Shaw is as far from Taine on the one side as he is from Swinburne on the other—“as far this side bardolatry as Johnson or Mr. Frank Harris.” To the idolatrous and insensate worship of Shakespeare which got on Ben Jonson's nerves, which Lamb brought back into fashion, and which has gone to blasphemy and sacrilege in the mouth of Swinburne, Shaw, like Byron before him, declined to subscribe. And for the very good reason that, being primarily an ideologue, he has examined Shakespeare as a man of thought only to find him wanting. Lop away all beauty of form, all grace of mood—in a word, reduce Shakespeare to his lowest terms—and what is the result? Paraphrase the encounters of Benedick and Beatrice in the style of a Blue-book, carefully preserving every idea they present, and it immediately becomes apparent to Shaw that they contain at best nothing out of the common in thought or wit, and at worst a good deal of vulgar naughtiness. Paraphrasing Goethe, Wagner, or Ibsen in the same way, he finds in them original observation, subtle thought, wide comprehension, far-reaching intuition and psychological study. Even if you paraphrase Shakespeare's best and maturest work, you will still get nothing more, Shaw avers, than the platitudes of proverbial philosophy, with a very occasional curiosity in the shape of a rudiment of some modern idea, not followed up. “Once or twice we scent among them an anticipation of the crudest side of Ibsen's polemics on the Woman Question, as in All's Well that Ends Well, when the man cuts as meanly selfish a figure beside his enlightened lady-doctor wife as Helmer beside Nora; or in Cymbeline, where Posthumus, having, as he believes, killed his wife for inconstancy, speculates for a moment on what his life would have been worth if the same standard of continence had been applied to himself. And certainly no modern study of the voluptuous temperament, and the spurious heroism and heroinism which its ecstasies produce, can add much to Antony and Cleopatra.”
Last of all, Shaw goes a step further with the declaration that Shakespeare's weakness lies in his complete deficiency in that highest sphere of thought, in which poetry embraces religion, philosophy, morality, and the bearing of these on communities, which is sociology. “Search for statesmanship, or even citizenship, or any sense of the Commonwealth, material or spiritual, and you will not find the making of a decent vestryman or curate in the whole horde. As to faith, hope, courage, conviction, or any of the true heroic qualities, you find nothing but death made sensational, despair made stage-sublime, sex made romantic, and barrenness covered up by sentimentality and the mechanical lilt of blank-verse.” All the truly heroic which came so naturally to Bunyan is missing in Shakespeare. In the words of Whitman, Shaw regards Shakespeare as “the æsthetic-heroic among poets, lacking both in the democratic and spiritual,” but never as “the heroic-heroic, which is the greatest development of the spirit.” In Shaw's eyes, Shakespeare's “test of the worth of life is the vulgar hedonic test, and since life cannot be justified by this or any other external test, Shakespeare comes out of his reflective period a vulgar pessimist, oppressed with a logical demonstration that life is not worth living, and only surpassing Thackeray in respect of being fertile enough, instead of repeating 'Vanitas vanitatum' at second-hand, to word the futile doctrine differently and better.... This does not mean that Shakespeare lacked the enormous fund of joyousness which is the secret of genius, but simply that, like most middle-class Englishmen bred in private houses, he was a very incompetent thinker, and took it for granted that all inquiry into life began and ended with the question: 'Does it pay?'.... Having worked out his balance-sheet and gravely concluded that life's but a poor player, etc., and thereby deeply impressed a public which, after a due consumption of beer and spirits, is ready to believe that everything maudlin is tragic, and everything senseless sublime, Shakespeare found himself laughing and writing plays and getting drunk at the 'Mermaid' much as usual, with Ben Jonson finding it necessary to reprove him for a too extravagant sense of humour.” Like Ernest Crosby, Shaw regards Shakespeare as the poet of courts, of lords and ladies. His fundamental assent is accorded to Tolstoy in his declaration that Shakespeare's quintessential deficiency was his failure to face, fairly and squarely, the eternal question of life: “What are we alive for?”[120]
It is a task of the merest supererogation to go into the details of Shaw's admiration of Shakespeare's plays, to quote his praise of Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night's Dream as “crown jewels of dramatic poetry”; of Romeo and Juliet with its “lines that tighten the heart or catch you up into the heights”; of Richard III., as the best of all the “Punch and Judy” plays, in which the hero delights man by provoking God, and dies unrepentant and game to the last; of Julius Cæsar, in which the “dramatist's art can be carried no higher on the plane chosen”; of Othello, which “remains magnificent by the volume of its passion and the splendour of its word-music”; of the “great achievement” of Hamlet; and of Macbeth, than which “no greater tragedy will ever be written.” Not only is Shaw unaffectedly fond of Shakespeare: he pities the man who cannot enjoy him:
“He has outlived hundreds of abler thinkers, and will outlast a thousand more. His gift of telling a story (provided someone else told it to him first); his enormous power over language, as conspicuous in his senseless and silly abuse of it as in his miracles of expression; his humour; his sense of idiosyncratic character; and his prodigious fund of that vital energy which is, it seems, the true differentiating property behind the faculties, good, bad, or indifferent, of the man of genius, enable him to entertain us so effectively that the imaginary scenes and people he has created become more real to us than our actual life—at least, until our knowledge and grip of actual life begins to deepen and glow beyond the common. When I was twenty I knew everybody in Shakespeare, from Hamlet to Abhorson, much more intimately than I knew my living contemporaries.”[121]
John Bull's Other Playwright.
