MEASURED with rule, plumb-line or hay-scales, “Man and Superman” is easily Shaw’s magnum opus. In bulk it is brobdignagian; in scope it is stupendous; in purpose it is one with the Odyssey. Like a full-rigged ship before a spanking breeze, it cleaves deep into the waves, sending ripples far to port and starboard, and its giant canvases rise half way to the clouds, with resplendent jibs, sky-sails, staysails and studdingsails standing out like quills upon the fretful porcupine. It has a preface as long as a campaign speech; an interlude in three scenes, with music and red fire; and a complete digest of the German philosophers as an appendix. With all its rings and satellites it fills a tome of 281 closely-printed pages. Its epigrams, quips, jests, and quirks are multitudinous; it preaches treason to all the schools; its hero has one speech of 350 words. No one but a circus press agent could rise to an adequate description of its innumerable marvels. It is a three-ring circus, with Ibsen doing running high jumps; Schopenhauer playing the calliope and Nietzsche selling peanuts in the reserved seats. And all the while it is the most entertaining play of its generation.
Maybe Shaw wrote it in a vain effort to rid himself at one fell swoop of all the disquieting doctrines that infested his innards. Into it he unloaded Kropotkin, Noyes, Bakounin, Wilde, Marx, Proudhon, Nietzsche, Netschajew, Wagner, Bunyan, Mozart, Shelley, Ibsen, Morris, Tolstoi, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Plato—seized them by the heels and heaved them in, with a sort of relieved “God help you!” The result is 281 pages of most diverting farce—farce that only half hides the tumultuous uproar of the two-and-seventy jarring sects beneath it. It is a tract cast in an encyclopedic and epic mold—a stupendous, magnificent colossal effort to make a dent in the cosmos with a slapstick.
Why, all the saints and sages who discuss’d
Of the Two Worlds so learnedly, are thrust
Like foolish Prophets forth: their Words to Scorn
Are scatter’d, and their Mouths are stopt with Dust.
Shaw explains that he wrote the play in response to a suggestion by A. B. Walkley, the dramatic critic of the London Times that he should tackle the subject of Don Juan. In his 37-page preface he traces, at length, the process of reasoning which led him to the conclusion that Juan, as he was depicted by the fathers, was a fraud and an impostor. In the business of mating, he says (after Schopenhauer) it is not the man but the woman that does the pursuing. Man’s function in life is that of food-getting. Woman’s is that of perpetuating the race. Hence man’s ordinary occupation is making money, and woman’s is getting married. To protect himself against “a too aggressive prosecution of woman’s business,” he says, man has “set up a feeble romantic convention that the initiative in sex business must always come from him.” But the pretense is so shallow “that even in the theater, that last sanctuary of unreality, it imposes only on the inexperienced. In Shakespeare’s plays the woman always takes the initiative. In his problem plays and his popular plays alike the love interest is the interest of seeing the woman hunt the man down.”
And so, the hero of this new play, John Tanner (our old friend Juan Tenorio) is the pursued, and Doña Ana (Miss Ann Whitefield) is the pursuer. John is a being of most advanced and startling ideas. He writes a volume called “The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion,” full of all sorts of strange doctrines, from praise of the Oneida Community to speculations regarding the probable characteristics of the Superman. He laughs at honor, titles, the law, property, marriage, liberty, democracy, the golden rule and everything else that God-fearing folks hold sacred; he has a good word for Czolgosz; he gives directions for beating children; he curls his lip at civilization; he ventures the view that “every man over forty is a scoundrel.” And then, with all this cargo of nonconformity afloat in his hold, fate sends him sailing into a haven of staunch orthodoxy.
He and Roebuck Ramsden, a gentleman who hangs Herbert Spencer’s portrait on his library wall as a sort of banner of his intellectual modernity, are appointed guardians for Ann, whose papa has just passed away, and John, to protect himself against being caught in ambush by the Life Force, as represented in his ward, endeavors to marry her off to Octavius Robinson, a harmless young man who has lived beneath her father’s roof since his childhood. John is aware of the faults of Ann and has no yearning to be enmeshed in her web. He notices that she is a liar and politely calls her attention to the fact; he observes her pursuit of him and makes open preparations for flight. Finally, in full cry, he runs away in an automobile across Europe. But the Life Force is more powerful than gasoline, and Ann, yielding to its irresistible impulse, follows him—across the English channel, to Dover, and across France toward the Mediterranean. In the Sierra Nevada mountains she brings her game to bay and in old Grenada poor John receives his coup de grace. Thus he sinks to earth:
Tanner. ... The trap was laid from the beginning.
Ann (concentrating all her magic). From the beginning—from our childhood—for both of us—by the Life Force.
Tanner. I will not marry you. I will not marry you.
Ann. Oh, you will, you will.
