CHAPTER III
As a young man of twenty-four, Bernard Shaw began to evolve a moral code. He perceived in those phases of contemporary existence which either intimately touched his life or daily challenged his critical scrutiny, a shocking discrepancy between things as they are and things as they should be. He has never been a “whole hogger,” like Pope or Omar Khayyam: he neither believed that whatever is is right nor wished to shatter this sorry scheme of things entire. The arch-foe of idealism, he paradoxically prefaced his attack by hoisting the banner of an ideal. Shaw has spent more than a quarter of a century in formulating his ideal, in attempting to concretize his individual code into a universal ethical system.
Let us not fall into the crass error of supposing that Shaw has never come under the spell of the fascination of idealism and romance. Shaw the realist paid his toll to Romance before the moral passion ever dawned upon his soul. Just as Zola always bore the brand of Hugo, just as Ibsen worked his way through romance to real life, so Shaw found his feet in realism only after tripping several times over the novels of a romantic imagination. Shaw's novels are the products of a riotous and fanciful imagination, if not, as he dubs them, the compounds of ignorance and intuition. In a celebrated discussion with Mr. W. H. Mallock, we have Shaw's frank confession:
“We are both novelists, privileged as such to make fancy pictures of Society and individuals, and to circulate them as narratives of things that have actually been; and the critics will gravely find fault with our fictitious law, or our fictitious history, or our fictitious psychology, if we depart therein from perfect verisimilitude. Why have we this extraordinary privilege? Because, I submit, we are both natural-born tellers of the thing that is not. Not, observe, vulgar impostors who lie for motives of gain, to extort alms, to conceal or excuse discreditable facts in our history, to glorify ourselves, to facilitate the sale of a horse, or to avoid unpleasantness. All humanity lies like that, more or less. But Mr. Mallock and I belong to those who lie for the sheer love of lying, who forsake everything else for it, who put into it laborious extra touches of art for which there is no extra pay, whose whole life, if it were looked into closely enough, would be found to have been spent more in the world of fiction than of reality.”[24]
Shaw has somewhere placed on record his boast that such insight as he had in criticism was due to the fact that he exhausted romanticism before he was ten years old. “Your popular novelists,” he contemptuously declared, “are now gravely writing the stories I told to myself before I replaced my first set of teeth. Some day I will try to found a genuine psychology of fiction by writing down the history of my imagined life, duels, battles, love-affairs with queens and all. They say that man in embryo is successively a fish, a bird, a mammal, and so on, before he develops into a man. Well, popular novel-writing is the fish stage of your Jonathan Swift. I have never been so dishonest as to sneer at our popular novelists. I once went on like that myself. Why does the imaginative man always end by writing comedy if only he has also a sense of reality? Clearly because of the stupendous irony of the contrast between his imaginary adventures and his real circumstances and powers. At night, a conquering hero, an Admirable Crichton, a Don Juan; by day, a cowardly little brat cuffed by his nurse for stealing lumps of sugar.... My real name,” he added, “is Alnaschar.”[25]
As a matter of fact, Shaw has anticipated his exhaustion of romanticism by some seventeen years. It was not until he finished the novels of his nonage that he could justly boast of having “worked off” that romanticism which always appears to be latent in every creative imagination in the stage of incipiency. Remember what Stevenson wrote to William Archer of Cashel Byron's Profession:
“As a whole, it is (of course) a fever dream of the most feverish.... It is all mad, mad and deliriously delightful; the author has a taste in chivalry like Walter Scott's or Dumas's, and then he daubs in little bits of Socialism; he soars away on the wings of the romantic griffon—even the griffon, as he cleaves air, shouting with laughter at the nature of the quest—and I believe in his heart he thinks he is labouring in a quarry of solid granite realism.
“It is this that makes me—the most hardened adviser now extant—stand back and hold my peace. If Mr. Shaw is below five-and-twenty, let him go his path; if he is thirty, he had best be told that he is a romantic, and pursue romance with his eyes open; perhaps he knows it; God knows!—my brain is softened.”[26]
It is all very well for Shaw to say that he used Bizet's Carmen as a safety valve for his romantic impulses. But the testimony of his own novels flatly contradicts his complacent assertion that he was romantic enough to have come to the end of romance before he began to create in art for himself.
These novels, in spite of their youthful romanticism, nevertheless constitute the record of the adventures of an earnest and anarchic young man, with a knack of keen observation and terse portraiture, striving to give voice to and interpret the spirit of the century. When someone, in 1892, suggested that Shaw was, of course, a follower of Ibsen, Shaw replied with a great show of indignation: “What! I a follower of Ibsen! My good sir, as far as England is concerned, Ibsen is a follower of mine. In 1880, when I was only twenty-four, I wrote a book called 'The Irrational Knot,' which reads nowadays like an Ibsenite novel.” And in the postscript to the preface to the new edition of that novel, after having declared with familiar Shavian wiliness in the preface that he “couldn't stand” his own book, he makes a sudden bouleversement as follows: “Since writing the above I have looked through the proof-sheets of this book, and found, with some access of respect for my youth, that it is a fiction of the first order.... It is one of those fictions in which the morality is original and not ready-made.... I seriously suggest that 'The Irrational Knot' may be regarded as an early attempt on the part of the life force to write 'A Doll's House' in English by the instrumentality of a very immature writer aged twenty-four. And though I say it that should not, the choice was not such a bad shot for a stupid instinctive force that has to work and become conscious of itself by means of human brains.”
With all its immaturity, The Irrational Knot is undoubtedly in the “tone of our time.” It is the ill-chosen title, however, rather than the contents which recalls Nora and Torvald. The institution of marriage is not shown to be irrational; Shaw's shafts were aimed at the code of social morality which renders marriages such as the one described inevitable failures. Shaw not only seeks to expose the fatal inconsistencies of this social code, but also damns the feeble shams with which Society attempts to bolster up those inconsistencies.
