G.B.S.—Mankind’s Friend

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Everyone ought to learn German, Shaw said, and he himself was determined to do so; but since he was only fifty-five, there was no hurry. He never did learn it, and when Germans who knew no English visited him, he would let them talk until they ran out of breath. Then he would put his hand to his heart and say: “Ausgezeichnet!” He did not quite know what the word meant, he said, tongue in cheek, but it always made the Germans happy. I myself would have been quite up to speaking a little English with him, but I never visited him, for purely humane reasons. For I am convinced that he never read a line of mine, and this might well have been a source of some embarrassment to him. True, we might have avoided that plight by shunning literature altogether and turning at once to a subject that concerned us equally—music.

It was German music Shaw had in mind, and nothing else, when he spoke of German culture and his debt to it. He made that very plain and declared frankly that all the Western culture he had acquired was as nothing compared to his intuitive grasp of German music from its birth to its maturity. The son of a mother who was a singer and singing teacher, Shaw left a body of dramatic writing that is the epitome of intellectuality; yet the music of words is part and parcel of it, and he himself stressed that it was constructed on the model of thematic development in music. For all its sober brilliance, its alert and derisive critical judgment, it strives deliberately for musical effect. No reaction to it pleased the author more than that of a British colleague whom he held in high esteem, Harley Granville-Barker, who exhorted the actors at a Shaw rehearsal: “For God’s sake, bear in mind that this is not a play but an opera! Deliver every speech as though you expected to give an encore!”

In truth, Shaw, like every important dramatist before him, created his own idiom, a language of the theater at bottom as unrealistic as the chanted passion of the opera, exalted, exaggerated, terse, and striking, no less rhetorical than Corneille’s verses or Schiller’s iambic measures, and, strange as it may sound, no less pervaded with pathos, a term here not meant to imply unctuousness and bombast, but the ultimate in expression, an eccentricity of speech steeped for the most part in humor, full of esprit, challenge, effrontery—the ringing paradox. In his Preface to “Saint Joan,” which is so good that it almost makes the play superfluous, he strips bare the scientific superstition of our times, insisting that the theories of our physicists and astronomers, and the credulity with which we accept them, would “have dissolved the Middle Ages in a roar of skeptical merriment.” That sets the style. And not only does Shaw the essayist speak in this vein; he often—indeed, usually—has his characters speak in similar fashion, and it should be noted in passing that his figure of speech about dissolving an audience in a roar of skeptical merriment precisely describes his own effect on his spectators.

When William Archer, in 1885, first met the young Dubliner, only recently come to London, in the British Museum, he found Shaw preoccupied with two works, which he studied in turn for weeks on end. They were Marx’s “Das Kapital” and the score of Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde.” Here you have the whole of Shaw. Here is Shaw the radical socialist, zealously addressing meetings, going beyond the teachings of Henry George (who aimed only at the reform of landholding) to demand the nationalization of capital in every form; Shaw the guiding spirit of the Fabian Society, author of “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism,” a book Ramsay MacDonald went so far as to call the world’s most valuable, next to the Bible; Shaw, beginning his career as a playwright with “Widowers’ Houses,” a tract about middle-class pseudo-respectability and the social evils of slum ownership; Shaw, who remained forever a man of social contention, who called his plays, sometimes a little condescendingly, “dramatic conferences.” And here is Shaw the born Thespian, utterly lacking Wagner’s sultry eroticism with its outheavening of heaven, yet Wagner’s true pupil as a maker of intellectual music, and also as his own apostle and tireless commentator.

He wrote a book about Wagner, “The Perfect Wagnerite,” a work of shrewd lucidity that compares most favorably with the burrowing flimflam of German Wagner exegesis. Nor is it mere coincidence that close beside this book stands another treatise of critical gratitude and homage, “The Quintessence of Ibsenism”; for Ibsen, about whose creative kinship with Wagner I once attempted to write, was Shaw’s other teacher, and his case is an interesting demonstration of the extent to which an altogether different temperament can utilize for its own purposes like-minded experiences, once they have been fully encompassed, creatively melting them down into something totally new and personal.

