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PARTISAN REVIEW
the author-bursts forth in an impassioned monologue which presents
an apocalyptic vision of the nature and destiny of the Shavian
theater.
As
the other characters drift off the stage, bored with
Audrey's preaching, he describes them as follows: "There is some–
thing fantastic about them, something unreal and perverse, something
profoundly unsatisfactory. They are too absurd to be believed in;
yet they are not fictions; the newspapers are full of them." He might
be describing all of Shaw's characters: unbelievable as people, yet
not defined as fictions either; unsatisfactory, now, even to their author.
But the ironist's inspiration is unquenched; alone on the lighted
platform before the darkened house, Audrey continues: "And mean–
while my gift has possession of me; I must preach and preach no
matter how late the hour and how short the day, no matter whether
I have nothing to say." It is the voice of Shaw, the genius of farce,
at last aware of his real basis. But Shaw the moral therapist (though
relegated to the final stage-direction) has still the last word. "But fine
words butter no parsnips," he warns us; "the author, though a pro–
fessional talk-maker, does not believe that the world can be saved
by talk alone."
II. Action as Theatrical:
Six Characters in Search of an Author.
There is a kinship between what I have called the Shavian
theatricality especially as it emerges in the later plays, and the much
deeper, more consistent and more objective theatrical forms of Piran–
dello. Shaw as theater artist seems to have been feeling for something
which Pirandello achieved: the restoration of the ancient magic of
"two boards and a passion," frankly placed in the glare of the stage
lights and the eye of the audience. In both theaters, the human is
caught rationalizing there in the bright void. But Pirandello, having
the seriousness of the artist, presents this farcical-terrible vision with
finality, and in an integral theatrical form; while in Shaw's complex
case the artist is always being thwarted by the drawing room enter–
tainer, or dismissed as romantic by the Fabian optimist or the morally
fit man of good will. It is therefore Pirandello that one must study,
in order to see how the contemporary idea of a theater (as held by
its most accomplished masters) emerged from nineteenth-century
