PASSION AND STYLE THE SECRETS OF
SHAW'S SUCCESS
BERNARD SHAW, then, has won the attention of the present
generation, and he will hold the attention of posterity not because
he has new theories about the world, but because, by virtue of
strictly personal and inalienable qualities, he is able to give to
the most "hackneyed claptrap" (Bernard Shaw's own description) an
air of novelty. Were he baldly to tell us that incomes should be
equally divided, and that interest is an iniquitous and profoundly
unsocial device invented by those who have too much money for the
purpose of levying blackmail upon those who have not enough, we
should simply remember that we had read all this years ago in an
old book and turn to something rather more worth our time and
attention.
But when Bernard Shaw writes "Widower's Houses" or "Socialism
and Superior Brains," it is quite another matter. Here we have
original work of the first quality. The ideas are common to us
all; but Bernard Shaw's presentation of these ideas thrills us with
a conviction that nothing quite like it has ever come within our
experience. We realize that we have never before encountered just
this blend of wit and sense, this intellectual wrestle and thrust,
this fervor and fun, this argumentative and syllabic virtuosity,
this apparently impudent disregard of style that only the more
piquantly emphasizes a perfectly individual and highly cultivated
literary art. Then we begin to wonder what is the inspiration of
this rapid Jehu; whence does he get his impulse to drive all these
ancient ideas so furiously through the modern world. How are we to
explain the passion that fills him and lifts his work to levels
higher than the platform he undertakes to fill? We are sensible in
Bernard Shaw's best work of a horse-power, of a spiritual energy,
which is no more the product of his doctrinal prejudice against
rent and interest than the energy which drove Wagner to compose
the Nibelung's Ring was the product of his desire to justify
his revolutionary principles or to improve the operatic stage
scenery of his generation. We know that the inspiration of Bernard
Shaw must be something deeper than a dislike of Roebuck Ramsden or
a desire to abolish Mr. Sartorius. We know, in fact, that Bernard
Shaw, like every man of genius, is the happy agent of a power and
a passion which uses his prejudices, memories, and doctrines in a
way he is intellectually powerless to resist.
The real thrill of his work is conveyed in some sentences of
his preface to "Man and Superman"—sentences used by him in quite
another connection:
This is the true joy of life: the being used for a purpose
recognised by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn
out before you are thrown on the scrap-heap; the being a force of
nature, instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and
grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to
making you happy.
To apply this passage to the work of Bernard Shaw is again to
destroy the popular conception of him as merely the acute
raisonneur, the intellectual critic of his kind, with a
wallet of revolutionary propaganda whereby his reputation lives or
dies. Not his doctrine and not his deliberate pulpiteering make
Bernard Shaw a vital influence in modern literature. The real
secret of his influence can be explained in a sentence: Bernard
Shaw has passion and he has style. Therefore, like every man of
genius, he is driven to say more than he intends, and to say it in
an arresting voice.
It remains to ask what is the prime irritant
of this
passion in Bernard Shaw. Where are we to look for the catfish
which keeps his mental aquarium alive and astir? First, without
preliminary, let us dart on that preface "Why for Puritans," which
more than any other gives us the key to Bernard Shaw's work and
character. Bernard Shaw writes as follows:
I have, I think, always been a Puritan in my attitude towards
Art. I am as fond of fine music and handsome buildings as Milton
was, or Cromwell, or Bunyan; but if I found that they were becoming
the instruments of a systematic idolatry of sensuousness, I would
hold it good statesmanship to blow every cathedral in the world to
pieces with dynamite, organ and all, without the least heed to the
screams of the art critics and cultured voluptuaries.
Bernard Shaw's primal inspiration, that is to say, is not esthetic
or intellectual, but moral. We have to reckon with a moral fury
where he most individually rages. The demon which seizes his pen
at the critical moment, and uses him for its own enthusiastic
purpose, is the demon which drove Milton to destroy Arminius. When
Bernard Shaw imagines that he coolly and reasonably desires, simply
as a practical socialist and in the name of common sense, to
nationalize land and capital, and give to everybody as much money
as he requires, he is mistaken. Like every other prophet who has
succeeded in moving his generation, Bernard Shaw begins with a
passion and a prejudice, and afterward manufactures and
systematizes the evidence. That Bernard Shaw is a socialist is an
accident of the time. The essential thing is that Bernard Shaw
passionately hates all that is complacent, malevolent, callous,
inequitable, oppressive, unsocial, stupid, irreligious, enervating,
narrow, misinformed, unimaginative, lazy, envious, unclean,
disloyal, mercenary, and extravagant. Hating all this with the
positive, energetic, and proselytizing hatred of an incorrigible
moralist, he has naturally seized on the biggest and most adequate
stick in reach with which to beat the nineteenth-century sinner.
This stick happened to be the socialist stick. If G. B. S. had
lived with Grosseteste in the thirteenth century, it would have
been the no-taxation-without-representation stick. If he had lived
with Star Chamber in the sixteenth century, it would have been the
Habeas Corpus stick. If he had lived with Rousseau in the
eighteenth century, it would have been the social-contract-and-law-of-nature
stick. Bernard Shaw's socialism stick is simply his
weapon—the most convenient weapon to hand—with which to convict
a society founded upon capitalism of the greatest possible amount
of sin with the least possible opportunity of an overwhelming
retort from the sinner. The important thing is not that Bernard
Shaw preaches socialism, but that he uses the doctrines of
socialism as Cromwell's troopers used the psalms of David or as
Tolstoy used the gospels of Christ—namely, to put the unjust man
and his evil ways out of court and countenance. To this end he
employs also his craft as a dialectician, his gift as a stylist,
his clear exposition and wit, his fun, irony, observation of men,
genius for mystification and effective pose—all, indeed, that
enters into the public idea of G. B. S. These things are merely
auxiliary; any moment they are likely to be caught up in the
service of his passionate mission—a mission of which Bernard Shaw
is often himself aware when he is most firmly under its dominion.