Ibsen is supposed to have once said that each of his plays might just as well have become an essay. Shaw, for one, never forwent the essay that inhered in his every play, letting it stand beside the play, or rather embodying it in a preface, often as long and as eloquent as the play itself, calling things by their names with a critical directness unfitting in the play proper. I for one find fault, for example, with the unhappy scrambling of essay and drama that allows Gauchon and Warwick, in the fourth scene of “Saint Joan,” to concoct the terms “Protestantism” and “Nationalism” in a definition of Joan’s heresy and of heresy in general. Factually these terms may not have been anachronisms in the fifteenth century, but as formulations they have an anachronistic effect and break up form and style. They belong to the essay—where, indeed, they are to be found. The play should have shunned them, should have been content with an interpretive formulation.

Neither this, nor even the fact that in “Saint Joan,” as in other plays of Shaw, the aria sometimes turns into an editorial, can keep this “dramatic chronicle” from remaining the most fervent thing Shaw ever wrote, the play that is poetically the most moving, the closest to high tragedy—a work inspired with a truly elating sense of justice, a work in which the mature rationality of an esprit fort that has outgrown the confines of the eighteenth and even of the nineteenth century bows before sanctity, a work that fully deserves its world fame. There is but one other play I would put beside it, or perhaps even ahead of it. That is “Heartbreak House,” creative fruit of the First World War, a play of which neither Aristophanes nor Molière nor Ibsen need have been ashamed, a play that belongs in the forefront of comedy, a play of sparkling dialogue and the most fanciful cast of characters, supremely humorous yet filled with things cursed and condemned, pitched in the mood of a doomed society.

When all the one-act plays are included—and there are among them such works as “Great Catherine” and “The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet”—it turns out that Shaw wrote more plays than Shakespeare; and if they are of uneven weight, like those of his great predecessor, against whom he liked to match himself so gamely; if some of them have withered, their problems growing outdated, as he foresaw: they do include, besides those already named and singled out for praise, such things as “Caesar and Cleopatra,” “Man and Superman,” “Androcles and the Lion,” and the stunningly clairvoyant political satire, “The Apple-Cart”—things that have withstood, and will long continue to withstand, the onslaughts of time, in part because of their wisdom and their profoundly edifying message, in part because of the winged wit of their poetic idiom. When we add the floodtide of essays, commentary, and amplifying criticism—embodying an all-embracing encyclopedic knowledge that draws equally on the natural sciences, theology, religious and general history, and especially on the socio-economic sphere, always artistically leavened, full of esthetic charm, and unfailingly entertaining—when we add all this, we find ourselves face to face with a lifework of astonishing scope, apparently the fruit of continued inspiration, unceasing merriness, and of an indefatigable will to work.

Like Ibsen and Wagner, Shaw was, first and last, a hard worker. In the words of Zarathustra, his goal was not his happiness but his work. To him idleness was above all a crime against society, and utterly foreign to his nature. He said once that he had never been young, in the sense that the average person “sows his wild oats.” For that very reason he remained everlastingly youthful in his work—frisky as a colt, even in his old age. Anti-bourgeois to the core, a Marxist, fond of the revolutionary slogan: “Enemies of the bourgeoisie, unite!” he was yet, in his own moral convictions and mode of life, middle-class through and through, indeed, puritanical. He could retire from literature tomorrow, he said, and be. come a respectable cheesemonger, without changing one iota of his domestic habits.

For him the counterpart to the bourgeois was not the Bohemian but the socialist. The world of people, he said, who spent their evenings over champagne suppers with actresses, models, and dancers— that world was unknown to him, and he wondered how its hapless victims endured it; indeed, he often doubted that it actually existed, for all the actresses and dancers he had known were decent, hard-working women.

He himself was a man of rigorous and sensible work habits. He did not burn the midnight oil, tossing off his plays on the spur of inspiration. He performed his intelligently planned literary labors between breakfast and the noonday meal, and he went to bed regularly before midnight, so that he might tackle them in the morning with freshness, lucidity, and poise. Dissolute Bohemianism revolted him—he simply had no practical use for it. Vice bored him; and as for intoxication, he put these words into the mouth of the old Captain in “Heartbreak House”: “I dread being drunk more than anything in the world. To be drunk means to have dreams; to go soft; to be easily pleased and deceived, to fall into the clutches of women.”