Endowed with much of the bluntness of Bluntschli, but with an added sensitiveness, the “hero” of this novel may be described as the crude and repellent prototype of the later Shavian males. Believing more in force than in savoir faire, in brutal sincerity than in conventional graces, Conolly stands out for literal truth and violent tactlessness as against social propriety and observance of les convenances. He is acting with perfect validity to himself when he says, in answer to the question as to what he is going to do about his wife's elopement with a former lover: “Eat my supper. I am as hungry as a bear.” After Marian's desertion by her lover, Conolly urges her to return to him, assuring her that now she is just the wife he wants, since she is at last rid of “fashionable society, of her family, her position, her principles, and all the rest of her chains for ever.” Marian refuses, because she cannot “respect herself for breaking loose from what is called her duty.” Their definitive words epitomize the failure of their life together.
“'You are too wise, Ned,' she said, suffering him to replace her gently in the chair.
“'It is impossible to be too wise, dearest,' he said, and unhesitatingly turned and left her.”
The subjects which inspired Shaw's maturer genius are the same subjects which so actively, if crudely and imperfectly, struggle for expression in this early work. Much acuteness is exhibited by the young man of twenty-four in spying out the weak points in the armour of “that corporate knave, Society.” When the “high-bred” wife of the “self-made” man elopes with a “gentleman,” Society's dismay is only feigned. Like Roebuck Ramsden, Marian's relatives are quite willing to forgive, and even to thank, the cur if he will only marry her: by ousting a rank outsider like Conolly, Douglas appears to Society almost in the light of a champion of its cause. Shaw was too close an observer of life, even at twenty-four, to attempt to make out a case against matrimony by celebrating the success of an unblessed union. His point is turned against Society, less for upholding traditional morality than for making the preservation of its class distinctions its highest laws. Society is ready enough to forgive Douglas; but Marmaduke Lind, in setting up an unblessed union with Conolly's sister, Mademoiselle Lalage Virtue, of the Bijou Theatre, places himself beyond the pale. For she is socially “impossible”; and, consequently, there can be no relenting towards Marmaduke until he return, and, in the odour of sanctity and respectability, marry Lady Constance Carberry!
The Irrational Knot cannot be called novel on account of its rather commonplace thought that “a girl who lives in Belgravia ought not to marry with a man who is familiar with the Mile End Road.” But as Mr. W. L. Courtney suggestively remarks: “What is novel is the illustration, in clever and mordant fashion, of the absurd folly and wastefulness of social conditions which obstinately make intelligence subservient to aristocratic prestige. Even in our much-abused country there is, and has been for a long time, a career open for talent; but the aspiring male must not encumber himself by taking a partner out of ranks to which he does not belong. Thus, 'The Irrational Knot' is nothing more nor less than an early tract in defence of Socialism or Communism, or whatever other term should be applied to theories which seek to equalize the chances and opportunities of human beings.” In The Irrational Knot are found the marks of that individual mode of observing and reflecting life, which is popularly denominated “Shavian.” Here is the first clear testimony to that rationalistic mood in Shaw which permeates so much of his subsequent work. And yet this book contains intimations of that deeper philosophy of life which conceives of rationality merely as an instrumentality for carrying out its designs. This knot is irrational only because it is too rational. Marian shrinks from reconcilement with Conolly: she cannot breathe in the icy atmosphere of his rationalistic cocksureness. Conolly expresses Shaw's fundamental protestantism in his assertion that Marian's ill-considered flight with Douglas was the first sensible action of her whole life. It was admirable in his eyes because it was her first vigorous assertion of will, of vital purpose. The human being can and will find freedom only in overriding convention, repudiating “duty,” and solving every problem in terms of its own factors. The book, indeed, is marked less by immaturity of thought than by crudeness of execution. The characters are deficient in the flexibility and pliancy of human beings, and the book lacks suggestion of “the slow, irregular rhythm of life,” of which Henry James somewhere speaks. To Shaw, the depiction of Conolly was evidently a labour of love; and, consequently, we have an execution of force, if not always of convincing veracity. Elinor McQuinch, shrewd, sharp-tongued, acid—the familiar advocatus diaboli, and Shaw in petticoats of the later Shavian drama—is delightfully refreshing in her piquancy, and truly Ibsenic in her determination to “be herself.” The nascent dramatist often speaks out in this book—note the melodramatic Lalage Virtue—but nowhere more characteristically than in the trenchant deliverance of the justly-vexed Elinor:
Facsimile (reduced) of first and last pages of the original manuscript of Love Among the Artists.
Courtesy of Mr. D. J. Rider.
“Henceforth Uncle Reginald is welcome to my heartiest detestation. I have been waiting ever since I knew him for an excuse to hate him; and now he has given me one. He has taken part—like a true parent—against you with a self-intoxicated young fool whom he ought to have put out of the house. He has told me to mind my own business. I shall be even with him for that some day. I am as vindictive as an elephant: I hate people who are not vindictive; they are never grateful either, only incapable of any enduring sentiment.... I am thoroughly well satisfied with myself altogether; at last I have come out of a scene without having forgotten the right thing to say!”
Imagination lingers fondly, as Mr. Hubert Bland once remarked, over the spectacle of Elinor standing in the middle of the stage, three-quarters face to the audience, and firing off those acute generalizations about people who are not vindictive. Shaw's cleverness has begun thus early to betray him; a number of the characters are smart, but quite unnatural. The “Literary Great-grandfather” of the present Shaw unerringly pointed out many of the weak spots of Society; but his fundamental Socialism, impatient of class distinctions and social barriers, leads him occasionally into crude caricature. The book's greatest fault lies, perhaps, in the fact that his characters employ, not the natural, ductile speech of to-day, but the stilted diction of Dumas and Scott.
