Shaw's Forgotten Lecture (And Other
Matters Shavian)
by
Arthur Sherbo
In the course of my grubbing in periodicals I have come upon some
unrecorded items of interest to students of the life and writings of Bernard
Shaw.
The Cambridge Review, a weekly review of university life and
thought, reported in the October 17, 1907, number that "Mr. G. B.
Shaw will lecture under the auspices of the Cambridge University Fabian
Society on 'Socialism and the University Man' on October 24th. There will
be a limited number of tickets for which application should be made to E.
H. Dalton, King's College." The report of the lecture and the letters that
followed have been overlooked by Shaw's biographers. The lecture was
briefly reported in the Cambridge Review for October 31
with
an anecdote involving a postcard written by Shaw.
Mr Bernard Shaw gave us a most exhilarating lecture in the
Alexandra Rooms on the University Man and Socialism. Those who study
our Correspondence columns will see that his economics did not convince
every member of his audience. . . .
The Chairman, Mr Wedd of King's College, introduced Mr Shaw by
relating a history which should not be buried in the obscurity of lapsing
time. He told the story of Mr Shaw's first visit to lecture in Cambridge,
and of the influence his fiery eloquence had upon a little old Professor in
the audience, who thought much and long on Mr Shaw's ideals, but was not
sure of his 'Ethical Basis.' The little old Professor was afterwards better
known as Bishop Westcott: and Mr Wedd delighted his audience by telling
them of the post-card which Mr Shaw sent at the Chairman's request to
allay Professor Westcott's doubts. It was delightfully simple—we
hope
a sancta simplicitas which will condone its reproduction
here—'You know the old boy better than I do: tell him my E. B. is
the
same as his.'
The anecdote about the postcard goes back to Shaw's 1888 visit to
Cambridge where he spoke on "Socialism: Its Growth and Necessity."
Nathaniel Wedd, Fellow of King's College and secretary of the Cambridge
Fabian Society, had arranged for that visit. A different version of the
postcard was recorded by G. Lowes Dickinson; here Shaw's answer to
Professor Westcott, later Bishop of Durham, was, "Ask the old boy what
his is, and tell him mine's the same."[1]
The same number of the Cambridge Review printed a
letter by Charles R. Webster of King's College, which throws a little more
light on the content of the lecture. Webster reported that Shaw "denied that
capital could be made to leave this country by onerous taxation of the rich,
although he admitted that 'saved income' (the only source of capital) can
very readily and easily leave the country." Webster's letter prompted two
others, one by Frederic Keeling of Trinity College and one by Dudley
Ward of St. John's College, both in the November 7 number. Keeling
disagreed with Webster and maintained that the "advance of Socialism"
would not "drain capital out of the country." Ward tried to mediate between
Webster and Shaw:
Taking Mr Shaw's statement that at present capital can 'very readily
and easily leave the country' as intended, also the future, he triumphantly
suggests that Mr Shaw has given away his case. It was rather unfair,
however, to overlook the speaker's proposal for meeting this difficulty by
an income tax graduated to the disadvantage of incomes derived from
foreign investments.
These letters give some idea of the tenor of Shaw's lecture.
Webster replied to both Keeling and Ward the following week,
writing that Shaw "wished the middle classes to join the labour classes in
a systematic attempt to obtain a large portion of the incomes of the rich by
means of taxation. He distinctly maintained that, once the control of the
taxing power was obtained, there was nothing to prevent this. But he
entirely disregarded the effect of such taxation on the supply of capital." All
of which culminated in Shaw's reply to Webster in the November 28
number of the periodical. This letter has also been overlooked. I quote it
in its entirety.
Mr Charles R. Webster has made a curious mistake. He thinks he has
put a difficulty to me. It is I who have put a difficulty to him; and he has
not yet got over it.
