V •r /N ^ /^. PLAYS: PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT PLAYS: PLEASANT AND UN- PLEASANT • BY BERNARD SHAW • THE SECOND VOL- UME, CONTAINING THE FOUR PLEASANT PLAYS BRENTANO'S • NEW YORK PUBLISHERS Copyright. 1898, h/ George Bernard Shaw Copyright, 1898, hy Herbert 8. Stone ^ Co. Copyright^ 1905, hy Brentano's CONTENTS ifHeater Arts Libra r>' PR. PAGE V XXI Preface . . . , . . Introduction . < ... Arms and the Man ..<.., 3 Candida ........ 83 The ]VLa.n of Destiny . c , . c 163 You Never Can Tell ..... 219 PREFACE Readers of the discourse with which the preceding yolume is prefaced will remember that I turned my hand to playwriting when a great deal of talk about " the New Drama/' and the actual establishment of a " New Theatre " (the Independent), threatened to end in the humiliating discovery that " the New Drama/' in Eng- land at least, was a figment of the revolutionary imagina- tion. This was not to be endured. I had rashly taken up the case; and rather than let it collapse, I manu- factured the evidence. Man is a creature of habit. You cannot write three plays and then stop. Besides, the " New " movement did not stop. In 1894, some public spirited person, then as now unknown to me, declared that the London theatres were intolerable, and financed a season of plays of the " new " order at the Avenue Theatre. There were, as available new dramatists, myself, discovered by the In- dependent Theatre (at my own suggestion) ; and Mr. John Todhunter, who had indeed been discovered before, but whose Black Cat had been one of the Independent's successes. Mr. Todhunter supplied A Comedy of Sighs. I, having nothing but " unpleasant " plays in my desk, hastily completed a first attempt at a pleasant one, and called it Arms and the Man. It passed for a success: that is, the first night was as brilliant as could be de- sired; and it ran from the 21st April to the 7th July. To witness it the public paid precisely ^1777:5:6, an average of £23:2:5 per representation (including nine matinees), the average cost of each representation being vi Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant about <£80. A publisher receiving ,£1700 for a book would have made a satisfactory profit on it: the loss to the Avenue management veas not far from <£5000. This, however, need not altogether discourage specula- tors in the " new " drama. If the people who were willing to pay j£l700 to see the play had all come within a fortnight instead of straggling in during twelve weeks — and such people can easily be trained to understand this necessity — the result would have been financially satisfactory to the management and at least flattering to the author. In America, where the play, after a fort- night in New York, took its place simply as an item in the repertory of Mr. Richard Mansfield, it has kept alive to this day. What the feelings of the unknown benefactor of the drama were on realizing that the net cost of running an " artistically successful " theatre on the ordinary London system was from <£400 to £500 a week, I do not know. As for me, I opened a very modest banking account, and became comparatively Conserva- tive in my political opinions. In the autumn of 1894 I spent a few weeks in Flor- ence, where I occupied myself with the religious art of the Middle Ages and its destruction by the Renasence. From a former visit to Italy on the same business I had hurried back to Birmingham to discharge my duties as musical critic at the Festival there. On that occasion there was a very remarkable collection of the works of our " pre-Raphaelite " painters at the public gallery. I looked at these, and then went into the Birmingham churclies to see the windows of AVilliam Morris and Burne-Jones. On the whole, Birmingham was more hopeful than the Italian cities ; for the art it had to shew me was the work of living men, whereas modern Italy had, as far as I could see, no more connection with Giotto than Port Said has with Ptolemy. Now I am no believer in the worth of any " taste " for art that cannot pro- duce what it professes to love. When my subsequent Preface vii visit to Italy found me practising the dramatist's craft, the time was ripe for the birth of a pre-Raphaelite play ; for religion was alive again, coming back upon men — even clergymen — with such power that not the Church of England itself could keep it out. Here my activity as a Socialist had placed me on sure and familiar ground. To me the members of the Guild of St. Matthew were no more " High Church clergymen," Dr. Clifford no more " an eminent Nonconformist divine," than I was to them " an infidel." There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it. We all had the same thing to say; and though some of us cleared our throats to say it by singing Secularist poems or republican hymns, we sang them to the music of " Onward, Chris- tian Soldiers " or Haydn's " God Preserve the Emperor." But unity, however desirable in political agitations, is fatal to drama, since every drama must be the artistic presentation of a conflict. The end may be reconcilia- tion or destruction, or, as in life itself, there may be no end; but the conflict is indispensable: no conflict, no drama. Now it is easy enough to dramatize the prosaic conflict of Christian Socialism with vulgar Unsocialism: for instance, in Widower's Houses the clergyman, who never appears on the stage at all, is the only real op- ponent of the slum landlord. But the obvious conflicts of unmistakeable good with unmistakeable evil can only supply the crude drama of villain and hero, in which some absolute point of view is taken, and the dissentients are treated by the dramatist as enemies to be deliber- ately and piously vilified. In such cheap wares I do not deal. Even in the propagandist dramas of the previ- ous volume I have allowed every person his or her own point of view, and have, I hope, to the full extent of my understanding of him, been as sympathetic with Sir George Crofts as with any of the more genial and popular characters in the present volume. To distil the quin- tessential drama from pre-Raphaelitism, medieval or viii Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant modern, it must be shewn in conflict with the first broken, nervous, stumbling attempts to formulate its own revolt against itself as it develops into something higher. A coherent explanation of any such revolt, addressed in- telligibly and prosaically to the intellect, can only come when the work is done, and indeed done with: that is to say, when the development, accomplished, admitted, and assimilated, is only a story of yesterday. But long before any such understanding is reached, the eyes of men begin to turn towards the distant light of the new age. Discernible at first only by the eyes of the man of genius, it must be concentrated by him on the speculum of a work of art, and flashed back from that into the eyes of the common man. Nay, the artist himself has no other way of making himself conscious of the ray: it is by a blind instinct that he keeps on building up his masterpieces until their pinnacles catch the glint of the unrisen sun. Ask him to explain him- self