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.