Mrs. Warrens Profession | Page 8

with real
circumstances, but with a set of conventions and assumptions half of
which do not exist off the stage, whilst the other half can either be
evaded by a pretence of compliance or defied with complete impunity
by any reasonably strong-minded person. Nobody can feel that such
conventions are really compulsory; and consequently nobody can
believe in the stage pathos that accepts them as an inexorable fate, or in
the genuineness of the people who indulge in such pathos. Sitting at
such plays, we do not believe: we make-believe. And the habit of
make-believe becomes at last so rooted that criticism of the theatre
insensibly ceases to be criticism at all, and becomes more and more a
chronicle of the fashionable enterprises of the only realities left on the
stage: that is, the performers in their own persons. In this phase the
playwright who attempts to revive genuine drama produces the
disagreeable impression of the pedant who attempts to start a serious
discussion at a fashionable at-home. Later on, when he has driven the
tea services out and made the people who had come to use the theatre
as a drawing-room understand that it is they and not the dramatist who
are the intruders, he has to face the accusation that his plays ignore
human feeling, an illusion produced by that very resistance of fact and
law to human feeling which creates drama. It is the deus ex machina
who, by suspending that resistance, makes the fall of the curtain an
immediate necessity, since drama ends exactly where resistance ends.

Yet the introduction of this resistance produces so strong an impression
of heartlessness nowadays that a distinguished critic has summed up
the impression made on him by Mrs Warren's Profession, by declaring
that "the difference between the spirit of Tolstoy and the spirit of Mr
Shaw is the difference between the spirit of Christ and the spirit of
Euclid." But the epigram would be as good if Tolstoy's name were put
in place of mine and D'Annunzio's in place of Tolstoy. At the same
time I accept the enormous compliment to my reasoning powers with
sincere complacency; and I promise my flatterer that when he is
sufficiently accustomed to and therefore undazzled by problem on the
stage to be able to attend to the familiar factor of humanity in it as well
as to the unfamiliar one of a real environment, he will both see and feel
that Mrs Warren's Profession is no mere theorem, but a play of instincts
and temperaments in conflict with each other and with a flinty social
problem that never yields an inch to mere sentiment.
I go further than this. I declare that the real secret of the cynicism and
inhumanity of which shallower critics accuse me is the unexpectedness
with which my characters behave like human beings, instead of
conforming to the romantic logic of the stage. The axioms and
postulates of that dreary mimanthropometry are so well known that it is
almost impossible for its slaves to write tolerable last acts to their plays,
so conventionally do their conclusions follow from their premises.
Because I have thrown this logic ruthlessly overboard, I am accused of
ignoring, not stage logic, but, of all things, human feeling. People with
completely theatrified imaginations tell me that no girl would treat her
mother as Vivie Warren does, meaning that no stage heroine would in a
popular sentimental play. They say this just as they might say that no
two straight lines would enclose a space. They do not see how
completely inverted their vision has become even when I throw its
preposterousness in their faces, as I repeatedly do in this very play.
Praed, the sentimental artist (fool that I was not to make him a theatre
critic instead of an architect!) burlesques them by expecting all through
the piece that the feelings of others will be logically deducible from
their family relationships and from his "conventionally unconventional"
social code. The sarcasm is lost on the critics: they, saturated with the
same logic, only think him the sole sensible person on the stage. Thus it

comes about that the more completely the dramatist is emancipated
from the illusion that men and women are primarily reasonable beings,
and the more powerfully he insists on the ruthless indifference of their
great dramatic antagonist, the external world, to their whims and
emotions, the surer he is to be denounced as blind to the very
distinction on which his whole work is built. Far from ignoring
idiosyncrasy, will, passion, impulse, whim, as factors in human action,
I have placed them so nakedly on the stage that the elderly citizen,
accustomed to see them clothed with the veil of manufactured logic
about duty, and to disguise even his own impulses from himself