SHAW calls “The Philanderer” a topical comedy, which describes it exactly. Written in 1893, at the height of the Ibsen craze, it served a purpose like that of the excellent revues which formerly adorned the stage of the New York Casino. Frankly, a burlesque upon fads of the moment, its interest now is chiefly archeological. For these many moons we have ceased to regard Ibsen as a man of subterranean mystery—who has heard any talk of “symbolic” plays for two years?—and have learned to accept his dramas as dramas and his heroines as human beings. Those Ibsenites of ’93 who haven’t grown civilized and cut their hair are now buzzing about the head of Maeterlinck or D’Annunzio or some other new god. To enjoy “A Doll’s House” is no longer a sign of extraordinary intellectual muscularity. The stock companies of Peoria and Oil City now present it as a matter of course, between “The Henrietta” and “Camille.”
But when Shaw wrote “The Philanderer” a wave of groping individualism was sweeping over Europe, the United States and other more or less Christian lands. Overeducated young women of the middle class, with fires of discontent raging within them, descended upon Nora Helmer with a whoop and became fearsome Ibsenites. They formed clubs, they pleaded for freedom, for a wider area of development, for an equal chance; they demanded that the word “obey” be removed from their lines in the marriage comedy; they wrote letters to the newspapers; they patronized solemn pale-green matinées: some of them even smoked cigarettes. Poor old Nietzsche had something to do with this uprising. His ideas regarding the orthodox virtues, mangled in the mills of his disciples, appeared on every hand. Iconoclasts, amateur and professional, grew as common as policemen.
Very naturally, this series of phenomena vastly amused our friend from Ireland. Himself a devoted student of Ibsen’s plays and a close friend to William Archer, their translator, he saw the absurdity and pretense in the popular excitement, and so set about making fun of it.
In “The Philanderer” he shows a pack of individualists at war with the godly. Grace Tranfield and Julia Craven, young women of the period, agree that marriage is degrading and enslaving, and so join an Ibsen club, spout stale German paradoxes and prepare to lead the intellectual life. But before long both fall in love, and with the same man, and thereafter, in plain American, there is the devil to pay. Julia tracks the man—his name is Leonard Charteris—to Grace’s home and fairly drags him out of her arms, at the same time, yelling, shouting, weeping, howling and gnashing her teeth. Charteris, barricading himself behind furniture, politely points out the inconsistency of her conduct.
“As a woman of advanced views,” he says, “you determined to be free. You regarded marriage as a degrading bargain, by which a woman sold herself to a man for the social status of a wife and the right to be supported and pensioned out of his income in her old age. That’s the advanced view—our view....”
“I am too miserable to argue—to think,” wails Julia. “I only know that I love you....”
And so a fine temple of philosophy, built of cards, comes fluttering down.
As the struggle for Charteris’ battle-scarred heart rages, other personages are drawn into the trenches, unwillingly and greatly to their astonishment. Grace’s papa, a dramatic critic of the old school, and Julia’s fond parent, a retired military man, find themselves members of the Ibsen club and participants in the siege of their daughters’ reluctant Romeo. Percy Paramore, a highly respectable physician, also becomes involved in the fray. In the end he serves the useful peace-making purpose delegated to axmen and hangmen in the ancient drama. Charteris, despairing of eluding the erotic Julia shunts her off into Paramore’s arms. Then Grace, coming out of her dream, wisely flings him the mitten and the curtain falls.
It is frankly burlesque and in places it is Weberfieldian in its extravagance. It was not presented in London in 1893 because no actors able to understand it could be found. When it was published it made a great many honest folk marvel that a man who admired Ibsen as warmly as Shaw could write such a lampoon on the Ibsenites. This was the foundation of Shaw’s present reputation as a most puzzling manufacturer of paradoxes. The simple fact that the more a man understood and admired Ibsen the more he would laugh at the grotesqueries of the so-called Ibsenites did not occur to the majority, for the reason that an obvious thing of that sort always strikes the majority as unintellectual and childish and, in consequence, unthinkable. So Shaw got fame as a paradoxical sleight-of-hand man, as Ibsen did with “The Wild Duck” in 1884, and it has clung to him ever since. At present every time he rises to utterances a section of the public quite frankly takes it for granted that he means exactly the opposite of what he says.
It is unlikely that “The Philanderer” will ever take the place of “East Lynne” or “Charley’s Aunt” in the popular repertoire. In the first place, as has been mentioned, it is archaic and, in the second place, it is not a play at all, but a comic opera libretto in prose, savoring much of “Patience” and “The Princess Ida.” In the whole drama there is scarcely a scene even remotely possible.
Every line is vastly amusing,—even including the sermonizing of which Mr. Huneker complains,—but all remind one of the “I-am-going-away-from-here” colloquy between “Willie” Collier and Miss Louise Allen in a certain memorable entertainment of Messrs. Weber and Fields.