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PARTISAN REVIEW
the grand manner, adding, in one's sense of the construction, to Shaw's
favorite if not really quite valid kinship, with Moliere, another perhaps
more important, with Racine. Shaw's despair was with actors who in
his time were becoming incapable, so he said, of speaking speeches
of more than ten words; he gives them many times that at a swat here,
to be livened with yawns from the unintellectual Statue, and it begins to
pall only on the subject of love. Unfortunately that is something Don
Juan, even if he is really John Tanner, is supposed to talk about, and
it lets down the second half of the performance.
Somebody has described all of Shaw's plays as deriving their comic
irony from the rout of non-Shavians by Shavians. Considering the num–
ber and scale of the paradoxes entailed in that quality this is not
very helpful; still, in terms of this dialogue Hell, or non-Shavianism,
is
fairly simply defined as the pursuit of individual pleasure, for which the
Statue or ordinary man yearns, not having the qualifications to be
interested in Heaven, and in which Don Juan the genius is naturally
miserable, having much
in
common with Joan as a representative of the
"passion of the divine will." So they talk themselves around
to
changing
places. What the Shavians are ultimately up to might be disconcerting
if one could find out, or
if
Shaw ever found out, but it would not be
alone among ultimates in that; and Shaw does not need
to
be valued as
a systematizer; it is enough, for the history of the drama, that he per–
formed the function of the satirist, of exposing falsities, on so large
a scale, with so high an aim, and so strangely-should one say divinely?
-without malice.
The last point is most crucial to his Caesar, who as has been
remarked has a most un-Julian resemblance to Jesus Christ, while re–
maining unimpaired as a Shavian: "My friend, taxes are the chief
business of a conqueror of the world." This is the philosopher-king,
beyond spite and recognition of affront, beyond happiness, and with
enough dramatic interest around to counteract the overdose in him of
Marcus Aurelius, and the under-dose of what he is usually thought
to have thought about Cleopatra. That she had a child by him you
would not suspect from Shaw; that he is, either consequently or never–
theless, Shaw's noblest character, you would not suspect from Laurence
Olivier, until the third act, when he plays with great skill a thoroughly
noble and affecting departure. Before then there is a good deal
of
un–
Shavian gagging, even of a type done better in Broadway musicals, as in
the scene in which he is revealed as Caesar to the excessively trembling
Cleopatra, and in his froglike jump from the lighthouse-it is partic–
ularly unfortunate there since Shaw has himself overdone the blue
