Shaw: The Man and His Ideas

...I am suggesting, however, that in taking him in the way it did the public knew more about the essential nature of his inspiration than he did himself...

...The true background of the comic vision of life is the tenor and sadness of that same world which serves the tragedian...

...A critic in the London Spectator once suggested that what was lacking in George Bernard Shaw was "the sense of the human...

...On this score, Irving Babbitt's analysis was a good deal sounder than either Bentley's or Win-sten's...

...This argument proves too much, however, for obviously the "philosophy" of everyman, including the nearest bartender, if dressed up in professional jargon, would sound, to a non-professional, equally impressive...

...256 pp...

...Shaw's concern centrally is not with the substance of what he is saying but with the impression he is trying to make...

...Very Rousseauistic is his statement that "it is quite useless to declare that all men are born free if you deny that they are born good...

...When one of his characters embarks on too long a speech, another character promptly complains about it, and so we sense that the author is not losing touch with our patience...

...Its supposed concern with the solution of "social problems" is less important than the display of wit with which this is accompanied...

...This was not an acquired habit of his maturity (a habit which made him the delight of the journalistic fraternity because he always made such naturally good copy) but, as we learn from Winsten's biography, was with him from the beginning...

...One pictures sorrow and suffering directly, another does so indirectly...

...It was this irresistible impulse to administer a kind of shock therapy to the sleepy mind that made Shaw deliver a rapturous paean on the subject of the true gentleman before the National Liberal Club in 1913...

...to his neighbor, Winsten, whose wife sculpted the statue of Saint Joan in his garden at the foot of which the ashes of both Shaw and Mrs...

...The privilege was bestowed upon him by his intelligence and by his faculty of being always amusing...

...Education as a largely disciplinary force or as the acquisition of that frein vital (that vital, life-giving inner check extolled by Irving Babbitt) was not to Shaw's taste at all...

...In spite of all his "ideas," Shaw is as disinterested a player with words as his fellow-Dubliner Oscar Wilde, whom indeed he admired more than any other English playwright of his generation...

...author, "The Proustian Vision" The concern of Eric Bentley in this new edition of an old work is with the mind and art of Shaw...

...Later on, Winsten tells us, when Shaw was writing musical criticism for London newspapers, he came to be regarded by his readers as "a privileged lunatic...

...Is it not the fascination of the juggler of ideas—the number of flashy discs which he is able to keep revolving in the air at any one time...

...Shaw were scattered, it is the humanity, struggles and sufferings of the famous author that seem important...

...And we must not forget how "well-made" the play is or how much of its effect depends on the technical dexterity which tells the author when exactly he must jerk one of his puppets from before our eyes and replace it with another in order to keep our interest and attention...

...Winsten writes: "As to schooling, it was high time, he believed, that we fitted the school to the child and gave up the barbarian practice of fitting the child to the institution...

...But the humanity with which he has not been able to invest the intelligent and witty puppets of his own plays, he has himself now been endowed with by his biographer, Winsten...

...One might say that the character lives only for this particular moment...

...It is a good pun, the audience rises to the bait, and the line gets a big laugh...

...I think I know what he meant, and it has always constituted a formidable objection in my mind against Shaw the playwright that he should seem to suffer from such a lack...

...Someone has said that it was very clever of Shaw to put such a sweet coating over the bitter pill of his message but that it was even more clever of the British public to lick off the sweetness without touching what was underneath...

...is largely deceptive...

...Or that made him address an "advanced" meeting on the subject of modern religion in the following terms: "One of the reasons which has induced me to take up this subject of late years is the simple observation that people who have no religion are cowards and cads...

...Even upon familiar topics, Bentley has some illuminating things to say...

...The result of this perverse habit of mind was noted humorlessly by Henry M. Hyndman almost half a century ago: "He is never so happy as when he is running a tilt at the party with which he is, at least nominally, associated...

...Stephen Winsten deals almost exclusively with his personal life...

...Take the matter of paradox—the quality caught by Max Beerbohm in the well-known caricature showing Shaw regarding himself with satisfaction standing on his head...

...Like Rousseau, Shaw "asserted that man is primarily a feeling, not a thinking animal...

...It shows that if Shaw's philosophy is re-stated in professional jargon it sounds just as plausible as any other philosophy...

...It does not take much imagination, I think, to perceive that Shaw —with his ne'er-do-well drunk of a father, his heartless egotist of a mother, his strange sisters, the humble clerkship which was his first job and the unreasoning terror of his boss which accompanied it, his long apprenticeship to the slightest success in the world which did not come to him until he was well into middle age—must have led one of the un-happiest lives of which we have any record...

...The young American in this play is named Hector Malone Jr...

...Even while he was a boy at school, Shaw had learned that "there was an original method of torturing the teachers...

...If you allow people who are caddish and irreligious to become the governing force, the nation will be destroyed...

...Shaw utters half-truths, first, because, as has been noted, half-truths jolt people into paying attention, second, because he would never presume to think he could utter The Whole Truth, and, third, because there is usually a side of the truth which deserves special notice, having been obscured by our stupidity, sentimentality and fear...

...One faces up to the raw-realities and insists—in the name of catharsis—on rubbing his reader's nose in them until he screams and (we hope) is healed bv the shock: another writer runs away from the facts and jagged edges of human nature, garnishes life with fantasy and wit...