Clearly, intoxication was meant to include, preeminently, erotic ecstasy, an experience unknown to Shaw. This does not mean that he was a misogynist. On the contrary, like Ibsen, he may well be described as an extoller of women. The women in his plays are generally superior to the men in common sense and sense of humor—usually at the expense of the men. But he was fond of quoting Napoleon, who said that women were the business of idlers, adding on his own that no man with any serious mission in the world could spare time and money for affairs with women. A St. Anthony he was not, for that saint was beset by temptations, while Shaw, with his vitreous nature, evidently found continence of the flesh as easy as abstention from meat. He made no dogma of vegetarianism. One man’s meat, he said simply, was another man’s poison. But the “rebellion against the tyranny of sex” —his own expression was part of his social, moral, and esthetic credo, and in his plays there is nothing of passion, infatuation, sensual abandon—that Come può esser ch’io non sia piu mio of Michelangelo—and indeed, these qualities would seem strangely out of place there.

One is tempted to ask him, as the Prince importunes the Queen in Schiller’s “Don Carlos”: “Have you, then, never loved?” The answer would probably have been a laughing “no”—laughing, but a no, nonetheless, of that same vitreous character. A “Marienbad Elegy” with its “Passion brings sorrow”—indeed, anything like the experience the septuagenarian Goethe underwent with Ulrike von Lewetzow—would have been unimaginable in the case of Shaw, and he prided himself more on its absence than do we, on his behalf.

His was a magnificent durability, yet it somehow lacked full-bloodedness—so much so that, despite the grandeur of his life, this lack detracted from his stature. I am quite fond of the massive meals that delighted Luther, Goethe, and Bismarck, and I rather fancy Churchill’s drinking and smoking as well. In the picture of Shaw—not merely his physical presence but also his intellectual stature—I find a certain quality of gauntness, vegetarianism, and frigidity that somehow does not quite seem to fit my idea of greatness. That idea implies a degree of human tragedy, of suffering and sacrifice—the knotted muscles of Tolstoi, bearing up the full burden of morality, Atlas-like; Strindberg, who was in hell; the martyr’s death Nietzsche died on the cross of thought— it is these that inspire us with the reverence of tragedy.

But in Shaw there was nothing of all this. Was he beyond such things? Or were they beyond him? He called one of his own pieces “A Light Play About Difficult Things.” He might well have given that title to all of his writings, and I am not so certain whether this very definition will not apply to all art to come, and whether Shaw may not turn out to have been the smiling prophet of generations emancipated from tragedy and gloom. Yet I ask myself whether his facility was perhaps not a little too facile, whether he was ever the man to take grave matters with their full gravity.

Let the future determine his weight in the scales to the last ounce. This much is certain: His sobriety, like his diet of greens, was necessary to his particular brand of clearheadedness, unconstraint, and liberating ebullience; and nothing could be more erroneous than to mistake his coolness for an actual incapacity for love. He may have laughed at everyone and everything, but he was anything but a Mephistophelian nihilist, “thrusting the devil’s chill fist in the face of the soothing powers of creation.” Again it is his Captain Shotover in “Heartbreak House” whom he gives these words to say: “Old men are dangerous; it doesn’t matter to them what is going to happen in the world.” Shaw did care what was to become of the world, right down to the age of ninety-four. The clergyman who intoned the prayers at his deathbed was quite right when he said: “This man was surely no atheist.” He was no atheist, for he reverenced the vital force that is conducting so noble an experiment with man on earth, and was sincerely concerned lest God’s experiment become a failure. Convinced that the esthetic element, creative joy, is the most effective instrument of enlightened teaching, he tirelessly wielded the shining sword of his word and wit against the most appalling power threatening the triumph of the experiment—stupidity. He did his best in redressing the fateful imbalance between truth and reality, in lifting mankind to a higher rung of social maturity. He often pointed a scornful finger at human frailty, but his jests were never at the expense of humanity. He was mankind’s friend, and it is in this role that he will live in the hearts and memories of men.