James Bridie: Clown and Philosopher [Reprint 2016 ed.] 9781512804126

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James Bridie: Clown and Philosopher

James Bridie: Clown and Philosopher By Helen L. Luyben

Philadelphia

University of Pensylvania Press

© 1965 by the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number : 64-24508

Published in Great Britain, India and Pakistan by the Oxford University Press, London, Bombay and Karachi

7476 Printed in the United States of America

For my Mother and Father

Contents

Introduction I

9

The Dramatic Method

15

Ambiguity in The Switchback

35

III

Sengs of Innocence

51

IV

The Clown Despairs

97

V

Songs of Experience

129

Notes

167

Chronology

173

Bibliography

177

Index

179

II

Introduction O N E M U S T B E G I N T O define truth by deciding what it is not, or so the hero of James Bridie's last play, The Baikie Charivari, seems to say when he kills the soothsayers clamoring around him. So this study can be defined, to begin with, in terms of what it is not. It is not a biographical study. The only remotely relevant biographical facts are that Osbome Henry Mavor, whose pen name was James Bridie, was born on January 3, 1888, and died on January 29, 1951; he was a Scotsman and a physician. (For the curious, however, a chronology is supplied as an appendix.) Nor is this a summary description of Bridie's complete works—forty-odd plays—or an attempt to relate the dramatist to the narrow scope of the Scottish theater. These three objectives already have been attained by Winifred Bannister in her book James Bridie and His Theatre. No attempt at mere inclusiveness has been made here; rather, the analysis is selective, with the intention of illustrating in representative plays a philosophical continuity which, when recognized, goes far toward defining the total genius of Bridie. This continuity is traced through three stages of moral awareness, which might be labeled innocence, disillusionment, and resolution, corresponding to three chronological periods, the early plays (19281937), the middle plays (1938-1947), and the late plays (1948-1951). To be positive, then, this study attempts to show that Bridie is a moralist and that his plays are, in a special 9

JAMES

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BRIDIE 1 CLOWN

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PHILOSOPHER

sense, morality plays; thus his original use of religious myth is explored, primarily his use of the myth of the fall from innocence (which includes the myth of temptation). Moreover, the study defends Bridie as a craftsman, in an attempt to correct the misconception that he is a bungler. Misinterpretation

of his intention

in the plays has led to

criticism of their structure, which is not diffuse, unmeditated, or slapdash, but instead carefully plotted. Evidence for this view is found primarily in the conscious use of myth supported by a metaphysical use of language, but also in the use of common structural techniques (for example, dramatic

fore-

shadowing). As Bridie's morality goes beyond the limits of logic, so his structure disregards the limitations of realistic drama, demanding dramatic forms—farce and fantasy—which

will

encompass the illogical and portray a higher reality than the realistic; so his language operates on two planes, literal and poetic. Finally, Bridie's moral affinity with S h a w and Ibsen

is

explored, not with the intention of tracing literal borrowing but to clarify Bridie's philosophical and dramatic intention. T h e justification for such comparisons is obvious : Bridie wrote critically of Shaw as a playwright and adapted several of Ibsen's plays. F r o m the two, he adopted a dramatic method which capitalizes on the use of what he called a judicial attitude (and what I refer to as judicial ambiguity) and a corresponding philosophical relativism, both of which allow the apparently irreconcilable conflicts in his play between order and disorder, humility and pride, responsibility and irresponsibility, selflessness and selfishness, salvation and damnation. Shaw's influence is stressed in the earlier plays, Ibsen's in the later plays, when a greater moral awareness in Bridie's protagonists suggests their understanding of the relativity of human values as distinguished from the ambiguity of divine.

INTRODUCTION

11

Chapter I of this study appeared in a slightly altered version in the Educational Theatre Journal (December 1963), and my analyses of The Black Eye and The Baikie Charivari were first printed, again slightly altered, in Modern Drama (February 1963 and May 1964). I am grateful to Jonathan Curvin and A. C. Edwards, who gave their permission to reprint this material; to Constable and Co., who gave their permission to quote from Bridie's works; to Bridie's widow and son and to Winifred Bannister, who helped me with the chronology; and to Patricia Martin, who caught some of my glaring errors. Finally, I am deeply indebted to Gerald Weales, whose chapter on Shaw and Bridie in Religion in Modern English Drama suggested my interpretation of the use of daemonic temptation in Bridie's general use of the myth of man's temptation and fall, and whose daemonic inspiration and pervading influence on this study could never be acknowledged in footnotes. H.L.L.

James Bridie: Clown and Philosopher

I The Dramatic Method M O D E S T , S E R I O U S , deeply and selflessly devoted Dr. Osborne Henry Mavor, consulting physician to (and later governor of) the Victoria Infirmary of Glasgow, became, J . B. Priestley says, the victim of his persona, James Bridie, the defiant, wilful, impudent, brilliant amateur playwright: the drama critics were deceived into finding what Bridie only pretended to be and seldom discovered what he was trying to do. What Bridie pretended to be was a middle-aged doctor who sat up at night to dash off play after play just for a lark. "Because he started late, out of a very different profession in which he had won decent recognition," Priestley writes, "because he was at heart both proud (in the best sense) and shy, and dramatic criticism is more ruthless and damaging than any other sort, he made use of this appearance to cover certain defects while trying hard to remedy them. . . . he worked harder and longer, and revised more often, than he pretended to do.'" The same pride and modesty were responsible for the pen name, James Bridie (a combination of the names of Osborne THE

15

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Henry Mavor's patemal grandparents, James Mavor and Mary Ann Bridie), behind which the Glasgow physician sought anonymity when at the age of forty he began to send out his plays. Until then Bridie had produced only undergraduate fare at Glasgow University, while simultaneously (and for a while unsuccessfully) trying to pass the anatomy finals so as to become the physician his engineer father had himself wanted to be. His caricatures and humorous verse and prose, including dramatic criticism, had been published in the Glasgow University Magazine, of which he had been an editor, and plays with titles to rival Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Momma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad had occasionally been performed for undergraduate audiences : The Son who was considerate of his Father's Prejudices, No Wedding Cake for Her, The Duke who could sometimes hardly keep from Smiling, The Baron who would not be convinced that His Way of Living was anything out of the Ordinary. (In one sense, of course, the medical student was the victim of the college buffoon in his battered bowler hat with a hole in the crown, his red necktie, tomato-colored jacket, magenta trousers striped with mauve, blue socks with horizontal black stripes, brown brogues, and monocle.) But there is still another sense in which Bridie is the victim of the persona Priestley speaks of. He is the victim of his own criticism, in which he is too often cocking a snook. In the essay " T h e Theatre," for instance, after he studies the Greek origins of the words comedy, tragedy, and farce, he comes up with these definitions: Comedy "is a composition intended to be part and parcel of a binge," tragedy is a "goat song," which is "as plain a piece of description as a 'swan song.' It is a song, delivered with a peculiar bleating intonation, about a certain human quality shared by mankind with the goat—that of butting furiously and hopelessly against the facts of life." Farce,

THE

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meaning a haggis (from the Italian farcio,

17

I stuff), is "an hour

or two filled with anything that comes into the heads of the author or the actors." Next he insists that "the eternal function of the Theatre is to entertain," that "the Theatre is a PassTime" : I have repeatedly heard persons coming out of a theatre say to each other that such and such a piece of work is very amusing, but it is not a play. A play is a method of passing an interval of time. A stage play is a method of passing an interval of time by putting an actor or actors on a platform and causing them to say or do certain things. If it is amusing, that is to say if it succeeds in making the spectators unconscious of the passage of time, it fulfils its function and has merit. If, on the other hand, the spectators are conscious of the passage of time, of the dreadful progress of the Universe towards destruction and nothingness, the play has failed and has no merit, or, at least, no merit as a play. . . . T o produce belief is the principal trick in this particular device for passing Time. . . . passing Time is no mean or frivolous activity. The consciousness of Time is a very terrible thing . . . A play makes us believe that we are taking part in a fuller kind of life than that in which we live with its long, unbearably flat passages and longueurs. These longueurs are absent in dreams, and to induce a sort of dream state is part of the trick.1 Passing time is no mean or frivolous activity, especially in a Universe progressing towards destruction and nothingness, but toe often, as in the Preface to Colonel Wotherspoon and Other Plays, Bridie tries to deny that his plays are anything but entertainment by dismissing their moral purpose : He is aware, he says, of being called "an amateurish but edifying dramatist," the second of which adjectives invests him with a "sacred duty." But instead of defending the edification of the plays, he chooses the company of Sir James Barrie, who, he says, "doesn't bother himself much with morals or greatness" : " I do not cling to his mantle, but I stand, for once in a way, a cabin boy in his

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J A M E S B R I D I E : C L O W N AND P H I L O S O P H E R

galley and I echo him in the sentiment. ' W h a t ' s all this ado about edification ? A r e you pleased or are you not ?' " In the same preface, he tries to ridicule technique per se ( " I t is a terrible thing to face the public handicapped by an insufficiency of what is called technique; for, you must know, if the writer of words intended to be spoken on the stage has the gift of prophecy and understands all knowledge and all mysteries and though he has all faith so that he could remove mountains and has not technique, he is nothing") when he is capable of the more valid criticism that technique " h a s nothing to do with the blind adherence to a few arbitrary rules"—rules which are "applied like postage stamps on circulars.'" T h i s passage, too, from his autobiography, One

Way

of Living,

reveals both

self-ridicule and a capacity for serious self-analysis; in it he imagines a conversation between the Recording Angel

and

himself: ". . . I make patterns. I'm a carpet playwright. I weave. If you cannot follow the lines of my design; if you cannot read the Great Names of Allah woven among olive trees and the scorpions and the stags, at least I hope you will like the gaiety of the colours and the variety of the shapes. Tread lightly on my Berlin Persians, on my quaint linoleums, for you tread on my dreams." "That is all very well," said the Recording Angel when he had read my plays, "but . . ." "Just a minute," I said. "Listen to this. 'She came downstairs. She went to an office and sat there all day. She went back to her divan room at six-thirty and stayed there reading library novels. She had no friends and no money to spend.' . . . If I make her alive then I have told a story, a story out of which you can take your own meaning, a story you can round off with your own moral. If I put in a murder in the next flat, a love affair with her employer or any such miserable incident I put it in became otherwise no one would buy this story. But they are not the story. The story is the girl herself, coming to life, reaching to you over the footlights and telling you that you are not alone in the world; that other human beings live, suffer, rejoice and play the fool

THE

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19

METHOD

within the same limitations that bind you. And all this nonsense about last acts. Only God can write last acts, and He seldom does. You should go out of the theatre with your heard whirling with speculations. You should be lovingly selecting infinite possibilities for the characters you have seen on the stage. What further interest for you have they, if they are neatly wrapped up and bedded or coffined? . .

Certainly that Bridie is the victim of his critics can be documented. They have relentlessly and severely attacked him as a craftsman, at times to the exclusion of any consideration of the theme being developed in a play and the possible appropriateness of the structure, however diffuse, to that theme. Thus George J e a n Nathan could write of Daphne

Laureola

(1949),

a play which because of the performance of Dame £dith Evans has received more critical attention both in England and in the United States than have Bridie's best plays: [Bridie's] plays are further as unsatisfying as a dinner, even when presided over by an expert waiter, which skips from the cocktail to the dessert and fails to provide an entree. They have a beginning and an end, sometimes fair enough, but no middle. This Bridie . . . seemed to write a play almost every other day. . . . judging from the nature of a large number of them, I don't see why he could not toss off twice as many as he did. . . . It is evident that . . . he was a man of ideas and talent but his assembly line activity did not allow him to do justice to them. There is about most of his work an unmeditated air and slapdash preparation that give it the sense of a first draft. All through this Daphne Laureola one feels it, together with its lapses and confusions. Shreds of the fantastic and whimsical mix awkwardly with patches of conventional polite comedy and the pseudo-philosophical. The recognizable and believable collide with the far-fetched and silly.' Yet the juxtaposition of opposites, of the conventional with the fantastic, the believable with the silly, is integral to the

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play whose t h e m e — t h e degradation of civilization—contrasts the civilized with the uncivilized a n d is reinforced by the alternating a n d a p p a r e n t l y incongruous tones. But defense of Bridie, as when he is called "the savior of British comedy," coming to rescue English theater when n o one was left after Shaw to write polished a n d witty conversation, fares no better. Usually it praises the obviously good or the wrong thing—the polished and witty dialogue a n d the "wee dose of idiosyncrasy" for example, which supports his reputation as a creator of odd, vividly alive characters but does nothing to disprove the theory that as a c r a f t s m a n he was a bungler. "Yet Bridie's wind-bags are still actor's d r e a m s , " one critic writes to excuse dialogue which he finds prolix.' Another criticism admirable for its avoidance of the issue is William Jeffrey's in The Oxford Companion to the Theatre: His technique has not always been equal to his ambition. An overfacile pen has been his bugbear, and he is wilful and wasteful in his use of excellent material. But on the whole his influence in the theatre has been salutary. When it seemed as if modern comedy was about to commit hari-kiri by reducing speech to a minimum, along came Bridie with a train of characters, every one of whom will talk twenty to the dozen and deave the welkin. All in all, Bridie has devised plays rich in entertainment and generous in their number of good parts for players.' In other words, the wilful a n d wasteful use of excellent material is easily ignored in following the a m a z i n g flow of rhetoric; all the clever talk hides the decline a n d demise of the play in the second a n d third acts. W h e n a critic faces the issue of the structure of a Bridie play, generally he judges it by some preconceived idea of "the structure of a play," as opposed to " t h e structure of a novel." T h u s Joseph W o o d K r u t c h , writing about A Sleeping Clergyman (1933), criticizes its action for being " a bit diffuse" :

T H E DRAMATIC

METHOD

21

Some of the scenes seem to be tangential to the main business in a manner proper enough in a novel but tending in drama to destroy that effect of rapid movement in a single direction which is almost necessary if a play is not to give the impression that it halts when it should go forward. . . . Moreover, many individual scenes are written with the finest dramatic instinct, so that whatever has been said about a certain cumbersomeness in the organization of the whole does not apply to the movement of most of the parts taken by themselves." Thus Margaret Marshall, writing about Daphne Laureola, criticizes the play for being all "third act and epilogue" like A Streetcar Named Desire. The play explores the consequences of a choice, she says: Now the consequences of such choices are interesting enough. The trouble is that, in the theater, they constitute third act and epilogue—the real drama, the dynamic development, has gone before. The incidents illustrating the consequences may be fascinating, and some are dramatic in themselves, but all are part of a situation which is an ending, not a beginning or a middle, and therefore basically static. . . . What has gone before must somehow be made clear—which makes for long stretches of analysis and reporting that may, again, be interesting but are not intrinsically dramatic. 9 Miss Marshall probably is in error about the plot of Daphne Laureola (in one sense a choice is revealed in the last act of the play). But this is not an argument about interpretation; nor is it a defense of A Sleeping Clergyman. The point is that when Krutch and Miss Marshall do not find what they are looking for, they do not look at what they find. Both recognize, of course, the importance of substance in a play and that Bridie has this, even though he "may not have mastered the art of compact dramatic construction," as Krutch puts it. "If the piece falls short," Miss Marshall writes of Daphne Laureola, "it is at least of a quality to engage the intelligence." Krutch is

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J A M E S BRIDIE : C L O W N AND

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more effusive: "But in a theater where nothing is more c o m m o n than plays well m a d e out of nothing, substance is precious enough to be more than welcome even if its organization is a little uncertain. And M r . Bridie has substance." Eric Bentley, like K r u t c h , prefers Bridie's substance to wellm a d e plays; unlike K r u t c h a n d Miss Marshall, he comes to Bridie with n o preconceived idea of form a n d is willing to look for the playwright's intention in each play. Calling Bridie's 1948 play Gog and Magog a better piece t h a n " a less imperfect play," Indictment ("Plainte contre I'inconnu") by Georges Neveux, he explains his judgment this way : T h e French well-made play is exasperatingly well made. Here's the machine, as it were, and look, there's your sausage. Bridie's piay, everyone agrees, doesn't quite come off. T h e sausage isn't there because Bridie doesn't believe in machine manufacture. If he can't quite make his wild tale a symbol of human fate—as is, say, Synge's Playboy—it's not for lack of trying. And by trying, I don't mean having highminded intentions outside the play, but seeking after the right theatrical form for the intentions in the play. At those happy moments when Bridie's farce begins to mesh with his idea one glimpsed a bigger sort of drama than Neveux's play. . . . if Bridie isn't a very great playwright, he is a genuine one, and the best, apparently, that the British can offer today." If, in the u n h a p p y moments, Bridie's plays are imperfect, they are imperfect not because they are m a d e on the assembly line but because they are not. This is, at least, a step nearer the truth than is N a t h a n ' s criticism. Some of the confusion of opinion about Bridie's intention and the success with which he accomplishes it is due to his apparent simplicity but actual complexity. Admittedly, he is sometimes too explicit (in bad plays) a n d criticism which censures him for being explanatory where he should be suggestive is then justified. Jonah and the Whale, The Last Trump, It Depends What You Mean, a n d Dr. Angelus deserve

THE

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23

to be criticized for, respectively, their prolixity, acres of talk, unabashed garrulity, and longwindedness." But some criticism is complacent and superficial when a play is difficult and complex. T h e critic for The Times Literary Supplement was correct in finding an unwillingness to make things easy for the audience in Bridie's best plays.12 There is an ambiguity in these, an ambiguity inherent in their structure and in characterizations within the structure. Moreover, the ambiguity is intentional, as this comment by Bridie on Shaw suggests: The most disturbing feature of Widower's Houses was the judicial attitude of its author. H e repeatedly stepped over from the prosecutor's desk to that of the Devil's advocate. We are still disturbed by this attitude. We like our author to take sides. We like to know what he is getting at and to see him continually getting at it. This juggling with right and wrong destroys the opportunity delighted in by critics of a philosophic bent of taking sides against the author. How can a critic attack an author if he is for ever stating the converse to his own thesis in a much more brilliant fashion than the critic can achieve? How can any one be expected to die for a cause of which its chief protagonist cannot resist pointing otit the feeble and ridiculous features?" Sewell Stokes suggests a recognition of Bridie's intention in Dr. Angelus (1947). O n e does not know whether to take the villain seriously or not, he writes: "Bridie's trouble—an old one with him—is that he has not m a d e u p his mind what kind of play he is writing; or would it be fairer perhaps to say that he has—and that to confuse us is a part of his intention?"" Most critics seem not to suspect that Bridie is copying Shaw's judicial attitude. Peter Fleming praises in an early (1930) play, The Anatomist, the "interplay of contrasts" which produces a flavor "at once w a r m and dry, like the flavour of a good sherry," but admits that the characterization of Dr. Knox leaves him "with a slight, a very slight, feeling of inconclusiveness." At the end of the play, Dr. Knox, he writes, "so imperious and

24

J A M E S BRIDIE : C L O W N AND

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sultanic, is reduced to the dimensions of a small boy of feminine p e r c e p t i o n . " " Inconclusiveness bothers Robert Speaight in his appraisal of Bridie; its absence in The Dragon and the Dove (1942) leads him to praise a m i n o r play as one "of real i m p o r t a n c e " : "[Bridie's] chief f a i l i n g — a n inability to bring his best ideas to a satisfactory conclusion—is not evident, since legend has already provided him with a last a c t . " " Inconclusiveness, or ambiguity, is inherent in the structure of a Bridie play because the plays are a r g u m e n t s in which the balance of thesis a n d antithesis is m a i n t a i n e d a n d of which the conclusion is never a resolution. T h e y are a r g u m e n t s about, or searches for, t r u t h , a n d about t r u t h there is n o finality. Even Bridie's fantasies—although he would pass them off as pure e n t e r t a i n m e n t — m u s t be construed as arguments. Eric: Linklater writes in The Art of Adventure : " I t is, I believe, his conception of d r a m a - a s - a r g u m e n t t h a t has led to a loosethinking but c o m m o n complaint against M r . Bridie." T h e complaint is the old o n e — t h a t Bridie loses interest in the conclusions of his plays, ending t h e m before his story is ended. Linklater c o n t i n u e s : ". . . this c o m p l a i n t comes f r o m critics who, because they are looking for a purely d r a m a t i c denouement, have lost sight of the a r g u m e n t . T h e play finishes when the a r g u m e n t is finished."" T h a t Bridie conceived of d r a m a as a r g u m e n t , that he believed in a n d d e m o n s t r a t e d the "theatrical value of discussion"—the exploitation of which he believed was Shaw's invention in the art of e n t e r t a i n m e n t — w i l l be shown in each analysis that follows. Describing S h a w ' s "invention," Bridie wrote : It is a common matter of observation that when two men in a railway carriage begin to discuss any general topic the other occupants put down the most enthralling of books and newspapers and listen. In the theatre today, if two duelists were to put down their rapiers and daggers to elaborate a casual remark

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25

by one of t h e m about, say, the e r a d i c a t i o n of muskrats, be assured that the a u d i e n c e would lean f o r w a r d in its seats a n d listen with breathless a t t e n t i o n . "

This is what Bridie does. The duelists put down their rapiers and discuss the morality of muskrat eradication. And the conclusion of their argument is never a resolution: this is important. For, as Moray McLaren puts it, " T o us in Ireland and Scotland an argument that reaches a conclusion has failed." A play is a "flow of soul" rather than a "feast of reason."" The duelists would not agree, in the argument about muskrats, to eradicate or spare the animals, but they would discover in the discussion that they and the muskrats have souls. Bridie, again writing about Shaw, says of the message of his plays, " I n its essentials it is a religious message, for Mr. Shaw is a deeply religious man."" Bridie, too, is a deeply religious man, and the message of his plays is a religious message. The Scots' preoccupation with the soul probably is no greater than that of the Irish, or the English, and the struggle between God and the Devil probably is rooted no deeper in the consciousness of the Scots than of the Irish, or the English, despite what Iain Crawford says to the contrary; but Crawford is right that the theme which exercises Bridie's mind "most strenuously and which calls forth his best work" is the struggle between God and the Devil, and he is right, too, that "there is nothing sententious or evangelical" about Bridie's approach.21 Bridie's best plays are not obviously religious plays at all, just as The Devil's Disciple and The Doctor's Dilemma are not obviously religious dramas. Thus, The Switchback, Bridie's first play (1929), is less obviously a religious play than is the inferior Mr. Bolfry (1943). In Mr. Bolfry, the Christian minister McCrimmon and the pagan devil Bolfry, raised (according to the method described by Reginald Scot in The Discoverie of Witchcraft) by McCrimmon's niece Jean and two soldiers

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J A M E S BRIDIE : C L O W N AND P H I L O S O P H E R

billeted at the manse during the war, form an alliance against the agnostics—Jean and the soldiers Cully and Cohen. As Bolfry puts it, " M r . McCrimmon, it seems to me we cannot begin our battle for the souls of these persons until they realise that they have souls to battle for."" This is Bridie being clear and explicit. Bolfry continues: "But I am also, like yourself, a servant of One whom I need not name. . . . I a m the same Instrument of Providence as he who smote Job's body with boils for the good of his soul." T o Cully, who has laughed at his suggestion that this world can be a Paradise if one chooses the w a y of William Blake and proclaims that "Now is the dominion of Edom and the return of Adam to Paradise," Bolfry s a y s : The real War is . . . The War between Good and Evil. The Holy War. It is a War not to destroy but to create. It is like the war between man and woman. If there were no war, God would go to sleep. . . . Death would conquer both Good and Evil and there would be Nothing. . . . M y Führer fights for the New Disorder; for disorder is perpetual movement and movement is Life. The Eneiny has stated his Ten Points, from Mount Sinai in a thunder storm. . . . Disorder may win the day. . . . Then Man's genius will burst its bonds and leap to meet the sun. The living, glorious animal in you will riot in the fields, and the soul will laugh for joy, naked but not ashamed. Your Self will be triumphant. When I win, Man will be an individual. You may love your neighbour if you like, but all that is highest in you tells him to keep his distance. . . . There is no Hope in my country. No man hopes for what he has. What are the virtues that keep you going? Courage? Honesty? Charity? I have them too. Courage is the reaction to Fear. You are more afraid than I am. Honesty is the reaction to lies. Charity is the reaction to hate and suspicion. M y honesty spurns your superstitions. My charity embraces both the sheep and the goats. M y flags are the Pride of the Eye and the Lust of the Flesh. Their other names are Art and Poetry . . . I tell you that all you have and all you know is your Self. Honour your Self and set him free; for the Soul and the Body are one,

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27

and their only h o m e is the World, and their only life is the Flesh and their only friend is the Devil. L e t the wild horses loose!

This "Rhetoric" McCrimmon recognizes as "the voice of my own heart speaking evil," and he determines—honoring his Self and setting it free—to tear Bolfry from his breast if he dies for it; his inclination after this midnight debate, during which Bolfry has consumed quantities of medicinal whisky, is to chase the Devil across the moor and force him at knifepoint over a cliff and into the sea. The young people's assurance is thus knocked out of them (Cully says, "I'm not sure of anything in the whole Universe"); McCrimmon, who returns from the chase to drink the heel of Bolfry's whisky bottle neat, will not admit and yet will not deny that his temptation by the devil has been more supernatural than that represented by a bottle of whisky. Mrs. McCrimmon, who, Bolfry admits, "is probably the key to the whole business," keeps her mind on such things as being properly shod to go chasing devils in thunderstorms and can't be bothered to scream when, next morning, the umbrella Bolfry left behind gets up and walks by itself out of the room, because, as McCrimmon says, nowhere is there greater faith than hers. Admittedly, this is explicit religion and explicit drama. Mr. Bolfry received a West End production and was greeted with "a paean of praise."" A similar theme treated with greater subtlety in The Sivitchback was not detected and the play has been virtually ignored. In the latter, the Christian Sir Anthony Craye, who tries to persuade Mallaby to live under the Order of the Ten Commandments by continuing to serve the medical profession and mankind, is at once in conflict and cahoots with the pagan Aunt Dinah, who encourages Mallaby to know, honor, and set free his Self to be an archeologist. Mallaby, after a major wrestling match, is "realizing" his soul in the third act. But another act would be needed to discover

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whether his self-knowledge, like McCrimmon's, would admit that "We've got the queer, dark corners in our mind and strange beasts in them that come out ranging in the night," would admit, that is, that the Self has two potentialities. Because Bridie is the kind of religious dramatist that Shaw is, it is impossible to label these potentialities " a potentiality for good" and "a potentiality for evil." Mallaby's choice in The Switchback might better be characterized as the choice of apparent Disorder over apparent Order. The words must be qualified in Bridie's plays because finally his attitude is ambiguous. There is, first of all, the suggestion that the way of Order and logic is superseded by the way of Disorder which represents, ultimately, a higher order and logic. (Bridie, writing in an entirely different context, expresses a general philosophy which should be remembered in interpreting his plays: "A modern state is best if it is a makeshift . . . It should look with suspicion on all logical processes within itself and outside itself. Logical processes do not apply to the human soul. It should find its inward fire in institutions of immortality—in the work of its artists, its poets and its musicians."") If this first were the only suggestion, a "reasonable" reaction to characters like Mallaby would be wrong: unambiguously, the doctor would leave the stage a crusading hero. But there is also the suggestion in Bridie's plays that the way of Disorder is destructive, that McCrimmon has chosen wisely to denounce the drunken days of his Divinity School years. To complicate matters still more, sometimes, as in Mr. Bolfry, the way of Disorder is presented in an argument of irrefutable logic, and the reaction of the representative of the way of Order takes a most irrational and disorderly form. Sometimes the way of Disorder is an extremely "reasoned" choice, as are the choices of Dr. Knox, in The Anatomist (a play based on the life of Robert Knox, the famed nineteenth-

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century anatomist who narrowly escaped imprisonment for his suspected involvement in the body-snatching business of Burke and Hare) and of Dr. Angelus in the play by that name. Thus D r . K n o x , for whose anatomy classes corpses are supplied by Burke and Hare (who trap and murder the unsuspecting), has rationally chosen to carry the deaths of poor wretches around his neck until he dies because he believes it is his duty to pass along the knowledge he has acquired. T h e cause, he says, "is between Robert K n o x and Almighty God. I shall answer to no one else. As for the world, I shall face it. . . . D o you know that I am the apostolic successor of Cuvier, the great naturalist ? D o you know that, although I am a comparatively young man, much of my work is already immortal?'" 1

To

Amelia, the woman he loves, he admits that he is a "little pink shivering boy crouching within this grotesque, this grisly shell of a b o d y . " In the light of her presence he sees his battle against the people who call him a murderer as "so much foolish bombast and vanity," as a "squalid, torturing farce." He struts and rants and puts on a bold face but his soul is sick within him at the horror of what he has done. Walter Anderson, Dr. K n o x ' s young demonstrator, who is completely disillusioned when he discovers that his idol condones murder, represents the way of O r d e r in this play, yet he screams, rushes about white and shaking, and nearly collapses upon recognizing in the school mortuary a girl who befriended him in a bar; Dr. K n o x answers his hysteria with, It will be perhaps a satisfaction to you to know that your friend will be improving the minds of the youth of the town in place of corrupting their morals. . . . Come, my dear lad, I perceive you have had a shock. You must not mind my rough tongue. It is a defect in me as sentimentality is in you. T h e life of this poor wretch is ended. It is surely a better thing that her beauty of form should be at the service of divine science than at the service of

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any drunken buck with a crown in his pocket. Our emotions, Walter, are for ever tugging at our coat-tails lest at any time we should look the Truth in the face. Walter, declaring that " T h e truth is she was murdered. . . . You are a coward and a murderer," strikes at Knox, who catches his wrist and replies, " M r . Anderson, I shall not require your services this forenoon. In the afternoon you will present yourself at my private room and apologise to me. In the meantime you will go to bed. In the future I advise you to abstain from alcohol." Bridie, in a preface to The Anatomist, states, " N o solution to the mystery of Knox's attitude in 1828 is suggested. Perhaps Mary's (in Act I I I ) is nearest the truth, though she only says it to hurt him.'"* Walter's fiancee, who is jealous of his devotion to Knox and begs him to leave the anatomist to take up private practice, says, " I think you are a vain, hysterical, talented, stupid man. I think that you are wickedly blind and careless when your mind is fixed on something. But all men are like that. There is nothing very uncommon about you, Dr. K n o x . " This is perhaps nearest the truth. T h e way of Disorder is synonymous with selfishness or integrity, the way of Order with selflessness or compromise; the reader must choose. O r he may choose to let Bridie's ambiguity stand unmolested in the belief that truth about such things is unknowable because a Knox will answer to no one but Almighty God. Dr. Knox is lecturing in Amelia's drawing room when the curtain falls—about the heart of the rhinoceros: "This mighty organ, gentlemen, weighs full twenty-five pounds, a fitting fountainhead for the tumultuous stream that surges through the arteries of that prodigious monster. Clad in proof, gentlemen, and terribly armed as to his snout, the rhinoceros buffets his way through the tangled verdure engirdling his

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tropical habitat." The reader is ready to grant that the doctor is a "little pink shivering boy" armed against the world, forced to do the evil of murder. Then Knox adds, "Such dreadful vigour, gentlemen, such ineluctable energy requires to be sustained by no ordinary forces of nutrition . . ,"11 He seems to be talking about himself. His energy must be sustained by no ordinary force. Knox, McCrimmon, Dr. Angelus, and Mallaby—all of Bridie's rhinoceroses—are sustained by extraordinary forces, forces which represent potentialities outside themselves. In each case they are trying to realize selves outside or beyond themselves, to be something beyond blushing boys. They meet with varying success because the forces nourishing them "are not all equally expert and conscientious," as the Archangel Raphael explains it in Tobias and the Angel, Bridie's popular biblical play, and because as material for nourishment they have not been "invariably well chosen." The Archangel, who has guided Tobias on his journey, is explaining to Sara that she cannot love him but must love Tobias, her husband. Raphael is Tobias' daemon, he says: "A daemon, spelt with an 'a,' is a creature by whose agency you write immortal verse, go great journeys, leap into bottomless chasms, fight dragons, starve in a garret." Sara adds, "Strangle our husbands"; Raphael admits this, continuing, "It is perhaps fortunate that daemons are much too occupied to visit, or to concern themselves with, the bulk of mankind. . . . When it is necessary to Jahveh's purpose they make contact, often with extremely disturbing results; for daemons are not all equally expert and conscientious, and their material is not invariably well chosen." Sara can love Tobias' daemon only "in a Pickwickian sense"; when she sees Raphael looking out of Tobias' eyes, she must imitate Mrs. McCrimmon, look the other way and busy herself with household tasks, for she cannot love what she cannot understand. "Love what you understand," Raphael tells her—

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that is, "Tobias, and Tobias alone," "his little oddities, his little bursts of friendliness, his gentleness, his follies," and "his little round fat body"—"and you will understand more and more till your life is so full that there will be no room for anything else, torturings and itchings and ambitions and shames."1* Here would be a condemnation by Bridie of the tortured and ambitious were it not that Raphael says, "When it is necessary to Jahveh's purpose . . ." The ambitious cannot be condemned if their ambition is necessary to Jahveh's purpose. Bridie's heroes, then, are inspired, expertly or inexpertly, by representatives of a supreme force which is in Tobias and the Angel called Jahveh but which has other names in other plays. The force is served by a necessary combination of daemons of Order and Disorder, or in other terminology angelic and diabolic daemons. If there is always a combination of opposing forces at work, inspired men must necessarily be in conflict with a major element in their environment. Sometimes their liberalism is in revolt against convention and tradition, as is the case with Dr. Knox; sometimes, like McCrimmon, they stand for convention and tradition against modern relativism— against those whose minds are open because they are empty. In all cases they defend egoism against altruism, or pride against humility, in the sense that their inner faith in themselves, when they become material for divine or supernatural inspiration, is firm. Their inspiration is interpreted by the uninspired as impractical or literal madness, selfishness, irresponsibility, unreasonableness, wilfulness, or impiety. The fate of Bridie's rhinoceroses reflects the illogical or exotic values of this Jahveh, or World Morality, a morality which can best be described as that found in the story of the prodigal son. The morality of a Bridie play kills the fatted calf in compassion and love for the son who has wasted his substance with riotous living, proclaims, "For this my son was dead, and is alive again;

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he was lost, and is found." It is a morality hard for logical elder brothers—Cully, Cohen, and Jean in Mr. Bolfry, Walter and Mary in The Anatomist—to understand. It requires generosity and compassion of them, which is its justification. Not every reader is a logical elder brother. For the prodigal sons of the world, the exotic values being championed are initially acceptable. But Bridie's ambiguity forces them to look at the ways they are wasting their substance and to decide if they might not better waste it in some other way. They, the illogical and disorderly, are asked to look logically and unemotionally at themselves. Bridie's use of symbolism and Christian myth, then, is like Shaw's, rather than like Eliot's. He does not believe in Archangels and Devils but in forces—but there is not much difference, he would say. Thus, in a play like Tobias and the Angel, which is a dramatic transcription of a tale told in the Book of Tobit in the Apocrypha and in which the Archangel Raphael and the daemon Asmoday appear, Raphael and Asmoday are symbols of forces, as are humans like Craye and Aunt Dinah in The Switchback. Bridie's use of the Adam myth—which is the subject of the analysis of The Switchback in the next chapter—is like Shaw's use of the concept of Christian sacrifice in The Devil's DiscipleWhen Bridie wrote Tobias and the Angel, The Black Eye, and Marriage Is No Joke, he was not literally writing religious plays about the fate of the prodigal son. And when he wrote The Baikie Charivari he was not literally writing about the temptation and crucifixion of Christ. Perhaps more important than that Bridie is a religious dramatist is that he is a comedian; his piety will not be solemn. James R. Carlson draws the comparison with Shaw in a review of Tobias and the Angel: " A t its best the religious theater has played variations on tragedy, and at its worst it

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has bathed itself in sentimentality. Seldom has it seen that comedy awakens a kind of response never tapped by solemnity or limpid emotion. Thoughtfulness and laughter travel together in theater and in life and they play together in the 'religious drama' of J a m e s Bridie (as they do in the 'religious drama' of his fellow iconoclast Bernard Shaw)." 3 " Bridie wrote "binges" and "haggises" rather than "goat songs," but he wrote them in the full knowledge that mankind, like the goat, butts furiously and hopelessly against the facts of life. T h i s is an achievement beyond the reach of the amateur.

