Personalities at Bay

SOME of the English reviewers of Frank Harris’s Bernard Shaw (Simon & Schuster, $3.00) have pronounced it trivial and dull. I should call it indigested, at times almost maudlin, and in some of its literary criticism childish; but the inclusion of so many of Shaw’s letters saves it from triviality and the way in which Harris unconsciously portrays himself as a picture of harried puzzlement is far from dull. To expect much instruction concerning the ‘real Shaw’ is to prepare one’s self for disappointment. As Shaw himself says, ‘Anyone who looks for such an explanation at second hand when my works are there to tell him all about it at first hand must be an idiot.’ But as a portrait of the author, a man who hated compromise and for whom all moderation was compromise; who was perpetually tortured by his own egoism; who liked to think of himself as a Casanova, but whose heroes were really Joan of Arc and Jesus; ‘who hated cruelty and injustice and bad art,’and who despised tact and viewed all humor and even all the amenities of life with suspicion — as a portrait of this interesting creature, trying to understand his Shavian (and Fabian) subject, the book is highly diverting. But it is also not a little pathetic.

Harris, at least in this book, strikes one as a mediocre intelligence that thought itself a genius. He impressed men, and even great men, by his boldness, his singleness of purpose, and his devotion to what he conceived to be the truth; and these are often really the marks of genius. But he had many of the faults of his type and his time: facile impressionism, brag parading as strength, nonconformity mistaking itself for originality, and the kind of arrogance that is often a confession of weakness.

He denies that Shaw is a great man, and whether Shaw is or is not, only time will tell. But Harris, walking round and round Shaw, taking notes, grudgingly praising here, timidly praising there, and all the while pressing upon the reader his conviction that he, Frank Harris, is really the superior man, has the effect, certainly never intended, of making Shaw seem positively Jovian. And when one winds up the reading of the book with Shaw’s Postscript, this effect is complete.

R. M. GAY