G.B.S.: 1856-1950

METHUSELAH is dead. In Shaw goes the last of the Victorian prophets, the last of the long line of young beards who became the great, bearded old gentlemen. Yet, in important ways, Shaw had no connection with the igth Century at all. He was really a man of the 18th Century, closer to Voltaire and Swift than to Marx and Morris. The Anglo-Ireland of 1856, when he was born, was an ossified 18th Century society. It was elegant yet genteel; it was ruled by the blistering aristocratic candor and the simple aristocratic naivety; it was naturally irreverent, as aristocratic societies are; it was libertine in word, but preserved the trite, conventional and charming copybook morality of the 18th Century in action. When he died, Shaw was really a hundred years older than his admitted age, as sweet and prim and gentle as anyone out of Goldsmith.

Inside this prosaic moral crust, the Anglo-Irish have always carried a defiant spirit. The high point of the Irish genius is reached in pure, disinterested destructiveness, and of that Shaw was the supreme intellectual embodiment in his time and the eager heir of Swift. It is important to note, however, that this destructiveness is mainly directed at sitting birds; the war of 1914 may have come at an awkward time in Shaw's life as an artist--he was 58--but once the world began to destroy itself, Shaw's destructiveness was outdone, he made crazy and unhappy attempts to outpace it, and as an artist or teacher ceased to have much to say. Assimilated by the middleaged, he had no spell for the young in politics and as an artist he influenced no one. There remained only his reclame, perhaps his most remarkable achievement--his unique stage personality remained sharp, sagacious and dazzling; the delightful vanity of his genius kept the limelight till the last.

Shaw had an inspired instinct for success; innate prudence combined shrewdly with presumption in getting it. Emigration to a duller and richer civilization than his own he saw was the only safe thing for a man who found destructiveness so exhilarating. It was the only sure escape from Irish melancholy and cynicism. In Victorian England, the young Shaw found enough to last him a lifetime. As a middle-class individualist of the highest power, who believed that poverty was a crime, who married a rich and intelligent wife and made a fortune which could be compared with that of any Undershaft, Shaw was an ambiguous socialist: his intellect was totally engaged; his whole life (as Trotsky suspected) was not. The device of the Superman, the super-intellect, the Life Force, was his escape from the determinism of Marx and it coincided with his native, 18th Century taste for despots.

The charm of it all for Shaw himself was that the English always survived his attacks and came back for more. They earned his lasting respect by paying him handsomely for it and then, by turning Fabian as he had urged, diddling him out of his savings and earnings at the rate of 19/6 in the -L-, plus the Death Duties. In Ireland, he might have been reduced to the alcoholism which had frightened him as a child in the life of his father. And there was a second strain of Irish genius which can be developed to a higher pitch outside that country: the role of the stage-Irishman. Whenever that genius has submitted to the discipline of the theater, it has been irresistible. Behind Shaw the dramatist were Goldsmith, Sheridan and Wilde.

THE early danger in Shaw's career was that he would become a dilettante--the famous jaeger suit, the Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, the diabolical twist to the eyebrows and, later on, the dinner jacket into which he changed every evening during the war, when no one wore such a garment, are obdurate vestiges of dandyism. But the shocking London of the '708 was too much for the genteel and moral Irish Protestant, who had worked as an accountant and claimed to be kin to a baronet. He heard the Biblical and warlike voice of Marx. Its despotic sound, its subversiveness, its talk of the continuous war of classes, its protest against poverty, the passion of its economics, lastingly moved Shaw, for he was poor, came from an oppressed nation, had lost his religious faith, and was in need of a weapon and a role.

The great Irish evil, which all Irishmen fear, is romanticism; Shaw's conversion was real enough, but common sense, sanity, shrewdness, the practical were the Shavian aims. He was neither a visionary nor a crank; but rather, in the manner of Swift--though far more successful in his mission to the English--a negotiator. By eloquent attack, irony, laughter, bounce, by the intrigue of words and a wit that cut everything to ribbons, in a prose so clear, fast and pure that it was like a charmer's music to the snake, Shaw hypnotized England. People became Socialists without knowing it even while they were denouncing Shaw as a mountebank and a playboy. Trotsky lamented that Shaw was a good man fallen among Fabians. But Shaw knew his Englishman and loved him, as the stinging fly loves the thick hide it farsightedly chooses as a safe home for its eggs.