II Ambiguity in The Switchback

the Adam myth was never again as specific as it was in his first play, The Switchback. Usually he was simply describing a temptation and loss of innocence—a temptation by daemons to leave a state of innocence (the pink shivering boy or naked Adam state) in order to realize a potentiality beyond innocence. The New Adams have two choices after their fall. They can attempt to regain their lost innocence, that is they can deny all daemons, can look the other way and go about their household tasks, as Raphael suggests Sara should do. Or they can walk boldly toward a New Eden, to live inspired by their ruling daemon in a land beyond the further temptation of the routed daemon. Mallaby says in the last act of The Switchback, "Mankind has many inventions, but only three ways of happiness—Make-believe, Curiosity and Irony. The first two ways I have travelled hopefully on aching feet. They are finished. I'll see what is in the third.'" Having lived in a state of innocence that was only make-believe, Mallaby "falls" under the temptation of daemons representing opposite forces—in a moment of inspiration or curiosity—and

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35

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chooses to be led by the victorious daemon into the Land of Irony, beyond further temptation. This is the most general application of the Adam myth, corresponding to its treatment in other plays. But the myth can be applied more specifically in The Switchback, for here is an Eve, a serpent, and an order from God which is disobeyed (and in the revised edition of the play quotations from Genens and Paradise Lost). The play is about Mallaby, a country doctor, whose experiments toward a cure for tuberculosis are discovered by three London gentlemen stranded in his house because of motor trouble. Two of the gentlemen, Pascal (a newspaper man) and Burmeister (a financier), with the help of Mrs. Mallaby and against the advice of Sir Anthony Craye (head of the Royal Academy of Medicine), persuade Mallaby to take the cure to London where it is publicized before being approved by the Academy; an error is discovered in the experiments and Mallably is struck from the medical register. When Mrs. Mallaby goes off with Burmeister, Mallaby goes home to drink, until he is inspired to go off to the Near East to be an archeologist. All of this, Bridie says, "is intended to demonstrate the Vanity of Human Wishes, the Importance of Being Earnest, the Inevitability of Fate, the Economic Law, the Immortality of the Soul and the Pleasures of Hope."' The surprising thing is that the play manages to do all this and more. Indeed it is almost impossible to believe that it is a first play, so mature is its conception and so controlled the writing. But it was written—and rejected by Alfred Wareing of the Glasgow Repertory Theatre—in 1922. It did not receive a production until 1929, a year after young Tyrone Guthrie chose for his first production a much lesser play, The Sunlight Sonata. Winifred Bannister's reaction to The Switchback stop» at an acceptance of the values championed in Mallaby. The theme of the play, she says, is the seduction of altruism by the shoddy

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artifices of civilization; "an innocent selfless student in the cause of humanity" is seduced by "individuals who represent the expedient state of our civilisation."3 This can be restated in the metaphor of the Adam myth: Adam is tempted by Eve, who has been tempted by the serpent (a combination of Burmeister, representing financial gain, and Pascal, representing fame and reputation), to eat of the fruits of materialism. Awakened from his innocence to the materialism of his Eden, he rejects the latter and goes off to regain the former'by digging among the ruins of an old world. In other words, he denies the daemon representing the shoddy artifices of civilization. But this criticism errs in bringing the argument of the play to a conclusion; it forgets McLaren's warning that an argument that reaches a conclusion has failed, at least in Scotland. It decides—and the play does not—that Mallaby is a great and noble soul, a "selfless student in the cause of humanity," and not simply a cranky child. It decides that Craye is a representative of expediency, and not an "archangel unawares" as Mallaby facetiously calls him in Act I. It decides that Aunt Dinah, who encourages Mallaby to go to Palmyra to regain his soul, is his "true ally" and "loyal protector" and not a devil quoting scripture. Certainly the ambiguity of the play—an ambiguity which accounts for most of its brilliance—provides support for this interpretation. Yet to say that "Bridie loses some sympathy for his central character" by making his indictment of society in Act III sound like drunken hysteria is to underestimate the playwright. If Mallaby has lost the audience's sympathy, it is because Bridie intended this. To imply that Bridie has lost control in the third act is to fall into the same error of subjectivity that traps other critics. Part of Bridie's intention in the play is to make his audience look critically and reasonably—as elder brothers—rather than simply emotionally, at its central character, who is, if not

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childish in his innocence, something a little less than childlike. It is not only in the final act that Bridie shows Mallaby's "madness" or "freakishness"; his characterization comes to its logical climax here. It is not difficult to put people in the proper camps in a play like The Sunlight Sonata, where Beelzebub and his seven henchmen are on stage, tugging one way on the characters, and the Misses Faith, Hope, and Charity pulling the other; but it is difficult to decide, for example, whether Sir Anthony Craye is a devil or an angel. Altruism may have been seduced by the shoddy artifices of civilization, and the cure for disillusionment with this world ("this pestilential ditch of a world," Mallaby calls it in Act III) may be digging for another Eden in the East, but the converse of this thesis is competently if not brilliantly stated by Craye. Throughout the play, he can be counted on for the sane, dignified response to Mallaby's unreasoned impetuosity. In Act I, scene ii, when, coming on stage to find his wife in tears and mistakenly suspecting Craye of some infamous advance, Mallaby rails, "Does he think I'm afraid of him because he is Lord High Pimp of Harley Street ? What is it, you infernal, incompetent plumber? What did you say, you damned old cad ?" Sir Anthony answers, "Look here, Dr. Mallaby, you forget yourself. Take your hand off my coat, sir. Ah ! I wish you a very good morning." Craye goes for his coat, puts it on without assistance, and goes out, Bridie writes, "like Coriolanus or somebody." Mallaby is immediately penitent : " I am a little quick-tempered. Dear me, what a dreadful scene! I'm sorry, dear. I'm frightfully sorry." In the third act, when Craye brings Mrs. Mallaby home and attempts to piece together the lives smashed by the others' carelessness, thesis and antithesis are stated like this: Mallaby. You have evidently come to stammer and blether and be pompous and sententious and impressive as usual. You are

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wasting your time on me. I am not a public meeting. I'm not even a man. You and your gang have done for me. Utterly. Sir Anthony. You are making things impossible for me by your rudeness. Mallaby. Then get to hell out of here. Sir Anthony. Look here, Mallaby, sit down in that chair and don't be a fool. I am not going to get angry with you—I never get angry with sick men, and you are obviously ill. Sit down at once when I tell you. Bridie's stage direction is "MALLABY sits down. He is very weak, and S I R A N T H O N Y is used to obedience." (Archangels are, perhaps?) Mallaby gains strength and sobriety of a kind with the intensity of his emotion, stating the play's thesis variously: Ο cities, I'll go to you. I'll fill my soul with you! You know, you cities, how soon, in how little time our little, shoddy, concrete and stucco world will be bitten to death by bacteria, shrouded in jungle and burnt there by the sun. . . . Where will be then Sir Anthony Craye and his doom-dealing Academy and his epochmaking book on the Mesenteries? A broken bit of delft from a Harley Street lavatory. "By George, they had sanitation of a sort then, too?" . . . I'm being practical. Is it being practical to lock a chain round my leg and limp up old Craye's treadmill? What for? To grind out a few false proofs to bolster up the ephemeral superstitions of these pundits, his friends? I'm damned if it is. I'm damned if I will. The only practical things are life and eternity. I'll go where they've written their message on the old grey face of the world. I'm free, I tell you. Free. The bonds of my captivity are broken. I'll go now. As fast as I can. . . . You're a tame elephant, proud of its little procession. I know what you want. Honour and glory, the consciousness of work well done, respect—"to give your little senate laws and stand attentive to your own applause"—all that. I don't. Pascal wants brute power. I don't. Your friend, what's-his-name—Burmeister, wants money and all the piggish pleasure it can bring. I don't. I'm an altruist. I only want the kingdom of heaven. It is within me, and, by heaven, I'll be king of it!

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Then comes the antithesis: " I quite understand," says Sir Anthony. "You are excited. If you shoulder your responsibilities . . . This is hysteria. . . . You had ambition once. You still have, I'm sure. You have the stuff in you. We are giving you the chance to come back—perhaps eventually (who knows?) to take your place alongside Lister, Jenner, Hunter, Harvey." It is clear from the beginning of the play that Bridie intends to contrast two attitudes toward life—Craye's sobriety, and the various madnesses displayed by Mallaby and the other characters. Sir Anthony is immediately cautious about accepting another tuberculosis cure, doubting the younger doctor's judgment, perhaps after observing his behavior at his first entrance. (He has watched Mallaby make an unfortunate reference to "those damned Jews" in the presence of Burmeister, then recover awkwardly, only to tell Lord Pascal that "the life of a busy G.P. leaves very little time to waste" reading his paper.) "But there's no job at which a man's judgment is so likely to play him false as in this research business," Craye tells Burmeister and Pascal. He condemns their motives in helping Mallaby : "You're after his livelihood and his professional honour and his immortal soul. I say nothing of his domestic happiness." T h a t he is an "archangel unawares" can be supported by situation, characterization, and language in the play, beginning with the mention of Mallaby's immortal soul in the speech just quoted. Sir Anthony repeatedly attempts guidance, advising against advertising Mallaby's research before it has been passed on by the Academy, warning Mrs. Mallaby against Pascal's and Burmeister's "irresponsibility," trying to save Mallaby's professional standing by advising the publication of a disclaimer of Pascal's newspaper report, bringing back Mrs. Mallaby in Act I I I and asking that Mallaby forgive her, finding the place in Horrocks' laboratory for him.

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Craye's speeches cannot, of course, be read consistently on a symbolic level. This is not Bridie's method. But awareness of his intention to make Sir Anthony some kind of divine agency makes certain of the dialogue meaningful on two levels. For example, in the first act Craye is trying to warn Burmeister and Pascal against accepting Mallaby's cure for tuberculosis too readily : Burmeister. . . . If you don't know the fellow, he can't be any good, because if he'd been any good you'd have known him, Toady, wouldn't you? Sir Anthony. You know perfectly well that I keep an unusually open mind on everything connected with my profession. But . . . Burmeister. . . . What a type you are, Toady! Sir Anthony. I am nothing of the kind. I'm an ordinary honest man. I'm not surprised you can't recognise one when you see him. All I said was . . . Pascal. All you said was that you've no interest in any bit of work that isn't turned out by your own little ring. Just who is in Craye's "ring" is uncertain. Mrs. Mallaby dislikes him because he appears as a roadblock between her and the "life and shops and theatres and dresses and dances" in London. An Eve, tempted by serpents and herself tempting Mallaby, she is at least not at first in Sir Anthony's ring. Aunt Dinah approves of Craye while she condemns Pascal and Burmeister : " H e was the only decent one, though. Those other two are rascals." Yet if the way of madness, as opposed to Craye's clear sobriety, is the way of the devil, she must be in another camp, quoting scripture. T h e answer is that Craye and Aunt Dinah are cohorts; like Bolfry and McCrimmon, and Raphael and Asmoday, they work toward one end, an end larger than either and encompassing both. The theory that a supernatural agency is at work in The Switchback can be supported by situation and language.

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Weather is one of its instruments : F o g brings the three London gentlemen to Mallaby's study (Burmeister says about his host, " H e never had a luckier stroke in his life than at the moment the fog threw us up on his doorstep"). Mallaby, noticing that the fog has lifted in Act I, says, "Yes, God rolled u p the fog as I came down the valley. It was a very singular sight. We have m a n y fogs here, and they roll away like great maps. It uplifts the spirit, don't you think? Pharaoh and his chariots behind you, and no hope anywhere, and suddenly the sea throws up its arms and lets you pass . . . " Thus, to inspire Mallaby's revolt, the force at work rolls out a thunderstorm in Act I I I , and the revelation is punctuated by thunder claps and lightning, the latter illuminating Palmyra, Mallaby's new Eden, on a wall m a p . Weather is both angelic and daemonic, the thunderstorm allied to Aunt Dinah (Mallaby says, " I ' m as m a d as a thunderstorm") and the fog as sober as Sir Anthony. T h e two attitudes are blended in the agency at work. Mrs. Mallaby is an Eve, and Palmyra is Mallaby's new Eden. Mallaby, at the end of the play, is a fallen Adam, tempted by Eve and a pack of serpents out of his innocence, and off to a new Eden in the pursuit of knowledge. Again one can look to situation, characterization, and language to prove Bridie's intention. (Bridie has tipped off the reader at the beginning of the play, of course; Pascal finds Milton on the mantlepiece in the doctor's study and reads off the theme of the p l a y : " O f man's first disobedience and the fruit . . .") First of all, Mallaby's characterization has the innocence of A d a m — a child-like innocence which reveals itself in emotional instability, egotism, stubbornness, tactlessness, and gullibility. Mallaby hardly needs alcohol to make him lose his inhibitions. H e is led by his unstable emotions from his first entrance, when his innocent deprecation of Burmeister upsets him, through the fracas with Craye over Mrs. Mallaby's tears, to his own tears

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at Craye's scolding for his drunkenness : in Act I I I Craye says, "You're a coward because you try to drug yourself out of your responsibilities, and you're a fool because you think vou can," to which Mallaby childishly replies, "Don't scold me. I don't think I can bear it. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I'll cry, I think," and he does so. He is misled into releasing his experiments to Pascal's paper by Burmeister— the conventional serpent in the Garden—who plays on his anger at Sir Anthony for making Mrs. Mallaby cry. What is more, he is unaware that he is being pushed around. " I ' m not an easy man to drive," he says immediately after agreeing to go to London with his cure. His egotism takes the form of straightforward statement, as in "Damn it, Dorothy, any man of common intelligence can twist those big business men round his little finger if he takes the necessary trouble. . . . Dorothy, if I had any time for such folly I could be a millionaire in a year," and in "I've heard old Craye speak at the Congress and I've read his stuff, and the man's a pompous ass, deary. He couldn't possibly understand what I'm driving at. . . . M y work is big work. I feel it. I know it. Let it stand by itself without assistance from distinguished and benevolent boobs." T h e egotism is revealed, too, in a kind of false humility : When he realizes that he has spoken of "damned Jews" in the presence of Burmeister, he says, "It's like me. It's very like me." And the false humility is coupled with a severity of self-judgment, another form of egotism; he does not "give a damn," he says, whether Craye is his enemy or not, but he objects to losing his temper. Incidentally, Mallaby has a strange dislike of being touched, a symbol of the evasiveness that Burmeister finds in his personality. (The evasiveness itself is perhaps symbolic of an Adam-like seclusion in a Garden of Innocence, a withdrawal from the harsh realities.) "Don't paw me, sir! I can't stand being pawed ! " Mallaby says when Burmeister touches his arm,

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and Mrs. Mallaby rushes in with the tact sorely needed : " H e ' s such a baby in many things." His stubbornness makes him uncompromising in his refusal of the conventional and traditional. He glories in having upset, he believes, Tarantanov's Theorem, and the world shall know about it even though "the Royal Academy of Medicine and all the cohorts of Hell try to stop" him. " I ' m the most original worker since Pasteur," he continues. " B u t medical etiquette—" the serpent suggests. "Curse medical e t i q u e t t e ! " shouts the innocent Adam. This emotionalism and egotism (or pride) is further supported by the romanticism of his language. In Act I he is Daniel against the lions ("Somehow, I can't help feeling as if the lions had come to Daniel's den") and Caesar marching on R o m e ("Well, I suppose I have crossed the R u b i c o n " ) .

In

Act I I he is an elephant hunter without a gun ( " B u t [Pascal and Burmeister] are like rogue elephants in a jungle somehow. And I can't find my gun"). As Act I I comes to a blazing close, he is the romanticist and individualist fighting the machine; the following speeches argue strongly against the theory that Dr. Mallaby is a selfless student in the cause of humanity and are significant, incidentally, read in the light of what has been suggested is the role of Craye and of the supernatural force he ultimately serves: Sir Anthony. . . . We must keep the profession clean. It is our duty to it and to humanity. Mallaby. I, too, have a duty to my profession and to humanity and to myself. Sir Anthony. A duty you delegate to the cheap press. Mallaby. What have they got to do with it ? They are nothing. Even humanity isn't so much in face of . . . I tell you I will not have the motions and creations of my mind cramped, conditioned and stereotyped by you and your damned machine. I tell you . . .

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SWITCHBACK

Sir Anthony. Have it as you wish. But if you meddle with the machine you will be smashed. Mallaby. Very well. then. I shall be smashed. In Act I I I , Mallaby soliloquizes after the maid gives notice ( " T o act with a heart maddened with sorrow"); when he has made the decision to leave one life for the next, he speaks of himself as a slave whose bonds of captivity are broken, and in his last speech he is—of all people—Adam, as he quotes to Mrs. Mallaby from Paradise

Lost:

" T h e world was all before them

where to choose their place of rest, and, Providence their guide, they hand-in-hand with wandering steps and slow through Eden took their solitary way." Bridie writes that

Mallaby

looks at the wreck of the room, chuckles, and repeats " E d e n . " In derision or good humor? Again the ambiguity. If Mallaby is the traditional Adam, forced to leave Eden because of a first disobedience (eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge), and if Craye is an archangel delivering God's orders, Mallaby sins in putting his responsibility to himself above his responsibility to his profession. The fall, then, comes at the end of Act II, when he refuses to publish a disclaimer, having completely submitted to the temptations of

Mrs.

Mallaby and Burmeister. Symbolically, this triumph of self over social responsibility can be construed as tasting of the fruit of

self-knowledge,

or leaving

a

period

of

self-ignorance

(innocence) to enter a period of self-knowledge (experience). (The fall, fortunate or unfortunate, can also be understood as a death and rebirth. That there is something of this in Bridie's intention can be seen in the speech Mallaby makes when he first glimpses the future before him:

"Isn't it rot to say a

man's only got one life? Funny fate that I should be fixed as a doctor. U p here in the rain and clouds and snow. Well, I've got unfixed again and no mistake.") The play does not answer

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whether Mallaby will find self-knowledge in Palmyra, whether his digging will raise Truth or Cain (Mallaby says when he decides to go to London to promote his cure, "I'll come up myself tomorrow and raise Cain all over the shop"), but there is a suggestion at the end of the play that the learning process has begun and Mallaby will no longer be—like Cain—a tool of his emotions and thus everyone's tool. " I won't be made a tool by any man," Mallaby declares in Act II, as his wife and Burmeister maneuver him into defying Craye and the Royal Academy. The Fate of which he is a tool, combining the two attitudes of sobriety and madness, is, significantly, called "Dummy" in the play. "Dummy plays," says Mallaby in the card game with Aunt Dinah at the beginning of Act I I I . This suggests a wilfulness at work, a Fate or God like the Jupiter characterized in one of Bridie's last plays, The Queen's Comedy—who created the universe during a mood which he describes as " a querulous, restless state in which I quested aimlessly for some ill-defined satisfaction of whose nature I was (and am) unaware," who has not nearly finished his work and must be excused abruptly to go back to work because he has "just thought of something else.'" Perhaps this is not so much wilfulness as improvisation. If there is a logic to the system it is a higher logic than the human mind can conceive, and Bridie chooses to look on it as illogical and therefore playful. Mrs. Mallaby is a relatively colorless Eve, but Eve she is, bored with life in the Garden, perhaps sincerely wanting something better for her husband, a materialist nevertheless, and, according to her, realistic and extremely practical. As a temptress she uses the same appeals that Eve used : "There's life and shops and theatres and dresses and dances for me, and glory everlasting for you lying on that desk, and you know it, and you're not man enough to lift a finger to get me out of this

AMBIGUITY IN T H E S W I T C H B A C K

47

horrible, horrible p l a c e ! " She urges practicality: "Work's a thing that does something." T o which A d a m replies, " D o you think I've never wanted t o — t o get a w a y ? Very well, then. I may not know much about this great world on which you a p p e a r to be such an expert . . ." W h e n the experiments have been publicized a n d Mallaby begins to doubt the wisdom of the move, Eve again appeals to his m a n h o o d and his love for h e r : "But you stuck out the war, dearest," she says. "Please. For my sake." Finally, like Eve she has second thoughts a n d regrets. Immediately after persuading Mallaby tQ go to London she says, "George, we've been rather h a p p y here, haven't we ? . . . Won't you be sorry to leave this little room and the hollyhocks and the hills? . . . D o n ' t you think perhaps it's rather a daring step ?" She presents all the arguments against going that he has just unsuccessfully put to her, but the temptation has worked a n d he is swollen with pride a n d arrogance, or inner faith a n d courage. After her fall—to the temptations of Burmeister—when she returns to Mallaby, she cannot understand the necessity to leave the G a r d e n ; she does not u n d e r s t a n d , that is, that she has got Mallaby expelled. N o w her urgings of practicality d o not work. N o temptation works on a new A d a m , a n d w o m a n , the temptress, is truly irrelevant east of Eden, in the L a n d of I r o n y — a s M a l l a b y makes brutally clear to h e r : Ί don't know w h y it is, b u t just at the m o m e n t you seem to m e so . . . so d a m n e d irrevelant [sic]." In Act I I Mallaby quotes the biblical version of the A d a m a n d Eve s t o r y : Mallaby. "She took the fruit thereof and did eat, and gave also to her husband." Mrs. Mallaby. Oh, I see. You think old Burmeister's the serpent? Mallaby. He's a subtle brute.

48

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Burmeister, clearly, is the traditional serpent, no matter how many other devils are driving Mallaby. He works through Mrs. Mallaby, sweet-talking her as Milton's serpent sweettalked Eve. He shares a little of Mallaby's romanticism— although one suspects, noting his success in the practical world, that it is a contrived romanticism. His compliments begin immediately. "Here we are, three low-browed cutthroats appearing out of the thick and murky night at the door of a lonely and lovely fairy princess who does not even ask our business," he says to Mrs. Mallaby on meeting her. Once in London, his campaign intensifies, he is saying things like "[London] shall stand or fall by your opinion," and it is not long before he leads Mrs. Mallaby into the Black Forest. Yet he does not work only on Mrs. Mallaby (being unable to depend on her intelligence, it seems). He encourages Mallaby's anger at Craye to encourage, in turn, the doctor's determination to take his tuberculosis cure to London. When Mallaby discovers the distorted report of his experiments in Pascal's newspaper, Burmeister is there to flatter him into defiance of the Royal Academy, which gets him struck from the register. "Dr. Mallaby," he says, "you are like all really great men— inarticulate. And you have another characteristic of greatness: you do good by stealth and blush to find it fame." And by the time Craye arrives to ask Mallaby to write a disclaimer to the article, proud Adam is ready to be crushed by any damned machine. It is as difficult to put Aunt Dinah into the Adam and Eve story as it was for Bridie to label her in the "Argument" of the play: she acts, he writes, as "chorus, familiar spirit, deus ex machina and what not." 5 For two acts she seems irrelevant. She falls off a ladder tacking up a plum tree; when she comes on stage she is revealed as an outspoken busybody with a fondness for riming and skipping. But in Act I I I she takes a

AMBIGUITY

IN T H E

SWITCHBACK

49

major role, and the reason for her flights onto and off the stage for two acts is evident : She has been a device of dramatic foreshadowing. Pascal and Burmeister have proved themselves rascals and the "Jew gentleman" has really sold Mrs. Mallaby something, as Aunt Dinah prophesied. The tone of the play changes with the opening speeches of Act I I I , but Aunt Dinah's language previously has provided adequate preparation. She and Mallaby realize that they are talking on two levels now, about a card game and about Mallaby. "Dummy's King of Diamonds took my Queen," Mallaby says. Burmeister, the financier, is the King of Diamonds, Mrs. Mallaby the Queen, and Dummy is the Fate at work in the play—a Fate with whose freakish side Aunt Dinah seems allied. "Well, Dummy will play. Yes, yes, indeed he will. And Dummy could play you out of your five wits, George," Aunt Dinah answers. "You will learn your fate soon enough." By this time one listens carefully to the old woman, and when she says, "I'm a little bit daft, but . . . I'll help," one suspects that she brews up the thunderstorm and brings in Craye to interrupt Mallaby's "splendid realisations" and thus annoy him into a determination to escape. "I'll see that he goes," she says and skips out, and one no longer doubts that Mallaby will go. Mechanically, Aunt Dinah is necessary to the play to give Mallaby an audience in Act I I I , and functionally she encourages his "madness." She serves the further purpose of preparing the reader, during what is otherwise a naturalistic play, for the farce that dominates Act I I I . (For a good part of the act Mallaby spends his time emptying off glasses of whisky, chasing about half-shaved in a brilliant dressing gown, reciting nursery rimes, and tickling Aunt Dinah, who in turn skips about or chases away his patients with a fire poker.) And this farce is an integral part of The Switchback, because Mallaby's revolt in the play is, in one sense, the revolt of flamboyance

50

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and madness against sobriety and conventional responsibility. If Aunt Dinah's madness is "the madness of truth,"* then Mallaby's search is a search for truth, and truth is to be found when one releases oneself from slavery " t o the sick and silly" and serves only his own soul. " O r is it ? " Bridie in effect asks with his play.

III Songs of Innocence

of the third-act drunken horseplay, remains well within the naturalistic form. This is not true of the plays to be discussed here—Tobias and the Angel (1930), The Girl Who Did Not Want to Go to Kuala Lumpur (1930), Marriage Is No Joke (1934), and The Black Eye (1935). In Tobias and the Angel, Bridie uses an episodic plot for the first time, changing the scene from a Nineveh slum, to the banks of the Tigris, to a walled garden in Persia, to a gateway near Kifri, and back to Nineveh. He puts a real angel and devil on the stage and sends his leading character on adventures so fantastic that the spirit of the play created is defined by one critic as that of the Arabian Nights Entertainments.1 Tobias and the Angel is, of course, based on the Book of Tobit in the Apocrypha; it is a "plain-sailing dramatic transcription of the charming old tale," Bridie writes in the "Author's Note" to the play.2 It is a religious play, but a religious play whose ritual, one critic notes, is "the sensual song-and-dance of the Eastern beauties," a religious play, another critic writes, which "is at the same time as sophisticated 51 " T H E S W I T C H B A C K , " FOR A L L

52

J A M E S BRIDIE : C L O W N AND P H I L O S O P H E R

as the New Yorker."' On the secular level, it is a fairy tale; it is every pink shivering boy's wildest dreams come true: The timid Tobias, son of Tobit, a good-natured old Jew who, although he once had great wealth, is now penniless and sightless, goes on a journey to reclaim an old debt owed his father; the Archangel Raphael, disguised as a porter named Azarias, accompanies him. Through Raphael's intervention, Tobias kills a wild fish, terrifies a bandit, risks strangulation to marry a beautiful, wild princess (Sara), scares away the fiend who has bewitched his bride, drives a hard bargain with his father's old debtor, returns with camels and talents, and finishes off by curing his father's blindness. The plots of the other plays mentioned above are as fantastic, sometimes more fantastic; they are not all as successful as Tobias and the Angel, but they are, like it, cut from rich brocade, as J . B. Priestley would say. Priestley writes in a preface to Meeting at Night, one of Bridie's last plays (with a fantastic plot of its own): But Bridie was like a tailor cutting awkwardly because he is using a rich brocade and not grey flannel. He was trying to cram a large loose mind and a large loose play into the narrow space of our convention. . . . he nearly always wanted to tell much more of a story than most contemporary playwrights try to handle. . . . when he found both a theme and a manner that allowed him to work with some ease within the limitations imposed by the conventional form, ranging from A Sleeping Clergyman to Tobias and the Angel, we are compelled at once to recognise his size and weight and originality.' Bridie was aware that he was cramming a large, loose play into a narrow space and that critical reaction to the result was sometimes wide of the mark, as he indicates in a play written during this period, Colonel Wotherspoon (1934). Bridie clearly is satirizing himself here—he once used the pseudonym of the

SONGS

OF

INNOCENCE

53

play's best-selling first novelist, Archibald Kellock—as well as satirizing his critics. At one point, Archie summarizes the plot of his novel: This fellow, you see, lives in the country with his widowed mother in an old sort of tumbledown house, because they're not so well off as they once were and there's a sort of mystery about his father. And he makes up his mind when he is quite a kid that he'll go and find his father somewhere. And he's out riding one day and he meets this girl who lives in the village and there's a sort of mystery about her too, so they are sort of drawn together by that in a way. . . . And a fellow and other four fellows come down and kidnap her, and this fellow, Toby, kills one of the fellows. And then there's a trial and he gets ten years for justifiable homicide, and in the meantime these other fellows have got clean away with the girl. And she's been taken off to Buenos Aires and knocks about the world a bit, and gets a bit hard and bitter. And this fellow meets a gipsy called One-Eyed Mo' in prison— he's rather a fine character, a sort of lovable rascal. And they escape and fetch up in Chicago and join a gang. They're forced to, against their will, you see. And there's a vendetta between the two gangs, and . . .* This is not much of an exaggeration of the plot of Tobias and the Angel and perhaps not as fantastic as that of Marriage Is No Joke. Archie's book is discussed as the Book of the Week on the National Programme from London by Mr. Derek Putney and Mr. Reginald Devereux, who agree that it is a most remarkable book but cannot agree on why it is. Mr. Putney sounds a bit like Priestley : " I should say for its vitality. . . . One had read so many books recently by young people who take an almost corpse-like view of life that one feels—how can one express it ?—as if one were strolling in the catacombs and as if suddenly a large and healthy and Lido-bronzed Mr. Kellock had burst his cerements and asked one to have a drink." When the transmission breaks down, Putney is sounding more and more like a Bridie critic:

