“Arms and the man I sing.”
—The Aeneid.
ARMS and the Man,” on its face, is a military satire, not unrelated to “A Milk White Flag,” and Shaw himself hints that he tried to keep it within the sphere of popular comprehension, but under the burlesque and surface wit there lies an idea that the author later elaborated in “Man and Superman.” This idea concerns the relationship of the sexes and particularly the matter of mating. Ninety-nine men in every hundred, when they go a-courting, fancy that they are the aggressors in the ancient game and rather pride themselves upon their enterprise and their daring. Hence we find Don Juan a popular hero. As a matter of fact, says Shaw, it is the woman that ordinarily makes the first advances and the woman that lures, forces, or drags the man on to the climax of marriage. You will find this theory set forth in detail in the preface of “Man and Superman” and elaborated in the play itself. In “Arms and the Man” it is overshadowed by the satire, but even a casual study of the drama will reveal its outlines.
The scene of “Arms and the Man” is a small town in Bulgaria and the time is the winter of the Balkan War, 1885–6. Captain Bluntschli, the hero, is a Swiss soldier of fortune, who takes service with the Servians because war is his trade and Servia happens to be nearer his home than Bulgaria. A machine gun detachment under his command is overwhelmed by a sudden and unscientific charge of blundering Bulgarian horsemen, and he swiftly takes to the woods, being little desirous of shedding his blood unnecessarily. He and his comrades are pursued by Bulgarians bent upon finishing them, and, passing through a small town at night at a gallop, he shins up a rainspout and takes refuge in the bed-chamber of a young woman, Raina Petkoff, the daughter of a Bulgarian officer.
The ensuing scene between the two is a masterpiece of comedy and Richard Mansfield’s performances of the play have made it familiar to most American theater-goers. Bluntschli, as Shaw depicts him, is a soldier entirely devoid of the heroics associated in the popular imagination with men of war. He has no yearning to die for his country or any other country, and, after bullying his unwilling hostess with an unloaded revolver, he frankly confesses that he is hungry and sleepy, and that, as a general proposition, he prefers a good dinner to a forlorn hope. She is a young woman suffering from much romanticism and undigested French fiction, and very naturally she is tremendously astonished. Her heavy-eyed intruder, as a matter of fact, fairly appals her. His common-sense seems idiocy and his callous realism sacrilege.
But, nevertheless, the theatricality of his appearance makes an overwhelming appeal to her and she shelters him and conceals him from his enemies—her countrymen—and when he goes away, she sends after him a portrait of herself, just as any other romantic young woman might do. To her the incident is epochal, but Bluntschli himself gives little thought to it. As he says afterwards, a soldier soon forgets such things: “He is always getting his life saved in all sorts of ways by all sorts of people.” So he fights a bit, forages a bit, perspires a bit, draws his pay, eats his meals, and waits, in patience, for the war to end.
But Raina does not forget. Even when peace comes at last and her betrothed, Major Sergius Saranoff, comes home, she still remembers her “chocolate-cream soldier.” Sergius was the blundering ass whose reckless charge sent Bluntschli flying through the night into Raina’s chamber. He is a queer mixture of romanticist and realist, of aristocrat and blackguard, with the ideals alternately of a Cæsar and a potman. One moment he revels in a Byronic ecstacy with Raina, the next moment he is making Mulvaney-like advances to Louka, her maid.
This Louka is one of Shaw’s peculiarly human characters—a sort of refined and developed Regina, taken from “Ghosts” and given an essentially Shavian cast. She has a soul above servility, though she answers Raina’s bell, and when Saranoff, awakening to his own grotesque hypocrisy, revolts against Raina’s idealization of his very tawdry heroics, Louka is ready to enmesh him in her net. She will be a fine lady, this superwoman in a maid’s cap, and like Raina she will go to Belgrade for the opera and to Vienna for frocks and frills.
Bluntschli, returning, helps to set the stage for her. Raina’s father and Sergius, her betrothed, have met the Swiss and invited him to the Petkoff home, not connecting him with the intruder who invaded Raina’s bed-chamber. They want him to give them aid in the prosaic business of putting up the shutters of war—to show them how to get their men home and feed them on the way. This is his true forte and he comes to the domicile of the Petkoffs—and again meets Raina. She is now twenty-three, and the usual physiological revulsion against Byronic sentiment is beginning to stir her. She sees that Sergius, with all his gallant cavalry charges and play-acting, is rather a cheap sort after all, and in the same light she sees that Bluntschli, despite his frank running away and his fondness for chocolate-creams, is the more honest of the two. The Swiss himself still gives little thought to her. His business is to show old Petkoff how to bring his regiments home, and after that, to return to Switzerland and take over the management of his deceased father’s chain of Alpine hotels.
But, as Shaw hints, the man in the case has little to do with the ordering of such dramas. Raina and Louka, each with her prey in sight, fall to the chase. Sergius wavers, holds himself together, essays a flight, is dragged back, and capitulates. As Louka carries him into camp, the innocent and romantic little Raina is left free to bag Bluntschli. He walks into the net with eyes wide open and, as it were, sword in hand. When he finds himself enmeshed he is surprised beyond measure, but he is a good soldier, is Bluntschli, and this time it is too late to run away.
“Major Petkoff,” he says to the old man, “I beg to propose formally to become a suitor for your daughter’s hand.”
And that is the end of the drama.
A detailed description would spoil the charm of the play’s exuberant and boundless humor. As a comedy it is capital, from the scene of Bluntschli’s entrance into Raina’s chamber to the last scene of all, wherein the Petkoffs cross-examine him as to his finances. Bluntschli is no mere burlesque. In him Shaw has tried to depict a real soldier as opposed to a soldier of the grand opera or Ivanhoe type. He has succeeded, in his way, as admirably as Cervantes, albeit a great many persons—like Raina herself—whose idea of soldierly bearing is expressed in St. Louis and of heroism in the charge of the Light Brigade, have been vastly puzzled by Bluntschli.
Raina is drawn boldly and with what artists call an open line, and her revolt against romantic tomfoolery and humbug is shown with excellent art. Sergius, with his surface civilization and complex personality—“the half dozen Sergiuses who keep popping in and out of this handsome figure of mine”—and his keen self-analysis, is naturally a less obvious type, but even he is perfectly consistent in his inconsistency. Louka is the female Don Juan—the Donna Anna of “Man and Superman,”—to the life. Her deliberate ensnarement of Sergius, in itself would make a drama well worth the writing. The Petkoffs, Raina’s parents, are simple-minded barbarians, and Nicola, their man-servant, who willingly resigns Louka to Sergius, is of a breed not peculiar to Bulgaria.
The play, despite its abounding humor and excellent characterizations, is not to be numbered among Shaw’s best. The second act, which should be the strongest, is the weakest, and the remarkable originality and humor of the first scene rather detract from those that follow. Shaw describes the play as his first attempt at writing a drama comprehensible to the general public. With this object in view, he lavished upon it a wealth of wit, but it is to be doubted if the real, inner humor of the action has ever gone home. Mansfield still has it in his repertory, but he seldom presents it. Persons who admire “Beaucaire” and “Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde” are not apt to demand it.