What Trotsky really lamented was that Shaw was not a crusader or a fanatic. Others have complained that he was neither a philosopher nor a political thinker of any substance. Shaw's great vanity as an artist--and he was an artist above all--enabled him to agree with double-edged modesty with his critics. He often spoke, truly, of his poor education. He observed with real humility the learning and the passion of the Webbs, whom he worshipped. It was a kind of modesty when he boasted of his brilliance and genius; because (if it can be put this way) brilliance and genius were all he had. And he knew their nature: he had the penetrating comic genius. He was expert, as the comic genius is, in absurd juxtapositions and non sequiturs. His prose is made of sentences which have less and less to do with the preceding ones; each is a fresh beginning, fresh with new, vivid effrontery and traveling away from the point, like the words of an incurable but dazzling talker who is intoxicated by his own flow.

The result is that the reader or audience sooner or later falls into the boredom of the overstimulated. If Arms and the Man, Candida, The Man of Destiny, John Bull's Other Island, Major Barbara, Pygmalion and possibly You Never Can Tell are excepted, the law of diminishing returns begins to work halfway through his plays. There are wonderful moments in Man and Superman and St. Joan, but comedy, or in the last case, tragedy, degenerate into the longueurs of debate; farce becomes crude. Devastating in his ability to talk on both sides of the question and to cap or sink his own arguments, Shaw damps us because he talks his way back to the status quo, and leaves the impression that all he has had to say has only verbal importance. We are back where we started.

THE failure in feeling was noticed by the earliest critics of Shaw. William Archer said of his characters that instead of blood "a kind of sour whey" flowed in their veins. The fact is that anger and indignation--the most intellectual of our emotions--were alone portrayed successfully; the laughing anger of Shaw must be compared to Voltaire's. The brief poetical passages in John Bull's Other Island are the poorest sentimentality; even the saintly figure of Father Keegan in that play occasionally arouses shyness. In St. Joan the pathos is commonplace and the mysticism embarrassing. Shaw hardly goes deeper than the sentiment--pure though it is with the curious Irish purity--of the philanderer; and philanderers of either sex make the mistake of crediting the opposite sex with their own characteristics. Shaw's lovers do not test each other's hearts, but only their wills. They are adroit in the campaigns worked up by the mental affections; they are trained in that military sense of love one sees also in Sheridan, in seeking out the strategy of character. There is no hate in this love and no fear either; it is neutral.

All this was a brilliant device for dramatizing feminism and the new women--one might say Shaw emancipated women and Wells emancipated men--but the emancipation soon appeared to cover a superficial part of life; the doctrine was to lead to a serious nutritional deficiency when he described the spiritual passions, as in St. Joan and in his religious theorizings. On these he is as dry and flat as a biscuit.

Chesterton accused Shaw of the gloom of a general Puritanism, and this naturally rankled. The weakness of the Puritan, especially of the Shavian kind, is his dangerous levity and cheerfulness, the merry, practical streak which evades the ungovernable tumult of feeling. The theory that the Life Force was driving on and on was felt by his audiences to be an escape from the crucifying emotional matter of the gains and losses. One more dazzling Irishman had talked himself out of life into the heavens like a whizzing rocket and had come down dead and extinct like the stick. One more superbly agile lizard had lived off its own tail, consumed itself and come back to exactly what it was before.

Exasperated critics frequently took the failure of feeling further and said that Shaw's characters were unreal, that they were no more than walking arguments. This is a half-truth, though it is a fact that Shaw did not believe in character for its own sake. Few Victorian writers did. His eye for the middle-class milieu was perfect. He knew exactly the values beneath the humbug and was only rash in assuming that men and women can live without it. Candida is an excellent portrait of a woman and so is the delightful Major Barbara. The theater, and comedy above all, has always dealt in types; the sentimental Englishman and the disillusioned Irishman in John Bull's Other Island are brilliantly observed. The political characters in St. Joan are a triumph of irreverent dialectic and penetrating understanding.

The economic view was as rewarding an approach to the anatomy of character itself as the now fashionable psychological approach. His young men have the assertiveness of youth itself, their vanity is perfect. His masterful or stupid middle-aged women are a special excellence, and so are his pompous fathers. Undershaft is convincing as a human being. A very vain man, Shaw was a connoisseur of vanities and his collection is not wounding or disheartening--as it is, say, in smaller writers like Maugham--largely because Shaw is warmed by the fire of a natural affinity. Only a clumsiness of plot--Shaw was not a natural plot-maker, but a reckless piler on of the grotesque for satirical reasons--distorts the focus in which character is seen. The clear failures are his Cockneys; they are a Dubliner's caricatures of a character too subtle for him.

IN his public career Shaw continued the art of saying the last word, which was his making as a supreme pamphleteer.

As a music critic his levity maddened and refreshed. In dramatic criticism he was more solid, went down to fundamentals, and this part of his work, dense with experience, is bound to survive, however fashion affects the plays.

