Shaw at Ninety

1

ON the twenty-sixth of July, Bernard Shaw will be ninety years old. How should we—or he— feel about it ? The ninetieth birthday of the man who once wrote, “Every man over forty is a scoundrel,” is an ambiguous occasion. Ambiguous because he does not believe in celebrating any birthdays, let alone ninetieth birthdays. Ambiguous because, in the opinion of so many, Mr. Shaw has outlived his genius and even his usefulness. Ambiguous because, it is thought, the politics of the twentieth century has traveled far beyond the ken of Fabianism. Ambiguous because twentieth-century literature has taken quite a different turn since the days when Shavian drama was the latest thing. And yet, despite Mr. Shaw’s indifference to celebrations, despite the indifference of my contemporaries to Mr. Shaw, I propose to celebrate the ninety-year span of this man’s life by asking the Shavian question: What use has it been? To what end has Bernard Shaw lived?

Seventy years ago a young Irishman went to live in London. Another twenty years had to pass before London was fully aware of the fact that it possessed a new critic, a new novelist, a new thinker, a new wit, and — rarest of all — a new dramatist. In the first decade of the twentieth century Shaw’s reputation swept across America and Central Europe. On the death of Anatole France in 1924 he was declared the leading Great Man of European letters. A new play by Shaw was a world event. Between 1923 and 1925 the part of Saint. Joan was enacted by Winifred Lenihan in America, Sybil Thorndike in England, Ludmilla Pitoëffin Paris, Elisabeth Bergner in Berlin. On the occasion of his seventieth birthday a New York Times editorial declared Shaw “probably the most famous of living writers.”

Soon the fame won by plays and books was doubled by the fame won by his films. Shaw’s opinions on everything were reported in the press almost weekly. Has any other author ever been so famous during his lifetime? (Since 1905 many articles on Shaw have been published every year. Some forty whole books have been written about him.) True, none of his books has sold like Gone With the Wind, none of his plays has run as long as Tobacco Road. But, even by the economic criterion, Shaw’s career was “sounder” than any merely popular author’s, for his books went on selling indefinitely and his plays returned to the stage again and again. True, as a “ best-selling classic” Shaw does not rival Shakespeare or the Bible. But then it takes the death of its author to put the final seal of respectability upon a classic. And Shaw refuses to die.

If, as Freud says, the life of the artist is a quest for honor, riches, fame, love, and power, Shaw must be one of the most successful men who ever lived. Then why is he, rather obviously, a sad old man? Because he is sorry to leave a world which he has so brilliantly adorned? That is too shallow an explanation. Honor, riches, fame, the love of women, these he has been granted in abundance. Yet the striking thing about Shaw is his relative aloofness from all these worldly advantages. He talks about them all as if they belonged to somebody else.

But Freud mentioned a fifth goal: power. And this Shaw has only had to the same extent as any other rich writer, and that is to a very small extent indeed. Not that Shaw wanted to be Prime Minister or anything of that sort. The only time Shaw stood as candidate in a large-scale election his abstention from demagogy amounted to a Coriolanus-like repudiation of his electors. When the electors turned him down, they were returning a compliment.

This was not the kind of power Shaw wanted. Crude personal ambition is something he scarcely understands. What he did feel was the consciousness of great spiritual resources within him, the consciousness of a message — of, as he put it, being used by something larger than himself. When, therefore, people paid attention to the ego of Shaw and not to the message of Shaw, when they paid attention to the small and not to the large thing, that was for Shaw the ultimate catastrophe. More plainly put, Shaw’s aim has been to change our minds and save civilization; but we are still in the old ruts and civilization has gone from bad to worse. For Shaw this must be the cardinal fact of his career. “I have produced no permanent impression because nobody has ever believed me.”