Far from 'minimising the importance of the fact that capital can leave
the country,' I point out that capital can and does leave the country at
present. All the capital I have myself invested is invested abroad, with the
exception of certain sums which I have invested in England in concerns
which present the special attraction of having ventured on what may be
described as limited socialism. What has Mr Webster to say to this? His
position is founded on the assumption that a system which drives capital out
of the country is thereby condemned. Therefore the existing system is out
of court as far as he is concerned. I have been kind enough to try to save
him from the consequences of his own argument by suggesting that even
within the limits of the present system, emigration of capital could be
discouraged by a special tax on imported dividends. He replies in despair
that 'the easy way in which such a tax could be evaded makes it a practical
impossibility.' This shews that Mr Webster
has no practical experience of foreign investments. They are taxed almost
automatically: the revenue suffers much less from evasions in their case
than in that of income made at home. However, if Mr Webster will not
have it so, his difficulty is all the greater.
Mr Webster quotes Professor Marshall as saying 'In recent years we
have suffered much from schemes which claim to be practical, and yet are
based on no thorough study of economic realities.' I entirely agree with
Prof. Marshall. There is nothing more appalling in English public life than
the way in which politicians of all parties appeal to popular ignorance for
permission to lay hands on our industrial system without the most
elementary knowledge of economics. Fortunately, that is a reproach which
neither Professor Marshall nor any other expert is likely to level at the
Fabian Society. Mr Webster, by ascribing such a blunder to Professor
Marshall, is committing felo de se; and I leave it to King's
College to bury him with the ceremonies appropriate to the manner of his
decease.
Yours truly,
G. Bernard Shaw.
10, Adelphi Terrace, London, W.C.
23rd November, 1907.
All this may be added to Michael Holroyd's account of Shaw and
Fabianism in Volume II, 1898-1918, The Pursuit of Power
of
his Bernard Shaw (1989).
The November 11, 1916, number of The Cambridge
Magazine, a periodical which boasted the "Largest Circulation of
any
University Weekly in Great Britain," contained the statement, "We imagine
that our readers will be interested to see the following extracts from some
of the letters which the Editor has received during the past few weeks."
Extracts from five letters are quoted, the writers of the letters being, in
order, Thomas Hardy (two sentences), William Archer (one sentence),
Bernard Shaw (which I quote below), John Masefield (two sentences), and
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (two paragraphs). All the letters praise the
periodical, Hardy admitting "a liking for the lighter paragraphs," Archer
urging wide reading of the Foreign Press section, and Masefield terming it
"an excellent piece of work." Quiller-Couch, Professor of English at
Cambridge University, commenting on the course of the war, also praised
the Foreign Press section. Shaw also sided with Archer and Quiller-Couch:
"The
Cambridge Magazine is, as far as I know, the
only
paper which attempts to do for the public what has to be done every
morning by our official departments; that is, supply a conspectus of the
foreign press. The ordinary papers supply what they call Sidelights, by
which they mean One Side Lights, which are much more dangerous than no
lights at all when driving between the devil and the deep sea. The
consequence is that there has been, throughout the war, a dangerous
discrepancy between the instructed official and executive opinion and public
opinion. Ministers are compelled
to talk to the public according to its ignorance instead of according to their
own knowledge; and thus the gulf between them is widened. Some day the
Government will be forced by military necessity to propose some step for
which the nation is unprepared and against which it is violently prejudiced.
The Government will be overborne by public opinion; and the military
authorities will be compelled, not for the first time, to ignore the
Government and to coerce the nation. The only available precaution against
such a schism at present is a conscientious study of the
Cambridge
Magazine."
In November 1914, when his
Common Sense About the War
appeared, Shaw's public reputation was at its nadir, so it seems strange that
in November 1916 a journal would value a statement of praise from him.
Perhaps by then (after the Battle of the Somme) people were becoming
more aware of the truth of Shaw's objections to the Great War.
[2]
I have come upon a few pieces that have escaped the efforts of J. P.
Wearing, editor of G. B. Shaw. An Annotated Bibliography of
Writings About Him. Volume I: 1871-1930 (1986). Two are from
The English Review, the periodical started by Ford Madox
Ford; the first appears in the section titled "The Month" in an anonymous
discussion of realism in the drama, particularly about Shaw and J. M.