The 1914 war was a profound shock to Shaw's comic genius and his optimism. Heartbreak House appeared to many as a confusion. The disillusion with the failures of the Labor government, in which the Webbs and many of his Fabian friends served, turned Shaw back to his own inherited responses. The old 18th Century taste for autocrats revived. So Mussolini was admired, Hitler was given a hand and Stalin was exalted. Their virtue was that they were practical. Shaw appeared to agree with the scientists that what succeeds is good and he had been careful, as a Marxist, to say that capitalism had been good in the days when it succeeded. Failure, like poverty, had always been the Shavian crime. The only failure he seems to have been proud of was his own failure to earn more than -L-6 by novels and casual writing before he was 40. To the hostile, Shaw's trotting to Moscow and his defense of tyrants seemed a mixture of cynicism, contemptible prudence, and an old mountebank's determination to keep in the limelight; a degeneration from the noble pages of The Intelligent Woman's Guide.

More virtuous than Voltaire--he was the good man's Voltaire--Shaw was no more free than the Frenchman from the irresponsibility of a chaotically lucid mind which changed the focus too fast for his own eye. The age of Swift, to which Shaw historically and spiritually belonged, believed in authority; it believed that the moral was the practical; it was worldly, though without huge wealth; it believed in the beatitude of the conventional. It managed to believe in these things and at the same time to preach revolution in the name of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Victorian practicality meant the practical man's ruthless advantage; Shaw's was the older practicality of a fundamental fairness and goodness. Romanticism made him believe that autocrats could distribute this. He believed, like Wells, like everyone who matured before 1914, in the superior person. Shaw romantically imagined in his heart that the new despots, like the old, had both the good sense and the sense of honor of the old kind of gentleman. But those died with the machine.

IT has been truly said that Shaw's anger never made enemies. Irish evasiveness, sociability and energy made him wish resolutely to cut the best figure on the thinnest ice. He kept up his stage role to the last. He was sometimes petulant in the publicity he delighted in. His great age was his last great turn, which could hardly conceal an appalling loneliness. All his contemporaries were dead. His wife had gone. He recognized how poor his contacts with human beings were, now he was without intermediaries. He was, in a sense, unhuman. He depended on servants whom he hardly knew. He came close at times to that terrible condition of the old in contemporary England, who discover that there is no one to depend on and for whom the mere mechanics of living have become tragically difficult. At the illness of a servant during the blitz, he and his sick wife had been obliged to leave the famous, ugly old Rectory at Ayot St. Lawrence and live among the bombs in London.

He was not friendless, but he was manifestly apart from his friends, a lonely figure with bright eyes and ceaseless tongue, going for walks. The handwriting was still firm and bold and beautifully formed on the famous postcards; the soft and beautiful voice was still firm and ready when he spoke on the telephone. His mind was still large and showed only the normal sense of persecution felt by those in contemporary England who have been relieved of so much of their property by the State. With the shrewdness of an afflicted banker he protested against the threat of capital levy. Like Samuel Butler he had a profound respect for capital.

The brain still worked fast and though frail the body was resistant. Only his legs weakened. His laughter still rescued him from the melancholy of his race. He ended as a testimonial to the value of his famous quirks: teetotalism, vegetarianism, his theories about health and hygiene. He ended as a kind of saint of prudence, a saint known for his good sense rather than his sufferings, for his chronically topsy-turvy advice rather than his visions. He became the Gandhi of economics.

The vein of compromise, the failure to carry anger" for very long, the tendency to become too clever for wrath, weakens him when he is compared with Swift. Compared with Voltaire's, his imagination is drier, lacks picture and lacks nature too. A kind of middle-class gentility preserved him from the great disgusts, the unspeakable horrors which greater imaginations could grasp. The prose is, however, a superb vehicle for the pamphleteer and any page of it is a model of the art of conducting unfair arguments. He was a highly original artist and the art lay in the transmuting of disruptive debate into a kind of classical Mozartian music. The plays date most seriously when they are debates, yet the verbal wit is perennially irresistible. There is no writer who so conspicuously and largely holds the whole social and political and intellectual life of a long, rich period of heresy and revolt in his hands, a revolt against everything from marriage to God--and back.

From William Morris until the dictators, he holds everything. The England which gave him little recognition until he was known on the Continent and in America--which for years he refused to visit--has dropped him again; even the revolutions of the last 30 years have been made by war, not by Shavian gradualism, even in England. But he was the indefatigable showman at the door for more than half a century who, until the wars came, stole the show. It was war which established the final Fabian victory.

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