George Bernard Shaw: His Plays

by H. L. Mencken

The author was born with the dramatic instinct of a Sardou or a Hal Reid and throughout the book there are scenes of tremendous excitement and clatter. Cashel fights fairly terrific battles—among others one with Miss Carew’s footman, Bashville, who also loves her—and the general air of the book is distinctly warlike. Most of the minor characters are commonplace. Skene and his wife and Lord Worthington are old friends from Thackeray and Lucian Webber, Lydia’s cousin and unsuccessful Romeo, is the ready-made rising young statesman of contemporary English fiction.

“An Unsocial Socialist” is a tract born of the nights that Shaw passed in pondering the philosophies. All of the ten articles in the manifesto of 1845 are preached in it, and in addition there is much that the Hon. “Tom” Watson, the Hon. Eugene Debs, and various other earnest gentlemen were destined to spout forth years later. “I suppose,” says Max Beerbohm, “that there is not under heaven a subject on which Shaw has not thought deeply and indignantly.” “An Unsocial Socialist” justifies this venture. It is the most riotous hodge-podge of cart-tail oratory and low comedy in the language.

Sidney Trefusis, a millionaire, takes to wife Henriette Jansenius, the daughter of a millionaire, and after a brief honeymoon bids her good-bye. He is no ordinary money-king, this strange young man, but a Rothschild with the ideas of a Marx. The times, he decides, are out of joint. Things have grown rotten in Denmark. To live as men of his fortune live would be to give his tacit consent to the immoral scheme of things. And so he deserts his wife, assumes the name of Smilash, and going to a small country town, sets up shop as the local jack-of-all-trades.

From this point on, for a hundred pages, the book is a socialist tract. To his wife, who pursues him, and to everyone else he encounters—the faculty and student body of a refined young ladies’ seminary, the village politicians, chance passersby, enemies, and friends—he expounds his theories. Also—and this is what makes him rise from the common level of propagandists—he practices many (though not all) of the things he preaches. In the end, his neglect kills his wife and he goes ranging England in search of a real affinity. When he finds her he marries her and the book ends—with a most marvellous letter from the hero to the author.

As in the case of “The Philanderer” a great many persons have wondered how Shaw could make such a ridiculous character of a man whose doctrines apparently coincide with his own. In truth, it is highly improbable that Shaw, or any other sane man, ever held to the ideas expressed by Trefusis. The latter’s speech beside the corpse of his wife is without parallel in fiction. And some of his other utterances and acts—how royally and deliciously sacrilegious they are! Certainly an age that finds Schopenhauer’s essay on women a never-ending delight should be better acquainted with the ecstatic shocks of “An Unsocial Socialist.” Trefusis, being utterly beyond the pale, is as productive of wicked little thrills to the orthodox and virtuous as McIntosh Jellaludin, David, Pantagruel, or the latest popular murderer.

“The Irrational Knot”—the theme of which is evident from the title—is now but a name. It was one of a vast multitude of similar books that saw the light at the time of its birth. Not one of the reviewers, eulogists or enemies of Shaw seems to think much of it. “Love Among the Artists,” on the contrary, is a novel that deserves to rank with the really important fiction of the time. The theme is not startlingly original and in the 400-odd pages there are oceans of tiresome talk, but the work, as a whole, bears the stamp of distinction, and if only for the admirable searching portrait of the Polish pianiste, Aurélie Szczympliça, it deserves some share of attention.

The story has the amiably discursive cast of the other Shaw stories and ill bears translation into a brief summary. Adrian Herbert, an artist, is a character about whom others, in a sense, revolve, though, in himself, he is little interesting. At the start he is affianced to Mary Sutherland, a young woman of artistic longings. The chief business of the book is to show how he is won away from Mary by the Szczympliça and duly and regularly married by that remarkable young woman. As for Mary, she finds consolation in the arms of John Hoskyn, an eminently practical and matter-of-fact gentleman, who wanders into Bohemia quite by accident, and is much astonished by what he sees there.

Shaw was a newcomer in Bohemia himself when he wrote this book and to this fact may be ascribed the freshness and virility of some of the characters—the Szczympliça in particular, and Owen Jack, the eccentric composer. In the former the vagaries of the artistic mind are revealed with considerable originality and delicacy. If he was tempted to make a burlesque of the soulful little Aurélie, he kept a tight rein upon the impulse. Jack, on the contrary, is frankly a figure out of low comedy. Nothing more grotesque than his struggles with the Philistines is to be found in any of the Shaw plays. Like Cashel Byron, he and Aurélie deserve to be translated from the closet to the stage. Jack especially is sufficiently obvious to give any comedian of fair talents the opportunity of a lifetime.

Shaw’s pair of critical pamphlets—“The Perfect Wagnerite” and “The Quintessence of Ibsenism”—will go down into history beside Robert Schumann’s early reviews of the compositions of Chopin and Huxley’s opening broadsides for Darwin. Each paved the way for better knowledge and better understanding. In 1888, when “The Perfect Wagnerite” was published, the composer of “The Ring of the Nibelung” was still caviare to the Britons. The professors of the day knew him and feared that the great gaping public would come to know him, and so, like the ancient monks who kept the Scriptures under lock and key, they greatly desired that he be ignored. Shaw undertook the vain task of proving the younger Siegfried a socialist—and succeeded in making his readers meditate upon Wagner. Thus he earned whatever money and fame he got from his pains.

“The Quintessence of Ibsenism” includes some wonderfully illuminative and searching passages, but on the whole it is rather out of date. Shaw makes the Norwegian a social-philosopher of most earnest purposes, and hangs upon the book an elaborate and ingenious theory of sham-smashing. As a matter of fact, we have Ibsen’s own word for it that few of his plays contain much conscious preaching, and no doubt many of the alarming doctrines Shaw found in them were not there before he conjured them up. Nevertheless, the book remains the best estimate of Ibsen yet written in English.