George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man as an anti – romantic comedy / Shaw’s attitude to war and love

A self- confessed anti –romantic, Bernard Shaw gives his play Arms and the Man a subtitle – an anti –romantic comedy in three acts and in his Preface he explains that an anti-romantic comedy binds itself to reality and does not gives scope to imagination and idealism. Bernard Shaw, a leading exponent of Ibsenian realism, eschewed the English romantic dramas based on emotion and sentiment .In Arms and the Man Shaw is a romantic comedist, but an unrelenting campaigner of ideas, caustic and revolutionary; and here he deliberately makes such a blooming caricature of both love and war that the play ultimately becomes a banter on what is romantic.

Arms and the Man shows Shaw’s iconoclasm.  He ridicules the concept imbibed in Iliad, Odyssey and Beowulf who considered war as “a big picnic”. Consecrated with horror- to him, recklessness is often confused with heroism. Shaw’s mouthpiece for criticizing the romantic notion of war is Bluntschli, a Swiss officer in the army. Even as a person, he represents the opposite of what Raina, an incorrigibly fashionable lady, believes that every soldier should be a war hero .But soon Bluntschli comes as a bolt from the blue and his undeluded statement knocks the bottom out of her romanticism .Bluntschli is in every inch a soldier and takes soldiering as a profession and not a sacred mission. To him war is not a thing to gloat over, and he does not rush into the mouth of cannon for bubble reputation; but he is guided by a realistic instinct of self- preservation.

The romantic figure of the apparently heroic soldier Sergius is mercilessly satirized by Shaw . Bluntschli scoffs at Sergius’s cavalry charge by comparing him to Don Quixote charging the windmills as he knew a whole regiment of cavalry on the battery of machine guns and the only reason for the entire regiment not being shot down is that the enemies were provided with wrong ammunitions. This description makes Sergius   a figure of fun and ridicule. And with this Raina is converted to a realist.

Raina has similarly an idealized and romantic concept, not only about war but also about love. Initially she felt hallucinated by the romance of “higher love” and recognized Sergius to be her “soul’s hero” but when Sergius feels attracted by the sexual appeal of Louka and makes advances to her behind Louka’s back , the epitome of her romantic love  shatters to pieces.

This acted as an eye – opener to Raina. So long as she was putting up a mask of romantic love- she does not feel frustrated; instead she learns that people should not be guided by sheer romance. Hence her admiration for Bluntschli ripens into love, because it is only Bluntschli who can find out the real character beneath the romantic mask.

Arms and the Man is thus, a successful experiment experiment in a species of drama. It is a serious comedy with an anti- romantic attitude towards life and Shaw’s real motive is “ to expose the emptiness of romantic view of love and war” is fulfilled .