If the world is convinced that Shaw is only a gay deceiver, he himself has felt from the very beginning that the rôle he plays is that of the candid friend of society. “Waggery as a medium is invaluable,” he once explained. “My case is really the case of Rabelais over again. When I first began to promulgate my opinions, I found that they appeared extravagant, and even insane. In order to get a hearing, it was necessary for me to attain the footing of a privileged lunatic, with the licence of a jester. Fortunately the matter was very easy. I found that I had only to say with perfect simplicity what I seriously meant just as it struck me, to make everybody laugh. My method, you will have noticed, is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then say it with the utmost levity. And all the time the real joke is that I am in earnest.” It is Shaw's supreme distinction that he refuses to view life through the confining, beclouding medium of convention. His primal claim to serious attention is based upon the assertion of his freedom from illusion. If he appears grotesque and eccentric, it is not so much because he expresses himself grotesquely and eccentrically: it is primarily because he scrutinizes life with a more aquiline eyesight than that of the illuded majority. His levity has saved him from martyrdom; for, although it is a very difficult thing to speak disagreeable truths, it is a still more difficult thing to listen to them. Recall the treatment the British public gave to George Moore for his advocacy of realism, to Vizetelly for his championing of Zola, even to Shaw himself for his defence of Ibsen! Shaw has based all his brilliancy and solidity, Mr. Chesterton acutely observes, upon the hackneyed, but yet forgotten, fact that truth is stranger than fiction. And Shaw himself has cleverly put the case in his own paradoxical way. “There is an indescribable levity—not triviality mind, but levity—something spritelike about the final truth of a matter; and this exquisite levity communicates itself to the style of a writer who will face the labour of digging down to it. It is the half-truth which is congruous, heavy, serious, and suggestive of a middle-aged or elderly philosopher. The whole truth is often the first thing that comes into the head of a fool or a child; and when a wise man forces his way to it through the many strata of his sophistications, its wanton, perverse air reassures him instead of frightening him.”[93]
This spritelike quality, this indescribable levity inherent in the final truth of a matter, has communicated itself to Shaw's style in the most intimate way. With the not unnatural result that it is difficult for the average man to believe that opinions advanced with such light-hearted levity carry any of the weight of final truth. It is for this reason that all of Shaw's attempts to write genuine autobiography have been greeted with the most amiable scepticism. Shaw himself is able to speak with more confidence on the folly of writing scientific natural history, because he has tried the experiment, within certain timid limits, of being candidly autobiographical.
“I have produced no permanent impression,” he declares, “because nobody has ever believed me. I once told a brilliant London journalist[94] some facts about my family, running to forty-first cousins and to innumerable seconds and thirds. Like most large families, it did not consist exclusively of teetotallers, nor did all its members remain until death up to the very moderate legal standard of sanity. One of them discovered an absolutely original method of committing suicide. It was simple to the verge of triteness, yet no human being had ever thought of it before. It was also amusing. But in the act of carrying it out, my relative jammed the mechanism of his heart—possibly in the paroxysm of laughter which the mere narration of his suicidal method has never since failed to provoke—and if I may be allowed to state the result in my Irish way, he died a second before he succeeded in killing himself. The coroner's jury found that he died 'from natural causes'; and the secret of the suicide was kept not only from the public, but from most of the family.
“I revealed the secret in private conversation to the brilliant journalist aforesaid. He shrieked with laughter and printed the whole story in his next causerie. It never for a moment occurred to him that it was true. To this day he regards me as the most reckless liar in London.”
Had Shaw ever attempted to write the Rougon-Macquart history of his family in twenty volumes, along the candid lines of the above narrative, it is not improbable that he would thereafter have been permanently and forcibly deprived of his privileges as a lunatic. “I have not yet ascertained the truth about myself,” he wrote some years ago. “For instance, am I mad or sane? I really do not know. Doubtless, I am clever in certain directions; my talent has enabled me to cut a figure in my profession in London. But a man may, like Don Quixote, be clever enough to cut a figure and yet be stark mad. A critic recently described me, with deadly acuteness, as having 'a kindly dislike of my fellow-creatures.' Perhaps dread would have been nearer the mark than dislike; for man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid. I have never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from other men. There is not much harm in a lion. He has no ideals, no religion, no politics, no chivalry, no gentility; in short, no reason for destroying anything that he does not want to eat. In the late war, the Americans burnt the Spanish fleet, and finally had to drag men out of hulls that had become furnaces. The effect of this on one of the American commanders was to make him assemble his men and tell them that he believed in God Almighty. No lion would have done that. On reading it and observing that the newspapers, representing normal public opinion, seemed to consider it a very creditable, natural and impressively pious incident, I came to the conclusion that I must be mad. At all events, if I am sane, the rest of the world ought not to be at large. We cannot both see things as they really are.”