Commonplace as is the characterization, Shaw's next novel, Love Among the Artists, is a tract—less a novel than a critical essay with a purpose, in narrative form. Shaw confesses that he wrote this book for the purpose of illustrating “the difference between that enthusiasm for the fine arts which people gather from reading about them, and the genuine artistic faculty which cannot help creating, interpreting, or, at least, unaffectedly enjoying music and pictures.”
I have often wondered if it might not be possible for one who did not know Shaw personally to construct a quite credible biography by making a composite of the peculiarly Shavian types presented in his novels and plays. Without carrying the analogy to extremes, I think it mediately true that Shaw has one by one exhibited, in semi-autobiographic form, the distinguishing hall-marks of his individual and many-sided character. To what extent Owen Jack is a projection of the Shaw of this period, how graphically, if unconsciously, Shaw has revealed in this droll original his own ideals of music and his defence of a certain impudently exasperating assertiveness of manner in himself, is difficult to decide. Shaw insists that Jack is partly founded on Beethoven. And yet there is an undoubted resemblance between the real Irishman and the imagined Welshman who plays the Hyde of Jack to the Jekyll of Shaw. Like “C. di B.” and G. B. S., Jack is the first of the “privileged lunatics.” He scorns the pedantry of the schools, sneers at mechanical music of academic origin, jibes at “analytic criticism,” and fiercely denounces the antiquated views of the musical organizations of England, with their old fogeyism, their cowardice in the face of novelty, their dread of innovation, and their cringing subservience to obsolescent and outworn models. Like Shaw, Jack is always tolerant of sincerity, always sympathetic with true effort, unrestrainedly enthusiastic over any vital outpouring of the creative spirit; rebuking tyranny wherever he sees it, exposing falsehood whenever he hears it, eternally vigilant in exposing frauds and unmasking shams. And yet, with all his offensive brusqueness, fierce intolerance, and colossal self-sufficiency, gentle-hearted, compassionate, and, in the presence of beauty, deeply humble.
Shaw once called Love Among the Artists a novel with a purpose. Viewed from another standpoint, it is a collection of types, a study in temperaments. The author preaches the arrogance of genius as opposed to a false humility in the presence of great art works. The shallow artist, Adrian Herbert, “spends whole days in explaining to you what a man of genius is and feels, knowing neither the one nor the other”; Mary Sutherland never surpasses mediocrity as an artist because her knowledge is based upon hearsay instead of upon experience. She stands in sharp contrast to Madge Brailsford, who tersely puts her case to Mary—the case, one might say, of the whole book—“If you don't like your own pictures, depend upon it no one else will. I am going to be an actress because I think I can act. You are going to be a painter because you think you can't paint.” Mr. Huneker declares that Mary Sutherland, “lymphatically selfish and utterly unsympathetic,” is his prime favourite in the story. “Her taste in flaring colours, her feet, her habit of breathing heavily when aroused emotionally, her cowardices, her artistic failures, her eye-glasses, her treacly sentiment—what a study of the tribe artistic! And truly British withal.” The only other noteworthy figure in the book is the evasive, elusive Mademoiselle Szczympliça—a study searching in the closeness and delicacy of its observation. This charming and piquant Polish pianist, although emanating poetry and romance, has, as she puts it, the “soul commercial” within her. She cannot see why, even if she does love her husband, she should therefore dispense with her piano practice!
Unlike the classic model for a play, this novel has neither beginning, middle, nor ending; and yet it has many brilliantly executed scenes. Who could ever forget the street fight in Paris, the humorous “love-scene” between Madge Brailsford and Owen Jack, and the rehearsal, so acute in its satire—fitting companion-piece to the Wagner lecture in Cashel Byron's Profession?
It is noteworthy that Love Among the Artists heralds a favourite thesis of Shaw's—the natural antipathy between blood relations—a thesis expounded many years later by John Tanner in the rather leaden epigram “I suspect that the tables of consanguinity have a natural basis in a natural repugnance.” Cashel Byron is always catching himself in the act of “shying” when his mother is around—she used to throw things at him when he was a boy! Blanche Sartorius is quite ready to hate her father at a moment's notice; no love is lost between Julia and Colonel Craven; Vivie Warren stands out determinedly against her mother's authority; and Frank, with nauseating levity, takes great delight in “jollying” his reprobate father upon the indiscretions of his youth. Phil and Dolly are breezily disrespectful of parental rule; and Anne uses her maudlin mother as an excuse to do just whatever she wants. The thesis is part of Shaw's stock-in-trade, and might be regarded as a mere comic motif, were it not for the “damnable iteration” of the thing. Adrian Herbert avows his positive dislike for his mother, because, as he affirms, their natures are antagonistic, their views of life and duty incompatible—because they have nothing in common. We must take Shaw's insistence upon incompatibility of temperament between blood-relations with a good many grains of salt. It is not even half true that every mother tries to defeat every cherished project of her sons “by sarcasms, by threats, and, failing these, by cajolery”; that everyone's childhood has been “embittered by the dislike of his mother and the ill-temper of his father”; that every man's wife soon ceases to care for him and that he soon tires of her; that every man's brother goes to law with him over the division of the family property; and that every man's son acts in studied defiance of his plans and wishes. These things are only true enough to be funny; just enough of them happen in real life to give Shaw's thesis a sort of comic plausibility. It is the phrases, “love is eternal,” and “blood is thicker than water,” rather than the facts themselves, which make the iconoclastic Shaw see red. I find some explanation of his view in pardonable revolt, as a dramatist, against that persistent superstition of French melodrama—the voix du sang. Some explanation of Shaw's views in the matter may possibly be found in the facts of his own personal experience; at any rate, he once said that the word education brought to his mind four successive schools where his parents got him out of the way for half a day. Indeed, his campaign against the modern system of education springs from his recently expressed disgust with educators for concealing the fact that “the real object of that system is to relieve parents from the insufferable company and anxious care of their children.” Continuing in the same strain, he says:
