University of Virginia Library

SHAW NOT AN ORIGINAL THINKER

THE third fallacy is that Bernard Shaw is a profoundly original thinker and a propagandist of absolutely new ideas. He has repeatedly told his readers and his friends that he is nothing of the kind. His biographer somewhere quotes him as saying, "I am an expert picker of men's brains, and I have been extremely fortunate in my friends." Nor need we go to Bernard Shaw's biographer for this. Bernard Shaw has spent half his life in telling the world the exact scientific truth about himself, and of course the world has refused to believe him. It is hardly exaggeration to say that whenever Bernard Shaw tells people soberly and honestly exactly the sort of man he is, and exactly the kind of work he has done, they laugh heartily, and say that Bernard Shaw is a very funny and inventive person. Similarly, whenever he ventures into fun and fiction, his hearers insist upon taking him as seriously as they would take a prophet.

It follows that Bernard Shaw, who is a modest, conscientious, kindly, industrious, and well-read man of letters, is commonly regarded as a reckless firebrand who lives by the cart and the trumpet, is up to his neck in all that is lawless and improper, is without compassion or shame, speaks always in paradoxes, and claims to be greater than Shakspere. Not fewer than fourteen years ago Bernard Shaw told the world that he was an elderly gentleman who had made an immense reputation by being the best of a bad lot and by plagiarizing the English classics. He really meant what he said; but the preface in which he said it is still supposed to be the locus classicus of his claim to supersede the author of "Macbeth." Here, again, it is impossible to say of Bernard Shaw any true thing he has not already said of himself. He has repeatedly urged his critics and followers to reject utterly the legend of G. B. S. "I find myself," Bernard Shaw wrote in 1900, "while still in middle life almost as legendary a person as the Flying Dutchman. Critics, like other people, see what they look for, not what is actually before them. In my plays they look for my legendary qualities, and find originality and brilliancy in my most hackneyed claptrap. Were I to republish Buckstone's 'Wreck Ashore' as my latest comedy, it would be hailed as a masterpiece of perverse paradox and scintillating satire."

Nothing in modern literary history is more remarkable than the reputation of G. B. S. for original and daring speculation; and no one, myself possibly excepted, more thoroughly appreciates the funny side of G. B. S. as philosopher than the man to whom this reputation is so persistently attached. Five years ago I came to London burdened with the classic wisdom of an ancient university. I had read some philosophy in one school and some economy in another. As a musician I had read Wagner for a venerable classic. As the merest Philistine in connoisseurship, I recognized in Rodin a great sculptor of the last generation, as firmly established in immortality as Michelangelo, and I saluted in the New English Art Club a thoroughly respectable academy of painting. As a playgoer destined to succeed Max Beerbohm, who himself in remote

antiquity had succeeded G. B. S. on the "Saturday Review," I had become weary of Ibsen, and had begun to wonder why Granville Barker seemed old enough to be my uncle. Now, I do not regard myself as being in the least in advance of my time; yet when I came to London I found that Bernard Shaw, who still preached Ibsen and Wagner, who spoke with Rodin as a contemporary, who preached a philosophy which was already introduced into examination-papers at a place not suspected of modernism, who talked economy out of university text-books which it was a scholarly and pedantic exercise to confute in the lecture-rooms of Oxford—that this thoroughly safe, orthodox, and almost medieval Bernard Shaw was being received by the literary societies and the press of London as an original and revolutionary thinker. I then began to understand why Bernard Shaw has very little respect for some of his contemporaries.