prosaically, and you find that he " writes like an angel and talks like poor Poll," and is himself the first to make that epigram at his own expense. Mr. Ruskin has told us clearly enough what is in the pic- tures of Carpaccio and Bellini: let him explain, if he can, where we shall be when the sun that is caught by the summits of the work of his favorite Tintoretto, of his aversion Rembrandt, of Mozart, of Beethoven and Wagner, of Blake and of Shelley, shall have reached the valleys. Let Ibsen explain, if he can, why the building of churches and happy homes is not the ultimate destiny of Man, and why, at the bidding of the younger generations, he must mount beyond it to heights that now seem unspeakably giddy and dreadful to him, and from which the first climbers must fall and dash themselves to pieces. He cannot explain it: he can only shew it to you as a vision in the magic glass of his art work; so that you may catch his presentiment and make what you can of it. And this is the function Preface ix that raises dramatic art above imposture and pleasure hunting, and enables the dramatist to be something more than a skilled liar and pandar. Here, then, was the higher, but vaguer, timider vision, and the incoherent, mischievous, and even ridiculous, un- practicalness, which offered me a dramatic antagonist for the clear, bold, sure, sensible, benevolent, salutarily shortsighted Christian Socialist idealism. I availed my- self of it in my drama Candida, the " drunken scene " in which has been much appreciated, I am told, in Aberdeen. I purposely contrived the play in such a way as to make the expenses of representation insig- nificant; so that, without pretending that I could appeal to a very wide circle of playgoers, I could reasonably sound a few of our more enlightened managers as to an experiment with half a dozen afternoon performances. They admired the play so generously that I tliink that if any of them had been young enough to play the poet, my proposal might have been acceded to, in spite of many incidental difficulties. Nay, if only I had made the poet a cripple, or at least blind, so as to combine an easier disguise with a larger claim for sympathy, something might have been done. Mr. Richard Mans- field, who had won distinction for my Arms and the Man in America by his impersonation of Captain Bluntschli, went so far as to put the play actually into rehearsal before he would confess himself beaten by the physical difficulties of the part. But they did beat him; and Candida did not see the footlights until last year, when my old ally the Independent Theatre, making a propagandist tour through the provinces with A Doll's House, added Candida to its repertory, to the great astonishment of its audiences. In an idle moment in 1895 I began the little scene called The Man of Destiny, Avhich is hardly more than a bravura piece to display the virtuosity of the two principal performers. Its stage rights were secured by X Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant a hasty performance at Croydon last year, when, affront- ing the stupefied inhabitants of that suburb in the guise of a blood-and-thunder historical drama, in which Na- poleon's suggestion that the innkeeper should kill some- body to provide him with red ink was received as a serious trait of the Corsican ogre, it drove my critical colleagues to the verge of downright mendacity — in fact, one or two went over it — to conceal the worst from the public, and spare the author's feelings. In the meantime I had devoted the spare moments of 1896 to the composition of two more plays, only the first of which appears in this volume. You Never Can Tell was an attempt to comply with many requests for a play in which the much paragraphed " brilliancy " of Arms and the Man should be tempered by some con- sideration for the requirements of managers in search of fashionable comedies for West End theatres. I had no difficulty in complying, as I have always cast my plays in the ordinary practical comedy form in use at all the theatres ; and far from taking an unsympathetic view of the popular demand for fun, for fashionable dresses, for a pretty scene or two, a little music, and even for a great ordering of drinks by people with an expensive air from an if-possible-comic waiter, I was more than willing to shew that the drama can humanize these things as easily as they, in undramatic hands, can dehumanize the drama. But it is one thing to give the theatre what its wants, and quite another for the theatre to do what it wants. The demands of the fash- ionable theatre are founded on an idealization of its own resources ; and the test of rehearsal proved that in making my play acceptable I had made it, for the mo- ment at least, impracticable. And so I reached the point at which, as narrated in the preface to the first volume, I resolved to avail myself of my literary ex- pertness to put my plays before the public in my own way. Preface xi It will be noticed that I have not been driven to this expedient by any hostility on the part of our managers. I will not pretend that the modern actor-manager's rare combination of talent as an actor with capacity as a man of business can in the nature of things be often associated with exceptional critical insight. As a rule, by the time a manager has experience enough given him to be as safe a judge of plays as a Bond Street dealer is of pictures, he begins to be thrown out in his cal- culations by the slow but constant change of public taste, and by his own growing Conservatism. But his need for new plays is so great, and the handful of accredited authors so little able to keep pace with their commis- sions, that he is always apt to overrate rather than to underrate his discoveries in the way of new pieces by new authors. An original work by a man of genius like Ibsen may, of course, baflSe him as it baffles many pro- fessed critics; but in the beaten path of drama no un- acted works of merit, suitable to his purposes, have been discovered; whereas the production, at great expense, of very faulty plays written by novices (not " backers ") is by no means an unknown event. Indeed, to anyone who can estimate, even vaguely, the complicated trouble, the risk of heavy loss, and the initial expense and thought involved by the production of a play, the ease with which dramatic authors, known and unknown, get their works performed must needs seem a wonder. Only, authors must not expect managers to invest many thousands of pounds in plays, however fine (or the reverse), which will clearly not attract perfectly com- monplace people. Playwriting and theatrical manage- ment, on the present commercial basis, are businesses like other businesses, depending on the patronage of great numbers of very ordinary customers. If the managers and authors study the wants of those customers they will succeed: if not, they will fail. A public-spirited manager, or author with a keen artistic conscience, may xii Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant choose to pursue his business with the minimum of profit and the maximum of social usefulness by keeping as close as he can to the highest marketable limit of