Barrie. I quote the passages pertinent to Shaw:
It is certain that neither Mr. Barrie nor Mr. Shaw come with any
frequency at all near to the life we live to-day. Regarded philosophically
each of Mr. Shaw's plays resolves itself into a variety entertainment in
which character after character does his brilliant verbal "turn" and then
retires into the background.
. . . Subtlety of speech is impossible upon the stage, for you cannot
turn back the leaf to read the speech before the last, and whilst you are
reflecting upon the hidden meaning of one speech you will miss the
significance of three more. . . . For subtlety Mr. Shaw substitutes
half-truths in startling aspects. How Mr. Shaw would come off if it were
considered bad taste to laugh in theatres, so that speech after speech was
uttered without the break and the pause for the inevitable Shavian laughter,
we hardly dare to speculate. . . . His speakers overspeak, his actors
overact, and we are delighted. But a touch of realism will disturb our
delight.
* * *
But both Mr. Shaw, who gives us real speeches producing an
effective unreality, and Mr. Barrie, who gives us speeches in one evening
more sentimental than any collection of real characters could utter in the
course of a year—who convinces us in fact by a very unreal
means—both Mr. Shaw and Mr. Barrie do render some service to the
Republic. The one quickens our emotions, the other our thoughts. And it
is possible that the drama cannot do more than this, for are not to think and
to feel the converse of necessary qualities of a proper man? (1 [Jan. 1909]:
321—322)
An essay titled "The Critical Attitude" with the sub-title "English Literature
of To-day" begins with a long paragraph on Shaw, Granville Barker, and
John Galsworthy.
Of non-commercial English Dramatists three names at least are
worthy of consideration. They are those of Mr. Granville Barker, Mr. John
Galsworthy and Mr. Bernard Shaw. . . . They attempt to present us with
really human figures caught in the toils of vicissitudes really human, acting
as human beings really would do in a world such as these Dramatists, each
after his kind, may chance to see it. This is most particularly
true of Mr. Granville Barker and least so of Mr. Bernard Shaw. The
attraction of Mr. Shaw is that of unreasonable brilliancy. The sallies of his
characters hold our attentions but they do not engage our sympathies. We
are delighted with his figures whilst they talk, but all the while we are
subconsciously aware that we do not believe that any human beings so
ready with their tongues ever existed. The consequence is that Mr. Shaw's
plays—and it is with this purpose that he sets out to
write—may very
well awaken thought. But it is as to the ideas expressed by his characters
rather than as to their human and personal problems that we are set
thinking. . . . And just because ideas as to ideas are relatively valueless in
comparison with the ideas aroused by human problems, so the effect of Mr.
Shaw's work is comparatively transitory. Not one of his plays will leave as
much mark upon the emotions as, let us say,
The Playboy of the
Western World, by Mr. Synge, now so untimely
dead. (3 [Nov. 1909]: 655-666)
Although Wearing's bibliography does list thirteen pieces from
The
English Review, these two items may have been deemed
inappropriate for inclusion because they are only parts of pieces not wholly
devoted to Shaw.
Two other pieces appeared in The Egoist, for which
there
is no listing in Wearing's "Index of Periodicals and Newspapers." The first
was a facetious essay by Huntly Carter, "The Re-Incarnation of Mr.
Bernard Shaw," in the September 1, 1914, number of the periodical (1:
337-338). Carter had devoted a few pages (Wearing, p. 145, no. 1196) to
Shaw in his The New Spirit in Drama and Art (1913) and
was
to expand on his remarks in The New Spirit in the European Theatre
1914-1924 . . . (1925; Wearing, p. 307, no. 2518). Carter's essay
was prompted by a recently published Supplement "with that Shaw-ridden
journal, 'The New Statesman', on the subject of the 'ModernTheatre'." He
deals first with Shaw himself.
This theatrical blue-book not only starts off with Mr. George Bernard
Shaw, but it reeks of him. One is simply bewildered by his re-incarnations.
