Man and Superman and Three Other Plays (6 page)

It was as Punch, then, that I emerged from obscurity. All I had to do was to open my normal eyes, and with my utmost literary skill put the case exactly as it struck me, or describe the thing exactly as I saw it, to be applauded as the most humorously extravagant paradoxer in London. The only reproach with which I became familiar was the everlasting “Why can you not be serious”? Soon my privileges were enormous and my wealth immense. I had a prominent place reserved for me on a prominent journal every week to say my say as if I were the most important person in the kingdom. My pleasing toil was to inspect all the works of fine art that the capital of the world can attract to its exhibitions, its opera house, its concerts and its theatres. The classes patiently read my essays: the masses patiently listened to my harangues. I enjoyed the immunities of impecuniosity with the opportunities of a millionaire. If ever there was a man without a grievance, I was that man.

But alas! the world grew younger as I grew older: its vision cleared as mine dimmed: it began to read with the naked eye the writing on the wall which now began to remind me that age of spectacles was overtaking me. My opportunities were still there: nay, they multiplied tenfold; but the strength and youth to cope with them began to fail, and to need eking out with the shifty cunning of experience. I had to shirk the platform; to economize my health; even to take holidays. In my weekly columns, which I once filled from a For tunatus well that never ran dry or lost its sparkle so long as I pumped hard enough, I began to repeat myself; to fall into a style which, to my great peril, was recognized as at least partly serious; to find the pump tiring me and the water lower in the well; and, worst symptom of all, to reflect with little tremors on the fact that my magic wealth could not, like the money for which other men threw it away, be stored up against my old age. The younger generation, reared in an enlightenment unknown to my childhood, came knocking at the door too: I glanced back at my old columns and realized that I had timidly botched at thirty what newer men—Rudyard Kiplings, Max Beerbohms, Laurence Irvings
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and their contemporaries—do now with gay confidence in their cradles. I listened to their vigorous knocks with exultation for the race, with penurious alarm for my own old age. When I talked to this generation, it called me Mister, and, with its frank, charming humanity, respected me as one who had done good work in my time. Mr. Pinero wrote a long play to show that people of my age were on the shelf; and I laughed at him with the wrong side of my mouth.

It was at this bitter moment that my fellow citizens, who had previously repudiated all my offers of political service, contemptuously allowed me to become a vestryman
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-me, the author of “Widowers' Houses”! Then, like any other harmless useful creature, I took the first step rearward. Up to that fateful day I had never stopped pumping to spoon up the spilt drops of my well into bottles. Time enough for that when the well was empty. But now I listened to the voice of the publisher for the first time since he had refused to listen to me. I turned over my articles again; but to serve up the weekly paper of five years ago as a novelty—no: I had not yet fallen so low, though I see that degradation looming before me as an agricultural laborer sees the workhouse. So I said “I will begin with small sins: I will publish my plays.”

How! you will cry—plays! What plays? Let me explain.

One of the worst privations of life in London for persons of intellectual and artistic interests is the want of a suitable theatre. The existing popular drama of the day is quite out of the question for cultivated people who are accustomed to use their brains. I am fond of the theatre, and am, as intelligent readers of this preface will have observed, myself a bit of an actor. Consequently, when I found myself self coming across projects of all sorts for the foundation of a theatre which should be to the newly gathered intellectual harvest of the nineteenth century what Shakespear's theatre was to the harvest of the Renascence, I was warmly interested. But it soon appeared that the languid demand of a small and uppish class for a form of entertainment which it had become thoroughly accustomed to do without could never provide the intense energy necessary for the establishment of the New Theatre (we of course called everything advanced “the New”: vide “The Philanderer”). That energy could only be supplied by the genius of the actor and manager finding in the masterpieces of the New Drama its characteristic and necessary mode of expression, and revealing their fascination to the public. Clearly the way to begin was to pick up a masterpiece or two. Masterpieces, however, do not grow on the bushes. The New Theatre would never have come into existence but for the plays of Ibsen, just as the Bayreuth Festival Playhouse would never have come into existence but for Wagner's Nibelungen tetralogy. Every attempt to extend the repertory proved that it is the drama that makes the theatre and not the theatre the drama. Not that this needed fresh proof, since the whole difficulty had arisen through the drama of the day being written for the theatres instead of from its own inner necessity. Still, a thing that nobody believes cannot be proved too often.