Anyone who knows Shaw’s aims and attitudes knows that this is as complete a confession of failure as old Carlyle’s famous sentence: “They call me a great man now, but not one believes what I have told them.” Three years after Carlyle’s death Shaw wrote on behalf of the peaceful Fabians that “we had rather face a Civil War than such another century of suffering as this has been.” And then came, of all things, the twentieth century, the age of Wilhelm II, Tojo, and Hitler! In 1932 Shaw was again addressing the Fabians, He said: “For forty-eight years I have been addressing speeches to the Fabian Society and to other assemblies in this country. So far as I can make out, those speeches have not produced any effect whatsoever.”

“So what?” some will be content to say, reconciling themselves with cynical ease to the ways of the world. Why should Shaw think he can change civilization by thinking, writing, and talking? This, says one of his Marxist critics, is the “bourgeois illusion.” Winston Churchill does not use the Marxist vocabulary, but his essay on Shaw, in Great Contemporaries, conveys the same contempt. He will accept Shaw only on condition that he does not ask to be taken seriously. He ignores Shaw’s repeated assertion: “The real joke is that I am in earnest.”

2

THE fact that Shaw has been easy to brush off can be explained by the method which he has used to spread his fame, a method he expounded forty years ago with characteristic frankness: —

In order to gain a hearing it was necessary for me to attain the footing of a privileged lunatic with the license of a jester. My method has therefore been to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say and then say it with the utmost levity.

The lunatic jester was named “G.B.S.,” a personage who from the start was known to many more people than Bernard Shaw could ever hope to be, a Very Funny Man, whose perversities were so outrageous that they could be forgiven only under the assumption that they were not intended, whose views and artistic techniques seemed to be arrived at by the simple expedient of inverting the customary. Unfortunately Bernard Shaw proved a sorcerer’s apprentice: he could not get rid of “G.B.S.” The very method by which Shaw made himself known prevented him from being understood. The paradox of his career is that he should have had so much fame and so little influence.

So little influence? Is the phrase disparaging? After all, Shaw had an appreciable influence at least on the generation of 1910. And yet even this is hardly something that Shaw would congratulate himself upon, for it was mainly negative. It represented only the superficial part of his teaching, his anti-Victorianism. It was often the kind of influence he had positively to disown — as in the case of the young criminal whose plea of being a disciple of Shaw was later embodied in The Doctor’s Dilemma. The attention Shaw attracts must not be confused with influence.

During the first decades “G.B.S.” was a Dangerous Spirit, distinctly Mephistophelian, red-bearded, young, and aggressive. No kind of philosopher can more easily be dismissed. Eugene O’Neill’s play Ah, Wilderness portrays this early Shavian “influence” as a sort of measles which the more literary high school boy must have and then forget. After the First World War, the great dividing line in Shaw’s career, “G.B.S.” was regarded as rather cute, a Santa Claus if not a Simple Simon. William Archer crowned his long series of attempts to discredit Shaw with a final blow: Shaw was a Grand Old Man. “Not taking me seriously,” said Shaw, “is the Englishman’s way of refusing to face facts.” And by “the Englishman” Shaw has always meant Monsieur Tout-le-monde. “What is wrong with the prosaic Englishman is what is wrong with the prosaic men of all countries: stupidity.”

Before the First World War, Shaw was the leader of the avant-garde. After it he was the Grand Old Man — which meant that he had lost the support of the rebellious young. In 1898 Shaw had written: “I may dodder and dote; I may potboil and platitudinize; I may become the butt and chopping-block of all the bright original spirits of the rising generation; but my reputation shall not suffer; it is built up fast and solid, like Shakespeare’s, on an impregnable basis of dogmatic reiteration.” Like Shakespeare’s! What an irony, for the man who wished to have, not literary prestige “like Shakespeare’s,” but influence like Voltaire’s or Luther’s. “I see there is a tendency, ‘ Shaw said in 1921, “to begin treating me like an archbishop. I fear in that case that I must be becoming a hopeless old twaddler.”