There are Bernard Roger Fry, G. B. Desmond MacCarthy, George Bernard
Ashley Dukes, G. Bernard William Archer, George Granville Barker Shaw,
and so on, and so on, and so on, till one staggers with the shrieks of the
Shavian spooks. The real Shaw is the only one worth a moment's notice.
Having nothing better to feed on, he appears feeding on the Cinema as the
nearest he can get to the sublime in the theatre. . . . Take this statement for
instance:—"Now, the cinema tells its story to the illiterate as well as
to
the literate; and it keeps its victim (if you like to call him so) not only
awake but fascinated as if by a serpent's eye. And that is why the cinema
is going to produce effects that all the cheap books in the world could never
produce" (nor all the cheap Shaw plays). If this means anything, it means
that the cinema has revealed
to Mr. Shaw its amazing aesthetic-dramatic possibilities. . . .
—Whether
the effect of the cinema noticed by Mr. Shaw, does not conclusively prove
that Mr. Shaw and his disciples have led the drama off the right line of
development? Whether, therefore, the cinema is not likely to provoke to
revolt the indestructible dramatic instincts of mankind? And whether, in
drawing attention to the cinema and its dramatic possibilities Mr. Shaw is
not in danger of confirming a suspicion which says that Mr. Shaw has a
reputation as a playwright but no one supposes that he wishes it to be
remembered. But these questions do not occur to Mr. Shaw. He is far too
busy evolving Shaw the chastiser with scorpions from the picture
show.
He then dispatches Mr. Roger Fry-Shaw, Mr. Desmond MacCarthy-Shaw,
Mr. Granville Barker-Shaw, Mr. Ashley Dukes-Shaw and Professor
William Archer-Shaw, with nary a kind word for any of them. Mr.
Dukes-Shaw, he writes, "is not one of the Supreme Intelligences. He is a
Shavian, and a very
little and ugly one." I quote only the first sentence of Carter's concluding
paragraph: "Considered as a whole the Supplement has an air of
ephemeralism, petrification and putrefaction." He may be alluding to
Shaw's playlet,
Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction, or The Fatal
Gazogene (1905). In the 1913
New Spirit in Drama and
Art, Carter wrote, "Ibsen, for example, has never recovered from
Mr. Bernard Shaw's victimisation of him. Together with Shakespeare, he
was butchered to make a Fabian holiday" (p. 36). He had no sudden
volte face in the
Egoist essay: "It was William
Archer who discovered the literary Ibsen; Bernard Shaw, the economic
Ibsen; between them they murdered the spiritual Ibsen." And by 1925 he
was still belaboring Shaw, although five years later he asked Shaw's
opinion on the cinema as an art form. Shaw answered on January 1, 1930,
quite politely. He wrote that "Art for art's sake is rather like fox hunting
or skating, which have no sense
except as ways of procuring food or moving from place to place, but are
continued for fun by people who don't eat foxes and also, after hours of
skating, take off their skates at the spot where they put them on, without
having travelled in the meantime further than the opposite side of the
pond." He concluded, "In short, I don't quite see why you should boggle
at the description of the cinema as an art form."
[3]
The second piece on Shaw in The Egoist was by M.
Montagu-Nathan, better known as Montagu Montagu Nathan, a
musicologist who wrote much on Russian Music. "'Shaw—' (From
the
Epilogue, Fanny's First Play)" appeared in the August 1916
number (3: 121-122). The essay deserves to be read in its entirety, but I
shall only quote parts.
For many many years George Bernard Shaw has been preaching
Christianity, but—perhaps because until lately the name God has not
occurred in his discourse—even his parishioners appear to have been
unaware of his theme. . . . First came "A Little Gospel of Redemption for
a Little Theatre." Its hero, a duke's brother, expiates his sin, committed
when a master, by serving a parvenu. There was an odd thing about
Fanny's First Play, namely, that its author neglected to
demonstrate what should be the attitude of the Superman towards the
slapper of his cheek. . . . It seemed plain, in short, that Shaw had not yet
finished with Christianity. And when Androcles came, it was
proven. . . .