“Until it is frankly recognized that children are nuisances to adults except at playful moments, and that the first social need that arises from the necessary existence of children in a community is that there should be some adequate defence of the comparative quiet and order of adult life against the comparative noise, racket, untidiness, inquisitiveness, restlessness, fitfulness, shiftlessness, dirt, destruction and mischief, which are healthy and natural for children, and which are no reason for denying them the personal respect without which their characters cannot grow and set properly, we shall have the present pretence of inexhaustible parental tenderness, moulding of character, inculcation of principles, and so forth, to cloak the imprisoning, drilling, punishing, tormenting, brigading, boy and girl farming, which saves those who can afford it from having to scream ten times every hour, 'Stop that noise, Tommy, or I'll clout your head for you.'”[27]
With gradual, yet unhalting steps, Shaw works his way to those startling and topsy-turvy theories which are so delightfully credible to the intellectuels and so bewilderingly exasperating to the Philistines. In Love Among the Artists, Madge Brailsford's open avowal to Owen Jack of her love for him gives a hint that the theory of woman as the huntress and man as the quarry is upon us. But quite the contrary course is taken in Cashel Byron's Profession, Shaw's next novel. Cashel Byron, the perfect pugilist, fights his way into the good graces of the “high-born” heiress, Lydia Carew, by the straight exhibition of his physical prowess. The whole book is conceived in such broadly satirical vein that it is impossible for me to accept it as anything except a boyishly irrepressible pasquinade. Fortunately, the “little bits of Socialism that were daubed in” here and there at first, were afterwards deleted; the current version is a novel, pure and simple, with no discoverable Socialistic thesis behind it. Shaw's explanation that the book was written as an offset to the “abominable vein of retaliatory violence” that runs all through the literature of the nineteenth century need not detain us here; Shaw has made out his own case with sufficiently paradoxical cleverness in the inevitable preface. He spends one-half of his time in explaining his actions during the other half; and it has even been unkindly hinted that each new book of his serves merely as an excuse for writing another preface. And it should be remembered that the preface to Cashel Byron's Profession was written some eighteen years later than was the book itself—ample time for Shaw to devise any excuse for representing his book as a deliberate challenge to British ideals. Suffice it to say that a comparison of Cashel Byron's Profession with Rodney Stone, for example, will make plain the distinction between the realism and the romance of pugilism. And while Byron's exhibitions of physical prowess are the most “howlingly funny” incidents in the book, it is nevertheless true that Shaw has done nothing to surround the “noble art of sluggerei” with any halo of fictitious romance.[28] “Its novelty,” as Shaw himself maintains, “consists in the fact that an attempt is made to treat the art of punching seriously, and to detach it from the general elevation of moral character with which the ordinary novelist persists in associating it.”
The real novelty, and, indeed, the chief charm, of the book consists rather in the fact that no attempt is made to treat anything seriously. So far as the prize-ring is concerned, the book's realism is veracious; the rest is the frankest of popular melodrama. What appeals more strongly to the popular heart than a low-born but invincible slugger fighting his way, round after round, to the side of a noble and fabulously wealthy heroine! What more oracularly Adelphic in its melodrama than the “finger of fate” upon the “long arm of coincidence” directing Cashel's mother to the mansion of Miss Lydia Carew! And what an exquisite fulfilment of poetic justice—the ultimate discovery that Cashel is a scion of one of the oldest county families in England, and heir to a great estate! The thing that makes the book go, of course, is its peculiarly Shavian cast—the combination of what Stevenson called “struggling, overlaid original talent” and “blooming gaseous folly.” Shaw's sense of dramatic situation continually foreshadows the future playwright. The abounding humour of the exquisitely ludicrous scene at the reception—the devastating comicality of the brute, with his native “mother-wit,” turned rough-and-ready philosopher! When Cashel is set down in the midst of this ethical-artistic circle, he breezily excels all the professors—for he discusses art positively, in the terminology of his own profession, in which he is a past master. The sublime hardihood of elucidating Beethoven and Wagner in terms of the pugilistic art of Jack Randall! And Bashville, over whom Stevenson howled with derision and delight, what a brief for democratic Socialism is Bashville—prototype for the Admirable Crichton and 'Enry Straker—keenly conscious of his own absurdity, yet zealously standing out in defence of his mistress and in insistence upon the truly democratic doctrine of “equal rights for all, special privileges for none.” Who cannot sympathize with Stevenson: “I dote on Bashville—I could read of him for ever; de Bashville je suis le fervent—there is only one Bashville, and I am his devoted slave; Bashville est magnifique, mais il n'est guère possible.” Or when he says: “Bashville—O Bashville! j'en chortle (which is finely polyglot).” Service is as sacred to Bashville as pugilism is to Cashel. Each is the “ideal” professional man, who magnifies his office and measures up to the height of his own profession. Each demands recognition for fulfilling to the best of his ability his own special function in life. Shaw insists that the real worth of a man is not to be measured by the social standing of his profession, but in terms of his professional efficiency.