54

J A M E S B R I D I E : C L O W N AND P H I L O S O P H E R

Mr. Kellock's work has that indefinable something which one can only describe as Quality. This is particularly well seen in the almost brutal certainty with which he hurls situation upon situation, climax upon climax, till one holds one's very breath at the prospect of the almost inevitable collapse of the—(his voice begins to fade)—whole massively conceived, almost chaotically constructed . . . In Colonel Wotherspoon Archie states his intention in his novel, which, carrying this analogy farther, is Bridie's intention in all his plays: "You see the object of the story—it's a kind of parable—the object is to show that whatever happens to you externally, if you see what I mean, your soul may keep all right through it all; I mean it's, well, it's sort of integrity, if you understand." Bridie's concern for the integrity, or commitment, of the soul is everywhere manifest. In The Switchback, the important thing is Mallaby's consciously assumed commitment to a way of life. Dr. Knox, Mr. McCrimmon, and Mr. Bolfry are men with the courage of their convictions. Tobias' soul is uncommitted, without courage because without conviction, a soul living in the state of make-believe innocence until it is superhumanly inspired. Tobit states the problem in reaction to Raphael's refusal of a glass of wine on the grounds that he is a teetotaler: "As you wish. Far from me be it to force any man to drink against his convictions. It is rare to find any convictions at all these days." If in his commitment man must fulfil superhuman potentialities in himself, the drama of this fulfilment must escape the bounds of naturalism. If man's inspiration is extraordinary, the events which chronicle this experience must be extraordinary, in order to be faithful to the inner experience. In the drama, the external representation of a miraculous inner experience takes, according to Eric Bentley, the form of farce or melodrama. Bentley writes in " T h e Psychology of Farce" : " I f art

SONGS

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55

imitates life, it should be added that while naturalistic art imitates the surfaces, 'melodramatic' art imitates what is beneath the surface." Melodrama, he explains, is the counterpart of farce on the tragic side, its "absurd" plots representing "the refusal of tragic man to limit himself to naturalism," representing, that is, "the real absurdity of life." T h e implication is that the plots of farce represent the same thing but from a comic viewpoint. Bentley continues about non-naturalistic art : It is a matter, then, of finding external representation—symbol— for what cannot be photographed or described. . . . It may be that the principle of the primacy of plot holds for all drama. It certainly holds for melodrama and farce. Here in the action lies that subtlety which is sometimes and notoriously absent from dialogue and even character. The enacted story is itself a language. And this is to say that it is symbolic. . . . it is important to see what is exaggerated in farce and what is not. While, certainly, the external facts are distorted, the inner experience is so wild and preposterous that it would probably be impossible to exaggerate it. To the inner experience, the farceur tries to be utterly faithful.' T o the wild inner experience of a boy's introduction to the miracle in life Bridie has tried to be utterly faithful in Tobias and the Angel. Priestley linked A Sleeping Clergyman with Tobias and the A ngel as examples of plays in which Bridie found both a theme and a manner that allowed him to work with some ease within the limitations imposed by the conventional form. In quality, the range is wide between these two plays, although they are both non-naturalistic; a comparison of the two will account for the superiority of the latter, despite Bridie's judgment in One Way of Living that A Sleeping Clergyman was "the nearest thing to a masterpiece" he would probably ever write.' A Sleeping Clergyman (1933) is also episodic, having nine

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different scenes and spanning some sixty-five years (eighty-five days elapse during Tobias and the Angel). It is a melodrama; Tobias and the Angel is a farce, as the term has been defined. But while there is suggestiveness arising from ambiguity in the latter, A Sleeping Clergyman lacks the subtlety of action required, according to Bentley, of successful melodrama. It is too obviously and unconvincingly special pleading against eugenics, perhaps because Bridie was too close to the problem of the play : he was writing an article against sterilization of the unfit at the same time.' A Sleeping Clergyman is a symbol of the inscrutability yet omnipresence and omnipotence of Jahveh's purpose, but it is not a subtle symbol. The melodrama—in which the "absurdity," representing the seeming chaos of existence, ranges from murder by poisoning to illegitimate birth—is put into the naturalistic framework of a story told by one doctor to another in a Glasgow Club, in the presence of a clergyman who continues to sleep throughout it. The clergyman, although mystifying nearly all the first-night critics," obviously represents an enigmatic God, distant and impersonal. Bridie identified him in One Way of Living : "God, who had set it all going, took his ease in an armchair throughout the play.'" 0 While the clergyman sleeps, the life of Dr. Marshall is enacted : The long-lived doctor sees his genius friend, Cameron, die of tuberculosis before completing his scientific experiments but after fathering the illegitimate child of Hannah Marshall, the doctor's sister. He lives to see the child, his niece whom he has raised, murder the father of her unborn and, again, illegitimate twins, then commit suicide after their birth. Finally, he sees the twins, Charles and Hope Cameron, whom he also raises, survive inherited tendencies toward self-destruction to save others from disaster, Charles halting a world epidemic by discovering a miraculous cure, and Hope salvaging (temporarily) the League of Nations. Bridie

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57

is obviously saying that it is not for man to decide who is to be allowed descendants; he has stacked his cards, leaving no doubt that good has triumphed in the end. He has dropped his judicial attitude. The judicial attitude prevails in Tobias and the Angel, a supreme "external representation" or "symbol," using Bentley's terms, of comic man's refusal to limit himself to naturalism. Tobit is obviously, by himself, such a symbol. "Tottering about like a sturdied sheep," blinded, and penniless, he refuses to lose faith in luck and miracles. His reward, because Bridie is writing farce and not melodrama, is restoration of his sight and of a loan (with considerable interest), and a rich daughter-in-law. Tobit is so obviously a symbol of virtue that Joseph Wood Krutch forgets the other symbols in the play and decides that Bridie's story is "the story of virtue rewarded, which is probably the most thoroughly engaging story in the world." 11 Krutch assumes, that is, that the Archangel Raphael has been sent by Jahveh only to reward Tobit's faith, that Raphael's concern is not to make a man of the less virtuous Tobias or to free the even less virtuous Sara from the daemon Asmoday; these things happen along the way, he would say, but only because they are rewards to Tobit. Certainly Tobias' success is a reward to his father; Tobit's wishes have been granted when he can say about his son, "How strong you've grown! What muscles! You great ox of a b o y ! " But is Sara really a reward ? The knowledge of her bewitchment certainly would unsettle her father-in-law; even in safe ignorance Tobit suggests slight disapproval of Sara's ways: " I t is a strange thing," he says, when she appears at the end of the play, "for a new daughter to arrive with none of the usual preliminaries, but you are very welcome." Therefore, it is at least possible that the fate in the play has not been exclusively concerned with rewarding Tobit.

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Largely because of Bridie's judicial attitude, Jahveh's purpose must remain unknown. But that it is to reward Tobias' virtue—among all kinds of virtue displayed in the play— could not be supported by a close examination of Tobias' characterization; although Raphael defends Tobias against Sara, his final judgment of the boy is that he is a "soft sort of half-wit." Jahveh's purpose might even be to effect the defeat of his diabolic daemon by his angelic daemon, that is, to liberate Sara from her dissatisfaction with the commonplace. His purpose, then, would be to effect the marriage between Tobias and Sara, an interpretation which gains support when Bridie, in the "Author's Note" to the play, calls Raphael a "supernatural Tristan," as if to stress that Raphael brings Tobias to Sara as Tristan brought Isolde to Mark. It could as well be that Tobias is to be liberated from the commonplace by his marriage. Finally, Jahveh's purpose could have nothing to do with Tobit, Tobias, or Sara; it could be as simple as the desire to bring nightingales and larks back to Persia, for in forty years only one nightingale and one lark had been heard there : on the night and morning of Tobias and Sara's wedding, the nightingales and larks return. Raphael's last speech discounts none of these interpretations : " I t is good to praise Jahveh and to exalt His name./ . . . Tobit, a few prayers with alms and

righteousness

are better than

many

with

unrighteousness and avarice./ Jahveh has heard your prayers and has seen your deeds that were themselves prayers./ . . . Fear not, Tobit and Tobias, for it shall go well with you; praise God therefore." It shall go well with Tobit

and

Tobias,

although Jahveh has heard only Tobit's prayers and seen only Tobit's deeds. Surely Bridie's theme is that all men serve Jahveh's inscrutable purpose, sons who are always with Him, like Tobit, and prodigal sons, like Tobias. T h e son's role is

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59

servitor to the father, but whether the service is selfish or unselfish, conscious or unconscious is, finally, irrelevant. Nor do the characteristic responses of Tobias, Sara, and Tobit when Raphael reveals himself as the Archangel clear up the ambiguity of Jahveh's purpose. Tobias, who has not in eight-five days become conscious of the miraculous around him, remembers a realistic detail: " N o wonder Toby was frightened. Do you remember, father, [the dog] was frightened to come in when the Angel was in the house ?" Tobit, almost overwhelmed by the miracle of Raphael's visitation, because his acceptance of miracle is so unreserved, barely manages to say, " W e have been visited." Sara's ambiguous speech could support the interpretation that Jahveh's purpose was to marry her to Tobias in order to make him aware of miracle and wonder, to inspire him with her romanticism to be more than a little boy; although Raphael reports that Asmoday is "bound and in Egypt," one wonders about the strength of the rope when she identifies Raphael with Tobias. She says of Raphael, "But I grew less and less afraid of him, and he seemed to dwindle and fade till I could hardly be sure he was there at all. Do you remember at the gate of the Khan at Kifri ? I saw him pale, like a ghost, and when he walked in front of you [Tobias] I saw you through his body. Today I saw him like a drifting mist." Tobias has become his daemon in her eyes. There is at least the suggestion that she will not look the other way but encourage its expression. If Bridie's theme is that man is fulfilled in serving God's purpose, he has a neat symbol in the action of his play—that is, in the son Tobias' journey in service of the father Tobit. But Tobit himself is such a symbol; his life is a son's service, and its events, gifts from a father. T h e dinner Raphael brings with him in Act I is a gift: Raphael, who must keep his identity a secret, tells Tobit to "pretend" the dinner is a gift from Jahveh,

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to which Tobit answers, "Yes. Capital. Let us. It makes it all more exciting and it has the merit of being true." His blindness is "an act of God," although Tobias, the realist, believes that if Rasik, his father's valet, had chased away the sparrows from Tobit's bed in the courtyard, Tobit would never have cataracts. T h e restoration of his sight, the safe return of his son are gifts, for which Tobit's first response is gratitude. This attitude makes the commonplace a surprise, good luck, a miracle, the "splendour" of which it sometimes takes weeks to realize; "Jahveh is full of unexpected moments," he says. It is lucky to be poor when one is blind, he reasons: " I nearly knocked down the seven-branched candlestick. What do you think of that? Isn't it lucky we aren't still in our fine house in Leviathan Avenue ? I'd have broken the Chaldean vases and tumbled down the marble stairs, and bumped myself all over in the corridors." Tobias answers realistically : " W e could have afforded a couple of slaves to lead you about." When Tobias regrets not having caught a fish for dinner, Tobit says, " I t is the happier for the fish that you haven't." The humiliation his wife Anna bears in scrubbing office floors is "a splendid tonic." Tobit is a symbol of the way of Order, a rational and reasonable man who accepts miracles because they have the merit of being true; he is " a most respectable old gentleman," Raphael says. He is sorry he cannot go to Jerusalem for Pentecost. Although Bridie uses the Christian name, Tobit is a Jew and the holiday would be called Shavuoth and would celebrate the revelation of the Law at Mount Sinai; Tobit is clearly in what Mr. Bolfry would term "the Enemy's camp." It is his "plain duty" to bury the strangled Jew whom Tobias has found on the road although he is the first to admit that performing this selfless duty for his Father is " a kind of selfishness," if not the "self-righteousness" that his wife labels it in a burst of anger. Finally, there is the suggestion that Tobit is an innocent

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Adam, living in childlike rather than childish innocence, able to wonder and marvel. Tobit has never been tempted to disobey his Father, because he knows how to avoid daemons, as he tells Tobias. Obedience to the Ten Commandments has always satisfied him, and his advice to Tobias, as the latter begins his journey, is simply a garrulous translation of the commandments : "Sonny, when I am dead, bury me . . . and look after your mother always. . . . Don't forget the God, sonny, and he will do fairly by you as he does to all good men. If he gives you any money, let the poor have some of it." Tobit goes on, including rules like "Don't waste your time with girls, pay your employees well, and drink only enough wine to make you happy," and concluding, "Go with God, my son, and steer cautiously the ship of piety in a sea of passions." Tobias, trying to account for his own great timidity ("We of the new generation are all much more temperamental and highly strung"), suggests that Tobit is not afraid of anything because he belongs to "a generation that had no nerves." "It is true of all new generations," Tobit says, that they are more temperamental and highly strung than older generations; "Our father Adam must have been a very tough gentleman indeed, I often think." Tobias probably did not see the point of his father's joke, but Bridie's point could be that it is not "nervelessness" that accounts for Tobit's strength but unshaken faith. Not that Tobias, a member of "the new generation," is in any sense an experienced Adam at the end of the play. It is true that, through the intervention of Raphael, he has been able to realize potentialities far beyond himself. He frightens away a Kurdish bandit armed to the teeth, not with a gun but with rhetoric: And the first thing I met was a huge and scaly monster which thought, as you think, you ignorant dog, that I was a little no-account. And it barked and roared and bit at me. So I killed

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it and tore out its liver, and there it is, wrapped up in a cloth. And what I did to that atrocious, fire-breathing river demon I shall do to you, you hairy-toed polecat, you son of a burnt father, for I am only beginning the carnage I feel I must make before sunset. . . . May your blood turn to dog's blood, you father of sixty dogs! Did you hear me tell you to go in peace? Your liver is too white to put beside that of a river dragon, for it is the colour of the dark flames of hell. You are safe from me, pitiful and hideous ape. Only take your ugliness from my pure sight before I repent my mercy. When R a p h a e l is present T o b i a s is inspired to poetry which wins him his "glorious bride," although he believes that it is Sara who is the "Angel of the L o r d " inspiring him. When R a p h a e l comments that he has " b e c o m e quite the poet," he says, " I ' m inspired. I ' m inspired. An Angel of the Lord has visited me. I'll write a song for her and you will set it to music." T h i s complete oblivion so irritates Raphael that a few speeches later he says, " Y o u are a tiresome little fellow, Tobias, and I have a good mind to leave you altogether." Essentially, Tobias is still innocent of his potentialities; it is still true of him that he is not, as Tobit told R a p h a e l in Act I, " a n experienced man of the world." O n the realistic level of-the play, R a p h a e l is responsible for Tobias' luck, but symbolically, of course, Tobias is responsible for his heroic deeds : H e has been able to j u m p over crevasses, climb cliffs, and walk distances he never though he could walk by fulfilling a potentiality for heroism within himself. But his faith in himself is not strong enough to allow him to claim the deeds for his own, despite an effort to persuade S a r a to the contrary. Describing his journey to his father in Act I I I , he gives R a p h a e l full credit, and in one sense this humility is more becoming the son who is servitor to the Father than is Tobias' bragging to Sara in Act I I : " D i d Azarias run the risk of being strangled by Asmoday ? N o ! Did Azarias terrify the bandit

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who attacked us on the road near Asshur? N o ! Did Azarias fight the devil-fish ? No ! Who did ? I did. Azarias sat in perfect safety and gave good advice." This is the speech of a rhinoceros, a champion of egotism, a man who feels that wide crevasses must be jumped and high cliffs climbed—in service to a Father whose scale of values shows, paradoxically, pride on the same level with humility. Tobit prays to such a Father : "For he doth scourge and has mercy, he leadeth down to hell and bringeth up again." Tobias recognizes Him too, as this speech to Sara reveals: " I probably should have become very, very ill if I had gone on to Rages and left you. If I had only seen your eyes looking over your yashmak I should have remembered them for ever and pined away with longing. And Jahveh was kinder and more cruel to me than that." T h e Father of Tobias and Tobit for some inscrutable reason rewards them equally. The elder son, Tobit, who has served Him faithfully all his life is rewarded, but so is the prodigal son. Tobias has urged retaliation against servants who are bullies— when Tobit urged patience and indulgence. He has lied about his identity to frighten a bandit, and about his poverty to impress a woman. More important, his trust in other people, even in his wife, is never great enough, because it is not strong in himself : In Act I I he complains to Raguel of Raphael, "And he has played me a nice trick. It might have cost me my life. Your ^Ethiopian might have shot me, and I might have fallen, and lots of things might have happened"; in Act I I I , even though Raphael has assured him that he can restore Tobit's sight by striking the gall from the gall-bladder of the devilfish into the old man's eyes, he distrusts the Archangel: "Father, what have I done ? It was Azarias: he gave me some . . . Azarias! What have you done?" Yet the son who has thus sinned against the laws of his father is rewarded with the fatted calf, his wishes fulfilled, his desires granted. He wished

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for the courage

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to fish among

the

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Assyrian

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approach women without terror in his heart and finds himself facing bandits, devils, and businessmen, as well as married to a beautiful princess. O n the realistic level of the play, Tobias has begun to find fulfilment in performing this first service for his father; on the symbolic level, his journey is every pink shivering boy's journey through life and his fate every boy's fate—although every boy's fate is not so apparently glorious. Tobias' destination, Rages, is a "forty days' m a r c h , " Tobit says in Act I. Symbolically, life is a forty days' march, or a forty days' temptation, for in one sense T o b i a s is tempted for forty days and does not fall. He is tempted, that is, to put faith in himself, to realize the Raphael within him, but he will only admit that his inspiration has come from without himself— from Sara, an Angel from Heaven. H e has, however, admitted "inspiration," which is the first step in becoming a rhinoceros. In Act I I T o b i a s says to Sara, " O f course I ' m not a hero, but a man likes a little credit for what he has done. . . .

I

should like you to be proud of me, Sara. I find it very difficult to be proud of myself. I have to keep lashing myself up to it. If you'll help me it will be quite easy to be proud of myself." T h a t Sara could be Tobias' salvation and that Jahveh's purpose has been to liberate Tobias rather than Sara can be supported by the text of the play. Sara is as obviously on the side of Disorder as Tobit is a disciple of Order. T h a t she is intentionally this is shown by the change Bridie made in the characterization he found in the Book of Tobit, a change referred to in the "Author's Note." Bridie writes, " T h e opinions of the characters are substantially unaltered, except those of Sara. It seemed natural that she should fall in love with her supernatural Tristan, and equally natural that, like a sensible girl, she should accept the inevitable." His alteration

both

pleased and displeased the critics. Derek Verschoyle, whom it

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displeased, implies in criticizing Sara's characterization a criticism of the structure of the play as well; Bridie's treatment of Sara, he says, is "one of the chief factors which prevent Tobias and the Angel from being a very memorable play." The play's second act, he continues, "is but uneasily the consort either of history or the rest of the play. . . . Sara, belying the scriptural chronicle of her modest virtues, suggests by her demeanor and deportment that the circumstances which had disposed of her previous seven husbands had not been wholly fortuitous. . . . The third act recovers the mood of the first scene."" Gilbert Wakefield, who dissents "most emphatically" from the opinion that Sara should be the wise young woman of the Book of Tobit, says that she provides half the Arabian-Nights spirit of the play." This suggests that he perceives the fantastic, the romantic in Sara's characterization—perceives, that is, that Bridie intends to contrast the disorder of her life with the order Tobias has been taught. When a stranger arrives at Sara's garden, she is ready to call the guard and have him strangled and thrown to the foxes, and her father tells his servant to "put an arrow into him." When a stranger arrives at Tobit's door, he is wished peace on all his travels and invited to come in. Sara has inherited her father's violence, but none of his practical realism (Raguel is so certain that Sara will strangle her eighth husband that he digs a grave prematurely and has to fill it up again). But there is much of his mother in Tobias—much of the tendency to look downward to one's work instead of up to see angels. It seems "natural," as Bridie says, that Sara should fall in love with Raphael because she is the kind of woman who automatically disobeys orders and "arrives with none of the usual preliminaries." She revolts against custom and the commonplace, which permits her to fall in love with a servant and strangle seven husbands, all of them, her father says, "Most

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reputable, decent young fellows." She is, like the woman in the song her servant sings to her, chained to the commonplace world but free to roam, in her imagination, "like a jaguar," "sport like a kitten," and "howl like a jackal." She allows herself to yield completely to the temptation of daemons— Asmoday and Raphael: "If—when I like a thing—or a person, I just let go and go down the wind. There is no other way of liking. . . . Take me to the hills, Azarias—away from here. I will be your slave. My heart stopped beating long ago when I saw you first in the garden." (In this story, too, temptation takes place in a garden.) But there is a difference in the temptations of Asmoday and Raphael; as the latter says, ". . . daemons are not all equally expert and conscientious." Asmoday has made happiness impossible for Sara, because he has taught her dissatisfaction with the commonplace; he has tempted her to think that she is "different from other girls." Hers is a romanticism more fantastic than Mallaby's: She cannot die but must live in "sorrow continual" and "undying pain." Her lover must face death for her; he cannot be mean about little things and snore in his sleep. But Raphael's temptation, which began in her father's garden when a look from the Archangel made her obey an order she had refused to obey moments before (she consents to put on a cloak her father has sent out to keep her warm), holds out contentment like an apple : "Love what you understand and you will understand more and more till your life is so full that there will be no room for anything else—torturings and itchings and ambitions and shames." Bridie says that it is entirely natural that Sara, like a sensible girl, should accept the inevitable. His ambiguity allows at least two interpretations: Sara accepts the fact that she cannot love Raphael, not even in Tobias, but must love Tobias alone—his little round fat body, humble, guileless eyes, and chubby cheeks. But the "inevitable" might also be con-

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tinued submission to the temptation to romanticize life, for as soon as Raphael leaves her alone with Tobias, Sara is saying, "It runs in my memory that a certain little fat man rescued me from Asmoday," and to Tobias' protest that it was Raphael who rescued her, she answers, "It was not Azarias. It was you. Look up. Don't be a fool." In this case, at the end of the play her identification of Tobias with Raphael is complete; she has made herself a new Tobias, and the old one need fear strangulation no longer. If Raphael has failed to sway Sara in the garden, both he and she have, at the end of the play, failed in their temptation of Tobias, who alternates between submission and defiance. Finding himself committed to marry Sara, even if it means strangulation by Asmoday, he catches himself, realizes he is being led on, and balks: " W h a t have I been saying? This is what comes of boasting and blowing and bluffing. And I can't get out of this infernal garden." Raphael forces him onward, the marriage contract is signed, and Sara begins her part of the temptation. She will turn him by his own admission into a man worthy of her love. With a childlike innocence of her motives, Tobias begs her not to cry at the prospect of his death : "Sara, don't cry. It is pleasant here in the garden. The past and the future are outside high walls. We needn't look over the walls— even if we could. Don't cry, Sara." T o which Eve replies, "You must love me very much to face death for me." But A d a m will not yield to the temptation to declare again what he declared to her father : " W h a t do I care for devils? I have one fear only—that I shall die away from your daughter, as I shall die if you will not give her to me. I will die with her gladly." H e stands firm: "I love you very much, of course. But as for facing death . . . I am perfectly certain I shouldn't have done that if Azarias hadn't put me u p to it. . . . I ' m only a poor little worm, really. I like to think I could die for

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you." But he is not firm for long. Eve says, "Tobias. You are a brave little man. You are much braver than you think you are," and in his ecstacy Tobias must proclaim, "Oh my beautiful! What do I care whether I die or not ?" Sara and Raphael seem to be working together to make a man out of Tobias, yet Sara's motivation is in Asmoday, Raphael's opponent, who is one of Jahveh's fallen angels. The two are like Aunt Dinah and Sir Anthony Craye in The Switchback, each employing very different methods from the other. Raphael's is the rational approach, even when the heroism to which he is inspiring Tobias is fantastic. It is necessary for Tobias to kill the devil-fish, but he must not swim out too far because "There are nasty currents in the fairway." It is necessary for him to frighten away the bandit who threatens his life, but he does not have to lie about who he is in doing it. He must meet Sara, but he does not have to misuse Raphael's head in standing on it to see over the garden wall (Raphael says, "You were using my head for a dancing floor on which you were performing the horrid dances of ^Ethiopia. It was time you had a lesson"). Tobias must frighten away the daemon Asmoday, risking strangulation, but he does not have to let his dog know that he is afraid : "Try to pretend to be a man," Raphael says. "The dog is laughing at you. . . . What a way to behave before your dog! You are a god to your dog. What must he think of you ? You will make an atheist of him." But Sara's is the irrational approach. To make Tobias bold, and to get him to praise her arms and legs, she must accuse him: "Then you despise me because you saw my arms and legs, and no young man has any right to see a person's arms and legs." He must be an articulate hero in risking death for her; he must say, "Oh, my beautiful! What do I care whether I die or not?" He must even be jealous of Raphael in the passion of his love for her.

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In Tobias and the Angel Anna, with characteristic obtuseness, recognizes her new daughter-in-law as "a dear, sensible girl," "just the girl for Tobias" who "is even more unpractical than his poor silly old father." Although she has the roles of Tobias and Sara reversed, she is correct in seeing the marriage as a fusion of opposite extremes, the practical with the unpractical, Order with Disorder. Marriage as a stabilizing influence is again Bridie's concern in Marriage Is No Joke. John MacGregor, a Highland divinity student, is represented (as Bridie describes the play in a preface, "The Anatomy of Failure") as "making a beast of himself with rum; entering, under a cloud of alcoholic verbiage, into a frivolously undertaken marriage contract; stupefying himself with drink on his wedding night; committing a dangerous and brutal assault upon a servant; and, later, handing over the entire control of his destiny to a half-educated, underbred, little hussy of a wife."" Priscilla, the little hussy, is the barkeeper's daughter, reminiscent in her ill-tempered boredom of Sara in her father's garden. MacGregor's heroism in rescuing her from certain death at the hands of a drunken patron recalls the heroism of Tobias, and one begins to look for the Angel Raphael in this play, only to discover that MacGregor's inspiration comes from alcohol and the mystic fervor it is able to arouse in him. For it is under the influence of rum or cold arrack punch that MacGregor becomes intensely aware of divine guidance; then it is that he proclaims, Do you know what my religion is? It can be told in five words. "We do because we must." That's a hell of a thing, eh? . . . Well, I hate my blasted religion. . . . I hate it from the bottom of my soul. But you canna escape it. You can't get away from your religion once you know. It's a part of you till you die, and then on, on through Heaven or Hell.

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But, as Bridie says, MacGregor hands over the entire control of his destiny to his wife, Priscilla; she must, then, be one of Jahveh's agencies, an interpretation that can be supported by her characterization. Clearly Priscilla, speaking common sense and "managing," represents the forces of Order; her dream of Heaven is "Fine hard work and no lady visitors." After their marriage, she forces MacGregor to sign the pledge (although he is afterwards unfaithful to it). She cannot keep him home from the war, which lands him in North Persia and involves him with the mistress of the Shah of Jangalistan, Nastasya, known to the Cossacks (who have murdered the Shah before he can claim his kingdom) as "Tigritza." She cannot, then, restrain him from rescuing Nastasya from the murdering Cossacks (he is filled with arrack punch) and agreeing to become the Shah of Jangalistan. For MacGregor is also filled with a sense of his potentialities to be something more than a shy Highlands divinity student among the glib tongues at Glasgow University. As he says, There are whiles I think if I had been born into another age I would have been a king myself. . . . Those old kings [of Babylon] knew their jobs. There's no right kings, nowadays. Even old Kaiser Bill now. There's no real magnificence about yon wee sergeant-major of a fellow. These old chaps . . . like their own great man-headed bulls they were . . . the equals of Lucifer, Son of the Morning. . . . Superb. The Lord has forgotten how to make kings in His own image. Jahveh's agency of Disorder, Nastasya, flatters him with the title of Samson, pours arrack down his throat, adding the titles of General Arrack and Shah Alcohol, and mothers him with "Ah, bebe. You must have your milk. Come, maman will give you your nice milk. . . . It is the blood-royal for the veins of my little hero. Are you brave, now, a g a i n ? " She also tempts

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him with her majesty and mystery : "We sit in the dark and I whisper strange things to you," she says. "You are afraid of the dark? . . . You are afraid of me." MacGregor answers, "No. Maybe I'm a little afraid of myself. . . . I never saw the like of you before. You're majestic." She even tries to persuade him that deserting the British army to become Shah of Jangalistan is a rational act: "Oh, my love, you are so shrewd and sensible. You give us our most need. We are impulsive orientals, nous autres." But Priscilla's hold on MacGregor is strong, strong enough to keep his relationship with Nastasya Platonic during his short reign as Shah. More important, he begins to echo his wife's values. When he virtually proposed marriage only minutes after meeting her in her father's public-house, Priscilla said, "It's all very funny for you easy-going, happy-go-luckies with no responsibilities; but marriage isn't a thing to make a joke of. . . . It's a contract." Thus, when Nastasya asks him (on the day his reign comes to an end) why he has not kissed her since the day they met, he says, "Well, a King's oath is binding, and I've passed my oath to my wife." At another point, he says, "It's a sane man you want to rule this country, and fighting's a madness and drink's a madness, but love's the wildest madness of them all." Nastasya's passion has so crazed her that men must kill each other for her; MacGregor, she says, must kill Baliarski, who will kiss her, or be assassinated by him. But MacGregor only laughs at her, and she is forced to draw a dagger on him." The last two scenes of the play take place twelve years later; MacGregor has returned to Priscilla and a parish in a London suburb and is engaged in attacking slum landlords instead of Turks, when Nastasya turns up among the members of a troupe of Singing Cossacks at one of the local theaters and offers him the same temptation, a princedom in Petersburg, if he will go with her to Paris to

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organize the counter-revolt against the Bolsheviks. But Priscilla's power is indomitable now, and MacGregor says, "I trusted you, Tigritza. . . . If you had had an ounce of morality or self-control or common honesty . . . if you weren't daft you would see I was a different man altogether from the one you knew . . . It's no use talking. These days are done. There are no kingdoms to conquer. Not any more for me." Priscilla, already the victor, need not interrupt MacGregor's meeting with Nastasya at the theater to counter his "We do because we must" with "Well, I'll tell you what you 'must,' my mannie. You must come straight away home with me." For this is precisely the destiny involved in MacGregor's commitment to something outside himself. "Coward ! You run away from me. You are afraid. You are afraid of life," Nastasya screams as the play ends, but MacGregor puts his arm around Priscilla's shoulders, says, "What do you know about life? Here is life," and leaves to be king of his own castle and his own church henceforth. In a moment of inspiration (he and his father-in-law have shared a bottle of whisky earlier) MacGregor for the first time senses the reality of what he had thought was only an illusory conquest and glory. For the first time he senses the truth of his statement early in the play that "drunk or sober we're always our real self." For MacGregor the choice is always between illusion and reality, between the heroic and the commonplace. "I need my bit of illusion," he says to Priscilla's father in the first scene. "I drink and I'm a king, a damned pagan demigod. I feel my heart beat as no other man's heart beats, and I feel magnificence in every muscle and wild daft vapours in my head. . . . And yet I look back the day after and I see that there's predestination even in illusion." Heroism, he believes, is the escape from responsibility, from a predestined commitment. He drinks and he is no longer "a poor weeshy softy of a fellow . . . no

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fit company for a girl with a spark of fire in her." But Priscilla wants his real responsible self and throughout the play forces him, sometimes reluctantly, to accept it. He talks and rages in his sleep, she tells her father, and she has to wake him up. She sits down and looks into the fire, Bridie writes, repeating, "And I have to wake him up." In Nastasya's dressing room, when MacGregor accuses her of s p y i n g on him, she says, "Funny life these theatricals lead. You're never yourself right. . . . Nice, in a way, too. I used to fancy myself at it, once. . . . You grow out of it." "Yes. You grow out of it," MacGregor replies, an admission of acceptance, not a grudging admission like those he felt he must make to Priscilla on the first morning of their marriage: But this marriage business. It's a gey queer affair. Like going to your own funeral. . . . Don't mistake me. It's not a bad thing a funeral, and it's not a bad thing a marriage. It's just that they're very important, both of them. A wee bittie too important for human understanding. All the cleverness and the games and the diversions we used to think so grand fade to nothing in the face of them. We maybe don't realise it at the time, but it's true that marriage is a sacrament. It's a dedication to a new kind of life— the real life that came to the world, they say, millions of years before . . . Priscilla interrupts MacGregor here with an "Amen," the commonsense reaction to a hangover mysticism, and he is forced to look for sympathy from the hotel valet, the victim of his heroic, or drunken, attack the night before, but now a confessed admirer of his pugilistic artistry. They discuss the sobering effect of marriage : the giving up of visits to the gymnasium to box with the fellows and of old-fashioned straight razors, the sad longings to hit some big fellow in the eye. Marriage is like every other experience in life, MacGregor says, a beginning anew; and, like any beginning, if it is not "what we thought it

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would be, what was it promised us anything different but our own daft whimsy-whamsies and imagination and nonsense?" Reality is commonplace, not heroic. MacGregor determines to put all nonsense and story-book fancies out of his head and "live steadfastly and calmly the new life to which it has pleased God to . . ." But here the march of the naval reservists distracts him; war will provide an opportunity for heroism. What it does provide is disillusionment with heroism. He discovers during his brief reign as Shah not only that soldiering involves paperwork but that it should involve responsibility: I thought once I was born to be a great general. . . . I've no serious objection, look you, to blowing the insides out of a man if he's trying to do the same by me, and good luck to both of us; but that's just a wee bit of making war. When you're a king and a general, your job is to rot and break and ruin the immortal spirit of a people to the third and fourth generation. And it runs in my mind that the Lord'll forgive you for being a hunting beast, but not for being a Devil. This sort of thinking sends him back to England to hunt out irresponsible devils like Motherwell, the landlord whom he would like to see jailed for keeping tenants in a condition that should not prevail in a pig sty. But MacGregor hesitates when Motherwell threatens to sue him for libel and to withdraw his money from the church, and it is Priscilla who forces him to face the reality of the situation when he would like to retreat to an illusory heroism in aiding Nastasya. He has been preaching against the irresponsibility of capitalism while keeping his own real (responsible) and illusory worlds quite separate. It is an illusion, he believes, to think that one can put into action what he preaches. He objects to Priscilla's suggestion that he continue to fight Motherwell, although he complains that there is no chance for heroism in a commonplace parish. " I ' m sick to death of this. War's an