A new design for a statue in Leicester Square.
Reproduced by the special permission of the proprietors of Punch.
E. T. Reed
Courtesy of the Artist.
The literary side of the mission of Ibsen in England, as Shaw conceived it, was the rescue of that unhappy country from its centuries of slavery to Shakespeare. The moral side of Ibsen's mission was the breaking of the shackles of slavery to conventional ideals of virtue. And Shaw's iconoclastic cry in the Saturday Review was “Down with Shakespeare. Great is Ibsen; and Shaw is his prophet.”[122] Interrogated in 1892 as to whether Shakespeare was not his model in writing Widowers' Houses, Shaw replied with quizzical disdain: “Shakespeare! stuff! Shakespeare—a disillusioned idealist! a rationalist! a capitalist! If the fellow had not been a great poet, his rubbish would have been forgotten long ago. Molière, as a thinker, was worth a thousand Shakespeares. If my play is not better than Shakespeare, let it be damned promptly.” And in reviewing his work as a dramatic critic, he said: “After all, I have accomplished something. I have made Shakespeare popular by knocking him off his pedestal and kicking him round the place, and making people realize that he's not a demi-god, but a dramatist.”[123] When he came to judge the works of the two dramatists by the tests of intellectual force and dramatic insight, quite apart from beauty of expression, he found that “Ibsen comes out with a double first-class, whereas Shakespeare comes out hardly anywhere.” Shaw recognized only the splendour of Shakespeare's literary gift; whereas, in Ibsen, he hailed the very antithesis of Shakespeare, i.e., a thinker of extraordinary penetration, a moralist of international influence, and a philosopher going to the root of those very questions to the solution of which Shaw's own life has been largely devoted. In the dramas of Ibsen, he found epitomized the modern realistic struggle for intellectual and spiritual emancipation, the revolt against the machine-made morality of our sordid, flabby, and hypocritical age. Shaw had begun his career in the strife and turmoil of the Zetetical and Dialectical Societies, debating the questions of Women's Rights, Emancipation, and Married Women's Property Acts. Before he had ever read a line of Ibsen or heard of A Doll's House, he had already reached the conclusion, always consistently maintained by him, that Man is not a species superior to Woman, but that mankind is male and female, like other kinds, and that the inequality of the sexes is literally nothing more than a cock-and-bull story, invented by the “lords of creation” for supremely selfish motives. When Ibsen wrote Ghosts, his name was unknown to Shaw. But it is undeniable that, in the eighties, Shaw was forging towards precisely similar conclusions. He had felt in his inmost being the loathing of the nineteenth century for itself, and had marked with exultation the ferocity with which Schopenhauer and Shelley, Lassalle and Karl Marx, Ruskin and Carlyle, Morris and Wagner had rent the bosom that bore them. Smouldering within his own breast was that same detestation of all the orthodoxies, and respectabilities, and ideals railed at by these political, social and moral anarchs. Fired by their inspiring example, he had espoused the cause of Socialism, and zealously fought the battle for equality of opportunity, for social justice, for woman's freedom, for liberty of thought, of action, and of conscience. His conscious revolt against a sentimental, theatrical and senselessly romantic age, chivalrously and blindly “holding aloft the banner of the ideal,” preceded his acquaintance with The Pillars of Society and The Wild Duck. A Fabian, almost universally regarded in England as a crack-brained fanatic and doctrinaire, he found years afterwards in An Enemy of the People the final expression of his experience that all human progress involves as its fundamental condition a recognition by the pioneer that to be right is to be in the minority. The very keynote of Shaw's own convictions was struck in Ibsen's declaration that the really effective progressive forces of the moment were the revolt of the working-classes against economic, and of the women against idealistic, slavery.
During the entire period of his career as a dramatic critic, Shaw stood forth as an unabashed champion of Ibsen. For many years prior to this period, he had borne the odium of Philistine objurgation; never, even in the blackest hour of British intolerance and insult, did he once flinch from adherence to the Wizard of the North. Much that he wrote in the Saturday Review concerning Ibsen and his plays, he had already said—and said better—in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, written in the spring of 1890.[124] Still, the articles in the Saturday Review completed Shaw's analysis of Ibsenism, as exhibited in the remaining plays of Ibsen published after 1890; and, in addition, they possessed the advantage of being criticisms of the acted dramas themselves. The brilliant brochure, entitled The Quintessence of Ibsenism, contains the heart of Shaw's Ibsen criticism, and is undoubtedly the most notable tour de force its author has ever achieved in any line. It is a distinct contribution to that fertile field of modern philosophy farcically and superficially imaged by Gilbert, mordantly dramatized by Ibsen, and rhapsodically concretized by Nietzsche. Let us disabuse our minds at once of the idea that this book is either mere literary criticism or a supernally clever jeu d'esprit. Not a critical essay on the poetical beauties of Ibsen, but simply an exposition of Ibsenism, it may be described as an ideological distillation of Ibsen in the rôle of ethical and moral critic of contemporary civilization. To call The Quintessence of Ibsenism one-sided is not simply a futile condemnation: it is a perfectly obvious truth.