quality, and constantly feeling for an extension of that limit through the advance of popular culture. An unscrupu- lous manager or author may aim simply at the maximum of profit with the minimum of risk. These are the ex- treme limits of our system, represented in practice by our first rate managements on the one hand, and the syndicates which exploit pornographic musical farces at the other. Between them there is plenty of room for most talents to breathe freely: at all events there is a career, no harder of access than any cognate career, for all qualified playwrights who bring the manager what his customers want and understand, or even enough of it to induce them to swallow at the same time a great deal of what they neither want nor understand (the public is touchingly humble in such matters). For all that, the commercial limits are too narrow for our social welfare. The theatre is growing in importance as a social organ. Bad theatres are as mischievous as bad schools or bad churches ; for modern civilization is rapidly multiplying the numbers to whom the theatre is both school and church. Public and private life become daily more theatrical: the modern Emperor is " the lead- ing man" on the stage of his country; all great news- papers are now edited dramatically; the records of our law courts show that the spread of dramatic conscious- ness is affecting personal conduct to an unprecedented extent, and affecting it by no means for the worse, except in so far as the dramatic education of the persons concerned has been romantic : that is, spurious, cheap and vulgar. In the face of such conditions there can be no question that the commercial limits should be over- stepped, and that the highest prestige, with a personal position of reasonable security and comfort, should be attainable in theatrical management by keeping the pub- Preface xiii lie in constant touch with the highest achievements of dramatic art. Our managers will not dissent to this: the best of them are so willing to get as near that position as they can without ruining themselves, that they can all point to honorable losses incurred through aiming " over the heads of the public," and are quite willing to face such a loss again as soon as a few popular successes enable them to afford it, for the sake of their reputation as artists. But even if it were pos- sible for them to educate the nation at their own private cost, why should they be expected to do it? There are much stronger objections to the pauperization of the public by private doles than were ever entertained, even by the Poor Law Commissioners of 1834, to the pauper- ization of private individuals by public doles. If we want a theatre which shall be to the drama what the National Gallery and British Museum are to painting and literature, we can get it by endowing it in the same way. The practical question then is, where is the State to find such a nucleus for a national theatre as was presented in the case of the National Gallery by the Angerstein collection, and in that of the British Mu- seum by the Cotton and Sloane collections? No doubt this is the moment for my old ally the Independent Theatre, and its rival the New Century Theatre, to invite attention by a modest cough. But though I ap- preciate the value of both, I perceive that they will be as incapable of attracting a State endowment as they already are of even uniting the supporters of " the New Drama." The proper course is to form an influential committee, without any actors, critics, or dramatists on it, and with as many persons of title as possible, for the purpose of approaching one of our leading man- agers with a proposal that he shall, under a guarantee against loss, undertake a certain number of afternoon performances of the class required by the committee, in addition to his ordinary business. If the committee is xiv Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant influential enough, the offer will be accepted. In that case, the first performance will be the beginning of a classic repertory for the manager and his company which every subsequent performance will extend. The formation of the repertory will go hand in hand with the discovery and habituation of a regular audience for it, like that of the Saturday Popular Concerts; and it will eventually become profitable for the manager to multiply the number of performances at his own risk. Finally it might become worth his while to take a second theatre and establish the repertory permanently in it. In the event of any of his classic productions proving a fashionable success, he could transfer it to his fash- ionable house and make the most of it there. Such managership would carry a knighthood with it; and such a theatre would be the needed nucleus for municipal or national endowment. I make the suggestion quite dis- interestedly; for as I am not an academic person, I should not be welcomed as an unacted classic by such a committee; and cases like mine would still leave fore- lorn hopes like the Independent and New Century The- atres their reason for existing. The committee plan, I may remind its critics, has been in operation in Lon- don for two hundred years in support of Italian opera. Returning now to the actual state of things, it will be seen that I have no grievance against our theatres. Knowing quite well what I was doing, I have heaped difficulties in the way of the performance of my plays by ignoring the majority of the manager's customers — nay, by positively making war on them. To the actor I have been much more considerate, using all my cun- ning to enable him to make the most of his methods; but though I have facilitated his business, I have occa- sionally taxed his intelligence very severely, making the stage effect depend not only on nuances of execution quite beyond the average skill produced by the routine of the English stage, in its present condition, but upon Preface xv a perfectly simple and straightforward conception of states of mind which still seem cynically perverse to most people, or on a goodhumoredly contemptuous or profoundly pitiful attitude towards ethical conceptions which seem to them validly heroic or venerable. It is inevitable that actors should suffer more than any other class from the sophistication of their consciousness by romance; and my conception of romance as the great heresy to be rooted out from art and life — as the root of modern pessimism and the bane of modern self- respect, is far more puzzling to the performers than it is to the pit. The misunderstanding is complicated by the fact that actors, in their demonstrations of emo- tion, have made a second nature of stage custom, which is often very much out of date as a representation of contemporary life. Sometimes the stage custom is not only obsolete, but fundamentally wrong: for instance, in the simple case of laughter and tears, in which it deals too liberally, it is certainly not based on the fact, easily enough discoverable in real life, *;hat tears in adult life are the natural expression of happiness, as laughter is at all ages the natural recognition of de- struction, confusion, and ruin. When a comedy of mine is performed, it