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abomination, but I was a man, in the war. And here I am like a hemmed bullock easing my soul with bellowing and roaring I know not what. I'll throw it all up and be a man again." It is then that Priscilla says, "Again ? You've never been anything but a big baby." Drunk or sober, the baby in MacGregor tries to escape the reality of responsibility, yet responsibility plagues him. He may say, " I have no real wish to go fighting and roaming, not at all any more. . . . I'm changed," but it is not true. Life is for him "beginnings and beginnings and beginnings," " a dozen lives," and each beginning is "another verse of an old song." He truly does because he must, in blind allegiance to something outside himself, only partly personified in his wife, only partly particularized in their marriage; his allegiance is perhaps best described as a son's service. At the end of the play, when Motherwell conveniently appears at Nastasya's dressing-room door to be greeted by her as "daddy," MacGregor can say to him, Here's me, all these months, been soaring in the air like a daft old crow letting out squawks out of myself about economics and armaments and capitalism and communism, instead of beginning at the beginning. See you, all of you, he told me I should have begun at the beginning, and it's there I will begin. And the first thing I'll do is to tell a blackmailing, bullying, thieving, randy old hypocrite of a slum landlord to take himself and his dirty money out of my sight and out of my church. He is back at the beginning again, in the sense that the baby in him has a new game to play, the hero in him a new kingdom to conquer; but to the extent that he has accepted the reality of heroic action in the real (responsible) world, he is at a new beginning. He is helped by Priscilla, who is there to "manage" him, and by their marriage, proved holy in its strength under attack by the forces of Disorder. Marriage, then, can be a symbol of man's responsibility to

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something outside himself; in marriage he can discover and fulfil his superhuman potentialities. Priscilla receives the entire control of MacGregor's destiny insofar as she is his partner in marriage; it is the marriage itself that exercises the mystic control, where Priscilla's common sense, especially when MacGregor has a hangover, might only succeed in alienating him, in the way he alienated Nastasya by laughing at her passion. Eve is the agent, not of Adam's salvation (or ruin) but of the salvation (or ruin) of the institution of marriage. Order is not to dominate Disorder (or Disorder, Order); the two are to be preserved in eternal tension. Adam's role has been reduced to that of a passive partner, the fate, it has been suggested, that is in store for Tobias. MacGregor remains as innocent of his motivations as does Tobias; he rescues women from drunken tramps and assassinators, and tenants from mean landlords, by accident as it were, for he is an unreasoning animal, driven by outside forces. As Bridie says in "The Anatomy of Failure," he is like all "bull-headed fighting men from Hercules to John L. Sullivan," a "bombastic brute of a hero," whose "savage instincts" are given "a grotesque sort of world" (in the second half of the play) in which they can "follow their bent."" Predominantly, he is another Sara—another Mallaby—dissatisfied with the commonplace and desiring the excitement of the adventurous and fantastic. "You mistake me," he protests. "You think I'm a blood-thirsty sort of devil because I've taken kindly to scrapping. But if there were any other kind of a game . . ." Life cannot be quietly standing up to Motherwell; one must tell a hypocrite to take his dirty money out of one's church, and tell him as loudly as possible. John Stewart, the hero of The Girl Who Did Not Want to Go to Kuala Lumpur, although he does not share MacGregor's ambiguity of character, does share his great physical strength,

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lyricism, and religious mysticism. The resemblance between the two is not accidental; Bridie writes in the preface to the collected volume in which The Girl appears that the play "is almost unintelligible to anyone unfamiliar with Highland drama and romance. It is a burlesque forerunner of my equally unintelligible Marriage is no Joke."" The Girl carries the story of Marriage Is No Joke as far as the rescue of the dissatisfied heroine from her loneliness; in this case the interested friends of Margaret Unthank bring a postman, John Stewart—who is really a divinity student—in off the street to propose marriage to her in order to save her from the fate of a "Missy-Baba" in Kuala Lumpur, the destiny her reprobate uncle has in mind for her. MacGregor's great strength in saving Priscilla from the drunken tramp in her father's public-house (after he has carried "the crumpled bundle that was his adversary to the window" and dropped him out, he tells Priscilla, who is worried that he has killed the tramp, "I could have taken on five of his brothers for a diversion") is paralleled by Stewart's agility in defending Margaret against her uncle's tyranny : When Major Unthank confronts the eloping pair with a revolver, Stewart, who is also the Amateur Cruiser Weight Champion of Scotland, proclaims, "If you had a battery of howitzers and a regiment of cavalry at your back I would kill you with my two hands rather than you should keep Margaret," and then hits Unthank with a vase, "makes a Douglas Fairbanks leap at him, turns him over and puts on a half-Nelson."" MacGregor, with enough rum in him, is lyrical in complimenting Priscilla : Ach, there's no roughness in you at all, just a kind o' salt tang about you like a wee fir wood in Marayshire. Just a sensation enough to make you no' like other girls. . . . It's a way of speaking a Highlandman has when he comes at last after all his journeyings to the girl he could be doing with.

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Her hair is "like the wee waves that play love-games with the shingle on the beaches of Iona," he says; "Give me another sensation of rum and you'll have the door open and all the riches of no' such a bad brain poured out in you lap, mo chridhe." John Stewart, who is also a poet (his verses have won a first prize), describes a portrait of M a r g a r e t : Her hair is like the golden web that is the canopy of a fairy's barge; and her eyes are like two of the Pleiades reflected in the dark waters. Her little mouth is full of loving. To look on her makes me think of my own glen in a day of sunshine with a far-off piper on the sea-shore playing faint songs of loves long ago. Bridie is fooling here, of course (Stewart adds, when his listeners have complimented his description, "It is quite good. But I could do better before I became a teetotaler"), as he is fooling throughout the play, and much of the comedy comes from the juxtaposition of Stewart's mock heroic and matter-offact speeches. After this— Miss Unthank, I have the greatest pleasure in asking you to accept the hospitality of my auntie. . . . You will follow, if you please, your own judgments and desires. . . . If after you have left this house of captivity, you wish that you should never see me again, you will never see me again—either you nor the Postmaster nor nobody else. That is all I have to say. —he must supply his name to Margaret when she attempts to thank him for his offer. Or he rushes into the room to rescue Margaret from some dire evil, crying, "What is it now, then, what is it, my lovely?" to receive the answer "I couldn't sleep," which forces his next speech to be "Have you tried a hot mustard foot-bath?" Indeed, Bridie seems to be burlesquing Synge or Yeats in passages like this :

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Stewart. Where were you going, so early in the morning? Margaret. Were you standing out there all night? Stewart. I was. Where were you going so early in the morning? Margaret. Oh, why did you stand there all night? Stewart. Because my heart is full of you. Where were you going so early in the morning? Margaret. I don't know. Over the edge of the world, I think. Stewart. It is dark and lonely over the edge of the world. Margaret. Is it? Oh, is it? Stewart. Yes. . . . What do you see in my eyes now? Margaret. I don't know. Stewart. Does it make you feared or glad? Margaret. Both feared and glad.

Nevertheless, the postman, like MacGregor, is inspired—a fairy, the old wives say. "But they say," Stewart tells Margaret, "one autumn night the wee folk walked round and round my father's croft, widdershins, crying like grasshoppers, and in the morning there was a bairn that was the image of the baim that was there before; but it was not the bairn. There was something queer and clever in its eyes." His role is that of the fairy prince (his entrance is announced by the speech "Perhaps it's the Fairy Prince"). And in a real sense this is also the role of John MacGregor and of Tobias : MacGregor, in inspired states, feels divine blood within himself and then it is that he rescues his princesses. Marriage Is No Joke and especially The Girl are minor plays, of course, perhaps because they are both, as M. Willson Disher said of the former, among those of Bridie's plays which are "so completely over the first-night audience's heads that they rank as failures."" Both are interesting for their characterizations— Major Unthank from The Girl, who turns up later in the character of George Triple in Meeting at Night, is especially memorable—but, more important, for their use of farce. Although Bridie labels Marriage Is No Joke a melodrama, it

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seems obvious that he is being satirical. He writes about the play in "The Anatomy of Failure" : The audience . . . took the squalid scene in the public-house and the debasing and sordid scene in the bridal chamber as pieces of entertaining, naturalistic, sentimental comedy . . . If the play had all been in this vein of pleasantry it might have succeeded. . . . The first part . . . was written in a fantastic, deliberately unreal manner, otherwise it would have been quite unbearable. In Part Two . . . I presented [the] incidents with the utmost restraint. Lest the chief protagonist, a woman, should appear incredible, I drew her straight from life. I was accused of stealing her from a melodrama. Part Two was regarded as a wild, unbridled dash into impossible theatricality Obviously the play is non-naturalistic, imitating what is beneath the surface of life rather than the surface itself. Insofar as the play is the distorted external representation of John MacGregor's inner experience—his "game," which is so wild and preposterous that it would probably be impossible to exaggerate it—it parallels the farce of Tobias and the Angel. But insofar as it aims merely at eliciting fitful laughter and remains unconcerned with the "delineation of the play of character upon character" or the treatment of any moral problem, it approaches the kind of farce defined by Leo Hughes in A Century of English Farce : If the essence of farce is its dependence upon mere laughter, as opposed to comedy and its treatment of moral problems, that dependence will be seen to have a profound effect upon the structure of farce. Laughter is by its very nature transient, even fitful. The hearty, unreflective variety is especially dependent upon surprise and cannot therefore be long sustained. Correspondingly, the kind of drama which has as its chief aim the eliciting of this sort of laughter must itself be fitful, full of shifts and surprises, in terms of structure, episodic." The Girl is safely within the tradition outlined by Hughes;

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its " f r a m e w o r k " is the rescue of the fairy princess by the fairy prince, a n d the "separate beads" strung on the " t h r e a d " are attempts to elicit

unsustained

laughter. 15

One

of

Bridie's

repeatedly successful beads, or devices, is the conversation which degenerates f r o m a point of high tension. T h u s , in The Girl, M a r g a r e t shoots into the room after striking her a u n t to escape, and

Mrs. U n t h a n k

follows, shouting,

"Margaret!

R i c h a r d , she struck me !" Unthank. Oh, shut u p ! Margaret. W h a t d o you w a n t ? Tom. Calm yourself, Miss Margaret. It's all right now. It's all right now. Margaret. Please don't say "It's all right," as if I had had a fit in a tram-car. Mary, tell me. What are you doing here? Mary. My mother used to say . . . Margaret. I never knew you had a mother. Mary. Oh, yes, I had. Margaret. How funny ! I didn't know. Mary. Well, you might have known. But that isn't the point. You see, dear, we've come to rescue you. Again, when M a r g a r e t learns that Stewart is studying to be a minister a n d cannot then understand why he is a postman, the conversation degenerates rapidly f r o m a discussion of the gentleness of postmen, to the pride of post-office girls, t o the relative worth of m e n a n d w o m e n in every profession. O t h e r devices are a character's continual but inconsistent mispronunciation of the n a m e of another character, a n d a confusion arising f r o m the ambiguity of the language used. Early in the play M a r g a r e t faces a friend of her f a t h e r : Margaret. Oh, M r . Smellie, I must have the money! I don't want to go to Kuala Lumpur. Smellie. Who's he? Margaret. It isn't a he. It's a place

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When Smellie returns in the final act to offer to marry Margaret, there is more confusion : Smellie. I have come to rescue this decent young girl from worse than death. Margaret. But nobody said Kuala Lumpur was worse than death, Mr. . Smellie. Smellie. Margaret. Mr. Smellie. Smellie. I was not referring to Kuala Lumpur. As a matter of fact, I think Kuala Lumpur was a plant. Tom. It's a place. Smellie. Damn it, I know that. Another variation is found in the use of language in Is No Joke.

Μarriage

Josef, an Armenian interpreter with the British

army in Persia, elicits most of the fitful laughter in the scenes in which he appears by just opening his mouth and releasing fantastic combinations of Moslem and Christian oaths and British slang; similarly Nastasya jumbles Russian, French, and English. But these devices are in addition and subordinate to the farcical, or episodic, action in each of the plays. With The Black Eye, which is a major play, Bridie seems to be sticking pins into the institution of marriage, deliberately puncturing the mysticism which brings John MacGregor home, like the other foot of Donne's twin compasses, to end where he began. T h e last line in the play is " I wonder if people who get married do live happy ever a f t e r ? " Bridie writes in " T h e Anatomy of Failure" about the hero of the play, George Windlestraw : Love itself did not prevent George from following his ruinous career of folly, gambling, philosophizing and alcoholism. What right had he to live happy ever after? The soft answer that he had no right cannot turn away wrath of this calibre [the wrath of

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the woman playgoer who is, Bridie says, the patron and dictator of the theater].13 The Black Eye might be called George and the Angel, for it parallels closely the theme of Tobias and the Angel. Again a pink shivering boy succeeds beyond his wildest dreams—in literal and symbolic service of his father. Again the fulfilment takes place under a kind of daemonic inspiration, called in this play a "sort of stable combination between" reason and instinct, or "a sort of two-sparrows-for-a-farthing feeling," "a sort of sixth sense." George Windlestraw, the Tobias of the play, is the younger son, apparently a disappointment to his father because he has failed the chartered accountant examinations four times and has not settled into his niche in the business world as his older brother Johnnie has. When Angus Windlestraw is struck by a post-office van and consequently hospitalized, George, who is on the verge of bolting because Johnnie's girl friend has fallen in lcve with him, is forced to step into his father's shoes at the factory. He discovers there gross negligence on the part of his brother, quarrels with Johnnie over this and over the girl, and finally does walk out on the family with the intent of earning a fortune to save his father's business. The next day he wins £8,250 gambling and betting on the horses and returns to save his father from bankruptcy. The girl, Elspeth, annoyed with the entire family for its failure to help her straighten out George, throws over both brothers, denouncing the Windlestraws as "a pack of damned savages" and calling forth Johnnie's line, "I wonder if people who get married do live happy ever a f t e r ? " Bridie is explicit about his intentions in the p l a y : "George" in The Black Eye was all the younger sons and Idle Jacks out of Grimm, and his story was their story. . . . Its moral is that of The Prodigal Son and of The Labourers in the Vine-

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yard and of half the fairy tales in the world. It is that we are not justified by a catalogued series of sensible, social acts but by something very much more extraordinary." In the final scene, Bridie has Mrs. Windlestraw, George's mother, say upon George's entrance, "Oh, here's the Prodigal Son at last." The prodigal son—the straw in the wind—who has wasted his substance with riotous living, is welcomed into the arms of an extraordinary fate; as in Tobias and the Angel, Bridie's drama is true to the marvelous inner experience of a boy's discovery of his superhuman or divine potentialities. Critics like Derek Verschoyle seem aware that they are not dealing in The Black Eye with naturalistic drama : In its plot, its wholesale reversal of the laws of probability, and the exotic sense of values which it expresses, it is the exact dramatic equivalent to the serial story which provides the "feminine depressed classes" of today with a means of imaginative escape from the tedium of ordinary life. But unlike the authors of the serial stories who regard their fantasies merely with the cynical detachment of the purely commercial producer, Mr. Bridie insists that his story should be taken seriously, its moral mastered and followed." Yet Verschoyle does not, he says, believe "for an instant" in George. What he does not believe in, probably, is Bridie's hypothetical universe. Bridie stressed the "irony of the realisation of the hypothetical universe [George] so cautiously and reasonably builds up."" That George is essentially as cautious and reasonable as, for instance, Tobias, that he tries to look the other way when tempted by the forces of Disorder, can be illustrated by an examination of his characterization. It is a combination of illusion and responsibility, a mystic acceptance of duty, that brings MacGregor back to the same beginning, and it is a

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combination of illusion and responsibility, though of other types, that brings George back home. " W e can't live for ourselves," he says. " I t would be quite easy if we did, wouldn't it ? " Near the end of the play, he says, I've got to go home; and that's probably a very good thing. I can't expect to make a fortune, backing outsiders and playing roulette with convicts all the time. I don't think I quite grasped what a very valuable fighting base the family is. Living one's own life is all very well when one knows exactly the sort of life one would like. But who does? . . . Of course, it could never happen again. It was sheer impossibility as it was. The illusion here—and certainly George is suggesting that "we are . . . justified by a catalogued series of sensible, social acts"—keeps Bridie's hero an innocent Adam, which becomes most apparent when he is contrasted with the old Adam in the play, the convict Samuel Samuels, the agency of his good fortune or his Angel. George may preach the philosophy of Disorder, he may think that he is a balloon rather than a caterpillar but his actions betray his words. He tells Elspeth about the caterpillar whose father told it to put its best foot foremost : George. . . . it began wondering which foot was its best. Elspeth. And what happened? George. Nothing. Elspeth. Of course, yes. . . . Are you a caterpillar? George. No. I'm a balloon. . . . Elspeth. Still. . . . You're ballooning about and you don't see where you're going to land? George. No. While it is true that circumstances beyond George's control do blow him about like a balloon, he continually attempts to control his destiny and, in fact, spends the entire play

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trying to determine which is his best foot. Thus, the fatalist philosophizes: Isn't it a waste of time? I mean planning the future and all that. . . . Because you can't plan things out beforehand. I mean, you can, but it's no use. You can't be prepared for every event— eventuality. And if you could be prepared—I mean really thoroughly—you'd only be cutting out the good luck. You can't cut out bad. . . . Most things work out themselves if you leave them to do it. Nearly every kind of thing. You shouldn't interfere with the working of things you don't understand. An argument with his brother is neither Johnnie's nor his fault: " I t was the way things worked out." Drunken success at untying a knot in a shoelace is providential: I couldn't have undone that knot if I'd been sober. Providence looks after the drunk. Profound truth, that. If you could always be drunk, Providence'd always look after you. Now, if you could always be drunk without poisoning yourself and looking silly and disgusting. . . . But a reasonable man cannot always be drunk, and George chooses to act reasonably rather than trust in Providence. He has been thinking a good deal about what his "line" is, he tells his father. He quite rationally decides to bolt when he fears capture at the hands of Elspeth—a rabbit in the hands of a cavewoman, his sister says—and injury at the hands of Johnnie; when the sister calls his decision cowardly, he replies, "Well, a living coward gets more fun than a dead hero. And I don't want to fight Johnnie. I don't want to be a chartered accountant. And I'm not sure that I want to be Elspeth's husband." T h e sister, Connie, who is the emotional one for all her psychological knowledge, says, " I thought you loved her," which prompts this clear-headedness: " I do, but I've a very warm regard for myself. I've known myself longer, and I'd

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still rather be bossed by myself than by anybody else [including Providence ?] . . . at least until I've knocked about a bit and got enough character to answer back, now and again." Until he accomplishes the escape, he anxiously switches from foot to foot: Reason's against me and instinct's against me; but a man has something else besides reason and instinct if he's any good at all. A sort of stable combination between the two. I'm going to follow that. I promise you it'll make me do something definite very soon indeed.

But he is interrupted at this point by his mother, who offers consolation about "those beastly exams," and, consciencestricken, he switches feet: "No, I didn't do my best. But it was like a nightmare. I was going back five feet for every three I went forward. But I should have stuck it out for your sake. I'm a selfish brute." Having argued—providentially—with Johnnie and left the business to make a "roaring great fortune," he begins to shake himself free from Providence : I'll have to go and walk about a bit. I'll have to shake myself free from these blasted circumstances. Napoleon said he made circumstances, and he was a common little crook. I'll have to see whether I can't manipulate them a bit better than I've been doing. Oh, I know, I know. I look as if I were letting my father down and the family down and Elspeth down, but I won't let them down. I've got to pull out for a better jump.

This is not mere airy utterance. Nor is George's reaction to Mr. Samuels, whose room he shares at Mrs. Scoullar's boarding house, the reaction of a balloon. On the other hand, Mr. Samuels is truly a balloon. "He bounces to his feet and on to the bed, almost in one movement," Bridie writes; he changes, conversationally, on a dime :

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Samuels. A humorous author, I gather from your manuscripts. Well, it is a great gift—a great gift. It must be pleasant to be able to let a little sunshine into a drab world. An exquisite thing, a sense of humour. A great handicap in the affairs of life, but an exquisite quality. George. I don't know. I haven't got one. Samuels. No? Well, I don't suppose you ever miss it. And talking of missing things . . . M r . Samuels suggests a game of roulette when he learns that George is "rather up against i t " and has to "get some money somehow as quickly as possible." But George has work to do. Annoyed at this reaction, Samuels, who sounds very much like the voice of George's own heart (as Bolfry was the voice of M c C r i m m o n ' s heart), replies, If you're going to make a fortune you musn't work. You must cerebrate. And if you can't cerebrate you must pick the brains of the old, wise and experienced. And you must also familiarise yourself with games of chance. . . . Do you believe that there's something inside of us looking after us? . . . Do you believe that if we trust it and say, "Carry on," it'll do its best for us ? . . . Do you believe that if we shy and flinch and look round and measure the distance and count the cost it'll say, " T o Hell with you," and go and look after someone else? . . . Then faites votre jeu. Go in where glory waits. George's protests do not cease : No, I'm sorry, but I can't. I'm broke. I've got no money. . . . No. Honestly. It's not that I don't think it's all right, and I've no prejudice against gambling within reason, but there are certain circumstances. . . . It's rather a long story, you see. I've got a sort of obligation of honour. Finally, he reasons out his choice of the number on which he breaks the bank : Because the day of the month is the seventeenth, he bets all his winnings on seventeen. T h a t the day

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happens to be the eighteenth should teach him a lesson which Samuels does not define but which is that if it were not for human ignorance Providence would not stand a chance. As certainly as Tobias is visited, George Windlestraw is visited by an angel of Jahveh. Bridie's language is too suggestive for the interpretation to be avoided. Add to the dialogue quoted above this exchange, in which the irony of Samuels' reference to

"a

father"—surely

the symbolic

father which

George

serves—is lost on the son : Samuels. Stake it as boldly, every whit, as if it were stamped with the very Guelph. George. I didn't quite catch that. Samuels. It's Robert Browning. George. Oh, yes. So it is. My father used to read him to us on Sundays. Samuels. Oh, you've got a father, have you? Come along, we'll be late. Moreover, Samuels has the dignity and pedantry of Raphael, as well as the Archangel's patience with foolish young Adams. H e is superbly if drunkenly elegant in the third scene of Act I I , in which he faces removal from the hotel in which George and he are celebrating their good luck at the races : I have stayed in every large caravanserai in Great Britain, Europe, and the United States. I might add Asia, Africa and India. And never have I had an experience like this before. Send for the Manager. . . . I'm not accustomed to impudence and I don't like it, and I won't have it, as you will very soon find. . . . Gross impertinence. That's another thing you've learned, George my boy—not to submit to any damned nonsense from these hounds. Make yourself respected. If one prefers, the metaphor of the old Adam may be substituted for that of the angelic visitor. Samuels is a knowledgeable and ironic Adam, aware of a transcendent and glorious gift

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which he chooses to call the technique of dishonesty. He explains to George, The technique of dishonesty, my dear young friend, is a very complicated matter. The troublesome part of it is that persons with a natural bent towards roguery are apt to put too much confidence in that transcendent and glorious gift. They neglect to study the law. . . . Apart from bets I pay nothing that I can avoid paying. But there is a mystical, holy quality about a bet. If I went back on a bet I know I should go mad. It is by a superhuman agency that one avoids the law of the commonplace and wins a bet, and when one loses there is a mystical obligation to pay Providence's debts. Aligned with Samuels is Elspeth who, although she believes herself to be a manager of affairs (that is, in the camp of Order), floats about like a balloon caught by every breeze. She echoes Samuels in her advice to George : " W h a t ' s wrong with you, George, is that you don't respect yourself enough. That's the beginning of doing . . . well . . . great things." Although she preaches a philosophy alien to Samuels (she tells George that he must "take a grip o f " himself and a job in her father's office), she alternately advances and retreats in her love affair with George, rushing in on the family at ten o'clock in the morning to find out why George has failed to show up for an interview with her father, bolting when he tells her he has fallen in love with her, telephoning him minutes later from a pay-station to invite him to lunch. She acts, she admits, under "the illusion that I know what I'm after. And I don't. . . . I can't keep off the telephone," which is never more evident than in the final scene when she calls the Windlestraws "savages" and bolts again. Yet a more reasonable and civilized family than the Windlestraws—with the exception of Connie—could not be imagined; it is because Elspeth and Connie are alike that they clash so

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violently. The symbol of the Windlestraws' civility is their respect for each other's privacy. And again Connie is the exception : It is not "normal" not to want to talk about other people's business, she says; if she had been born in a maternity hospital she would think there had been a mistake. Clearly she and Elspeth stand with Samuels as the "naturals" or "primitives" who are annoying to Mrs. Windlestraw. "It's quite natural," Mrs. Windlestraw says of Elspeth's inconsiderate visit at ten o'clock in the morning, when the sweeps are in the drawing-room and she is sorting the laundry, "but it's very annoying, like most natural things." Mrs. Windlestraw is annoyed with Connie for worrying about George : "My dearest, you are really hardly old enough to form a really valuable opinion as to what the mother of a grown-up family or an intelligent young man of twenty-two ought to think or say or do. Anyhow, if you like being worried to death, I don't, and I've had some experience of it." Connie quite "naturally" cries her eyes out when her father is hurt, but still her behavior leaves something to be desired; says her mother, "Dear, dear, it doesn't seem to be worth while being clever when anything terrible happens." And Connie is especially annoying when in the final scene she tells Elspeth the primitive truth—that the latter is in love with George and is stringing Johnnie along; she must leave the room, Mrs. Windlestraw decides. Mrs. Windlestraw's characterization is central to the meaning of the play, for it is in her—and in George insofar as he is able to attain her level—that the morality of Bridie's hypothetical universe finds its expression. Why, if the themes of The Black Eye and Tobias and the Angel are alike and if the natures of George and Elspeth closely parallel those of Tobias and Sara, is a marriage of Order and Disorder not the ending of this play? The answer lies in the ambiguity of George's characterization, which is partly the judicial ambiguity with

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which Bridie treats most of the characters in this play, but which also suggests that the fusion of contradictory forces—the marriage—could take place within George, in the same way that a marriage has taken place within Mrs. Windlestraw. T h e reasonable George has already been amply delineated;

the

unreasoning or emotional George, who finds an affinity with Elspeth, Connie, and Samuels, appears in these passages: Els pet h. Are you fond of music? George. I don't know. Are you fond of children or trees or hills or houses or people ? I can't answer questions like that. Elspeth. Then how could you forget a thing like that [his appointment with her father]? Don't you see what an insult it was to me? George. It wasn't an insult. It was a sort of a compliment. Elspeth. What do you mean? George. If it is any compliment that a useless poor creature like me should be precipitated into a state when he can't remember his own name. If a rhinoceros had come charging into my bedroom I'd have chuckled at it through the rosy mist. I can only gabble like a fool to you now. . . . Thus, combined with the civility of Mrs. Windlestraw is her unreasoned belief in the old wives' cure for nose-bleed : " A n d Johnnie, if your nose starts to bleed again, put the front door key down your b a c k — a f t e r you've locked u p . " T h e combination, which produces transcendent reason—it is, after all, wise to lock up at night—can be further illustrated.

When

George tells her of his plan to go to London and Connie comments that he has no money and may have to sleep on the Embankment, Mrs. Windlestraw replies, " H o w much do you think he'll need? London's very expensive. T h e seats in a theatre cost at least twelve and sixpence . . . " And of course one should go to the theater when one goes to London. She must change her dress before going to the hospital to console

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her injured husband; one should think of one's appearance. This comment is rather more endearing: "The Matron at the Nursing Home told me that all the doctors are expecting another epidemic of influenza. So nice for them, don't you think?" Yet Mrs. Windlestraw's morality is more than a combination of reason and emotion, reaching at last a transcendent reason; it is a combination of justice and mercy, reaching, finally, superhuman or transcendent justice. She approximates the Biblical father who cries, "For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found." She does not judge first, then try; she first accepts. And her influence seems to be the strongest operating on her son George, who complains of Elspeth, when she accuses him of cowardice in running away from his job at his father's factory, "That's like you. You jump to conclusions, and you don't give me a chance. Verdict first, trial afterwards." Thus, it is Johnnie's suspicion, first that George has more than figuratively seduced Elspeth and second that his brother is lying when he reports that the telephone is not Elspeth but a wrong number, that enrages the younger son and finally makes him desert the family business. Bridie's variations on the theme—illustrating, incidentally, careful structure—come with the hotel waiter's unfortunate assumption that George and Samuels are not residents of the hotel and thus not privileged to drink in the private lounge, and with George's landlady's immediate assumption that his sister is not his sister but a woman who has come to conduct some "funny business" in her decent lodgings. In contrast, Mrs. Windlestraw assumes that George has tried his best to get through his examinations, that he is not leaving home for selfish motives, and that he is both wise (in deciding to go away when he discovers that he is in love with Elspeth) and not wise (in the sense of that word Elspeth understands).

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George, too, can assume that his father does not really wish that he had beaten the initiative out of his son, that Angus Windlestraw only hits people of his own size, and that according to the father's lights he has given his son the best possible chances. (That Angus Windlestraw shares some of his wife's impulse to open his arms to the prodigal son is apparent: "George," he says, "I'll tell you something. You're a poor enough fish, but I aye likit you better nor Johnnie. . . . Keep your thumb on that, mind.") George can accept Samuels' drunken drowsiness and be kind to him in the embarrassing scene in the hotel: "It's all right. It's all a misunderstanding. Sam, put on your coat, old boy. It's just a mistake. See, I'll help you. There, now." On the other hand, Elspeth cuts Samuels with " I f we meet again—and I hope we won't—we can discuss that. Take yourself off, will you ?" Again, as Mrs. Windlestraw accepts the fact that her sons have "bad blood" to get out of their systems by periodically fighting, George accepts, with his black eye from his brother, Johnnie's suspicious, cautious, bullying, stupid dullness. (Bridie's judicial attitude will not paint an older brother in solid colors, and Johnnie is somewhat redeemed after his callous treatment of George. While George is still recovering from the shock of his father's accident, Johnnie says, "By God, you selfish little rat, you are! I know what you want. You want to roam wide and free and find something with a kick in it that doesn't entail hard work. You haven't the guts to enlist or go to sea . . . You've got to turn to and do something for Mother and the girls." But Johnnie draws sympathy in the agonizing scene in which he proposes marriage to Elspeth, if not in what appears to be a sincere statement about his brother : "He's a fine chap, George, really. A bit queer, in some ways, but he's got magnificent stuff in him. He's the best of the bunch of us, really. . . . I'm not very good at being put right. Especially by a . . . younger brother . . .")

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Finally, there is in Mrs. Windlestraw's transcendence some of the daftness and some of the prophecy of Aunt Dinah in The

Switchback.

Indeed, the language of the opening of the

final scene, in which she is seen playing Patience, recalls the card game played by Aunt Dinah and Mallaby in Act I I I of that play; it is obviously symbolic : " O h , there's a Queen of Diamonds for that King of Spades. It's going to come out all right.

I hope Johnnie fixes things up with Elspeth tonight.

She'd suit him, I think." Her daughter, who is watching the game, says, "There's a J a c k of Clubs underneath all that pile of things. You can move him to the Queen of Diamonds." Although Mrs. Windlestraw says, "Should I ? Well, perhaps. . . . I wonder what George is doing to-night," probably she does not move George to Elspeth before she must interrupt her game, gather up the cards, and prophesy, "Such a pity! It looked as if it were going to come out." T h e play does not come out, in the conventional sense, yet its hero, Bridie says, is to "live happy ever after," even without the "right." The question which, in the end, suggests itself is whether or not George is a hero. T o the extent that Providence works for his good fortune, he is not heroic. In fact, when he attempts to interfere in his destiny he appears a little foolish. This seems to be Bridie's judgment of man, in 1935 at least. Bridie labels The Black Eye a comedy. Certainly the play is concerned with the delineation of character and with the treatment of a moral problem. His insistence that it is not a farce' 1 suggests that here there is no external exaggeration or distortion of internal experience—suggests, that is, that the hypothetical universe which George constructs is real both in and out of the play. In any event, the world of the play is as carefully as it is ingeniously constructed. In the first scene, George comes upon " A Serious Person" in an aged bowler hat (his own is new), whom he has just seen climbing over a

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cemetery wall. The Serious Person is solemnly singing a Hymn to the Dawn, his own composition : The Moon has gone The early tramcars herald in the Dawn. I love the railings in our street, I grasp them with my hands and feet; I care not for the leaping stars. I clutch the cold, triumphant bars, For, one by one in regular row, They lead me where I want to go. The Milk . . . The nale sublucent Milk . . . brings all things, all things Home. The Serious Person has spent the night in the cemetery because his Auntie, " I n exchange for certain conveniences in the shape of food, shelter and so forth," has the right, he believes, to expect that he conform to the regulations governing her household, including the rule that he be in by eleven o'clock; she is unreasonable, yes, but she is ninety-five years of age. He finds, he says, her ways convenient on most occasions; when he fails to conform he takes the consequences. He neither knows nor experiments to discover his own ways. " M y programme is rather explicit," he says. " I must go now and face my Auntie's wrath as a preliminary to her infinitely preferable ham and eggs." Bridie has written a parable for his play, giving his audience the key to his moral, as he gave them the key to The Switchback by putting Milton in Mallaby's study. Here is George, clutching for the cold bars of reason yet actually being led home by something much more extraordinary, something unreasonable but seemingly eternal, something whose transcendent justice serves ham and eggs with its wrath. The irony is that he does not recognize himself.