Shaw's mastery of the portrayal of striking contrasts is exhibited in the case of Cashel Byron and Lydia Carew. There is a strong hint of the “female Yahoo” in Lydia's avowal to her aristocratic suitor: “I practically believe in the doctrine of heredity; and as my body is frail and my brain morbidly active, I think my impulse towards a man strong in body and untroubled in mind is a trustworthy one. You can understand that; it is a plain proposition in eugenics.” This was fun to Stevenson—but “horrid fun.” His postscript is laconically eloquent: “(I say, Archer, my God! what women!)” William Morris seems to have had the rights in the matter in describing Lydia, to Shaw privately, as a “prig-ess.” Shaw grandiloquently speaks of her as “superhuman all through,” a “working model” of an “improved type” of womanhood. “Let me not deny, however ...,” he remarks, “that a post-mortem examination by a capable critical anatomist—probably my biographer—will reveal the fact that her inside is full of wheels and springs.” The book closes on a mildly Shavian note—the romance has dwindled to banality. “Cashel's admiration for his wife survived the ardour of his first love for her; and her habitual forethought saved her from disappointing his reliance on her judgment.”
All that was needed to expose the threadbare plot of Cashel Byron's Profession was The Admirable Bashville: or Constancy Unrewarded—Shaw's blank-verse stage version of the novel. This delightful jest was perpetrated in defence of the stage-right of the novel, which threatened to pass into unworthy hands through the malign workings of that “foolish anomaly,” the English Copyright Law. In Shaw's celebrated lecture on Shakespeare, at Kensington Town Hall, section 10, as given in his abstract, reads as follows:
“That to anyone with the requisite ear and command of words, blank verse, written under the amazingly loose conditions which Shakespeare claimed, with full liberty to use all sorts of words, colloquial, technical, rhetorical, and obscurely technical, to indulge in the most far-fetched ellipses, and to impress ignorant people with every possible extremity of fantasy and affectation, is the easiest of all known modes of literary expression, and that this is why whole oceans of dull bombast and drivel have been emptied on the heads of England since Shakespeare's time in this form by people who could not have written Box and Cox to save their lives. Also (this on being challenged) that I can write blank verse myself more swiftly than prose, and that, too, of full Elizabethan quality plus the Shakespearian sense of the absurdity of it as expressed in the lines of Antient Pistol. What is more, that I have done it, published it, and had it performed on the stage with huge applause.”[29]
Liking the “melodious sing-song, the clear, simple, one-line and two-line sayings, and the occasional rhymed tags, like the half-closes in an eighteenth-century symphony, in Peele, Kid, Greene, and the histories of Shakespeare,” Shaw quite naturally “poetasted The Admirable Bashville in the rigmarole style.” After illustrating how unspeakably bad Shakespearean blank verse is, Shaw ludicrously claims that his own is “just as good.” Nor is it possible to deny that his own blank verse positively scintillates with the Shakespearean—or is it Shavian?—sense of its absurdity. The preface to The Admirable Bashville has the genuine Shavian timbre, with its solemn fooling, its portentous levity, its false premises and ludicrous conclusions. In that preface, as Mr. Archer puts it, Shaw “defends the woodenness of his blank verse by arguing that wooden blank verse is the best. That, at any rate, is the gist of his contention, though he does not put it in just that way.”
The play—for despite Shaw's prefaces, the play's the thing—is a truly admirable burlesque of rhetorical drama. Not Bashville, but Cashel only is admirable; it is Cashel's constancy that is rewarded. The piece is couched in a tone of the most delicious extravagance—a hit, a palpable hit, in every line. I cannot resist the temptation to quote from the scene in which Lydia, Lucian, and Bashville, fast locked against intrusion, debate the question of admitting Cashel, the presumably infuriated ruffian, who has just been successfully tripped up by Bashville as he is trying to enter the Carew mansion.
Lydia:We must not fail in courage with a fighter.
Unlock the door.
Lucian:Like all women, Lydia,
You have the courage of immunity.
To strike you were against his code of honour;
But me, above the belt, he may perform on
T' th' height of his profession. Also Bashville.
Bashville: Think not of me, sir. Let him do his worst.
Oh, if the valour of my heart could weigh
The fatal difference 'twixt his weight and mine,
A second battle should he do this day:
Nay, though outmatched I be, let but my mistress
Give me the word: instant I'll take him on
Here—now—at catchweight. Better bite the carpet
A man, than fly, a coward.
Lucian:Bravely said:
I will assist you with the poker.
And well worth remembering is the naïve autobiography, delivered at the request of the Zulu king, of that celestially denominated “bruiser” concerning whom Cashel once said: “Slave to the ring I rest until the face of Paradise be changed.”
Cetewayo: Ye sons of the white queen:
Tell me your names and deeds ere ye fall to.
Paradise:Your royal highness, you beholds a bloke
What gets his living honest by his fists.
I may not have the polish of some toffs
As I could mention on; but up to now
No man has took my number down. I scale
Close on twelve stun; my age is twenty-three;
And at Bill Richardson's “Blue Anchor” pub
Am to be heard of any day by such
As likes the job. I don't know, governor,
As ennythink remains for me to say.
Those who witnessed the original production of the play by the London Stage Society in 1903, and also the later production in 1909 at the “Afternoon Theatre” (His Majesty's), unhesitatingly gave it that “huge applause” of which Shaw speaks so frankly. “The best burlesque of rhetorical drama in the language,” is Mr. Archer's sweeping dictum. Even the most hardened of Philistines might find it easy to agree with his statement: “Fielding's 'Tom Thumb' and Carey's 'Chrononhotonthologos' are, it seems to me, not in the running.”
