Blanco Posnet—Adversary of God

BLANCO POSNET-ADVERSARY OF GOD The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet~ Bernard Shaw's American frontier melodrama, is very frankly a play of religious experience. Religion dominates this one-act play from start to finish. It is sub-titled "A Sermon in Crude Melodrama," and its preface opens with Shaw's comment, "This little play is really a religious tract in dramatic form."l No critic fails to acknowledge that fact, although each critic quite naturally weights certain details in his interpretation more than others. Indeed, Chesterton ascribes its failure to pass the censor to the fact that "one of the characters professes a belief in God and states his conviction that God has got him." He then adds, by implication , that the play is, in its essence, "honest religion."2 Henderson, in his discussion of the play, says that "religious conversion , a subject wildly remote from the theatrical tradition, is ... the sole theme of The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet. In spite of its apparently flippant title and mining camp language it is the most sincerely religious of plays."3 A page later he adds that Shaw is indebted to Tolstoy'S Power of Darkness for some of the atmosphere of the play, but suggests that most of the conception of the play is original. The play is "in small compass," he decides, "a narration of the workings of that religion which Shaw first projected in The Dream in Hell." The comparison of Shaw and Tolstoy, which Henderson invites, is immediately fruitful, for the two share many enthusiasms. Neither, for instance, believed in "art for art's sake" but agreed that great art blossomed only from religious conviction. When Tolstoy in his essay, "What is Art?" called for didactic art which affirmed man~s brotherhood, Shaw could approve. He reviewed the essay and praised what he called the "valid point ... that our artistic institutions are vital social organs."4 Didacticism was for both of them, it thus appears, the inevitable product of religious concern. Naturally, therefore, The Power of Darkness (1886) and Blanco Posnet are tracts for their times concerned, it so happens, with the lowest classes of society. Both are plays of religious conversion, the one dramatizing a comparatively orthodox Christian experience of repentance, confession, and absolution from sin, the other dramatizing conversion as it occurs in what Shaw calls "the religion of the twentieth century." 1 Bernard Shaw, The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (London, 1947), p. 355. The standard Constable edition is cited throughout. 2 G. K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw (London, 1948), pp. 226, 227. 3 Archibald Henderson, George Bernard Shaw: Man of the Century (New York. 1956), p. 588. 4 Pen Portnlits and Reviews, p. 260. 2 MODERN DRAMA May Tolstots play is a bleakly realistic description of the power of ignorance, superstition, selfishness, brutality, and appetite in men's lives. Nikita, the central figure, is a rake, the hired man of a wealthy landowner whose wife is his mistress. He has already, at age twentyfive , a long history of seduction and dissipation. Now, as the action proceeds, he acquiesces in the poisoning of his employer so that he may himself marry the widow and gain both her and an inheritance. But he also gains two stepdaughters, one of whom he promptly seduces, so that his jealous wife becomes more bitter and shrewish with the passing days. When the stepdaughter gives birth to his child, he assists in killing and burying it in the cellar in an effort to hide the sin and to dear the way for the stepdaughter's marriage. Surrounded by brutality, avarice, hatred, ugliness, and meanness, Nikita succumbs like all the rest. It is clear from the context of the play that the cry of conscience uttered by the second stepdaughter, a little ten-year-old child, will be stifled in a year or two just as surely as it has been rendered ineffective in the aged Akim, Nikita's pious father. For Tolstoy, the power of darkness is too great: worldliness, pettiness, brutality, ignorance are almost insurmountable. It destroys the souls of men and the fabric of society. The only salvation in such bleak circumstances, Tolstoy thought, lay in...