The new “G.B.S.” proved another spirit that could not be exorcised. And the new “G.B.S.” was worse than the old, for fogies have even less influence than iconoclasts. The old critics had at least feared and scorned Shaw. An admirer of the new sort wrote: “But I do not believe that we will thus scorn him or forget him when the irritation of his strictures on events that are close to our hearts or to our pride is removed.” Unfortunately, for Shaw’s purposes, irritation to our hearts and our pride was desirable, while praise for the irritator was neither here nor there. If the undirected rebelliousness of Mencken — whose first book of criticism (1905) was also the first book ever written about Shaw — was only a negative and distorted Shavianism, that is the only sort of Shavianism that has as yet had any currency at all.

The people who have revered Shaw in his later years — revered him as patriarch, as senile prodigy — have not bothered to imbibe any of his teaching. This is best illustrated by the fact that Broadway, though always reluctant to stage anything but a new play, has revived old Shaw plays and made money with them, while his new plays were either left alone or played to half-empty houses. It was not that Shaw’s new plays were so obviously inferior to his old plays. They were in any case much better plays than most of those on Broadway. It was that Shaw was no longer welcome as a living force. He was a Classic — that is, the author of plays old and awesome enough to be innocuous.

When Shaw won popular fame he lost his serious reputation. “The bright and original spirits of the rising generation” repudiated him and passed on. A Nation editorial of October, 1909, already reflects new departures: “The time has come . . . when the insolent Shavian advertising no longer fills us with astonishment or discovery, or disables our judgment from a cool inspection of the wares advertised. The youthful Athenians who darted most impetuously after his novelties are already hankering after some new thing. The deep young souls who looked to him as an evangelist are beginning to see through him and despair.” The occasion of these patronizing remarks was the publication of Chesterton’s brilliant book (still the best) on Shaw, which, despite Chesterton’s avowed dislike of “time snobbery,” was an attempt to make Shaw sound dated.

In 1913, D. H. Lawrence wrote that there ought to be a revolt against the generation of Shaw and Wells. In the same year a young English critic, Dixon Scott, who was soon after to be killed at Gallipoli, interpreted Shaw, in one of the best critical essays of that generation, as essentially a child of London in the eighties. Shortly after the First World War the leading poet of the new generation, T. S. Eliot, was careful to put Shaw in his place as “an Edwardian,” a quaint survivor from before the flood. Several of the clever critics of this clever decade wrote essays to prove Shaw an old fool. Theatrical criticism followed the general trend. The gist of George Jean Nathan’s notices in the twenties and thirties is that Shaw is played out.

When William Archer conferred the title of Grand Old Man, Shaw was not yet seventy. The wheel turned, and lo! an ancient of seventy-five, eighty, eighty-five. Diamond jubilees followed jubilees as the figure rose and rose. This year, when Shaw is ninety, some will laugh with him and some will laugh at him, some will laugh sentimentally and some will laugh superciliously. Few will laugh in the true Shavian fashion — seriously.

I hope some of the main features of Shaw’s career are now clear. To gain an audience he invented a pose. The pose gained him his audience but prevented him from having any influence. The mask of clowning in Shaw’s career has as its counterpoint the mask of clowning, of farce and melodrama, of Kitsch and sheer entertainment, in his plays. Of this second mask a great theatrical critic, Egon Friedell, remarked that it was clever of Shaw so to sugar his pill but that it was even cleverer of the public to lick off the sugar and leave the pill alone. In that battle with his audience which is the main conflict in Shavian drama, in that battle with the public which is the main conflict in everything that Shaw writes or says, the audience, the public, has won. “I have solved practically all the pressing questions of our time,” Shaw says, “ but . . . they keep on being propounded as insoluble just as if I had never existed.”