Not until the appearance of An Unsocial Socialist, fifth of the novels of his nonage, is the Pandora's box of Shavian theories opened. There now begin to troop forth those startling and anarchic views with which the name of Shaw is popularly associated. This modern “École des Maris” heralds the reign of the “literature of effrontery”; Shaw is beginning to take his stride. With all its extravagance and waywardness, An Unsocial Socialist has been declared by at least one critic of authority to be as brilliant as anything George Meredith ever wrote. Let us recall Stevenson's warning to Shaw: “Let him beware of his damned century; his gifts of insane chivalry and animated narration are just those that might be slain and thrown out like an untimely birth by the Daemon of the Epoch.” Gone are the chivalry and romance—the winds of Socialism have blown them all away. But the book fairly reeks of the “damned century,” with its mad irresponsibility, its exasperating levity, its religious and social revolt. Written in 1883, it seethes and bubbles with the scum of the Socialist brew just then beginning to ferment. Shaw's original design, he tells us, was to “produce a novel which should be a gigantic grapple with the whole social problem.... When I had finished two chapters of this enterprise—chapters of colossal length, but containing the merest preliminary matter—I broke down in sheer ignorance and incapacity.” Eventually the two prodigious chapters of Shaw's magnum opus were published as a complete novel, in two “books,” under the title An Unsocial Socialist. Shaw begins fiercely to sermonize humanity, to deride all customs and institutions which have not their roots sunk in individualism and in social justice. The Seven Deadly Sins are: respectability, conventional virtue, filial affection, modesty, sentiment, devotion to woman, romance. Sidney Trefusis is the philosopher of the New Order, revolted by the rottenness of present civilization and resolved, by any means, to set in motion some schemes for its reformation. Discovering too late that marriage to him, as to Tanner, means “apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of his soul, violation of his manhood, sale of his birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat,” Trefusis deliberately deserts his wife, not because, as with Falk and Svanhild in Ibsen's Love's Comedy, love seems too exquisite, too ethereal to be put to the illusion-shattering test of marriage, but because marriage involves the triumph of senses over sense, of passion over reason. Even after he has ceased to love Henrietta, her love for him continues to set in motion the mechanism of passion, and he is revolted by the fact that she is satisfied so long as “the wheels go round.”
The millionaire son of a captain of industry, Trefusis has, by a strange freak of fate, drunk deep of the Socialist draught of the epoch. Respecting his dead father for his energy and bravery among unscrupulous competitors in the struggle for existence, Trefusis curses his memory for the inhuman means employed in his business dealings and the social crimes concealed by the shimmer of his “ill-gotten gold.”
His most significant utterance—an outburst before the wealthy landowner, Sir Charles Brandon—gives us a clear picture of Shaw's Socialist views at this time:
“A man cannot be a Christian: I have tried it, and found it impossible both in law and in fact. I am a capitalist and a landholder. I have railway shares, mining shares, building shares, bank shares, and stock of most kinds; and a great trouble they are to me. But these shares do not represent wealth actually in existence: they are a mortgage on the labour of unborn generations of labourers, who must work to keep me and mine in idleness and luxury. If I sold them, would the mortgage be cancelled and the unborn generations released from its thrall? No. It would only pass into the hands of some other capitalist; and the working classes would be no better off for my self-sacrifice. Sir Charles cannot obey the command of Christ: I defy him to do it. Let him give his land for a public park: only the richer classes will have leisure to enjoy it. Plant it at the very doors of the poor, so that they may at least breathe its air; and it will raise the value of the neighbouring houses and drive the poor away. Let him endow a school for the poor, like Eton or Christ's Hospital; and the rich will take it for their own children as they do in the two instances I have named. Sir Charles does not want to minister to poverty, but to abolish it. No matter how much you give to the poor, everything but a bare subsistence wage will be taken away from them again by force. All talk of practising Christianity, or even bare justice, is at present mere waste of words. How can you justly reward the labourer when you cannot ascertain the value of what he makes, owing to the prevalent custom of stealing it?... The principle on which we farm out our national industry to private marauders, who recompense themselves by blackmail, so corrupts and paralyses us that we cannot be honest even when we want to. And the reason we bear it so calmly is that very few of us really want to.”
A Marx in Shaw's clothing, Trefusis devotes all his energies, all his wealth, to the task of forming an international association—“The International,” history gives it—of men pledged “to share the world's work justly; to share the produce of the work justly; to yield not a farthing—charity apart—to any full-grown and able-bodied idler or malingerer, and to treat as vermin in the commonwealth persons attempting to get more than their share of wealth or give less than their share of work.” Whole-souledly committed to Socialism in its iconoclastic aspects, Trefusis defies convention, prudery, delicacy, good-taste, and tact in all his actions, convinced beyond reclaim that “vile or not, whatever is true is to the purpose.” His philosophy holds it a short-sighted policy to run away from a mistake or a misunderstanding, instead of “facing the music” and clearing the matter up. A licensed eccentric like his prototypic creator in real life, Trefusis is permitted to take liberties granted to no one else; and by the “exercise of a certain considerate tact (which, on the outside, perhaps, seems the opposite of tact),” but which in reality consists in the most ingenious double-dealing, he somehow or other contrives to have his way and go scot-free.
In the early part of the story, disguised as that “terrific combination of nerves, gall, and brains,” Smilash, he dexterously philanders to his heart's content with several young girls at the boarding-school where his wife was educated. The verisimilitude of the portraits, the acute psychology exhibited in the portrayal of the feelings, sentiments, and sentimentalities of young girls in the boarding-school stage of evolution, testify to Shaw's remarkable gifts as a genuine realist. That forerunner of Julia Craven, the romantic little Henrietta Jansenius, is portrayed with insight, and not without delicacy and restraint. The most unreal, most unhuman scene in the book is that in which Trefusis apostrophizes the body of his dead wife. His reflections impress me as both flippant and callous in their solemn setting. It is with a sense of profound shock that we hear him rudely flout the “funereal sanctimoniousness” of the family physician, mock at the “harrowing mummeries” of religious and social observance, and “damn the feelings” of a father and mother who regarded their daughter as their chattel and showed no true feeling for her when she was alive. Trefusis is devoured with the conviction that the first, if the hardest, of all duties is one's duty to one's self. His fine Italian hand is betrayed in his later philanderings with the whilom loves of Smilash, now grown up into disagreeable, hard, calculating women. Trefusis's trickery of Sir Charles Brandon, his unfeeling deception of Gertrude Lindsay, his base flattery of Lady Brandon, his misleading promise to Erskine, are all exhibitions of his Jesuitical policy. The exponent of Socialism and the New Morality, Trefusis has no scruples in employing unfair means to secure whatsoever he wants—for the cause of labour and for himself.[30]
George Bernard Shaw.
