YOU Never Can Tell,” like many of the dramas of Shakespeare, was made to order. Shaw wrote it in 1896 and he calls it “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 theaters.” And so he laid the scene in England, and made all his characters English and kept as close to the earth as he could. But for all that, he failed to make a conventional parlor drama of it. Shaw is Shaw, and when he set out to build a comedy à la mode he evolved instead a tragedy covered with a sugar-coating of farce. On its face it is uproariously and irresistibly funny; beneath the surface there is as nasty an undercurrent as that of “Widowers’ Houses.”
Fergus Crampton, a wealthy English yacht builder, and his most marvellous family are the chief characters of the play. Years before the curtain rises Crampton and his wife agree to disagree and she packs off to Madeira with their three babies—two girls and a boy. Subscribing to the heterodox doctrine that a married woman is entitled to her own home, her own pocket-book and her own name, Mrs. Crampton assumes the cognomen of Clandon, bestows it upon her offspring and brings them up in complete ignorance of the existence of their paternal progenitor. Also she rears them in strict accordance with her ultra-advanced ideas of independence and individualism. In all matters concerning the emotions and intellect, they have freedom. And so they become unconscionable egotists, disrespectful to their elders, self-willed and obstinate, and nuisances in general.
As the curtain rises we find the Clandons back in England. Happening into a small seaside town, Phil and Dolly, the younger of the three children, scrape an acquaintance with one Valentine, a struggling young dentist (and also a being with advanced views of human events), and Dolly has the honor of paying him his first fee. Through him they meet his landlord, an irascible old gentleman in a semi-nautical coat and an habitual frown. They invite both dentist and landlord to luncheon, and at the meal the discovery is made that the latter is none other than the long-lost Mr. Crampton. Like the leading comedian of a burlesque show afterpiece, Crampton is in consternation and shrieks “My wife!” in a hoarse stage whisper.
“You are very greatly changed,” observes Mrs. Clandon-Crampton.
“I daresay,” replies the wretched husband and father. “A man does change in eighteen years.”
This much of the prologue being accomplished, the personages proceed to the real business of the action. Crampton, outraged and disgusted beyond measure by the manners and dress of his progeny, demands that Phil and Dolly be given over to his care and custody on the ground that their mother is an unfit person to have the charge of them. Meanwhile Valentine, the dentist, has felt a yearning towards Gloria, the elder daughter, and Gloria, after surviving five previous sieges of her heart, looks upon him not unkindly. One brief interview, in fact, serves to advance him to a point whereat he may safely offer her a chaste caress. Her mother, greatly astonished by his easy victory over Gloria’s battalions of modern principles, seeks an explanation. Valentine very blandly discusses the situation.
The duel of sex, he says, is much like the contest between the makers of guns and the makers of ship’s armor. One year one is ahead and the next year the other. In the old days, he says, mothers taught their daughters old-fashioned methods of resisting the wiles of old-fashioned Romeos, and for a space this method of defense was successful. But by-and-by the Romeos learned its weak points, and the fond mammas of England had to devise some new armor. They hit upon scientific education, and for awhile it, too, was successful. But in the end the old story was repeated.
“What did the man do?” says Valentine. “Just what the artilleryman does—went one better than the woman—educated himself scientifically and beat her at that game just as he had beaten her at the old one. I learned how to circumvent the Woman’s Rights’ woman before I was twenty-three....”
But before the play is done the philosophical duellist of sex finds himself the vanquished rather than the victor. He begins to have doubts about his preparedness for the marriage state and essays a polite withdrawal. But Gloria, weighted with the wisdom of five previous amorous encounters, is no easy adversary to lose.
“Be sensible,” says the valiant Valentine. “It’s no use. I haven’t a penny in the world.”
“Can’t you earn one?” demands Gloria. “Other people do.”
Valentine, scenting a chance to flee, is half-delighted, half-frightened.
“I never could!” he declares. “You’d be unhappy.... My dearest love, I should be the merest fortune-hunting adventurer if——”
She grips his arm and kisses him.
“Oh, Lord!” he gasps. “O, I——”
The trap has sprung and he is caught fast.
“I don’t know anything about women,” wails the duellist of sex, pathetically. “Twelve years’ experience is not enough.”
William, the waiter at the hotel, reads the moral.
“You never can tell, sir,” he says, “You never can tell.”
So much for the love making, which you will find, in slightly different form in “Widowers’ Houses” and “Man and Superman.” The battle between the Cramptons, husband and wife, is a more serious thing. In some mysterious way the dramatist manages to keep the spectator from sympathizing with either, but Crampton, nevertheless, is a character in a tragedy and not in a comedy. It is all a ghastly horror to him—the flight of his wife, the cynical, worldwise impudence and grotesque individualism of his children, the perversity and topsy-turveyness of the whole domestic drama. He is no martyr, by any means, for life in his company, it is evident, would be an excellent imitation of existence in a cage with a tiger, but if he is not lovable, he at least has a great capacity for loving. He and Gloria have a memorable encounter, in which she explains her theory of conduct in detail.
“You see,” she says triumphantly, at the end, “everything comes right if we only think it resolutely out.”
“No,” says Crampton sullenly, “I don’t think. I want you to feel: that’s the only thing that can help us....”
In the end he succumbs to the inevitable senilely.
“Ho! ho! He! he! he!” he laughs, as Gloria bears Valentine away. And then, say the stage directions, “he goes into the garden, chuckling at the fun.”
Somehow the boundless humor of the play is forgotten long before this undercurrent of ironic pathos.
William, the waiter, is one of Shaw’s most delightful characters. He is, in truth, the chorus to the drama, and a man of deep philosophies. To everyone’s consternation it is discovered that the eminent Mr. Bohun, Q. C., who is called in as legal adviser to the Clandon-Cramptons is William’s son.
“I’ve often wished he was a potman,” he says. “Would have had him off my hands ever so much sooner, sir. Yes, sir, had to support him until he was thirty-seven, sir....”
William reads Schopenhauer, but he has no intellectual yearnings.
“My name is Boon, sir,” he says, “though I am best known down here as Balmy Walters, sir. By rights I should spell it with the aitch you, sir, but I think it best not to take that liberty, sir. There is Norman blood in it, sir, and Norman blood is not a recommendation to a waiter.”
Bohun, the son, is a blustering, roaring legal whale of the low comedy type. The last act of the play is made a screaming farce by his elephantine efforts to smooth out the family tangles of the Clandon-Cramptons. In the end he reaches a decision worthy of Solomon.
“You can do nothing,” he says to Crampton, “but make a friendly arrangement. If you want your family more than they want you, you’ll get the worst of the arrangement; if they want you more than you want them, you’ll get the better of it. The strength of their position lies in their being very agreeable personally. The strength of your position lies in your income....”
And that is the nearest approach to a solution of the difficulty that the play offers.