Up to this point Shaw’s secret is an open one. Shaw’s famous method, his “Shavianism,” by which people mean his pose of arrogance, was a deliberate strategy in an altruistic struggle. As I have suggested, it was precisely because Shaw was so unusually immune from the common frailties of ambition and egoism that he could adopt the manner of the literary exhibitionist without risk to his integrity. His campaign of self-promotion was not the campaign of a clever careerist who decides to secure at once by cunning what he will never secure later by genius. Shaw had artistic genius enough, and knew it, but he was not primarily interested in artistic genius and artistic reputation. He wanted his pen to be his sword in a struggle that was more ethical than aesthetic.

Wishing to change the world, Shaw wished to speak to the public at large, not merely to bis literary confreres. So he put his genius at the service of his moral passion. He knew that he risked sacrificing altogether a high literary reputation (like, say, Henry James’s); and the fact that his name is so often linked with the publicist Wells indicates that, for a time at least, Shaw has forgone that kind of reputation. The arrogant pose was an act of self-sacrifice. Shaw’s modesty was offered up on the altar of a higher purpose. In order to be influential he consented to be notorious.

His failure was double. Willingly he forwent his literary reputation. Unwillingly he had to admit his lack of influence as a thinker. The term ArtistPhilosopher which Shaw coined for himself is perhaps a concealed admission that both as artist and as philosopher he had failed to make his mark.

3

IF THIS were the whole story, Shaw would be no more important than a hundred other men who have abandoned art for “action” or propaganda without making any noticeable dent in the world’s armor. Shaw’s is a more complicated ease. If he is today a sad old man it is not himself that he has found disappointing. His unhappiness is not that of a Citizen Kane finding that success does not bring contentment. It is in us that he is disappointed. It is modern civilization he grieves over. To the man who now proceeds to ask: but is not Shaw one of us? is he not an integral part of modern civilization? one would have to reply: his ideas are indeed typically modern, a synthesis of all our romanticism and realism, our traditionalism and our revolutionism, yet he himself is not one of us. He is further apart from his contemporaries than any other thinker since Nietzsche.

Shaw was born and bred a Protestant in the most, fanatically Catholic city in the world. That indeed is his situation in a nutshell. His home, far from being one of puritanic pressures like Samuel Butler’s, was one of abnormally tepid relationships. From the beginning Shaw was encouraged to be independent. Practically the only thing his education taught him was how to stand alone. His keenest pleasures were those which the imagination could feast on without intrusion from people around him; when he speaks of his voluptuous youth he means he read novels, wandered round an art gallery, reveled in opera and melodrama. Since his schooling was as unlyrannical as his home, he was largely unaffected by it. The first time he felt the pressure of society was when he became a clerk. It was too much for him. He broke with his whole environment by going to seek his fortune in London. If he lived with his mother there, it was only to save money. Mother and son continued to see little of each other.

Shaw entered British society by the Bohemian gate. He never tried to become an established member of the upper, middle, or lower class. He remained “unassimilated.” His first circle of acquaintance consisted largely of musicians, his later circle of writers and actors. Even his journalistic experience did not bring Shaw overmuch into contact with the general run of men. As book reviewer, art, drama, and music critic, he worked at home, at the gallery, the theater, and the concert hall, not at the office. A brief connection with the telephone business convinced Shaw for a second time that he must never try to “earn an honest living.”

From 1882 on, Shaw was a socialist, addressed mass audiences, served on committees, was elected borough councillor, stood as candidate for the London County Council. But how far all this work was from any mingling with the working class, the middle class, or any class except that of intellectuals is clear to anyone who studies the life of Shaw in particular or the history of the Fabian Socialists in general. The Fabian Society should be thought of less as one of the several branches of the British Labor movement than as one of the many societies for intellectuals which abounded in Victorian, and especially Late Victorian, England.