Ibsen, then, was the hero of the new departure. It was in 1889 that the first really effective blow was struck by the production of “A Doll's House” by Mr. Charles Charrington and Miss Janet Achurch. Whilst they were taking that epoch making play round the world, Mr. Grein followed up the campaign in London with his “Independent Theatre.” It got on its feet by producing Ibsen's “Ghosts”; but its search for native dramatic masterpieces, pursued by Mr. Grein with the ardor and innocence of a foreigner, was so complete a failure that at the end of 1892 he had not produced a single original piece of any magnitude by an English author. In this humiliating national emergency, I proposed to Mr. Grein that he should boldly announce a play by me. Being an extraordinarily sanguine and enterprising man, he took this step without hesitation. I then raked out, from my dustiest pile of discarded and rejected manuscripts, two acts of a play I had begun in 1885, shortly after the close of my novel writing period, in collaboration with my friend Mr. William Archer.

Mr. Archer has himself described how I proved the most impossible of collaborators. Laying violent hands on his thoroughly planned scheme for a sympathetically romantic “well made play” of the type then in vogue, I perversely distorted it into a grotesquely realistic exposure of slum landlordism, municipal jobbery, and the pecuniary and matrimonial ties between it and the pleasant people of “independent” incomes who imagine that such sordid matters do not touch their own lives. The result was most horribly incongruous; for though I took my theme seriously enough, I did not then take the theatre more seriously, though I took it more seriously than it took itself. The farcical trivialities in which I followed the fashion of the times, some flagrant but artistic and amusing examples of which may be studied in Mr. Pinero's “Hobby Horse,” written a year later and now familiar in the repertory of Mr. John Hare, became silly and irritating beyond all endurance when intruded upon a subject of such depth, reality, and force as that into which I had plunged my drama. Mr. Archer, perceiving that I had played the fool both with his plan and my own theme, promptly disowned me; and the project, which neither of us had much at heart, was dropped, leaving me with two abortive acts of an unfinished and condemned play. Exhuming this as aforesaid seven years later, I saw that the very qualities which had made it impossible for ordinary commercial purposes in 1885, might be exactly those needed by the Independent Theatre in 1892. So I completed it by a third act; gave it the far-fetched mock-Scriptural title of “Widowers' Houses”; and handed it over to Mr. Grein, who launched it at the public in the Royalty Theatre with all its original tomfooleries on its head. It made a sensation out of all proportion to its merits or even its demerits; and I at once became infamous as a dramatist. The first performance was sufficiently exciting: the Socialists and Independents applauded me furiously on principle; the ordinary play-going first-nighters hooted me frantically on the same ground; I, being at that time in some practice as what is impolitely called a mob-orator, made a speech before the curtain; the newspapers discussed the play for a whole fortnight not only in the ordinary theatrical notices and criticisms, but in leading articles and letters; and finally the text of the play was published with an introduction by Mr. Grein, an amusing account by Mr. Archer of the original collaboration, and a long preface and several elaborate controversial appendices in the author's most energetically egotistical fighting style. The volume, forming number one of the Independent Theatre series of plays, is still extant, a curious relic of that nine days wonder; and as it contains the original text of the play with all its silly pleasantries, I can recommend it to collectors of quarto Hamlets, and of all those scarce and superseded early editions which the unfortunate author would so gladly annihilate if he could.

I had not achieved a success; but I had provoked an uproar; and the sensation was so agreeable that I resolved to try again. In the following year, 1893, when the discussion about Isbenism, “the New Woman,” and the like, was at its height, I wrote for the Independent Theatre the topical comedy called “The Philanderer.” But even before I finished it, it was apparent that its demands on the most expert and delicate sort of acting—high comedy acting—went quite beyond the resources then at the disposal of Mr. Grein. I had written a part which nobody but Mr. Charles Wyndham could act in a play which was impossible at the Criterion Theatre—a feat comparable to the building of Robinson Crusoe's first boat. I immediately threw it aside, and, returning to the vein I had worked in “Widowers' Houses,” wrote a third play, “Mrs. Warren's Profession,” on a social subject of tremendous force. That force justified itself in spite of the inexperience of the playwright. The play was everything that the Independent Theatre could desire—rather more, if anything, than it bargained for. But at this point I came upon the obstacle that makes dramatic authorship intolerable in England to writers accustomed to the freedom of the Press. I mean, of course, the Censorship.