IV The Clown Despairs

It Depends What You Mean (1944) James Redfem wrote, "It is this dramatic and almost Ibsenish development from somewhat farcical comedy to vivid reality which gives this play its distinction, for it turns out to be a serious searching treatment of the problem of marriage.'" Redfem's criticism illustrates a recognition of, but unsuccessful attempt to define, the influence of Ibsen on Bridie; it incompletely judges both Ibsen and Bridie, for it suggests that Bridie's concern in this play is social which in turn assumes that Ibsenism can be defined as social drama. Nor is Winifred Bannister's attempt to describe Ibsen's influence on Bridie successful. She notes that Bridie adapted several of Ibsen's plays, then concentrates on biographical parallels between the two playwrights, finding the influence "absorbed at the root" and thus impossible to define clearly; when she is specific, she cites a common "loathing of hypocrisy and humbug" and a common "will to satire in dramatic form.'" The nature of Ibsen's influence is to be defined by exploring his and Bridie's moral affinity in the light of Joseph Wood Krutch's evaluation of 97 I N HIS REVIEW OF

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Ibsen in "Modernism" in Modern Drama. The tendency of d r a m a since Ibsen has been, according to Krutch, "to undermine the foundations of Post-Renaissance civilization," that civilization which rests on the premises that "man is a creature capable of dignity," that "life led in this world . . . is worth living," and that "the realm of human rationality is the realm in which man may most fruitfully live." Ibsen, in denying that any truth is permanent or absolute (Krutch cites Dr. Stockmann's statement in An Enemy of the People that truths die), began the assault; although he did not himself reject the three premises, remaining a moralist who, despite all that he discarded, held fast to the belief in rationality and free will, he made possible their rejection by his followers.' There is a parallel between Ibsen's and Bridie's philosophical relativism, a parallel which will be developed in this and the last chapter but which can immediately be strengthened, using the play that Krutch cites, by drawing the analogy between Dr. Stockmann (who is in some ways a comic character) and Bridie's often ridiculously self-important yet earnest heroes. As Ibsen will not judge Dr. Stockmann by painting him black or white, Bridie will not judge Mallaby. In one sense, of course, Bridie's increasing philosophical relativism cannot be distinguished from his early adoption of Shaw's judicially ambiguous dramatic method, probably because Shaw's method has roots in philosophical relativism : If finality is an illusion, a play's meaning should be ambiguous, and Dr. Mallaby's and Sir Anthony Craye's truths should exist side by side. Bridie's plays in the period 1938-1948 seem increasingly concerned with the conflict between absolute and relative values (Mr. Bolfry, in which the Reverend McCrimmon struggles against the relativism of his niece and of the soldiers Cully and Cohen, was written in 1943) and with the difficult distinction between illusion and reality. The equivocal title It

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Depends What You Mean sets the tone of the period; the personification of equivocation comes in Professor Mutch of that play whose more intelligible speech sounds like this : Well, now, perhaps it is quite true that I have a sort of a tendency to sublimate emotions and impulses into some sort of rationalised and connected intellectual system. But why not? I mean to say, we have developed ratiocinating faculties no doubt for some sort of coherent purpose—or at least as part of a more or less intelligible process. And after all there's a certain satisfaction in the exercise of one's more highly developed faculties.' But added to the feeling of inconclusiveness, which, after all, is not new, is the note of despair which haunts these plays— Babes in the Wood (1938), The King of Nowhere (1938), It Depends What You Mean, and Dr. Angelus (1947). Both The King of Nowhere and Babes in the Wood are about "vanity and decadence," Winifred Bannister writes; both "reflected the contemporary individual's passionate devotion to itself.'" Of course Bridie had been concerned since The Switchback with the individual's passionate devotion to himself, but to consider these middle plays as treatments of that devotion's tendency to distort both the self and the world outside the self will be clarifying. In Vivaldi, in The King of Nowhere, there is none of Mallaby's innocence of motive; there is a carelessness, an irresponsibility—in contrast to Mallaby's sense of duty—which is the ultimate result of a distortion or disintegration of self. It is Vivaldi's tragedy that he cannot, finally, be himself. A successful London actor, Vivaldi is committed by his wife to a mental home when for the first time a play of his fails and he develop« a persecution complex. He escapes from the home and is sheltered by a recluse, a fortyfour-year-old spinster, who has conceived a fantastic plan to save the world and who wants a leader. Vivaldi, whose external grace has charmed four women into becoming his wife, does

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not fail to attract the spinster, and it is no time before she is telling him that he is "the Deliverer," " T h e Hero," " T h e Man sent from God." He plays and believes in the part, as he has played and believed in the parts of Hamlet and Lear. But Dr. McGilp, who is in charge of the mental home, will not let him continue to act such a dangerous role. McGilp makes him confront his own self, and the vacuum he discovers sends him to the safety of McGilp's institution where he can successfully avoid the reality which frightens him. The last scene of the play finds him in comfortable and permanent illusion, presiding as Chief of the inmates in the home; he has consciously assumed the role of a madman, not only to convince the spinster that he is not yet well enough to build up with her the ruin of their empire but to retain some identity, even though it be an illusory identity. Although in one sense The King of Nowhere

is a study of

the personality of the actor, of the man who consciously assumes selves different from his own, and although at the time of its production critics found political overtones in the play, its theme, which is not simply "the vanity of man,"' has universal application. This criticism explores the

political

implications: A mental patient as prospective dictator—there is no help for it, the dramatist must justify this not very subtle epigram on life and politics by carrying it off in brilliant satirical style. But in spite of the liveliest facility in making his audience l a u g h — one line in three is electrical—[Bridie] remains almost in Calvinistic earnest where his main theme is concerned. T h e play has wit without humor. Olivier has a big sham acting part which leads him nowhere. And if anyone thinks that such plays do good in this world or serve as warnings, I am sorry to recall that several of them were to be seen in Berlin theatres a year or two before Hitler came to power.'

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There is a Calvinistic earnestness; there is wit without humor. Bridie has, in other words, dropped Shaw's judicial attitude. Still his epigram on life is more subtle than this criticism suggests. In answer to the spinster's accusation " I thought you were burnt up body and soul with our great idea, and you were only acting," Vivaldi says, "Only acting? Only acting? Great Heavens, woman, to act is to create the perfect union between body, mind and spirit.'" To Dr. McGilp he says, "It's the make-up that saves me in the theatre. I'm all right so long as I'm somebody else." For Vivaldi, character, or morality, is a conscious assumption; because he has no sense of self, he can have no self-knowledge or conviction. And because he has no self-knowledge, he has no knowledge of others. In ignorance, he sees woman as an enemy, a crowd as a mob whose "poor, muddled, clouded minds" are to be played upon. His speech is a potpourri of lines from roles, as he assumes the character and emotion appropriate to the situation—the self-pity of Lear, a Wildean rapture at the appearance of the ladies dressed for dinner ("Oh, my darlings, you look divine! I shan't be able to eat a bite"); yet often his is the stock and inappropriate response to the situation, as when, called upon to speak of love to the spinster, he quotes from St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians, and, when insulted by Dr. McGilp, he responds automatically, "You have come here to insult me in my own house." Corrected by his wife, he must speak dull, common lines, but he has soon dismissed reality: Mrs. Vivaldi. But it isn't your house, Frank . Vivaldi. What's that got to do with it? Mrs. Vivaldi. Well, you said it was your own house, and it's Miss Rimmer's house, really. Vivaldi. Whose house it is is beside the point. In this house or any house I will not be badgered, bullied and insulted.

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Vivaldi in his grandest style can humbly declare, " I ' m not fit to touch the hem of your garment," or boldly assert, Practical difficulties! The Alps were a practical difficulty to Hannibal. What thing that was worth doing since the beginning of time was not confronted and beset and almost overborne by practical difficulties? There is no difficulty too great for human ingenuity and energy and manhood to conquer and destroy. The question is not, "Is it difficult?"; the question is, "Is it worth doing?" If the answer is "Yes," why, then, in God's name, let us set about it. T h e cliches indicate the insincerity. Vivaldi is an automaton, saying words that are not his and performing actions according to directions. His relationships with others are copied : Miss Rimmer, the spinster, is his saint, the Virgin Mary, and he is her knight with sword and white horse; Mrs. Vivaldi is Delilah to his Samson; the spinster's little secretary, who makes the mistake of thinking he is in love with her, is his queen who will ride with him in his triumph, dressed in a great golden banner; McGilp is " T h e Beloved Physician," Buller, the spinster's cousin and in charge of her militia, "Mon brave." Vivaldi is concerned exclusively with the effect he has upon others: When he appears in the first scene "wearing the white make-up and the twisted black mouth of a pierrot" and Dr. McGilp makes no comment, he says, " W h y haven't you mentioned my face ? Are you trying to humour me ?" Coming in from addressing a rally of the party members, he says, "Darling, they ate it u p ! " This is vanity, as is his description of the theater audience ("Lousy. Packed like sardines in a tin, of course. And oily like sardines, and smelly like sardines; and no heads, like sardines. . . . But I need something to work on. A little intelligence. Only a little"), and by extension the theme of the play should be the vanity of man. But this fails to take into consideration the awful mechanism of Vivaldi's

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behavior. Mrs. Vivaldi says, "You see, he isn't strictly speaking a man at all." Vivaldi is non-human, a machine, a tool of others; without protest he becomes Henry Gaunt, the creation of Miss Rimmer: "I think," he tells her, "that you are the kind of woman I could trust with my life." Miss Rimmer has as little regard for the self as does he : "I don't care who you are," she says. "I'm going to make you something entirely different." He has no knowledge, but he will buy the people who have the knowledge "for half a crown and a kind word." He does not have, his accusers say, conscience, loyalty, or common decency—in a word, character. Vivaldi is a symbol of modern mechanistic man who, although he may speak of his immortal soul (he says to Miss Rimmer, "Do you think every part and corner of my immortal soul is your own private property?"), has no acquaintance with it. He is a brother to Cully, Cohen, and Jean, who need to be taught by Mr. Bolfry and the Reverend McCrimmon that they have souls. Vivaldi, then, is an uncommitted man, sensing his capacity for inspiration but finally incapable of fulfilling himself because of moral lassitude. He says : But there is something—something that is not vanity and selfishness and the tricks of the trade. In my profession I am at the top of the tree. It is a canvas tree, but I didn't get there without working and starving and fighting with despair. There was no need for that. I could have sold carpets and curtains in my father's warehouse. But I had a passion in me that drove me on. You despise me because I am a despicable lover. But the passion of men and women is childishness to my passion. In another age I might have been a saint and martyr. Vivaldi is play-acting again, this time to cure a leading lady's first night jitters, as he admits in practically the next breath (by this speech he restores Miss Rimmer's faith in him). But the speech is interesting for its assumption that the age and

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not Vivaldi is at fault, still another evidence of his failure to assume responsibility, his automatism. Vivaldi's disintegration of personality is a professional hazard, but if this disintegration is symbolic, the play is more than a Calvinistic condemnation of man's vanity; it is a condemnation of man's spiritual aridity. The spiritual disintegration which characterizes Vivaldi appears again in the publisher James Brewer, his mother, and his English house-guests in Babes in the Wood, which was performed in London three months after the opening of The King of Nowhere. This play is about Robert Gillet, a Scottish schoolmaster who, when he learns that his book on higher mathematics is suddenly a great success, decides to give up the teaching profession. His first venture into the world is a weekend holiday, with his wife Margaret, in the home of his publisher, Brewer, at Miching Mallecow, Sussex. Brewer first appears to the Gillets wearing a scarlet wrap over a scarlet bathing-suit, his wet hair, "twisted to give the appearance of a couple of little horns" and looking, therefore, Bridie writes, "terribly like Mephistopheles.'" His mother, Diana Hangingshaw, is an old woman in a wheeled chair who wears a cap "representing a bird of Paradise in a nest of old lace" and spends her time knitting "something that looks like an enormous scarf" in a wild design of a great variety of colors (she reminds Margaret of "one of those old women at the guillotine in the French Revolution"), screaming at the butler for whisky and soda, and stupefying people with her odd responses. The English house-guests are Susan Copernicus, the beautiful wife of a nitrite manufacturer (she immediately professes great interest in Gillet's book and in two days has him begging to kiss her), and Gerald "Loopy" Strutt, a bearded architect with whom Susan is living briefly. Together with a fat, diseased looking butler whose name is Rupture, these people compose

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Bridie's waste land, or in the metaphor of the play, the wood into which the babes, Robert and Margaret, are loosed. There is still another metaphor employed in the play, that of the Faust legend. Brewer is not only described as a devil, he is called one by his mother, and he frequently speaks like one, particularly in this speech—a reaction to Mrs. Gillet's statement that she and her husband plan to return to Edinburgh rather than make their home in London: "Oh, he mustn't do that. He mustn't do that. He mustn't forget that I am his publisher. I have his mortal body and immortal soul under contract. I shall not permit it." He conspires with his mother against the Gillets: Brewer. Well? Mrs. Hangingshaw. Well? Brewer. I think this is going to be quite charming. Mrs. Hangingshaw. You always were a mischievous lad. Brewer. It is hereditary. His home has the fascination of evil and the heat and heavy mists of hell. There is a spider on the ceiling of the black and silver striped guest-room in which Robert and Margaret sleep, and a devil-moth under the lampshade. Bathing in his pool gives one the illusion of bathing in boiling oil. A striped stable houses zebras in the garden; the dinner bells are flat. Brewer alternates between Berlioz' and Gounod's Fausts on the piano. His mother, who will not fit into the Faust story but may be the witch out of Hansel and Gretel (she tells Loopy, " . . . if you do not instantly obey me, I shall put a curse in your joints and your liver and your lungs . . ."), warns Gillet that "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do," but Mrs. Hangingshaw sometimes gives such valuable pieces of advice knowing that she will be disobeyed; Gillet is thus encouraged to get his idle hands on Susan.

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But Robert Gillet, a Faustian philosopher, is prevented from selling out to the devil by a legendary Margaret who, unexpectedly ignoring Mrs. Hangingshaw's advice to let Robert run off with Susan, follows the example of Papageno Copernicus and uses physical violence in the spiritual war for her husband's soul. "Puppy," Susan's husband, with whose mentality Mrs. Hangingshaw equated Margaret's, has had to learn not to follow the old woman's advice. Trying "sympathy and tact" as she advised failed; now Puppy tries methods learned "in the Salonika gutter" where he spent his childhood. He arrives to interrupt Robert and Susan's little idyl, ordering Susan to accompany him on a trip to the United States to buy a film company; when Susan hesitates, Puppy hits her and she follows him meekly to catch the boat at Southampton, but not before urging Robert to follow her—on a lecture tour of the States. Robert's spiritual guide hits him at the first mention of passports, impressing upon him "the full implications of the married state," and the two leave the stage "at a run," hand in hand, like children. Before they go, Margaret says to Rupture, "Get the car. Or a taxi. Or a train. Or a bus. . . . Unless you'd like to be a robin and cover us with leaves," to which Rupture replies, "Now did people like that ought to be trusted with money?" Innocence has been threatened but is finally preserved by a mystical responsibility symbolized, as in the earlier Marriage Is No Joke, by the holy estate of matrimony. Babes in the Wood is a minor play, like The King of Nowhere, but unlike the latter it manages lightheartedness and achieves a measure of ambiguity. There is a glamor in Brewer's evil, a suggestion of truth in his response to Margaret's triumph in saving Robert from Susan : " I should have loved to make my own Hell for Mr. Gillet. He would have enjoyed it. But I bow to your superior expertise in Hell-making. Farewell."

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Bridie is on both sides again, on Margaret's and on Brewer's. The opposition between these two is clear cut, Margaret intuitively disliking Brewer even before meeting him because his letters sound "flippant," "impish and unearthly," and because they indicate that "he lives for the fun of the thing." Bridie makes Margaret just embarrassing enough to take the edge off the victory of Order in the play. At times she is servile ("He is very patient, Mr. Brewer. A schoolmaster has to be. I think Bob has had more irritating things to put up with than most men. . . . But you know you are patient, Bob. Aunt Ethel said once . . ."), or irritatingly timid ("I'm not sure that I'm going to like this visit. . . . Everybody's sure to be frightfully clever. . . . But I feel so ignorant"), but withal warm and unselfish. Reminding Brewer of a clergyman ("Gillet," Brewer says when Margaret leaves the room, " I am tortured by a mad and hopeless adoration for your wife; but I cannot help feeling as if a clergyman had just got out of a third-class smokingcarriage. Will you tell us a funny story, Gerald?"), she takes everyone to her bosom, worrying about their souls. When Susan neglects Loopy, Margaret takes him in although she does not like him : "Oh, no. Poor little soul! No. I'm sorry for him of course." There is no trace of self-importance in her dedication to saving Robert. T o Mrs. Hangingshaw she says, "Well, I mean, it doesn't mean much to that sort of woman, but it means a lot to Bob, I'm afraid. He takes things so seriously." There is such fervor in the speech in which she announces herself as Robert's savior that Brewer, who has entered the room unnoticed and seated himself at the piano, plays and sings "Anges purs, anges radieux" from Gounod, beginning "to improvise like a maniac shouting with mirthless Mephistophelean laughter." This is the end of the speech : I've stuck by you all these years, Bob Gillet, and kept the whole clutching, clawing world off you. I'm not going to stand by now

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and see you dragged through the mud. A pitiful, bedraggled object you are already. It's got to stop. It's got to stop now, do you hear? I'm going to save your self-respect. Whether you like it or not, I'm going to save you ! You are not going to America. Margaret's phrase "save your self-respect" suggests the kind of knowledge for which Robert Gillet has been tempted to sell his soul-—the knowledge of evil denied a Calvinist pedagogue. Gillet is ready to sell his soul, and his school as well, for adventure, for the release from dullness and responsibility— in the word he uses, from Calvinism. Gillet explains his decision to leave the school to one of the students, Mackintosh : I'm a dull, middle-aged man leaving a rather tedious and harassing job for a little leisure and—and inviting of my soul. You don't understand these things yet, and I hope you never will. I hope you go peacocking round the world meeting adventure at every corner and changing your life as often as you change your shirt. Never let your mind get heavy, Mackintosh. Keep the spirit of High Emprise alive in your soul . . . Don't grow old. It's an abominable state. T o Susan Copernicus, later, he says about his book—the work of his responsible years : . . . it all appears to me a little trivial. . . . This week-end has been a very important week-end in my life, Susan. . . . I've always been a conventional sort of chap. My parents were rather strict. Calvinist. You know. And I've always had to work hard. I haven't had the time to . . . to "invite my soul" as some other chaps have. . . . I didn't ask to be understood. It never occurred to me that it would do me any good to be understood. Inviting one's soul takes on the connotation of sowing one's wild oats, and Gillet's quest seems to be a search for T h e Facts of Life. In an amusing scene at the beginning of the play, Gillet attempts to explain the facts of life to Mackintosh; this

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ritual the schoolmaster always performs on a student's fourteenth birthday. T h a t Mackintosh is better adjusted to the facts of life than is Gillet soon becomes c l e a r : One must remember that there is nothing essentially—ah— squalid about these matters unless the—ah—method of approach makes them so. . . . On the other hand, they may quite easily become an obsession. One's mind is apt to dwell unduly on—on these matters, unless one keeps a very careful watch upon oneself. T h e scene takes on significance when later Gillet feigns tolerance of Susan's rather complicated sexual life and of his own illicit desire for her. As is so often the case, Bridie gives his reader the theme of the play in the first scene, carefully structuring the play to develop it and carefully using language to support it. S o Gillet says before Mackintosh's arrival, " T h e Facts of Life ! W h a t are the facts of life, anyhow? Nobody knows," and this exchange follows: Margaret. No. I don't suppose they do. Gillet. All this fuss about natural physiological processes! We're like a lot of Australian bushmen, with our outrageous solemnities and our indecent tabus. Margaret. Yes, dear. Gillet. And we can't even agree about first principles. Margaret. No. Except that there has to be some sort of law and order about it all, dear, hasn't there? Margaret's "Yes, d e a r " says paragraphs; it says that Gillet is a pedant, entertaining concepts alien to his moral consciousness within the safety of his library. It is Spring and Gillet is fortyfive, a dangerous age the psychologists say : What a disgusting time of year Spring is ! . . . M y very conversation is rotting away into pedagogese. I can't even talk like a

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human being. Let alone think. I am only forty-five, and here I am. An imbecile. A prig. A pedant. A dotard. My mind has gone.

T h e success of the book liberates him : "I shall begin to live !" Margaret would spend the money for a new bathroom, but Gillet prepares to escape—the daily routine ("You've been used to a daily routine for so many years," Margaret protests), drudgery ("Is there any sense in drudgery? Drudgery for its own sake?" he asks). With an innocence Margaret never allows him to lose, he says, "We'll lead exactly the same kind of life. Except that there will be no intolerable urchins with adenoids and no examination papers and no parents. No parents! It never occurred to me until this moment what lucky devils Adam and Eve w e r e ! " Adam and Eve, having no parents, inherited no original sin and were therefore able to enjoy, temporarily at least, a state of innocence; it is some such glorious idyl that Gillet anticipates as he deserts the northern camp of O r d e r : " I shall be all right in the South. . . . It will be good for my immortal soul!" If Gillet's weekend at Brewer's is to be good for his immortal soul, the experience must be meaningful; yet Margaret's slap in the final scene seems to be that of a doctor, bringing a patient back to consciousness. Gillet recovers, as if from delirium : "I feel just like . . . it's just like when I had a temperature of 105. Do you remember? . . . I must get my bearings. I must think." The experience of temptation occurred in a dream from which he awakes into an original pristine innocence. The play ends before Gillet can be haunted, as McCrimmon was haunted, by his dream; but like Mr. Botfry, the play has developed the struggle between the two natures of Robert Gillet. "But these people haven't got the parish-pump inhibitions you and I are used to in our neighbours," Gillet says to Margaret about Brewer and company. "They're free from the stupid

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middle-class sanctions we poor ushers have imposed on us and must impose on our wretched pupils." Later Brewer, the voice of his secret heart, tempts him : We have cast away the bonds of repression. We have tamed the crouching beast. We lead him by a pink ribbon to feed upon the lilies. We have sublimated our individual consciousness. We have authority to do exactly as the spirit moves us. At the beginning of the play Gillet says, Ο Lord ! Ο Lord ! Ο Lord ! Ο Lord ! . . . All life is frustration and devilry. . . . My dear, do you think it's possible that the Lord has punished me for looking too closely into the secrets of His universe? . . . T o force an intelligent being to be a schoolmaster! Surely such a refinement of torture must have been devised by some supernatural agency. Even then the devil is at work, tempting the philosopher to degrade his devotion to "tidying the Universe." As Bolfry spoke the secrets of M c C r i m m o n ' s heart, Brewer repeats Gillet's doubts, speaking in front of him to M a r g a r e t : His life's work, if we are to regard his book, is devoted to tidying up the Universe. A neat, intelligible, tidy Universe. That is your ideal, Gillet; or do I mistake you? . . . I envy you. I like to deny and to disintegrate. It is a nasty, fidgety vice with me. I often wish that I were virtuous. And yet . . . You were talking about the "Faust" legend, Margaret. You philosophers, Gillet: are you really wise ? You passionately tidy up and tidy up in the hope that one day everything will be in its place. But will there be a place to put it? You sell your soul to find what is missing . . . . the Truth, the Truth, the Truth . . . when it may well be that the truth is that there is no Truth. T h e philosophers and scientists cannot even agree on first principles, Gillet complains early in the play, and later Brewer helps him degrade his profession:

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Tell ine, Gillet, when will scientists begin to wear dog-collars? . . . And Cassocks and albs and dalmatics and gaiters and mitres? They already hunt heretics. They already pronounce ex cathedra on this thing and that thing and the next thing. They are already the guardians and inspectors of human conduct. But M a r g a r e t slaps her husband back into an inherent reserve ( " M y good fellow," Gillet says to Mackintosh when the boy expresses his admiration for his schoolmaster, "you mustn't go all little Paul Dombey. It isn't decent. It isn't respectable"); she slaps him back into an inherent devotion to O r d e r ("There's n o use having a system if you don't stick to it," he says at one point). Immediately Brewer's living-room, whose " f o r m u l a " h a d only been " s t r a n g e " in the sense of " f o r e i g n " before, becomes "beastly." Gillet runs with his savior f r o m the h e a t a n d the mist of hell—with his physician f r o m the fever of illness. A judicial ambiguity allows the reader to decide for himself whether a soul has really been saved, and his decision reduces itself to a preference either for dodos or for birds of paradise. T o Brewer M a r g a r e t is an " a n a c h r o n i s m " : ". . . in the midst of all our free-winging birds of paradise, our dear M a r g a r e t is a D o d o . " T o M a r g a r e t , keeping zebras a n d liking flat dinner chimes is beastly : "What a silly a s s ! " she says of Brewer. It is a measure of Bridie's success that both Brewer and M a r g a r e t are appealing, that the w a r m t h of this comedy, for example, holds its own against the glamor of evil: Gillet. To force an intelligent being to be a schoolmaster ! Surely such a refinement of torture must have been devised by some supernatural agency. . . . Oh, L o r d ! Did vou hear that? .Margaret. No, dear. Mice? Gillet. No, that sentence. T h a t sentence I said just now. . . . At one point in Babes in the Wood, have this exchange :

M a r g a r e t a n d Robert

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Gillet. T h e s e i m m o r a l little rats are forever whining when they're hurt. U p o n mv soul, M a r g a r e t , I c a n ' t understand these e m a n c i p a t e d people at all. T h e y v a t t e r about repression and the misery it causes. T h e y claim the right to let their blooming libidos rip. T h e y pretend they're building A r c a d i a in E n g l a n d ' s green and pleasant land. A n d yet they're the most melancholy g a n g I ever saw. T h e y ' r e always in some sort of emotional trouble. Give m e a b u n c h of jolly, teetotal, b e e f - a n d - c a b b a g e eating Puritans every time. T h e y get far m o r e fun out of life. Margaret. intellectual.

I think it's being intellectual.

I ' m glad I ' m

not

Gillet. It has nothing to d o with being intellectual. It has to do with being idle and half-baked and self-indulgent.

And when, after Brewer has declared that the bonds of repression have been cast away by the new era, the publisher is challenged by Loopy's "Who says so?" he replies, in the accents of Mephistopheles, " I say so. And it is the glory of our time that I have as much right to say so as anybody else." The irony which saves Gillet's long speech is that he is as much among those who would defend the devil's right to speak as he is among the Puritans; he is among the melancholy and selfindulgent, forcing his wife into the role of a martyr to his wellbeing. Margaret is, in this role, sister to Mrs. McCrimmon and to the two wives finally to be discussed, Angela Prout in It Depends What You Mean and Margaret Angelus in Dr. Angelus. Both of these plays are minor, too, but both develop further the theme of self-distortion or, in the words of the Calvinist, self-indulgence. In the former, the wife willingly assumes the role of hand-maiden in the house of God, that is in the house of George Prout, Artist; in the second, Margaret Angelus is literally martyred—that is, murdered—for what is to be the salvation of her husband's soul. Both George Prout and Dr. Angelus indulge themselves, Angelus more literally than Prout. Indeed, Angelus is an extreme case of self-

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devotion; at the end of the play he undergoes a spiritual disintegration like that of Vivaldi, beginning, as he is arrested, with prayers to "Jesus tender Shepherd" and ending "howling like a dog." In short, in these two plays the holy estate of marriage has disintegrated into slavery or a convenience. In It Depends What You Mean, George and Angela Prout, a painter and a poet, discover the extent to which their marriage has disintegrated when they are called upon to participate in a "Brains Trust," a panel discussion during which prominent members of the community answer questions submitted to them, for the amusement of the local army camp. A compound question submitted by a silly private of the women's corps ("Is marriage a good idea ? And if it is what's the best way to choose a partner?") confronts Angela as she is on the verge of an affair with her husband's childhood friend, Mutch, the equivocating professor of metaphysics, because, as she explains, People who are in love get to be in love with love. And in the long, long times when George was somewhere else, or with his head all muffled in the clouds, absorbed in his painting, I felt restless and silly and hungry. I thought it was sympathy I wanted, but it was love I wanted. Mutch is participating on the panel with the Prouts and, among others, a doctor who believes that no sane people marry, and Lady Dodd, who has long since learned to bear her husband's infirmities, equating as she does marriage with kindness to animals. During the discussion of the question, when George tries to summarize his and Angela's marriage as " a darned good arrangement," with each of them giving and taking a bit, Mutch is forced to propose himself as Angela's lover and protector. Like Gillet who belittled passion with, apparently, no experience of it, Mutch denounces marriage, as symbolized by the Prout's marriage, as the best way of living :

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It's all right for George. He's got somebody to look after his laundry and cook his meals and fight with the tradesmen and listen to his ravings and tell him he's wonderful. But where in the name of all the suffering saints does Angela come in? She's got a far better brain than he has. She's got all the qualities to make her name in the world, and she's got what he hasn't got— decent manners and the capacity for hard work. And she's got to stand like a conjuror's assistant flourishing a handkerchief and shouting "Voila" whenever he takes a mangy rabbit out of the hat. T h e Brains T r u s t disintegrates into chaos, with people shouting and crying, George walks out a b r u p t l y — t o take rat poison, Angela f e a r s — t h e curtain is r u n g down, a n d the others hurriedly follow George; back at the Prouts' studio, George and Angela allow themselves to be talked into putting u p with each other for a n indefinite period, a n d M u t c h , w h o has backed out of a n a r r a n g e m e n t to go away with Angela because his housekeeper would be inconvenienced, is taken off by L a d y D o d d . T h e play ends very m u c h as it began, the Prouts' conversation paralleling their conversation at the beginning of the play w h e n the Reverend Paris called on t h e m to ask t h e m to entertain the troops. T h e n they sounded like t h i s : Angela. T h e lucky fellows! Prout. What do you mean by "lucky"? I had a year of the army before they chucked me out and I never went through such indiluted hell since I was at school. Angela. I often think— Prout. Nonsense. Angela. My dear George, I am accustomed to the peculiar Chesterfieldian grace of your interjections, but I wonder what Mr. Paris will think of us. N o w they sound like t h i s : Prout. I don't think you ought to have talked to Jimmy like that. Angela. I nearly threw the bag at him.

