SHAW AND PIRANDELLO
595
of Moliere's
honnete'S gens,
to whom the story of Argan is pre–
sented, the absurdity and the impossibility are clear from the first.
Thus the temporal form of the play is given:
it
will be a demon–
stration by
reductio ad absurdum
of Argan's untenable assumptions–
i.e., by an appeal from logic to reality, from Argan's rationalization
to what Moliere can assume that his audience directly
sees.
When
the demonstration is complete, the play is over; but the comic con–
vention and the dramatic form are objectified with reference to the
common
sense of the audience. It is this common or agreed-on basis
which Shaw, like Hans Castorp, will not or cannot have- whether
because he cannot rely on a common ground with his audience, or
because it would limit the freedom of the mind which he demands.
In the beginning of his career (in
Major Barbara,
for instance)
the unmanageable depths of the Shavian irony were obscured by the
cliches of the parlor comedy which he was ostensibly writing, and
by the supposed security of the Edwardian parlor. And Shaw himself
hid coyly and more or less successfully behind the pretense of the
standard cast of characters. In
H eartbreak House
the parlor has lost
its solidity, the rationalized "characters" are more frankly accepted
as unreal, and the true Shavian sense of human life as rationalizing
in the void almost finds its true form, the "fantasia" or the arbitrarily–
broken
aria da capo.
Moreover, in
H eartbreak House
we may observe
the cognate process: the emergence upon the stage of the ironist him–
self. It is true that Shaw can be felt in all
his
plays behind the paper–
thin mask of his characters; and it is true that there are representa–
tives of the Shavian
persona
before Captain Shotover. But the Cap–
tain, probably Shaw's profoundest farcical figure, is also the most
complete representative of Shaw himself. The drawing room evap–
orates; the characters evaporate, and the prophet-clown himself ap–
pears upon a stage which is now accepted as a real platform before
the modern crowd. The basis in reality of romantic irony is in the
attitudes of the ironist; and just as everything in
T he Magic Mountain
points to the shifting thoughts and feelings of Castorp-Mann, so
Shavian comedy is not so much a consistent theatrical form as an
extension of the author's own entertaining conceptual play.
Too True to be Good
is not one of Shaw's best plays; indeed he
almost abandons the pretense that he is writing a play at all. But
at the end, Audrey- the burglar-preacher who obviously represents