In Androcles there is none of the destructive satire of
France's Procurator of Judœa, but its fault lies in that
Shaw
is not content with his long-pursued constructive scheme of making people
laugh at themselves, and thus build up a happiness that none can destroy,
but descends with his dancing lion to court the guffaws of the gallery. In
his long Preface on The Prospects of Christianity his lion
dances again.
At times Shaw is deliciously flippant. . . . At others, both in the play
and in the preface, he risks the easily incurred displeasure of the
snippet-readers who have never inquired what he is talking about but know
him only by these detached things he happens to have said. . . . Only the
Philistine will object to his having called Christ an artist, and only the
fanatic will feel hurt by the implication that the believer is drunk and the
sceptic sober, while the fool alone—accompanied possibly by the
conscientious objector—will take exception to the mild Nietzscheism
in
his exposition of the Divine character. This was inevitable in a man
accustomed to examine every question, even those affecting himself, from
all points of view.
Therein lies Britain's debt to Shaw. He has attempted to teach the
beefy Broadbent to think impersonally.
. . . In Androcles he sets out to show us that Christ
never
meant us to receive a blow on the second cheek, but to disarm our
adversary either by displaying an exquisite sense of humour or, like
Dostoieffsky's immortal Mwishkin, a baffling ingenuousness. But in the
play this, and almost every point, is so prepared, so coquetted with that it
is gathered by the audience without the shock that alone can compel the
mind to retain its essential truth.
So it is with Pygmalion. It has not been given to every
one to write, talk and debate convincingly about art and pugilism, drama
and medicine, music and sociology, to consort, as he once did, with the
artistic aristocracy of the future, to speak in plays both like "the man of the
world" and like him "of the world to come," and who else in Britain
perceived that the accent of "educated people" has so much in common with
Cockney that a flower-girl may, with a little training in manners, represent
a duchess, so long as the manners are remembered? All this too, was
foretold when, in the Dramatic Essays, he rebuked Irving for his ridiculous
vowels.
There is one idea absent from the Preface to Pygmalion
that would perhaps have brought home the importance of the study of
phonetics . . . but he does not say in what the importance of phonetics
lies.
And to the present writer it seems to lie in that, once versed and
practised, one can tell not where a parson was born, but the particular
parish in Heaven he wishes to occupy, by the way he pronounces the name
of the Deity. What a tale of Gards, Guds, Gords, Higgins could have made!
He would have found one for each of the jarring sects.
Why a specialist in Russian music should have written on Shaw's plays
remains a mystery.
Ivor Brown, the foremost English dramatic critic for more than thirty
years, wrote much on Shaw. One minor piece, tangentially about Shaw, has
been overlooked and should be added to the literature on Shaw. The short
piece, "Shaw's First Manager," was published in the New Statesman
and Nation, July 6, 1935 (N.S. 10, no. 228, 12-13). The manager
was J. T. Grein, of whom Brown wrote, after giving biographical
information about him, that if he "had done nothing more for the English
century than open its doors to G—B—S, he deserved of our
country,
which he made his by adoption, the recognition which foreign governments
delighted to give him."
A major oversight is the failure of bibliographers to remark W. J.
Turner's long article "G.B.S. as Music Critic" in the August 6, 1932,
New Statesman and Nation (N.S. 4, no. 76, 154-156). Turner
is described in the DNB as poet, musical critic, journalist,
and
playwright, and he knew whereof he wrote. The article is too long to quote
in its entirety. Turner is reviewing the three volumes of "musical criticism
contributed to the World week by week during the years
1890-94" and writes in his second paragraph,
Mr. Shaw was the best and most brilliant professional journalist
London had known since the days of Hazlitt and De Quincey, and if we of
the present generation are apt to look askance at Mr. Shaw and even to
detest what seems to us a superficial omniscience, we have only to dip once
more into his dramatic criticisms or to read these three volumes of his
musical criticisms to discover again what a great intellectual force he was
and what a large part he has played in the development of the mental
activity of this country.