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Prout. No doubt. But he's a sensitive sort of fellow and you were damned rude. Angela. My God ! . . . Oh, what's the use? George, why must you leave braces lying about all over the place? You know you never wear them. Prout. I hardly think this is a time to be talking about braces. Angela. No, perhaps not. . . . Prout. Oh, Lord, this place is a positive dog's breakfast. Angela. I thought you liked it that way. Prout. Yes, I do. And somehow we always seem to be able to find things. There's one thing I want, though. Angela. There isn't a drop in the house. Prout. What about a cup of tea? Angela. I'll put the kettle on. Prout. No; I'll put the kettle on. H E E X I T S . As this is the first time for years that he has ever done a spontaneously civil action A N G E L A registers first astonishment, then delight, and darns the socks with fresh gusto. George's spontaneously civil action and Angela's delight are the promise of the play, yet the despair of Angela's " I felt restless and silly and hungry" hangs in the air—with

the

despair of this speech from George : I said that when I married I would marry the perfect woman or die a bachelor. I was ugly. I was poor, but an artist can marry anybody he likes. A wise man told me that and I believed him. I was determined to marry a woman who was graceful and beautiful, without blemish, but curiously touched by humanity that she might escape the horror of perfection. I could hear only her voice. It would sound, I thought, like bees on the clover, like quick accidental waterfalls, like the lower notes of the skylark, like the song of the thrush. A voice full of sympathy, but not impertinent sympathy. And talking good sense. And talking good English. And not trying to be clever. T h e woman would have a personality strong and individual but ready to blend with other personalities, to wann and illuminate them. I knew her. I could hear her. But I could not see her. All I knew was that she would

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be a surprise. Dark? Fair? It was nothing to me. Height? As high as my heart. But beautiful she must be, and honest and gentle and strong. And look what I married ! T h a t ! Angela, George says at another point, "insistfs] on being treated like a rational being and at the same time claim[s] the right to behave like a spoilt child"; "I forgot your birthday three weeks ago," he says, "and you sulked for ten days. How can I make a comrade and friend and partner out of a creature like t h a t ? " It is to Bridie's credit that is is impossible to decide whether Angela or George is more self-indulgent and so to place the blame. Even Mutch, who has extreme difficulty expressing the idea, agrees that Angela is not free from t a i n t : ". . . though it's partly her fault of course. I mean, after all, she's got a personality of her own, and what the hell . . ." M u t c h is attempting to say that Angela chooses servility and encourages George's t y r a n n y ; indeed, she seems to luxuriate in martyrdom. George is describing Mutch to L a d y Dodd, but actually he not only reveals his own situation, he accurately describes the form of his wife's indulgence : Jimmy's a stray dog. If anybody's kind to him and gives him a bone and a cookhouse fire to sit at, he goes all maudlin. He goes off his head. He can bark and snarl all the way down the street. He can bite the children who try to tie tin cans to his tail . . . The trouble is that no woman can be trusted with a dog. . . . They're not content with taking the brute for a run and feeding it and throwing sticks for it, and teaching it a few self-respecting tricks. They set to work and steadily undermine its morale until it's a cringing nervous little horror. It's not the dog's fault. They talk baby talk to it. They let it slobber all over their faces. They take it to bed with them at night. George, the stray dog, afraid to go all maudlin, barks and snarls instead; Angela is not afraid of him, babies him, and takes

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him to bed with her when he will cooperate. T h u s is the illusion of a m a r r i a g e preserved. In an attempt

to answer

the w o m a n

private's

question,

G e o r g e and A n g e l a e n a c t their first meeting, using scenery left over from the p a n t o m i m e that entertained the troops the night before. G e o r g e , strangely excited, forgets his emotional reserve; he is not speaking as a young love-sick boy, but acting, with the release of a m a n w h o fears passion, as a husband whose inherent reserve—despite his public b a r k i n g a n d

snarling—

prevents him from expressing s y m p a t h y a n d gratitude : Prout. Nasty things, these colds. Hadn't you better stay in bed? Angela. O h , no. I'm not encouraged to go to bed when I have a cold. I've never learned the habit. Prout. T h e n I think it's a damned shame. Y o u spend all your life thinking for others and working for others and you'll never get any thanks for it. Angela. But I'm not that sort of person at all, M r . Prout. Prout. I don't think you know what sort of person you are. Perhaps it's as well. Angela. W h y ? Prout. Because that curious shy grace you've got might be lost. You're like a wild creature conscious of every leaf that stirs, but unconscious of yourself. I think it's the most important part of vour charm. Y o u see, you're not classically beautiful, though you've got interesting features and rather beautiful eyes. ( T a k e s her hand.) And your hands are lovely. . . . Angela. But you can't see me. It's too dark. Prout. I see you all the time. I can't get you out of iny head. I never in my life met a human being who interested me so much. And yet I'm afraid of you. Angela. Afraid of ine? W h y ? Prout. I wish I knew. When a woman attracts me, I'm not usually afraid. Angela. You are often attracted by women? Prout. M y God, yes ! But you're a different kettle of fish. I told you why.

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They embrace and the scene is over; Bridie writes that Prout, "in some

embarrassment,"

sits down. With his next speech

Prout has recovered his public self and is barking again : " M y wife and I behaved in that idiotic way because . . . " He is so enslaved, he is so much Angela's dog, that barking is his only defense. With more wisdom—or more pity—his master would not feel the need to look around for other stray dogs. If Babes the Wood What

You

is about selling one's soul to the devil, It Mean

in

Depends

is about selling one's soul to his wife, a

superior expert in Hell-making as Brewer said. T h e case for Order is tritely presented by the Reverend Paris, assisted by Lady Dodd, and incidentally by the silly private, her boyfriend Walter, and the doctor whose opinion is, to state it more fully, "Anyone can get on with anybody else if he tries hard enough. If I went blindfolded to any cinema queue and picked out a female, she and I could live happily enough ever after if we had to. And that's how it's done, I solemnly assure you." Paris summarizes the situation, interestingly not blaming P r o u t : We all have absurd inclinations and we don't always behave very wisely, but there's one thing we owe to our self-respect and that is to play the game. . . . We must have some kind of standards, and I don't know of any better than the good old sporting standards of the New Testament. . . . [Family life] is based on a solemn contract between a man and a woman. If you break the contract the whole system falls down. . . . Professor Mutch has behaved very badly, and Mrs. Prout has exercised very little self-control. . . . If Mr. and Mrs. Prout have stuck it for fifteen years they can stick it for another twenty-five, and they've just jolly well got to. The Professor ought to go and get married and settle down. It would do him a world of good. Lady Dodd confirms that the three "have alLbeen very naughty indeed"; the private who started everything has learned that

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she should " m a r r y someone practical," and this seems to be Walter, who does not hesitate to lecture total strangers that " I f you look at it reasonable, judies is things that most blokes can do with in moderation. There's things you've got to do. You've got to eat and you've got to sleep, but you ain't got to go running after other blokes' judies." Enough has been quoted to indicate that Bridie intends to satirize by its presentation this conventional morality. But the ambiguity of his attitude is sufficient to allow Redfern's judgment that the dialogue is sometimes "sententious and commonplace." 1 0 Although Hunter Diack seems unaware of it, he is suggesting the way in which Dr. Angelus

might seem "Ibsenish" in its

philosophical relativism. He writes: There is a curious metaphysical quality about Mr. Bridie's new play. The illusion lies not in convincing us that the events before us are a projection of the real world, but in persuading us that the unreal world of Dr. Angelus's brain is for the time being more worth attention than any part of reality we have known. Dr. Angelus, then, is "of the theatre" in the fullest meaning of that phrase. . . . Mr. Bridie's problem has often been to confine the rich flow of his ideas within the limits of plot and character; but in Dr. Angelus he has created a mind easily capable of handling the flood of ideas and of retaining its peculiar integrity throughout all the quick changes of mood. . . .[Dr. Angelus'] moonstruck blethers are often sound sense peculiarly strung together. . . . [His mind dominates the play] so thoroughly that we take sides with this larger lunacy against the callow or moronic creatures who people the ordinary world." Sewell Stokes, whose conclusion that Bridie may have intended to confuse us in Dr. Angelus

was quoted in Chapter I, is less

completely caught up in the " l u n a c y " : Dr. Angelus is at first only comic, and at this time the normal conduct of the other characters "makes one wonder if, after all, murder is a suitable

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subject for comedy"; then in the final scene Alastair Sim plays the doctor "with almost embarrassing realism . . . so that we cannot help asking why we were not led to take this villain seriously before."" T o the extent that the characterization of Dr. Angelus allows for this confusion, Bridie appears to support the relative truth which Krutch finds in Ibsen. Dr. Angelus, which is based on an actual Glasgow murder case," contrasts the character of Dr. Angelus, who poisons his mother-in-law and wife for the release the insurance money will bring him, with that of Dr. Johnson, his young partner who, although he becomes increasingly aware that the death certificates which Angelus persuades him to sign are false, cannot bring himself to accept the older doctor's guilt. Johnson rationalizes Dr. Angelus' behavior, crediting his insinuations, forgiving his human frailties, discrediting warnings from others as malicious gossip. Angelus often hinted, Johnson explains, that his mother-in-law, Mrs. Taylor, "was too fond of the bottle," and at the woman's death the young doctor did not think he should question too closely the diagnosis of his partner. When Johnson discovered that Angelus "was in some sort of tangle with the servant girl" (the girl, Jeanie, is pregnant and under the impression that Angelus is divorcing his wife to marry her), he worried but thought that "after all, he's only human. There's often a side to the best of us we can't control."" Johnson is especially willing to overlook Angelus' playful smacks to Jeanie's bottom because he believes himself to have compromised a woman patient: the woman, Mrs. Corcoran, who is thirty to his twenty-four years—and unhappily married —finds Johnson's pompous seriousness so engaging that she declares herself in love with him while she is only half-dressed at the end of an examination; as she throws her arms around his neck, Mrs. Angelus interrupts them. Johnson does not need Angelus' warnings against involvement with Mrs. Corcoran,

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for he has adopted the Hippocratic Oath as his moral code and has thus agreed to hold "aloof from all voluntary wrong and corruption, including the seduction of females and males, of freemen and slaves." Mrs. Angelus is taken ill, the woman suggests that Angelus murdered Mrs. Taylor for her £10,000 insurance policy, but still to doubt the integrity of Angelus is, for Johnson, to play the role of Judas Iscariot. It is Mrs. Corcoran who goes to the police in order to release Johnson from this idolatry. Maclvor, the police inspector, arrives on the morning of Mrs. Angelus' death, too late to save that victim of Angelus but in time to save Johnson. Mrs. Angelus' death has convinced the young doctor that his idol is a murderer, but he is physically prevented by Angelus from going to the police to give himself up as an accessory to the crime. After Maclvor's men take the howling Angelus into custody, Johnson continues his self-flagellation, heedless of Maclvor's consolation that "if the Procurator Fiscal and the Criminal Investigation Department couldna get off the mark quick enough to save Mrs. Angelus there's nobody going to blame you, and you little better than a bairn." Inspector Maclvor makes two points in his final speech to Johnson. He says, first, "You've taken a kind of tumble to your self respect, but that's no harm, no harm at all. You did your best and it wasna very good and that's a fair epitaph for most of us," and, second, "You young ones don't know the difference between good and evil." Either Maclvor is to be regarded as "moronic," much as the Reverend Paris would have to be regarded as moronic for suggesting that the Prouts put up with each other in the future, or Johnson has been deceived about what is truth. That the latter is the case can be substantiated by an examination of Bridie's characterizations of Angelus and Johnson. It seems clear that Johnson has created Angelus in his own image, and the measure of his pride

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is that he has made Angelus a Christ, to betray whom would make him Judas. The line between pride and humility is fine, but behind this statement from Johnson, "Here am I a stranger in the big city and not much more than a kid after all and you take me into partnership," is the pride of being taken in at twenty-four as a partner rather than as an assistant. The pride is more obvious in this exchange between the young doctor and Mrs. Corcoran : Mrs. Corcoran. . . . But I shouldn't be saying that to his assistant, should I ? Johnson. Partner. Mrs. Corcoran. What did you say? Johnson. Dr. Angelus and I are partners. Μrs. Corcoran. Of course you are. I saw at once you were far too clever to be an assistant. . . . Johnson is otherwise free from taint, a Parsifal on a holy quest; against him the degradation of Angelus is measured. Johnson describes the profession to which he and Dr. Angelus, presumably, have dedicated themselves: It was a sort of a—a holy quest. Like the Holy Grail. I mean, you were after something. It might even be a way of saving mankind. And although you didn't believe in God or any of that sort of rot, you were really a kind of priest; with High standards and self-discipline and fine, simple rules and so on. Did you ever hear the Hippocratic Oath . . . Johnson repeats part of the oath that Dr. Angelus swore: "So far as power and discernment shall be mine, I will carry out regimen for the benefit of the sick and will keep them from harm and wrong. To none will I give a deadly drug nor offer counsel to such an end; but guiltless and hallowed will I keep my life and my art. . . ." In Angelus Bridie has created another Vivaldi, an actor

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assuming and throwing off morality as he would a mask, his speeches of trite sentimentality delivered dispassionately. None of his personalities is to be trusted; nothing he says is to be believed. He can be judged only by his actions, as Vivaldi could be judged only by his actions. As Mrs. T a y l o r lies dying, Angelus asks Johnson to look at her in the morning, for which he will pay a two-guinea consultant fee; but Johnson o b j e c t s : Johnson. I thought it was the custom—I mean etiquette—for one doctor to see another doctor's dependents for nothing. Angelus. We shall snap our fingers at etiquette in this case. It is a sweet sensation to get a new kind of fee. T h e wind on the heath, brother, is nothing to it. You shall have your fee. Johnson. It's very kind of you, Doctor. I don't like taking it. Angelus. Then cultivate the principle of the Moral Holiday. It strengthens one's moral constitution for the other days of the year. And it is very agreeable. T h e speech is ironic, of course, because Angelus does not expect to have to pay the two guineas, but it also illustrates the dramatic quality of Angelus' morality. In Act I I , Angelus reviews for Johnson Francis Bacon's classification of the idols that beset men's minds, pausing at the last: It is of the Idols of the Theatre that I am most afraid. . . . T o Bacon's mind, the Idols of the Theatre are those systems of philosophy that create for their devotees an unreal world, in which people act artificially, according to a predetermined book of words, as they do in Stage Plays. You must be on your guard against such idols, my dear lad. You must not be ruled by systems. T h e system by which Angelus believes himself enslaved and from which he attempts to escape is described in this speech : Suppose this man to have made an unfortunate marriage. Suppose him to be subjected to the incessant attempts of two ignorant

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and narrow-minded women to mould him to their miserable conception of what a right-thinking domestic animal ought to be. . . . Suppose this man to have passionate physical longings. Unless they are satisfied he cannot plan, he cannot think, he cannot invite his soul, he cannot rise above the earth. Angelus, too, wants to invite his soul, take a permanent moral holiday from the artificiality of expressing concern for his wife ("This is very trying for all of us. V e r y discomposing and upsetting. I can get nothing done. Poor Margaret occupies m y entire field of consciousness"), from the artificiality of expressing grief at her death ("Poor Margaret is at peace. Her weary journey is ended. She is in Abraham's bosom. A n d we can only hope that she's comfortable. Her story is told. T o me, at least, it will always be an inspiration"). But that system of philosophy which actually rules him is something quite different. After he has knocked

Johnson

unconscious to prevent his going to the police, Angelus settles himself and delivers a long monologue to his victim; he says in part: This realisation of oneself is the aim and object of existence. . . . Can we now imagine a man who holds this firm conviction being placed in a situation in which what is called murder would be a perfectly logical and reasonable solution of his difficulties? . . . Y o u may answer to this that the world is wide. He can leave those creatures [who tie him down] and seek other fields. But that is not the solution of a man of courage, to run like the wandering Jew from city to city seeking rest and finding none. He must stand and fight. . . . It is the only thing he can do consistent with his self respect. It is the passionate devotion to self, then, which tyrannizes Angelus w h o has, in fact, throughout his life chosen "to run like the wandering J e w , " instead of to stand and fight; he has run from the navy and the mercantile marine, to the Green

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R o o m , to medical school, and to the altar with the daughter of a wealthy Edinburgh family, from the Solomon Islands to India, China, and East Africa, collecting curios, having his picture taken, and killing hippopotamuses. Yet after all this inviting of his soul, he is no closer to it, perhaps because, like Vivaldi, in the assumption of so many false roles he has lost sight of it. T h e role the doctor is playing at the moment, which gives him a ready-made book of words to speak, is that of the oldschool, pious Christian believer. T h e description of poor M a r garet at peace in Abraham's bosom, her weary journey ended, is only a sample from his cliche-riddled speech, which includes such gems as " T h e Lord gave and the Lord taketh away," " D e a t h is the common lot," and " W e are blind leaders of the blind, and the ditch gapes for us on either side." T h e r e are longer passages where Bridie's satire is sustained : I have lost all that is dearest to me in life. It will take me many months to gird up my loins and once again march breast forward. T h e married state is a blessed one, George. It will be the happiest day of my life when I see you standing at God's altar taking those solemn vows which can only be dissolved by death. Alas, death has dissolved my vows and there remains an emptiness that can never be filled. A great void, George. T h e hypocrisy of the man is so apparent that it is hard to conceive of Diack's being won, even temporarily, to his side. It may go unnoticed in the opening exchange of the play : Angelus. Have you had a hard day? Johnson. Pretty stiff, Doctor. Twenty-seven visits and two surgeries of about three hours each. Angelus. We must do what we can for suffering humanity. We must do what we can. I am sorry that you have been kept so late. You might have joined us in family prayers. Johnson. I'm afraid that's not much in my line.

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Angelus, A pity. A pity. In a world like this it ought to be a case of all hands to the pumps. . . . But later, when Angelus tells the servant-girl, "But I know that your heart is not so hard as that. It is not conceivable that there should be that amount of evil in human nature. I trust human nature. I reverence it," or when he reminds Johnson, " I t is an Age of Unbelief. You young fellows never experience the sublime satisfaction of becoming even for an hour or two, as a little child. I find public worship a purifying experience," hypocrisy screams at the reader. Becoming as a little child is, for Angelus, synonymous with taking a moral holiday, this corruption of Christianity serving as a symbol of the spiritual disintegration of the man. The disintegration is complete at the end of the play, when Angelus is reduced to a hysterical, howling animal. T h e play is a bitter judgment of man, as are, in varying degrees, the other plays discussed in this chapter; Mr. Bolfry is as severe in its way. Although The King of Nowhere and Dr. Angelus are, by implication at least, defenses of traditional values—honesty, generosity, and responsibility—their tone is often shrill, suggesting that the defense is unsure. In the better plays, Babes in the Wood and It Depends What You Mean, Bridie manages an ambiguity which supports Ibsen's relativism. Margaret's truth has as much validity for Faust as Mephistopheles'. James Mutch is as right as the Reverend Paris. It depends what one means by truth, validity, and right. Still, interrupting the acceptance of this ambiguity, especially in It Depends What You Mean, is the new note of despair—a fertile despair, for it bred Bridie's fine last plays, Mr. Gillie and The Baikie Charivari. Robert Gillet escapes the abominable state of old age by running off the stage hand in hand with his wife; Brewer, his publisher, teasingly suggests that "it may well be

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that the truth is that there is no T r u t h . " When the despair is gone, Bridie, in Mr. Gillie, allows his schoolmaster no such easy escape and, in The Baikie Charivari, puts the question of final truth, not in the devil's mouth but in the mouth of man.

ν Songs of Experience " H E R E I S P E E R G Y N T , of Scotland," Walter Elliot writes to introduce Bridie's last play, The Baikie Charivari, published two years after the playwright's death in 1951. Sir James MacArthur Pounce-Pellott, Knight Commander of the Indian Empire, who has retired as District Commissioner of Junglipore to Baikie, Scotland, where he is tempted by the De'il, is, Elliot believes, like Ibsen's hero, who is visited by another devil, the Button-Moulder.1 Looking at The Baikie Charivari in the light of Peer Gynt will further clarify the nature of Ibsen's influence on Bridie, not only in this last play but in two other late plays, Daphne Laureola (1949) and Mr. Gillie (1950).

Two general parallels can be drawn : first, both Bridie and Ibsen are concerned, in The Baikie Charivari and Peer Gynt, with the problem of knowing the self, of committing it to some purposive action—admittedly not a new theme for Bridie. In Peer Gynt, man is given two alternatives, being himself (which means "to slay oneself . . . to stand forth everywhere/ With Master's intention displayed like a signboard") or being to himself enough.' In the three plays to be examined in this 129

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chapter Bridie's protagonists choose between these alternatives. Second, Ibsen's hero progresses rapidly from innocence to experience, surviving the experience by adopting ironic poses. If the heroes of Bridie's early plays—Mallaby, Tobias, and George Windlestraw—are innocent Adams, certainly PouncePellott and all the heroes of the later plays are old or experienced Adams, residents not of the make-believe Garden of Eden but of the Land of Irony. The best of them speak with a godlike distance or irony, in imitation of the voice of the morality operating in all of Bridie's plays and once put on the stage in the character of Jupiter in The Queen's ComedyThey speak, as Elliot notes that Bridie's "Unknown God" speaks, "neither in wrath nor, certainly, in pity; but in some strange form of kinship, though remote and salt as the sea.'" Among Bridie's early ironic Adams, which all are minor characters, Mr. Samuels, George's savior in The Black Eye, is most memorable (the divine Raphael in Tobias and the Angel, whose irony is natural and not cultured, cannot be considered in this classification). Of the heroes in the middle plays, only George Prout in It Depends What You Mean suggests this kind of distance when he faces the reality that his wife does not spend her life thinking of others (as he believed she did when they met) but is capable of sulking for ten days if he forgets her birthday. The change between Mr. Samuels, a minor, eccentric character, and Pounce-Pellott, a major character of tragic stature, was taking place in Prout. When Bridie, about the time that he wrote The Baikie Charivari, attempted to use an ironic Adam in the role of a comic eccentric, a misfit—the character of George Triple in Meeting at Night—most of the fun had gone out. George Triple is Major Unthank of The Girl Who Did Not Want to Go to Kuala Lumpur explicated. Involved in all sorts of shady deals (he is usually saying something like "Now, if you care to ask no questions and let me have your

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cheque for four or five hundred now, I think I can promise you a pleasant surprise by next autumn"), Triple has been in prison twice and, in spite of this, is loved by his daughter, Cornelia. Cornelia is loved by Hector Maclachlan, another serious Scotsman (like John Stewart), who rescues her from a tipsy gentleman in the fog near Charing Cross Station and would rescue her from her father. "It was quite like the Arabian Nights," Triple's daughter tells him when she brings back her savior. But Triple, as he says, "has lived through a thousand and one of his own," and has suffered for daring rather than judicious business operations. There is ironic wit in his speeches but little originality : Money, my dear young friend, is a commodity, but not a commodity of equal value for everybody. You might as well give whisky and cigars to an infant as give money to a person who does not know how to use it. The elephant has a dignity as striking as that of the mahout—but we do not dress it in a loin cloth and a turban. . . . A man who does not get enough to eat is a born fool. . . . A child either has parents, or he has no parents. If he has no parents, I am quite prepared to feed him myself. If he has parents and they do not feed him, he is born of fools and will probably grow up into a fool and spend his money on racing dogs and patent medicines and subscriptions to the Socialist Party. Why should you take money from sensible people and give it to fools ? You find the question absurd. Yet it expresses in a nutshell the whole trend of modern political theory. . . . I have, from time to time, taken money from fools and spent it wisely.5 Triple's fate—he marries Hector's mother and gains a half share in her inn—is unimportant; he is characterized as a man who enjoys outsmarting the born fools, has a degree of selfknowledge ("I may be a bit of a moral cripple, but wouldn't you say I had a touch of genius somewhere?"), and is clearly to himself enough. His role has no symbolic import and his language is literal even when it is ironic.

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The difference between a George Triple and Lady Katherine Pitts of Daphne Laureola is that the latter is symbolic of something much larger and more significant than a titled London matron misused by the uncivilized persons around her. She seems a symbol of disillusioned innocence, a symbol of England after the Second World War, and by extension, of Western civilization. Yet she is only partly successful as such a symbol, is a much lesser Pounce-Pellott. She is a transitional character between George Prout and Mr. Gillie, her disillusionment rendering her ineffectual like Prout; the two of them, Prout and Lady Pitts, are as ineffectual in their experience as Robert Gillet of Babes in the Wood is in his innocence. Daphne Laureola is transitional in still another sense : It suggests the conscious poetic method which Bridie was to use in his last play. In it Bridie is using the myth of Daphne, whom Edith Hamilton describes as "another of those independent, love-and-marriage-hating young huntresses" who especially did not want to become entangled with a god, because, as the ocean nymphs told Prometheus, " T o war with a god-lover is not war,/ It is despair." Apollo, Miss Hamilton writes, came upon Daphne hunting in a short dress with her hair "in wild disarray," and he thought, "What would she not look like properly dressed and with her hair nicely arranged ?" He pursued her, but she called to her father for help and was changed into a laurel tree, thus escaping violation. Miss Hamilton concludes : Apollo watched the transformation with dismay and grief. "O fairest of maidens, you are lost to me," he mourned. "But at least you shall be my tree. With your leaves my victors shall wreathe their brows. You shall have your part in all my triumphs. Apollo and his laurel shall be joined together wherever songs are sung and stories told." The beautiful shining-leaved tree seemed to nod its waving head as if in happy consent.'

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The working out of this symbolism in the play is not entirely successful, according to the critics looking for allegory. The Spectator's reviewer commented that "Neither the title nor the irrelevant introduction of a pot of laurel can raise Daphne Laureola into the realms of symbolism." When Dame Edith Evans played to New York audiences, Walter Kerr found the symbolism "fuzzy and unnecessary"; John Lardner found it "muddy," and the reviewer for Theatre Arts labeled it "elephantine." The latter wrote, "The frail plot is so overburdened with mythological allusions, elephantine symbolism and quasi-poetical declamations that it cannot bear the weight, and by the third act has ignominiously and abjectly collapsed," which fairly well summarizes the critical opinions mentioned.7 The frail plot is this: Lady Pitts sits drinking double brandies and staring gloomily in front of her in a Soho restaurant that is undergoing repairs. Around her other diners, including a young Polish refugee, talk desultorily and attempt to keep from staring at her. Finally she begins to talk, inviting everyone present to tea in her beautiful garden before her chauffeur, Vincent, appears to conduct her out of the restaurant and home. When she protests, the young Pole comes to her defense against Vincent and ends up unconscious on the floor. Home is, it is discovered in Act II, the home of Sir Joseph Pitts, Baronet, eighty-seven years old. The Pole, Ernest Piaste, and the others arrive for a rather uncomfortable tea party, and before he leaves Ernest declares his love for Lady Pitts; while he is kissing her, they are interrupted by Sir Joseph. In Act III, a week later, Ernest, who has been hiding in the garden on the chance of seeing Lady Pitts, confronts Sir Joseph. Sir Joseph describes his fifty-year-old wife's past: daughter of a parson, she won scholarships and first class honors in economics and modern languages yet could only

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find work as a governess; she married a schoolteacher who soon left her a poor widow, whereupon she took a job as "secretary to a biscuit factory in Birmingham," and "ran a shelter for prostitutes at night" until Sir Joseph rescued her by marrying her. He explains her behavior at the restaurant: She has outbreaks. One can't really be surprised. It's all this emancipation of women. They think they can do what they like but it's not in their nature to do what they like. They just wallop about with the tide until they're caught in some new form of slavery. I found her plenty to do to keep her mind occupied but there's more than the mind has to be kept occupied . . . I wouldn't mind her amusing herself with young men, but the trouble is she doesn't know how. She has the misfortune to be a dyed-in-the-wool Puritan.' Ernest agrees to worship Lady Pitts from a f a r : "She will be to me as Beatrice was to Dante Alighieri when she had gone to Heaven"; she will be the laurel tree, who "eternally spreads her leaves," and he will be the Sun-god, who though far away "still warms and comforts her and endows her with life." Ernest leaves, and Lady Pitts arrives in time to watch Sir Joseph die. In the last act, which takes place six months later, the same people are dining in the same Soho restaurant, saying much the same things. Ernest, who does not read the newspapers, learns for the first time of Sir Joseph's death, falls to the floor in a dead faint, and is kindly revived by the others in time to see Lady Pitts enter the restaurant with Vincent, who is now her husband. Ernest reproaches her with his disillusionment and despair: I so desperately mind that I feel as if ten thousand mad rats were tearing my heart to pieces with red hot teeth. I do not understand why you do this. You knew what you were to me. . . . It is a very old story. Has nobody told you the story of the poor peasant who worshipped a goddess? And then he found

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there were no gods and goddesses, only an empty sky. Has nobody told you about the god who loved a mortal girl, thinking she was as he was, and found that she was a no-good slut? . . . You can have it both ways, if you know what it is to love. . . . You have plunged my light in darkness to enjoy the embraces of that evil dog.

Lady Pitts declares that she will not be blamed because Ernest chose to make her a goddess and is disillusioned to discover that she is a human being. The play ends as she leaves the restaurant and Ernest orders a double brandy. Lady Pitts is in every sense of the word a fallen woman, which in no way contradicts Sir Joseph's statement that she is " a dyed-in-the-wool Puritan." She is bound by no illusions about herself or others; she is anti-romantic and ironic. Ernest is "an excitable, crazy, ignorant, young man" who is in love with himself, who is not interested in her but in finding a Beatrice; and men, she says, are "all the same—unless they're pigs. And the pigs are at least honest with themselves and with us. I've found that out now. That's why I've settled down in a nice clean pig-sty." She tells Ernest, "You think because you played at being a bandit in the War that everything is like that. You wanted to save the distressed lady from the ogre, didn't you ? " His love for her is "calf love" : he comes "bleating" to her because he has lost his way, but she has lost her way too. She is a bad woman, playing at respectability, " a kept woman," she says : Kept in more senses than one. Vincent, there, is my keeper, among other things. His job is to keep me out of mischief when I have the impulse to dash out and say to the first beggar in the street: "For God's sake, speak to me. Tell me I'm not the only creature in this damnable dead universe." She is kept by Sir Joseph too, like a jewel in a glass case; she allowed him to buy her ("It's the only way I ever had of

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getting what I needed," he says) and to make of her a "collector's piece," "Pure bloody Hepplewhite." Ernest would do what Sir Joseph has done; he would make an object of Katherine Pitts in an attempt to attain something of inhuman purity. He would make her a laurel tree, a goddess. That she has had enough of worship is revealed in the final act when she enters the restaurant with Vincent, who could never be accused of putting her on a pedestal. She knows that she has bought Vincent but, as she says, at least he is honest with himself and with her. Moreover, Lady Pitts' marriage reveals to Ernest that what he had thought was a spiritual affinity is lust for the older woman : " I am not Dante," he says, realizing now that she has never been to him " L a Gloriosa donna della mia mente." It is because of these two revelations that the play is not totally static, not all third act and epilogue.' It is as "an emblem of civilization" that Bridie intends Lady Pitts, as Robert Herring suggested when he wrote that "Dame Edith uses the fagade of this broken pathetic creature as if she sees her an emblem of civilization through whose cracks she herself, with ease and authority, can reveal the reality beneath the Daphne within the laurel."" 1 Certainly Katherine Pitts symbolizes in one sense England in the aftermath of war, rejecting romanticism for realism, illusion for reality. Bridie contrasts the Soho restaurant, cluttered with ladders, ceiling and floor sheets, and only half plastered, with Sir Joseph's secluded garden: a floor beam in the restaurant is worm-eaten and is to be replaced by steel girders, but until post-war England can produce steel girders for restaurant floors it is safe only around the walls. "We're on the lip of the pit, e h ? " one of the diners says. " O n thin ice, you were, sir, there," George, the "moribund" waiter, tells a diner who forgets about the floor and begins to cross it; " I suppose we all are, these days." In Sir Joseph's summerhouse the civilized serenity is invaded by

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the Soho diners—uncivilized young people whose reaction to the genteel Lady Pitts is that of hypnotized rabbits, and the suspicious businessmen Gooch and Watson who hesitate to give their cards or addresses to strangers because, as Gooch says, "You never know these days," and, as the well-fed Watson says, "What the hell we fought the War for, I don't know. . . . No law and order, these days. Every second type you meet carries a cosh in his hip-pocket and a razor in his waistcoat. Decent people won't be able to cross their doorsteps for a square meal." Among these people, among the spivs and the bored married couple, the spirituality of the gracious Lady Pitts makes her a ghost, able to cross the weak flooring unharmed; "She rose a little from the ground and passed from the room like a ghost," Ernest says when she leaves the restaurant in the first act. In her drunkenness she speaks as though inspired : Everything has happened before. The Dark Ages have happened before. The apes have beaten us before when we thought they were feeding out of our hands. . . . It always happens. "An hundred generations, the leaves of autumn, have dropped into the grave." And again we shiver miserably in the confines of a long winter, as Christendom and the Roman Empire did hundreds of years ago. Again and again and again and again we have covered the face of the earth with order and loveliness and a little justice. But only the face of it. Deep down below the subterranean brutes have bided their time to shake down our churches and palaces and let loose the little rats to sport among the ruins. Her gentility is not superficial, even though in the next breath she addresses one of the rats, Gooch, in this m a n n e r : Then keep your remarks to yourself, you goddamned, greasy toad. . . . I'd be interested to know what you call yourself. I could suggest several names. Oaf, lout, dolt, pig, ass, ape, slubberdegullion, son of a bitch, clown, fool, lickspittle, codface. idiot,

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imbecile, stinkard . . . You louse-bitten tinker's cur, how dare you speak to me? . . . Then keep your blasted trap shut. She turns the other cheek when a blow is struck her, is ready to forgive any insult, hurries to correct any misunderstanding, as when she persuades Ernest to consider Vincent's accusation of blackmail as insanity. She is selfless where Ernest is selfish; she asks his forgiveness for having spoiled his romantic dream. She is selfless even in the acceptance of the degradation which her marriage to her servant, " a very stupid man . . .

a faith-

ful watchdog, but a very stupid m a n , " represents. As if in symbolic acceptance of vulgarity, she agrees to circle rather than cross the dangerous floor when she leaves the restaurant in the final act. She has admitted ruin if she has not quite joined the rats sporting among the ruins. Katherine Pitts as a symbol of an exhausted culture has the tragic stature that Vivaldi as that symbol does not have, for, unlike Vivaldi who finds refuge in illusion, she possesses a selfknowledge which must destroy illusion. She has chosen the way of experience, the necessary corruption of innocence, because that seemed to her the "reasonable" way. " I want to experience things," she tells Ernest. " I want danger. I want to risk something. I want to risk my health and my reputation, my livelihood, my life itself. W e can only appreciate what we have by risking it." In one of her drunken monologues in Act I she recalls her childhood : We had a laburnum tree at the vicarage. T h e pods were poisonous. We were told that we must not on any account eat the pods. It was like the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. . . . I ate some laburnum seeds and I was very ill, but I learned no more about good and no more about evil by that act. All that came later. But my father was very angry. He was terrible in his rage. I wore a white sailor suit when I ate the laburnum. My father thought I did it out of badness

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or to show off. . . . But he was wrong. Perhaps God was wrong about Adam and Eve. I only wanted to know about good and evil. T h a t was reasonable enough. . . . Even God is often unreasonable.

