GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
1. His Life. Mr. Shaw, born in Dublin in 1856, is the son of a retired civil servant. His early education was received in Dublin, and at the age of fifteen he was earning his living as a clerk. Coming to London (1876), he tried novel-writing as an alternative to clerking, but with no success at all. He was one of the first members (1884) of the Fabian Society, and took a vigorous part in its socialistic work. A witty and voluble speaker, not without moments of real eloquence, he was much in demand as a lecturer. In 1885 he began his connection with journalism, and was successively on the staff of several London papers, writing on music, painting, and the drama. In music he was a strong advocate of Wagner. The dramatic works of the great Norwegian Ibsen were for long his pet subject. During the years 1895–98 his dramatic articles in The Saturday Review attracted much attention owing to the freshness of their opinions and the vitality of their style. About this time he started to write and produce plays of his own; and with them he began his long verbal contest with the British public over their failure to appreciate the merit of his work. In the end, owing partly to his own voluble persistence, but chiefly to the virtues inherent in his dramas, he won the day; so that a new play by Mr. Shaw, if indeed it does not command a wide acceptance of its views, is at least received as a powerful and stimulating addition to the dramatic literature of our time.
2. His Novels. Mr. Shaw began his career as an author by writing four novels which were rejected by every publisher in London, and subsequently saw the light in obscure periodicals of socialistic sympathies. The best of the four are The Irrational Knot (1880) and Cashel Byron’s Profession (1882). He republished the books in 1901, calling them “Novels of my Nonage.” To readers acquainted with the later writings of Mr. Shaw there are several familiar features plainly to be seen: the straight, clean thrust of the style, the bold and dramatic portraiture of the characters, and the irreverent mishandling of treasured institutions. There is even the note typical of the earliest plays—a curious frigidity and barrenness of emotion, as if the novelist had made a vow to cut sentiment clean out of his books. The crude socialism preached in the stories probably scared the publishers; for, though they by no means represent even the average of Mr. Shaw’s work, they are always readable and often amusing.
3. His Plays. As a playwright Mr. Shaw began as a disciple of Ibsen. In his early attempts he succeeded in reproducing the cold and intellectual realism of the great Norwegian, but he quite failed to catch the humane and intensely romantic idealism that lies deep within the heart of the Ibsen plays. Widowers’ Houses (1885), a didactic play on the subject of slum-property, was a discouraging beginning to his play-writing. It was hard and repulsive in sentiment; it lacked the later Shavian high spirits and verbal acrobatics; and it appealed only to a small circle of enthusiasts. The Philanderer (1893) was much lighter and more attractive, though it did not lack harsher touches, almost callous in their nonchalance; it showed, however, the beginning of that mastery of the technique of the stage that was henceforth to distinguish nearly all Mr. Shaw’s plays. Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893), grimmer and abler, was refused a license by the censor of plays; and then with Arms and the Man (1894) Mr. Shaw had his first successful bout with the British public. In the play the satiric intention was obvious, for the “glories” of war were freely ridiculed; but the satire was so overlaid with a briskness of action, with a rocketing interchange of witticisms, and with an almost reckless display of high spirits that both the general public and the cautious critics were taken by storm. From this point Mr. Shaw never looked back, and his plays appeared in a steady procession. We can mention only the more important of them: Candida (1894), an attempt at the romantic sentimental comedy, only too rare with Mr. Shaw; You Never Can Tell (1896), purely and hilariously comic, and masterly from beginning to end; Cæsar and Cleopatra (1898), quaintly serio-comic, but picturesque and brilliant; Man and Superman (1903), containing many of its author’s opinions expressed with startling audacity, but too long and voluble; John Bull’s Other Island (1904), on the Irish question; The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906), very censorious on the medical profession; and Androcles and the Lion (1912). At this point the War intervened, and the effects of it on Mr. Shaw’s acutely sensitive mind, along with the pressure of increasing years, can be seen in the style of the later plays. One can detect a certain waning strength. The energy and gayety are still visible, but they appear fitfully; the high scorn is apt to degenerate into querulousness; and there is a hardening of temper, for which the dramatist tries to atone by fits of puerile burlesque. Heartbreak House (1917) is abrupt and even savage in places; and Back to Methuselah (1920), in spite of its infinity of range and the brilliance of disconnected passages, is heavy with the weight of mortality.
We have still to mention Mr. Shaw’s prefaces, which are remarkable features of his plays. As the plays successively appeared, the prefaces increased in length, till they began to rival in importance the plays themselves. Each of them is a tractate on some question that for the time engrossed the attention of the playwright. For example, the preface to Cæsar and Cleopatra deals in Shavian fashion with Shakespeare, that to Androcles and the Lion with early Christianity, and that to Back to Methuselah with what he calls Creative Evolution. The prefaces are diffuse, paradoxical, and egotistical; but they are brilliant and incisive, and they represent the best of Mr. Shaw’s non-dramatic prose.
4. Features of his Plays. (a) Their Wit. The distinction between wit and humor is commonly expressed by saying that humor appeals to the emotions, whereas wit touches only the intellect: humor deals with incidents and actions, wit with words and phrases. Mr. Shaw ranks among the greatest wits in the language. He delights in the quick cut and thrust of verbal sword-play, in the clever distortion of a phrase, and in the brilliant paradoxical sally of the intellect. It is this wittiness that has given him his commanding position in foreign countries. It is not that Mr. Shaw is inhumanly devoid of emotion and sympathy, but he is afraid of such emotions, and often deliberately stifles them. In Candida he attains to a high level of delicate sentimentality, but in How He lied to Her Husband he jeers at the admirers of his own handiwork. In his later plays he wearies a little over this exuberant play of wit. In Back to Methuselah, for example, perhaps the most attractive feature is a mood of sere romantic melancholy.
