Man and Superman and Three Other Plays (19 page)

In the autumn of 1894 I spent a few weeks in Florence, where I occupied myself with the religious art of the Middle Ages and its destruction by the Renascence. 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 churches to see the windows of William 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 produce what it professes to love. When my subsequent 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
¹
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, Christian 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 reconciliation 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
Widowers' Houses
the clergyman, who never appears on the stage at all, is the only real opponent 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
^z
are treated by the dramatist as enemies to be deliberately and piously vilified. In such cheap wares I do not deal. Even in the propagandist dramas of the previous 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 quintessential drama from pre-Raphaelitism, medieval or 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 intelligibly 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
^aa
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 himself prosaically, and you find that he “writes like an angel and talks like poor Poll,”
²
and is himself the first to make that epigram at his own expense. Mr. Ruskin has told us clearly enough what is in the pictures 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 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, unpracticalness, which offered me a dramatic antagonist for the clear, bold, sure, sensible, benevolent, salutarily shortsighted Christian Socialist idealism. I availed myself of it in my drama
Candida,
the “drunken scene” in which has been much appreciated, I am told, in Aberdeen.
^ab
I purposely contrived the play in such a way as to make the expenses of representation insignificant; 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 think 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 Mansfield, 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, which is hardly more than a bravura piece to display the virtuosity of the two principal performers. Its stage rights were secured by a hasty performance at Croydon last year, when, affronting the stupefied inhabitants of that suburb in the guise of a blood-and-thunder historical drama, in which Napoleon's suggestion that the innkeeper should kill somebody 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 consideration 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 it wants, and quite another for the theatre to do what it wants. The demands of the fashionable 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 moment 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 expertness to put my plays before the public in my own way.

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 calculations 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 commissions, 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, baffle him as it baffles many professed critics; but in the beaten path of drama no unacted 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 commonplace people. Playwriting and theatrical management, 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 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 unscrupulous manager or author may aim simply at the maximum of profit with the minimum of risk. These are the extreme 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 leading man” on the stage of his country; all great newspapers are now edited dramatically; the records of our law courts show that the spread of dramatic consciousness 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 overstepped, and that the highest prestige, with a personal position of reasonable security and comfort, should be attainable in theatrical management by keeping the public 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 possible 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 pauperization 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 Museum 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 appreciate 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 managers 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 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 fashionable 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 disinterestedly; 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 forlorn hopes like the Independent and New Century Theatres their reason for existing. The committee plan, I may remind its critics, has been in operation in London for two hundred years in support of Italian opera.