171:1E LAUGH SARDONIC.* Mo. BERNARD Saaw's new volume of plays
serves merely to confirm the -impression left by all his later work, that he has long since withdrawn from all human society to inhabit a two. dimensional .werld peopled by goblins. To describe his fantasias, on, thiapleneas caricatures would be altogether wide of the mark, for the.easence of a.caricature is its resemblance to the original a similitude heightened, not impaired, by the overstatement • of one or more special characteristics. Nothing of the kind can be said of Mr. Shaw's inventions, which caper and prattle not even by the simply intelligible rule of contraries, but in a :manner so erratic that there is no means of inferring, and placing oneself at, the datum-point from which they were visualized—unless, as there is some reason to suspect, the .base of all Mr. Shaw's triangulations is nothing more than an overweening contempt for humanity which expresses itself by endowing his characters with the intellect of Bedlam.
But perhaps the explanation that he no longer meets any real people in daily life is too attractively easy a method of accounting for his peculiar vision as embodied in the -recent plays. It may be nearer the mark to say that these bear the manifest stamp of an, intercourse rigorously confined to persons who can .only be termed, in no derogatorysense, secondary—those whose chief function in life is the translation into one artistic medium or another of the doings, • passions, and experience of the noninterpretative mass of the community which,as oompared in complealty of consciousness with the artist, is unquestionably primary. But there can be no grosser error in psychology than to mistake the secondaries for primaries, and to represent the ordinary, intuitive, and .non-analytical man or woman in terms of the self-descriptive, restless, and easily . unbalanced technician, whose genuine personality is almost totally absorbed and consumed by his work, in proportion as that work is good of its kind, leaving little but the poorest of small change for daily affairs.
This mistake, -however,. Mr. Shaw makes over -and over again, and the simpler (superficially) the type which he wishes to counterfeit, the more distractingly obvious the divergence becomes. It is also responsible for the extreme lack of individuality in his dramatic conversations, which renders it almost impossible to follow or retain the different characters concerned in his dialogue, which in the worst literary sense is "no respecter of persons," but rattles on, sometimes with brilliance, rarely with truth,. and never with discrimination.
The present volume consists of one full-length play and. five trifles —not by any. means " light , as air," in execution at all . events, for although (with the exception of O'Flaherty, V.C., which aims at comedy) these are all broadly farcical in conception, a large proportion of the dialogue would hardly be tolerated in the least ambitious revue. What is one to make, for instance, of this sort of thing (Great Calherine)?— " Potiomkin—Have you had a college education, darling ? I have.
Beistaston--Certainly. I -am a Bachelor of Arts. Potion-Ilan—It is enough that you are a bachelor, darling : Catherine will supply thearts " a passage which might be explained away as an illustration of the Prime Minister's bailie.' humour, if it could not be :matched over and over again in contexts not susceptible of this indulgent interpretation : the " Admiral von Cockpits " and " General von Sohinkenburg," for instance, in The Inca of Perusa2em, the buffoonery in the same .play of the Princess who does not know how to use a telephone, or of the ex-doctor waiter who, on being reproved for bringing . lukewarm tea, proceeds from professional habit to takethe teapot's pulse, or the heavy-footed horseplay of Annajanaka.
The name-piece, Heartbreak House, which is described in a particularly long and discursive Preface as " cultured and leisured Europe before the war " (though the action of-the •play takes place, with a scrupulous regard for the unities, in war time), is a curious medley of harlequinacle and Lenten ,sermon, as bewildering in its way as Staindberg's Spook Sonata, without the eerie power of that distracted genius to grip the attention alike in eccentricity and commonplace. Possibly it might appear more intelligible in the round with living -mouthpieces to render the criss-cross of argument moreeasy to follow : on the printed page it resolves itself-simply into a trial of endurance between author and reader, in which the former oomes off all too -eaeily first, with all the honours except lucidity. The fact is that the latter, subconsciously preoccupied (till he abandons the attempt as hopeless) by the effort to make the characters square with some known concept of ordinary men and women, never has the glimmering of a chance, and when at last he realizes that the whole thing is a grotesque, a Bakst procession (without the element of beauty in freakishness) flatly profiled on a conventionalized background, it is too late to retrace the steps of. false impression and begin again with an unclouded mind.
No artist, in whatever medium and whatever the conventions he chooses, can afford to fling away the aid of illusion as Mr. Bernard Shaw deliberately does. The best-trained child, with the best will in the world, cannot be expected to perform the muscular feat of swallowing a neat powder without a dole of lubricating jam—yet this is the physical impossibility which Mr. Shaw exacts of the reader by sedulously stopping-out every human element of his personages with the exception of a few harsh surfaces which can be exploited for facile satire. In the result, the reader is ten times more critical of characters in which he is unable to believe than if his judgment were softened towards them by the atmosphere of reality.
Qui trop ernbeasse, trial &eine. In the Preface to The Inca of Perusalem Mr. Shaw, contrasting himself with the foolish mass of his countrymen who once regarded the Kaiser as a genuine danger, briefly declares : " I knew better." No phrase could better have expressed his handicap. To know better is not necessarily to know well—it may even be the exact opposite. When it comes to the presentation of humanity, it is a curse which genius itself can hardly suffice to compensate.
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