The New Republic/Volume 1/Number 1/A Change in Shaw
A Change in Shaw
Pygmalion, a romance in five acts, by G. Bernard Shaw. Presented at the Park Theatre, New York, Oct. 12, 1914.
IF a play has breath in its body, it lives outside as well as inside the theatre. Tragedy or fantasy, comedy or farce, it goes with us from the footlights to the street. It may fade, like a glance of understanding. It may be forgotten, like a sympathy outlived. But however fleeting its impression, it must, if it is to withstand criticism, persuade us that its allegiance is to life. It must, that is to say, survive the mere galvanic hour Like true eloquence in the orator, it must abide the morning after, in a world without glamor or enthrallment. And it will abide if it has awakened within ourselves that sanction to which dramatic method is simply the vivid aid.
Bernard Shaw has, of course, been singularly a dramatist of life. He has been blamed for using his characters as mouthpieces, and for decoying them merely to surprise or amuse us. The criticism is fair, in so far as he has served his purpose at the expense of his characters' individuality. People in real life are never entirely like people in Shavian plays. Their motives are not so exact. Their emotions are not so amusingly meretricious Their language is not so pellucidly logical. But where Shaw touches reality is in his dramatization of conventions and codes It is easy for us now to believe that we came honestly by our own mental receptivity, but a whole theatric generation has had the benefit of the sharpest critical intelligence of his age. Shaw received English-speaking audiences into a theatre cloyed with sentiment and muffled in tradition. He found them full of precious assumptions about character and circumstance to which it was a constant habit to defer. He sent people home with a new sense of their own principles and prejudices, as if they had endured a healthy though uninvited dispute. He gave to current morals a different and vastly more intelligible meaning, and did it through the challenged mind rather than through the mobile heart. He has, at any rate, up to the present, always raised expectancies as to social intention and perception which, despite any flippancy of situation, he has never failed exuberantly to fulfil.
Up to the present, however, for "Pygmalion" marks a sharp and vital change A thing to see, it is also a thing to laugh with and enjoy, a comedy of quite diverting skill. Coming from success in Germany and England, it is already established here as one of our most inviting plays But, facile in the theatre, laying springes for our laughter, it expires with the tenancy of one's chair
Consider, first, the slightness of "Pygmalion." The scene is darkest London. At its center, huddled in a rainstorm under the gaunt portico of St. Paul's in Covent Garden, sits a flower-girl, the trampled lily of Cockaigne To this guttersnipe, in the midnight shower, comes a brusque, fraternal gentleman, the man of hard words and gentle deeds. But, unlike his counterpart in "The Unsocial Socialist," this is a practical reformer, a phonetic expert, a wizard in vocables. In a few months, he muses loudly, he could give the guttersnipe the articulation and the soul of a duchess. Convert her speech, convert her manners—she'll be a lady as good as any of the land. He surveys her broodingly, thrusts a banknote at her, scowls at thanks, and disappears.
Something in this girl answers the clarion of Henry Higgins. She arrives next day to hire, but with his own bounty, his magic aid. He accepts her, but with consequences. Her father pursues, a crafty, jocular soul, minstrel of "the undeserving poor." For another banknote, however, he leaves his plastic girl to Henry Higgins, departing with a frank, unchristian wink. Eliza is thereupon washed, scrubbed and put in the forcing-bed, to be gingerly transplanted, after three months, for the social scrutiny of a Chelsea flat Eliza acts the human pianola to her master's anguish and delight He next ordains a garden party, a Gethsemane, and here Eliza triumphs The trick is accomplished, she's a lady, a penniless, beautiful woman on the professor's bachelor hands. He storms at the problem Eliza now presents, and she, passionately human, hates him for loving him. They exchange "brute" and "liar," create a situation, fly asunder, and later, after a burlesque frenzied chase, unite. The union is deferred for the reappearance of Eliza's father, now endowed by a funny-column American millionaire, and converted into a funny-column social reformer. The fatehr departs, to point a skit on the ascent to marriage via property, leaving Henty Higgins to expound Shaw's favorite crux, "I can't live with her, and I can't live without her."
Here, then, is a fantasy of gossamer texture, requiring for its reality a wealth of humor, of sympathy, of art. It is almost as if Shaw had been allured by the winsome muse of J. M. Barrie, only to be deserted, poor victim of inveterate intelligence, the moment that Eliza left her slum. It is not Eliza that is at fault, but the arid sympathy of Shaw. Forced, for lack of realizing her warm and touching possibilities, to see her as purely comic, Shaw had to make people respond by methods invented for the stage. She is bribed with chocolates and silks, and her bribery makes us laugh. She bewilders the stage housekeeper, and we smile. She upsets the "silly ass" at a British afternoon tea, and we grin. She ejects "bloody," and we roar We are then prepared for excruciating references to the "pre-digested cheese trust," speeches on "middle class morality" and fortunes juggled to suit theatric needs. But all the time we imagine a real Eliza, unlike this comic butt, who would have justified a very different mirth.
Farce, perhaps, is also worth our while. But one judges this is accidental farce. As comedy, at any rate, it is spurious. Shaw has stooped to fabricate a play. It is only fair, however, to ascribe some of this delinquency to the cast. It is hard to believe that any part could have survived the conscientious over-acting of Mr. Merivale as the professor. He kept jumping on imagination's toes. Mr. Edmund Gurney, on the other hand, awakened delighted appreciation as Eliza's father. If he captivated every soul in the theatre, it was by richest reference to life. I felt sorry when Mr. Gurney returned in the last act. He was set to spur a very jaded muse.
But if Mr. Gurney was the gem, Mrs. Campbell was the high and radiant star. Of autumn—if stars are seasonal—there was no more than the faintest sigh in her performance. Forbidden by the dramatist any excursion into her own opulent and seductive regions, she exquisitely declined to adapt Eliza Doolittle to her personal proclivities. Without verve, but with enveloping skill, she attained utter fidelity to the Cockney wench. As the flower-girl, the bullied pupil, the phonetic doll, the eventual woman—from seed to bud and bud to flower—she was fully and beautifully resourceful. In that part one might yearn to see a young creature of such pulsing humanity that one would turn to her for the poignancy of her springtime and the wonder of awakening sex. Yet here is a triumph without a single adventitious aid. Incidentally, Mrs. Campbell's voice was memorably lovely. There is for everyone a cadence in words like "moon" and "swoon," but never, never was any phrase so cadent as her Galetea's fluted "drop of booze."