THEATER CHRONICLE
103
Power, or the latter's aristocratic politics with Marxian socialism.
His eclecticism served him as a dramatist, since by letting different ideas
run away with him at different times he was able to secure something
like the dramatist's necessary balance and attitude of detachment to–
ward any one set of dogmas. He was not a great creator of character, but
because he could be sympathetic with so many different kinds of ideas
he was able to have some understanding of the different human beings
who might hold them. In
Saint Joan
he sympathizes as much with
the Catholic theology of the Inquisitor as with Joan's Protestantism;
in
Major Barbara
he cannot choose between the aestheticism of the
professor of Greek and the power philosophy of the munitions maker;
for that matter, the Salvation Army gospel of the heroine has the
last word and might even be the true one. Shaw cannot be accused of
insincerity for the simple reason that he did not know what it means
to believe in an idea; he was a dramatist, first and last, the role of
preacher and pedagogue were part of his comic mask, and in the end
all ideas are equally grist for his dramatic mill.
This, it seems to me, is one of the first things about the current
revival that has to be recognized. Because the middlebrows have appro–
priated Shaw, it has been fashionable among highbrows to snoot him as
a playwright. We have been told that he is a magnificent pamphleteer,
that the prefaces are greater than the plays, and, most recently, that
the best Shaw really resides in his musical criticism; anything but that
he is a great playwright. The music criticism is indeed exuberant and
wonderful, but it is nowadays out of date and rather unnecessary-a
fact which Shaw himself acknowledged; the prefaces bore us to death
even when we admire the extraordinary virtues of the Shavian prose, for
they reveal Shaw at his most pedagogic and long-winded. None of
these would now be read were it not for Shaw the playwright; and even
the plays themselves make pretty dull reading unless one comes to
them after having seen a performance. Shaw loved and understood the
stage, and he did not write closet dramas; even the success of his journal–
ism is due in great part to the fact that he carries it off with an actor's
swagger.
One can lament the state of the contemporary theater which has to
revive such a piece of fluff as
The Apple Cart,
but in Shaw's behalf one
has to marvel that here at his weakest and most senile he is still able,
with a good cast, to carry the audience along with him. An audience
(as was the case on the evening I saw this play) is willing to laugh at
almost anything if they are given half a chance, and Shaw gives that
chance even though his wit is often creaking and altogether too calcul–
able on the printed page. Perhaps he learned most about the stage from