is nothing to me that the spectators laugh — any fool can make an audience laugh. I want to see how many of them, laughing or grave, have tears in their eyes. And this result cannot be achieved, even by actors who thoroughly understand my purpose, except through an artistic beauty of execution unattainable with- out long and arduous practice, and an effort which my plays probably do not seem serious enough to call forth. Beyond the difficulties thus raised by the nature and quality of my plays, I have none to complain of. I have come upon no ill will, no inaccessibility, on the part of the very few managers with whom I have discussed them. As a rule, I find that the actor-manager is over-sanguine, because he has the artist's habit of underrating the force xvi Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant of circumstances and exaggerating the power of the talented individual to prevail against them ; whilst I have acquired the politician's habit of regarding the in- dividual^ however talented, as having no choice but to make the most of his circumstances. I half suspect that those managers who have had most to do with me, if asked to name the main obstacle to the performance of my plays, would unhesitatingly and unanimously reply " The author." And I confess that though as a matter of business I wish my plays to be performed, as a matter of instinct I fight against the inevitable misrepre- sentation of them with all the subtlety needed to conceal my ill will from myself as well as from the manager. The real difficulty, of course, is the incapacity for serious drama of thousands of playgoers of all classes whose shillings and half guineas will buy as much in the market as if they delighted in the highest art. But with them I must frankly take the superior position. I know that many managers are wholly dependent on them, and that no manager is wholly independent of them ; but I can no more write what they want than Joachim can put aside his fiddle and oblige a happy company of beanf casters with a marching tune on the German con- certina. They must keep away from my plays: that is all. There is no reason, however, why I should take this haughty attitude towards those representative critics whose complaint is that my plays, though not unenter- taining, lack the elevation of sentiment and seriousness of purpose of Shakespear and Ibsen. They can find, under the surface brilliancy for which they give me credit, no coherent thought or sympath)'^, and accuse me, in various terms and degrees, of an inhuman and freakish wantonness ; of preoccupation with " the seamy side of life; " of paradox, cynicism, and eccentricity, reducible, as some contend, to a trite formula of treating bad as good, and good as bad, important as trivial, and trivial as important, serious as laughable, and laughable Preface xvii as serious, and so forth. As to this formula I can only say that if any gentleman is simple enough to think that even a good comic opera can be produced by it, I invite him to try his hand, and see whether anything remotely resembling one of my plays will result. I could explain the matter easily enough if I chose ; but the result would be that the people who misunderstand the plays would misunderstand the explanation ten times more. The particular exceptions taken are seldom more than symptoms of the underlying fundamental disagree- ment between the romantic morality of the critics and the realistic morality of the plays. For example, I am quite aware that the much criticized Swiss officer in Arms and the Man is not a conventional stage soldier. He suffers from want of food and sleep; his nerves go to pieces after three days under fire, ending in the horrors of a rout and pursuit; he has found by experi- ence that it is more important to have a few bits of chocolate to eat in the field than cartridges for his revolver. When many of my critics rejected these cir- cumstances as fantastically improbable and cynically unnatural, it was not necessary to argue them into com- mon sense: all I had to do was to brain them, so to speak, with the first half dozen military authorities at hand, beginning with the present Commander in Chief. But when it proved that such unromantic (but all the more dramatic) facts implied to them a denial of the existence of courage, patriotism, faith, hope, and charity, I saw that it was not really mere matter of fact that was at issue between us. One strongly Liberal critic, who had received my first play with the most generous encouragement, declared, when Arms and the Man was produced, that I had struck a wanton blow at the cause of liberty in the Balkan Peninsula by mentioning that it was not a matter of course for a Bulgarian in 1885 to wash his hands every day. My Liberal critic no doubt saw soon afterwards the squabble, reported all xviii Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant through Europe, between StambouilofF and an eminent lady of the Bulgarian court who took exception to his neglect of his fingernails. After that came the news of his ferocious assassination, and a description of the room prepared for the reception of visitors by his widow, who draped it with black, and decorated it with photographs of the mutilated body of her husband. Here was a suffi- ciently sensational confirmation of the accuracy of my sketch of the theatrical nature of the first apings of western civilization by spirited races just emerging from slavery. But it had no bearing on the real issue between my critic and myself, which was, whether the political and religious idealism which had inspired the rescue of these Balkan principalities from the despotism of the Turk, and converted miserably enslaved provinces into hopeful and gallant little states, will survive the general onslaught on idealism which is implicit, and indeed ex- plicit, in Arms and the Man and the realistic plays of the modern school, lor my part I hope not; for ideal- ism, which is only a flattering name for romance in politics and morals, is as obnoxious to me as romance in ethics or religion. In spite of a Liberal Revolution or two, I can no longer be satisfied with fictitious morals and fictitious good conduct, shedding fictitious glory on overcrowding, disease, crime, drink, war, cruelty, infant mortality, and all the other commonplaces of civilization which drive men to the theatre to make foolish pretences that these things are progress, science, morals, religion, patriotism, imperial supremacy, national greatness and all the other names the newspapers call them. On the other hand, I see plenty of good in the world working itself out as fast as the idealist will allow it; and if they would only let it alone and learn to respect reality, which would include the beneficial exercise of respecting themselves, and incidentally respecting me, we should all get along much better and faster. At all events, I do not see moral chaos and anarchy as the alternative Preface xix to romantic convention; and I am not going to pre- tend that I do to please the less clear-sighted people who are convinced that the world is only held together by the force of unanimous, strenuous, eloquent, trumpet- tongued