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.”