A good deal of the rest of the article is given over to quotation of Shaw's
criticism, with Turner's comments. He quotes Shaw on his attitude as a
critic, on Wagner and on Gustav Mahler as conductor of Wagner, on
Chopin and
George Sand, on Brahms and Beethoven, and on Verdi. Of this last Turner
notes, "Even more astonishing [than his criticism of Brahms] is his
perception of the greatness of Verdi, not only the Verdi of
Otello and
Falstaff, but of the early Verdi," and
then he quotes Shaw on Verdi's
Ernani. Turner briefly notes
Shaw's appreciation of Yvette Guilbert, Richter, Mott, and Joachim and his
wrong-headed view of Schubert. And he concludes: "Sometimes reading his
musical criticism I wonder what had happened to Mr. Shaw. He has grown
old, but has not grown old like Verdi."
Wyndham Lewis, in his short-lived periodical The Enemy, A
Review of Art and Literature (1927-29), appended some "Notes" to
the third and last volume, dated First Quarter, 1929. The first of the six
notes bears the title "My disciple, Mr. Bernard Shaw" and was prompted,
as will be seen, by an article in Time and Tide for November
16, 1928. I quote in part.
At the time of Mr. Bernard Shaw's letter in favour of Fascism, I
thought from extracts that found their way into the Press, or comments, that
I would henceforth have to reckon with a new disciple. . . .
"It is a convention to assume that there is nothing people like more
than political liberty. As a matter of fact there is nothing they dread more.
Under the feeble and apologetic tyranny of Dublin Castle we Irish were
forced to endure a considerable degree of compulsory freedom. The
moment we got rid of that tyranny we rushed to enslave ourselves. We gave
our police power to seize any man's property and to put upon him the onus
of proving that it belonged to him. We declared that as prison would not
deter Irishmen from evil-doing they must be savagely flogged; and when the
evil-doers were flogged they were imprisoned for long periods lest the
flogging should provoke them to commit fresh crimes."
. . . What concerns me of course is this: the Art of Being
Ruled, as interpreted by Mr. Shaw, will probably find itself
involved
with a motley of doctrines. . . . One thing I am sure about, however: that
is that my new disciple will always be upon the winning side, or sides (and
so to some extent he will be a security for my opinions): also that he will
never commit any gaffe or make any scandal (so through him
my teaching will never get into trouble but remain eminently respectable as
far as he is concerned). With him my doctrine is safe and that
is something. But still I am doubtful whether I should repudiate him, or, on
the other hand, allow him silently to take his place in proximity to a book
that contradicts so flatly what he has taught himself all his life.
The Art of Being Ruled is by Lewis; in it he devotes some
four
pages (55-58) to adverse criticism of
St. Joan and
Back
to
Methuselah. He seems not to have had anything further to say about
Shaw.
A long, anonymous (editorial?) review of Shaw's Too True to
be Good, Village Wooing, and On the Rocks was the
second offering in the New Statesman and Nation for
February
24, 1934 (N.S. 7: 250-257). It, too, has gone unremarked despite its title,
"Fascism and Mr. Shaw." The review is made up of four long paragraphs;
I quote part of the second, the most pertinent for analysis of Shaw's views.
In the play
On the Rocks Mr. Shaw paints a picture of
the
existing political situation: a national Government headed by a Prime
Minister attractive and likable, a master of phrases once spell-binding but
now void of meaning, eternally busy with no time to think; a Cabinet of
party men thinking in terms of general elections, attempting to ignore the
surging discontent of the masses who are increasingly
contemptuous of Parliament, party politics and "old men"; a head of the
police professionally concerned with keeping order by whatever means
come to hand; Labour leaders who know that something must be done, but
who are frightened of new ideas; Communists whose doctrines are as
dogmatically held as they are poorly adapted to existing circumstances. Mr.
Shaw makes fun of the lot. When the Prime Minister, after a fortnight's
thinking over the works of Karl Marx, returns with a new energy, the
policy he launches is a very un-Marxian hotch-potch which, it is suggested,
might prove attractive to the multitude if put forward by a leader who was
young and energetic and able to combine an armed nationalism with an
authoritarian determination to put everything to rights without any nonsense
about liberty. No wonder that Mr. Shaw is accused of advertising Fascism.