From a photograph by Eduard J Steichen made at 10 Adelphi Terrace,
London, W.C. August, 1907.
Mr. W. L. Courtney has somewhere called attention to the curious triumph achieved by “our only modern dramatist,” as he calls Bernard Shaw, in view of the fact that Shaw has never hesitated at interpreting women as beasts of prey. In the novels we find premonitions of Shaw's later attitude toward women. Some suspicion of Shaw's theory that woman “takes the initiative in sex business” dawns upon us when Madge Brailsford openly courts Owen Jack; but Lydia Carew, that bloodless Ibsen type, is anything but the huntress. An Unsocial Socialist opens our eyes; for Henrietta shamelessly pursues the mocking Trefusis and exhausts every feminine wile in the effort to induce him to return to the chains of wedlock. The idea is also uppermost in the final scene, in which Trefusis, by means of a little diabolically-concocted sentiment, persuades the pursuing Gertrude to give him up, and, “for his sake,” to marry Erskine. When Shaw came to erect his theory into a system in Man and Superman, he threw a flood of light upon all his former work. There is a keynote to the philosophy of every great or pioneer thinker: Shakespeare had his Hamlet, Wagner his Free-willing of Necessity, Schopenhauer his Will to Live, and Nietzsche his Will to Power. So Shaw is the apostle of the Life Force, as he calls it; and woman is incarnate life force—potent instrument of that irresistible, secret, blind impulse which Nature wields for her own transcendent purposes, heedless of the feelings, welfare, or happiness of individuals. Recognizing woman as the primal vital agency in the fulfilment of Nature's laws, he has not unnaturally come to regard her as “much more formidable than man, because she is, as it were, archetypal, belonging to the original structure of things, and has behind her activity, sometimes benevolent and more often malevolent, the great authority of Nature herself.”[31] Under the spell of this plausible conviction, Shaw endows woman with all the attributes of a blind, unreasoning, unscrupulous force of nature. And for his faith he can find ample support in the literature of an age which produced Schopenhauer's Essay on Woman, The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, The Triumph of Death, Gräfin Julie, Erdgeist, The Confounding of Camellia. With great adroitness, but with a curious inconsistency in one who has spent years of his life in “blaming the Bard,” Shaw finds the chief support for his claim in the plays of Shakespeare himself. By blandishment, Rosalind accomplishes her purpose; Miranda ensnares Ferdinand with the words, “I would not wish any companion in the world but you. I am your wife if you will marry me.” Juliet scales Romeo's defences one by one, and there is Desdemona with her fond “hint”; Mariana, the strategist; Helena, pursuing the recreant Bertram; Olivia, powerless to hide her passion; and poor, mad, melancholy Ophelia.
One has only to pass in review Shaw's work, from An Unsocial Socialist to Man and Superman, to discover that persistent exemplification of his theory that “woman is the pursuer and contriver, man the pursued and disposed of.” Indeed, in his very first play, we find Shaw's concrete illustration of Don Juan's statement that “a woman seeking a husband is the most unscrupulous of all the beasts of prey.” All the men in Shaw's plays seem to suffer, not from Prossy's, but from Charteris's complaint: “At no time have I taken the initiative and pursued women with my advances as women have persecuted me.” All seem to labour under the conviction that the woman's need of a man “does not prevail against him until his resistance gathers her energy to a climax, at which she dares to throw away her customary exploitations of the conventional affectionate and dutiful poses, and claim him by natural right for a purpose that far transcends their mortal personal purposes.” The quintessence of the Shavian woman is Ann Whitefield, that “most gorgeous of all my female creatures,” as Shaw calls her—incarnation of fecundity in Nature, wilful, unscrupulous, immodest, aggressive, dominant—compelling Tanner to obey her biological imperative.
The appearance of Shaw's theory in An Unsocial Socialist is responsible for this divagation of mine from the theme of the novels, this anticipation of the feminine psychology of the plays. It is highly unreasonable to suppose that the exploitation of such a theory on Shaw's part is a perverse and impish trick, designed solely épater le bourgeois: Shaw has driven home his theory in countless deliberate statements. As a philosophic concept, as an interpretation of woman by an a-priorist, little fault can be found with Shaw in the matter. No one can question Shaw's right to his opinion. Even as an effort to make the natural attraction of the sexes the mainspring of the action in modern English drama, Shaw's delineation of woman is far from being unworthy of consideration, though it has swung wide of the mark in exaggerative reaction against the romantic sentimentalities of the English stage. Shaw's women are full of purpose and vitality—the most “advanced” of women in assertion of their rights, in resolute determination to override all the barriers of current respectability and “prurient prudery,” in perfect readiness to forego all considerations of good taste, tact, delicacy, modesty, conventional virtue. They ruthlessly repudiate all those qualities which have led man to dub her his “better half.” Shaw's mistake consists in painting woman, not as she really, normally is, but as his preconceived philosophic system requires her to be. He planks down for our inspection less a life-like portrait of the eternal feminine than a philosophic interpretation of the “superior sex.” Shaw is a remarkable critic of life. Certain phases of human nature, unnoticed or unaccented by others, he has depicted with a veracity, a cleverness, a sparkling brilliancy beyond all praise. But it is one thing to portray an individual, a totally different thing to announce a universal type. A soldier like Bluntschli, a dare-devil like Dudgeon, a minister like Gardner, a hero like Cæsar or Napoleon, a wooer like Valentine, a Socialist like Trefusis, a pugilist like Byron—all these may have lived. Shaw doubtless can—indeed, sometimes does—point to their counterparts, if not in literature, certainly in real life. But to say that all soldiers are like Bluntschli, for example, is little more foolish than to say that all women are like Blanche, like Julia, like Ann. The vital defect in Shaw's women is that they are too blatant, too obvious, too crude. They are lacking in mystery, in finer subtlety, in the subconscious and obscurer instincts of sex, in the arts of exquisite seduction, of keenly-felt yet only half-divined allurement.[32] The Life Force goes about its business, one would fain remind Mr. Shaw, not openly and with a blare of trumpets, but by a thousand devious and hidden paths. Of course, there is always the danger of taking Shaw too seriously. Mr. Archer wittily, but, above all, entirely truthfully, dubbed Ann a “mythological monster.” As a pendant to Everyman of the Dutch morality, Ann may be the Everywoman of the Shavian morality. But even Shaw himself admits, with wily fairness, that while, philosophically, Ann may be Everywoman according to the Shavian dispensation, yet in practical, everyday existence there are countless women who are not Ann.