lying. To me the tragedy and comedy of life lie in the consequences, sometimes terrible, sometimes lu- dicrous, of our persistent attempts to found our insti- tutions on the ideals suggested to our imaginations by our half-satisfied passions, instead of on a genuinely scientific natural history. And with that hint as to what I am driving at, I withdraw and ring up the curtain. INTRODUCTION To the irreverent — and which of us will claim entire exemption from that comfortable classification? — there is something very amusing in the attitude of the orthodox criticism toward Bernai-d Shaw, He so obviously disre- gards all the canons and unities and other Jiings which every well-bred dramatist is bound to respect that his work is really unworthy of serious criticism (orthodox). Indeed he knows no more about the dranuitic art than, ac- cording to his own story in "^'The Man of Destiny," Napo- leon at Tavazzano knew of the Art of War. But both men were successes each in his way — the latter won vic- tories and the former gained audiences, in the very teeth of the accepted theories of war and the theatre. Shaw does not know that it is unpardonable sin to have his char- acters make long speeches at one another, apjiarently thinking tliat this embargo applies only to long speeches which consist mainly of bombast and rhetoric. There never was an author who showed less predilection for a specific medium by which to accomplish his results. He recognized, early in his days, many things awry in the world and he assumed the task of mundane reformation with a confident spirit. It seems such a small job at twenty to set the times aright. He began as an Essay- ist, but who reads essays now-a-days? — he then turned novelist with no better success, for no one would read such preposterous stuff as he chose to emit. He only succeeded in proving that absolutely rational men and women — al- though he has created few of the latter — can be most ex- tremely disagreeable to our conventional way of thinking. xxii Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant As a last resort, he turned to the stage, not that he cared for the dramatic art, for no man seems to care less about "Art for Art's sake," being in this a perfect foil to his brilliant compatriot and contemporary, Wilde. He cast his theories in dramatic forms merely because no other course except silence or physical revolt was open to him. For a long time it seemed as if this resource too was doomed to fail him. But finally he has attained a hearing and now attempts at suppression merely serve to advertise their victim. It will repay those who seek analogies in literature to compare Shaw with Cervantes. After a life of heroic en- deavor, disappointment, slavery, and poverty, the author of '' Don Quixote " gave the world a serious work which caused to be laughed off the world's stage forever the final ves- tiges of decadent chivalry. The institution had long been outgrown, but its vernac- ular continued to be the speech and to express the thought "of the world and among the vulgar," as the quaint, old novelist puts it, just as to-day the novel intended for the consumption of the unenlightened must deal with peers and millionnaires and be dressed in stilted language. Marvellously he succeeded, but in a way he least intended. We have not yet, after so many years, deteraiined whether it is a work to laugh or cry over. " It is our joyfullest modern book," says Carlyle, while Landor thinks that ** readers who see nothing more than a burlesque in *Don Quixote' have but shallow appreciation of the work." Shaw in like manner comes upon the scene when many of our social usages are outworn. He sees the fact, an- nounces it, and we burst into guffaws. The continuous laughter which greets Shaw's plays arises from a real contrast in the point of view of the dramatist and his audiences. When Pinero or Jones describes a whimsical situation we never doubt for a moment that the author's point of view is our own and that the abnormal predicament of his characters appeals to him in the same light as to his Introduction xxiii audience. With Shaw this sense of community of feeling is wholly lacking. He describes things as he sees them, and the house is in a roar. Who is right.'' If we were really using our own senses and not gazing through the glasses of convention and romance and make-believe, should we see things as Shaw does.'' Must it not cause Shaw to doubt his own or the public's sanity to hear audiences laughing boisterously over tragic situations ? And yet, if they did not come to laugh, they would not come at all. Mockery is the price he must pay for a hearing. Or has he calculated to a nicety the power of reaction } Does he seek to drive us to aspiration by the portrayal of sordidness, to disinter- estedness by the picture of selfishness, to illusion by dis- illusionment .'' It is impossible to believe that he is unconscious of the humor of his dramatic situations, yet he stoically gives no sign. He even dares the charge, ter- rible in proportion to its truth, which the most serious of us shrinks from — the lack of a sense of humor. Men would rather have their integrity impugned. In " Arms and the Man " the subject which occupies the dramatist's attention is that survival of barbarity — mili- tarism — which raises its horrid head from time to time to cast a doubt on the reality of our civilization. No more hoary superstition survives than that the donning of a uni- form changes the nature of the wearer. This notion pervades society to such an extent that when we find some soldiers placed upon the stage acting rationally, our con- ventionalized senses are shocked. The only men who have no illusions about war are those who have recently been there, and, of course, Mr. Shaw, who has no illusions about anything. It is hard to speak too highly of " Candida." No equally subtle and incisive study of domestic relations exists in the English drama. One has to turn to George Meredith's "The Egoist" to find such character dissection. The central note of the play is, that with the true woman. xxiv Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant weakness which appeals to the maternal instinct is more powerful than strength which offers protection. Candida is quite unpoetic, as, indeed, with rare exceptions, women are prone to be. They have small delight in poetry, but are the stuff of which poems and dreams are made. The husband glorying in his strength but convicted of his weak- ness, the poet pitiful in his physical impotence but strong in his perception of truth, the hopelessly de-moralized manufacturer, the conventional and hence emotional typist make up a group which the drama of any language may be challenged to rival. In "The Man of Destiny" the object of the dramatist is not so much the destruction as the explanation of the Napoleonic tradition, which has so powerfully influenced generation after generation for a century. However the man may be regarded, he was a miracle. Shaw shows that he achieved his extraordinary career by suspending, for himself, the pressure of the moral and conventional atmos- phere, while leaving it operative