It was at a somewhat later time that the critics came to treat Shaw as a reckless liar and a privileged lunatic. At this period, he impressed the self-conscious literary clique as a witty, but frivolous, ignoramus, totally incompetent to discuss the high subjects of which he professed such penetrating comprehension. I once had an interesting discussion with Mr. Shaw about the subject of his flippancy. “Do you accept as just the criticism, made in some quarters,” I asked Mr. Shaw, “that you and Whistler were very much alike in your attitude towards the general public?”
“Not at all, that is a crude error,” replied Mr. Shaw earnestly. “Whistler came to grief because he gave himself up to clever smartness, which is abhorrent to the average Englishman. As for me, I have never for a moment lost sight of my serious relation to a serious public. You see, I had an advantage over Whistler in any case, for at least three times every week I could escape from artistic and literary stuff, and talk seriously on serious subjects to serious people. For this reason—because I persisted in Socialist propagandism—I never once lost touch with the real world.”
Shaw's critiques, sallies, and reviews were the combination of a laborious criticism with a recklessly flippant manner. Into literature he carried the methods he adopted on the platform, where he tossed off the most diligently acquired, studiously pondered information with all the insouciance of omniscience. As a critic, Shaw has ever laboured for the scanty wages of the “intolerable fatigue of thought.” In characteristic style, he has gone so far as to declare that good journalism is much rarer and more important than good literature; he has no sympathy with Disraeli's view of a critic as an author who has failed. “I know as one who has practised both crafts,” wrote Shaw in 1892, “that authorship is child's play compared to criticism; and I have, you may depend upon it, my full share of the professional instinct which regards the romancer as a mere adventurer in literature and the critic as a highly skilled workman. Ask any novelist or dramatist whether he can write a better novel or play than I; and he will blithely say 'Yes.' Ask him to take my place as critic for one week; and he will blench from the test. The truth is that the critic stands between popular authorship, for which he is not silly enough, and great authorship, for which he is not genius enough.”[95]
While Mr. Shaw was laboriously striving to impart lightness and insouciance to his literary style, and to acquire careless sang-froid as a platform speaker, he was likewise making the acquaintance of certain distinguished men of his day. His relation and association with William Morris, for example, exercised no noteworthy influence upon his art; but it certainly did no less than accentuate certain distinct traits of his character. Unmistakably, in this way, does this association serve to give us a clearer insight into the rationale of Shaw's—popularly-called—idiosyncrasies. On the other hand, it furnishes us a new aspect of Morris from the Shavian point of view.
Readers of the authorized edition of Cashel Byron's Profession will recall that William Morris, who, like Shaw, had thrown himself into the Socialist revival of the early eighties, first became curious about Shaw through reading the monthly instalments of An Unsocial Socialist as they appeared in the Socialist magazine To-Day. Shaw had heard of Morris, to be sure; and had even, years before, once seen him—of all places in the world!—in the Doré Gallery. Yet his notions about Morris were, in reality, of the vaguest. He knew nothing beyond the meagre facts that he was a poet, that he belonged to the Rossetti circle, and that he was associated with Burne-Jones and with what was then called Æstheticism. He had never read a line of Morris's, and, in fact, had taken no definite measure of his calibre. This was the situation when Shaw found himself one evening in Gatti's big restaurant in the Strand at the table with Morris and H. M. Hyndman. Morris belonged to Mr. Hyndman's society, the Democratic Federation, now the Social-Democratic Federation, while Mr. Hyndman himself was the head centre of London Socialism. With naïve simplicity, Morris humbly announced that he was prepared to do whatever he was told and go wherever he was led: that was all he could say. In a letter to me describing the interview, written many years afterwards, Mr. Shaw said that, while it was only snap-judgment—a personal impression across the table—he could not help being “privately tickled by this announcement from an obviously ungovernable man who was too big to be led by any of us.”