MRS. WARREN [bewildered] But—
VIVIE Wait a moment: I’ve not done. Tell me why you continue your business now that you are independent of it. Your sister, you told me, has left all that behind her. Why don’t you do the same?
MRS. WARREN Oh, it’s all very easy for Liz: she likes good society, and has the air of being a lady. Imagine me in a cathedral town! Why, the very rooks in the trees would find me out even if I could stand the dulness of it. I must have work and excitement, or I should go melancholy mad. And what else is there for me to do? The life suits me: I’m fit for it and not for anything else. If I didn’t do it somebody else would; so I don’t do any real harm by it. And then it brings in money; and I like making money. No: it’s no use: I can’t give it up—not for anybody. But what need you know about it? I’ll never mention it. I’ll keep Crofts away. I’ll not trouble you much: you see I have to be constantly running about from one place to another. You’ll be quit of me altogether when I die.
VIVIE No: I am my mother’s daughter. I am like you: I must have work, and must make more money than I spend. But my work is not your work, and my way not your way. We must part. It will not make much difference to us; instead of meeting one another for perhaps a few months in twenty years, we shall never meet: that’s all.
MRS. WARREN [her voice stifled in tears] Vivie: I meant to have been more with you: I did indeed.
VIVIE It’s no use, mother: I am not to be changed by a few cheap tears and entreaties any more than you are, I dare say.
MRS. WARREN [wildly] Oh, you call a mother’s tears cheap.
VIVIE They cost you nothing; and you ask me to give you the peace and quietness of my whole life in exchange for them. What use would my company be to you if you could get it? What have we two in common that could make either of us happy together?
MRS. WARREN [lapsing recklessly into her dialect] We’re mother and daughter. I want my daughter. I’ve a right to you. Who is to care for me when I’m old? Plenty of girls have taken to me like daughters and cried at leaving me; but I let them all go because I had you to look forward to. I kept myself lonely for you. You’ve no right to turn on me now and refuse to do your duty as a daughter.
VIVIE [jarred and antagonized by the echo of the slums in her mother’s voice] My duty as a daughter! I thought we should come to that presently. Now once for all, mother, you want a daughter and Frank wants a wife. I don’t want a mother; and I don’t want a husband. I have spared neither Frank nor myself in sending him about his business. Do you think I will spare you?
MRS. WARREN [violently] Oh, I know the sort you are—no mercy for yourself or anyone else. I know. My experience has done that for me anyhow: I can tell the pious, canting, hard, selfish woman when I meet her. Well, keep yourself to yourself: I don’t want you. But listen to this. Do you know what I would do with you if you were a baby again—aye, as sure as there’s a Heaven above us?
VIVIE Strangle me, perhaps.
MRS. WARREN No: I’d bring you up to be a real daughter to me, and not what you are now, with your pride and your prejudices and the college education you stole from me—yes, stole: deny it if you can: what was it but stealing? I’d bring you up in my own house, so I would.
VIVIE [quietly] In one of your own houses.
MRS. WARREN [screaming] Listen to her! listen to how she spits on her mother’s grey hairs! Oh, may you live to have your own daughter tear and trample on you as you have trampled on me. And you will: you will. No woman ever had luck with a mother’s curse on her.
VIVIE I wish you wouldn’t rant, mother. It only hardens me. Come: I suppose I am the only young woman you ever had in your power that you did good to. Don’t spoil it all now.
MRS. WARREN Yes. Heaven forgive me, it’s true; and you are the only one that ever turned on me. Oh, the injustice of it, the injustice, the injustice! I always wanted to be a good woman. I tried honest work; and I was slave-driven until I cursed the day I ever heard of honest work. I was a good mother; and because I made my daughter a good woman she turns me out as if I was a leper. Oh, if I only had my life to live over again! I’d talk to that lying clergyman in the school. From this time forth, so help me Heaven in my last hour, I’ll do wrong and nothing but wrong. And I’ll prosper on it.
VIVIE Yes: it’s better to choose your line and go through with it. If I had been you, mother, I might have done as you did; but I should not have lived one life and believed in another. You are a conventional woman at heart. That is why I am bidding you good-bye now. I am right, am I not?
MRS. WARREN [taken aback] Right to throw away all my money!
VIVIE No: right to get rid of you? I should be a fool not to? Isn’t that so?
MRS. WARREN [sulkily] Oh, well, yes, if you come to that, I suppose you are. But Lord help the world if everybody took to doing the right thing! And now I’d better go than stay where I’m not wanted. [She turns to the door.]
VIVIE [kindly] Won’t you shake hands?
MRS. WARREN [after looking at her fiercely for a moment with a savage impulse to strike her] No, thank you. Good-bye.
VIVIE [matter-of factly] Good-bye. [MRS. WARREN goes out, slamming the door behind her. The strain on VIVIE’s face relaxes; her grave expression breaks up into one of joyous content; her breath goes out in a half sob, half laugh of intense relief. She goes buoyantly to her place at the writing-table; pushes the electric lamp out of the way; pulls over a great sheaf of papers; and is in the act of dipping her pen in the ink when she finds FRANK’s note. She opens it unconcernedly and reads it quickly, giving a little laugh at some quaint turn of expression in it. ] And goodbye, Frank. [She tears the note up and tosses the pieces into the wastepaper basket without a second thought. Then she goes at her work with a plunge, and soon becomes absorbed in her figures.]10
CANDIDA
PREFACE
READERS OF THE DISCOURSE with which the preceding volume is prefaced will remember that I turned my hand to playwriting when a great deal of talk about “the New Drama,” and the actual establishment of a “New Theatre” (the Independent), threatened to end in the humiliating discovery that “the New Drama,” in England at least, was a figment of the revolutionary imagination. This was not to be endured. I had rashly taken up the case; and rather than let it collapse, I manufactured the evidence.
Man is a creature of habit. You cannot write three plays and then stop. Besides, the “New” movement did not stop. In 1894, some public spirited person,y then as now unknown to me, declared that the London theatres were intolerable, and financed a season of plays of the “new” order at the Avenue Theatre. There were, as available new dramatists, myself, discovered by the Independent Theatre (at my own suggestion); and Mr. John Todhunter, who had indeed been discovered before, but whose Black Cat had been one of the Independent’s successes. Mr. Todhunter supplied A Comedy of Sighs. I, having nothing but “unpleasant” plays in my desk, hastily completed a first attempt at a pleasant one, and called it Arms and the Man. It passed for a success: that is, the first night was as brilliant as could be desired ; and it ran from the 2 1st April to the 7th July. To witness it the public paid precisely £ 1777:5:6, an average of £ 23:2:5 per representation (including nine matinees), the average cost of each representation being about £80. A publisher receiving £1700 for a book would have made a satisfactory profit on it: the loss to the Avenue management was not far from £5000. This, however, need not altogether discourage speculators in the “new” drama. If the people who were willing to pay £1700 to see the play had all come within a fortnight instead of straggling in during twelve weeks—and such people can easily be trained to understand this necessity—the result would have been financially satisfactory to the management and at least flattering to the author. In America, where the play, after a fortnight in New York, took its place simply as an item in the repertory of Mr. Richard Mansfield, it has kept alive to this day. What the feelings of the unknown benefactor of the drama were on realizing that the net cost of running an �
�artistically successful” theatre on the ordinary London system was from £400 to £500 a week, I do not know. As for me, I opened a very modest banking account, and became comparatively Conservative in my political opinions.
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. Matthew1 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 dissentientsz 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 speculumaa 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 i
n 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.
Man and Superman and Three Other Plays Page 14
