SHAW AND PIRANDELLO
593
thesis
a
la Brieux which he had tried to use in
Major Barbara,
but a
"fantasia" as he calls it. This notion of dramatic form was derived
from Chekhov, as he explains in the preface; and one way to under–
stand the superior consistency and self-consciousness of this play is
by comparing it with Chekhov's masterpiece. It was a performance
of
The Cherry Orchard
which Shaw saw before the first World War
that gave him his clue- precisely because Chekhov saw the prewar
drawing room, "cultured, leisured Europe before the war," as Shaw
puts it, not as eternal, but as dissolving before our eyes, and the
significant mode of human action, not as rationalizing, but as the
direct suffering of the perception of change. It was Chekhov's opposite
perspective on the bourgeois theater of human life which made Shaw
aware of the nature and limitations of his own.
Thus the ostensible scene is still the emancipated parlor; but in
Heartbreak House
this parlor is no longer felt as all reality: we feel
around it and behind it the outer darkness, the unmapped forces of
the changing modern world. The life of the play is still in the making
of epithets and in logical fencing; but now we see that the emanci–
pated mind, though omnipotent in its own realm, is helpless between
the power of the wealth-and war-making business-industrial-financial
machine one way, and the trivial or deathly passions of the faithless
psyche the other way. And the parlor in which it is free to play its
endless game is itself brought into focus as a thin insulating sheath.
Because of this added dimension-because Shaw now places his
scene in a wider perspective- he understands the real shape, the tem–
poral development of his action, far more accurately. In this play, as
in
The Cherry Orchard,
nothing happens, and nothing is proved or
disproved. The people come and go, their love affairs come and go
with the pointless facility of the monkey-house; offstage we are aware
of their endless intrigues for money or power. But the interest is
centered where it belongs: not on event or narrative sequences, not
on what happens to any individual, but on the fateless fate and the
bodiless farce of the emancipated mind itself. This, I think
is
what
Shaw means by subtitling the play "A fantasia in the Russian manner
on English theses." Chekhov sees his people "as" suffering; Shaw,
with his moral fitness, sees them "as" fully awake and sharply ration–
alizing. That the abstract form of these complementary versions of
human action should be so similar is perhaps significant. In any case,