for others. Those who study this play — extravaganza, that it is — will attain a clearer comprehension of Napoleon than they can get from all the biographies. "You Never Can Tell" offers an amusing study of the play of social conventions. The 'Hwins" illustrate the dis- concerting effects of that perfect frankness which would make life intolerable. Gloria demonstrates the power- lessness of reason to overcome natural instincts. The idea that parental duties and functions can be fulfilled by the light of such knowledge as man and woman attain by intuition is brilliantly lampooned. Crampton, the father, typifies the common superstition that among the privileges of parenthood are inflexibility, tyranny, and respect, the last entirely regardless of whether it has been deserved. The waiter, William, is the best illustration of the man ''who knows his place" that the stage has seen. He is the most pathetic figure of the play. One touch of verisi- militude is lacking; none of the guests gives him a tip. Introduction xxv yet he maintains his urbanity. As Mr. Shaw has not yet visited America he may be unaware of the improbability of this situation. To those who regard Hterary men merely as purveyors of amusement for people who have not wit enough to entertain themselves, Ibsen and Shaw, Maeterlinck and Gorky must remain enigmas. It is so much pleasanterto ignore than to face unpleasant realities — to take Riverside Drive and not Mulberry Street as the exponent of our life and the expression of our civilization. These men are the sappers and miners of the advancing army of justice. The audience which demands the truth and despises the con- temptible conventions that dominate alike our stage and our life is daily growing. Shaw and men like him — if in- deed he is not absolutely unique — will not for the future lack a hearing. M. ARMS AND THE MAN ARMS AND THE MAN ACT I Night. A lady's bedchamber in Bulgaria, in a small town near the Dragoman Pass. It is late in November in the year 1885, and through an open window with a little balcony on the left can be seen a peak of the Balkans, wonderfully white and beautiful in the starlit snow. The interior of the room is not like anything to be seen in the east of Europe. It is half rich Bulgarian, half cheap Viennese. The counterpane and hangings of the bed, the window curtains, the little carpet, and all the ornamental textile fabrics in the room are oriental and gorgeous: the paper on the walls is occidental and paltry. Above the head of the bed, which stands against a little wall cutting off the right hand corner of the room diagonally, is a painted ivooden shrine, blue and gold, with an ivory image of Christ, and a light hanging be- fore it in a pierced metal ball suspended by three chains. On the left, further forward, is an ottoman. The wash- stand, against the wall on the left, consists of an enamelled iron basin with a pail beneath it in a painted metal frame, and a single towel on the rail at the side. A chair near it is Austrian bent wood, with cane seat. The dressing table, between the bed and the window, is an ordinary pine table, covered with a cloth of many colors, but with an expensive toilet mirror on it. The door is on the right; and there is a chest of drawers be- 3 4 Arms and the Man Act I tween the door and the bed. This chest of drawers is also covered by a variegated native cloth, and on it there is a pile of paper backed novels, a box of chocolate creams, and a miniature easel, on which is a large pho- tograph of an extremely handsome officer, whose lofty bearing and magnetic glance can be felt even from the portrait. The room is lighted by a candle on the chest of drawers, and another on the dressing table, with a box of matches beside it. The window is hinged doorwise and stands wide open, folding back to the left. Outside a pair of wooden shut- ters, opening outwards, also stand open. On the bal- cony, a young lady, intensely conscious of the romantic be uty of the night, and of the fact that her own youth and beauty is a part of it, is on the balcony, gazing at the snowy Balkans. She is covered by a long mantle of furs, worth, on a moderate estimate, about three times the furniture of her room. Her reverie is interrupted by her mother, Catherine Petkoff, a woman over forty, imperiously energetic, with magnificent black hair and eyes, who might be a very splendid specimen of the wife of a mountain farmer, but is determined to be a Viennese lady, and to that end wears a fashionable tea gown on all occasions. Catherine {entering hastily, full of good news^. Raina — (she pronounces it Rah-eena, with the stress on the ee) Raina — (she goes to the bed, expecting to find Raina there) Why, where — (Raina looks into the room.) Heavens! child, are you out in the night air in- stead of in your bed ? You'll catch your death. Louka told me you were asleep. Raina (coming in). I sent her away. I wanted to be alone. The stars are so beautiful ! What is the matter ? Catherine. Such news. There has been a battle ! Raina (her eyes dilating). Ah! (She throws the Act I Arms and the Man 5 cloak on the ottoman, and comes eagerly to Catherine in her nightgown, a pretty garment, but evidently the only one she has on.) Catherine. A great battle at Slivnitza! A victory! And it was won by Sergius. Raina (with a cry of delight). Ah! {Rapturously.) Oh, mother! {Then, with sudden anxiety) Is father safe? Catherine. Of course: he sent me the news. Ser- gius is the hero of the hour, the idol of the regiment. Raina. Tell me, tell me. How was it ! {Ecstati- cally.) Oh, mother, mother, mother! {Raina pulls her mother down on the ottoman; and they kiss one another frantically.) Catherine {with surging enthusiasm) . You can t guess how splendid it is. A cavalry charge — think of that! He defied our Russian commanders — acted with- out orders — led a charge on his own responsibility — headed it himself — was the first man to sweep through their guns. Can't you see it, Raina; our gallant splen- did Bulgarians with their swords and eyes flashing, thundering down like an avalanche and scattering the wretched Servian dandies like chaff. And you — you kept Sergius waiting a year before you would be be- trothed to him. Oh, if you have a drop of Bulgarian blood in your veins, you will worship him when he comes back. Raina. What will he care for my poor little worship after the acclamations of a whole army of heroes? But no matter: I am so happy — so proud! {She rises and walks about excitedly.) It proves that all our ideas were real after all. Catherine {indignantly). Our ideas real ! What do you mean? Raina. Our ideas of what Sergius would do — our patriotism — our heroic ideals. Oh, what faithless little creatures girls are ! — I sometimes used to doubt whether 6 Arms and the Man Act I they were anj-thing but dreams. When I buckled on Sergius's sword he looked so noble: it was treason to think of disillusion or humiliation or failure. And yet — and yet — (Quickly.) Promise me you'll never tell him. Catherine. Don't ask me for promises until I know what I am promising. Rain A. Well, it came into my head just as he was holding me in his arms and looking into my