...The consequence is that there are now shoals of the intellectually underprivileged, who feel flattered at their own ability to understand and tolerate the most outrageous jokes at their own expense...

...An unlikely enough name, to be sure, but it has a point which is revealed in the third act...

...Shaw the expert juggler, the vaudevillian, has not been given quite the attention and applause he deserves...

...In fact, I was put in mind of Wilde by one of the little tricks that Shaw plays with us in Man and Superman...

...His "problem plays" are more entertaining and amusing than they are problematic, because the most problematic thing in the world is human nature and Shaw was congenially cut off from the depiction of this nature...

...The half of the truth which Shaw ignores is always the 'easy' half, the half which needs no repeating because it is shouted from the housetops, because it is a half-truth that is firmly established to the point of being a menace...

...They doubtless share this feeling of complacency with the monarchs in earlier times who licensed their jesters to say anything at all to them, even the truth...

...Bentley makes this observation: "The art of epigram and apothegm is the art of salutary half-truths...

...Having just witnessed a triumphant performance in summer stock of Man and Superman, which Shaw once called his "most significant work," I have a vivid sense of the power of that communication...

...The last statement reminds us inescapably of Rousseau's sentence in his Confessions: "If I am not better [than other men] at least I am different...

...But what, precisely, is the nature of the fascination which Shaw exercises over our minds in this play and others...

...The incidents of Dostoievsky's life were perhaps more melodramatic, as arc those, too, which are chronicled in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, but neither Dostoyevsky nor O'Neill had lives that were basically more difficult or tragic than that of Shaw...

...To Bentley, it is Shaw, the public figure, who attracts our attention...

...If these then were some of the "ideas" which lay beneath the mask of frivolity, perhaps Winston Churchill was not so far wrong as Bentley implies when he indicated in his book Great Contemporaries that he was able to "accept Shaw only on condition that he does not ask to be taken seriously...

...In the midst of a scene between father and son, the young man suddenly bursts out with the words: "Stop hectoring me...

...We must have a religion if we are to do anything worth doing to get our civilization out of the terrible mess in which it now is...

...This explains why Shaw, the Socialist, quickly became a classless favorite of his country...

...Of course, one may put all this fooling aside and grapple with Shaw's message—the bitter pill under the sugar coating...

...The preparation for it has been implicit in his name from the beginning, and we feel something between annoyance and admiration to find the joke so simple y et unexpected...

...Joad later described his effort as not very successful,' it does successfully discredit those who shrug Shaw's philosophy off as amateurish trifling...

...One of the masters was so infuriated with this 'devil incarnate' that he smacked him brutally on the ear...

...The surface of Shaw's work, if we understand it in this wav...

...2.00...

...Winsten's account makes us aware of the fact that there is more than one road in the domain of art which leads a man away from his own sorrows...

...Bentley tells us that "one philosopher attempted to provide 'a formal philosophical setting for Shaw's doctrines' in a metaphysical treatise of some length—I refer to Matter, Life and Value, by C. E. M. Joad...

...Like Rousseau, Shaw believed that all men were born good...

...Although Mr...

...Once we grasp the analogy with Rousseau (which Bentley uses at one point, though he interprets it in his own and not altogether adequate fashion), we see that what is most serious in Shaw falls into a more coherent pattern...

...The trick has been turned not through any maudlin sentiment but by the recital of plain facts about Shaw's childhood and early youth...

...The materials which go into the making of his act have distracted from the appreciation of its dexterity, which is its point...

...Babbitt in his first book in 1908 thought he had discovered an equivalent of Shaw in one of Mari-vaux's plays in the 18th century where a character is described as follows: "He is a man whose first impulse is to ask, not 'Do you esteem me?' but 'Are you surprised at me?' His purpose is not to convince us that he is better than other people, but that he resembles himself alone...

...New Directions...

...Bright and witty marionettes which serve as the vehicles of "ideas" but are mere simulacra of human beings—such were the limits of his creative ability and incidentally all he needed for communication with his audience, communication which is no less successful today after his death than it was during his life...

...There is a little bit of Nietzsche, a little bit of Emerson, a little bit of Shakespeare, a little bit of everything, and Shaw's accomplishment lies in his sense of timing...

...I shall never be able to think of the clownish Shaw's life again without the pro-foundest sympathy...

...It is exactly the same as it was with Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest, where the point of the entire play hangs finely on the pun in the closing line...

...From this, there followed a view of education very much like that of Rousseau in Emile...

...and invites his audience to trip down the primrose path of irresponsibility with him...

...The box on the ear by an outraged teacher that I have mentioned ended his own schooling, and he does not seem to have ever referred to formal education after this time without something derogatory in his tone...

...He never wearies us...

...Now there is a certain type of spoiled child who shares with Shaw every quality except that which makes him what he is...

...Bentley's book tells us much about its subject that we did not know, that we are glad to know, and that raises our respect for him...

...and a very fine art it is...

...He formed a secret society sworn to give topsy-turvy answers to questions asked by teachers and to play pranks with the text by putting in "not' where the affirmative was called for and to compete always for the bottom place in the class...

...Bentley labels Shaw in one of his chapters as "the Fool in Christ," but I myself prefer to think of him as the Fool in the Court of King Demos...

...Equality of opportunity and education, as has become apparent recently, accentuates rather than diminishes the differences in the native capacities of men...