One might almost say that the Fabians were nearer to the Aesthetes than to the trade-unions. Theirs was but another form of Bohemianism. “Instead of velvet jackets and a slap-dash joviality,” as Dixon Scott put it, the young writers of the eighties “took to saeva indignatio and sandals,” to “Jaeger and Ibsen and Esoteric Buddhism.” “They became infidels,” he added, “atheists, anarchists, cosmogonists, vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists, antivaccinationists.” Far from involving Shaw personally in ordinary British society, socialism helped to keep him out of it. And for good. For he married a wealthy Fabian in 1898, and in the twentieth century has barely pretended to be a part of our world at all. At best he descends upon us from his country house at Ayot St. Lawrence like a prophet descending from mountain solitude.

If this version of Shaw’s career seems fanciful, turn to the last page of the preface to Immaturity, the long essay which is the nearest approach to an autobiography that Shaw will ever write. Calling himself “a sojourner on this planet rather than a native of it,” Shaw continues: —

Whether it be that I was born mad or a little too sane, my kingdom was not of this world: I was at home only in the realm of my imagination, and at my ease only with the mighty dead. Therefore I had to become an actor, and create for myself a fantastic personality fit and apt for dealing with men, and adaptable to the various parts I had to play as author, journalist, orator, politician, committeeman, man of the world and so forth. In this I succeeded later on only too well. In my boyhood I saw Charles Mathews act in a farce called Cool as a Cucumber. The hero was a young man just returned from a tour of the world, upon which he had been sent to cure him of an apparently hopeless bashfulness; and the fun lay in the cure having overshot the mark and transformed him into a monster of outrageous impudence. I am not sure that something of the kind did not happen to me; for when my imposture was at last accomplished, and I daily pulled the threads of the puppet who represented me in the public press, the applause that greeted it was not unlike that which Mathews drew in Cool as a Cucumber. .... At the time of which I am writing, however, I had not yet learned to act, nor come to understand that my natural character was impossible on the great London stage. When I had to come out of the realm of imagination into that of actuality I was still uncomfortable. I was outside society, outside politics, outside sport, outside the church. If the term had been invented then I should have been called the Complete Outsider.

Shaw was certainly an outsider. And, as we have seen, the ruse by which he sought to get Inside was by no means successful.

4

AT THIS point Shaw’s career is revealed to us as something more than a picturesque misadventure, and Shaw as something more than a frustrated propagandist or a frustrated man of action. Of course he is a frustrated propagandist to some extent — all preachers are. But he is not a man of action at all. He is an artist, and therefore, whatever his didactic urge, whatever the naturalistic ardor with which he seeks to portray the outer world, he gives expression to his own nature and tells the story of himself. In the art of persuasion one Hitler or one Hearst is worth a thousand Shaws. The fact that Shaw did not descend to the methods of the politician, let alone of the demagogue, would indicate that— in spite of himself—he was not fundamentally a propagandist.

When remarking that the good advice of the Gospels, Dickens, Plato, has never been heeded, Shaw says in the foreword to his Prefaces: “ You may well ask me why, with such examples before me, I took the trouble to write them. I can only reply that I do not know. There was no why about it : I had to: that was all.” A cryptic solution? To those who know their Shaw it is suggestive of other Shavian tenets. Most basic of them is the statement in The Sanity of Art: “We are afraid to look life in the face and see in it, not the fulfilment of a moral law or of the deductions of reason, but. the satisfaction of a passion in us of which we can give no account whatever.” To satisfy passions we do many things because we “have to” — there is “no why about it.” If the passion is a sufficiently high one — according to Shaw, chastity is passion, thought is passion — the action is justified.

Shaw’s passions are high. In the preface to Immaturity, which I have already cited, Shaw refers to himself as an Insider. “The moment music, painting, literature, or science came into question the positions were reversed: it was I who was the Insider. I had the intellectual habit; and my natural combination of critical faculty with literary resource needed only a clear comprehension of life in the light of intelligible theory: in short, a religion, to set it in triumphant operation.”One of the most interesting portraits of Shaw is his own John lanner, the man of ideas who in this world of ours is rightly regarded as even more a gasbag than an iconoclast, but who in the realm of the spirit, as Don Juan Tenorio, is a true master.

