JUST as Ibsen, when he set up shop as a dramatist, began by imitating the great men of his time, so Shaw, when he abandoned novel-writing for play-making, modeled his opus upon the dramas then in fashion. Ibsen’s first play was a one-act melodrama of the old school called “Kiaempehöien” and it has been forgotten, happily, these fifty years. Shaw’s bow was made in “Widowers’ Houses,” a three-act comedy. Begun in 1885, in collaboration with William Archer, the incompleted manuscript was dusted, revamped and pushed to “finis” in 1892. It is not a masterpiece, but its production by the Independent Theater Company of London, served to introduce Shaw to the public, and thus it had a respectable purpose. Admittedly modeled upon the early comedies of Pinero and Jones, it shows plain evidences that it was produced during the imitative stage of the author’s growth. It has scenes of orthodox build, it has an “emotional” climax at the end and there are even soliloquys—but the mark of Shaw is plainly upon every line of it. The “grand” scene between the hero and the heroine might be from “Man and Superman.” There is imitation in it, as there is in the earlier works of most men of creative genius, but there is also a vast deal of originality.
At the time the play was begun Shaw was engrossed in the propaganda of the Fabian Society and so it was not unnatural that, when he set out to write a play he made a social problem the foundation stone of it. Harry Trench, a young Englishman but twice removed from the lesser aristocracy and with the traditional ideals and ideas of his caste, is the tortured Prince of this little “Hamlet.” Happening in his travels upon two fellow Britishers—father and daughter—he falls in love with the latter and in due course makes his honorable proposals. The father, scenting the excellent joys of familiar association with Harry’s titled relatives, gives his paternal blessing, and the affair bobs along in a manner eminently commonplace and refined. The clan Sartorius has money; the clan Trench has blood. An alliance between Harry and the fair Miss Sartorius is one obviously desirable.
But before the wedding day is set, there comes trouble aplenty. By accident Harry is led into an investigation of the manner in which the Sartorius pounds, shillings and pence reach the wide pockets of his fiancée’s father. What he discovers fairly horrifies him. Papa Sartorius wrings his thousands from the people of the gutter. Down in the slums of St. Giles, of Marylebone and of Bethnal Green lie his estates—rows upon rows of filthy, tumble-down tenements. The pound saved on repairs kills a slum baby—and buys Blanche Sartorius a new pair of gloves. The shillings dragged from reluctant costermongers and washerwomen give Sartorius his excellent cigars. He is the worst slum landlord in London—the most heartless, the most grasping, the most murderous and the most prosperous. His millions pile up as his tenants shuffle off to the potter’s field.
Harry’s disgust is unspeakable. He will have nothing of the Sartorius hoard. Rather starve upon his miserable $3500 a year! He will work—he has a license to practise upon his fellow-men as physician and surgeon—and he and Blanche will face the world bravely. But Blanche, unfortunately, does not see it in that light. Harry’s income is regular and safe, but seven hundred pounds is no revenue for the daughter and son-in-law of a millionaire. And when she discovers the reason for Harry’s singular self-sacrifice and modesty, her pride rages high. After all, Sartorius is her father. He may squeeze his tenants for the last farthing, but he has been good to her. His money has been hers, and even when she fathoms the depths of his heartlessness, her shame does not break her loyalty. So she sends Harry about his business and seeks consolation in maidenly tears. Thus they remain for a space—he sacrificing his love to his ideals of honesty and honor, and she offering her virtuous affection upon the altar of filial allegiance and pride.
It is Sartorius who solves the problem. He is not shocked by Harry’s revolt, by any means. The world, as he knows, is full of such silly scruples and senseless ideas of altruism. And, at any rate, he is willing to give his tenants as much as he can afford. He explains it all to Blanche.
“I have made up my mind,” he says, “to improve the property and get in a new class of tenants.... I am only waiting for the consent of the ground landlord, Lady Roxdale.”
Lady Roxdale is Harry’s aristocratic aunt and Blanche’s face shows her surprise.
“Lady Roxdale!” she exclaims.
“Yes,” replies her fond papa. “But I shall expect the mortgagee to take his share of the risk.”
“The mortgagee!” says Blanche. “Do you mean——”
“Harry Trench,” says Sartorius blandly, finishing the sentence for her.
And so the melancholy fact is laid bare that Harry’s safe and honorable $3500 a year, upon which he proposed to Blanche that they board and lodge in lieu of her father’s tainted thousands, is just as dirty, penny for penny, as the latter. Sartorius puts it before Harry, too, and very plainly.
“When I,” he says, “to use your own words, screw and bully and drive those people to pay what they have freely undertaken to pay me, I cannot touch one penny of the money they give me until I have first paid you your seven hundred pounds out of it....”
Of course, that puts a new face upon the situation. Thinking over it calmly, Harry comes to the conclusion that the oppression of slum dwellers is a thing regrettable and deplorable, but, on the whole, inevitable and necessary. As Sartorius shows him, they would not appreciate generosity if it were accorded them. Ethically, they are to be pitied; practically, pity would do them no good. In matters of money a man must make some sacrifice of his ideals and look out for himself. And so Harry and Blanche are united with benefit of clergy and the Sartorius money and the Trench blood enters upon an honorable and—let us hope—happy and permanent alliance.
In incident and character-drawing the play is rather elemental. Sartorius is the stock capitalist of drama—a figure as invariable as the types in Jerome K. Jerome’s “Stageland.” And the other persons of the play—Harry Trench, the altruist with reservations; William de Burgh Cokane, his mentor in orthodox hypocrisy; Lickcheese, Sartorius’ rent-collector and rival, and Blanche herself—all rather impress us as beings we have met before. Nevertheless, an occasional flash reveals the fine Italian hand of Shaw—a hand albeit, but yet half trained. That Blanche is a true daughter to Sartorius, psychologically as well as physically, is shown in a brief scene wherein she and a serving maid are the only players. And the “grand” scene at the close of the play, between Blanche and Harry, smells of the latter-day Shaw to high heaven. Harry has come to her father’s house to discuss their joint affairs and she goes at him savagely:
“Well? So you have come back here. You have had the meanness to come into this house again. (He blushes and retreats a step.) What a poor-spirited creature you must be! Why don’t you go? (Red and wincing, he starts huffily to get his hat from the table, but when he turns to the door with it she deliberately gets in his way, so that he has to stop.) I don’t want you to stay. (For a moment they stand face to face, quite close to one another, she provocative, taunting, half-defying, half-inviting him to advance, in a flush of undisguised animal excitement. It suddenly flashes upon him that all this ferocity is erotic—that she is making love to him. His eye lights up; a cunning expression comes into the corner of his mouth; with a heavy assumption of indifference he walks straight back to his chair and plants himself in it with his arms folded. She comes down the room after him.)...”
It is too late for poor Harry to beat a retreat. He is lost as hopelessly as John Tanner in “Man and Superman” and in the same way.
The scene savors strongly of Nietzsche, particularly in its frank acceptance of the doctrine that, when all the poets have had their say, plain physical desire is the chief basis of human mating. No doubt Shaw’s interest in Marx and Schopenhauer led him to make a pretty thorough acquaintance with all the German metaphysicians of the early eighties. “Widowers’ Houses” was begun in 1885, four years before Nietzsche was dragged off to an asylum. In 1892, when the play was completed and the last scene written, the mad German’s theories of life were just beginning to gain a firm foothold in England.