eyes, that perhaps we only had our heroic ideas because we are so fond of reading Byron and Pushkin, and because we were so delighted with the opera that season at Bucharest. Real life is so seldom like that — indeed never, as far as I knew it then. (Remorse fully.) Only think, mother, I doubted him : I wondered whether all his heroic quali- ties and his soldiership might not prove mere imagination when he went into a real battle. I had an uneasy fear that he might cut a poor figure there beside all those clever Russian officers. Catherine. A poor figure ! Shame on you ! The Servians have Austrians officers who are just as clever as our Russians ; but we have beaten them in every battle for all that. Raina (laughing and sitting down again). Yes, I was only a prosaic little coward. Oh, to think that it was all true — that Sergius is just as splendid and noble as he looks — that the world is really a glorious world for women who can see its glory and men who can act its romance ! What happiness ! what unspeakable fulfil- ment! Ah! (She throws herself on her knees beside her mother and flings her arms passionately round her. They are interrupted hy the entry of Louka, a hand- some, proud girl in a pretty Bulgarian peasant's dress with double apron, so defiant that her servility to Raina is almost insolent. She is afraid of Catherine, but even with her goes as far as she dares. She is just now excited like the others; but she has no sympathy for" Act I Arms and the Man 7 Raina's raptures and looks contemptuously at the ecsta- sies of the two before she addresses them.) LouKA. If you please^ madam, all the windows are to be closed and the shutters made fast. They say there may be shooting in the streets. (Raina and Catherine rise together, alarmed.) The Servians are being chased right back through the pass ; and they say they may run into the town. Our cavalry will be after them ; and our people will be ready for them you may be sure, now that they are running away. (She goes out on the bal- cony and pulls the outside shutters to; then steps back into the room.) Raina. I wish our people were not so cruel. What glory is there in killing wretched fugitives ? Catherine (business-like, her housekeeping instincts aroused). I must see that everything is made safe down- stairs. Raina (to Louka). Leave the shutters so that I cart just close them if I hear any noise. Catherine (authoritatively , turning on her way to the door). Oh, no, dear, you must keep them fastened. You would be sure to drop off to sleep and leave them open. Make them fast, Louka. LouKA. Yes, madam. (She fastens them.) Raina. Don't be anxious about me. The moment I hear a shot, I shall blow out the candles and roll myself up in bed with my ears well covered. Catherine. Quite the wisest thing you can do, my love. Good-night. Raina. Good-night. (They kiss one another, and Raina's emotion comes back for a moment.) Wish me joy of the happiest night of my life — if only there are no fugitives. Catherine. Go to bed, dear; and don't think of them. (She goes out.) Louka (secretly, to Raina). If you would like the shutters open, just give them a push like this. (She^ 8 Arms and the Man Act I pushes them: they open: she pulls them to again.) One of them ought to be bolted at the bottom; but the bolt's gone. Raina (with dignity, reproving her). Thanks, Louka; but we must do what we are told. (Louka makes a grimace.) Good-night. Louka (carelessly). Good-night. (She goes out, swaggering.) (Raina, left alone, goes to the chest of drawers, and adores the portrait there with feelings that are beyond all expression. She does not kiss it or press it to her breast, or shew it any mark of bodily affection; but she takes it in her hands and elevates it like a priestess.) Raina (looking up at the picture with worship). Oh, I shall never be unworthy of you any more, my hero — never, never, never. (She replaces it reverently, and selects a novel from the little pile of books. She turns over the leaves dreamily; finds her page; turns the book inside out at it; and then, with a happy sigh, gets into bed and prepares to read herself to sleep. But before abandoning herself to fiction, she raises her eyes once more, thinking of the blessed reality and murmurs) My hero ! my hero ! (A distant shot breaks the quiet of the night outside. She starts, listening; and two more shots, much nearer, follow, startling her so that she scrambles out of bed, and hastily blows out the candle on the chest of drawers. Then, putting her fingers in her ears, she runs to the dressing-table and blows out the light there, and hurries back to bed. The room is now in darkness: nothing is visible but the glimmer of the light in the pierced ball before the image, and the starlight seen through the slits at the top of the shutters. The firing breaks out again : there is a startling fusillade quite close at hand. Whilst it is still echoing, the shutters disap- pear, pulled open from without, and for an instant the rectangle of snowy starlight flashes out with the figure of a man in black upon it. The shutters close immedi- Act I Arms and the Man 9 ately and the room is dark again. But the silence isi now broken by the sound of panting. Then there is a scrape; and the f.ame of a match is seen in the middle of the room.) Rain A {crouching on the bed). Who's there? (The match is out instantly.) Who's there? Who is that? A Man's Voice {iii the darkness, subduedly, but threateningly). Sh — sh ! Don't call out or you'll be shot. Be good; and no harm will happen to you. {She is heard leaving her bed, and making for the door.) Take care, there's no use in trying to run away. Remem- ber, if you raise your voice my pistol will go off. {Com- mandingly.) Strike a light and let me see you. Do you hear? {Another moment of silence and darkness. Then she is heard retreating to the dressing-table. She lights a candle, and the mystery is at an end. A man of about 85, in a deplorable plight, bespattered rvith mud and blood and snow, his belt and the strap of his revolver case keeping together the torn ruins of the blue coat of a Servian artillery officer. As far as the candlelight and his unwashed, unkempt condition make it possible to judge, he is a man of middling stature and undistinguished appearance, with strong neck and shoulders, a roundish, obstinate looking head covered with short crisp bronze curls, clear quick blue eyes and good brows and mouth, a hopelessly prosaic nose like that of a strong-minded baby, trim soldierlike carriage and energetic manner, and with all his wits about him in spite of his desperate predica- ment — even with a sense of humor of it, without, how- ever, the least intention of trifling with it or throwing away a chance. He reckons up what he can guess about Raina — her age, her social position, her character, the extent to which she is frightened — at a glance, and con- tinues, more politely but still most determinedly) Excuse my disturbing you; but you recognise my uniform — Servian. If I'm caught I shall be killed. {Deter- minedly.) Do you imderstand that? 10 Arms and the Ma,n Act I Raina. Yes. Man. Well, I don't intend to get killed if I can help it. {Still more