The joke is that when he gets down to thinking seriously about the problem
raised in his play, the result is a Preface which
completely smashes the Fascist case. . . . And for the first time he seriously
argues the problem of liberty, reaching the conclusion that economics must
be the business of experts, everybody doing his share of work—he
says
we must all be "slaves" in our working hours—while leisure should
be
completely free, and, finally, the right to criticise sacrosanct.
The reviewer added that "It is a good thing that Mr. Shaw has at length
realized his own importance. He has been muddle-headed enough in the
past to praise Mussolini's oppression of personal freedom, though it was
always enough that if Mr. Shaw had been an Italian he would either have
been in exile or in prison."
Another oversight of some consequence is the failure to list C. H.
Rickword's "Bernard Shaw" (Scrutinies 5) in The
Calendar of Modern Letters for September 1925 (2: 50-54).
Rickword was the cousin of Edgell Rickword, coeditor with Douglas
Garman of the periodical. Wearing, incidentally, does not list The
Calendar in his "Index of Periodicals and Newspapers." As with
most
of the other resurrected pieces Rickword's essay should be read in its
entirety; I shall quote only enough to reveal his preoccupations.
In respect, then, of the destructive side of his work, Mr. Shaw would
seem to be in danger of the usual ironical fate of the artist who bends his
art to the direct improvement (by flogging) of his age. The more
successfully such an artist diagnoses and lashes the follies, which are
commonly the ephemeral manners, of his time, the more swiftly and
completely does his value to posterity depend on his purely literary virtues
of wit in arrangement and language. . . . Even his technique is an
adaptation to the purposes of the theatre of the methods of the revivalist
preacher, who, seeking to turn men from their wickedness, contrasts their
sin and wretchedness with his own inner vision of happy righteousness,
seasoning the whole with threats of hell. . . . The charge that to Mr. Shaw
actors are puppets to be put up to spout Shavians ideas and oratory is
familiar. . . . Whenever possible, he employs the purely mechanical method
of collecting his persons from as many different social
strata as possible. (51)
Rickword remarks that "jocosities punctuate nearly all Mr. Shaw's elevated
passages. That, beyond irritating by their cheapness, they do not jar, proves
not their aptness, but the justness of Mr. Shaw's suspicion of the quality of
the preceding heroics" (52). He concludes, after some more remarks about
Shaw's unfortunate jokes and his tendency to write melodrama with his
tongue in his cheek (
The Devil's Disciple, for example), with
his comparison of Shaw with Shakespeare.
Shakespeare approached reality unprejudiced by any ethical
conception, whereas Mr. Shaw approaches it with a scale of values founded
on an abhorrence of human
nature and a conviction of its original and unredeemable sinfulness. The
dramas that result, far from attempting a reconciliation of life in the
classical manner, are purely romantic flights from reality. In his revulsion,
Mr. Shaw has constructed a universe as purely in his own image as
Shelley's. But whereas Shelley is enabled to secure acceptance by his
literary equipment as a poet and by the preservation in his universe of many
human qualities in a etherialised form, Mr. Shaw has on his side only
oratory and the puritanical conscience. So that, when we are offered the
alternative of serving God in Mr. Shaw's way or of being scrapped by the
life force (or in other words, being sent to Hell), it is excusable if we
regard the choice as being between assasination and suicide—and
decline
to comply either way.
One final, minor, note. The June 18, 1932, New Statesman
and
Nation (N.S. 3, no. 69, 794) carried an "Appeal" on behalf of
Councillor W. G. Ballinger who went to South Africa as technical adviser
of a native Trade Union organization. Ballinger had been financed by grants
from individuals and by the international and British Trade Union
movements. The trust fund was now depleted and the signatories to the
appeal asked for contributions to afford Ballinger £100 a year salary
and £100 a year for expenses. Shaw's name headed the list of
signatories, H. G. Wells's was second, and there were fourteen others,
including Archbishop William M. Carter and three noblemen.[4]
Notes
