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historical material, but not too obtrusively; just enough to give the
drama of its time; and the final scene, probably as economical and
imaginative a one as Shaw ever wrote, is the best and only way he
could suggest the essential paradox of the saint for mankind. Only
at the climax, where Joan recants her confession, is the old
prosateur
really out of his depth, though he gives it his very best try:
I could do without my warhorse; I could drag about in a skirt;
I could let the banners and the trumpets and the knights and soldiers
pass me and leave me behind as they leave the other women,
if
only I
could still hear the wind in the trees, the larks in the sunshine, the
young lambs crying through the healthy frost, and the blessed blessed
church bells that send my angel voices floating to me on the wind.
But without these things I cannot live; and by your wanting to take
them away from me, or from any human creature, I know that your
counsel is of the devil, and that mine is of God.
Even in Miss McKenna's inspired delivery the lines did not quite
come off: the phrases fall into place too smoothly, the epithets are too
pat, the language too pointed and rhetorical-the tidy hand of the
Shavian prose has arranged neatly a few poetical emblems. But Shaw
does know his own limitations very well and he promptly cuts the blather
short, and the play moves on to be redeemed by its final scene.
What is remarkable about the scene-and this usually goes un–
noticed in Shaw-is that underneath all his intellectual antics he was
really a genial and kindly man who had much fondness for his fellow
human beings, and of all kinds and classes too. Perhaps no other writer
ever wrote less out of violent inner conflict and tension than did Shaw,
and the experience of the saint would therefore seem to have been
the most remote from the old Blarneyer; but
Saint Joan
succeeds, not
merely by the dramatist's craft, but because Shaw's human sympathies
could embrace his own temperamental opposite. He may not be a poet;
but he did have a real feeling for people; and this is no small recom–
mendation for a dramatist. It is also particularly worth saying at a
time when O'Neill, also undergoing something of a revival, is on the
boards with two plays where every muscle is taut and strained to pro–
duce profound, throbbing, passionate, stark human drama but with
a feeling for people that is ultimately cerebral and remote.
The revival of Shaw is certainly not the one thing now needful for
the American theater; our problems, in and out of the theater, are
different from his, and much of Shaw is as outdated as the ormolu
clocks and velvet waistcoats of late Victorianism and Edwardianism;
but the revival will do no harm, no harm at all.
William Barrett
