SNAP SHOTS
Middleton, George
SNAP SHOT S By George MiddleUm THE arrival of Bernard Shaw at the seventieth milestone has quite rightly attracted international comment. He is unquestionably the greatest literary figure in the...
...In actual life all cases of scarlet fever are different and so are all love affairs...
...When it came to writing plays himself he immediately struck out in new reactions...
...It is starved people who read fiction and what they demand from it is the sort of satisfaction a penniless child gets from looking through a confectioner's window...
...This version, I believe, was licensed...
...But it is not my job...
...I had a letter to Mr...
...And even today, on his seventieth birthday, his sword again flashes with all its brilliancy against addle-pated censorship, as of yore...
...WARREN'S PROFESSION...
...John Ervine, himself a well-known playwright...
...They stayed to listen, then to admire...
...Shaw and be graciously discussed the whole matter of censorship with me...
...tion, has impressed himself upon his generation...
...When I pointed out to him that there were several plays in London at the time that treated in a frivolous way the same subject, he remarked: "But your play shows the economic contribution which prostitution makes where the divorce laws are strict...
...He let me tell my story, for I really wanted his advice...
...But his way of saying them was his own...
...yet it might well be, for Shaw is tall and powerfully knit like the figure that so long graced the approach to the Pantheon in Paris...
...It so happened that just previous to its contemplated production, a very prominent member of the Government had obtained a collusive divorce in England, and had exposed its mechanism as a contribution toward lessening of the rigors of English divorce laws...
...Probably the opposite is the truth...
...Soon the world heard him shouting his wares...
...It lifts young people over adolescence and helps a good deal later on in many ways...
...Yet I cannot help but append some words of his own just released for publication which will best explain his attitude towards one aspect of his work...
...He would be a bold man who declares that the literally sexless Dickens was less virile than the literally passionate Swinburne...
...The point was that many of the old motifs ceased to have force...
...He never compromised with himself...
...I can see his marvellous blue eyes flashing now, as he laughed about it, sunk 'deep in his chair before the fireplace...
...I do not know whether there is any truth in the oft repeated story that Shaw himself posed for Rodin's Le Penseur...
...He was the flashing sword rather than the shining shield...
...Let no one mistake: he knows every technical trick of the trade as conventionally done...
...Space forbids more than this comment...
...I have always been so steeped in dramatic music and painting that I have purposely refrained from attempting to do the work of the painter and musician in my plays," he wrote, "If you compare the love scene at the end of 'Man and Superman' with the second act of 'Tristan and Isolde' you will see that they as music and literature differ and that I have deliberately accepted the difference, not because words cannot express pure emotion but because music can do it so much better for stage purposes that it seemed to me silly for playwrights to go on doing what was now evidently the composer's job...
...he has •been relentless in his attacks on conventional Morality, yet he is himself a moralist...
...Then he told me about MRS...
...I think she was a sort of female Fagin, if memory serves me rightly...
...Shaw told me he has changed her "profession" and given her one less shocking to British morality...
...He is unquestionably the greatest literary figure in the world today, not only by reason of what he has created but also_ because of his influence...
...He told everybody he was as interesting as Shakespeare...
...He showed woman the pursuer...
...He was compelled to publish them at his own expense in America, since no one would produce them because they violated the traditions...
...La Rochefouauld was right when he said that very few people would know anything about it if they had not read about it, and 99 per cent of what has been written about it is pure imagination...
...he revealed their worthiness and use in a work-a-day world, not so much by explaining them as by his devastating revelation of the forces that opposed them...
...A play of mine, revealing the collusive manner in which divorces were obtained, had been accepted for production by Sybil Thorndyke, in London...
...After dinner speaker, lecturer, pamphleteer and novelist...
...The more real a man's sex is the less likely -he is to imagine that paper lovemak-ing is any better than paper fighting...
...I had the great privilege of passing an hour with him some years ago...
...Most people have as little actual experience of love as of thought...
...The day before production the censor refused to allow my play to be produced...
...But asid from the fact that h writes as a consummate artist in his chosen medium, he quickly saw the danger of preaching unless done through the 1 force of provocative laughter...
...He has laughed many ideas out of court and no thoughtful person can read him without self-questioning...
...People stopped to see how true this was...
...And he laughed over its prostrate body...
...By the way, I think the confectioner's window function of art is a very useful one...
...Capitalism got many a jaw-felling punch...
...occasioned by this question of censorship...
...yet he will best be remembered as a dramatist...
...He turned everything upside down and thus compelled people to examine them...
...All his ideas weren't original...
...They were given to the press on the occasion of the public tribute offered him by the Labor party, and were written to St...
...He has always, at bottom, been a teacher, though no ene more than he has spoofed at reform...
...In books all love affairs are the same, just as in medical treatises all cases of scarlet fever are the same...
...Shaw, through consu...
...Yet in order to protect it, Mr...
...What a fortunate thing that his brilliant capacities were dedicated to radical movements...
...By acting on this view I have no doubt produced an impression of deficiency, especially as I do not carry everybody with me in my contention that passion for thought is.the strongest of all passions and that love is comparatively negligible and transient, besides being so adulterated that it is worse in its effect than hate...
...Right back of him was a sketch that Rodin made of his wife, at the time the great French sculptor was doing the famous Shaw bust, which was standing in another part of his room...
...Sex ceased to be romantic...
...He flicked serious moments with a laugh...
...Yet he wrote about life and people as he saw them...
...It appears that when that play was offered for production it was also refused a license...
...People talked "too much," and v.he conventions were mocked to such a shocking degree...
...Yet the motley never could conceal the seriousness of his socia < indictments...
...My business is the comedy or tragedy of sex, not its voluptuousness...
...I could have had no more charming host...
...People who have love affairs, as they call their sexual adventures and even their sexual meals, seldom read anything but politics and sport...
...Years of theater going, as a critic, soon showed him the paucity of such conventional handlings of stated situations...
...He admitted the influence of Samuel Butler...
...When they don't get it they have no use for art at all as far as love is concerned and are apt to declare that the artist has no sex...
Vol. 18 • August 1926 • No. 8
