The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1924-08-16

idealist with the world, and in both
her fate is to be dutifully executed by
quite polite State officials. But the
worlds of Shaw and of Toller are diff
ferent worlds; the characters in Saint
Joan are people drawn from the world
Of medieval history; in se-Mensch,
the protagonists, except Sonia Toll
Ter states, are not individual charac-
ters'-they are symbols representing
the forces that govern the world to-
day, the world of the class-struggle in
its most brutal reality. Hence Toller
has message for the working class,
and that is perhaps why the workers
have less opportunity Of seeing Masse-
Mensch than Saint Joan. Not that
serious consideration can be given tol
the rash classification of Saint Joan
as Fascist, on the grounds that Shaw
accepts philosophy of social despair
when he seems to depict the shabbi-
ness of the powers that be merely by
contrast with the glorious courage
and perfect faith of one human being,
martyred without malice in her own
age, and canonized by humbugs in the
next.
Now whether Saint Joan be or be
not Shaw's greatest work, it certainly
is one of the finest historical plays
ever written-in the conventional
sense that an historical play is a
dramatization of true story" from
the history books; and Saint Joan is
nothing more. But in it Shaw's stage
craft has so surpassed itself, and, in
the present production at the New
Theater, he is so nobly served by the
players, that the effect overwhelms
powers of criticism. The too subtle
critic, failing to discern that the secret
of Saint Joan is not in any obscuran-
fist evasions but in its Homeric sim
plicity, seeks some explanation of
Shaw's emphasis on the lives and
fates of half-legendary personalities,
diverting attention from his plays un-
questionable historical background of
social cenflict-on the one side the
feudal aristocracy and the interna-
tionalist Roman Catholic Church in al
lance with a foreign invader, and on
the other side a nationalist middle
class finding its theological expression
in incipient Professionalism and persona
fed by Joan; and so into the play
wright's incidental irony is read a
consistency of despair which is not
likely to be supported by Shaw's
preface in the edition about to be pub
lished by Messrs. Constable-if indeed
there is any preference, other than the
brief historical note that appears on
the program at the New Theater.
Saint. Joan might well stand without
one, because its epilogue, when the
ghosts of Joan, her prosecutors from
hell, and modern priest assemble to
the Dauphin in dream, supersedes
the need for any predatory argument.
If critics of the Left are to justify
the mediocrity of their own under
standing-a thing which the critics of
find the intellectual food of Fascism
in Saint Joan, how is the almost help
less pessimism of Masse-Mensch to be
treated? Masse-Mensch is more di-
rectly drama of class-war; the bour-
geois critics have not attacked it, for
they have not understood it. There
is no criterion by which a unique ex-
preston Of genuine revolutionary art
that is, art created out of conscious
experience Of the working-class revo-
lution-can be judged by critics tim
orous Of analysing the meaning of a
conflict which the bourgeoisie would
prefer were ignored. Happily for the
"Heartbreak House" audiences who
attended the Stage Society's perform
ances the political significance-the
"propaganda"-of Masse-Mensch is OBJ
scured by its pessimissm, a pessimism
Ia I,1 IL.