She has learned tolerance of the good and evil in herself and in others, which prevents her from judging the self-righteous and self-ignorant, which makes hers the role of Cassandra, a prophet rather than judge of mankind. But she has learned despair as well, for tolerance and compromise breed despair in the idealist, and the weight of the future is heavy. Two structural matters should be noted. First, the play approaches poetic drama, not entirely because of the metaphorical nature of its language but because of the symbolism of its action and characterizations. The minor characters are "types," as Margaret Marshall notes, but this is intentional; they are only symbols of humanity." The play has a cyclic structure appropriate to its theme : the same people are present in the restaurant in the first and fourth acts; their conversation is essentially unchanged. Acts II and I I I are the antistrophe, contrasting with strophe both in setting and tone: Lady Pitts in the Soho restaurant—the public self—is invulnerable; the tone she sets is predominantly brittle. Lady Pitts at home reveals a vulnerability which radiates softness. Second, Bridie in Daphne Laureola uses to its maximum effect a device which cannot have escaped the reader's notice in his plays; as early as The Switchback, when Mallaby, fortified by whisky, faced Sir Anthony Craye, Bridie used intoxication not only as a device for character revelation but also to symbolize inspiration, heightened sensibility, possession by daemons or gods. As he wrote in "The Anatomy of Failure," the point of using the "trick" of intoxication is that in my part of the country a man is slow in revealing the

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picturesque or emotional side of his nature unless he has blunted his inhibitions by some artificial means. Now, in a stage play an audience must be enabled to size up a character as quickly as a boxer sizes up his enemy in the ring. The actor must unbosom himself rapidly and all of a heap if he is to establish the philosophy underlying the motives of his two hours' traffic. In the old plays a confidant was used. To a drunken man, all the world is his confidant." Lady Pitts' drunkenness in Act I excuses (that is, realistically accounts for) her poetic language and immediately sets the play's tone, an incongruous combination of the poetic and the vulgar. What Bridie failed to do dramatically with Lady Pitts he did with Pounce-Pellott in The Baikie Charivari, a play similar in theme, tone, and poetic structure yet differing in the final choice it makes. But the resurgence of courage, the resolution beyond Lady Pitts' choice of despair, came first in the realistic play Mr. Gillie. Gillie chooses as Pounce-Pellott does; in one sense the heroes are identical, just as in one sense Bridie wrote all his life about one man, Dr. Mallaby, and his choice. The similarity between the names of Gillie and Gillet seems to demand a comparison, first, between the two schoolmasters; the difference between the maturity of the two men parallels the difference between the two plays and suggests the reason for the superiority of the later play. Gillet, who runs away from evil, remains a babe, like Tobias and Windlestraw; Gillie, who allows evil to knock him down, then gets up and invites it to drink with him, achieves a tragic stature denied to children. Gillet is saved from the tempters Brewer and Mrs. Hangingshaw by his wife; Gillie has not been prevented by his wife but has yielded to temptation, gaining the strength of commitment. Gillet's passion is tidying up the universe; Gillie's, untidying it by "opening cages and letting prisoners fly free.""

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The scene of the prologue of Mr. Gillie is a court in heaven; Gillie has been knocked down and killed by the furniture van which was to remove all his earthly possessions to the auction room, and a procurator is presenting him to the judge as a "candidate for immortality." Act I begins Gillie's story on the day that he learns from the Reverend Gibb, chairman of the education committee, that his school is to be closed and that he is to take a subordinate position in another school, under a headmaster whom he does not admire. Gillie immediately resigns and begins a novel, his second in twenty years. An English teacher, Gillie would be an artist himself if he could, he says; "If I can't, I'll help others to be that." His first novel "was published by an Edinburgh firm. It sold four hundred and forty-six copies. It brought me in seven pounds, five and eightpence halfpenny. Since then I have made nearly forty pounds a year by writing science notes for The Boy's Companion." He "might have been headmaster of a big school in Glasgow," his wife says, if he had paid attention to his "cards." Instead he watched his students, waiting for the singers, the violinists, the poets—the few capable of being inspired—and these he filled with enthousiasmos (Thomas Carlyle is a favorite of his). These he unsettled: "Thank the Lord for that. . . . If I've done nothing else in my life, at least I've unsettled one or two people." These he gave "the key to the treasure house and taught . . . the mysteries." On the day that Gillie resigns as headmaster, he learns that his latest protege, a miner's son, has, because of his encouragement, decided to "fly" to London to be a playwright; the boy, Tom Donnelly, has secretly married Gillie's protegee, a violinist. Accused by Mrs. Gillie, by the bride's drunken father (Dr. Watson), and by the Reverend Gibb of encouraging and promoting the marriage of children, Gillie declares,

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We've just had an example of guts and determination; and that's one thing none of us here has shown for many a long day. You ought to be proud of your flock, Mr. Gibb. You ought to be proud too, Watson, if there's a spark of pride in your sodden composition. . . . I feel enormously uplifted. I've just had a glimmer of an intimation that life's worth living. . . . Did you ever know an artist who was any good who wasn't prepared to burn down his house and go out like a man after his Grail? But Gillie's confidence has been misplaced. Six months later the playwright and violinist return from London for a visit, the playwright a film critic for the Weekly Thespian, the violinist a sort of "companion" for her husband's boss, Mr. Kelly. Watson, because his son-in-law and daughter now can afford first-class sleepers, hired cars, fine clothes, an apartment in "Enchanter's Nightshade" pink, and dinner parties at the Girning Arms (to one of which he has been invited), is ready to accept Tom and apologize to Gillie : " I must say this has left me a wee thing easier in my mind. I wouldna go so far as to say it, but maybe you had some right on your side after all, William. God works in a mysterious way His wonders to perform." The Reverend Gibb, when he learns that Tom is rich, also indirectly apologizes to Gillie. He says to Tom, " I admit I had my doubts, at one time, of the wisdom of your step. But it is very gratifying that it has all turned out so well. Mr. Gillie must be proud of you." Then, striking Gillie another blow, he announces that the schoolhouse must be vacated for a new tenant. The play ends with Gillie rejecting help from Tom and Gibb, his mind already occupied with a drawing he has been shown; it is by a local girl who believes that she may have to give up her drawing lessons because she is needed in her father's bakery. "All she needs is a bit of encouragement," Gillie says. "I'll raise the De'il in her tomorrow." Despite the procurator's plea in the epilogue that Gillie's

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story "is one of misdirected effort," that work "must be judged by the results it produces," that Gillie "has done nothing and whatever influence he has exercised has been dissipated into absurdity or worse," and that therefore he should be consigned to limbo, the judge assigns the schoolmaster "the vacant seat between Lincoln and John Wesley." It is not Gillie's fault that the cat got the prisoners he freed from their cages: . . . the few minutes between the door of the cage and the jaws of the cat make life worth living. . . . Whether this man's endeavours were useful or not is a matter for Whoever gave him his instructions. Victory or defeat have nothing to do with the case. Let us at least be gentlemen. Let us honour the forlorn hope. Bridie still will not pass final judgment; the Instruction-Giver, Jahveh, must finally judge, because only He knows the purpose behind Gillie's life. In choosing the way of forlorn hope rather than of acceptance or compromise, Gillie has literally chosen to slay himself to be himself. In choosing survival and Vincent, Lady Pitts has chosen to be to herself enough—that is, she has refused possession by any master, Apollo or otherwise. While seeming to involve herself with humanity by her marriage to her chauffeur, actually she withdraws. But not Gillie, who chooses slavery, possession, involvement. That his Master is the De'il, as he and Dr. Watson suggest (Dr. Watson says, "You're an interfering auld wife, with the conceit of the Devil"), has nothing to do with the case either. What is important is that Gillie has been mastered by something beyond the self, by literature and art. Yet he is not entirely unlike Lady Pitts, for he also is an ironic Adam, and his muted despair is the most haunting found in all the plays. Because of the paradox involved in slaying oneself to be oneself, Gillie's behavior is inherently ambiguous. He has chosen the way of slavery or dedication, responsibility or commitment,

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and selflessness, yet he attacks servility and conventional conceptions of responsibility and is attacked for irresponsibility and selfishness. He is committed to inspiring the human soul and would die rather than fail to perform his duty : " T h e human soul isn't like anything else and anything we do about it isn't like anything else," he tells Mrs. Gillie when she says that encouraging students is like "backing horses." " . . . the qualities were there. If I'd seen those qualities and done less than my damndest to give them a chance, it would have been better for me to put a millstone round my neck and jump in the loch." Yet he is accused of irresponsibility and selfishness: "That's right," his wife says. " G o on reading. That's how you get out of your responsibilities. That's how you get out of listening to plain common sense." "Escape, escape, escape all the time," Gibb chides. "Escape from your duties. Escape from your responsibilities. That was all you cared for. . . . I know that a man of your temperament finds rules and regulations a little trying." "Self, self, self, all through," Mrs. Gillie says, angered that Gillie has encouraged Tom's marriage. "That's you. . . . It was always the fine things you were going to do. It never struck you to do the thing next your hand and make a job of schoolmastering." But Mrs. Gillie's judgment, at least, is not to be trusted, because she alternates between this and statements like "We'd be better off if you could keep your eyes open and think of yourself for a change—not to mention me." Gillie speaks against conventional responsibility: Get this into your head. You owe your father nothing. He's fed you and clothed you—in a sort of way—because he'd have had the police after him if he hadn't. But that doesn't give him the right to make a slave of you for the rest of your life. He fosters self-confidence or pride : You'll take the world by the throat, the two of you. It's the only

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way to deal with the old bitch. And in five years you'll be playing violin concertos at the Albert Hall and Tom will be making his bow at the Haymarket, with the audience tearing the stuffing out of their seats. But he depends upon the stabilizing effect of humility in those he tempts; he says to Tom, "You stood out a bit beyond the other dolts and morons because you had a vein of holy humility, I thought. I had hopes that ten years' conscientious application would turn you into something worth while." It is his own strain of holy humility which necessitates Gillie's eloquent and often ironic despair. Like Lady Pitts, he has involved himself enough with humanity to learn his identity with the drunken, self-pitying Watson and the "trace of some kind of architecture among the ruins" that the doctor represents; he sees the truth in Watson's statement " . . . as one failure to another. Chuck i t ! " Caught in his cage, Gillie cries, For the past twenty years I've been a turnkey in a children's prison. . . . I've pumped ditchwater in at one ear and watched it come out at the other. As for myself, I've spent every minute of my spare time groping blindly for a way of escape, like a lavatory attendant filling football coupons. If I hadn't had a decent wife, keeping me fat and fed and comfortable—anaesthetising me—I'd have shot myself long ago. . . . I never took much to teaching. Most of the time it didn't seem to be worth while, to tell you the truth. But ordinarily his speech is guarded by irony, as in these comments on Tom's success and the rejection of his latest novel for its "early-Victorian" women who seem to have no legs: We have to keep up to the minute if we're to survive nowadays. Haven't we, Tom? We savages north of the Tweed can't know anything of the great movements and swelling advances in the modern world. We know nothing about Life, Mr. Gibb. . . . That's it. That's the joke. [Tom's] "made good". I thank thee,

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Tom, for teaching me that word. He's made good and true and beautiful—in London, Mr. Gibb. Aren't you surprised? Aren't you pleased? T h u s when Gibb evicts him and T o m offers to seek Kelly's help, the agony makes the irony horrible : " M y dear T o m , an orthodox J e w may be appreciative of your hospitality, but you must not offer him roast pork. No. I have influence in certain quarters. I may get a j o b as a lavatory attendant. Let us change the subject once more." His humility will not let him convict Watson, Gibb, or T o m , but he must resort to irony in his defense of Watson's hypocrisy ( " Y o u did your best," he says when the doctor, again partaking of the Gillies' fireside and whisky, recalls that he wanted to murder Gillie when he discovered his daughter's marriage), Gibb's servility to the education committee ( " Y o u are an ideal humane killer"), and T o m ' s compromise ( " I ' m not T o m ' s keeper, he can look after himself. He's proved that, anyway. . . . There are more good pit boys where he came from"). Gillie's humility is based finally upon his uncertainty about himself and the choices he has made (that is, upon his awareness of the relativity of human values), for he cannot know beforehand that he will be awarded the seat between Lincoln and Wesley. Behind his speeches is the suggestion that he may be among the many described by Carlyle who "with a whole imbroglio of Capability" spend their entire lives "stupidly groping about . . .

in ever-new expectation, ever-new dis-

appointment," who "shift from enterprise to enterprise, and from side to side : till at length, as exasperated striplings of three-score and ten, they shift into their last enterprise, that of getting buried." Everyone, Carlyle says in the essay Gillie reads to T o m , must spend several years of practice in meeting disappointment, the object being to "acquire notions of distance and become a seeing M a n , " which is another way of saying to

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become an ironic Adam. There is the suggestion that Gillie's irony is a pose maintained with considerable difficulty; though he may say in Act I, "If you think anything's going to surprise me you don't know me," he cannot at first accept Tom's betrayal with distance. Indeed, Gillie suggests, when he says, "I've spent every minute of my spare time groping blindly for a way of escape," Peer Gynt questioning the Button-Moulder: "But suppose a man never has come to know/ What master meant with him?" MT. Gillie has been interpreted by Gabriel Marcel as an expression of Bridie's personal and artistic credo; the playwright proclaims, Marcel writes, "avec espece d'alacrite joyeuse les droits imprescriptibles de la personne et de Peffort createur."" In addition to Gillie's defense of the artist's moral and intellectual superiority, there is the dialogue that begins the play in which Gillie attempts to define genius—specifically artistic genius—for Tom. "Possession by a god" is a better definition than "an infinite capacity for taking pains," he feels, although, he adds, taking pains is part of it. They say a sonnet takes a year to write. Nobody can get perfection, except once in a way; but he's got to work over and work over until he gets as near it as possible . . . In the Drama, there's all the more need for that meticulous carefulness. Every line must be loaded with significance and pull its weight. Every movement counts. Every article of furniture on the stage must mean something. Bridie is not ridiculing technique here. What Gillie says can be applied to this play, as it can be applied to the great majority of the plays analyzed in this study. While Gillie is talking, he and Tom are playing a game of chess, a game requiring, in a sense, "an infinite capacity for taking pains," a game which he loses because his wife's conversation interferes with his power of concentration. After Mrs. Gillie has chattered

148

J A M E S B R I D I E : C L O W N AND P H I L O S O P H E R

at their backs for several pages, Tom says, "Check," and Gillie replies, "Practically a fool's mate. Well, well. Though how I'm to be expected to concentrate when . . ." But there he stops. This is meticulous carefulness. Moreover, this seemingly irrelevant movement on the stage—the game of chess which Gillie loses—and the cribbage game between Dr. Watson and Gillie which opens Act II, carry a symbolic weight, the subtlety of which strengthens the play. Gillie loses the chess game but wins at cribbage, a game of chance; winning games of chance, as Samuels told George Windiest raw, depends upon possession by the gods. Gillie's life, even more than George Windlestraw's, is based upon the theory of chance: character, he believes, is tested by chance and "There's no way of telling a weak character till it's up against life." He took a chance on Tom and made a mistake; his conclusion is this: " I was only wrong. There's nothing final about making mistakes—if there's no real harm done." When Mrs. Gillie comments, "It's a good thing you take it that way," he adds, "There's no other way to take it." Possessed by the gods, Gillie finally seems to win at life, too— the distance of a seeing Man, an irony which gives him an infinite capacity for taking (that is, bearing) pains. Thus pervading the play is this necessary ambiguity, for if, as the judge says, "Whether this man's endeavours were useful or not is a matter for Whoever gave him his instructions," Gillie cannot finally be judged. Although the action and language of Mr. Gillie are meaningful on several levels, the play within the fantastic framework of the heavenly court remains naturalistic. This is not true of The Baikie Charivari, which alternates the realistic with the poetic more consistently than the two were alternated in Daphne Laureola and without, in this play, use of the device of intoxication to excuse dialogue which is meaningless on the

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149

literal level. The prologue is non-realistic : it begins with "A short Punch and Judy, Anniversaire-du-bebe Overture." The De'il announces from a mask in the moon his intention of chasing Sir James Pounce-Pellott (Punch from the Punch and Judy show) with a pack of hellhounds and, momentarily hiding his face, enlists the aid of one, the Reverend Beadle (the beadle from Punch and Judy), who believes the devil's voice to be the voice of God. Pounce-Pellott appears at the window of one of the cottages beneath the moon, shaving and whistling operatic arias, to introduce himself as a descendant of "Pontius Pilate, Procurator of Judea, Samaria and I d u m e a " : My predestinate fate has been not unlike his. But they did not allow me to wait for a reply. I did not wash my hands of the Mahatma. He washed his hands of me. So here I am at Baikie in my new little chrysalis bungalow lapped in my little pension, with all my old life behind me, waiting to learn the new life. Who will teach me the ways of the new life? I am eager to learn." There is surface realism in the opening scene of Act I, in which Lady Pounce-Pellott (Judy) reprimands an impertinent electrician who has repaired an electric fire for her (the workman, a Communist, is the hangman character from Punch and Judy) and, with her husband, entertains a procession of people who have called to welcome them into the community. T h e scene following this is fantasy : when Pounce-Pellott drops off to sleep waiting u p for his daughter Cynthia (her nickname is Baby), the house is visited by the De'il, three of the guests of the afternoon—Joey Mascara, an artist (the Punch and Judy clown); Dr. Jean Pothecary, a woman psychologist (the doctor), and Lady Maggie Revenant, the grand-daughter of a Marquis (the ghost)—who are revealed now as hellhounds, and a fourth hellhound—an American publisher, Mrs. Jemima Lee Crowe

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J A M E S BRIDIE : CLOWN AND P H I L O S O P H E R

(Jim Crow), who is to appear five days later to offer PouncePellott $200,000 to write his memoirs. The five have come to initiate Baby into their pack but are interrupted when PouncePellott awakens. The mood of fantasy remains even if the scene is construed as Pounce-Pellott's dream, a device Bridie used in Act II of Dr. Angelus when Dr. Johnson's growing suspicions about his partner make him dream of a court trial at which he is accused of being an accessory to the murder of Mrs. Taylor.1" In the second act, five days later, the American publisher arrives with her offer on the day that the PouncePellotts are to entertain their new friends at dinner. This predominantly realistic scene of temptation is followed by the stylized scene of the party, which takes the form of a symposium organized to teach Pounce-Pellott "the ways of the new life" and ends with the destruction of the members of the symposium at the hands of the former District Commissioner of Junglipore. In a raised voice Pounce-Pellott says, I have washed my hands of my G o d and killed Him. I have sold Him for order. Therefore I must be punished. But, by the God I sold, I will not go quietly. Where is my Stick !

Bridie writes that "The lights flicker in rainbow colours. Drums. Loud, squeaking, Punch and Judy music plays Rule Britannia in the minor. Judy and Baby run to and fro squealing softly." After Pounce-Pellott, talking like Pontius Pilate and acting like Punch, kills his guests, there is a clash of cymbals and the De'il appears, to admit at least temporary defeat. Pounce-Pellott speaks as the play ends: I've killed all those fools who pretended to know. And so . . . and so . . . With the soothsayers littered about the stage

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151

EXPERIENCE

T h a t I slew in m y rage, W h o did not know . . . and no m o r e d o I I must jest again and await my reply . . . Good-bye.

. . .

The Baikie Charivari, T . C. Worsley wrote after seeing its first production in October, 1952, belongs to the class of Bridie's "intellectual fantasias, a form which he very much fancied, though, truth to tell, he never managed to get control of it." Worsley finds the play "filled with false starts and dropped herrings" and "finally unsatisfying"; Bridie is concurrently putting over fancies which are never successfully integrated, which remain "entertaining analogies" that "tease more than they illuminate."" Worsley refers to the use of the Punch and J u d y story and the legend of Pontius Pilate, which Bridie acknowledges in a note to the play. A combination of the characters of Punch and Pontius Pilate, Bridie writes, has created Pounce-Pellott: There is a tradition that the celebrated character of Punch is a projection of Pontius Pilate. The connection between the two characters is loose and fantastic, and probably depends on the fact that they are both regarded as important symbolic murderers. It is Pilate who is the dominant character, as Bridie admits in saying that he has perhaps "whitewashed" Punch (that is, diminished his "homicidal stature") in his "natural desire to put a little punch into Pontius." Pilate, after all, did not murder the man who tried to tell him the Truth; he simply washed his hands of Christ's blood and order was preserved, with the Jews giving Caesar his due. Pilate was, Bridie writes, "essentially a 'good' man, and indifferent honest, according to his lights. Further, in all the circumstances, he was probably right; and it was his misfortune that he was cast for the villain of the piece in a play where virtue was, mainly by his act, triumphant.""

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J A M E S BRIDIE : CLOWN AND P H I L O S O P H E R

T h e analogy between Pounce-Pellott and this P u n c h - P i l a t e character can be shown to be integral to the p l a y ; the play can carry the weight, too, of Elliot's analogy with Peer

Cynt—

because the character of Pounce-Pellott is solid and strong in itself, without these trappings. Pounce-Pellott is a

Mallaby

returned from digging among the ruins for the old life and convinced now that he must accept the new life, even if only with a jesting irony. He tells the Reverend Beadle when the latter comes to call, We're like visitors from Mars. All this is entirely new to me. I'm beginning life all over again—from the start. It's most exhilarating. . . . I've decided to throw overboard everything I ever learned or knew. It's the only way. It's no good trying to fit round pegs into square holes. I've gone all malleable. I've gone all plastic. I'm wonderful material for a spiritual adviser. Would you like to be my spiritual adviser? T h a t he should use this tone in speaking to a m e m b e r of the clergy would be illuminating to a m a n of greater intelligence than Beadle. Such a man is the artist, M a s c a r a , w h o can tell when a leg is being pulled, who can recognize, that is, a spiritual adviser when he sees one. M a s c a r a remarks to the lamp-post, later in the play, When Pontius Pilate cam hame frae the East, What did he find? What did he find? Bewilderment, doubt and a fog of the mind In the places lang syne he had left behind. Allah, the Disheveller, had been there afore him. T h e proud had been scattered in the imagination of their hearts, And the Mighty been coupit from their seats. For the magistrate's doup maun aye be on the seat of judgement; He may smile and play the host; but there's aye a cause in his hied. Pilate, wi' hinging lip and sweet urbanity, Has come a second time to judge humanity.

SONGS

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153

EXPERIENCE

Dod, and he'll mak a bonny moagger o't, as he Done afore . . . But whit was he to dae? For the things that were done in the green tree They are daeing again in the dry; And what can he say but, "See ye to it" ? And wash. And let them die. Pounce-Pellott's role, as was Pilate's, is that of judge, not only of others but of himself. Moreover, in that role of judge (in this case District Commissioner) he is, as was Pilate, a civil servant, and as Mascara tells the other civil servant, Robert Copper, Controller for the Ministry of Interference (the policeman from Punch and Judy), the role of a servant is not to govern : " I ' m saying, who gave them permission to govern anything ? They're supposed to be a Ministry. That means a collection of servants. Doctor Beadle here'll tell you that a servant when he ruleth is an abomination in the sight of the Lord." Mascara, an anarchist, would have neither rulers nor servants. But PouncePellott who, although he has been retired as a servant of the British

Empire,

serves

something

much

larger,

Mascara's truth, addressing him before killing h i m : And as for you, delightful Joe, My answer must again be, no. Though I should be the last to grudge Your claim to be your only judge, Your notions are confused and muddy; Your unbowed head is pretty bloody; I find the skipper of your soul A little short of self-control And far too ready to commute And be a playful prostitute. Your hedonism and anarchy, Alas, make no appeal to me. Your harp has made the Halls of Tara An intellectual Saharah. I do not want you, Joe Mascara.

rejects

154

JAMES

B R I D I E : C L O W N AND

PHILOSOPHER

J o e , like all the devil's pack, tempts Pounce-Pellott with the illusion of self-sufficiency, but Pounce-Pellott, standing alone on the stage at the end of the play, symbolizes the truth of man's insufficiency and his need for a Master whose intention he may wear like a signboard. As a judge, Pounce-Pellott asks questions, but purposive questions as J o e suggests. " M y husband has no small talk," Lady Pounce-Pellott says. " H e can only ask questions. All sorts of questions. . . .

It was part of his j o b . . . . Gracious ques-

tions." Considering Pounce-Pellott in the light of Mascara's speech—as a judge of humanity

or spiritual

servant—the

choice of the word gracious can only have been intentional : Pounce-Pellott's questions are asked in a search for grace. But it is a jesting search for grace, because Pounce-Pellott, like Gillie and Lady Pitts, is hampered by a self-knowledge complete enough to recognize his own part in the evil of mankind. His idealism makes him a hard judge of himself; when he judges his tempters by slaying them, symbolically he is slaying himself. In rejecting the "easy solutions, the crutches that might protect him without helping h i m , " as Gerald Weales says, he is rejecting self-sufficiency in an act of humiliation." Lady Pounce-Pellott describes her husband's consciousness of the sin of pride, admitting that they attended church regularly in Junglipore to help " P o l l y " with his " e q u i l i b r i u m , " because in India he was a sort of King—Sahib this and Huzoor that. Everybody sort of bathed in his mild and magnificent eye. He thought it wasn't good for him, you see. So he was terribly respectful to God and the Viceroy and all that sort of thing. Though, mind you, he hated it. He's a very proud man. . . . He knew he was building up something terrific. But he knew too that it might all tumble about his ears any day. So he put in a bit of destruction too. T o balance it. So he shot tigers and stuck wild pig, although he hated it.

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155

T o the Reverend Beadle's remark that taking up painting would be an "innocuous occupation" for him in his retirement, Pounce-Pellott says, "I suppose so, if it doesn't go to one's head." The depth of his fall from grace (and, literally, from power) is implied by the disillusionment underlying his irony, beginning with his first speech : "I did not wash my hands of the M a h a t m a . He washed his hands of me. S o here I am at Baikie in my new little chrysalis bungalow lapped in my little pension . . ." Consciousness that he is to be given by his new neighbors only solutions which he must reject makes his compliment to Mascara ironic: Joey, here, is going to coach me in modern aesthetics. There's no such thing as pure chance, is there ? I expect a perfect shower of angels and guides. The Lord threw down Joseph to me outside the municipal convenience, half an hour ago. I took it as a sign that my education was well in hand. But it is Pounce-Pellott w h o is the angel unaware, a kind of spiritual gadfly to his tempters. " W h a t about the immortal soul ?" he asks the psychologist, Dr. Pothecary, w h o has simplified it out of existence and thus forced him to pronounce this judgment on her before killing her : For all that I have known and done You split to one, and one and one . . . I think it is by no means plain That you can put me together again; And, anyhow, I'll eat my hat If I'm so simple as all that. The irony is subtle in this conversation between Pounce-Pellott and the Reverend Beadle, w h o should be a spiritual adviser but in whom religion has been reduced to a dead, flat stone, a piece of machinery which turns out meaningless words (using Pounce-Pellott's metaphors):

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J A M E S BRIDIE : C L O W N AND P H I L O S O P H E R

P.-P. I gave it a good deal of thought, and it looks as if I were right in coming here. Beadle. I hope you may find it so. P.-P. I didn't know a soul in Baikie; but I thought I'd find a pretty good cross-section of the human race. Beadle. You could describe it that way. P. P. I think I need Baikie. Beadle. And Baikie needs you, Sir James. P.-P. Oh, does it? Well . . . I'll have to get my bearings first, as I told you. I must get my bearings. Beadle, after all, sees Pounce-Pellott as a prosperous Job, as the prologue makes clear; the minister has no perception of the judge's spiritual sickness and is all too ready to mistake the voice of the devil for God's voice instructing him to "shake" Pounce-Pellott's "Spiritual Pride." Beadle's language is trite, mechanical—reinforcing his automatism: " . . . the ways of Providence . . . are truly wonderful." " W e have an anchor that keeps the soul/ Steadfast and true while the billows roll." In breaking the commandments "your ruin has begun," "you dry the eternal sea," "your fields will never thrive," "you shut the road to Heaven," "you lock the Heavenly Gate," "you toll the doom of men," and thereafter "the sky will lose its blue," "the sun will rise no more," "the stars will cease to shine." When he is asked for his truth he answers with empty jargon: P.-P. . . . Have you nothing to tell me? Beadle. Yes. P.-P. Well, then, tell me. Beadle. I will. P.-P. Then go ahead. Beadle. What we have heard is the confused cry of "Lo, here; lo there!" Of which we have information from the Holy Scriptures. . . . The Church has the answer to it all. That is all I have to say.

SONGS OF

157

EXPERIENCE

When Dr. Pothecary is asked for truth, she, too, repeats jargon; moreover, she rejects any personal interest in the individual Pounce-Pellott but feels the specimen Pounce-Pellott, with his "Regression to foetal life" and "strong negative transference," will interest her profession. Pounce-Pellott registers his disapproval thus: Pothecary. . . . You're the sort of man we like to help. . . . P.-P. You say "we." Is this a sort of collective impulse? Pothecary. I'll say " I " if you like. P.-P. That's much better. I like it better that way. . . . T h e fall of a man into a community of "souls" such as these, the discovery of "Bewilderment, doubt and a fog of the mind," is painful if the man has any human sympathy; it is often fatal if he recognizes himself in the bewildered faces he sees. Until the end of the play when he makes a choice, Pounce-Pellott remains

inactive,

uncommitted,

almost

content

to

say,

"Yes . . . you see, it doesn't matter about me and Judy. It's rather fun for us, and we shall both be out of it in a very few years." He is forced into commitment to save his child : " B u t there's nowhere to put our egg, if you see what I mean. . . . there seems to be no order and no place and nothing but a milling crowd shouting paranoid doctrines out of a whirlpool." His daughter reflects everything that he must destroy to save h e r : " I t ' s all right by m e , " she says. " I ' l l try anything once." " I ' v e ne faith in a' body," she swears in the scene in which, literally, her father's awakening saves her from initiation into the devil's pack (the scene, then, is a symbol for the final action of the play). She tells the symposium: I didn't want to come into this bloody world. . . . I don't know what in the blazes I'm here for, but the least I can do is to make it bearable. . . . It takes me from one empty hour to the other. . . . I've had too much of everything. I'm spiritually sick and perhaps you'd better wipe it up and say no more about it.

