help of such contortions, which we prefer to regard as merely personal whims, Mr. Shaw preached the perfectly sane doctrine that if human beings are represented on the stage at all, their actions should arise demonstrably out of human motives, and not be accounted for because a particular cupboard or a particular door exists in a particular place or because coincidences of arrival and departure are made possible by a very small room having a singular number of French windows and doors. The alteration of the whole course of people's lives by a single telegram he would never tolerate. All the heroic virtues and vices of the stage he laughed out of court; and be thought the sexual motive a ridiculously inadequate basis for plays. The "well-made play," as the phrase goes, provoked all his fury. His assaults, as we have said, have had a remarkable effect. They did not only serve epater les bourgeois. If they had not been true in substance they could not have succeeded. As it is, his principles control the management of the Court Theatre, and account for its success. The Court Theatre of to-day is a repertoire theatre and a school of acting of a kind that London has never had before. It would be less than just not to give Mr. Shaw credit for all this. The too mechanical stagecraft which he attacked was, and still is, only a slightly more refined form of the ineptitude of the callow author who, being incapable of making a catastrophe arise naturally out of the dialogue, is reduced to introducing it as the unexplained and unrelated work of some exterior force, some unclassical deus ex machinii, with the words: "But what is this strange feeling that creeps over me, &c." ? Moreover, Mr. Shaw, whether or not lie thinks that he is superior to Shakespeare —we have never been quite sure about this—has helped the cause of Shakespeare and prevented him from becoming, like Byron, "a household pet." Mr. Shaw boasts that when he began to write criticisms Shakespeare was a divinity, but now he has become a fellow-creature. It is certainly all to the good if Shakespeare is not ignorantly swallowed as having a sort of plenary.verbal inspiration. The change can only mean that he is read more, and therefore appreciated more. Another observation we would offer is that Mr. Shaw, like Hazlitt and Lamb and other old critics, but unlike most modern critics, described the acting as well as the construction of the play. This is worth thinking of. May not a similar practice have explained to some extent the influence of that unctuous but enthusiastic critic, Mr. Clement Scott, whom, by the way, Mr. Shaw deals with handsomely under a kind of most- favoured-friend clause ?
The gravamen of the charge againot Mr. Shaw is that though his principles banish stagy devices, the human motives which be substitutes for them are not after all very human. Mr. Shaw is conscious of the criticism. Directly or by implication he rebuts it several times in these volumes. " I am perfectly human," he seems to say. "Given my principles, how could I be anything else ? " We do not know how he could; we can only affirm that he is. Shakespeare, although be was not a Socialist—all the Elizabethans, indeed, whom Mr. Shaw preposterously derides—Thackeray, whom Mr. Shaw loathes, and all the great men whom it would be useless to enumerate, gave us likeable characters. We are not among those who think that Mr. Shaw is not a serious person. We think his intentions are very serious. He has written criticisms which conveyed valuable thoughts to boobies because he made boobies read them. Now the boobies are flocking to his plays, Fashion having decreed that one must go and laugh. If Mr. Shaw regards his plays as a vehicle of ideas—and we are sure that he does, because he is a serious person—he will invent characters whom dull, simple people will not only laugh at, but will respect and believe in. But can Mr. Shaw do it ? I8 he not in danger of producing a " well-made play" of his own in which the inadequate sex motive is employed as though it were adequate after all, only in an inverted sense, so that women pursue men instead of men women And is he not so abjectly afraid of showing that he has a heart—a too individualistic possession, we suppose—that he turns all compassion to gall He gains, no doubt, immense force as a dramatist in that he can say, truly—
"I never prayed for Dryads to haunt the woods again."
But how incalculable is his loss since he cannot add—
Mere welcome were the presence of hungering, thirsting men, Whose doubts we could unravel, whose hopes we could fulfil, Our wisdom tracing backward the river to the rilL"
After all, the drama must largely be built on conventions, and when we change those conventions we are apt to find plus pa change, plus c'est la minis chose. What are essentials are humanity, the sense of justice—well defined as a wider knowledge through love—and the sympathy of comprehension. The dramatist may have every gift of nature and of art, but wanting nothing but a human heart be wants all. "Spirits are not finely touched but to fine issues," and the fine issues are those which have their foundation in the common human emotions. Is it possible that those common human emotions may even yet develop in Mr. Shaw's art? If they do, who shall set a limit to his achievements on the stage ?
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