Whatever his duties to us, Shaw had his duty to himself. Whatever his function as a deliberate preacher, Shaw also knew himself to be a force that had to act according to the inscrutable laws of its own nature. He was being used — for an unknown purpose — through the agency of a passion “of which we can give no account whatever.” This passion led the man who thought of himself as a propagandist to what looks like the weakest and most unpromising of all propagandist media — the theater. Nor are the plays the most propagandist of plays. As far as the presentation of opinions was concerned, Shaw’s forte is for presenting both sides of a question with equal conviction, an art he brought to such a pitch that some thought his Saint Joan a defense of the Inquisition, while others thought his later political plays a defense of fascism. From beginning to end Shaw’s drama expresses his nature — his apprehension of many-faceted reality — much more than it champions particular doctrines. It even mirrors Shaw’s life rather closely in a series of self-portraits.

5

IT is not of course true, despite Mr. Wells, that all Shaw’s characters are Shaw — at least not in any obvious or important way. Nor can one, as Mr. Laski hints, simply look for a character who talks a lot, who believes in socialism, or creative evolution, and stamp him as Shaw. In Candida, for example, there is actually more of Shaw’s philosophy, more of Shaw’s plight too, in the Pre-Raphaelite poet Marchbanks than in the platform-speaking socialist Morell. These two characters might perhaps be taken as two halves of Shaw’s nature: his outer, glib, and confident half, at once socialist and social, and his spiritual, lonely, and artistic half, the half that puts him beyond the pale of society. Certainly the secret in the poet’s heart is the secret of Shaw the Outsider who is the real Insider, the man who is strong enough to leave the homestead and live with himself and his vision.

In the later plays the two most interesting selfportraits are Captain Shotover in Heartbreak House and King Magnus in The Apple Cart. Both portray Shaw’s role in modern civilization and in England in particular. In Heartbreak House, England is represented as a ship, with no captain, heading for the rocks. In a ship within this ship — a house in which— the only room we see is got up like a ship’s cabin lives Shotover, half lunatic, half sage, an ex-sailor who sold himself to the devil at Zanzibar. He is conducting researches with the aim of discovering a death ray ostensibly “to blow up the human race if it goes too far.”

Actually Shaw borrowed the death ray from a novel bv Bulwer Lytton in order to repeat a fancy he had aired long before in an essay: either we must learn to respect justice as such or acquire the power to kill each other instantaneously by merely thinking. Responsibility (our supreme desideratum according to Shaw) must be attained by whatever method — if not by a passion for justice, then by the passion of fear. It is significant that Shaw does not present Shotover as a noble character but as a senile eccentric. As poignantly as Nietzsche, Shaw recognizes his own limitation. Although Shotover marries a young woman, in sadly ironic recognition of the Shavian union of Artist Man and Creator Woman, he does not discover the death ray any more than England learns to respect justice. The end is chaos and misunderstanding.

The Apple Cart was discussed flat-footedly at the time of its first productions as a play advocating monarchy. This is a misunderstanding. The situation of the play — a king confronting his Labor cabinet — is actually a fantasy which, like all Shavian fantasies, has very concrete implications.

The king is a philosopher-king. In fact he is Shaw (even to his love life, which includes a humdrum wife whom he prefers to a romantic mistress). The problem of the play is not King George versus Ramsay MacDonald but the question: Who knows better what is going on and who is better fitted to cope with it— Bernard Shaw the artist-philosopher or Ramsay MacDonald the prime minister? Their common enemy is Breakages Limited — that is, capitalism, the sinister power, thriving on destruction, which the critics took no notice of because it is not personified on the stage. It lurks in the background. Now just as in Shotover Shaw does not make himself patriarchal, so in Magnus he does not make himself majestic. It is not clear that Magnus could really have won if he had gone to the polls, as he threatened, against the politicians. It is not clear that the philosopher can replace the prime minister. No basic problems are cleared up at the end. We are left with the not very encouraging title of the play.

