Last night I gave a short lecture and then moderated a talkback following a college production of George Bernard Shaw’s play Arms and the Man (1894), directed by my colleague Michael Ellis-Tolaydo. I hadn’t read the play since I was in high school, when I went on a Shaw kick. (I first became enamored with Shaw after seeing Androcles and the Lion.) I had fun thinking about what the plan can mean for college-age actors.
Arms and the Man is one of Shaw’s early plays, written a year before Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest, with which it shares some qualities. Both playwrights were Irish and loved poking holes in Victorian pieties at a time when empire exhaustion was making the English receptive to such satire. In Shaw’s play, Bulgarian military “hero” Sergius has recklessly disobeyed orders and won a cavalry charge, an action that recalls the charge of the Light Brigade (Tennyson’s “into the valley of death rode the 500”). Only Sergius proves to be very lucky: the enemy discovers they have the wrong ammunition for their guns and must flee.
At first his fiancé (Raina) worships Sergius, but she then realizes that she prefers one of the soldiers (Bluntschli) that he has routed and that has sought refuge in her bedroom. He’s a Swiss mercenary, down-to-earth rather than caught up in the poetry of martial glory, and she loves the way he breaks through all the posturing and sees her as she really is. Sergius, meanwhile, also realizes that “higher love” and martial glory are too thin an atmosphere to move in for long and similarly comes to earth, falling in love with Raina’s housekeeper.
I can see why I liked the play when I was young and why the student actors did. We are wonderfully idealistic at that age, but sometimes our idealism mutates into narcissistic grandiosity and inflated rhetoric and we need an earth-bound reality check. At one point, when Raina is chastising the Bluntschli for forcing her to lie, he replies, “When you strike that noble attitude and speak in that thrilling voice, I admire you; but I find it impossible to believe a single word you say.” She confesses that he has seen through her and says, “Do you know, you are the first man I ever met who did not take me seriously.” To which he replies, “You mean, don’t you, that I am the first that has ever taken you quite seriously.”
As I watched this scene, I was reminded me of a work that appeared nine years later and that I declared, on my Carleton College application form (in 1968), to be my favorite book ever: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Conrad deals with Britain’s end-of-empire malaise in a very different way than Shaw, not through comedy but through existentialist despair. Confronted with the task of revealing to Kurtz’s fiancé that the man she worshipped committed despicable acts before he died, Marlowe lies, even though he despises lying. He can’t bring himself to strip her of her illusions, however. Or more accurately, he himself can’t let go of the illusions that he sees her as symbolizing:
It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn’t he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn’t. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark — too dark altogether….
I wasn’t wrong to love Heart of Darkness at 18—in fact I still love it—but there is something wonderfully refreshing about seeing Bluntschli bluntly telling Raina to get off her high horse and face up to the facts of the world. Wouldn’t Kurtz’s intended have more of a chance of growing if Marlowe were to take her “quite seriously”?