(b) His Contribution to the Drama. Mr. Shaw’s long experience as a dramatic critic taught him at least what he was to avoid. When he began his career as a dramatist the theater was given up to the production of frivolous and even immoral pieces. Mr. Shaw vitalized this stuffy atmosphere, gave to play-writing a strong and vigorous tone, and added to it a spirit of broad comedy. From the purely formal point of view, he employed all the devices of stagecraft to give his plays an attractive and realistic setting. As regards the literary side of his plays, he marks in his work a great increase in the importance given to the stage-directions. Like Ibsen, he elaborates this feature of his plays till on the printed page they are almost as important as the dialogue. He is reverting to the precepts of Aristotle, who maintained that the drama is an affair of action, not of speech. Consequently Mr. Shaw’s plays often read like an interesting hybrid between the novel and the drama. We add an extract to illustrate this combination of speech and action:
Behind the Emperor’s box at the Coliseum, where the performers assemble before entering the arena. In the middle a wide passage leading to the arena descends from the floor level under the imperial box. On both sides of this passage steps ascend to a landing at the back entrance to the box. The landing forms a bridge across the passage. At the entrance to the passage are two bronze mirrors, one on each side.
On the west side of this passage, on the right hand of anyone coming from the box and standing on the bridge, the martyrs are sitting on the steps. Lavinia is seated half-way up, thoughtfully trying to look death in the face. On her left Androcles consoles himself by nursing a cat. Ferrovious stands behind them, his eyes blazing, his figure stiff with intense resolution. At the foot of the steps crouches Spintho, with his head clutched in his hands, full of horror at the approach of martyrdom.
On the east side of the passage the gladiators are standing and sitting at ease, waiting, like the Christians, for their turn in the arena. One (Retiarius) is a nearly naked man with a net and trident. Another (Secutor) is in armour with a sword. He carries a helmet with a barred visor. The Editor of the gladiators sits on a chair a little apart from them.
The Call Boy enters from the passage.
The Call Boy. Number six. Retiarius versus Secutor.
The gladiator with the net picks it up. The gladiator with the helmet puts it on; and the two go into the arena, the net-thrower taking out a little brush and arranging his hair as he goes, the other tightening his straps and shaking his shoulders loose. Both look at themselves in the mirrors before they enter the passage.
Lavinia. Will they really kill one another?
Spintho. Yes, if the people turn down their thumbs.
The Editor. You know nothing about it. The people indeed! Do you suppose we would kill a man worth perhaps fifty talents to please the riff-raff? I should like to catch any of my men at it.
Spintho. I thought——
The Editor [contemptuously]. You thought! Who cares what you think? You’ll be killed all right enough.
Spintho [groans and again hides his face].!!!...
Lavinia. Does the Emperor ever interfere?
The Editor. Oh yes; he turns his thumb up fast enough if the vestal virgins want to have one of his pet fighting men killed.
Androcles and the Lion
(c) His Defects. As a dramatist Mr. Shaw has many faults. When he is anxious to expound one of his opinions he subordinates the dramatic interest and permits his characters to become merely the mouthpieces of his views. Jack Tanner, the chief character in Man and Superman, is the stock example of such a personage. Nearly all his characters, moreover, though they are galvanically active, hardly impress the reader as being actually alive. Like Dickens, Mr. Shaw is skillful in the creation of freaks and oddities, but he is weak in the presentation of living and ordinary people.
(d) His Opinions. Like Mr. Wells, Mr. Shaw holds decided views on many subjects, from phonetics to the construction of the universe, and he is not backward in expressing them. More than once he has declared that he would never have written a word if he had not some message to convey. He has, however, a curious method of exposition, which he has purposely developed in order to shock his opponents into attention: a jesting, paradoxical mishandling of the truth, often glaringly personal, and stated with almost brutal clearness. As a result Mr. Shaw rarely finds himself taken seriously by the superficial reader, though the deep underlying seriousness of his opinions is nearly always perceptible to the attentive mind. It has often been urged that his opinions are purely destructive; and his efforts to provide alternatives to the institutions he condemns are not always of the happiest.
(e) His Style. Like his great fellow-countryman Swift, Mr. Shaw has a powerful and logical mind, with the same fierce satiric purpose and (it may be added) the same type of Irish nationalism. His prose is more amusing, less destructive, more diffuse, and less simple than that of the great Dean. In his dramatic dialogue, however, Mr. Shaw is pithy, direct, and absolutely clear. The example already given shows its character.
We add a brief specimen of his expository prose. It is the peroration to a long preface, and therefore somewhat more elevated in style than the average. It contains a characteristic mock-serious personal reference which sheds light on Mr. Shaw’s own opinion of his work.
I now find myself inspired to make a second legend of Creative Evolution without distractions and embellishments. My sands are running out; the exuberance of 1901 has aged into the garrulity of 1920; and the war has been a stern intimation that the matter is not one to be trifled with. I abandon the legend of Don Juan with its erotic associations, and go back to the legend of the Garden of Eden. I exploit the eternal interest of the philosopher’s stone which enables men to live for ever. I am not, I hope, under more illusion than is humanly inevitable as to the crudity of this my beginning of a Bible for Creative Evolution. I am doing the best I can at my age. My powers are waning; but so much the better for those who found me unbearably brilliant when I was in my prime. It is my hope that a hundred apter and more elegant parables by younger hands will soon leave mine as far behind as the religious pictures of the fifteenth century left behind the first attempts of the early Christians at inconography. In that hope I withdraw and ring up the curtain.
Preface to “Back to Methuselah”