Tanner. I tell you, no, no, no.
Ann. I tell you, yes, yes, yes.
Tanner. No.
Ann (coaxing—imploring—almost exhausted). Yes. Before it is too late for repentance. Yes.
Tanner (struck by an echo from the past). When did all this happen to me before? Are we two dreaming?
Ann (suddenly losing her courage, with an anguish that she does not conceal). No. We are awake and you have said no: that is all.
Tanner (brutally). Well?
Ann. Well, I made a mistake, you do not love me.
Tanner (seizing her in his arms). It is false: I love you. The Life Force enchants me: I have the whole world in my arms when I clasp you....
And this is the story upon which Shaw hangs his 175 pages of play—it would take seven hours to perform it in its entirety—his thirty-seven pages of introduction, and his sixty-nine pages of appendix.
The conflict between Tanner and the ethics and traditions represented by Ramsden is riotously and irresistibly humorous. The first act of the play, indeed, is the most gorgeously grotesque in all Shaw. Better fun is scarcely imaginable. The famous Hell scene, which forms a sort of movable third act, is also a masterpiece of comedy. Tanner during his flight from Ann, is captured by a band of social-anarchist brigands, led by one Capt. Mendoza, a sentimental Anglo-Hebrew. Mendoza’s story of his unrequited love for an English lass sends Tanner to dreamland, and he dreams that he is in Hell. And then an elaborately comic play within a play is performed. Mendoza appears as the Devil; Tanner as Don Juan; and Ann as Doña Ana de Ulloa. It is long, this episode, and beyond all hope of boiling down, but the persons who see “Man and Superman” without it miss two-thirds of the drama. An excellent exposition by the Devil of the superiority of Hell over Heaven forms part of it. During the rest of the action the characters discuss every imaginable subject, from love to the higher morality.
“Whatever they say of me in churches on earth,” says the Devil, “I know that it is universally admitted in good society that the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman; and that is enough for me....”
In the first act Violet Robinson, Octavius’ sister, gives her family an overwhelming shock by passing to that moral bourne whence no feminine traveler returns. Her maiden aunt is for turning her out of doors. Ramsden is apoplectic. Octavius is speechless. The scandal is appalling. And here comes Tanner’s chance. He has preached against marriage and now he will follow his preaching with practise. Virtuous or unvirtuous, what are the odds? The Life Force is at it again, and he, John Tanner, is its champion. So he goes to Violet’s rescue grandly—a hero, every inch of him.
“They think to blame you,” he says loftily, “by their silly superstitions about morality and propriety and so forth. But I know, and the whole world really knows, that you are right to follow your instinct; that vitality and bravery are the greatest qualities a woman can have, and motherhood her solemn initiation into womanhood, and that the fact of your not being legally married matters not one scrap either to your own worth or to our real regard for you.”
The limelight flashes here, but suddenly it goes out and Violet’s eyes flash instead.
“Oh!” she exclaims, “you think me a wicked woman, like the rest! You think that I am not only vile, but that I share your abominable opinions.... I won’t bear such a horrible insult.... I have kept my marriage secret for my husband’s sake. But now I claim my right as a married woman not to be insulted....”
And as Tanner wilts his fine theories come crashing down about his head.
The play is such a gigantic, ponderous thing that any effort to summarize it is difficult. The central idea—that, in mating, the man is pursued by the woman—is one that we have seen Shaw employ in “Arms and the Man,” “The Philanderer,” and other plays. As he himself says, it is not a new conception. Shakespeare had it, though maybe unconsciously, and its rudiments appear in the works of other men. Schopenhauer made it classical. In “Man and Superman” Shaw uses it as an excuse for airing practically every radical doctrine in the modern repertoire. “The general impression of the book,” says Huneker, “causes us to believe there is a rift in the writer’s lute; not in his mentality, but in his own beliefs, or scepticisms. Perhaps Shaw no longer pins his faith to Shaw.” Herein the critic makes the common mistake of confusing the dramatist and the theorist. Shaw borrows part of the title from Nietzsche and makes sad sport of the mad German in many a scene, but that is no evidence that he is insincere when, in his introduction, he classes Nietzsche with those writers “whose peculiar sense of the world I recognize as more or less akin to my own.” “The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion” at the end of the play is given, he says, merely to prove that John Tanner, its author, is really the revolutionist and genius the drama makes him out to be. Too often, says Shaw, a playwright is content to say that his hero is a man of parts without offering any tangible evidence of the fact.
All in all, “Man and Superman” is a work worth the two years of effort the title page hints it cost the author. But it is a pity that Shaw didn’t divide it into two plays, a volume of essays, two dozen magazine articles and a book of epigrams. The age of the epic is past. To-day we sacrifice Fortinbras to get “Hamlet” into two hours and a half.