In 1737, the greatest dramatist, with the single exception of Shakespear, produced by England between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century—Henry Fielding—devoted his genius to the task of exposing and destroying parliamentary corruption, then at its height. Walpole, unable to govern without corruption, promptly gagged the stage by a censorship which is in full force at the present moment. Fielding, driven out of the trade of Molière and Aristophanes, took to that of Cervantes; and since then the English novel has been one of the glories of literature, whilst the English drama has been its disgrace. The extinguisher which Walpole dropped on Fielding descends on me in the form of the Queen's Reader of Plays, a gentleman who robs, insults, and suppresses me as irresistibly as if he were the Tsar of Russia and I the meanest of his subjects. The robbery takes the form of making me pay him two guineas for reading every play of mine that exceeds one act in length. I do not want him to read it (at least officially: personally he is welcome): on the contrary, I strenuously resent that impertinence on his part. But I must submit in order to obtain from him an insolent and insufferable document, which I cannot read without boiling of the blood, certifying that in his opinion—his opinion!-my play “does not in its general tendency contain anything immoral or otherwise improper for the stage,” and that the Lord Chamberlain therefore “allows” its performance (confound his impudence!). In spite of this document he still retains his right, as an ordinary citizen, to prosecute me, or instigate some other citizen to prosecute me, for an outrage on public morals if he should change his mind later on. Besides, if he really protects the public against my immorality, why does not the public pay him for the service? The policeman does not look to the thief for his wages, but to the honest man whom he protects against the thief. And yet, if I refuse to pay, this tyrant can practically ruin any manager who produces my play in defiance of him. If, having been paid, he is afraid to license the play: that is, if he is more afraid of the clamor of the opponents of my opinions than of their supporters, then he can suppress it, and impose a mulct of £50 on everybody who takes part in a representation of it, from the gasman to the principal tragedian. And there is no getting rid of him. Since he lives, not at the expense of the taxpayer, but by blackmailing the author, no political party would gain ten votes by abolishing him. Private political influence cannot touch him; for such private influence, moving only at the promptings of individual benevolence to individuals, makes nice little places to job nice little people into instead of doing away with them. Nay, I myself, though I know that the Queen's Reader of Plays is necessarily an odious and mischievous official, and that I myself, if I were appointed to his post (which I shall probably apply for some day), could no more help being odious and mischievous than a ramrod could if it were stuck into the wheels of a steam engine, am loth to stir up the question lest the Press, having now lost all tradition of liberty, and being able to conceive no alternative to a Queen's Reader of Plays but a County Council's Reader or some other seven-headed devil to replace the oneheaded one, should make the remedy worse than the disease. Thus I cling to the Censorship as many Radicals cling to the House of Lords or the Throne, or as domineering women marry weak and amiable men who only desire a quiet life and whose judgment nobody respects, rather than masterful men. Until the nation is prepared to establish Freedom of The Stage on the same terms as we now enjoy Freedom of The Press, by allowing the dramatist and manager to perform anything they please and take the consequence as authors and editors do, I shall cherish the court reader as the apple of my eye. I once thought of organizing a Petition of Right from all the managers and authors to the Prime Minister; but as it was obvious that nine out of ten of these victims of oppression, far from daring to offend their despot, would promptly extol him as the most salutary of English institutions, and spread themselves with unctious flattery on the perfectly irrelevant question of his estimable personal character, I abandoned the notion. What is more, many of them, in taking this course, would be pursuing a sound business policy, since the managers and authors to whom the existing system has brought success have not only no incentive to change it for another which would expose them to wider competition, but have for the most part the greatest dread of the “New” ideas which the abolition of the Censorship would let loose on the stage. And so long live the Queen's Reader of Plays!