After Velásquez. From the original painting, exhibited in 1907.
(From a photograph by Emery Walker.)
The Hon. Neville S. Lytton.
Courtesy of the Artist.
Shaw's incorrigible practice of “blaming the Bard,” publicly inaugurated in the Saturday Review, is no mere antic in which he indulges for the fun of the thing, but as inevitable an outcome of his philosophy as is his championship of Ibsen. His inability to see a masterpiece in every play of Shakespeare's arises largely from the fact that he knows his Shakespeare as he knows his Bunyan, his Dickens, his Ibsen. It is flying in the face of fact to aver that a man who knew his Shakespeare from cover to cover by the time he was twenty does not like or admire Shakespeare. “I am fond,” says Shaw, “unaffectedly fond, of Shakespeare's plays.” He looks back upon those delightful evenings at the New Shakespeare Society, under F. J. Furnival, with the most unfeigned pleasure. A careful perusal of his score or more articles on Shakespeare in the Saturday Review shows that he has not only studied Shakespeare consistently, and periodically interpreted him from a definite point of view, but that he always fought persistently for the performance of his plays in their integrity. And although he has by no means taken advantage of all his opportunities, yet he has managed to see between twenty and thirty of Shakespeare's plays performed on the stage.
When Shaw first read Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's words: “Surely the crowning glory of our nation is our Shakespeare; and remember he was one of a great school,” he almost burst, as he put it, with the intensity of his repudiation of the second clause in that utterance. Against the first clause he had nothing to say; but the Elizabethans Shaw has always regarded chiefly as “shallow literary persons, drunk with words, and seeking in crude stories of lust and crime an excuse for that wildest of all excitements, the excitement of imaginative self-expression by words.” Mr. Shaw once defined an Elizabethan as “a man with an extraordinary and imposing power of saying things, and with nothing whatever to say.” Indeed, it was not to be expected that the arch-foe of Romance, in modern art and modern life, would be edified with the imaginative and romantic violence of the Elizabethans. Nothing less than a close and, so to speak, biologic study of humanity in the nude can satisfy one who avers that Romance is the root of modern pessimism and the bane of modern self-respect.
To call the Elizabethans imaginative amounted with Shaw to the same thing as saying that, artistically, they had delirium tremens. The true Elizabethan he found to be a “blank-verse beast, itching to frighten other people with the superstitious terrors and cruelties in which he does not himself believe, and wallowing in blood, violence, muscularity of expression and strenuous animal passion as only literary men do when they become thoroughly depraved by solitary work, sedentary cowardice, and starvation of the sympathetic centres.” He passes them in review, calling them a crew of dehumanized specialists in blank verse! Webster, a Tussaud laureate; Chapman, with his sublime balderdash; Marlowe, the pothouse brawler, with his clumsy horse-play, his butcherly rant, and the resourceless tum-tum of his “mighty line.” Even in this dust-heap, Shaw managed to find some merit and variety. Was not Greene really amusing, Marston spirited and “silly-clever,” Cyril Tourneur able to string together lines of which any couple picked out and quoted separately might pass as a fragment of a real organic poem? Though a brutish pedant, Jonson was not heartless; Marlowe often charged his blank-verse with genuine colour and romance; while Beaumont and Fletcher, although possessing no depth, no conviction, no religious or philosophic basis, were none the less dainty romantic poets, and really humorous character-sketchers in Shakespeare's popular style. “Unfortunately, Shakespeare dropped into the middle of these ruffianly pedants (the Elizabethans); and since there was no other shop than theirs to serve his apprenticeship in, he had perforce to become an Elizabethan too.
“In such a school of falsehood, bloody-mindedness, bombast, and intellectual cheapness, his natural standard was inevitably dragged down, as we know to our cost; but the degree to which he dragged their standard up has saved them from oblivion.” Indeed, Shakespeare, enthused by his interest in the art of acting and by his desire to “educate the public,” tried to make that public accept genuine studies of life and character in, for instance, Measure for Measure and All's Well that Ends Well. But the public would have none of them (traditionary evidence, be it noted), “preferring a fantastic sugar doll like Rosalind to such serious and dignified studies of women as Isabella and Helena.”
Shakespeare had discovered that “the only thing that paid in the theatre was romantic nonsense, and that when he was forced by this to produce one of the most effective samples of romantic nonsense in existence—a feat which he performed easily and well—he publicly disclaimed any responsibility for its pleasant and cheap falsehood by borrowing the story and throwing it in the face of the public with the phrase 'As You Like It.'” Despite Mr. Chesterton's assertion that Shaw has read an ironic snub into the title, and that after all it was only a sort of hilarious bosh, Shaw still maintains, as he did fifteen years ago, that when Shakespeare used that phrase he meant exactly what he said, and that the phrase: “What You Will,” which he applied to Twelfth Night, meaning “Call it what you please,” is not, in Shakespearean or any other English, the equivalent of the perfectly unambiguous and penetratingly simple phrase: “As You Like It.”
Shakespeare's popularity, Shaw would have us believe, was due to a deliberate pandering to the public taste for “romantic nonsense.” Shaw holds that Shakespeare's supreme power lies in his “enormous command of word-music, which gives fascination to his most blackguardly repartees and sublimity to his hollowest platitudes, besides raising to the highest force all his gifts as an observer, an imitator of personal mannerisms and characteristics, a humorist and a story-teller.” No matter how poor, coarse, cheap and obvious may be the thought in Much Ado about Nothing, for example, the mood is charming and the music of the words expresses the mood, transporting you into another, an enchanted world.
“When a flower-girl tells a coster to hold his jaw, for nobody is listening to him, and he retorts: 'Oh, you're there, are you, you beauty?' they reproduce the wit of Beatrice and Benedick exactly. But put it this way: 'I wonder that you will still be talking, Signor Benedick: nobody marks you.' 'What! my dear Lady Disdain, are you yet living?' You are miles away from costerland at once.” In other words, Shaw insists that a nightingale's love is no higher than a cat's, except that the nightingale is the better musician!
“It is not easy to knock this into the public head, because comparatively few of Shakespeare's admirers are at all conscious that they are listening to music as they hear his phrases turn and his lines fall so fascinatingly and memorably; whilst we all, no matter how stupid we are, can understand his jokes and platitudes, and are flattered when we are told of the subtlety of the wit we have relished, and the profundity of the thought we have fathomed. Englishmen are specially susceptible to this sort of flattery, because intellectual subtlety is not their strong point. In dealing with them you must make them believe that you are appealing to their brains, when you are really appealing to their senses and feelings. With Frenchmen the case is reversed: you must make them believe that you are appealing to their senses and feelings when you are really appealing to their brains. The Englishman, slave to every sentimental ideal and dupe of every sensuous art, will have it that his great national poet is a thinker. The Frenchman, enslaved and duped only by systems and calculations, insists on his hero being a sentimentalist and artist. That is why Shakespeare is esteemed a master-mind in England, and wondered at as a clumsy barbarian in France.”[119]