If faith is to be placed in M. Émile Faguet's dictum that no exceptional work of art is ever written by anyone before reaching the age of thirty, then Shaw's novels are debarred by the Statute of Limitations. The “ineptitude” of his novels, of which Mr. Shaw once spoke to me, is attributable to the fact that during this early period he fed upon his imagination. He had not yet come into any deep or really vital communion with humanity. Produced in that impressionable period when dreaming seems preferable to living, the novels bristle with faults—immaturities of form, crudenesses of expression, blatant didactics. They are often loose and disjointed, generally lacking in closely articulated structure. With all his pretended effort at realism, Shaw has failed to impart to his novels that one quality without which no modern work of fictive art can take the very highest rank—inevitableness. To Shaw, as to Zola, art is life seen through a temperament. And I often receive the impression that Shaw's novels are less faithful records of contemporary existence than documents revelative of Bernard Shaw. Shaw is lacking in artistic self-restraint; like the true propagandist, he seems almost unwilling to accept facts as they are, so eager is he to impose upon them the stamp of his individual predilections. It is the strangest of paradoxes that one who claims for himself that rare and priceless gift—the abnormally normal eyesight of the realist—should have spent his life in the endeavour to fix the mask of Shaw upon the face of life.
“The gods know that Bernard Shaw has many sins of omission to answer for when he reaches the remotest peak of Parnassus,” writes Mr. Huneker; “but for no one of his many gifts will he be so sternly taken to task as the wasted one of novelist.... There is more native talent for sturdy, clear-visioned, character-creating fiction in the one prize-fighting novel of Bernard Shaw than in the entire cobweb work of the stylistic Stevenson!... Shaw could rank higher as a novelist than as a dramatist—always selecting for judgment the supreme pages of his tales, pages wherein character, wit, humour, pathos, fantasy, and observation are mingled with an overwhelming effect.”[33] While there is much of truth in what Mr. Huneker says, I should hold quite the opposite opinion concerning Shaw's relative merits as novelist and dramatist. Not the least significant feature of the novels, to my mind, is their foreshadowing of the future dramatist.[34] Turning over the pages of the novels, from first to last one cannot but observe this recurrent trait: Shaw always sees his characters in a “situation.” It is difficult to read one of Shaw's novels without unconsciously looking for the stage directions. Proud as he is of his gifts as a “fictionist,” no one is more conscious than is Shaw himself of his deficiencies in this rôle. With his customary succinctness, he once put the case to me as it really is: “My novels are very green things, very carefully written.”
FOOTNOTES:
[24] On Mr. Mallock's Proposed Trumpet Performance. In the Fortnightly Review, April, 1894.
[25] Who I Am, and What I Think. Part I. In the Candid Friend, May 11th, 1901.
[26] The Letters of R. L. Stevenson, Vol. II. Edited by Sidney Colvin, pp. 107 et seq.
[27] Does Modern Education Ennoble? In Great Thoughts, October 7th, 1905.
[28] A dramatization of the novel, by Mr. Stanislaus Stange, was produced with moderate success in New York several years ago. Unique interest attached to the production because the part of Cashel Byron was taken by Mr. James J. Corbett, some time pugilistic champion of the world—and incidentally quite a clever actor. There is much of Cashel in Mr. Corbett, whose popular sobriquet is “Gentleman Jim.”
[29] Bernard Shaw Abashed. In the Daily News, April 17th, 1905.
[30] “The hero is remarkable because, without losing his pre-eminence as hero, he not only violates every canon of propriety, like Tom Jones or Des Grieux, but every canon of sentiment as well. In an age when the average man's character is rotted at the core by the lust to be a true gentleman, the moral value of such an example as Trefusis is incalculable.”—Mr. Bernard Shaw's Works of Fiction. Reviewed by Himself. In the Novel Review, February, 1892.
[31] The words are those of Mr. W. L. Courtney.
[32] There are exceptions to this generalization, of course—Lady Cicely, Candida, Nora, Jennifer, Barbara.
[33] Bernard Shaw and Woman. In Harper's Bazaar, June, 1905.
[34] It is worthy of remark that the conclusion of Love Among the Artists, as Julius Bab has pointed out, accurately prefigures the conclusion of Candida. The situation, the very words, are almost identical.
THE FABIAN SOCIETY
“If ever there was a society which lived by its wits, and by its wits alone, that society was the Fabian.”—The Fabian Society. Tract No. 41. By G. B. Shaw.