But perhaps the most complete picture of what I have called “Shaw’s role in modern civilization” was long ago provided in John Bull’s Other Island. As in Man and Superman Shaw represents himself by two characters and, as in Candida, the two Shaws are brought up against a more masterful person, one who really assumes that he — in Candida, it is she—has inherited the earth. In Candida the emphasis is chiefly psychological. In John Bull’s Other Island it is chiefly philosophic, a matter of rival outlooks. The Antagonist is not a charming lady but the Shavian Englishman, the Shavian professional man, the Shavian politician, Broadbent, the two syllables of whose name tell us nearly all we need to know of him. Shaw himself, I think, is part Larry Doyle, part Father Keegan; that is, partly the worldly Irishman whose realism drives him to have his revenge on England by “succeeding” as an Englishman, partly the divinely mad priest who believes (Shaw has been quoting the line ever since) that “every jest is an earnest in the womb of time.”

There is no passage in Shaw that more clearly shows what he is for and what he is against; there is no passage that more openly reveals his estrangement from our world, than this brief encounter between Keegan and Broadbent.:

BROADBENT: I find the world quite good enough for me: rather a jolly place in fact.

KEEGAN: You are satisfied?

BROADBENT: AS a reasonable man, yes. I see no evils in the world — except of course, natural evils — that cannot he remedied by freedom, self-government, and English institutions. I think so, not because I am an Englishman, but as a matter of commonsense.

KEEGAN: You feel at home in the world then?

BROADBENT: Of course. Don’t you?

KEEGAN (from the very depths of his nature): No. BROADBENT: Try phosphorus pills. I always take them when my brain is over-worked. I’ll give you the address in Oxford Street.

At the end of the play, when Larry Doyle again expresses his contempt for dreaming — it is Shaw’s own contempt for illusions, for idealism — and Broadbent tells us he has dreamt of heaven as a dreadful place, “a sort of pale blue satin,” Keegan gives us his dream. It is Shaw’s own ideal, which he hopes is no illusion: —

In my dreams it is a country where the State is the Church and the Church the people: three in one and one in three. It is a commonwealth in which work is play and play is life: three in one and one in three. It is a temple in which the priest is the worshipper and the worshipper the worshipped: three in one and one in three. It is a godhead in which all life is human and all humanity divine: three in one and one in three.

But Father Keegan is obviously even madder than Captain Shotover. He summarizes his own vision: “It is in short the dream of a madman.” To which Shaw’s Englishman retorts: “What a regular old Church and State Tory he is! He’s a character: he’ll be an attraction here. Really almost equal to Ruskin and Carlyle.” To which Shaw’s other half, Larry Doyle, adds: “Yes: and much good they did with ail their talk!”

Shaw’s dream of a better world, his impatience with dreams of a better world, his idealism and his antiidealism, his knowledge of the world of “Englishmen” and his alienation from this world — all these are implicit in the last pages of John Bull’s Other Island. These are not pages of the Bernard Shaw the public knows. They are pages of the man who once wrote haughtily: “My heart knows only its own bitterness.” They are pages of one whom the poet A.E. called a “suffering sensitive soul.”

6

WE ARE now in a position to see what Shaw’s career means over and above the well-attested fact that he wanted to be taken seriously and was not taken seriously. We can see that Shaw is a clear case of misunderstood genius. But, lest the story sound too much like that of the perennial “clown with a broken heart,”we must see also that Shaw never relaxed into self-pity; that his celebrated gayety is precisely a prophylactic against such relaxation; that, alienated as lie was, Shaw made a very special and subtle adjustment. Me turned his alienation to artistic and moral profit. He is one of the very few great modern artists who have not been dismayed by their own estrangement.