158

JAMES

BRIDIE : CLOWN

AND

PHILOSOPHER

With empty ideologies threatening to destroy his daughter— including the communist ideology of John Ketch, who once saved her life—Pounce-Pellott at last accepts emotional involvement and becomes a murderer. (Ketch, the impertinent electrician, whose ideology Pounce-Pellott links with that of Beadle as "the order of two dead stones . . . pieces of machinery" by which he will not be crushed, saved Baby when she fell out of her father's arms and overboard on a very early voyage home from the colonies; now he would put her in a labor camp : "She'll no' get her lipstick and her bath salts and her sweltering between sheets all day in the labor camp.") Pounce-Pellott's immediate provocation to murder is Mascara's attempt to seduce Baby while the two are putting away the china after the dinner party. T h e incident serves as a starting point for the discussion which ends so violently : " I t may be the new way of living," Pounce-Pellott says, "to accept a man's hospitality and attempt to seduce his daughter. I don't know. But I want to find out. I want to find out a lot of things." The fall of a man from a position of security, a forced retirement, produces a man "Bewildered by change and frightened by the lingering sharp smell of ashes"—the ashes of his life. When the man, like Pounce-Pellott, "hates being pushed about, even by Providence," as Lady Pounce-Pellott says, the fall must be cushioned by irony, yet there are moments—with women—when the proud man allows the pink shivering boy within him to speak. T o Dr. Pothecary, PouncePellott still speaks ironically, but he at least speaks the truth : "No, I'm a lost child. I'm appealing entirely to your maternal instinct." When she objects that a " V . l . P . can't be a lost child," he says, "He's never anything else." With his wife, the irony goes. When, early in the play, she worries about Baby's associating with Mascara, he tells her that young people are "far better to find their way for themselves. Especially when you

SONGS

OF

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159

and I don't know our way about." Neither this logic nor the "bloody tenderness" which follows it ("Darling, pull yourself together. I know it's tough for you, getting used to all this. But we've got to take our ups with our downs and I suppose, in the long run, it's good for the soul") works on Lady PouncePellott who stands solidly and unwaveringly for the old life. Pounce-Pellott puts on the mask again in front of Beadle, but his wife is frank : P.-P. But there is no Indian Empire. It would not surprise me in the least to learn that Balliol [his college] has disappeared. I should be delighted to find that it had. We want clear decks. A clean slate. A new start. Judy. I shall never get used to it, I'm afraid. P.-P. But you must. Another Margaret Gillet, Judy senses the presence of the De'il and is wise enough to know that there is nothing new about his interference in man's fate : Judy. Oh, my God ! . . . Did you arrange for those dreadful people to come here? P. P. No, darling. Judy. Somebody or something must have arranged it. It was too malignant not to be done on purpose. P.-P. I liked them. You must remember, it's all bound to be a little strange. We must learn to adapt ourselves. You see, in a way it's a . . . Judy. I know. A new kind of world. There's nothing very new about that lot. P.-P. No. But the point is, they've learned to adapt themselves. We've got to learn that, too, or we'll be blue with bruises. Though Judy's response to experience is emotional, she has chosen to wear the social mask of the gracious, unruffled hostess, and she tries to maintain it even when faced with conversation as unsettling as Lady Maggie's, of which this is typical:

160

J A M E S BRIDIE : C L O W N AND P H I L O S O P H E R

You're rather like Lydia Smith. But she was older. And she had rather a bad-tempered expression, poor thing. Her father was very bad-tempered. He hunted a good deal. His red face clashed horribly with his pink coat, I remember. But he's dead now. Practically everybody is dead, aren't they? Good-bye. Her true nature is revealed with her husband, whose "sweet reasonableness" is sharpened by contrast. Lady Pounce-Pellott and Lady Maggie stand for absolute values, like the authority of titles : "But being a Marquis gave a sort of mystic authority, didn't it ?" Judy says. Both represent the past, which, because it is ghostly and unreal, cannot be accepted or rejected. But Pounce-Pellott could reject his wife's emotional involvement. It is significant that he does not. Elliot notes in his preface that in Peer Gynt "Ibsen left the last word to the Button-Moulder and to the blind Solveig. Odd though it may seem, from Ibsen, Peer Gynt was going to be saved by the love of a good woman. Bridie will allow no such refuge to his hero."™ Yet just before Pounce-Pellott tells all his tempters that their truth is nonsense, I^ady Pounce-Pellott says, " . . . I don't want to be rude, but I've listened to as much nonsense tonight as I can bear." Polly happens to be her husband and she will not have him fought over "as if he were a fish head." She loses her composure before her guests, betraying, as the lady publisher comments, "a most extraordinary attitude,"—an attitude which is immediately copied by her husband in his inspired murder spree; it is, in other words, Judy who puts the Punch in Pontius Pilate. He drops the mask of cold, logical, lying irony and speaks impassioned truth. What he speaks about is Order. A dropped herring? No. Order until this moment has been his single god—the stern but human order of a judge. Now inhuman, impersonalized orders—communism, psychology, religion, economics, bureaucracy, which have as their goals and gods the destruction of individuality—

SONGS OF

EXPERIENCE

161

threaten to squash the individual Pounce-Pellott; his only defense is disorder and destruction : Order I have forever loved and ensued. Here and there I have imposed order upon this eel-pit of a world. I have killed my wife and my child. I have sold their bodies for honour; So I must be punished. I have washed my hands of my God and killed Him. I have sold Him for order. Therefore I must be punished. In the pride of his godlike distance, of his mental superiority over the eel-pit, he allowed his wife's and daughter's spiritual sicknesses, but now he joins the eels to bruise and be bruised. In the pride of self-sufficiency he sold his God, but now he stands humiliated, having slain the devils of pride within himself, "the soothsayers . . . Who did not know." In the pride of his mental superiority over the Jews who clamored for Christ's death—and to preserve order—Pontius Pilate washed his hands of the man whose truth, if admitted, would destroy order. As the play ends, Pounce-Pellott is afraid, expecting punishment from a God of Order, prepared to be taken away by the De'il, even more afraid when the De'il rejects him and he is left alone; he prepares to jest again, as Pilate jested. The debate between Order and Disorder, moreover, has been continuous throughout the play, not restricting itself to the conflict between husband and wife. Mascara's irresponsibility is a variation on the theme. About music the artist says, "Nobody practises nowadays. You've got to express yourself nowadays." "Every artist kens fine there are Laws," he says; he is an A.R.C.M. and an R.S.W.: "But God forgive me if I start laying down the law on the strength of that." Asked on the strength of what he lays down the law—as he obviously

162

J A M E S BRIDIE : CLOWN AND P H I L O S O P H E R

does at the symposium—he does not know. " T h e world itsel's miracle enough" for him, but in the next breath he calls its inhabitants "bloodthirsty brutes." This judgment introduces the major conflict between Order and Disorder in the play, Pounce-Pellott's part in which symbolizes Britain's and, by extension, Europe's role. Bridie writes in his "Note" to the play that Pilate makes not a bad prototype for the well-meaning, intelligent, devoted instruments of the Pax Britannica, which is equally hated by its enemies and its beneficiaries and seems now to have faded out. It is to be said, however, that amid all the welter of sociological theories, many of us are still utterly persuaded that Britain rose from the azure wave at Heaven's command and that it still has a sense of its vocation and responsibilities—that it invented Democracy (in its non-pejorative sense); and that it is still prepared to interpret Democracy according to the revelation granted only to Britain." Whether Bridie was thus persuaded is irrelevant; PouncePellott is as he murders the theorists, as he interprets democracy with his stick. The play is political and social; it is about the "sickness of Imperialism," as Winifred Bannister writes." It is about a man who, having imposed the order of the West upon the East, returns to find the West in chaos. In this light, Mrs. Crowe, the American publisher, is an Englishman's criticism of materialistic America, eager to exploit " T h e Decline and Fall of the British Empire" (Mrs. Crowe feels that "the unloading of the Indian Empire was a very, very significant occasion . . . It is thoroughly realised how the British Islands have suffered by assisting us to salvage civilisation"); she is a criticism, too, of ignorantly optimistic America ("In the meantime, government of the people for the people and by the people has not yet perished from the earth. And thank God for it. If it shows signs of doing so, the people can give their

SONGS OF

EXPERIENCE

163

governors the bums' rush. . . . Daddy is sitting on the banks of the Potomac/ Perfectly cosy with a great big gun"). But "the sickness of Imperialism" can be translated

"the

sin of pride," and Mrs. Crowe can symbolize for PouncePellott the compromise of integrity and, on the other hand, innocence before the Fall. T h e play, then, has a transcendent moral or religious theme, and the conflict between West and East, between O r d e r and Disorder, becomes an argument about the nature of man and the purpose, if any, of existence in a territory larger than the British Empire. Pounce-Pellott, speaking as Western man, addresses the symposium : T h e Wisdom of the East is that it is all no good. Mankind are thieves and liars and murderers and oppressors. And disease and famine we have always with us And we must shift as we can till Death comes to take us. The sun sets later in the West And we have not come upon such wisdom. It is ours to seek and to find, T o invent, to manipulate Rocks, rivers, metals, bodies and souls; In our search we found the East And brought with us the will to exist, T h e illusion of continuing existence . . . Pounce-Pellott as a judge of men has innocently denied that they are thieves and liars, upholding the rationality of man and of the universe. In the disillusionment of experience he is tempted to sell his beliefs as "memories" for the "Gilt-edged, golden-bodied Security" offered by Mrs. Crowe; compromise, she says, and admit that "According to your lights, you've done a good deal of good, though it may have been for a mistaken imperialistic policy . . . " But Mrs. Crowe's solution is rejected :

164

J A M E S BRIDIE : C L O W N AND P H I L O S O P H E R

I do not want you, Mrs. Crowe. I have the impulse to be free. You cosset me and pamper me, Maternally and tactfully.

Western philosophy, then, distorted by the pride of PouncePellott's tempters, who as symbols of tendencies in mankind are symbols of tendencies within Pounce-Pellott himself, is rejected in the judge's final choice; it is slain in an act of destruction and disorder. "But, by the God I sold, I will not go quietly," Pounce-Pellott says, acknowledging that he has sold out Disorder to impose Order upon his existence. But his act of Disorder represents no compromise of belief; by it he manipulates bodies, in the fashion of the West, in a continuing search for wisdom. With the soothsayers dead, he can await an unrevealed truth larger than that of the West or the East and encompassing both. That he believes there is such a reply to his questioning is suggested by his decision to allow an apprentice plumber and electrician, Toby Messan, to live and to marry his daughter. It is to a youth who does not know who he is because he has "no rieht begun, yet" that Pounce-Pellott entrusts Baby's salvation, declaring by this act his faith in the unknown but also his faith in salvation. He does not stop at questioning the purpose of the gods; by his action he affirms a faith in a final purpose. His disordered and destructive action testifies to a transcendent order, for he acts as a rational man deliberately choosing an irrational act, not as a hypnotized automaton (the Reverend Beadle calls Ketch's conviction "hypnotic automatism"). He is a testimony of the possibility of human inspiration as he stands on the stage "With Master's intention displayed like a signboard." He stands, finally, a prodigal son, both proud and humble, before a father whose presence, although only implied, electrifies the air. What is Bridie's intention in The Baikie Charivari? Structur-

SONGS OF EXPERIENCE

165

ally he intends a miracle play, he says. The play is an intellectual fantasia, as Worsley says, non-naturalistic, poetic in structure as well as in language because it is poetic in conception; its action interprets one symbol—the internal conflict of a human soul as symbolized by the struggle of Pounce-Pellott against his tempters. The control in the use of the symbol of Pontius Pilate and the originality in the use of the characters from the Punch and Judy show have by now been demonstrated. There remains to mention the use of verse, occasionally rhymed, which achieves, as Weales writes, "an intensity that is not so much the result of verbal ingenuity, as it is of the emotional and intellectual investment of the hero." 3 Philosophically Bridie is still concerned with the paradox involved in the impossibility of arriving at absolute truth but the necessity—the moral duty—of choosing and defending if necessary truth and good over evil. In his last story of temptation, he is specifically concerned with man's temptation to be less than himself, to become dehumanized and impersonal, to subordinate his individuality and will to some collective impulse, in an effort to adapt and adjust to an impersonal environment. In Pounce-Pellott, as in Gillie, he creates a character whose soul will not adapt itself to its environment, a character who resists society when it is wrong—not by any absolute standard, but according to his lights. The Baikie Charivari suggests a summary of Bridie's work, a last word on the themes which teased his mind during the twenty years that followed The Switchback and that carried Mallaby to the East and back again. A study of Bridie is completed, then, when the last implication of the play has been explored. If such finality is not entirely possible, it is only further testimony to Bridie's genius.

Notes CHAPTER I 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16

"Introduction," Meeting at Night, by James Bridie, London, Constable, 1956, pp. viii-x. Tedious and Brief, London, Constable, 1945, pp. 14, 15, 20. London, Constable, 1934, pp. vii, ix-xi. London, Constable, 1939, p. 298. The Theatre Book of the Year, 1950-1951, New York, Knopf, 1951, pp. 31-32. See Frederick Lumley, Trends in 20th Century Drama, rev. ed., London, Rockliff, 1960, pp. 221-223, and a review of "Dr. Angelus," The New Statesman and Nation, n.s. X X X I V (August 9, 1947), 110. Ed. Phyllis Hartnoll, rev. ed., New York, Oxford University Press, 1957, p. 96. "A Fig from Thistles," The Nation, C X X X I X (October 24, 1934), 486—487. "Drama," The Nation, C L X X I (September 30, 1950), 295. In Search of Theater, New York, Knopf, 1953, pp. 42-43. See Derek Verschoyle's criticism of Jonah and the Whale, " T h e Theater," The Spectator, C X L I X (December 16, 1932), 861; " T h e Last T r u m p , " The New Statesman and Nation, n.s. X V I (October 1, 1938), 493; It Depends What You Mean: James Redfern, " T h e Theatre," The Spectator, C L X X I I I (October 20, 1944), 359; "Dr. Angelus," The New Statesman and Nation, X X X I V , 110. "Punch on the Clyde," (July 24, 1953), 474. "George Bernard Shaw," Men of Turmoil, New York, Minton, Balch, 1935, p. 137. "The English Spotlight," Theatre Arts, X X X I (November, 1947), 47. " T h e Theatre," The Spectator, C L X X X I (November 5, 1948), 589. Speaight et al., Since 1939: Drama, The Novel, Poetry, Prose Literature, London, Phoenix House, 1949, p. 38.

167

168 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29

30

J A M E S BRIDIE : C L O W N AND PHILOSOPHER

London, Macmillan, 1948, pp. 38-39. Men of Turmoil, p. 135. "Edinburgh Festival: Theatre," The Spectator, C L X X X V (August 25, 1950), 241. Men of Turmoil, p. 140. "Auld Nick and Mr. Bridie," Theatre Arts, X X X I V (July, 1950), 25. Plays for Plain People, London, Constable, 1944, p. 197. All quotations from the play are taken from this edition. Winifred Bannister, James Bridie and His Theatre, London, Rockliff, 1955, p. 153. "Equilibrium," The London Mercury, X X X I X (April, 1939), 589. The Anatomist, 2nd rev. ed., London, Constable, 1932, pp. 66-67. All quotations from the play are taken from this edition. Ibid., p. xiii. Bridie's second but no more clarifying ending for the play, to be used "If a more rapid curtain is desired," has Knox lecturing on the human heart: "The Heart of Man, we are told, is deceitful and desperately wicked. However that may be, it consists of four chambers, the right ventricle, the left ventricle, the left auricle, the right auricle. . . ." 2nd rev. ed., London, Constable, 1932, pp. 67-68. Gerald Weales, Religion in Modern English Drama, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961, p. 62. Weales writes: "In this mock-romantic play, set in the American Revolutionary War, Dick Dudgeon, a declared worshiper of the Devil, habitually displays a gentleness and kindness that becomes, in the scene in which he lets himself be arrested in the place of the Reverend Anthony Anderson, what might be called Christian sacrifice." "Drama, Broadway Off and On," The Christian Century, LXXIV (November 20, 1957), 1385.

CHAPTER II 1 2 3 4 5 6

2nd rev. ed., London, Constable, 1932, p. 74. All further quotations from The Switchback in this chapter are taken from this edition. Ibid., p. xi. Winifred Bannister, James Bridie and His Theatre, London, Rockliff, 1955, pp. 54-55. London, Constable, 1950, pp. 79-80. The Switchback, p. xi. Bannister, p. 55.

NOTES

169

CHAPTER III 1 2

3

4 5

6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14

15

16 17 18 19

Gilbert Wakefield, "Theatre," The Saturday Review, C L I I I (March 19, 1932), 297. Tobias and the Angel, 2nd rev. ed., London, Constable, 1932. T h e "Author's Note" precedes the play on an unnumbered page. All quotations from Tobias and the Angel in this chapter are taken from this edition. Ashley Dukes, " T h e English Scene," Theatre Arts Monthly, X X I I I (October, 1939), 708, and Theophilus Lewis, "Theatre," America, X C V I I I (January 25, 1958), 496. London, Constable, 1956, pp. x-xi. Colonel Wotherspoon and Other Plays, London, Constable, 1934, pp. 22-23. All further quotations from the play are taken from this edition. Introduction to Let's Get a Divorce! and Other Plays, New York, Hill and Wang, 1958, pp. ix-x, xv. London, Constable, 1939, p. 278. See James Bridie, "Sterilization of the Unfit," The Spectator, C L I (November 3, 1933), 623. See Derek Verschoyle, " T h e Theatre," The Spectator, CLI (September 29, 1933), 401; "Theatre," The Saturday Review, C L V I (September 30, 1933), 353; Grenville Vernon, " T h e Play," The Commonweal, X X (October 26, 1934), 618; " W h o Is the Sleeping Clergyman?" The Literary Digest, C X V I I I (October 20, 1934), 27, and W. P. Eaton, "Some New Plays in Print," New York Herald Tribune Books, X (May 6, 1934), 15. One Way of Living, p. 278. " T h e Taming of a Shrew," The Nation, C X L I V (May 8, 1937), 544. " T h e Theatre," The Spectator, C X L V I I I (March 19, 1932), 409. The Saturday Review, C L I I I , 297. Moral Plays, London, Constable, 1936, p. viii. All quotations in this chapter from Marriage Is No Joke and The Black Eye are taken from this collected edition. Bridie has written a "riotous" alternative for Act I I , scene i, the scene in which MacGregor abdicates his throne, but the first version is used here. Moral Plays, pp. viii-ix. Colonel Wotherspoon, p. x. Ibid., pp. 294-295. All quotations from The Girl are taken from this edition. "James Bridie: An Appreciation," The Spectator, CLXXXVI (February 2, 1951), 145.

170 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

J A M E S BRIDIE : C L O W N AND PHILOSOPHER

Moral Plays, pp. viii-ix. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1956, p. 21. Ibid., p. 24. The terminology is Hughes'. Moral Plays, p. xiii. Ibid., p. viii, and "Author's Note," p. ν (immediately The Black Eye). "The Theatre," The Spectator, CLV (October 18, 1935), In a letter to Dr. T. J. Honeyman, quoted in Winifred James Bridie and His Theatre, London, Rockliff, 1955, Letter to Dr. Honeyman, Bannister, p. 126.

preceding 606. Bannister's p. 126.

CHAPTER IV 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

"The Theatre," The Spectator, CLXXIII (October 20, 1944), 359. James Bridie and His Theatre, London, Rockliff, 1955, pp. 8-9. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1953, pp. 15, 21, 38-41, 130-131. John Knox and Other Plays, London, Constable, 1949, p. 180. Quotations from It Depends What You Mean later in this chapter are taken from this edition. Bannister, p. 137. Α. V. Cookman, "The Theatre," The London Mercury, XXXVIII (May, 1938), 62. Ashley Dukes, "The English Scene," Theatre Arts Monthly, XXII (June, 1938), 410. The King of Nowhere, London, Constable, 1938, p. 83. All further quotations from the play are taken from this edition. Babes in the Wood, London, Constable, 1938, p. 28. The Spectator, CLXXIII, 359. "The Theatre," The Spectator, CLXXIX (August 8, 1947), 173. "The English Spotlight," Theatre Arts, X X X I (November, 1947), 47. Bannister, p. 165. John Knox and Other Plays, p. 145. All further quotations from Dr. Angelus are taken from this edition. CHAPTER V

1 2 3 4

"Bridie's Last Play," The Baikie Charivari, or The Seven Prophets, A Miracle Play, London, Constable, 1953, p. xii. The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, IV, trans. William and Charles Archer, New York, Scribner, 1907, pp. 71, 252. Further quotations from Peer Cynt are taken from this edition. See Chapter II, p. 46. "Bridie's Last Play," p. vii.

NOTES

5

6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

171

Meeting at Night, London, Constable, 1956, pp. 14—15. All quotations from the play are taken from this edition. (In a note to the play, the collaboration of Archibald Batty is acknowledged by Bridie's trustees.) Mythology, Boston, Little, Brown, 1942, pp. 155-156. James Pope-Hennessy, "The Theatre," The Spectator, CLXXXII (April 1, 1949), 4 3 8 ; Walter Kerr, "The Stage," The Commonweal, LII (October 6, 1950), 630; John Lardner, "Dame Edith's Salvaging Co.," The New Yorker, X X V I (September 30, 1950), 52; "Daphne Laureola," Theatre Arts, X X X I V (November, 1950), 11. Daphne Laureola, London, Constable, 1949, pp. 64—65. All further quotations from the play are taken from this edition. See Chapter I, p. 21, for Margaret Marshall's criticism of Daphne Laureola. "The Theatre," Life and Letters Today, L X I (1949), 169. "Drama," The Nation, C L X X I (September 30, 1950), 295. Moral Plays, London, Constable, 1936, p. vi. Mr. Gillie, London, Constable, 1950, p. 71. All further quotations from the play are from this edition. "Le T h e i t r e de James Bridie," Etudes Anglaises, X (1957), 303. The Baikie Charivari, London, Constable, 1953, p. 5. All further quotations from the play are taken from this edition. See John Knox and Other Plays, London, Constable, 1949, pp. 132— 137 for the scene. "The Last Bridie," The New Statesman and Nation, n.s. X L I V (October 18, 1952), 448. The Baikie Charivari, p. xiii. Religion in Modern English Drama, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961, p. 90. The Baikie Charivari, p. ix. Ibid., pp. xiii-xiv. James Bridie and His Theatre, London, Rockliff, 1955, p. 183. Weales, p. 88.

Chronology

1888

Osborne Henry M a v o r born J a n u a r y 3, in G l a s g o w , S c o t l a n d , son of Henry A. a n d J a n e t (Osborne) M a v o r . 1 8 8 8 - 1 8 9 3 Lived at East Kilbride, n e a r G l a s g o w . 1894 Returned to Glasgow, to attend school (Glasgow H i g h School, Glasgow A c a d e m y ) ; summers spent at K i l c r e g g a n on the F i r t h of Clyde. 1 9 0 4 - 1 9 1 3 Studied medicine at G l a s g o w University, where he was (in 1 9 0 6 - 1 9 0 9 ) a contributing editor of the G l a s g o w University Magazine. 1913 Q u a l i f i e d as a doctor (M.B., C h . B ) ; joined the staff of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. 1 9 1 4 - 1 9 1 9 Served in the R o y a l A r m y M e d i c a l C o r p s , in F r a n c e , M e s o p o t a m i a , Persia, India, a n d T u r k e y . 1919 Bought a medical practice in G l a s g o w ; joined staff of V i c t o r i a Infirmary. 1923 Sold practice; became a consulting physician to V i c t o r i a I n f i r m a r y ; appointed professor, Anderson C o l l e g e of M e d i c i n e ; joined the board of the Scottish N a t i o n a l T h e a t r e S o c i e t y ; m a r r i e d R o n a Locke Bremmer. 1926 First book, Some Talk of Alexander, published by M e t h u e n in London. 1928 The Sunlight Sonata first performed M a r c h 20 at the L y r i c Theatre, Glasgow, produced by T y r o n e Guthrie. 1929 The Switchback first p e r f o r m e d M a r c h 9 a n d What It Is to Be Young, N o v e m b e r 2, by B a r r y J a c k s o n ' s B i r m i n g h a m R e p e r t o r y Theatre. 1930 The Anatomist first performed J u l y 6 at the L y c e u m T h e a t r e , E d i n b u r g h ; Tobias and the Angel first p e r f o r m e d N o v e m b e r 20 at the C a m b r i d g e Festival T h e a t r e (starring T y r o n e Guthrie, Anmer Hall, Flora R o b s o n ) ; The Girl Who Did Not Want to Go

173

174

1931

1932

1933 1934

1935 1936 1937

1938

1939

1942

J A M E S BRIDIE : C L O W N AND

PHILOSOPHER

to Kuala Lumpur first performed in November by the Scottish National Players at the Lyric Theatre. The Dancing Bear first performed in February by the Scottish National Players, Lyric Theatre; a revised version of The Switchback first performed August 8 at the Malvern Festival (starring Ralph Richardson, Cedric Hardwicke); Bridie's first London production, The Anatomist, in October at the Westminster Theatre (starring Henry Ainley, Flora Robson), produced by Tyrone Guthrie. Tobias and the Angel first performed in London, in March at the Westminster; Jonah and the Whale and The Amazed Evangelist first performed December 12 at the Westminster. A Sleeping Clergyman first performed July 29 at the Malvern Festival, moved to the Piccadilly Theatre, London. First Broadway production, A Sleeping Clergyman, in October by the Theatre Guild (starring Ruth Gordon); Marriage Is No Joke first performed February 6 at the Globe Theatre, London (starring Ralph Richardson); Colonel Wotherspoon first performed March 23 by the Scottish National Players, Lyric T h e a t r e ; Mary Read (a collaboration with Claud Gumey) first performed November 21 at His Majesty's Theatre, London, produced by Tyrone Guthrie, with Robert Donat, Flora Robson, W. G. Fay. The Black Eye first performed October 11 at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London. Storm in a Teacup first performed February 5 at the Royalty Theatre, London, produced by W. G. Fay. Storm in a Teacup, retitled Storm Over Patsy, performed in New York in March by the Theater Guild; Tobias and the Angel performed in New York in May at the Provincetown Playhouse; Susannah and the Elders first performed October 31 by the London International Theatre Club at the Duke of York's Theatre. The King of Nowhere first performed March 15 at the Old Vic (starring Laurence Olivier); Babes in the Wood first performed June 13 at the Embassy Theatre, London; The Last Trump first performed at the Malvern Festival, moved to the Duke of York's Theatre. The Golden Legend of Shults first performed July 24 at the Perth Repertory Theatre; What Say They? first performed at the Malvern Festival (starring Alastair Sim); Bridie awarded Doctor of Laws degree by Glasgow University; rejoined R.A.M.C. as major. Joined the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, of which he became chairman of the Scottish Committee; The

CHRONOLOGY

1943

1944 1945

1946 1947 1948 1949 1950

1951 1952 1954

175

Dragon and the Dove and A Change for the Worse first performed by the Pilgrim Players in August at the Lyric Theatre; Jonah 3 first performed in November at the Theatre of the Unnamed Society, Manchester; Holy Isle first performed in December at the Arts Theatre, London, produced by Alastair Sim. Mr. B o l f r y first performed August 8 at the Westminster (produced by and starring Alastair Sim); the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre, of which Bridie was chairman of the board, founded; its opening production, October 11 at the Athenaeum Theatre, was Holy Isle. It Depends What You Mean first performed October 12 at the Westminster; The Forrigan Reel first performed December 25 by the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre at the Athenaeum. Revised version of The Forrigan Reel first performed October 24 at Sadler's Wells; Lancelot first performed October 30 by the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre at the Royal Princess's Theatre, afterward the permanent home of the group. Awarded C.B.E. Dr. Angelus first performed July 30 at the Phoenix Theatre, London (produced by and starring Alastair Sim); John Knox first performed August 18 by the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre. Gog and Magog first performed December 1 at the Arts TTieatre. Daphne Laureola first performed March 23 at Wyndham's Theatre, London (presented by Laurence Olivier and starring Edith Evans). As governor of Academy, founded the first school of drama in Scotland—the College of Drama of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music; Mr. Gillie first performed February 13 by the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre; Mr. Gillie first performed in London March 9 at the Garrick Theatre (with Alastair Sim directing, starring); The Queen's Comedy first performed August 21 for the Edinburgh Festival by the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre, directed by Tyrone Guthrie and John Casson; Daphne Laureola performed in New York in September at the Music Box. Died January 29 of a vascular condition at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. The Baikie Charivari first performed October 6 by the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre. Meeting at Night (revised by Archibald Batty) first performed by the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre.

Bibliography WORKS OF JAMES BRIDIE Dramatic. (When the plays collected in each volume were earlier published separately, they are listed in chronological order of publication.) The Switchback, The Pardoner's Tale, The Sunlight Sonata. London: Constable and Co., 1930. (The Switchback, 2nd rev. ed., 1932.) A Sleeping Clergyman and Other Plays. London: Constable and Co., 1934. The Anatomist, 1931 (2nd rev. ed., 1932); Tobias and the Angel, 1931 (2nd rev. ed., 1932); The Amazed Evangelist, 1931; Jonah and the Whale, 1932; A Sleeping Clergyman, 1933. Colonel Wotherspoon and Other Plays. London: Constable and Co., 1934. Colonel Wotherspoon, What It Is to Be Young, The Dancing Bear, The Girl Who Did Not Want to Go to Kuala Lumpur. Mrs. Waterbury's Millennium. London: Samuel French, 1935. Moral Plays. London : Constable and Co., 1936. Marriage Is No Joke, 1934 (2nd rev. ed., 1936); Mary Read, 1935; The Black Eye, 1935. Storm in a Teacup. London: Constable and Co., 1936. (Acting Edition: Samuel French, 1937.) The King of Nowhere and Other Plays. London: Constable and Co., 1938. The King of Nowhere, Babes in the Wood, The Last Trump. Susannah and the Elders and Other Plays. London : Constable and Co., 1940. What Say They? 1939; Susannah and the Elders, The Golden Legend of Shults, The Kitchen Comedy. Plays for Plain People. London: Constable and Co., 1944. Mr. Bolfry, Lancelot, Holy Isle, Jonah 3, The Sign of the Prophet Jonah, The Dragon and the Dove. John Knox and Other Plays. London: Constable and Co., 1949. It Depends What You Mean, 1948; John Knox, Dr. Angelus, The Forrigan Reel. Daphne Laureola. London: Constable and Co., 1949. Mr. Gillie. London: Constable and Co., 1950.

177

178

J A M E S BRIDIE : C L O W N AND PHILOSOPHER

The Queen's Comedy. London: Constable and Co., 1952. The Baikie Charivari. London : Constable and Co., 1953. Meeting at Night. London: Constable and Co., 1956. Non-Dramatic. (Miscellaneous periodical articles are not included in this list.) Some Talk of Alexander. London: Methuen and Co., 1926. Autobiography. Mr. Bridie's Alphabet for Little Glasgow Highbrows. London: Constable and Co., 1934. Essays. "George Bernard Shaw," in Great Contemporaries. London: Cassell and Co., 1935 (published as Men of Turmoil, New York : Minton, Balch and Co., 1935). Criticism. One Way of Living. London: Constable and Co., 1939. Autobiography. Tedious and Brief. London: Constable and Co., 1944. Short plays, fragments, essays, poetry, film and radio scripts. The British Drama. Glasgow: Craig and Wilson, 1945. Criticism. A Small Stir: Letters on the English, with Moray McLaren. London : Hollis and Carter, 1949. Essays. SELECTED C R I T I C I S M OF JAMES BRIDIE Brief articles of criticism that have been fully identified in the notes are not repeated in this list. Bannister, Winifred. James Bridie and His Theatre. London: Rockliff, 1955. Gerber, Ursula. James Bridies Dramen. Bern: Francke Verlag, 1961 (Swiss Studies in English). Greene, Anne. "Priestley, Bridie, and F r y : The Mystery of Existence in Their Dramatic Works." Ph. D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1957. Chapter III. Marcel, Gabriel, "Le Thiätre de James Bridie," Etudes Anglcäses, X (1957), 291-303. Weales, Gerald. Religion in Modern English Drama. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961. Chapter IV.

Index

Bacon, Francis, 124 Bannister, Winifred, 9, 36-37, 97, 99, 162 Barrie, James, 17 Bentley. Eric, 22, 54-55, 56, 57 Blake, William, 26 Bridie, James THE ANATOMIST, 23-24, 28-31, 32, 33, 54 "The Anatomy of Failure," 69, 76, 80, 82, 139 BABES IN THE WOOD, 9 9 , 104—1 1 3 ,

114, 119, 127-128, 132, 140, 159 THE

BAIKIE

CHARIVARI,

9,

33,

IT DEPENDS W H A T YOU MEAN, 2 2 ,

97-99, 113-120, 122, 127, 130, 132 JONAH AND THE W H A L E , 2 2

99-104, 106, 114, 123-124, 126, 127, 138

THE KING OF NOWHERE,

THE L A S T T R U M P ,

22

MARRIAGE IS NO JOKE, 3 3 , 5 1 , 5 3 ,

69-80, 82, 84, 106 MEETING AT NIGHT, 5 2 , 7 9 ,

25-28, 31, 32, 33, 54, 60, 88, 98, 103, 110, 111, 113, 127 MR. GILLIE, 127-128, 129, 132, 140-148, 154, 165 ONE W A Y OF LIVING, 18-19, 55, 56 "Preface," COLONEL WOTHERMR. BOLFRY,

127-128, 129-130, 132, 140, 148-165 THE BLACK EYE, 33, 51, 82-96, 130, 140, 148 COLONEL WOTHERSPOON, 52-54 DAPHNE LAUREOLA, 19-20, 21, 129, 132-140, 143, 145, 148, 154

THE QUEEN'S COMEDY, 4 6 ,

THE DRAGON AND THE DOVE, 2 4

A SLEEPING

DR.

ANCEI.US,

22,

23,

29,

99,

113-114, 120-127, 150 GO TO KUALA LUMPUR, 5 1 ,

82, 130-131 GOG AND MAGOG,

22

SPOON AND OTHER P L A Y S ,

76-

17-

18, 77 CLERGYMAN,

130

20-21,

52, 55-57 THE SUNLIGHT SONATA, 3 6 ,

THE GIRL WHO DID NOT W A N T TO

130-

132

38

25, 27-28, 31, 33, 35-50, 51, 54, 68, 76, 95, 96, 98, 99, 130, 139, 140, 152, 165

THE S W I T C H B A C K ,

180

J A M E S BRIDIE : CLOWN AND PHILOSOPHER

' T h e T h e a t r e , " 16-17 31-32, 33, 51-69, 76, 79, 80, 83, 84, 89, 91, 130, 140 Browning, Robert, 89 TOBIAS

AND

THE

ANGEL,

Carlson, J a m e s , 33 Carlyle, Thomas, 141, 146 Crawford, Iain, 25 Diack, Hunter, 120, 126 Disher, M . Willson, 79

Lardner, John, 133 Linklater, Eric, 24 Marcel, Gabriel, 147 M a r s h a l l , M a r g a r e t , 21-22, 139 M c L a r e n , M o r a y , 25, 37 Milton, John, 36, 42, 45, 48, 96 Nathan, George J e a n , 19, 22 Neveux, Georges, 22 Olivier, Laurence, 100

Eliot, T . S., 33 Elliot, W a l t e r , 129-130, 152, 160 Evans, Edith, 19, 133, 136

Priestly, J . B., 15, 16, 52, 53, 55

Fleming, Peter, 23

Scot, R e g i n a l d , 25 S h a w , G. B., 10, 23, 24, 25, 28, 33-34, 98, 101 S i m . Alastair, 121 Speaight, Robert, 24 Stokes, Sewell, 23, 120 Synge, J . M „ 22, 78

Guthrie, Tyrone, 36 Hamilton, Edith, 132 Herring, Robert, 136 Hughes, Leo, 80 Ibsen, Henrik, 10, 97-98, 120-121, 127, 129-130, 147, 152, 160 Jeffrey, W i l l i a m , 20 Kerr, Walter, 133 Krutch, Joseph Wood, 20-22, 57, 97-98, 121

Redfern, J a m e s , 97, 120

Verschoyle, Derek, 64-65, 84 Wakefield, Gilbert, 65 Wareing, Alfred, 36 Weales, Gerald, 154, 165 Worsley, T . C., 151, 165 Yeats, W Β , 78