CORRESPONDENCE.
"THE SHOWING UP OF BLANCO POSNET."
[To THE EDITOR Or TEE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—The performance of Mr. Shaw's new play at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin is over, and I expect a good many people must be feeling foolish,—the officials who advised the Lord- Lieutenant, for instance ; the gentlemen responsible for the Dublin daily papers ; and, above all, the Censor. For it appears that the play is not a blasphemy, but a sermon, a remarkably orthodox sermon, and so all the preliminary fuss was quite unnecessary. It is impossible to imagine why the Censor refused to license it, unless he is, as has been unkindly suggested, a militant atheist who wants to suppress religion. It is impossible to guess, except on the hypothesis of possession by a mischievous devil, how the Dublin Castle officials came to allow Lord Aberdeen to be mixed up in the controversy at all. The Dublin Press, which for days before- hand had been holding itself in leash ready to protest against all possible outrages to faith and morals, has, since the play was actually produced, been printing bad-tempered articles and accusing Mr. Shaw of downright meanness in pretending to be blasphemous when he was really quite pious, and thus obtaining a glorious advertisement. This is a little uncon- vincing, since, after all, it was not Mr. Shaw who refused to license the play ; and unless it is suggested that he bribed the Censor and Lord Aberdeen, it is hard to see how he is responsible for the advertisement. The Dublin public meanwhile, has passed from suspicious curiosity to an amazed but enthusiastic admiration of the play.
Mr. Shaw chose a great theme, perhaps the greatest of all possible themes : the working of the Divine Spirit upon the soul of an unwilling man. "It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks," said the Voice to St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Blanco Posnet, drunkard, libertine, thief, also kicked against the pricks and found the vanity of it. Mr. Shaw has seized the dramatic moment in the man's life, and laid bare for us the workings of his mind and will, when the Spirit finally conquers him. There is nothing original in such a theme. It has been reiterated by Christian preachers, crudely stated by converts at revival meetings, elaborated, under conditions similar to those in Mr. Shaw's play, by Bret Harte. There is nothing original either in the violent con- trast between the " rottenness " (I quote the word from the play) of Blanco Posnet's life and "the great game" (I quote again) to which God opens his eyes. There has always been a tendency among converts—we may instance St. Augustine and John Bunyan—to exaggerate their own degradation for the sake of emphasising this contrast. And Mr. Shaw in representing his hero as a foul-mouthed black- guard, living in a community composed of roughs and hypocrites, is simply doing for the sake of artistic con- trast what others before him have done for the sake of exalting the grace of God. The great merit and the true value of Mr. Shaw's play do not lie in the theme or in the circumstances, but in the fact that he has enabled us to realise the change, never actually sudden, in the sinner's view of the grace which saves him. Blanco Posnet has been in open and conscious rebellion against God. He regards religion literally as a binding, and its fetters as a degradation to the man who wears them. He is unwillingly "led captive," to use St. Paul's phrase, by God ; but at first he regards the action of the Divine Power as mean, the trick of a sharper. He conceives of God as one who exults in the successful accomplishment of what comes very near being an actual swindle. On the verge of delirium tremens he sees written across a rainbow these words : "I've got the cinch on you this time, Blanco Posnet." So a struggler for sanctity in the Nitrian desert might have conceived a devil exulting after a successful ruse. So Blanco Posnet, when he has been seduced into performing a fine action, thinks of God. But he passes from this phase, and we see him passing. There is a feeling of mysticism in his references to the woman for the sake of whose child he has put his neck into the halter. He refuses to believe that she is real. He speaks of her as "the rainbow woman." Finally, we have his fierce sermon with its recognition of the difference between "the great game" and "the rotten game "; with its breathless assertion that, "silly" as the life of the Gospel is, and must be, in this world, yet be who lives it even for a moment loses "the rotten feeling "; and the extraordinarily suggestive throw-back to the supreme mystery of all,—why must the innocent die ?
There are two other conversions,—we use the theological word deliberately. Mr. Shaw describes the process as "going soft." The Sheriff, a rude, strong man with an elementary sense of justice, is "softened." Feemy Evans, the prostitute who is prepared to swear away Blanco Posnet's life because he scorned her, is "softened" too. In neither of these eases do we see anything of the process. The effects are before our eyes, and we do not doubt the reality of the spiritual change, because we have understood exactly how it happened in the case of Blanco Posnet. It is in the presentation of his enlightenment that the real merit of the play lies, and this is well done,—so well done that we are not merely intensely interested in the working of the divine grace, but are deeply sympathetic all through with the man himself. It is a triumph for Mr. Shaw that we should sympathise, feel, with Blanco Posnet. He is all that most of us who saw the play in the Abbey Theatre are not. He is primitive, violent, simple, intellectually remote from scepticism. He has in him a certain forcefulness. He is direct in his logic, direct in his action. Nothing in life shades off for him. The world is mapped out black and white like a landscape under the full moon. An audience of barbarians, I think, would sympathise naturally and easily with such a man. It might have seemed unlikely beforehand that an audience of educated, civilised men and women would have felt with him ; but in fact they did. This is the high praise that must be given to Mr. Shaw's latest play.
The actors whom Mr. Yeats has gathered round him in the Abbey Theatre were put to a severe test when they were called upon to present The Showing up of Blanco Posnet. Nothing could have been more different from their accus- tomed emotional atmosphere than this "sermon in crude melodrama." We were given beforehand Mr. Yeats's Kathleen ni Houlihan, and afterwards Lady Gregory's Workhouse Ward. In both pieces the actors were at home. They breathed freely in the air of Irish political mysticism and subtly restrained Irish comedy. It is no disparagement of their powers to say that they were not at their best in Blanco Posnet. Mr. Fred O'Donovan did well as Blanco, but there was in his acting a certain evidence of the influence of the traditions of the English stage,—gestures and actions belonging to the con- vention of the theatre. It could scarcely be otherwise. Was it possible for an actor who gave us afterwards an almost perfect Michael Miskell in The Workhouse Ward to be quite original and unhampered in Blanco Posnet? Miss Sara Allgood was a successful, a very nearly quite successful, Feemy Evans ; but—perhaps the fault was not hers—she did not look the part. I missed the effect of the draggled finery and raddled cheeks which Mr. Shaw surely intended in this woman. She failed, too, to suggest that curious physical characteristic which the prophet Ezekiel, and after him Swinburne, noted in women of this class. Mr. Arthur Sinclair, as Elder Daniels, gave me the impression of being too sincere. He may have been right in his interpretation ; but the Elder, I imagine, was more blatantly a hypocrite. I was impressed most favourably with the management of the scenes of confusion where the crowd speaks together. Nothing could have been better than the driving out of the women from the Courthouse or the tumultuous expulsion of the juror Nestor. Indeed, it is wrong to find fault with the acting at all, and it is only because there was so much of it which was very good that I venture to touch what seemed to me faults.—I am,
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