Our times suffer from sick conscience, and our geniuses suffer with the times. Modern artists are mainly of two types. The first, to use Flaubert’s figure, wants to vomit at the thought of the horror of our epoch, which it nevertheless looks straight in the eyes. The second looks in the other direction and calls loudly for literary Uplift, Patriotism, and something Wholesome. Shaw belonged to the first group, He vomited, but eventually emerged from the vomitorium with an incredibly optimistic smile on his face. Had he decided to join the second group? No, but he had decided that vomiting did no good, that the facts had to be faced but that they had also to be changed, and that if one is alienated from one’s environment one can recognize the fact and work out a plan of campaign.

Shaw’s older contemporary, Nietzsche, had come to a similar conclusion but had followed up his affirmations of health by losing his reason. Shaw found a happier though in some ways a no less desperate solution: he pretended to have no reason to lose. If modern life was as unreasonable as King Leaf, Shaw would cast himself as the Fool. Trace the word mad through his plays and you will find that the finest characters and the finest actions usually have it applied to them.

Accordingly I do not think Shaw can find a place in the paradise of the middle-brows despite his cheerful and moralistic manner. To be sure, there are subterraneous realms which Shaw never enters, and we cannot find in him what we go to Dostoevsky, Proust, or Kafka for. Yet, like Ibsen, Shaw has had “a strange, fairy-tale fate,” strange because in some ways so close to his age and in others so remote from it, strange because it was so hard for him to communicate. The problem of communication in the arts is never simple; the artist is one who tries to communicate the incommunicable. For the modern artist the problem, I think, is especially acute, and Shaw resorted to some very bizarre shifts. Living in this queer age, he found he had to give the impression that his highest quality — a sort of delicate spirituality, purity, or holiness — was fooling when what he meant was that his fooling was holy. The devil’s advocate was a saint. The clown was a superman.

Unlike Nietzsche, who finished few of his major works, Shaw has been able to give his very remarkable mind full expression. Although the ninety-year campaign of his life has not abolished war or even capitalism, it has at least made us the beneficiaries of some of the best pamphlets and plays in the language. And in them is recorded for all time a great spirit.

I have reiterated the fact that, on his own confession, Shaw has been a failure as a propagandist. I would not say he is a failure as a teacher. (The teacher not only need not be a propagandist; I would say he cannot be a propagandist — defining a teacher as one who helps people to learn, learning being something a man has to do for himself.) John Bull’s Other Island does not solve the Irish problem. It does not, as Mr. Odets’s Waiting for Lefty tried to do, send the audience rushing out to take action. Nor does it present a situation with the merely external truth (“objectivity”) of naturalists like Galsworthy. When Shaw feels the importance of a human situation, he presents it truthfully that is to say, in all its many-sidedness — and with a passionate accuracy that betokens commitment without prejudice. This is teaching. Shaw’s plays are not, though they seem to be, entertainments with propaganda awkwardly added. Their “propaganda” is itself a high art, their art is itself didactic. When they are faulty it is the “entertainment ” that is awkwardly added—added to the art, added to the didacticism, added as a sheer redundancy.

The fact that Shaw really wrote his plays because he “had to” (and not to change the world) was in the end the saving of Shavian drama both as art and as teaching. Writing merely what he had to write, Shaw will leave us a rich legacy. He has obeyed the Life Force, lived out his Destiny, worn the mask of the madman “G.B.S.”without really knowing why. We may learn in time not to despise even the mask, much less Bernard Shaw, as we have learned (I hope not to despise the Bohemian mask of Oscar Wilde and the Diabolical mask of Nietzsche, two other lonely, estranged teachers of our times. The influence of a propagandist may be prodigious, as we learned from the case of Josef Goebbels. But that was not all we learned from the case of Josef Goebbels. The influence of teachers is lamentably small — or the world would not be in its present state. Yet to the extent that we believe that influence negligible we are cynics. To the extent that we find in that influence a solace and a hope we are men.