determinedly.) Do you understand that? (He locks the door with a snap.) Raina {disdainfully). I suppose not. {She draws herself up superbly, and looks him straight in the face, saying with emphasis) Some soldiers, I know, are afraid of death. Man {with grim goodhumor) . All of them, dear lady, all of them, believe me. It is our duty to live as long as we can, and kill as many of the enemy as we can. Now if you raise an alarm Raina {cutting him short). You will shoot me. How do you know that I am afraid to die? Man {cunningly). Ah; but suppose I don't shoot you, what will happen then ? Why, a lot of your cavalry — the greatest blackguards in your army — will burst into this pretty room of yours and slaughter me here like a pig; for I'll fight like a demon: they shan't get me into the street to amuse themselves with: I know what they are. Are you prepared to receive that sort of company in your present undress? {Raina, suddenly conscious of her nightgown, instinctively shrinks and gathers it more closely about her. He watches her, and adds, pitilessly) It's rather scanty, eh? {She turns to the ottoman. He raises his pistol instantly, and cries) Stop ! {She stops.) Where are you going? Raina {with dignified patience). Only to get my -cloak. Man {darting to the ottoman and snatching the cloak). A good idea. No: I'll keep the cloak: and you will take care that nobody comes in and sees you without it. This is a better weapon than the pistol. {He throws the pistol down on the ottoman.) Raina {revolted). It is not the weapon of a gentle- man ! Man. It's good enough for a man with only you to Act I Arms and the Man 11 stand between him and death. (As they look at one another for a moment, Raina hardly able to believe that even a Servian officer can be so cynically and selfishly unchivalrous, they are startled by a sharp fusillade in the street. The chill of imminent death hushes the man's voice as he adds) Do you hear? If you are going to bring those scoundrels in on me you shall receive them as you are. (Raina meets his eye with unflinching scorn. Suddenly he starts, listening. There is a step outside. Someone tries the door, and then knocks hurriedly and urgently at it. Raina looks at the man, breathless. He throws up his head with the gesture of a man who sees that it is all over with him, and, dropping the manner which he has been assuming to intimidate her, flings the cloak to her, exclaiming, sincerely and kindly) No use: I'm done for. Quick! wrap yourself up: they're coming! Raina (catching the cloak eagerly). Oh, thank you. (She wraps herself up with great relief. He draws his sabre and turns to the door, waiting.) L,ovKA (outside, knocking). My lady, my lady ! Get up, quick, and open the door. Raina (anxiously). What will you do? Man (grimly). Never mind. Keep out of the way. It will not last long. Raina (impulsively). I'll help you. Hide yourself, oh, hide yourself, quick, behind the curtain. (She seizes him by a torn strip of his sleeve, and pulls him towards the window.) Man (yielding to her). There is just half a chance, if you keep your head. Remember: nine soldiers out of ten are born fools. (He hides behind the curtain, looking out for a moment to say, finally) If they find me, I promise you a fight — a devil of a fight! (He dis- appears. Raina takes off the cloak and throws it across the foot of the bed. Then with a sleepy, disturbed air, she opens the door. Louka enters excitedly.) LouKA. A man has been seen climbing up the water- 12 Arms and the Man Act I pipe to your balcony — a Servian. The soldiers want to search for him; and they are so wild and drunk and furious. My lady says you are to dress at once. Raina (as if annoyed at being disturbed). They shall not search here. Why have they been let in ? Catherine (coming in hastily). Raina, darling, are you safe.'' Have you seen anyone or heard anything.'' Raina. I heard the shooting. Surely the soldiers will not dare come in here.'' Catherine. I have found a Russian officer, thank Heaven: he knows Sergius. (Speaking through the door to someone outside.) Sir, will you come in now! My daughter is ready. (A young Russian officer, in Bulgarian uniform, en- ters, sword in hand.) The Officer (with soft, feline politeness and stiff military carriage). Good evening, gracious lady; I ara sorry to intrude, but there is a fugitive hiding on the balcony. Will you and the gracious lady your mother please to withdraw whilst we search.'' Raina (petulantly). Nonsense, sir, you can see that there is no one on the balcony. (She throws the shut- ters wide open and stands with her back to the curtain where the man is hidden, pointing to the moonlit bal- cony. A couple of shots are fired right under the win- dow, and a bullet shatters the glass opposite Raina, who winks and gasps, but stands her ground, whilst Catherine screams, and the officer rushes to the balcony.) The Officer (on the balcony, shouting savagely down to the street). Cease firing there, you fools; do you hear? Cease firing, damn you. (He glares down for a moment; then turns to Raina, trying to resume his polite manner.) Could anyone have got in without your knowl- edge. Were you asleep.'' Raina. No, I have not been to bed. The Officer (impatiently, coming back into the room). Your neighbours have their heads so full of run- Act I Arms and the Man 13 away Servians that they see them everywhere. (Po~ liteh/.) Gracious lady^ a thousand pardons. Good-night. (Military bow, which Raina returns coldly. Another to Catherine, who follows him out. Raina closes the shut- ters. She turns and sees Louka, who has been watching the scene curiously.) Raina. Don't leave my mother, Louka, whilst the soldiers are here. {Louka glances at Raina, at the otto- man, at the curtain; then purses her lips secretively, laughs to herself, and goes out. Raina follows her tv the door, shuts it behind her with a slam, and locks it violently. The man im?nediately steps out from behind the curtain, sheathing his sabre, and dismissing the dan- ger from his mind in a businesslike way.) Man. a narrow shave; but a miss is as good as a mile. Dear young lady, your servant until death. I wish for your sake I had joined the Bulgarian army in- stead of the Servian. I am not a native Servian. Raina (haughtily). No, you are one of the Aus- trians who set the Servians on to rob us of our national liberty, and who officer their army for them. We hate them ! Man. Austrian ! not I. Don't hate me, dear young lady. I am only a Swiss, fighting merely as a profes- sional soldier. I joined Servia because it was nearest to me. Be generous : you've beaten us hollow. Raina. Have I not been generous ? Man. Noble! — heroic! But I'm not saved yet. This particular rush will soon pass through; but the pursuit will go on all night by fits and starts. I must take my chance to get off during a quiet interval. You don't mind my waiting just a minute or two, do you? Raina. Oh, no: I am sorry you will have to go into danger again. (Motioning towards ottoman.) Won'f. you sit — (She breaks off with an irrepressible cry of alarm as she catches sight of the pistol. The man, all' nerves, shies like a frightened horse.) 14 Arms and the Man a